Lott still trying to make great plays off the field
A punishing defensive back in the 1980s and ’90s, Ronnie Lott won four Super Bowl rings with the San Francisco 49ers and earned 10 Pro Bowl appearances during his 14-year NFL career. He was named to the league’s 75th anniversary team in 1994 and elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2000.
Today, Lott continues to make an impact off the field. In 1989, he founded All Stars Helping Kids, a philanthropic organization that leverages the names, efforts and resources of other athletes, corporate leaders and individual donors to promote and foster educational and health initiatives for disadvantaged children. He also is the chairman of Play It Smart, the National Football Foundation program that seeks to improve the learning environment and build leadership skills for high school student athletes. In 1999, he co-founded HRJ Capital, a private-equity firm that manages almost $2 billion in assets.
Lott spoke to SportsBusiness Journal New York bureau chief Jerry Kavanagh on the eve of the NFL conference championship games.
Education: B.A., public administration, University of Southern California Favorite piece of music: The music of Prince Favorite vacation spot: The Four Seasons on the big island of Hawaii Favorite movie: “One on One” Best football movie: “Everybody’s All-American” Favorite book: “Manchild in the Promised Land,” by Claude Brown Pet peeve: I eat too much Cold Stone ice cream. Basic business philosophy: You’re always a rookie and you always have to exhaust the opportunities.
How is life after football? You have been busy. Lott: Life after football has been just like playing: You’re always out trying to make a great play.
What was your biggest adjustment to life after football? Lott: Learning how to be a rookie again.
What have you learned? Lott: That the playbook is definitely challenging. It’s much different. And the relationships that you have to build, and the new teammates that you have to work with, bring valuable resources andexperiences.
Tell me about All Stars Helping Kids. Lott: All Stars Helping Kids is a platform that we have been involved with since 1989. It allows young people to be engaged with opportunities that allow their education, their health initiatives, ways of getting them a chance to succeed or a chance to stand on someone’s shoulders to have success.
About the program you have said, “We can achieve more collectively than we can individually.” Lott: That is true, and that’s why we are calling on more athletes to be engaged with the philanthropic efforts of our society. We believe that there should be a calling for more athletes to get involved. I had an interesting phone call from Jim Brown a year ago. He shared with me his thoughts on what he started doing in the early ’60s: creating a social change, a social opportunity for others.
What did that phone call mean to you? Lott: For him to say that we are a part of that network, and that we continue to carry that baton and really try to inspire others to be a part of it, is a huge statement and a huge responsibility for all of the people who are associated with All Stars Helping Kids: Emmitt Smith, Marcus Allen. … All of us have to carry the torch of guys like Bobby Mitchell and Bill Russell and Jim Brown, who tried — and continue — to create social change.
Toward the end of your career, in a poll by The Sporting News, eight of 20 NFL coaches (including Bill Belichick) cited you as the best candidate among then-current players to be a head coach. No interest in coaching? Lott: No. The reason is, if you look at a guy like coach Belichick, and you look at the resources and you look at what he’s learned about coaching, the same journey that he’s been on in his search for excellence is the same journey that I’ve tried to incorporate in my life, even though it’s not coaching.
You find yourself wanting to be around people who are great at their profession and to be able to understand how they became great. I think that that’s one of the things that when you’re a coach or a CEO, you see those same attributes in a lot of folks. I believe, and I’ve often said that Bill Walsh could have been not only the head coach of the San Francisco 49ers, but also the CEO of Apple. And that’s what’s appealing to me in my life right now.
The Super Bowl this week is going to honor Bill Walsh. What is your involvement in that ceremony? Lott: It’s a small role: being there to flip the coin with Bill’s son and daughter and Jerry Rice and Steve Young. Bill had given so much to the game of football and, really, to society. This is a great tribute to what he has been able to leave behind for the game. I’m excited that I have a chance to be a part of it.
Lott has taken his competitive fire into the worlds of business and philanthropy.
What was Walsh’s great talent? Lott: Bill Walsh had the ability to inspire not only the great players but also the players who were the bottom half of the team. Another attribute was his ability to find a collective group of people that might not be the most talented group but the best group that would be able to win. His vision of how he introduced the offense, his way of cultivating relationships and putting forth his efforts in trying to create a platform for more minorities to participate in the coaching ranks — those are things I willalways remember Bill Walsh for.
In January 2006, in The Charlotte Observer, you said that the NFL and NFLPA “didn’t do enough to help former players, especially pioneers of the game suffering crippling health and financial difficulties.” Do you still feel that way? Lott: Yes, and the reason why I feel that way is simple. There is a debt that we still owe to those players who came before us. And that debt needs to be serviced by all of us.
If we’re able to come together and put an endowment in place and ask players to take some of their resources to put toward this endowment, I think we could help resolve some of the problems. It’s going to take a collective effort of everybody who’s been associated with the NFL to help these guys who have suffered and who have not had the resources to live a quality of life. And that’s all we can ask: not to support them in a way where it provides luxuries but just the basic necessities.
At one time, some people thought that you would succeed Gene Upshaw as head of the players association. Lott: That was not my idea, and that idea was thrown around a number of times. I think that when you look back, there are definitely some highlights of what Gene has been able to accomplish, as well as some times when we would love to have had him think about all people, whether they were retired or not. That’s a challenging job when you have to think of all of the athletes who have ever been associated with the game of football. Big task.
What’s the mission of Play It Smart? Lott: Play It Smart is a phenomenal program centered around elevating young people who might not have the resources and it provides for them the opportunity to see that they can enhance their needs. So, when they do move beyond the playing field and beyond their careers in sports, they have a chance to have the right resources to compete.
Look for more of this conversation in our sister publication, SportsBusiness Daily, located at www.sportsbusinessdaily.com.
Education: B.A., public administration, University of Southern California
