Art Simon has to chuckle when recalling a particular story about his good friend Jim Delany, the Big Ten commissioner, who is also Simon’s Hinsdale neighbor.
Has to because, to start with, it’s such a guy story. First of all, Simon, an attorney, was at the Final Four, the weekend of the National Collegiate Athletic Association men’s basketball championships, the biggest sports weekend in America outside of the Super Bowl.
He was a guest of Delany, who goes every year. Secondly, Delany, who’s usually accompanied by his wife, Kitty, was there without her because she was due to have their second child that Saturday, the day the semifinal games took place. It was 1992, and they were in Minneapolis.
Most wives do not allow their husbands a weekend trip to go to one of the year’s best sports parties under such circumstances, but it was, after all, part of the commissioner’s job. And Big Ten members Michigan and Indiana were in the Final Four. So Simon was already thinking what a cool guy his friend is.
What do you suppose happened?
“I went into labor minutes after the second game ended Saturday night,” recalls Kitty Delany. “I had given him a beeper, so I beeped him and he was at a party. By then it was 12 or 1 o’clock and too late for him to get a flight. I said I’m just going to drive myself to the hospital.”
Simon picks up the story. “We discussed all sorts of options, private planes and driving him, but that would have taken eight hours. In the end he stayed up the whole night worrying and took the first plane out.”
Continues Kitty. “The doctor came to me at 5 a.m. and said, `It looks like you’re going to have this baby and Jim’s not going to make it.’ But as it happened, just like the first time, I got stuck, stalled.”
Chance Delany wasn’t born until 10 a.m. on Sunday, April 5, 1992. His father had arrived at Hinsdale Hospital a little more than an hour before.
“I like sports as much as the next person so, yeah, I could understand it,” Kitty Delany says now. “I might have a different opinion if he had missed the birth. But all is forgiven.”
For his part, Delany says, “When (6-year-old) Newman was due, I didn’t go to the NCAA convention and then he was a week late. The second time around, we had two teams in the Final Four and I just figured . . . well, we gambled a little bit.”
But he made it, and though Indiana lost, Michigan advanced to the title game before losing to Duke. “I watched it on TV Monday night, and all’s well that ends well,” the commissioner concludes.
Expectant mothers are asking themselves, how obsessed with basketball could this person be? The 46-year-old Delany played on two Final Four teams himself as the sixth man for North Carolina in the late ’60s, where teammates included current Seattle SuperSonics coach George Karl and South Carolina coach Eddie Fogler. Basketball has remained a big part of his life.
In fact, Delany has parlayed a positive experience under legendary Tar Heel coach Dean Smith into a career in sports. Now he holds one of the most powerful positions in college athletics.
Only the fifth Big Ten commissioner since the 100-year-old conference began naming the position in 1922, the former guard is now calling some of the most consequential plays in intercollegiate athletics.
The Big Ten, which includes 11 schools (Illinois, Iowa, Michigan State, Northwestern, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio State, Purdue, Wisconsin and Penn State), is one of the nation’s major conferences. Delany must preside over decision-making involving 229 varsity sports programs and 6,700 student-athletes. Conference games are seen on live television more than 200 times a year.
The financial stakes have become astronomical as the concerns about the welfare of the athletes have heightened, so it’s no wonder Delany, while he might get those envious perks like Rose Bowl and Final Four tickets, has to take his job very seriously. His outward demeanor reflects it.
When Michigan was again in the NCAA basketball finals in 1993, they played his beloved North Carolina. What’s a commish to do? His conference or his alma mater? “You just have to remain neutral,” he says, because he was, of course, not in the privacy of his own home. “You don’t root, and you put on a professional face.”
Still, when Delany sits down to talk about his career one morning in his gray Victorian home with its white picket fence in the heart of town, it’s clear he didn’t get where he is by being a rigid conformist.
In fact, that picket fence has taken on a symbolic meaning in his life. Delany enrolled in law school, after receiving a high draft number, which ensured he wouldn’t be called to duty in those early ’70s years of the Vietnam War, because “I didn’t want to teach or sell insurance.” After graduating from North Carolina law school at 25, he took a job with the state’s attorney general’s office.
“I didn’t want to work for a law firm,” he says. “I thought if I did I’d have a white picket fence at 25, not 45. I wanted to have some experiences.”
So after a brief stint in government, Delany joined the NCAA’s enforcement division in Kansas City, traveling non-stop at a time of major upheaval in college athletics. Colleges suddenly were getting nailed for such violations as booster club-member “donations” to athletes-a practice formerly viewed as a time-honored tradition. Delany prosecuted close to a dozen major cases, though he won’t say which schools were involved, in four years.
He decided to leave in 1980. Still single and with his options wide open, Delany considered coaching basketball in Europe and pursuing a position as an administrator in Olympic-level basketball. Then he saw an ad for a job as commissioner of the Ohio Valley Conference. When he was named OVC commissioner at 31, Delany was the youngest commissioner in college sports.
Settling into the OVC’s Nashville home base, Delany met Kitty in the mid-’80s and they were married in 1986.
Kitty, 37, is a former reporter for The Tennessean in Nashville and a lawyer who put her career on hold when Newman was born in 1989, which happens to be the same time Delany was tapped for the Big Ten job.
Reared in Chattanooga, Kitty had never lived outside Tennessee, and neither she nor Jim had any close friends in the Chicago area. When it came time to find a home within commuting distance of the Big Ten’s Park Ridge headquarters, they looked in Barrington and Evanston before settling on Hinsdale.
They liked the community’s proximity to both airports-Delany travels at least 100 days a year-its old homes and mature trees and “its strong schools and strong neighborhoods,” Delany says.
Now they’re living a little slice of Americana, except that Jim’s life is a little more pressure-filled than most.
There’s the heavy travel schedule, the meetings with university presidents, the often intense discussions concerning millions of dollars in revenue and how they should be spent in a climate that is changing from male-dominated sports to one of equity for both genders.
Delany has shown where his emphasis lies regarding the relationships between academics and athletics, voting at the recent NCAA convention for tougher eligibility requirements for student-athletes, while he also supported a high-profile issue.
Though college basketball coaches were against it, Delany came down on the side of athletes in voting to allow players who declared for the NBA draft to return to school if they changed their minds.
“Jim is one of the brightest people in the intercollegiate ranks,” says Southern Conference commissioner Roy Kramer. “He’s an innovator and has shown a strong commitment to leading nationally on the major issues.”
His influence, says Kramer, is not easily measured by tangibles. “He’s someone who’s had an impact at the front end and behind the scenes. He commands a lot of respect.”
In his personal life, Delany vows he won’t get caught up in pushing his sons to athletic extremes. “Maybe I treated academics to the detriment of athletics at times in my own life,” says Delany, the son of a basketball coach from South Orange, N.J. “I can’t say I won’t ever get involved, but we want them to pursue whatever it is they like.”
So don’t look for him heckling the coaches at the local Little League game. In fact, Delany has had little time to become involved in community affairs.
Kitty sits on a committee reviewing candidates who will run for the school board and is a school volunteer and would like to get more involved. But . . . a measure of Delany’s finally settling into his picket-fence life in Chicago was his joining the Hinsdale men’s basketball league this winter.
In Nashville, pickup games were a big part of his recreational life, but Delany had gone five years without that outlet. Then friend Dave Stone, a 42-year-old Hinsdale stockbroker, invited him into the league.
“When the referees find out who he is,” Stone says, “sometimes he gets preferential treatment. But he’s not by any means arrogant about anything.
“The first time I met him in a three-on-three game, I didn’t know who he was. He liked to duck his shoulder down into you and knock you over. For a guy in a pampered position, he’s still a street kid from New Jersey.”
Kitty, a competitive tennis player, makes time for her husband’s basketball schedule “because she knows how much Jim’s basketball means to him,” Stone says. “But she knows what she married into.”
Yes, says Kitty, it’s true.
As this year’s Final Four rolls around, she’ll be reminded of that more than ever.
