Why It's Pat Croce's World

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Once he cashed out of SPT, Croce hit upon a wild and crazy and kooky scheme: he would buy the Philadelphia 76ers from the team's sole owner at that time, Harold Katz. And he did. The story of how Croce pulled off that caper occupies a special niche in the Philadelphia sports annals. Suffice it to say that for five months Croce chipped away relentlessly at Katz's reluctance. Asked at a news conference in March 1996 why he was selling to a group of buyers assembled by Croce, Katz quipped, "Pat Croce called me 50 times."

The challenge of bagging the 76ers played to Croce's strengths: boldness, doggedness, and unstinting optimism. Running the team was something else again. As I started to look into how Croce had fared as president of the 76ers' 80-employee franchise, I wondered if his bull-moose personality would suit a job that had to be done in a fishbowl and that demanded a manager's subtlety and finesse.

The job that Croce tackled was all the more daunting considering that, by the spring of 1996, the 76ers were the doormat of the NBA. The scene at the team's arena seemed ever more ugly and hopeless: Demoralized players were locked into long-term contracts. The fans' resentment was hardening, a fact that was increasingly conspicuous by their absence from games.

In one of his first moves as the incoming president, Croce offered Dave Coskey a job. Coskey had mixed feelings about it. From his three or four years as the team's PR director in the 1980s, he remembered Croce as an upbeat guy who had worked as a consulting sports trainer taping ankles in the 76ers locker room. Now Coskey renewed the acquaintance. He developed a favorable impression of what Croce might be like as a boss. He believed that they were of one mind when it came to dealing forthrightly with the news media. What's more, he sensed that Croce would foster a spirit in which "other people would enjoy your success as much as you do," Coskey says. He accepted the offer.

But once installed as the 76ers' vice-president of communications, Coskey chafed under Croce's management. Croce struck him as a fussbudget and intruded into what Coskey considered his domain. "I don't need a den mother following me around" is how Coskey, now the 76ers' executive vice-president, puts it. However, Croce listened to Coskey, recognized that he could handle the job, and backed off.

The capacity to listen keenly to others -- to keep an open mind and seriously consider others' points of view -- is a quality that stands in uneasy equipoise with the kind of blast-furnace confidence and drive that Croce embodies. Nevertheless, Croce does seem uncommonly blessed with a listener's ear. That quality served him well as he undertook the task of winning back the hearts of 76ers fans.

The circumstances could hardly have been bleaker. It wasn't just the disaffection among 76ers fans, who had suffered through five losing seasons in a row. That was horrendous enough. It was also the locale: Philly is known as a particularly brutal sports town. In 1999, for example, fans didn't even allow rookie quarterback Donovan McNabb a chance to suit up with the Philadelphia Eagles before booing him. Eagles fans chartered a bus to New York City and descended on the National Football League draft lottery to greet him with hoots and catcalls when the team chose him in the first round. Philadelphia bears a further distinction as a place where fans once booed the Easter Bunny during a Phillies game and pelted Santa Claus with snowballs during an Eagles game.

The chief executives of pro sports teams tend to make themselves scarce outside their corporate suites. Not Croce. Right away, he held an open meeting of season-ticket holders at the First Union Center. If they had complaints, he wanted to hear them straight from the shoulder. "I listened, and I took it, and at times it was heated," he recalls. To answer to bewildered fans after he hired Brad Greenberg as general manager, in May 1996, and then fired him less than a year later, Croce called another meeting. "I think that was absolutely the right thing to do because everyone was in an uproar," remembers Bennett Oltman, an apparel manufacturer and a longtime 76ers season-ticket holder who was at the meeting. Snagging the highly regarded Larry Brown as the 76ers' coach, soon after Greenberg's departure, further assuaged the fans.

Croce reinvented the role of NBA team owner, becoming to pro basketball what Sam Walton had been to retailing. Croce, by God, would meet and thank his customers personally. Before every home game he was a highly visible presence at First Union Center. As fans swarmed into the lobby, he was there to greet them, pump hands, ask their names. (Croce is obsessive about asking people's names, wherever he is.) He was publicly available in a tangible way. With his unflaggingly upbeat style he personified a dramatically different tenor in the 76ers' management. Croce in effect became "the fans' owner," Oltman says.

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