John Riordan: Grizzly Warrior reflects on a career as a sports executive

Andy Dolich emerged out of the world's first ever sports management college course to take on roles in five pro teams over the course of five decades

The real deal: Ja Morant of the Memphis Grizzlies looks to pass against Otto Porter Jr. of the Golden State Warriors during Game Two of the Western Conference of the NBA Play-offs. The sides meet in Game Three this Saturday. 

This weekend, Andy Dolich won’t know where to look. In the 90s, he spent a brief spell as President of the Golden State Warriors during a change of ownership. And then for most of the 2000s, he oversaw business operations as the NBA’s Grizzlies moved house from Vancouver to Memphis.

On Saturday in the Bay Area, where Dolich has spent most of his professional life, what is shaping up to be the most intriguing series of the NBA playoffs will land in from Memphis as two of his former teams square off in the third of a seven-game mini-marathon, effectively the semi-finals of the Western Conference and the quarter-finals of the whole thing.

“I was very happy when the Warriors won the first game in Memphis,” he told me from his office in Silicon Valley when we spoke by phone on Wednesday evening. “I was very happy when [Grizzlies star] Ja Morant played out of his skull [in Game Two on Tuesday]. Incredible. And I want it to be seven games. I don't know if it will. But wow, the two games have been incredible. Just absolutely incredibly exciting.” 

A good friend of mine told me I had to connect and chat with Andy Dolich and I didn’t quite know what to expect. 

Reading his CV certainly had me intrigued - a five-decade career during which he held executive positions across the main professional sports; the big four, NFL, NBA, MLB and the NHL as well as stints in professional soccer and lacrosse.

Most intriguing, for me anyway, was his 14 years at the Oakland A’s, in the midst of which they clinched the Battle of the Bay in 1989 against the San Francisco Giants to secure that year’s World Series. We ended up going 30 minutes over our allotted time.

“I was able to get into the business before it was a business in the early 70s,” he said. “And that just was a path for me that turned out to be far more amazing than I ever, ever could have imagined.

“My job was really on the business side of these franchises as sports was starting to become a true big business.” 

In 1972, Dolich was one of the first graduates of the first graduating class of the world’s first ever sports management program for budding executives. Ohio University (not to be confused with The Ohio State University) celebrates a landmark 50-year anniversary this weekend, of which more in a bit.

When I asked him to elaborate on what that era of sports was like before Ohio University sent the first sports business grads out into the world, he laughed and said he’d email me something later to help explain.

The 75-year-old had to go play basketball first but soon enough an email with a link to a 2010 Sports Illustrated feature partly about Dolich appeared in my inbox with the header: “Answer to your question about getting started in sports”.

Frank Hughes was writing about the then New Jersey Nets (now in Brooklyn) who were flirting perilously with ‘achieving’ the worst regular season record in NBA history. Ultimately they weren’t successful in dethroning the 1973 version of the Philadelphia 76ers whose nine-win feat of badness was lowered to seven by the 2012 Charlotte Bobcats a couple of seasons after the Nets struggled to 10 victories.

Dolich could not have launched his career at a lower ebb and the introductory paragraph to that 2010 Sports Illustrated piece by Hughes captures it pretty perfectly so I’m lifting it wholesale here:

Andy Dolich was a 25-year-old intern to the general manager at the time. These were the pre-Magic, pre-Bird days of the NBA, when front-office staff not only sold tickets but also acted as video coordinators, drivers, promoters and activists. And so Dolich was sitting courtside when he saw [player] Charlie Tharpe, with throw-up seeping through his large fingers and onto the wooden floor of the musty college gymnasium, stroll over to Roy Rubin and ask, "Coach, what do I do with this?" At which point assistant coach Paul Lizzo turned to Rubin and proclaimed, "Holy crap, we are screwed. We are totally screwed."

The Sixers’ General Manager was a man by the name of Don DeJardin and while the organization crumbled around him after the departure of Wilt Chamberlain, one of the greatest players of all time, DeJardin had the foresight to dip into the Ohio University program for cheap recruits who could help boost ticket sales, Dolich and three others from the program.

It had to start somewhere.

“There was simply no sports business,” Dolich told me by way of context.

“I mean, yes, there were the Dodgers, the Yankees, the football Giants, the baseball Giants. But they weren't selling seats for $1,000. They didn't have suites. You had a hot dog and a beer and a coke. That was it. They didn't have VIP parking. ESPN didn't exist. You had a front office of maybe 10 people as opposed to the 300 people it takes to run an individual team today. There were no season tickets.

“So I just was very, very lucky in the early 70s to get into the first sports management program in the United States.” 

Dolich was born in Brooklyn, grew up in Long Island and ultimately transplanted to the West Coast. 

A familiar story in many walks of life but most infamously achieved in the sport of baseball whose Dodgers and Giants upped sticks from Brooklyn and Manhattan to LA and San Francisco in the late 50s.

But what blew my mind was that it was Walter O’Malley, the controversial visionary who took over the Dodgers and moved them west after being thwarted in his attempts to build a new stadium, who endowed money to start the world’s first sports administration program.

O’Malley had first taken the idea to Columbia University who baulked in horror at the idea of an Ivy League institution lowering itself to sports academia.

“O'Malley was a visionary,” says Dolich. “This was literally in the late 50s when he was telling everyone who would listen that ‘sports is going to be a gigantic business’. And of course, people laughed at him.

“Incidentally, O'Malley bought the Brooklyn Dodgers for $800,000. What’s it worth today? $3.8 billion, $4.5 billion?” 

The furthest west that Major League Baseball had a team was the St. Louis Cardinals and O’Malley needed to look west also to launch his sports program in Athens County, Ohio.

In the 1950s, O'Malley and Dr. Clifford Brownell, a professor at Columbia University, shared ideas around how baseball could and should evolve as a business. The Dodgers owner was frustrated by the lack of business acumen at his ballclub. In his ideal world, a university would train students in areas such as player contract negotiation, facilities management, and marketing to ultimately boost the on-field performance.

Brownell planted these seeds subsequently for a doctoral student named James Mason who reverted to O’Malley and the Dodgers a decade later with the idea of launching a program at Ohio University.

“There are about 2,400 of us around the world,” Dolich told me.

“I love the program and I'm on the board. It's just sort of amazing to see where these men and women have worked in their careers all over the world. And it was because of one man's vision, Walter O'Malley. Today, there are 375 Masters or undergrads in sports management in the United States. 375! There shouldn't be because many of them are just robbing tuitions from young men and women who believe there's an opportunity and they don't. They're not going to help them.” Dolich won’t quit playing basketball in his 70s and he won’t quit musing on the many voids sport has yet to fill.

“Does the world of technology really understand sport? And vice versa? Does sport really understand the incredible global power of technology? My answer is no.” 

 But he is equally perturbed by the deep problems faced by grassroots sports, the lack of access for young athletes without means, the negative impacts of overly ambitious / deluded parents, the focus on winning over team building.

Dolich happened to be working at the Washington Diplomats as the now defunct NASL began its short, sharp era of professional soccer in the States. While there, their marquee star for a season was Johann Cruyff. So the still young sports executive learned early about the immense power of the most famous approach to youth development.

“Truly an amazing human being and an incredible footballer, too,” he recalls.

We wrap up so he can head out to shoot some hoops. 

"Sound body, sound mind," is his mantra, he says, and there's no sign of letting up.

@JohnWRiordan