The Best American Sports Writing 2013 (15 page)

I did ask Jimmy about Chisholm, the ex-con, and also about the ex-commie, and the news was not so good there either.

“The ex-con has got hepatitis A, B, C, and D,” Jimmy said. “I haven't seen him in a while.”

“What about the heavyweight?”

“He got deported,” Jimmy said.

“What for?” I asked.

“I don't know,” Jimmy said. “It's easy to get deported. But now I got a Czech guy in the gym, and his name's Attila.”

“Good name for a fighter,” I said.

“Absolutely,” Jimmy said. “And we got a new ring in there too.”

“How'd you manage that?” I asked him.

“Well,” Jimmy said, “they were filming this movie, part of it anyway, here in Pittsburgh, called
The Warrior
. You seen it?”

“No,” I said.

“Nick Nolte's in it, and he and I got to know each other. He's a good guy, and we're talkin' one day and he says, ‘You should be in the movie.' The next thing I know the director says so too. And I told him, ‘I don't want to be in your movie,' but then Nolte says it's gonna be easy, and they'd pay me. I told him I don't need you to do that, but for about five thousand dollars you can put a new ring in my gym for Attila and these other guys. So they did that, and now, you go see
The Warrior
, you can see me in it.”

So the ex-cop who is a community organizer and a trainer of sorts is also in the movies now, which is something he did for other people, pretty much as he has done everything else, including getting the ceiling painted in the Third Street Café. And of course he is still a poet, and in one of his poems, “Porkchop Didn't Shoot Everybody,” he tells the story of a guy who one night shot everybody he could see in a bar and also some people he couldn't see, but not everybody. The shooter is called Porkchop for reasons that are not explained, and during cross-examination of the state's star witnesses, one Silas Jones, Porkchop's attorney, attempts to clarify the situation by asking if his client was “just shooting at random.”

 

Silas said, “No, he wasn't shootin' at Random.

Random wasn't even there.”

The judge hit the gavel:

“With that last statement, we'll take a ten-minute break.”

 

You could see it coming, but it makes me smile every time anyway, so when it was time to get off the phone, I said, “Well, keep writing poems.”

“I will,” Jimmy Cvetic said. “I got thousands of 'em. You keep readin' 'em.”

And I suppose I will.

KENT BABB

FROM THE KANSAS CITY STAR

 

T
ODD HALEY WALKED
into the public relations office at Chiefs headquarters on a Thursday in early December. Four days before he was fired as the team's coach, he wanted to talk about what life was like inside this organization. But he didn't know who else might be listening.

Looking up toward the ceiling, he darted into a back hallway before hesitating. Then he turned around, going back through a door and stopping again. Haley suspected that many rooms at the team facility were bugged so that team administrators could monitor employees' conversations. Stopping finally in a conference room, Haley said he believed his personal cell phone, a line he used before being hired by the Chiefs in 2009, had been tampered with.

Paranoid? The Chiefs have adamantly denied that they tap phones or listen in on conversations. But as the team enters another period of transition after elevating defensive coordinator Romeo Crennel last week to head coach, interviews with more than two dozen current and former employees suggest that intimidation and secrecy are among the Chiefs' principal management styles—and that Haley wasn't the only one with paranoid thoughts.

“When you're mentally abused, you eventually lose it too,” one former longtime Chiefs executive said.

Since Scott Pioli was hired as general manager in January 2009, life for many inside the Chiefs' front office has been marked by massive staff turnover, fear, and insecurity about how closely they are watched. Numerous current and former staffers paint a picture of constant worry—and, in a few cases, of alleged age discrimination. Three former department heads sued the Chiefs in 2011, though the team has denied wrongdoing.

Clark Hunt, the team's chairman and CEO, rejected the notion that Arrowhead is a difficult place to work, but he said there has been an emphasis placed on responsibility. Change, he said, is often uncomfortable.

“We needed a culture that pursued excellence,” he said. “One that valued honesty and integrity, one where the employees would be held accountable.”

Stability has been another matter. In the last three years, more than half the workforce has turned over, and the vast majority of senior staff members are no longer with the team. As dozens have left the organization, with some of the holdovers and new hires trying to adapt to what many described as a restrictive working environment, dread has permeated the franchise.

“The level of paranoia was probably the highest that I had ever seen it anywhere,” another former high-ranking staffer said. “. . . If you make the wrong step, you might not be able to pay your mortgage.”

 

Three years ago, Pioli began ushering in a new culture on Arrowhead Drive. It centered on secrecy, extreme attention to detail, and putting an end to the way things had been under longtime general manager Carl Peterson.

“Part of it is not only changing the culture of your football team and your locker room,” Pioli told
USA Today
in August 2009. “It's changing the culture of all the things that touch your football team and your locker room.”

Some of the first changes involved shutting off access and protecting information. Non-football employees, including those who had worked for the Chiefs for decades, were told that they weren't allowed on certain floors, or in certain areas of the team facility. Business-side staffers with an office window facing the practice fields were made to keep their shades drawn during practices. The team president was no exception. A security guard made the rounds during practices, sometimes interrupting phone calls and meetings to lower shades.

Chiefs president Mark Donovan said his shade is drawn for the sake of consistency, to give the impression that no business-side employee is trusted more or less than another.

“This is making sure that everybody feels the same,” he said.

Pioli's background was with the New England Patriots, a team known for its devotion to privacy and bending the rules. As he promised, the environment changed. Some said it changed too much.

“It's not Lamar Hunt's organization anymore,” said Steve Schneider, the former stadium operations director who spent 14 years with the Chiefs before being fired in 2010, he said, for being disorganized.

Pioli, who was not made available by the team for this story, has said in the past that the changes were about ending a period of entitlement and emphasizing accountability. Those were the things, he repeated often, that lead a team to victories and championships.

During his first year, Pioli noticed a candy wrapper in a back stairwell and waited to see how long it took to be picked up. About a week passed, and it remained in the stairwell. He placed the wrapper in an envelope, and during a meeting of department heads, Donovan, then the team's chief operating officer, brandished the wrapper as evidence of the attention to detail that Chiefs employees had grown to ignore.

“A great coaching moment,” Donovan said.

Some thought the example was overblown. Pioli frequently came down hard on minutiae. Some emphases made sense, some staffers said; others, though, seemed over the top. One executive, who's no longer with the team, was sent to human resources for casually referring to Pioli by his last name; the executive said, however, that first names were acceptable. Pioli also sent a memo with detailed instructions, including which stairway to use and which doorway to enter, when using the facility's gym.

After a while, a saying was adopted by top administrators for behavior that didn't fit the new standards: “That's so two-and- fourteen,” they would say, referring to the Chiefs' win-loss record in 2008. This pertained to matters large and small: Stephanie Melton, who worked 11 years on the team's operations staff, recalled Pioli's reaction after she and a coworker, after working past midnight on a weekend, had parked a courier van in the unmarked space usually occupied by Pioli's car. The women had forgotten to move it, and Pioli was livid the next morning. Melton said she was made to feel for several days that she'd be fired.

“There was an incredible fear of saying and doing the wrong thing,” said a former business-side executive, who was among a group of sources who requested anonymity—in some cases because they still worked for the Chiefs, and in others because they believed their comments might hinder their chances of getting another job in sports.

Some, though, paid little attention to the changes. Mike Davidson, who left the team last year after 22 years as equipment manager, said the new policies never seemed overbearing to him.

“Everybody has a style,” he said, “and it's your job to figure out that style. I didn't have any problems.”

A few former employees, though they don't deny that the working environment was tense, said they believed Pioli and Donovan simply carried out changes that Clark Hunt, a graduate of the results-oriented Goldman Sachs training program, had authorized.

“It's professional football, and I do think that it can be a bit of a pressure cooker,” said Tammy Fruits, who resigned in October as the team's vice president of sales and marketing. “To attribute that to Scott Pioli is unfair.”

Donovan said Hunt's instructions were clear—and necessary.

“Really focus on integrity and accountability,” Donovan recalled Hunt suggesting. “He felt like we needed to take this place and focus on those two areas.”

But many saw Pioli as the face of the new way—and of overreaction. Melton said she frequently took the brunt of Pioli's outbursts on such matters as the temperature in his office, the radio signal in the weight room, and how much the organization spent annually on coffee.

Ray Farmer, the Chiefs' pro personnel director, said his boss is thorough—sometimes surprisingly so. He said that's a good thing.

“In some instances,” Farmer said, “you could say that he's a micromanager to a degree. I think he likes to know what information is and what you're doing . . . Scott wants to know, like as a math teacher, ‘How did you get to your problem; how did you get to the answer of the problem?'”

Hunt agreed.

“I believe that good leaders do bring an attention to detail to their leadership roles,” he said. “And something that I think we struggled with before both Mark and Scott got here was attention to detail. If you set an example with attention to detail, I think it spreads through the organization.”

Melton had a different opinion, saying Pioli's fixation on trivial matters seemed misguided.

“He was so focused on what seemed like unimportant details for the general manager of a football team,” she said. “We all had to step to the beat of his drum, but we all kept questioning: ‘How is this building a better football team?'”

Nothing was emphasized like the commitment to secrecy. Pioli was with the Patriots in 2007, when that organization and its head coach, Bill Belichick, were disciplined for the “Spygate” controversy, in which one of the team's video assistants secretly filmed signals by the New York Jets' coaches. Belichick, Pioli's mentor and a longtime friend, was fined $500,000—the maximum-allowed fine by the NFL—for his role in the scandal.

When Pioli took over the Chiefs, he seemed determined to eliminate the chance of a competitor spying on his team. This past November, a security guard noticed a sedan stopped on Lancer Lane, a public road that runs adjacent to the Chiefs' practice fields, as the team's morning session was beginning. The driver took a photograph on his cell phone, and the guard ran toward him, standing there until the man deleted the picture. As the guard returned to his post, he told a
Star
reporter that, if the man hadn't erased the photo, the guard would've confiscated the phone.

Donovan said the efforts to control team information have a purpose.

“You may think it's harmless,” he said when asked about some of the measures, such as lowering window shades. “Other people may think it's very harmful to our competitive advantage.”

Then he continued.

“It's about winning.”

 

This past year, Haley stopped talking on the phone and repeatedly checked his office for listening devices. After being fired, Haley didn't respond to interview requests; many former staffers said they signed confidentiality agreements upon being let go.

The Chiefs said there's nothing to substantiate Haley's fears, but some believed that anything was possible.

“I don't think that anything would surprise anyone, really,” said a former employee who worked for the Chiefs for more than two decades. “That's how Scott wants it.”

A common notion is that employees are constantly being watched. When they arrive and leave, where they're going within the building, and who they're talking to. Indeed, the technology exists at the Chiefs' offices, as it does in many corporate settings, to monitor phone calls and emails. But here, some staffers even hesitated before using their cell phones or speaking inside the building, because, like Haley, they suspected that conversations were monitored.

“The capability was definitely there for Big Brother to be watching,” said Schneider, whose job was to oversee maintenance at team facilities.