Steiner - You gotta have balls: how a kid from Brooklyn started from scratch, bought Yankee Stadium, and created a sports empire

Cover image: Anthony Causi

Cover design: Michael J. Freeland

Copyright 2012 by Brandon Steiner. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Steiner, Brandon.

You gotta have balls : how a kid from Brooklyn started from scratch, bought Yankee Stadium, and created a sports empire / Brandon Steiner.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-118-17207-0 (hardback); ISBN 978-1-118-33035-7 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-33104-0 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-33319-8 (ebk)

1. SportsNew York (State)New YorkMarketing. 2. SportsCollectiblesNew York (State)New York. I. Title.

GV585.5.N4S84 2012

796.0688dc23

This book is dedicated to the three most important women in my life:

For my mother, Evelyn. Everything I've ever learned can be traced back to something she once taught me. I try to live up to her no-fear attitude and her limitless compassion for people every day. Her favorite saying was: You gotta have balls.

For my wife, Mara. My most unsung, but biggest heroI still get butterflies when I see you walk by my office. You are and always will be the love of my life.

And for my daughter, Nicole. I like to count myself an avid collector of people, but even at her age, Nicole brings them together more quickly than I ever have.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to my son, Crosby, who will be anything he wants to be and more.

Thank you to our stepson, Keith Martinez, who reminds me that anything is possible. What an amazing story you turned out to be.

Thank you to my brother, Adam, who made the biggest comeback of all time, and has helped more people stop smoking than I imagined possible.

I'm grateful to my fellow Brooklynite and dreamer, Colby Brin. I started this book with countless threads of memories, experiences, and ideas in mind; I wanted to share them with the reader, but I wasn't sure how they fit together. Colby helped me weave them into the narrative that makes up these pages. I couldn't have done it without him.

The same goes for Steve Costello, Eric Levy, A. J. Romero, Andrew Rasero, Chris Amoroso, Brett Schissler, Kelvin Joseph, Sean Mahoney, Margaret Adams, and the entire Steiner Sports family. Thank you for making my dreams come true every day. It's an honor to work with all of you.

And of course all my friends from the Brooklyn schoolyards who have been there from the beginning and I know have my back until the end.

I'll always be grateful to Alzie Jackson, my old camp mentor.

Thanks to Matt Weinberg for always making sure Steiner Sports has had the best transportation.

Thanks to Shannon Vargo, Elana Schulman, Heather Condon, Peter Knox, Linda Indig, and the entire John Wiley & Sons team.

Thanks to my in-house marketing squad: Cassidy Mara, Thomas Hanvey, and Zachary Karow.

I am deeply grateful to the New York Yankees and the entire Yankee family. And the Steinbrenner family.

Special thanks to Randy Levine, for being the original visionary behind Yankees-Steiner, and my biggest fan; and to Randy Weisenburger, for being the Yankees-Steiner closer.

Thanks to the Dallas Cowboys; Notre Dame and Notre Dame Football; Madison Square Garden and Jim Dolan; Scott O'Neal; the Syracuse University Athletic Department; my friend Daryl Gross; Michael Veley and David Salanger; David Falk, for bringing me closer to Syracuse and having the vision to build the best sports management school on the planet.

Thanks to my idol Oprah Winfrey, for so much inspiration and so many aha moments. Over the 25 years she aired her show, I didn't miss many episodes. Now she has her own network. Talk about balls.

Thank you to Frank Bisignano, one of the smartest guys I have ever met, who taught me how to adjust when the circumstances have changed.

Big thanks to Harvey Mackay and the Mackay Roundtable for constant help and mentoring, and for showing me how to put together a book I could be proud of. As we like to say, None of us is as smart as all of us.

Prologue

Last Call at Yankee Stadium

When I was a kid growing up in Brooklyn, I lived for the summer. Summer brought the gifts of camp and all-day sports, as opposed to the burdens of school and studying. It was in summer that our little apartment on Kings Highway wouldn't be freezing when I woke up in the morning. And maybe most importantly, summer days had the potential to turn into afternoons spent at my favorite place in the world: Yankee Stadium.

My family didn't have season tickets or anything. My father was out of the picture; my mother was often sick, bouncing between the hospital and our house; and my two brothers had their own problems. For God's sake, we could barely make rent every month.

Yet whenever I could, I scrounged together the $1.50 it cost to go to a Yankees game with my friends. That $1.50 bought each of us a seat with a view obstructed by a steel pillar, but the seats were on the lower level, along the first or third baselinethe best value in the house. We went to as many doubleheaders as we could to stretch that $1.50 even further. We watched the seats in front of us like hawks so we could swoop in and grab the more premium spots as soon as their occupants left. I usually ate food that I snuck in, because the cost of the ticket itself was all I could afford.