It's How We Play the Game: Build a Business. Take a Stand. Make a Difference. - Hardcover

Ed Stack is the Chairman and CEO of DICK’s Sporting Goods. Born in Binghamton, New York, he now lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with his wife, Donna. It’s How We Play the Game is his first book.

Chapter 1: “Go Start This” 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 that 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.

Dick grew up adoring his oldest brother, my uncle Ed, who was nine years older. Ed was a dashing character—handsome, charismatic, athletic, fun loving. He was more of a father to my dad than their father had been. But the real influence on young Dick was his paternal grandfather, who introduced him to fishing for trout in the Susquehanna and Chenango, and for bass in some of the lakes outside of town. They did a lot of talking, and I understand they caught a lot of fish, but I think my dad enjoyed being outside on the water, the solitude and beauty of their setting, as much as anything. It was enormously calming.

Which did him good, because my dad was a high-strung kid with a lot on his mind. When he was in junior high, my uncle Ed joined the Army Air Corps and was away for years. My dad felt that loss. Even before then, he wasn’t doing well in school—he had trouble studying, and my siblings and I have long suspected that he had a reading disorder; he remained a poor reader throughout his life. He was deeply interested in sports, passionate about them. He landed a spot on Binghamton Central High’s junior varsity football squad in his sophomore year and played intramural basketball for a couple of years.

His greatest passion, then and throughout his life, was baseball. He was a catcher, and a good one, with a strong arm and a quick glove, and for several years played for the team at St. John the Evangelist, our parish church. The squad played other parishes, and the competition was surprisingly fierce. But while good, my dad wasn’t great. If he harbored any dreams of taking his game higher, like most kids he didn’t see them pan out.

So Dick Stack had a chip on his shoulder. He was barely getting by in his classes. He felt as if he was falling behind, that he was struggling at tasks his classmates found easy. He found just one respite: he immersed himself ever deeper into fishing.

And he worked. Dad had a paper route for a while, worked in an ice-cream parlor, then got a job with a guy named Irv Berglass, who ran an army-navy surplus shop in Binghamton. As the war ended, the surplus market was flooded with useful stuff the government no longer needed, everything from coats and boots to cook sets, sleeping bags, tents. Sportsmen loved browsing the store.

In January 1948, my dad graduated from Binghamton Central. He’d forever after say that it was “by the skin of my teeth,” which is no doubt true. He said he wouldn’t have made it without a passing grade—a flat-out gift—from an English teacher who told him, “I don’t know what will become of you, Dick, but somehow I know you’ll be a success.” At the store, the supply of surplus goods was beginning to slow, and Irv Berglass was mulling a transition into sporting goods. He knew my dad spent a lot of time fishing and was good at it. So he said, Listen, kid. I know you’re a big-time fisherman, and I want to get into the tackle business. Only I don’t know what we should stock, so I want you to go home and put together an inventory of what we’d need to get started.

My dad went home and put a list together. He stayed up into the early morning giving it thought, winnowing the list to the essentials, so that it all fit on two sheets of paper from a legal pad. The next morning, he took the list to Irv. The boss looked over the papers, took out a pen, and started crossing out items my dad knew any fisherman would need. Dumb kid, Irv said to him. You don’t know what the hell you’re doing.

Did I mention that my dad was a hothead? He snatched the papers away, stormed out of the store, and never went back. He walked across town, angry at the boss and himself—now he was out of high school, with no prospects for college, and suddenly jobless—and stopped in to see his father’s parents.

Martin and Mary “Mamie” Stack did not have a lot of money. Born in County Kerry, Ireland, they’d come to Binghamton during the cigar boom, and now they lived very modest lives, scrimping for every extra dime; they went so far as to erect a tiny cottage in their backyard, which they rented out. One challenge was my great-grandfather, who was a wonderful man liked by virtually everyone who met him—and was known around town as “Backy,” for the tobacco he chewed 24/7—but who was also an Irish cliché in terms of how much beer he consumed at the local pub. In other words, the dimes didn’t pile up.

My father showed Mamie the list he’d compiled, told her what had happened. She could see that he was torn up. After a while she quietly asked: “How much would it cost you to do this—to open this business for yourself?”

“Three hundred dollars,” he answered. He might not have been a great student, but he was always handy with numbers.

With that, she crossed the kitchen, went to a cookie jar in the back corner, reached in, and pulled out a wad of cash. God knows how many years of saving that represented. She counted out three hundred dollars, handed it to him, and said: “Go start this business yourself.”

As origin stories go, I think that’s pretty good. Some details have proved variable over the years: With each telling, my dad would have himself staying up later to put together the list; it was midnight when I was a kid, and by the time he told my kids the story, he was pulling an all-nighter. Occasionally, press accounts of my great-grandmother’s generosity have amplified the sum she handed over to $600, or even $1,200.

But my dad always insisted that it was with $300 that he started his business, and Mamie backed him up. That cookie jar of hers has become a lasting bit of iconography at Dick’s Sporting Goods. Today, when an...