Michael Reinsdorf Article

[DBAHO]

From da Cubune,

 

Michael Reinsdorf was a 14-year-old 9th-grader at North Shore Country Day School in 1981 when the annual "Intern Week" required him and his classmates to learn firsthand about a specific business.

 

As luck would have it, Michael's dad was just starting in a new business—his ownership group having purchased the White Sox—and Jerry Reinsdorf invited his son to fly down to Sarasota, Fla., stay with him at the Day's Inn and attend the club's instructional meetings.

 

"So there I am, sitting in a room with Roland Hemond and Tony La Russa," Michael Reinsdorf says of the team's general manager and manager at the time. "I mean, I'm sitting there when Roland Hemond says, 'I think we can purchase Greg Luzinski's contract from the Phillies.' It was unbelievable.

 

"Then I got to go along when they took [batting instructor] Charlie Lau to dinner, trying to entice him to come to the Sox. And I drove to spring training with Tony La Russa, just he and I, and Tony had me fill out the lineup card and then I shagged balls in batting practice. That was the best."

 

Small wonder that when it got out that Michael planned to attend the White Sox marketing meetings last month, the assumption was that the third of Jerry and Martyl Reinsdorf's four children must be positioning himself for a place on the payroll. It was only a small leap from there to guess that Michael was being groomed to take over his father's position as chairman of the Sox and as well as the Bulls.

 

Of course, Michael is not 14 anymore. Nor does he need a job. He's a little busy these days as a partner in one of the fastest growing real-estate development and consulting firms in the country to think much about it.

 

Headquartered in Northbrook with his partner, close friend and brother-in-law I. Steven Edelson, the two, along with White Sox vice president of operations Terry Savarise, founded International Facilities Group, which has been involved in more than $2 billion worth of sports and non-sports development projects, including Detroit's Comerica Park and Cincinnati's Great American Ball Park.

 

But perhaps just as significantly, Reinsdorf, 37, and Edelson, 44, have tapped into the trend of major-league sports owners over the last decade to manage the facilities in which their teams compete by doing the same thing on the minor-league level.

 

The two recently purchased the Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Roughriders of the U.S. Hockey League and have plans to buy another minor-league hockey team and a developmental arena football team, both of whom will play in the $113.5 million sports and entertainment complex in Stockton, Calif., the operations of which Reinsdorf's and Edelson's firm is overseeing.

 

"When a fan has a bad experience, they don't think of the owners as the third party," Edelson says. "They say, 'Boy, the Roughriders don't know what they're doing. Reinsdorf and Edelson don't know what they're doing.' Owning a team and operating the facility are two diametrically opposed things. A team owner wants the best of everything. Then you bring a third-party operator in who makes his living off the margin—charging the most he can for a hot dog—and you have a conflict.

 

"We said to Stockton [officials], 'If you want us to own the teams, we have to manage the facility and we need a 10-year commitment."

 

They both agree in retrospect that having Savarise join them, given his operations role with the White Sox and the United Center, was their "big break." Michael Reinsdorf also refers to Blackhawks owner Bill Wirtz as a mentor in learning about the day-to-day operations of a major facility. But it was Savarise's involvement, Reinsdorf says, that assuaged most concerns his father may have had in trusting his son.

 

"If he wasn't a little worried, I'd be shocked," Michael says.

 

"He said to me often, 'Don't take on anything you can't handle.' That was the main thing. Then, when we were at the All-Star Game last year, [Reds CEO] Carl Lindner came up to him and was just beaming about the job we did for the Reds [in overseeing Great American Ball Park] and I have to be honest, it wasn't my involvement. We're successful because we built an incredible staff of people around us who are smarter than us and have done an incredible job.

 

"But when Carl Lindner said, 'Your son's company is just incredible, I couldn't have done it without them,' just to see the smile on my dad's face, I could have hugged Mr. Lindner because it felt great. It just felt great because I know he was proud of me and proud of what we've done."

 

John McHale, former president and CEO of the Detroit Tigers when IFG was overseeing the development of Comerica Park, said the company first came to his attention because of the work of Savarise on U.S. Cellular Field and the United Center. But McHale says it took him "all of two or three minutes" for Reinsdorf to make an impression as a "first-class person."

 

"Michael is a little extra bashful, reticent, because of whose son he is, but it doesn't take much time to determine that he got the full measure of his father's creativity and level-headedness," says McHale, himself the son of a baseball father, former Braves President John McHale Sr.

 

"The salient quality of the Reinsdorfs is that they are straight shooters, which is a very valuable quality. If I were to say anything, it's that Michael gets [his point across] with a little more tact than his father. He has a little softer-edged."

 

Reinsdorf, the father of three, does not pretend that his father has not been a major influence on his career.

 

"When I was going into college [at Arizona], I'd turn to my dad and ask him for advice, what I should do in school," Michael says, "and he clearly said, 'You should go into business school. Real estate has been good to me. Maybe that's something you should look at, but obviously you have to make your own decision.' But I saw his success and thought, 'Wow, that's probably a good idea to follow in those footsteps. That's why I got involved in real estate."

 

But Reinsdorf says he resisted the temptation to work for his father.

 

"I wanted to try to be successful on my own without anyone saying I hung onto my dad's coattails," he explains. "People were always going to say, 'He was born into a wealthy family.' And clearly, I grew up differently than my father. My father is a self-made person. All his success he was responsible for. He didn't have a father to lean on and clearly I have that opportunity and it has been very helpful. But I still wanted to be out there in the real world, trying to make it on my own.

 

"The negative of being a Reinsdorf is that people think I have all the money in the world and live a certain lifestyle. But anyone could come over to my house and see what kind of home I live in. I don't drive an $80,000 car. I live a pretty conservative lifestyle. I'm pretty down to earth."

 

If pride kept him from depending on his father financially, however, he was also smart enough to use his name and his connections, as well as tap into the vast experience that continues to be no further than a phone call away.

 

"It's more valuable to me to have his advice than to have his money right now," Michael says. "I don't get into every specific nuance of the deals that we're working on. But I give him the big picture and he equates it to situations that he has been in in the past.

 

"From a negotiating standpoint, he said, 'You don't fall in love with your deals.' I've had to pull myself back sometimes from certain deals that I really like. I like the people involved, I think it's a great idea, a great deal and I've had to pull back because if you don't pull back, then you don't make the best deals for you or the company."

 

Both Reinsdorf and Edelson take exception to the notion that Jerry Reinsdorf is an unyielding negotiator.

 

"My father is a good negotiator," Michael says. "He's a fair negotiator. What he is, he's not someone who squeezes every last ounce of blood from you. He's always said to me, 'A good deal is not when you win and the other guy loses. It's when you both walk out saying that was a fair deal.'"

 

Michael Reinsdorf often refers to the Sox and the Bulls as "us," reflecting the kinship he feels to both organizations. Right around the time of SoxFest last month, Michael saw the direction he was headed with minor-league sports ownership and decided it would help if he could sit in on some of the White Sox marketing meetings.

 

"I've always been involved through my father in what goes on," Michael says. "We'd talk about, 'Did the organization [do the right thing]?' Of course, my questions were always more, 'Are we going to make a trade?' because that's the most fun. But I started thinking, 'I know we can take the best practices of the Bulls and the White Sox, the things we do right, and apply it towards these minor-league teams.'

 

"You look at the Bulls and unfortunately we don't have a great record right now, but we definitely have to have one of the best marketing departments in the NBA. And I want to emulate that throughout the minor leagues, teams we're involved with.

 

"At the same time, I think there are probably things we'll be doing with the minor-league sports that I can suggest—and just suggest because I have no official capacity with the White Sox or Bulls—that we could possibly do on the major-league level.

 

"So all I was doing was going to some meetings and next thing you know I'm next in line to take over for my father."

 

In Arizona, Suns owner Jerry Colangelo has asked an investment firm to look for potential buyers and has made clear his intentions to sell his interest in the team to avoid what would be a hefty estate tax.

 

Was there ever a time when Michael foresaw taking over for his father?

 

"No, because it's not an entitlement," he says. "I always get uncomfortable when people come up to you and they say, 'Your dad owns the Bulls.' My answer is, 'He's chairman of the White Sox and Bulls. He's a general partner. He has other investors. There are a lot of owners.' I kind of try to downplay it.

 

"I guess maybe if my dad owned 100 percent of the team, it might be something I would think about. But because it's not, it's not something I've given a tremendous amount of thought to. I've never really gotten into it or had that discussion with him."

 

Nor, he says, have he or his brothers Jon, 34, or David, 42, both involved in real-estate development, ever strived to be part of the Sox or Bulls organizations.

 

"I've never asked him to hire me for the teams," Michael says. "I love sports. But what I didn't want to have was the situation, for example, when Carroll Rosenbloom was the owner of the Rams and his son was the president of the team. He passed away and next thing you know, his son was out of a job.

 

"I remember it happening and I didn't want to be working for a team and have my dad sell the teams and now, 'OK, now what do I do?' So I said, 'You know what, maybe I should try to make it on my own without getting involved with the teams. I can still enjoy it just as much. Everyone who knows me knows how many games I go to."

 

And everyone who spends any time at all with Michael Reinsdorf can feel the same sense of wonder he had at 14, sitting in the same room with Roland Hemond and Tony La Russa, and shagging flies in the outfield.

 

"I'm old enough to know the difference," he says. "I know how incredible it is to be the son of Jerry Reinsdorf and have the accessibility and the fun of being involved because I knew what it was like before 1981."

 

Ask him to look at his long-range future and Michael says he can only envision being with his wife, Nancy, and children Jennifer, 9; Joey, 7; and Harry, 4. He and Edelson, the father of five, chose to work close to home in large part so that they could coach their kids' teams and watch them play.

 

"If you ask where will I be in five, 10 years, I'd say if I work really hard, I will be very successful," he says. "But if you ask me today, I'd tell you how upset I was recently when I missed my daughter's [teacher] conference. I told my mom and she said, 'Oh come on, your father never went to conferences.' But it's different now. My father was working so hard, he didn't always have time to go to our games. But he'd always be home for dinner at 6 o'clock every night.

 

"It's funny, but to this day, I prefer to have dinner at 6 o'clock."

[cwsox]

thanks for posting that

 

I get very good vibes from this guy relating to our future

[SkokieSox]

Kind of gives you a different take on things. Very good article, I thought. Glad I read it.