They don’t make movies anymore like the Jerry Colangelo story.
Probably because you would need Jimmy Stewart, Frank Capra and a less cynical public. You know, poor kid living in a house his immigrant grandfather constructed from railroad boxcars, influences of the old country everywhere, a kid who learned the accordion so he could play old Italian standards for the workers in the tavern down the block on Hungry Hill in Chicago Heights.
Roots were his lifestyle before they became fashionable.
He was a tough, good-looking kid with a sharp edge to him. Former high school baseball teammate Jim Bouton once said Colangelo could sell ice to Eskimos. But he also had the talent.
He was a heck of an athlete. Colangelo was an all-stater in baseball and basketball at Bloom High School. He fought future New York Yankees star Bouton for the ball and fought off an offer from the Los Angeles Dodgers. He also was a sharpshooting left-hander who was banned from county fairs for winning so many prizes at the basketball shooting games. Heavily recruited, he ended up at the University of Illinois.
He would go on to one of the most remarkable executive and business careers in pro sports, effectively building the Phoenix Suns from nothing and winning a World Series with the Arizona Diamondbacks he brought to Phoenix. Though he was removed from the Diamondbacks’ management last month, he doesn’t have misgivings.
Any regrets?
Colangelo forms his thumb and forefinger into a circle.
“The baseball experience,” he says, “here’s how I look at it: I was asked to do something and did it. I was able to deliver a franchise and build a park. The result of a plan that worked was a World Series in four years. You look at the Cubs and Red Sox and they’ve waited 100 years.
“The way it ended for me in baseball (being fired by new ownership brought in to keep the team out of bankruptcy) left something to be desired. Some of that wound is still open. But I’d do it all the same way, even knowing the result.
“It has been an unbelievable journey. How many individuals get the opportunity to spend a lifetime in a business that has their heart and passion? And it was basketball that made it all happen. . . . When I was a kid I picked up a basketball and I fell in love with it. Basketball created for me the journey of a lifetime.”
That journey continues in Springfield, Mass., for the man who has spent most of his life in the desert but calls himself a Chicago guy, a guy who says he has lived by his gut and his guts. Colangelo, 64, will be inducted Friday into the Basketball Hall of Fame along with Clyde Drexler, Bill Sharman, Lynette Woodard, Maurice Stokes and Drazen Dalipagic. He’ll be the second Illini basketball player, after Whiz Kid Andy Phillip, to be elected.
Colangelo will be enshrined as a contributor to the game. He will be introduced by a foursome of basketball greats, Connie Hawkins, Pete Newell, Wayne Embry and Bobby Knight. They are testament to the breadth and depth of Colangelo’s effect on basketball.
No, he didn’t play pro ball, just semipro out of college for $50 per game. It was a time when perhaps a dozen players entered the nine-team NBA each season and Colangelo wasn’t quite that good despite All-Big Ten honors.
But his teammates could see something. He was elected captain after his sophomore season, the first underclassmen to get the honor. The honor was taken away because the athletic department didn’t want to create the precedent, but Colangelo was the de facto leader. He got things done.
His Chicago story is well known. Already with a wife and child, he needed a job and went into partnership in a dry cleaning and tuxedo rental business with one of his mentors from the old neighborhood.
Colangelo likes to rhapsodize about the old days and the old neighborhood. Near his desk in his modern, glass-encased office here are two urns, both about 1,000 years old, found near his ancestral home in Italy. There is a photo of his boyhood home and the accordion. He says he keeps them, literally, at arm’s length to “never forget where you came from.”
But memories become more valuable with age, like the urns. Colangelo was estranged from his father for years. His business partner, who later became mayor of Chicago Heights, Chuck Panici, went to prison for corruption. The U.S. attorney said the city was a cesspool of crime. Al Capone often stopped by the church where Colangelo was an altar boy. But, to Colangelo, all the pieces became the quilt in which he wrapped his life experiences.
He fell into a job with the Bulls after a chance call to businessman Dick Klein, who remembered Colangelo from his college basketball career. Klein got the Bulls expansion franchise in 1966 and took Colangelo along as everything from scout to salesman. Colangelo loves to tell the story of walking down Michigan Avenue with a live bull trying to sell tickets.
Colangelo, with a business background and neighborhood savvy, began to earn a reputation around the then-burgeoning-with-expansion NBA. He was courted to be general manager by expansion teams in Seattle and Milwaukee, but he chose Phoenix. Nice weather, better salary.
“I’ve always been a guy to operate from the gut,” Colangelo says. “My first trip there, my heart and gut told me this is where I should be starting a new life, the Wild West and all that.”
Colangelo took a few turns as interim coach with modest results but did win four executive of the year awards. He also became a silent power in the NBA. He helped set franchise values and orchestrated rule changes. He established pension plans and his Suns were among the first to bring in international players.
He went on, effectively, to save the franchise after a drug scandal in 1988 and he put together his own group to purchase the team. When he arrived in Phoenix, he couldn’t afford to buy a house. Since then he has built houses for two teams. He eventually brought baseball and hockey to Phoenix and helped lure the NFL.
His downtown revitalization efforts got him named the 20th Century’s most influential Arizona sports figure by the Arizona Republic.
But with power comes criticism. He was accused of a public tax squeeze to get himself the baseball stadium, a rare condemnation that was forgotten quickly when his Diamondbacks won the World Series faster than any expansion team.
Colangelo went on a spending spree that brought Randy Johnson, Curt Schilling and a World Series triumph over the New York Yankees. The result was a hero’s welcome for Colangelo and eventually the loss of the baseball team that couldn’t get out from under a pile of debt.
It’s a cautionary tale for sports. Colangelo did what the fans and media often scream for: Spare no expense. He did and now is out of baseball. Though he remains on a contract with the Suns, he no longer owns them after a $400 million deal that will pay down about $230 million in Suns debt.
“Sometimes you wish for something (like a big asking price) and sometimes it happens,” Colangelo says somewhat mournfully. “It was a difficult, emotional decision.”
Colangelo never got that NBA title, but he came from nowhere to get the team that started it all for Arizona sports. He brought a reign to the desert.
“Maybe it is time to move on in life,” he says. “You’re 17 and a hotshot in high school, then 28 and the NBA’s youngest general manager and then you’re going on 65.
“Why did it happen like this? It was meant to be. You know, I’m a believer. I say God had a plan for my life. I cannot explain why it happened. It happened. I don’t know what opportunities there’ll be now. We’ll see. Anyway, it has been a nice journey.”
One that will stop Friday in Springfield for some well-deserved recognition.
