John Idzik will learn this fast: There is no such thing as a honeymoon anymore for the men who run professional sports teams. Even more than the guys who work under them, the coaches and managers who oversee day-to-day responsibility of those teams, it’s the GMs who bear the burden of impatience.
Ask the Mets’ Sandy Alderson. Alderson wasn’t on the job two months when someone had bought up the domain rights to FireSandy.com. Idzik, the Jets’ new boss, is about to see. When the NFL officially reopens for business in a couple of weeks, he is going to be on the clock for every move he makes, immediately. People already went to great lengths to critique his introductory press conference, for goodness sakes.
You know what might be the secret to being a successful GM, especially around here? It probably can be summed up by four words that might sound incongruous to the job description, four words that the most successful practitioners would probably distance themselves from. But seems to apply anyway:
Not. Giving. A. Damn.
Think about the three most successful GMs we have in town right now: Brian Cashman, Lou Lamoriello and Jerry Reese. Between them they have nine championships, 13 trips to championship level match-ups and one common thread: They either were born with or acquired the rare gift that allows them not to obsess about things they can’t control.
Mind you, all three men burn to win. I’ve sat beside Lamoriello in a few playoff press boxes through the years, sat in front of Reese in more than a couple of big-game football press boxes, seen the weariness on Cashman’s face at the end of especially draining playoff series. That stuff matters. Winning fuels them. Ambition drives them. Success is their oxygen.
But all three of them have reached places in their careers where one of their principle characteristics is this: They don’t care what people say about them, don’t care about how they are perceived, don’t lose sleep about the whims and winds of public sentiment.
Reese earned that quickly. It’s part of his nature, serious and studious, and it helped that he won a championship in his first year on the job (after selecting a perfect draft class). In the summer of 2011, a lot of people thought he had lost his mind with his roster decisions. By the winter of 2012, he was squinting champagne out of his eyes. And never changed his outlook in either extreme.
Lamoriello? I’ve long argued he could have operated a champion in any sport — he’s that smart, that savvy, that confident. Please remember what the Devils were when he took over 25 years ago, and what they’ve been since. And please understand — when he fires a coach, trades a player, breathes fire in a negotiation — he does it armed with a lifetime of success. Years ago, when I worked in Jersey, I’d ripped him in a column for firing a coach late in a season. He called me.
“You don’t like that move?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I hate it.”
He thought about that a second.
“Good,” he said. “I thought it was the right thing to do. Now I know it was.”
Epilogue: The Devils won the Stanley Cup two months later.
Cashman might be the best case study of all. This was a job that defined “transient” for years. Cashman took over in 1998, won a World Series that year, has won three more, and has helped established a stability within the organization that barely seemed possible anywhere in town, but especially in The Bronx.
He has endured tabloid scars of both front page and back, and survived. Now he essentially can tell Joba Chamberlain to fly a kite, he can crush the eternally popular Eduardo Nunez, he can willingly play the bad guy in Derek Jeter’s negotiation and neither worry nor care he will be hammered for it by fans. And he also rappels down buildings for kicks, and tomorrow — why not? — will parachute out of a plane over Miami. Maybe Idzik doesn’t want to go to that extreme.
Although … it couldn’t hurt.
Whack Back at Vac
Mike Gijanto: Joe Girardi is paid to say things like, “I see 95 wins in 2013,” but as I look things over, it sure feels like 1965 in Yankeeland …
Vac: One of these days, it really will be 1965 (or 1982) around the Yankees. But I have to see it first.
Michael Tate: Why is Roy White continuously ignored? Roy, along with Mel Stottlemyre, was the only Yankee worth watching during that dismal late ’60s era, always played the game hard. I’m certainly not advocating the Yankees retire his No. 6 (it’s Joe Torre’s now, anyway), but I think it’s high time to recognize Roy while he can still smell the roses.
Vac: The heartbreaking part of that is that there are a lot of Yankees fans who only know Roy White as a coach who got fired a few years ago.
@MarleyMarl17: It’s been a long time since I was that entertained watching a basketball game (Wednesday’s Warriors-Knicks).
@MikeVacc: And you know something? Even if you weren’t there, Clyde Frazier and Mike Breen called about as good a game as the craft allowed, which only added to its stature.
Bob Buscavage: Now that former NBA star Dennis Rodman and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un have watched an exhibition basketball game together, what’s next, Metta World Peace sitting courtside with Russian President Vladimir Putin?
Vac: I would love to have been sitting next to Henry Kissinger when those Rodman/Kim pictures appeared on his television screen. You?
Vac’s Whacks
I realize this isn’t CYO ball, and coaches aren’t going to bench players just because they have a few words for the referees, but is it a team rule that the Knicks have to get two or three technicals every game?
* If he isn’t careful, Rory McIlroy and his aching wisdom tooth may be about to discover that the commute from People’s Choice to Palookaville isn’t exactly as long as the one from Manhattan to Montauk Point.
* Good for Steve Lavin, showing his players who’s boss even if the decision to suspend D’Angelo Harrison seals St. John’s NCAA fate. But it’s also a reminder that it’s one thing to accrue a spectacular recruiting class, as Lavin did two years ago, and something quite different to shepherd it to glory.
* I’ve now watched all 13 episodes of Netflix’s “House of Cards,” and since I have no idea how long the spoilers’ statute of limit-ation is for an insta-series like this, all I’ll say is this: I wish there could be another 13 in my queue already.