Chapter 1: Two Roads Diverged 1 Two Roads Diverged
Saturday, July 11, 1970

THE OLD COURSE

ST. ANDREWS, SCOTLAND

On the final hole of the 99th Open Championship, thirty-six-year-old Doug Sanders faced a putt to beat Jack Nicklaus, to become the Champion Golfer of the Year. The biggest putt of his life, it was less than three feet.

The thousands of spectators ringing the green, along with the millions watching on television, held their breath as the flamboyant Californian, clad in purple from head to toe, surveyed his task from both sides and then hunched over the ball.

The stroke he made was painful to witness—a convulsive stab that pushed the ball so far right it never touched the cup. The following day, in an eighteen-hole playoff with Nicklaus, Sanders lost by a stroke as Jack notched the eighth of his record eighteen major titles.

On that same weekend, precisely three thousand miles to the west, another competition took place—the men’s championship of the Portland Country Club—and, as at St. Andrews, it came down to a short putt and the jittery fellow standing over it: me.

My opponent was Ray Lebel, a forty-seven-year-old oral surgeon, World War II navy fighter pilot, and father of seven. To call him the “Jack Nicklaus of Maine Golf” would be demeaning Ray. A member of the Maine Sports Hall of Fame, he’d won the state amateur seven times. Inside the Portland clubhouse, on a plaque honoring past champions, “Dr. R. Lebel” had made twenty-five appearances, including twelve of the previous thirteen years. (I’m not sure what happened in 1961—maybe he had jury duty.) Ray would ultimately win thirty-two Portland Country Club titles, along with fifteen more at a handful of other clubs, for a total of forty-seven club championships. According to Golf Digest, that’s the all-time record.

I was half his age, a wiry five ten and 160 pounds with a 5 handicap and a self-taught swing. I lacked Lebel’s stature in every sense. On a really good day I could bump it around Portland’s 6,200 yards in something close to par, but I was no match for Ray. Two years earlier, I’d made it to the final against him and he’d beaten me 7 and 6. Suffice it to say, I wasn’t brimming with confidence as we shook hands on the first tee that Saturday in 1970.

But somehow, after seventeen holes we were all square. I don’t recall much about our match except that I double-bogeyed the par-4 fifteenth and got away with it, as Ray, in a rare lapse, also made a 6. The eighteenth was a reachable par-5, and a solidly struck 3-wood got me home in two, pin high and about thirty feet from the hole. Ray, after outdriving me, came up short on his second shot and then played a mediocre pitch (by his standards) that settled on the front of the green, a bit farther from the hole than I was. He was now putting for birdie, while I had a look at eagle.

A handful of club members were watching all this, including my mother, along with my aunt and uncle, who were visiting us. My regular golf buddies were absent; knowing I’d had my ass kicked by Ray the last time, they’d opted out rather than bear witness to a second brutal slaying.

Ray’s putt burned the edge before stopping a foot away. So my situation was clear: two putts for victory. Of course, the only thought in my mind was For God’s sake, don’t three-jack—if you have to go extra holes with this guy, you’re toast. Despite that less than buoyant inner monologue, I was able to hit a solid putt, but a bit too solid, as it stopped just beyond the hole.

I had about three feet, slightly downhill, with a bit of slide to the right—the same putt Doug Sanders had faced.

I took a deep breath and managed to shake it into the hole. (Do you really think I’d be telling this story if I’d missed it?)

I remember thinking, Has this really happened? Indeed, more than half a century later I still look back at that day as my most surreally blissful moment on a golf course. On that blessed afternoon, the game I so loved had decided to love me back.

Word got around the club. It wasn’t long before my pals came out of the woodwork to offer incredulous congratulations. We were having a beer in the locker room when one of them said, “Hey, we need to go out and celebrate!”

“I’d love to,” I said, “but I’m on the air in forty-five minutes.”

During my formative years I’d developed two strong and abiding passions—one for sports, the other for the communications media. Always in the back of my mind was the notion, or at least the hope, I would someday find a job related to one or the other of them.

Of course, a lot of red-blooded American boys had similar ambitions, still do. Sports and media: If those two industries don’t spur you to embellish your résumé and knock on a few doors, what does? But I did have a couple of advantages, and the first of them was my dad.

John Hughes Norton Jr. (and yes, I’m John Hughes Norton III) was an executive in the broadcast business and held a variety of positions at networks and stations in several different cities—New York, Chicago, Portland, and Buffalo—which made for a peripatetic childhood for me and my older sister, Gini, but also gave me an early and inside look at the magic of television and radio.

The Portland station he managed had a Saturday morning kids’ show, a poor man’s Captain Kangaroo. Back when I was in the third or fourth grade, the highlight of my week was to go to the office with Dad on those Saturdays and watch the show unfold live from the studio. It wasn’t the actors or the show itself that captured me; rather, it was the process, the mesmeric coming together of all that lights-camera-action.

That said, my father and I weren’t particularly close. Like many fathers of that era, I guess, he was absent a lot, either at work or traveling for his job, and the child-nurturing was left to my mother, Virginia. Dad and I didn’t go on fishing trips or wrestle around on the floor together, and he wasn’t one for heartfelt guy chats or chats of any kind. (Even the whole sex-talk thing was left, weirdly, to my mother.)

I’ve often regretted never sitting down and asking him about his past, asking about his hopes and dreams, his worries and concerns, asking how and why he got into broadcasting, a reticent man in the communications business. Although he worked hard, I don’t think he ever felt appreciated. I know he had trouble holding on to jobs. He and Mom also had their difficulties, though they remained married for thirty-nine years until Dad’s death in 1977 at the age of sixty-nine.

One of the few tidbits of worldly wisdom my father shared with me came out of nowhere one day when he said wistfully, “Hughes, never feel bad when you are alone, because you’re in good company.” So many times in my life, I’ve had reason to recall those words.

All this to say those Saturday mornings in the Portland studios of WMTW were about as close to bonding as Dad and I ever got. The connection my father did provide, however, to the world of broadcasting would only deepen and endure.

A few years later at WKBW in Buffalo, the Saturdays with Dad continued, but this time it was not television that fascinated me but radio. WKBW was a Top 40 station where the smooth-talking disc jockeys leaned into a vintage RCA microphone and spun vinyl on a sixteen-inch turntable. In the era of “cool” they were the coolest.

So was the music they played. This was the late fifties, the heyday of Elvis, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Connie Francis, Ricky Nelson, among many others. The uncomplicated melodies and pounding beats of that era somehow spoke to me. Even now, my satellite radio is locked on ’50s Gold.

By 1962, my sister and I had attended schools in three different states, and my mother had become unhappy with the choppy education we’d gotten. A graduate of Agnes Scott, a private women’s liberal arts college in Decatur, Georgia, she was focused on getting Gini and me the best possible schooling. She’d also pushed us to work hard in school.

Her family had been in America for several generations, and her grandfather, a soldier in the Confederate army, was wounded at Pickett’s Charge, the Gettysburg conflict cited as the turning point in favor of the Union forces. I’ve often thought about that and marveled at the power of fate, the almost mystical way its unexpected consequences can change lives. After all, during that fierce 1863 battle, had Great-grandpa been killed rather than wounded, I wouldn’t be here!

Mom had decided I needed to complete grades ten through twelve at a boarding school. I wasn’t crazy about moving away from my family and friends for three years, nor was my father. Gini was on her way to Vassar and now he’d be looking at two hefty tuitions that would consume a major chunk of his salary. But Mom was on a mission: I would serve a three-year sentence at an institution that would propel me into an Ivy League school.

I didn’t want to let down my mother or myself, so I became a grinder; a highly organized, goal-oriented overachiever. When I joined the Boy Scouts, for instance, it wasn’t for the joy of fireside camping, it was to make Eagle Scout, and I systematically knocked off merit badge after merit badge until I had the requisite twenty-one of them at age fourteen, two or three years sooner than most.

And so, I left Buffalo and traveled five hundred miles east to Phillips Exeter Academy, a leafy bastion of the proud and privileged in Exeter, New Hampshire.

My first few weeks there were more intimidating than anything I’d ever experienced, both socially and academically. Being away from home for the first time was bad enough, but as the new kid, and entering as a sophomore, I felt estranged and out of step with my classmates, who had already gone through an initiation.

In public school, I’d grown used to big classes, heterogeneous groups of thirty or so kids sitting at assigned desks, with little oversight or pressure to excel. Suddenly I found myself in cozy seminars of ten or twelve, with some of the smartest kids I’d ever met and instructors whose mission was to challenge us. There was nowhere to hide. Over time, however, I came to see my mother’s point. I was getting a very good education and learning to understand the significance of it all.

Serendipitously, at the beginning of my senior year a few enterprising students started to set up a student radio station. It was a modest operation, housed in the basement of one of the dorms with a mighty signal strength of ten watts, barely reaching the perimeter of campus. The format was all music—a mix of rock, Motown, and blues. When I heard they were looking for deejays, I couldn’t resist. I’d absorbed enough from watching the guys in Buffalo that I figured I could at least fake it. Besides, how many superstar disc jockeys could there be within the Exeter student body?

When in the spring semester WPEA launched, I volunteered for the 7 to 8 a.m. slot. It was perfect, save for the fact that each day at Exeter began with Assembly, when everyone was required to gather in the imaginatively named Assembly Hall at 8 a.m. sharp. One lateness was permitted; after that, with each violation you were grounded for a weekend. So, I made sure to sign off my show by 7:55 and then sprinted a quarter mile across campus, sweating through my mandatory blazer and tie.

Meanwhile, I was able to find an outlet for my other childhood passion, sports. During three long, cold winters in Buffalo, I’d learned how to play ice hockey on the backyard rink my father had put together. Now at Exeter, I played sparingly on the hockey team. In the spring, I was a utility infielder on the jayvee baseball team (good field, no hit).

I wasn’t a sufficiently skilled golfer to make the Exeter team, but in the eight years since my family had left Portland, we’d kept a nonresident membership at the Portland Country Club, renting the same place we’d rented when we lived there. That’s where I’d spent my childhood summers, getting a little better at golf each year. When I returned to Exeter for my senior year, I saw a notice for the Exeter Academy fall golf championship, a match-play event held on the town’s nine-hole course. On a whim, I entered and won. The 1964 “Laurence M. Crosbie Fall Golf Championship” plaque still hangs on a wall in my home, but the cool part was that my win was announced during Assembly the next morning.

The following spring my mother’s grand plan came to fruition when, along with a number of my Exeter classmates, I got accepted to Yale.

My last Portland summer before heading to New Haven saw some excitement when the country club staged a high-profile charity golf event. A few thousand folks bought tickets to the clinic, and my best buddy, Chris Pierce, and I were among the first to sign up as marshals, thus guaranteeing ourselves ringside seats.

This was 1965, and the lineup that day included the reigning Masters champion Jack Nicklaus, the reigning U.S. Open champion Gary Player, and the soon-to-be-crowned PGA champion Dave Marr, along with England’s top player, Tony Jacklin.

I’d never been so close to pro athletes, especially guys I’d been watching and worshipping throughout my childhood, and it was cool to see them interact with each other, tease each other during the clinic, see them as real people rather than distant icons. The day began with a luncheon and questions from the audience. Then it was off to the range for the clinic. In between, Nicklaus had slipped out to the men’s room. As he emerged, I overheard one of the other marshals say to him, “Jack, how you feeling?” to which he replied, “About ten pounds lighter.” It was a revelation—these guys talked just like we did!

They had all been brought to us that day through the auspices of a fledgling sports management firm out of Cleveland. Little could I have imagined in the moment, that company was where I’d be spending my entire business career.

But first: I had some schooling ahead of me. Thanks to the rigorous academics at Exeter, Yale turned out to be less demanding than I’d anticipated. There was plenty of time for fun and games, the latter including four years as a marginal contributor to the hockey team and three years on the golf team.

As for the fun part, it began the moment I joined WYBC, the Yale radio station, where I worked as a deejay and did play-by-play of home football games and the occasional hockey game when I didn’t suit up.

Doing sports radio was exhilarating and at times I could really get into the flow of the action. Etched in my memory is a football game against the University of Connecticut. It was a warm September afternoon and the window in our radio booth was propped open. On a particularly exciting play I stood up to better describe the action, bumping into the support rod that held the window open. Down crashed the window, the frame hitting me smack in the head.

“Holy shit, what was that?” I blurted, adding a couple more expletives likely never heard in Connecticut broadcasting history. I’d completely forgotten I was live on the air. Blessedly there was no reaction from the FCC. I kept the recording of that game for years.

Despite that gaffe and others, I was able to splice together enough of my Yale airtime for a demo tape, which I sent to WGAN, a top radio station in Portland. To my surprise, the station program director said he’d like to hire me to do the all-night show, midnight to 6 a.m., the week between Christmas and New Year’s. I couldn’t say yes fast enough. That led to a summer job as the station’s “swingman.” When the regular deejay from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. took his vacation, I filled in. Then the 6-to-midnight guy would leave for two weeks, and I’d move into that slot, then the morning-drive guy, etc.

It was an absolute dream job. I was learning a lot while doing something I loved, I had plenty of time for golf, and I was making more money than my friends, who were lifeguarding or doing construction. I hung on to that WGAN gig for six glorious Maine summers. Life was good.

Then Vietnam happened.

Just before graduation in 1969, I got a letter from my draft board in Connecticut informing me that I would be drafted by the end of the year. I’d done two years of ROTC at Yale before dropping out, thank goodness, or I would have been on my way to the Mekong Delta as a second lieutenant with a life expectancy of about twenty minutes.

Desperate to avoid combat, I determined that my best chance was to enlist in some division of the Reserves, which would guarantee to keep me stateside. On August 15, I signed up for a six-year hitch in the Maine Army National Guard: six months of active-duty training, then one weekend per month and two weeks of summer camp each year through 1975.

The drive from the Portland Country Club to the WGAN studio was less than fifteen minutes, and when I slipped on my headphones for the 6 p.m. show, I was still on adrenaline from my match against Ray Lebel. For the next six hours I did my best to focus, but I’m sure I sounded goofy that night, floating on a self-congratulatory cloud nine.

The euphoria was short-lived, however, as I realized my summer was about to end with a couple of serious challenges. First was summer camp for the Reserves, two weeks in the company of kindred draft dodgers, playing soldier sixteen hours a day at a training center in the Maine woods. Then came a different sort of test: business school.

My commitment to the Reserves had forced me to put all future plans on a one-year hold, but I’d sent applications to a few business schools and was fortunate to get an acceptance from Harvard. I say fortunate because, although my college grades were good enough, my score on the business school exam was less than stellar, and I lacked what Harvard valued most—real work experience. The majority of those accepted by HBS had logged two or three years of meaningful employment, and others were accepted on the condition that they would put in those two years before enrolling. I guess a former part-time deejay was just what they were looking for.

It was a two-year program, and by the start of my second year I’d begun to think about how to put my MBA to use. When I asked myself in what field I wanted to forge a career, the answer came immediately: the one I’d grown to know and love, the broadcast business.

After a bit of research I targeted one company—a fast-growing conglomerate of radio and TV stations called Capital Cities. They owned WKBW in Buffalo, where my father had worked, and had recently acquired the New Haven station, WNHC, so I figured I had some karma going. On top of that, their two top guys, CEO Tom Murphy and President Daniel Burke, were both HBS alumni.

I wrote a letter to Murphy and it was Burke who replied. Over the next several weeks we corresponded, each of us getting a sense of what the other was after, and by the middle of my final semester at Harvard I had an offer to become Tom Murphy’s executive assistant, helping with a variety of Cap Cities projects.

I couldn’t believe my good fortune. Thanks to my hardworking father and iron-willed mother, so many good things had come my way. And now I had the opportunity to work beside a brilliant executive at the helm of his thriving company in the industry that had enthralled me for a decade. There was no way I could turn it down.

And then I met Mark McCormack.