Whenever a family-run grocery, restaurant or drugstore goes out of business, nostalgic 11th-hour customers reminisce about how wonderful the place was. They don’t dwell on the bottom line, which is that those businesses could not compete with corporate giants.
Paul Tagliabue, commissioner of the NFL, sounds similarly nostalgic when he introduces Virginia Halas McCaskey as the “First Lady of the NFL” at league functions. He is acknowledging her as the daughter of George Halas, who started the league, founded the Bears and ran them for more than 50 years.
But lately, the Bears haven’t been able to compete with the NFL’s best. And while Virginia McCaskey is the majority stockholder of a Bears franchise run as a family business, fans see much more of another woman executive who relishes the spotlight.
When she stands on the sidelines and speaks into the cameras as an NFL corporate giant–most notably after her St. Louis Rams won the 2000 Super Bowl–owner Georgia Frontiere seems to be usurping the “first lady of the league” role.
While the Rams slipped to first-round playoff elimination last season, the rebuilding they’ve undertaken seems like a touch-up compared with the makeover facing the Bears. The Bears have gone 19-45 with four last-place finishes in the last four seasons and haven’t made the playoffs since 1994. Acknowledging that the present system isn’t working, team President Ted Phillips is seeking a general manager.
But with eight McCaskey family members in various management positions, can the Bears convince a qualified candidate that there aren’t too many McCaskeys behind the wheel to let an outsider steer the team’s future?
That would be a tough sell to any outsider who heard former Bears star Gary Fencik, who has been mentioned as a candidate for the job, in a radio interview last week. Referring to Halas Hall, Fencik said, “There’s at least seven McCaskeys with offices [here], and some of them want this job.”
“It puts a newcomer in an awkward position to see that big a family structure, no matter what the business,” said Nick Trujillo, a faculty member at Sacramento State University who has done research on pro sports franchises as a professor of sports, society and communications. “Organizational politics are bad enough when they don’t involve best friends or family members. If there’s a family dynamic involved in office politics, that’s an added wrinkle to navigate.
“Perception of problems can be intimidating no matter what the reality is,” Trujillo said. “When dealing with so much family, who can you confide in, and how much can you confide?”
Reporting to various and sundry McCaskeys “could be a problem,” acknowledged Allen Sanderson, a University of Chicago sports economist. “The question is do they all speak with one voice? And do they all have real authority?”
Or real knowledge?
“There doesn’t seem to be a great correlation between a successful team and its owner knowing the game,” Sanderson said. “More important is how much an owner is willing to step aside.”
And in the case of the Bears, how many feet have to step aside. The difference between a newcomer meeting the owners of other teams or the owners of the Bears “is like the difference between going to a cocktail party or going to a family reunion,” Sanderson said.
But if the new general manager insists on autonomy a la Jim Finks, the Bears’ highly successful general manager from 1974-1983, “the prevalence of all those McCaskeys won’t mean that much,” said Stephen Ross, who teaches sports and antitrust law at the University of Illinois. “A strong football person, an established general manager type, would simply ask for heavyweight assurance up front that he would run the football program.”
How much of a McCaskey factor must be overcome will be evident early in the search for a successor to Mark Hatley, Ross said. Hatley’s four-year stint as vice president of player personnel ended with “mutual termination” last week.
“At this low point, the Bears can’t afford to have this new guy quit if he’s interfered with,” Ross said. “That said, will they bring in a strong individual who won’t tolerate interference from a family member? Or will they bring in a bright, young talent for whom this is a huge opportunity, someone not on anyone else’s short list of candidates, someone who could be perceived as beholden to them right off the bat?”
Phillips, in his third year as team president, answered some, but not all, of the skeptics’ questions last week.
He said he wants someone “who can run the football operations,” empowered to hire and fire the head coach. Regardless of the job title, the structure would be similar to that under which Finks worked. But Phillips left the door open for a less-proven prospect or a “good personnel man” who could learn football operations on the job. He declared that the McCaskey family ownership has assured him it will support his choice for the job.
Ross compared the Bears’ options with those of the father-and-son Presidents George Bush and George W. Bush, in what he called “the Dan Quayle factor”:
“Many people have contrasted the vice presidential choices of Bush the elder and Bush the younger. The elder deliberately picked Quayle, who was not perceived to be more knowledgable or experienced than him in any area. But Bush the younger’s vice president, Dick Cheney, is perceived as the opposite, [having] substantially more knowledge and experience.”
Trujillo said a resolute veteran general manager who won’t brook interference and can ignore the Bears’ looming family presence would clearly have a head start over “anybody who goes into the job and gets caught up in concerns about the politics of the family. That would be a first step backward.”
A successful new GM “could be adopted into the family,” Trujillo said. “But a veteran who puts a new system into place that doesn’t work could see it implode on him quickly.”
Glancing at the Bears’ management hierarchy with its cluster of McCaskeys at the top might make an intimidating first impression on an incoming executive or coach. But Ross, Sanderson and Trujillo said strong family presence doesn’t spell automatic interference any more than its absence guarantees freedom.
“It might be hard for a Bears general manager to say no to a McCaskey, but it might be just as hard for a Cubs general manager to say no to a top executive of Tribune Company,” Ross said. “And is it harder to say no to McCaskey family members to keep them from interfering or to deal with an overbearing owner like a Jerry Jones who you know will interfere and you can’t stop him?”
“It is not radically problematic to deal with family ownership,” Trujillo said. “And you can’t presume that you can’t confide in anyone. Family members can be as different or distant from one another as any other corporate partners.”
A key factor that soured the relationship between coach Phil Jackson and the Bulls was how much authority and autonomy general manager Jerry Krause got, Sanderson said. “I doubt it would have bothered Jackson any more if Krause were actually a member of [chairman] Jerry Reinsdorf’s family.”
Similarly, the current Los Angeles Dodgers seem to be more dysfunctional as a corporate business than the old Dodgers were as an O’Malley family business, Ross said.
“The McCaskeys have made questionable calls in the past,” he added, “but a family-run business brings a certain stability and integrity to a business that a corporation doesn’t.”
On the other hand, Sanderson said, sports businesses are not as competitive as many other businesses. “Owners, CEOs and managers can make more mistakes in sports, can be more incompetent or more ruthless, because they are more insulated from the consumers.”
Exchanging his economist’s cap for that of a fan, he said, “Right now, we’re sitting in Chicago with a bunch of sports franchises that are about as bad as they can get.
“But major stockholders are easier to organize to raise hell than fans are.”
