You Gotta Have Balls Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue: Last Call at Yankee Stadium

  Introduction: Being All In

  The Grind

  Chapter 1: What's with the Water in Brooklyn?

  Chapter 2: The Secret of ‘What Else?’

  Chapter 3: Life, Death, and Soda

  Dewey High School

  Syracuse

  Chapter 4: Yes or Yes

  If it Isn't Easy, it Isn't Possible

  Chapter 5: Getting the Raise, Then the Job

  Chapter 6: The Only Sports Bar in New York

  Chapter 7: Waiting to be Struck by Lightning

  Making Connections

  The ‘86 Giants

  Meeting Mara

  One Thing Leads to Another

  On My Own

  Making the Market

  Dreaming Up Appearances

  Medicine Men

  Our First Major Deal

  You Never Know

  Chapter 8: Play the Game, Not the Score

  Relationships, Not Transactions

  Chapter 9: Turning Memories Into Money

  Expanding Our Business

  My Favorite Collectible

  Chapter 10: The Big Break: Yankees-Steiner

  Chapter 11: The Light in the Other Room

  Chapter 12: Turning Dirt into Dollars

  Chapter 13: A Jewish Kid Meets Touchdown Jesus

  Chapter 14: The Final Days of Yankee Stadium

  The Frieze

  The Original Bricks

  The “I want to Thank the Good Lord for Making Me a Yankee” Sign

  The Black

  The Foul Poles

  The Clubhouse Carpet

  Chapter 15: Nothing but a Dreamer

  Chapter 16: Sandlot Wisdom

  Get Everyone to Buy In

  Make Sure Individuals Know What's Expected of Them

  If You Can't Motivate, Incentivize

  Make Everyone Feel Important

  Conclusion: What Makes You Tick?

  Index

  Brandon Steiner

  Supplemental Images

  Cover image: Anthony Causi

  Cover design: Michael J. Freeland

  Copyright © 2012 by Brandon Steiner. All rights reserved.

  Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

  Published simultaneously in Canada.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

  Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

  Steiner, Brandon.

  You gotta have balls : how a kid from Brooklyn started from scratch, bought Yankee Stadium, and created a sports empire / Brandon Steiner.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  ISBN 978-1-118-17207-0 (hardback); ISBN 978-1-118-33035-7 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-33104-0 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-33319-8 (ebk)

  1. Sports—New York (State)—New York—Marketing. 2. Sports—Collectibles—New York (State)—New York. I. Title.

  GV585.5.N4S84 2012

  796.0688—dc23

  This book is dedicated to the three most important women in my life:

  For my mother, Evelyn. Everything I've ever learned can be traced back to something she once taught me. I try to live up to her no-fear attitude and her limitless compassion for people every day. Her favorite saying was: “You gotta have balls.”

  For my wife, Mara. My most unsung, but biggest hero—I still get butterflies when I see you walk by my office. You are and always will be the love of my life.

  And for my daughter, Nicole. I like to count myself an avid collector of people, but even at her age, Nicole brings them together more quickly than I ever have.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to my son, Crosby, who will be anything he wants to be and more.

  Thank you to our stepson, Keith Martinez, who reminds me that anything is possible. What an amazing story you turned out to be.

  Thank you to my brother, Adam, who made the biggest comeback of all time, and has helped more people stop smoking than I imagined possible.

  I'm grateful to my fellow Brooklynite and dreamer, Colby Brin. I started this book with countless threads of memories, experiences, and ideas in mind; I wanted to share them with the reader, but I wasn't sure how they fit together. Colby helped me weave them into the narrative that makes up these pages. I couldn't have done it without him.

  The same goes for Steve Costello, Eric Levy, A. J. Romero, Andrew Rasero, Chris Amoroso, Brett Schissler, Kelvin Joseph, Sean Mahoney, Margaret Adams, and the entire Steiner Sports family. Thank you for making my dreams come true every day. It's an honor to work with all of you.

  And of course all my friends from the Brooklyn schoolyards who have been there from the beginning and I know have my back until the end.

  I'll always be grateful to Alzie Jackson, my old camp mentor.

  Thanks to Matt Weinberg for always making sure Steiner Sports has had the best transportation.

  Thanks to Shannon Vargo, Elana Schulman, Heather Condon, Peter Knox, Linda Indig, and the entire John Wiley & Sons team.

  Thanks to my in-house marketing squad: Cassidy Mara, Thomas Hanvey, and Zachary Karow.

  I am deeply grateful to the New York Yankees and the entire Yankee family. And the Steinbrenner family.

  Special thanks to Randy Levine, for being the original visionary behind Yankees-Steiner, and my biggest fan; and to Randy Weisenburger, for being the Yankees-Steiner closer.

  Thanks to the Dallas Cowboys; Notre Dame and Notre Dame Football; Madison Square Garden and Jim Dolan; Scott O'Neal; the Syracuse University Athletic Department; my friend Daryl Gross; Micha
el Veley and David Salanger; David Falk, for bringing me closer to Syracuse and having the vision to build the best sports management school on the planet.

  Thanks to my idol Oprah Winfrey, for so much inspiration and so many aha moments. Over the 25 years she aired her show, I didn't miss many episodes. Now she has her own network. Talk about balls.

  Thank you to Frank Bisignano, one of the smartest guys I have ever met, who taught me how to adjust when “the circumstances have changed.”

  Big thanks to Harvey Mackay and the Mackay Roundtable for constant help and mentoring, and for showing me how to put together a book I could be proud of. As we like to say, None of us is as smart as all of us.

  Prologue

  Last Call at Yankee Stadium

  When I was a kid growing up in Brooklyn, I lived for the summer. Summer brought the gifts of camp and all-day sports, as opposed to the burdens of school and studying. It was in summer that our little apartment on Kings Highway wouldn't be freezing when I woke up in the morning. And maybe most importantly, summer days had the potential to turn into afternoons spent at my favorite place in the world: Yankee Stadium.

  My family didn't have season tickets or anything. My father was out of the picture; my mother was often sick, bouncing between the hospital and our house; and my two brothers had their own problems. For God's sake, we could barely make rent every month.

  Yet whenever I could, I scrounged together the $1.50 it cost to go to a Yankees game with my friends. That $1.50 bought each of us a seat with a view obstructed by a steel pillar, but the seats were on the lower level, along the first or third baseline—the best value in the house. We went to as many doubleheaders as we could to stretch that $1.50 even further. We watched the seats in front of us like hawks so we could swoop in and grab the more premium spots as soon as their occupants left. I usually ate food that I snuck in, because the cost of the ticket itself was all I could afford.

  But that was all just fine with me. Those two hours watching the Bombers were a sacred respite from a home life that wasn't exactly ideal. It was a chance to sit among an entire crowd of people who were focused on a shared love. The state-of-the-art facility stood in stark contrast to the ramshackle conditions of my family's small home. I could let my eyes feast on the very stars I read about in the paper and heard about on the radio every day: Mantle. Maris. Yogi. Whitey.

  When I was a kid, Yankee Stadium was my personal paradise.

  I thought back on those summer days some four decades later, as I drove to the last game that would ever be played at the old Stadium. It was September 20, 2008, and the Yankees were hosting the Baltimore Orioles one final time. It was a big day for my marketing and memorabilia company, Steiner Sports. We were hoping to sell countless items commemorating this day alone.

  During the game, I sat in a field level box along the third baseline, with my son Crosby and a few friends. The air was warm, the sky was clear; it was a perfect fall afternoon.

  Except for the guy sitting next to me, in the adjacent box.

  He looked to be middle-aged, and was wearing tan pants and a blue shirt; he was dressed like he was part of the grounds crew. He pestered me throughout the game, asking me what items my company was going to sell to mark the occasion.

  I politely ignored him.

  After Mariano Rivera secured the final out of the 5-3 Yankees victory, Mr. Tan Pants leapt out of his seat and ran onto the field. He made it out there before the police even had a chance to set up a barricade.

  He ran straight to third base, squatted down, and yanked it out of the ground like a weightlifter hoisting a barbell. Then he ran right back to our section.

  As he was climbing back over the railing, I extended my hand as if to help him. Then I lifted the base from under his arm. Before he realized what had happened, the entire section erupted in a cheer.

  “Caught stealing!” someone yelled.

  Everyone went crazy.

  With all eyes on him, Tan Pants didn't go back to his seat. He fled the section, running up the steps and through the closest exit, before security could get to him. At least he was empty-handed.

  I went back to my own seat and sat down. I scanned the stadium, trying to pinpoint those old seats my friends and I used to sit in, the ones with obstructed views.

  I couldn't stand by while that guy stole not only a piece of history, but something that now belonged to me.

  That's right, me.

  When that final game ended, I was responsible for Yankee Stadium and almost everything in it.

  But we'll save that story for later.

  Introduction

  Being All In

  Not long ago, I was the keynote speaker at an event held for local residents who were out of work or looking to make a career change, at my synagogue in Scarsdale, New York. About 400 people attended. After my talk, the attendees met with representatives from businesses in the area who were hiring. It was a good opportunity to network.

  I spoke about my belief that people who are unemployed have to view finding a job as nothing less than a job itself. They must marshal the very same skills and discipline in a job search that they would bring to bear in a job. It's a simple idea, but a difficult mind-set to fully adopt.

  After I finished speaking and the audience dispersed, a woman approached me and introduced herself. She explained that she had recently left her job in book publishing to pursue a career as a real estate agent. She had long been passionate about helping people find their dream homes, and renovating and decorating them. She had a good friend with the same passion, and they had started their own real estate agency. They had a lot of clever ideas, and had put a lot of hard work in, not to mention some money. But the business was not yet profitable.

  “I don't understand why our ideas aren't working,” she said.

  She was ambitious and intelligent, but she was discouraged that she was not seeing results faster. Her new venture wasn't as successful as she had anticipated—yet she hadn't been at it that long. But rather than look at her situation as proof that she had more to learn and room to improve, she became frustrated.

  I see the same kind of thing all the time. People think they're going to start out in an industry, work for a little while, and find instant success. They want the fire, but they don't want to go out and chop the wood.

  No matter what business you're in, it takes many years to establish a business, build a reputation for yourself, and achieve success. It usually takes four or five years just to learn your industry and truly master the necessary skills. Then you spend another 5 to 10 utilizing those skills, learning from the experiences you have, and growing your business.

  If you think you can enter and succeed in a new industry in only a year or two—you gotta wise up. Because it's just not going to happen.

  While I don't think it's more difficult to “make it” today than it was 25 years ago, I do think it's more confusing. We read about young tycoons at start-ups like Zappos and LinkedIn, and we get lost in euphoria when we learn how their companies were instantly valued in the billions, after being around for only a couple of years. We're so starstruck that we fail to consider all the work leading up to those instants.

  Throughout this book, I discuss various habits and traits necessary to be successful. But I can tell you right now that the number one requirement, by far, is commitment.

  The guys who launched Facebook were relentlessly committed to what they were doing for years. Even if it was less than one year from the time Mark Zuckerberg first started programming Facebook to the time it garnered its first major investors, consider the countless years he spent learning computer programming as a kid growing up in White Plains, New York. That part didn't make it into the movie. But it's the most important part.

  The innovations that people are generating take the same amount of commitment and passion and time to develop as they always did. However, it takes much less time to bring them to the marketplace. This can confuse people and lead them to believe
that success should come faster. And when it does come, while it might come more quickly, so to speak, it certainly doesn't come more easily. In the end, it takes the same amount of work—and time.

  What the golden children of the Internet and any other successful entrepreneurs have in common is an incredibly deep commitment to and passion for what they do. (Okay, maybe some of them are also stone cold geniuses; but that's not exactly a teachable character trait.) They are people who are truly “all in” when it comes to their work. They always were. And even when that kind of passion doesn't translate to profound success, it is its own reward. Whether it's directed at a kid, or a lover, or a hobby, or work, passion is what gives us purpose in our lives.

  The trick is that while you can feel instantly passionate about another person, or a pastime—and that passion inspires you to commit yourself to its source—when it comes to work, the inverse is actually true. As my good friend Alex Mandossian likes to say, when it comes to work, commitment leads to passion.

  To be successful in this world, you gotta grind. You have to wake up every morning and look in the mirror and see someone who's committed to whatever your trade is. You have to find leadership in yourself.

  You gotta have the balls to keep at it for years without expecting much in return.

  The Grind

  After graduating from Syracuse University, I had no master plan. I knew I wanted to work in hospitality, but that was it. From there, I transitioned to restaurants. Later, I knew only that I wanted to work with athletes, but I still did not have a sweeping blueprint detailing how it would all work out. During my career, one road led to another too many times to count, and all of a sudden I found myself in a position to take on the biggest deal I could ever imagine—purchasing the demolished Yankee Stadium.

  The only master plan I had was to keep grinding it out, to keep throwing myself into every job, every responsibility, every project, and every task—and to welcome new opportunities when they arose. I was always so immersed in the work before me that often I didn't even realize I had done something really significant until I looked back on it later. I was all in. Always.