During his five-year reign as president of the Philadelphia 76ers, the upbeat, unabashed, and sometimes corny Pat Croce turned the team into the Cinderella story of the NBA and achieved folk-hero status. This is what real leadership is all about.
The insanely upbeat former Philadelphia 76ers president proves that nothing succeeds like excess.
Pat Croce was early for his lunchtime appointment at the Palm Restaurant in downtown Philadelphia. It was a chilly day two weeks before Christmas. Croce paused in the sunshine at the entrance to the Palm on Broad Street, the city's central thoroughfare. A man wearing tortoiseshell glasses and a trench coat emerged from nowhere, grabbed Croce, and hugged him. Holding each other by the elbows like wrestlers ready to grapple, the two men exchanged pleasantries. "I love you, you're the best," said the man, heading off. Croce turned to me. "He's a neighbor of mine," he said. "A lawyer."
A moment later an attractive young woman hurrying along the sidewalk hailed Croce and swooped in to hug him. Croce introduced her to me as Alison Grove, director of corporate sponsorship for the Philadelphia Orchestra.
A middle-aged woman in a crimson parka, her blond hair in a ponytail, was not far behind Grove. She hugged Croce, too. "Maybe you can help me," she said to Croce. The woman asked Croce for advice about what she should do with her framed photo of the New York skyline. "You know me, I'm at 104," she said as she unlatched herself from Croce and scooted down the sidewalk, her ponytail bobbing behind her. "I don't know who she is," Croce said under his breath. "I don't even know what 104 is." And he hustled into the Palm.
Along with such exuberant salutations as high-fiving and hey-dude-ing, hugging is a Croce trademark. He made his ebullient national debut (of sorts) in May 1996, as the new president of the Philadelphia 76ers. Onstage with other representatives of National Basketball Association teams for a nationally televised broadcast of the league's draft lottery, he erupted with glee when the 76ers wound up with the number one pick. He leaped to his feet, pumped his fists, slapped the palms of the other teams' representatives. Then he hugged David Stern, the proper, gray-haired NBA commissioner, kissing him on the cheek, and patted him on the sleeve of his suit jacket.
Pat Croce talks at full throttle. He doesn't walk into a room; he bolts in like a bronco. "Hi-ya doing, big man?" he'll say. Or, "Yo, hey!" Ask how he's doing, and he booms out, with zero trace of irony, "I feel grrrrrreat!"
That three-word effusion is Croce's mantra. The titles of his two recently published books -- one a memoir, the other a compendium of motivational pointers -- play off the I-feel-great slogan. His latest book, 110%: 110 Strategies for Feeling Great Every Day, underscores his theme of heady optimism and dares to recommend such platitudes as rise and shine (no kidding) and buy a comfortable pair of shoes (no kidding, again), while making his own fetish explicit: "Hug things (people, trees, etc.)."
If Croce's style is cornball, verging on buffoonery, his unabashed attitude is "Damn right." "I'm making corny cool," he boasts, breaking into a toothy grin. He exemplifies an extreme variety of an American archetype. Call it the Dale Carnegie man. Croce's is the extravagantly upbeat personality that, when seen in glad-handing politicians and high-pressure salesmen, causes people to, well, gag and recoil.
Yet in Croce that upbeatness appears to work. He enjoys folk-hero status in his native Philadelphia. His mirthful face is as familiar to people of the city as the sober visage of another former local entrepreneur, Ben Franklin. "The king of Philly," said Charles Pizzi, president of the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, when I asked him about Croce, whom he has known for 18 years. The reason for Croce's success, Pizzi said simply, "is the power of his personality."
There's no gainsaying his success. Croce's rise from a down-in-the-trenches physical therapist to one of Philadelphia's most successful entrepreneurs is the stuff of legend. He built his company Sports Physical Therapists (SPT) into an 11-state chain with 40 locations before selling it for about $40 million, in 1993. His record as a basketball impresario is, if anything, more remarkable. During his five-year reign at the 76ers (Croce resigned in July after being rebuffed in his bid for a larger role in the sports franchise's parent company), his team was the Cinderella story of the NBA. Before he took over, in 1996, the team's wretchedness was painfully evident, as much in its feckless business management as in its dismal won-lost record. Croce is widely credited with reinvigorating the business of the 76ers. Not coincidentally, the born-again team swept to the finals of the NBA championship last year.
Still, at the time of my conversation with Pizzi, I couldn't imagine that Croce had achieved his blockbuster success because of his hurricane-force personality rather than in spite of it. I doubted that his outlandish style could work to his advantage when he was functioning as a manager and leader. Operating at 110% joviality, as his book exhorts, wasn't just a mathematical impossibility. To me it seemed like a bad idea.
Branding Himself
For the record I should say that, coming to this story, I was on guard against a Croce charm offensive. People who are always up, always bursting with happy talk, I regard as suspect. I see them as likely to be tedious and cloying, even false and manipulative. Do any of us, in this day and age, really believe in the power of positive thinking? Encountering unbridled optimism, I just wonder what I'm being sold. And frankly, a whole lot of selling is what I expected to encounter in Croce.
When I met him last December on the day before our lunch at the Palm, he was about to board an executive jet for a chartered flight from Philadelphia to Nashville. He had invited me along to hear a motivational speech that he would deliver later in the day to sales representatives of Reynolds and Reynolds Co., a maker of auto-industry software.
He didn't hug me. He extended his left hand for me to shake. He recently had had surgery on his right elbow and was sparing it on doctor's orders. Though his elbow ached, he smiled broadly and exuded good cheer. Despite his black belt in karate and reputation for derring-do (as recently as November he'd disarmed a knife-wielding suspect in Love Park in downtown Philly), Croce didn't seem physically imposing. Of medium height, as spare as an oak plank, and wearing goggle-style glasses, he was dressed almost entirely in black: long-sleeved shirt with a polo-style collar, trousers, and shoes. The garb would have been suitable for a clergyman.
