Stand for Something

by John Kasich

  (How about setting our daddy-cam on that guy, and letting his kids rethink their opinion of him?)

  What happened next was almost surreal, as players on both teams began trading punches with fans in the stands and on the floor. Clearly, the idiot fan should have never doused an opposing player with beer, and the other idiot fans should have never started throwing punches, or taunting the players in any way, but the players should have never returned the blows; they should have walked away and left it to security officials to sort out the mess, but of course that could have never happened, because these athletes had been conditioned since childhood to give as good as they got; they would not be disrespected; they would not stand down.

  FAR-REACHING CONSEQUENCES—OR JUST A BAD BREAK?

  When the dust cleared, NBA commissioner David Stern handed down suspensions to eight players involved in the fighting, with the most severe penalties going to Indiana’s Ron Artest, who was suspended for the balance of the season, Stephen Jackson, who was suspended for thirty games, and Jermaine O’Neal, who was suspended for twenty-five games.

  “The actions of the players involved wildly exceeded the professionalism and self-control that should fairly be expected from NBA players,” Stern stated at his press conference to announce the suspensions. “We must affirm that the NBA will strive to exemplify the best that can be offered by professional sports and not allow our sport to be debased by what seem to be declining expectations for the behavior of fans and athletes alike.”

  Like the brawl itself, Stern’s press conference received wide media attention, but the backroom appeals from the NBA players’ association were given scant notice by comparison—and for some reason this last struck me as perhaps the most disturbing part of the whole imbroglio. When a federal judge granted a request to halt O’Neal’s twenty-five-game suspension at just fifteen games, the news was cause for celebration in Indianapolis, where the hometown Pacers had been struggling without their star player. Pacers president Donnie Walsh, an educated man and a purported community leader who should have known better, led the cheers. “It’s a great jolt at a time when we need it,” he said.

  What an affront, I thought when I heard Walsh’s remarks, and what a poor excuse for leadership, to welcome a disgraced player like O’Neal back into the fold simply in the name of winning. O’Neal had served just 60 percent of Stern’s original sentence, and here was his employer, publicly rejoicing that a Get Out of Jail Free card had been played in his name and his team could finally get back to playing at something close to full strength.

  Certainly, O’Neal’s behavior on November 19, 2004, was despicable, but if I was president of the Indiana Pacers, I would have considered weighing in with even stiffer penalties than the ones levied by the league. In some ways, just to cross sports and toss out a baseball metaphor to make a point, it’s as if a player was called out on strikes and then hired an attorney to appeal, arguing that he was denied an opportunity to earn a living by smacking the heck out of the ball and that he should therefore be entitled to another couple swings. That’s basically what it came down to. David Stern, who sets the rules and the tone for the entire league, determined what the penalties would be in this case, the players’ association argued that the suspension was not in Jermaine O’Neal’s best interests, and Donnie Walsh was only too happy to benefit from the reduced sentence. What kind of example does that set? What kind of message does it send to our young people? Donnie Walsh was handed a great opportunity to take some kind of stand, but he took no stand at all, choosing instead to focus on winning over doing the right thing, and it struck me as one of the most cowardly acts I’d seen in sports—or anywhere else for that matter.

  And let’s not delude ourselves into thinking Walsh’s actions in response to his players’ behavior didn’t resonate with our young athletes. This stuff doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The Pistons–Pacers brawl led to dozens of copycat brawls in college, high school, and recreational league gymnasiums across the country—I guess on the confused thinking that if such bad behavior was tolerated at the highest levels of the game it would be tolerated across the board. One such rumble, at a high school girls basketball game in Akron, Ohio, involved players and fans, and resulted in year-long suspensions and criminal charges, as the Ohio High School Athletic Association swiftly established strict penalties for players who climb into the stands to fight with spectators.

  I’m afraid this type of executive misstep doesn’t end with Donnie Walsh. Even Gary Bettman, the forthright commissioner of the National Hockey League and a man who’s been generally admired for his principled stands in the ongoing battle between players and management, made a similar miscalculation when he reinstated an all-star player named Todd Bertuzzi, who had taken out an opposing player named Steve Moore in such a violent and flagrant way that it remained to be seen at the time of Bettman’s decision if Moore would ever skate again. Here’s what happened on this score: Bertuzzi, playing for the Vancouver Canucks, sucker-punched the Colorado Avalanche’s Moore from behind in a March 8, 2004, regular season game, and slammed him facefirst onto the ice, breaking Moore’s neck. Bertuzzi, widely regarded as one of the best players in the game, was banned from the NHL for the remainder of the 2003-2004 season, and he was due to be suspended indefinitely into the 2004-2005 season as well. I have no issue with the initial punishment, which all concerned seemed to agree was a fair and just response to Bertuzzi’s unfair and unjust tactics, but as readers by now know all NHL players were effectively suspended for the 2004-2005 season, due to a lockout over a collective bargaining dispute.

  As it happened, then, Bertuzzi was forced to sit out only thirteen regular season games, and seven playoff games, resulting in the forfeiture of $501,926.39 in salary—a stiff penalty, to be sure, but one that hardly fit the crime, or the intent of the initial punishment, because in August 2005, Bettman decided to reinstate Bertuzzi, and to treat the lockout season as “time served” on his sentence. Once again, it was an outrage wrapped inside a loophole, and I looked on and thought, Come on, people, let’s get together on this one. Realize, as far as the 2004-2005 season was concerned, the man’s entire peer group served the same sentence on the sidelines—and none of them had blindsided their opponent and bashed his face onto the ice.

  But Bettman didn’t see it that way. “From an NHL standpoint,” he announced in his prepared statement explaining his decision, “there is no question that Mr. Bertuzzi’s actions clearly went well beyond what could ever be considered acceptable behavior in the National Hockey League. Mr. Bertuzzi must be held responsible for the results of his actions, and the message must be delivered loudly and forcefully that the game will not tolerate this type of conduct. I believe that the League’s response at the time of the incident and subsequently is consistent with that responsibility and delivers that message.” Bettman went on to suggest that Bertuzzi’s total suspension reached to nearly seventeen months—“the longest in NHL history”—once again failing to take into account that for most of those seventeen months every NHL player was also suspended due to a league-wide work stoppage.

  I’m sorry, but the only message that was delivered loudly and forcefully here is that the owners and executives of our professional sports franchises continue to hold their star players to all kinds of different standards. Apparently, the sight of a run-of-the-mill NHL player lying unconscious in a pool of his own blood is not enough to convince the commissioner that strong leadership is what it will take to stem the rush of bad behavior on our public stages—and to keep our children from beating the tar out of each other just to keep pace with their favorite sports heroes.

  It’s like one of those societal viruses, this bad behavior, and it’s spreading like nobody’s business, all because of an alarming lack of leadership. Sure, we can find these little pockets of hope, every here and there, but in general terms things are out of control. We are out of control, and instead of cheering on these knuckleheads from the stands, and buying the sneakers and spo
rtswear and energy drinks they endorse, we should be aligning ourselves with the programs that ratify the principles that resonate at home.

  Coaches are standing behind the bums on their rosters like never before—at a time when they should be making examples of them. Why is it that those who follow sports revere a coach like John Wooden, who ruled over UCLA’s basketball program for decades with an iron fist and a firm set of rules? Why is it that Vince Lombardi stands so tall in our collective memories? It’s because these guys didn’t cut any corners, or cut their players any slack. They had discipline. They were principled. They stood for something—and there’s nothing more rewarding than to stand for something and to stick to your principles and still be successful.

  Nowadays, at the professional level, I look at a guy like Bill Belichick, coach of the New England Patriots of the NFL, and wonder where we might find a couple dozen more just like him. You don’t see his players strutting in the end zone, doing these vulgar or taunting dances, or spiking the ball like children. There’s none of that arrogant posturing you see around the league. His players just get it done, without calling attention to the doing, and it’s a striking thing to see. Mainly, it’s the contrast that I find so striking, the way he treats his players as a team instead of as individuals; the way he demands respect and gives it in return; the way his standards are absolute.

  The leader sets the tone, and from my sideline perspective it seems Belichick’s message is that football is important, and winning is important, but life is more important still. At the end of your days, you’re not going to content yourself by counting your Super Bowl rings. You’re going to ask yourself, Was I a good person? Did I do the best I could with what I had? Did I treat people the way I wanted to be treated in return? These are the questions for a lifetime, and we draw strength and comfort when the answers come back in the affirmative. After all, as the Bible says, it doesn’t pay to inherit the world—or the Super Bowl, or the seven-figure contract—if in the process we lose our character.

  Stand for something? You better believe it, only here it means we must decide which teams we want to root for, which athletes we want on our side, which examples we’ll let stand for our children.

  5

  TAKING A STAND ON BUSINESS

  “A business that makes nothing but money is a poor kind of business.”

  Henry Ford

  I’ll go out on a limb on this one and state that most businessmen and women are ethical, diligent, conscientious, and driven to succeed. And it had better be a strong limb, because the business sections of our major newspapers are littered with news of one corporate misstep after another. Fraud. Corruption. Inflated earnings. False filings . . . it’s enough to leave hardworking Americans wondering where the profit is in an honest day’s work.

  Taken together, the seemingly endless string of scandals rocking the business world has created an atmosphere of mistrust and disillusion that threatens to quash our spirit of entrepreneurship and kill our willingness to invest in new ideas. It’s also threatening to distort the image of corporate America into one that is motivated by greed and avarice instead of one that rises to meet new challenges and pulses to creativity and innovation. How have we allowed this to happen? When did this shift take place? What can we do to clear some of that air and set things right? And, most important, how can we align ourselves with the “right” team and stand against those who give business a bad name?

  To begin, we’ll need to take a step back and look at the problem through a more forgiving lens, because I honestly believe we’ve let a relatively few rotten apples spoil the entire barrel on this one. Here’s why: The old saw about what makes a good news story holds especially true when it comes to corporate America. It’s the same dog-bites-man/man-bites-dog dilemma that has confronted newspaper editors since the invention of movable type. If a local man gets bitten by a local dog, it doesn’t make the paper, but if a local man bites a local dog . . . well, that’s a lead story. Journalists are not exactly climbing all over themselves to report on the largesse of Bill Gates, who along with his wife, Melinda, has donated more than $28 billion to various charities, including $750 million to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization and $1 billion toward the establishment of a scholarship program that bears their name; and we can read hardly a word about the good public works of Pierre M. Omidyar, the founder of eBay, who has pledged to give away much of his eBay holdings, estimated to be about $6 billion, to community-based causes that promote activism and volunteerism, including $100 million to his alma mater, Tufts University, for an innovative program to promote social entrepreneurship around the world. After all, if our parents taught us right, inviting others to share in our good fortune is merely what’s expected of us. That’s not news. It’s when we stray from those shared values and expectations that we have a story—and I’m sorry to report there’s been a whole lot of straying going on.

  STOP THE PRESSES

  As I write this, the American business community is struggling to make sense of the latest bulletin to capture media attention—allegations that Wal-Mart’s former vice chairman Thomas Coughlin misused up to $500,000 in corporate funds by misappropriating Wal-Mart gift cards for his personal use and filing fraudulent invoices for personal services from third-party vendors—many of these in apparent support of anti-union activities. Granted, on the big-time corporate level, $500,000 is often dismissed as petty cash, but the charges against Coughlin caused a stir precisely because of the relatively low dollar amount involved. Numbers that “small” get tossed aside like nothing at all, when in truth they’re “nickel-and-diming” us into confusion. If you’re like me, you read about some of these “inside” abuses of power and privilege, by people of stature like Thomas Coughlin, and they’re a full-in-the-face reminder how tempting it can be for some of our top executives to cheat both the system and their shareholders, and if it can happen at the hands of one of Sam Walton’s last remaining protégés on the board then it can happen anywhere. How is it possible that a guy with all that money, and all that power, is driven to something like this? If the allegations against Coughlin are true, what does it say about the risk-reward model he had in place on this one, that he put everything on the line—career, reputation, family, future—over a relative pittance? What a miscalculation!

  In business, as in anything else, timing is everything, and here Thomas Coughlin’s apparent bad timing took another bite out of the tanned hide of corporate America. Man bites dog? Heck, it’s more like man bites man, and when that happens you might as well stop the presses.

  Throw this scandal into the mixer with dozens of other high-profile corporate scandals and it adds heat to an already hot debate on the decline of ethics in the business community, and I don’t care which side you take up in the argument, you won’t be running out of ammunition anytime soon. Consider these recent falls from grace, played out on the front pages of newspapers across the country: John Rigas, chief executive of Adelphia Communications, was found guilty of conspiracy and fraud, for looting as much as $100 million in company funds; Dennis Kozlowski, of Tyco, was found guilty on 22 of 23 counts of grand larceny and conspiracy, having, among other things, diverted company funds to his personal account and thrown a $2 million party on Sardinia for his wife (he was sentenced to 8 1/2 to 25 years in prison and fined $70 million); and Tomo Razmilovic, of Symbol Technologies, fled the country after being charged with securities fraud.

  You’ll note here that I haven’t offered the findings in all of these cases after they went to trial, because many of them remain open at the time of this writing, and in certain cases where the verdicts have come in they have been swiftly appealed, but it’s the vast sweep of all these allegations that has gotten me worried. It’s the appearance of impropriety—all at once, and all over the corporate map. It’s enough to make you question the legitimacy of almost every transaction, without even taking into account the devastating collapses of Enron and WorldCom—two high-flying corporate g
iants of the middle 1990s booms whose names have now become synonymous with greed and graft and corruption.

  In case you missed it—although I can’t imagine how—the Enron debacle was a doozy, at the time the largest, most far-reaching accounting fraud and bankruptcy filing in U.S. history. The company grew out of a 1985 merger negotiated by Houston Natural Gas CEO Kenneth Lay, and was originally involved in the transmission and distribution of electricity and gas, and the development and operation of power plants and pipelines around the world. Under Lay’s putatively “visionary” direction, it was named “America’s Most Innovative Company” by Fortune magazine for five consecutive years, from 1996 to 2000, but it was all too good to be true. There were soon charges of irregular accounting procedures bordering on fraud, against Enron and its accounting firm, Arthur Andersen. Here again, the appearance of impropriety set people off, and investigators began looking closely at the company’s entire operation. Every day, it seemed, there were new allegations against Lay and his top executives, each one more alarming than the ones that preceded it. By November 2001, Enron’s stock price had plummeted from a high of $85 per share to about 30 cents, while its top executives—among them Lay, chief financial officer Andy Fastow and his wife, Lea Fastow, the company’s assistant treasurer—were facing criminal charges. And, while all this was going on, the Houston Astros baseball team had to endure the shame of playing their home games at Enron Field, before team officials were able to buy their way out of their naming rights contract for $5 million.