Aug

12

Book Review: The GM by Tom Callahan

Filed Under Book Review 

After seeing this book lying on the coffee table in Steve Yzerman’s office, I decided I wanted to give it a read. Reporter and sports columnist Tom Callahan took a look at Ernie Accorsi’s legendary 35-year career, ending as a GM for the New York Giants. The book The GM: A Football Life, a Final Season, and a Last Laugh was written as Callahan spent a year with Accorsi in his final year as General Manager for the Giants.

If you have ultimate dreams of becoming a GM or working in the sport side of a sports team rather than the business side, I highly recommend this book. If you want to work in the NFL on the PR side, this book is a great way to help you understand the sport side of the NFL and the people you will be working with. And if you’re just a Giants fan and want to see how certain players were drafted or signed, you’ll want to give it a read.

Here are some of the PR-related excerpts from the book:

Pat Hanlon, the Giants’ communications czar, found me [Callahan] a working space in the front office and made a place for me in the press box at all of the games, home and away. Curiously, my affiliation on the media badge and out-of-town seating charts read “Random House.” Thanks to the Giants’ director of public relations, Peter John-Baptiste, I was able to get one-on-one time with the ten or so players I wanted to know better than the others. None of them was exactly sure who I was, but they all knew I had some connection to Accorsi. — p. 2

Interestingly, the tension between Coughlin and the New York media flowed from the same source. “I don’t do any of that sidebar stuff,” Tom said. “I don’t have special writers or broadcasters who call me on the side for additional information, and you know, they hate me for that. Some of the media stars expect you to play this ‘if you do things for me, I’ll do things for you’ game. The first year I was here, one of them wanted to do a family story. My family. I did it. They killed me. Another thing: we’ve got this little practice area, and there’s a box for the media. I’ve always had that. Part of it’s for safety. Part of it is just so I’ll know where they are, so we can do our work without everybody being underfoot. Well, they hate me for that, too, because they had total free rein under Jim Fassel.

On the rare occasions when Yankees manager Joe Torre came under media fire, Tom thought he could detect a self-interested restraint on the part of the beat men and an unspoken threat from Torre. “Just reading between the lines,” Coughlin said, “it sounded to me like if the writers happened to go too far, Joe just might stop playing ball with them. With me, on the other hand, they know there’s no possible repercussions because I don’t play ball anyway. ‘Coughlin doesn’t give you anything,’ they tell each other, ’so there’s nothing to take back.’ — p. 102-103

Pat Hanlon, the Giants’ PR man, who may be the most thoughtful one in the industry, probably knew Coughlin the best, as it usually fell to Hanlon to steer Tom through the media shoals. “This is the business,” Pat said, “where the head coaches are always telling you how hard they work, how many hours they put in at the projector, how many nights they sleep in their offices. I’ve been with several head coaches who wore that on their sleeves as a badge of honor. How awfully, awfully hard they work. How terribly, terribly tough it is. They just can’t stop reminding you.”

“Well, this guy has never once even hinted that the hours are difficult, or that the work is impossible. Woe is me. I have to be here at five in the morning and I don’t leave until eleven at night, if I leave at all. None of that. Never. And I’ll tell you something, Coughlin works twice as hard as any of the others I’ve known. And on an intellectual level he’s miles ahead of all of them. He’s the brightest person, by far. I just wish he could — or we could — communicate to the public how much Tom loves the game of football, how much it really matters to him. That might help. He told me, ‘The day I retire will probably be two days before I kick. If I didn’t have football, I don’t know how  I’d keep living.’ — p. 103-104

“I would never ask anyone to take exactly what I say and run with it,” [LaVar] Arrington said. “I mean it. I would never say, ‘Write this about me or I’ll never talk to you again,’ because that’s not fair. That’s not life. They have to include their take, their part. I understand. I get it. But can’t I have a little part, too? There’s a picture being painted here, and it’s supposed to be a picture of me. Can’t I hold the brush for just a second? Please let me put a little paint on the damn canvas, so that this stroke here, that stroke there, are my strokes. They may not completely coincide with what’s being written or what’s being said, but there’ll at least be touches of what I consider to be the truth. Most often, isn’t the story already written by the time they come to you? Let’s be straight here. Don’t they just need a quote or two to fit into the second paragraph and the fifth? But I go on talking to them, and I’ll tell you why. Because I figure that even if the publisher and the editor say this is the story they want, at the end of the day maybe I can raise the individual reporter’s consciousness level just a little. Just one brushstroke. For what it’s worth, that means something to me. I’ll still get ripped, but I’ll have had a small impact. — p. 114-115

“Ernie is the last of his breed,” said Pat Hanlon, who may be the last of his breed, too, a PR guy who speaks his mind. “Ernie represents the Pete Rozelle era. Smaller organizations. Less specialization. Nobody else is ever going to start as the PR director of the Colts and end up as the general manager of the New York Giants. That’s never going to happen again. A lot of the fans are playing fantasy football and acting just like GMs, but are any of them true believers? Will any of them end up the real thing?” — p. 257-258

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