When Sam Houston Race Park promoted Andrea Young, she received an e-mail from her mother that said, “When you were a girl, you always wanted to be president.” Now she’s president of the horse racing track. She maintains her two-year-old title as COO and assumes the same titles at sister track Valley Race Park. On the day after her son Harper’s second birthday, she said, “Attendance is up, the handle is steady.” She credits an “irreverent and edgy” marketing campaign and “generating new revenue by diversifying. We brought in 30 Live Nation concerts.” The Vanderbilt grad worked sales and marketing for the Rockets before moving over to the Comets as president and CEO. She took a risk by going from basketball to horse racing, but she’s not a gambler. “I bet a little when I started after Harper was born, but only to learn the business.” And she understands that she may be an oddity. “Let’s face it. I’m not your typical track operator. I’m a young mom, 30-something and sassy.”
“I can’t be in two places at the same time,” said Bob Arum, the promoter of the two-city, two-championship night of boxing Feb. 21. So the New York native will be in Youngstown, Ohio, for the middleweights, Kelly Pavlik and Marco Antonio Rubio, rather than Madison Square Garden for the welterweights, Miguel Cotto and Michael Jennings. Why? Because his wife, Lovee Arum, made a big impression on doctors from the Cleveland Clinic for her cause, Keep Memory Alive. She will host doctors at the fight. “Who would think doctors would be interested in boxing?” she said. Lovee’s father, Morris Hazan, died of complications from Alzheimer’s. Her son, Todd duBoef, is president of Top Rank, Arum’s boxing-promotion company. Bob said his wife of 18 years is a board member of the Las Vegas foundation, which is behind the Lou Ruvo Brain Institute, being designed by Frank Gehry. She works with Larry Ruvo, a Nevada wine merchant who founded Keep Memory Alive in memory of his father, an Alzheimer’s victim, and Sig Rogich, a former U.S. ambassador to his native Iceland and a former Nevada boxing commissioner. A fundraising dinner is set for Feb. 28, featuring Siegfried and Roy in their first performance since October 2003, when a white tiger mauled Roy Horn.
Sports economist
Andrew Zimbalist
performed as Mother
Ginger in a local
“Nutcracker” production.
Sports economist Andrew Zimbalist landed two supporting roles in the Pioneer Valley Ballet Company’s April production of “Beauty and the Beast.” He was actually offered the lead after his performance as Mother Ginger in the holiday production of “The Nutcracker,” but couldn’t commit the time. Zimbalist took ballet lessons when he was 4 and 5. “I always loved to dance, the swing, rock ’n’ roll, folk, square and ballroom.” The Smith College professor joined the western Massachusetts ballet company “as a way to share more time with my daughter Ella (10 1/2) as a counterweight to all the sports I do with her twin brother, Alex.”
When the Brewers put on a show, you can bet that Bob Uecker will play a starring role. He was a late-night talk-show host, complete with a hilarious monologue, and a game-show host as the Brewers put together two hours of entertainment called “Winter Warm-Up.” Every seat in Milwaukee’s historic 2,400-seat Riverside Theater was sold. Owner Mark Attanasio was Uecker’s first talk-show guest. The Brewers’ version of “The Dating Game” featured four bachelorettes interviewing J.J. Hardy, and “Family Feud” pitted Canadians Doug Melvin, Gord Ash, Taylor Green and Dave Bush against Americans Jeff Suppan, Corey Hart, Rickie Weeks and Mike Cameron. There was some serious baseball talk as executives and 35 players participated in the pre-spring training event, but most of it was pure fun. Tyler Barnes and Matt Beringer put the show together with director John Walsh. Barnes said, “Rick Schlesinger simply cringed and signed approval every time I came for more funds.” The show closed with Uecker introducing Trevor Hoffman — his first appearance as a Brewer — as the house band, with Brewers EVP Bob Quinn, belted out “Hell’s Bells.”
Elizabeth Kennedy, an avid Southern California runner, is looking forward to trying the trails around Atlanta as she spends her initial months as VP of corporate responsibility for the Collegiate Licensing Co. at its headquarters. She was in charge of corporate responsibility at USC, making sure licensed vendors complied with good business practices. “Even though many had codes of conduct, at USC we discovered that in practice there was a disconnect.” She said it’s a particularly important issue on college campuses. Kennedy, who will return to California, said she became interested when working as a student reporter for the Ohio State newspaper on a story about T-shirt merchandising. Her new boss, CLC Managing Director Derek Eiler, said, “Corporate responsibility is a focus at our company. Ensuring fair working conditions is a huge movement on college campuses where student activists take passionate positions.” Eiler said that Kennedy built a reputation for leadership in corporate responsibility that extended beyond USC. … When asked about business in this economic climate, Eiler said, “Business is good,” despite the fact that “retail has not been an illustrious place to be over the last six months.” Eiler said he took his family — wife Sarah and son Ryan, 5, and daughter Kelsey, 3 — on a Disney vacation in January. “They even had a ‘recession special,’ but no one else was there. No lines. Good for us; bad for Disney.”
John Genzale can be reached at johngenzale@gmail.com.
