The Most Hated Man in Portland?

This story first appeared in the Nov. 20, 1996, edition of WW.

Bob Whitsitt is about as popular with Oregonians right now as taxes.

Oregonian sports columnist Dwight Jaynes, for one, has been on an editorial tirade against the 40-year-old Trail Blazers general manager since the season opener. Jaynes never seemed to like Whitsitt, and the decision to trade for shooting guard and public-relations nightmare Isaiah Rider didn’t help.

“Bringing Rider aboard this team was an embarrassing and incomprehensible blunder that comes from seeking a quick fix, rather than building a team in the right way,” Jaynes wrote in October. “Acquiring Rider will do serious damage to Whitsitt’s credibility, if he has any left.”

As veteran AP sports columnist Bob Baum, who lives in Portland, said, “A lot of people don’t like [Whitsitt].”

Cranky sportswriters aren’t the only ones slamming Whitsitt. On a crowded No. 14 bus driving east through downtown Portland, Whitsitt’s name generated quick disapproval.

“He’s too risky,” said Portlander and Trail Blazer fan James Johnson. “This group of players he brought in—who knows when they’re stoned or not. And the thing is,” he said with disbelief, “management is condoning it.”

The extraordinary thing about Whitsitt—who has been general manager of the Trail Blazers for three years—isn’t that he presides over yet another mediocre squad (as we go to press, the team has a 6 and 5 record, with hard-fought wins over bottomfish Minnesota and Vancouver and more turnovers than assists).

Nor is it amazing that, in one short year, Whitsitt has transformed a team of near-Boy Scouts to one that should be escorted to away games by probation officers. From family man Clyde Drexler to alleged girlfriend-beater Rasheed Wallace. From nice-guy Harvey Grant to cop assaulter Dontonio Wingfield. From model citizen Buck Williams to […] Rider.

What is truly remarkable is that if you travel outside of Portland, NBA sportswriters, agents and insiders will tell you with a straight face that the Blazers are lucky to have Bob Whitsitt. Whitsitt, in fact, is regarded as one of the league’s smartest and savviest GMs.

“The NBA is not about role models,” said Marty McNeal, the West Coast editor of Basketball America, a bible for serious basketball fans. “Whitsitt definitely prioritizes athletes over choir boys, and...you guys should be happy about that.”

McNeal said Portlanders need to scrap the small-town mentality and join the big leagues. “There’s no team in the NBA that doesn’t have questionable people. The question is, do you have good players?”

According to McNeal and others, Whitsitt is more than just the general manager of Portland’s professional men’s basketball franchise. He is also a symbol of what the NBA and other professional sports have become. The question remains: Is Portland ready?

To appreciate how much Bob Whitsitt and his style are at odds with Portland’s expectations of professional sports, it’s necessary to remember the homespun sensibility established by Whitsitt’s predecessor, Blazer patriarch Harry Glickman.

While today’s front-office employees talk about their dealings with Whitsitt as if they’ve been through a business management seminar—awkwardly hyping business buzz words like “synergy” and “profit centers”—Glickman’s former associates talk about friendship, humor, emotion and Portland.

Glickman, 71, grew up on Northwest Vaughn Street in an Italian-Jewish neighborhood and graduated from Lincoln High School in 1941. He served in World War II, returned to Portland to work briefly as a sports correspondent for The Oregonian, then quickly moved into sports promotion. He brought professional football to town for exhibition games, and in the 1960s he brought in the Portland Buckaroos, the hockey team that would eventually become the Winter Hawks.

In 1970, Glickman convinced a reluctant NBA to set up shop at the cozy 12,000-seat Memorial Coliseum.

For more than 20 years, Glickman presided over one of the most successful franchises in the NBA. The Trail Blazers won a championship in 1977, made its owner—California businessman Larry Weinberg—a ton of money and operated in a familial, even provincial, way.

“Glickman represents an old-fashioned style of basketball,” said Baum, who has covered the Blazers for 20 years. “He believed the game spoke for itself.” Glickman, he said, never felt comfortable about the marketing and glitz that have overtaken the NBA recently. “He didn’t believe in cheerleaders. He thought the game itself was the product.”

Former Trail Blazer promotions exec Wally Scales adds, “Glickman was absolutely the greatest. A handshake with Glickman was like a contract written in stone. And everyone in the community knew that and respected that.”

The management style of Harry Glickman’s day has about as much in common with today’s Trail Blazers as the telegraph has with the World Wide Web.

These days, the Blazers, purchased in 1988 by Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen, are far more than a basketball team. Scales said that when Glickman hired him in 1972, there were only eight people in the Blazers’ front office—now there are 300. “When Harry ran it, it was just basketball,” he said. “Now it’s concert promotion, restaurant promotion, food service.”

Whitsitt himself told WW that the new Rose Garden—which Paul Allen had built for the 1995-96 season — is a central piece of the new business that didn’t exist in Glickman’s day. “We have a $262 million mortgage to pay,” he said. “Every financial decision today has a huge financial impact. There is so much stress.”

“It’s about suits and ties,” said Curt Sampson, author of Full Court Pressure, a recent book about the Sonics, “and gobs of money and merchandise and TV.” Indeed, in its 50th anniversary season, the NBA is expected to sell $3 billion in merchandise (compared with $10 million a decade ago) and will rake in more than $1 billion in TV contracts during the next four years. “In the old days we were like, ‘Marketing? What the hell is marketing?,’” Scales said. “Well, now it’s more marketing than basketball. Drink the right Gatorade. Wear the right Nikes. I don’t know if Harry’s style could work today.”

Staggering player salaries have also changed the rules of the game. Savvy agents and sponsorships have turned first-year players like the Blazers’ 19-year-old Jermaine O’Neal into instant millionaires. O’Neal, who skipped college to join the pros, has a 3-year, $2.8 million contract with the Blazers—not to mention a $500,000 3-year contract with Adidas.

“The players are independently wealthy now,” Scales said. “They don’t have to worry about being good citizens. It’s a new NBA, and you need a new type of management to adjust to that.”

Anyone who ever went to a basketball game and sat anywhere near Harry Glickman remembers the image of the president spasmodically smashing his fists down on the seats, screaming at the referees in his gravelly voice, charging out into the lobby for a cigarette to calm his nerves.

Go to a game and watch Whitsitt, however, and the image is quite different. Cool, almost passionless, Whitsitt doesn’t applaud, and barely even seems to shift the muscles in his poker face.

Cliff Robinson’s agent. Brad Marshall, who has done battle with Whitsitt over the player’s contract, said the general manager’s demeanor on the court parallels his style dealing with players. “There are no relationships there,” Marshall said. “They have a whole lot of money, they have good minds, but they don’t have relationships.”

“I don’t think he’s going to go out of his way to build any kind of social or more in-depth relationships with his players,” said NBA agent Mark Termini, who represented Rod Strickland. “And I feel that’s appropriate. That’s common in the NBA now. GMs take this posture because the guy that’s your star today may have to be traded tomorrow. I don’t fault Whitsitt for that.”

Agent Dan Fegan, who represents Blazer Chris Dudley, called the general manager competitive and no-nonsense. “If you go in unprepared with Bob Whitsitt,” Fegan said, “he’ll beat the pants off you every time. If you want to get a good deal for your client, Bob will make you earn it. I was not ready for his style, and I was groomed at Yale law school.”

A Wisconsin native who joined the NBA as a marketing manager straight out of business school in 1978, Whitsitt has worked in Indianapolis, Kansas City, Sacramento and Seattle. It was in Sacramento—where Whitsitt was sent to oversee Kansas City’s move to the California market—that NBA execs began to take note of him. He convinced the league to support an expansion team in Sacramento’s smaller market, and he brokered the deal for the team’s new, privately funded arena. The idea of bringing private funding into NBA arena deals is widely seen as Whitsitt’s invention. “He was among the first to see that possibility,” said George Andrews, Magic Johnson’s former agent. Sacramento’s Arco Center turned into such a success story for the NBA that the Sonics, looking to build a new arena, brought Whitsitt up to the emerald city as the youngest GM in NBA history. He was 31.

In 1994, Paul Allen hired Whitsitt, reportedly for a $1 million-a-year salary; the former Sonics GM is now managing the half-billion-dollar Trail Blazers Inc./Oregon Arena Corporation. The corporation includes its own promotion company, its own food-service company and its own real estate development company, plus a video company that makes TV commercials and corporate videos.

“It’s not just about the Portland Trail Blazers,” Whitsitt told WW. “It’s an entertainment business. One night you’re having a basketball game, then a concert and then a trade show. The No. 1 and No. 2 priority is customer service.”

“If someone spills a Coke at the Rose Garden,” he adds, “we’ve got to get someone up there right away to clean it up. If the floor is sticky, someone’s going to remember that, more than if we won or lost.”

That’s not to say that Whitsitt, reportedly a competitive tennis player, doesn’t want to win games. In fact, the great paradox of the seemingly mediocre team Whitsitt has pulled together in Portland is that he is widely regarded as a GM who can build athletic, up-tempo sguads.

“If you look at Seattle, you know this guy can put together a team,” said Basketball America’s McNeal. “He’s a talent-oriented guy and he’s not afraid to take risks.”

Cleveland sports agent Bill Pollack adds, ‘There are only a few guys who can build teams in this league, and Whitsitt is one of the few.”

As GM of the Seattle Supersonics, Whitsitt took over a team that, in 1986, had a record of 31-51, placing it at the bottom of its division. When Whitsitt left the team in 1994, it had the best regular-season record in the NBA at 63-19. “He’s taken risks and been proven right many times over,” said Seattle Post-Intelligencer sportswriter Sheldon Spencer, who covered the Sonics during Whitsitt’s tenure in the early ’90s. “He gets a lot of credit here for the success we’ve seen with the Sonics. And I think he deserves it.”

Whitsitt’s biggest risk was drafting a young and untested Shawn Kemp straight out of high school in 1989. “The whole town disagreed with Whitsitt,” Spencer said.

“I remember dreading draft day that year,” Whitsitt said. “I remember going up on the podium and making the announcement about Shawn. They were almost throwing things at me. I was booed and booed all season.” Kemp has since turned into an all-star power forward.

Whitsitt was also savvy enough to draft and stick with an unpopular hothead from Oregon State University named Gary Payton. “Nobody liked Gary’s attitude,” Whitsitt said. “He couldn’t shoot well, he didn’t work hard enough. For two years it was, ‘Trade him!’ ‘Get rid of him!’ ‘He’s overpaid!’”

Payton, a Western conference all-star, is now considered the best defensive guard in the league.

In Portland, Whitsitt’s qualifications haven’t become immediately apparent. The team is hovering at .500, and the business is suffering.

Harry Hutt, the brand-new senior vice president of marketing, whom Whitsitt brought in from Detroit to boost Rose Garden ticket sales, told WW that his 12-person sales team has not met its goals for November. “We had hoped to be down to 500 seats left per game, and we’re at around 2,000 to 2,500,” he said, adding that the team can still remain profitable without selling out the arena every night.

Hutt said he gets calls all the time from people who say they’re canceling their season tickets because the Blazers are bad role models for their families. “I understand where the complaints are coming from,” Hutt said. " I raised kids. I applaud the sentiment. All I would ask is that they give [the team] a chance.”

Veteran marketer Hutt is hardly panicking, but he is eager to transform the Blazers’ bad-boy image into that of an exciting athletic team. During Hutt’s interview with WW, Jay Isaac, vice president of business affairs, interrupted him to ask the VP to preview a TV spot that was put together on 24-hour notice—a commercial showing a recent game that new guard Kenny Anderson won with a last-second shot. (The ad was on its way up to the “big guy”: Whitsitt.) “We have to take advantage of every situation,” Hutt said.

Although ticket sales are slightly off, Hutt said, merchandise sales are up 25 percent from last year, a result of a new attitude toward marketing and a brand-new line of merchandise, including Blazers trinkets, upscale golf shirts and jerseys.

But Paul Miller, who sells Blazers merchandise at the Rose Garden and at the downtown store Blazers on Broadway, said sales are definitely off. Despite the introduction of a new line of T-shirts, Miller said, “sales are much slower, much slower this year. I definitely think it’s because of the negatives with our new players.”

No one knows whether Whitsitt will remake the Blazers into a championship ball club—this year, the team’s goal is simply to make the playoffs. One thing is clear, however: A tight-lipped, bottom-line businessman like Whitsitt is better equipped than perhaps anyone else in the NBA to bring the Blazers, and Portland, into the big leagues of billion-dollar entertainment businesses, millionaire egos, glitzy marketing and players who are definitely not role models.

In other words, don’t blame Whitsitt. Blame the NBA.

Scales chides Portland sports fans for romanticizing the past. “People forget that Bill Walton was considered to be a Patty Hearst vegetarian communist with long hair.... That wasn’t so popular. [But] once Walton won a championship, he was down at Pioneer Square pouring beer on [former Gov. Neil] Goldschmidt’s head. Winning is everything.”