It's How We Play the Game Read online

  More Praise for It’s How We Play the Game

  “In It’s How We Play the Game, Stack demonstrates that he’s playing a different game than other retailers, moving past all the clichés about ‘giving back’ and turning his support of local communities into a kind of killer app.… Few recent business books are as well-told or as rich in takeaways.”

  —Jim Rohr, former Chairman of PNC Financial Services Group

  “In It’s How We Play the Game, Ed Stack makes the compelling case that leading with the values of sports—like hard work, teamwork, and selflessness—matters in business, and most of all, society.”

  —Adam Silver, NBA Commissioner

  “Ed Stack is not just a great entrepreneur running a big, successful business but a courageous American who is willing to stand up for what’s right. And he’s a talented author.”

  —Gert Boyle, Chairman of Columbia Sportswear Company and author of One Tough Mother

  “Ed Stack has created one of the greatest retail emporiums.… As this book shows, he is an entrepreneur, corporate steward, and leader of an engaged workforce, but first and foremost, he is always thinking about his customers.”

  —John Idol, Chairman and CEO of Michael Kors

  “Paints a fascinating picture of a man who is a fulfilled leader… Stack’s name should be on the impressive roll call of men and women whose will to compete, and success in doing so, offers inspiration and wisdom.”

  —Jay Monahan, Commissioner of the PGA Tour

  “An awe-inspiring story of overcoming obstacles… If there were more people like Stack running companies, the world would be a better place.”

  —Jimmy Dunne, Senior Managing Principal of Sandler O’Neill & Partners

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  In memory of my father, Richard John “Dick” Stack

  INTRODUCTION

  It was midafternoon on Valentine’s Day when I heard an early news report about the school shooting. The particulars drifted in as I hurried my way through a pile of work that needed attention before I left for a long Florida weekend with my wife: students and teachers killed, number unknown. Panic in the halls. A gunman armed with an assault rifle. My first reaction was: Not again.

  I’d found myself thinking that too many times lately. Hadn’t we all? Four months before, a lunatic had barricaded himself in a high-rise Las Vegas hotel, busted out his room’s window, and opened fire on a crowd of thousands gathered below for a country music festival. He’d snuck fourteen AR-15s, a type of assault-style rifle, into the hotel. Twelve were fitted with hundred-round magazines. It took him just ten minutes to kill fifty-eight people. Another eight hundred fifty-one—an almost inconceivable number—were wounded by his bullets or in the panic he created.

  A month later, a twenty-six-year-old misfit walked into the Sunday service at a Baptist church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, and let loose with an assault rifle, killing twenty-six people and injuring another twenty.

  In the few years before those shootings, there’d been so many others: A June 2016 terrorist attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando that killed forty-nine and wounded fifty-three; the shooter there had used an assault-style rifle, too. A December 2015 attack by husband-and-wife terrorists on a San Bernardino County public health training event and Christmas party, which left fourteen dead and twenty-two injured. A July 2012 massacre in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater. That same year, the brutal massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School that claimed twenty-six children and faculty.

  Mass shootings had become an all-too-familiar part of life in America. Their frequency seemed to be increasing. The number of dead seemed to ratchet upward with each new incident. And there seemed no end to it. No safe place left. And maybe worse, no one trying to deal with it—our political leaders seemed to lack the will for meaningful action. Their response to these tragedies had become depressingly predictable. One side would decry the availability of guns and call for a clampdown. The other would trumpet its broad interpretation of the Second Amendment—in which any regulation, any safeguard, was seen as a constitutional breach—and would drag out that old cliché that guns don’t kill people, people do.

  As I listened to the news on February 14, 2018, more details emerged from Parkland, Florida. The gunman was a former student at the school. Thanks to the weapon he’d chosen, a derivative of a rifle originally developed for military use, he’d performed his slaughter with grim efficiency, killing seventeen people in little more than six minutes. I left the office in a deep state of melancholy, not only at the day’s news but, perhaps even more, at the realization that it would happen again—that this tragedy was a link in a chain that seemed without end. Somebody has to do something, I thought. This has to stop.

  My wife shared my despair. On our way to Florida, Donna was as preoccupied with the shooting as I was, and we talked about little else. She was near tears. Somebody has to do something, we told each other. Somebody. Has. To do. Something.

  Halfway through the flight, forty-two thousand feet over the Carolinas, I realized that somebody had to be me.

  Because few people were better positioned for the mission. As the chairman and chief executive officer of Dick’s Sporting Goods, America’s largest sporting goods retailer, I led a team whose annual sales of firearms were among the nation’s largest. We sold thousands of rifles, shotguns, and handguns from our nearly eight hundred big-box stores in forty-seven states. And in our thirty-five outdoors-oriented Field & Stream stores, we sold the very style of rifle used in Parkland, Florida, that Valentine’s Day, and in so many other mass shootings.

  That made us part of the problem. But maybe, I thought, it could make us part of a solution, too.

  What followed that epiphany would thrust me and the company into an emotional and, at times, even threatening national debate. My team and I did something that few retailers had dared to: we followed our consciences, even if that steered our company into short-term hardship. We took a stand that earned both applause and condemnation, and in the months since, my life—and the lives of many Dick’s employees—hasn’t been the same.

  The mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School wasn’t the first occasion on which we encountered such a moment. Looking back, one can see that this tendency of Dick’s to go beyond the traditional role of retailer and get involved with the communities of which it’s a part—sometimes in a way that alters people’s lives for decades—is pretty ingrained. It all harks back to the store’s embryonic days as a small family business in upstate New York. The company’s founder, and the man for whom it is named—my father, Richard John Stack—recognized that he couldn’t prosper unless and until the city around him, and thus his customers, did too.

  Dick Stack wasn’t always a lovable man. There was nothing cuddly about him. He could be spiteful, prickly, and willfully hard to deal with. But in that belief about a company’s relationship with its surrounding community, he was right.

  This is the story of that company my dad started, which my team and I grew from two stores to hundreds—a story that shows Dick’s evolution from the humblest of beginnings to a classic American success story. The sporting goods industry is littered with roadkill, and its victims include giants. That we at Dick’s have survived, let alone thrived enough to become the only nation
al player left in the game, is a pretty remarkable tale on its own.

  But alongside that story of Darwinian struggle, I’ll also describe the rise of a corporate culture that has sought to do the right thing, time and again. You’ll see that we’re no angels: in business, we’re in the game to win. We love street fights, and we’re good at fighting them. Even as we’ve sought to defeat our rivals, however, we’ve striven to build a legacy of good corporate citizenship—to measure our success not only by how much we’ve made, but by what we’ve created.

  Importantly, the account that follows isn’t all about me. As the founder’s son and, also, the company’s leader for thirty-five years, I’ve been a key player in Dick’s story, but only one player. Thousands of men and women have had a hand in the company’s success. Even so, I’ve worked in the company since I turned thirteen, when it consisted of a single small store selling hunting and fishing gear, and most of my life has been indivisible from the business. Its DNA is bound up in mine, and mine in its.

  Has this journey that my team and I have taken together been a great adventure with hard-to-experience lows and exhilarating highs? Most definitely. I hope you’ll enjoy reading about it as much as I’ve enjoyed living it.

  CHAPTER 1 “GO START THIS”

  Richard John Stack: where to begin, explaining my father? He was a born salesman with the gift of blarney, a guy who could chat up pretty much anyone. He was a good, if conservative, businessman. He was an athlete in his youth and remained passionate about sports throughout his life. When I played baseball and football as a kid, he never missed a game. He defined customer service broadly: he believed that a business owed a debt to its community, and he made good on that debt in a number of ways. He did right by his hometown.

  But he was a complicated man. He stood five-eight and never topped 150 pounds, but he was a brawler, unafraid to use his fists to make a point. He wasn’t a particularly happy guy—he was driven more by a fear of failure than a desire to succeed, and he could be a humorless tyrant at work and home. He drank too much, smoked too much, didn’t eat well or exercise, and his habits turned him old before his time. He could be great company. Just as often, he wasn’t.

  So, to be straight with you, right from the start: there’s plenty of Horatio Alger to the story you’re about to read, several episodes of rags-to-riches heroism, but the first protagonist of this tale was no saint. He was a child of the Depression with his share of demons, and his days were not always easy or pleasant, for him or anyone close by.

  All that said, Dick Stack left imprints on me, his oldest son, and on the company he founded. Many were indelible and continue to color the way we do business today, more than seventy years after he opened his first store. Much of the culture we’ve built at the company that bears his name can be traced back through the years to the examples set by my mercurial, hard-living, often exasperating father.

  The good examples, that is.

  We’ll set out on this journey where he did, and where I did twenty-six years later: in Binghamton, New York, a town that occupies a narrow valley in the state’s “Southern Tier,” the long stretch of rolling countryside that runs along the Pennsylvania border, north and west of New York City. Binghamton is nestled on bottomland at the confluence of two rivers—the Susquehanna, which crosses the town from west to east and is already fat with the outflow of upstream tributaries, and the smaller Chenango, which joins the Susquehanna from the north.

  Downtown is tucked into the northeast crook of this confluence and is linked to neighborhoods to the west and south by a half-dozen bridges. The principal east-west street through town, US 11, is called Main Street west of the Chenango, and Court Street in downtown and the middle-class neighborhood of small shops and modest homes to the east. And it is in those rivers and on Court Street, in Binghamton’s East Side neighborhood, that the Dick’s story begins.

  Or, to take the story back even further, it begins at 11 McNamara Avenue, across the Susquehanna on Binghamton’s South Side, where my father was born on July 17, 1928.

  The Stacks were Irish Catholic, and the South Side was a blue-collar section of town populated with other Irish, along with Italians and Eastern Europeans. Binghamton was half again as big as it is today, swollen with immigrants. They’d started arriving by the thousands shortly after the Civil War, first to make cigars. By the 1880s, Binghamton was the second-biggest cigar town in America, strange as it is to think of New York as tobacco country.

  When the cigar boom passed, they made shoes. The Endicott Johnson Corporation ran huge plants in town, and in Johnson City, just west of Binghamton, and Endicott, a few miles farther west. “E-J,” as the company was known, was the biggest employer around for decades, employing twenty thousand people in the twenties and even more during World War II, when it made virtually all of the shoes used by the US military. In the mid-forties, it was turning out fifty-two million pairs of shoes a year.

  Newly landed immigrants showed up in droves, most knowing only enough English to ask, on arriving in town: “Which way E-J?” It became an unofficial Binghamton motto. In 1984, years into the company’s decline, Ronald Reagan visited on the stump, and he opened his speech with those words. He was way behind the times and was met with complete silence. Still, it underlined just how big a deal the company once was. Endicott and Johnson City, which with Binghamton form the Southern Tier’s “Triple Cities,” were named for the company’s two owners.

  More quietly at first, another company was growing in the Triple Cities that would soon change the face of the region. It dated to 1901, when two smallish companies that made time clocks and time-card readers were bundled into a new enterprise that incorporated in Binghamton. A decade later, through a series of mergers with outfits that made adding machines and commercial scales, the company became the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, or CTR, based in Endicott. In 1924, CTR changed its name to International Business Machines.

  So the town into which my father was born was a mix of heavy industry and high tech, with a workforce that reflected its shifting fortunes. During his youth, E-J was the biggest employer. By the time I came along, IBM dwarfed all. I can remember my dad saying, long before I understood what it meant, “If IBM leaves Binghamton, turn out the lights.”

  He did not have an easy childhood. Dick was the last of six kids born to Edward W. and Mae Stack, his dad the owner of a beer distribution business—which, during Prohibition, was a polite way of saying my grandfather was a bootlegger. That must have been an uncertain and dangerous way to put food on the table, though his grandchildren have come to view it as a swashbuckling, even romantic, chapter of Stack history.

  Tragedy struck the family before Dick was born. When his twin siblings, Billy and Betty, were nine months old, they caught whooping cough. My grandmother took them to the doctor. Betty was frailer; the doctor said he wanted to keep an eye on her, that she had the worse of it. Billy was a chubby, big-cheeked baby, a robust little boy, with a head of thick, curly black hair. The doctor judged him to be almost back to health.

  Once home, my grandmother took Betty inside and got her settled. When she came back to the stroller for Billy, she found he’d choked to death on his own phlegm. I’m not sure that anyone in the family got over that, especially my grandmother. My sister Kim was talking with her fifty-some years later, when my grandmother was in her eighties, and asked her about that day. “Some people say, ‘You have these other kids. Be thankful,’ ” Mae, whom we called Nana, said with tears in her eyes. “I think about that baby every day.”

  Billy’s death was a prelude to even greater pain. On August 1, 1935, when Dick was seven, his father was killed in a horrific car accident east of town. Family lore has long held that the crash was no accident—that Ed Stack Sr. was bumped off by mobsters looking to muscle in on his beer business, which by then was legal. The available record doesn’t dispute that legend outright, but it does raise questions about it: in a front-page story, the local paper reported th
at my grandfather had taken a downhill curve at high speed, drifted into the oncoming lane, and smashed his sedan into a truck loaded with live chickens. He was crushed behind the steering wheel and died on his way to the hospital.

  His female passenger, who was not my grandmother, was ejected from the car and “picked up unconscious in the center of the highway,” but recovered. I don’t know what became of her. Not long after, Nana lost the beer business. The reasons are murky, but it seems that Granddad may have been involved in some gambling, as well as booze, and she gave up control of the distributorship.

  From that point on, my dad’s childhood was one of deprivation. Ed Sr. hadn’t carried a life insurance policy. The beer income was gone. Nana had to take in boarders to make the mortgage. Dick’s upbringing fell largely to his father’s parents.

  * * *

  When I think back to the time I spent with Nana as a kid, I’m always impressed by her toughness. She was kind and had a charming, warm way about her, and she was a tiny woman, no more than ninety pounds. But she had steel inside, a no-nonsense core beneath her softness. I guess that’s inevitable, given everything she went through. She’d had her first five children in quick succession—my uncle Ed first; then, two and a half years later, twins, my aunt Rosemary and uncle Joe; and fourteen months after that, the second set of twins, Billy and Betty.

  So at one point the oldest of her five kids was barely four years old, in an age without baby formula or disposable diapers. That’d toughen up anyone. Then she lost Billy. She had my dad five years after that, and almost lost him to rheumatic fever, a close call that left him with a mitral valve defect in his heart. She hadn’t even put him in school when her husband died; her oldest, my uncle Ed, wasn’t yet sixteen.

  Faith and family saw her through those trials. She went to Mass every day, no matter the weather, no matter how tired she felt. And she held her children close. When I was growing up we’d go to her house a lot—the same house at 11 McNamara Avenue, where she lived into her nineties—or she’d come over to ours for Sunday dinner. I remember many cold nights when we’d build a fire after the meal and she’d call us around the fireplace to watch it. We sat there for what seemed like hours, watching the flames. It drove me crazy at twelve years old. Are you kidding me? Why are we wasting time staring at a bunch of burning logs? Now that I’m older, I can imagine that those nights reminded her of easier times, before all the heartache, when she and my grandfather would sit with their kids in the parlor of that little house.