Stadium For Rent: 4. The Egg

STADIUM FOR RENT:
Tampa Bay's Quest for Major League Baseball
By BOB ANDELMAN

4. The Egg

"When asked what comes first, the chicken or the stadium, it was easy for me to go back through the baseball records, my own experience and baseball's hierarchy to determine no previous baseball franchise had been awarded unless there was a suitable place to play."
-- Peter Bavasi, former baseball executive

The quest for a baseball team in the Tampa Bay area began with the age-old question, "Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?"

In this telling, St. Petersburg, Florida, played the part of the egg and, seven miles of water to the east, Tampa, Florida, played the chicken.

First envisioned under the colorful direction of St. Petersburg Times general manager Jack Lake in 1966 after the Milwaukee Braves were shanghaied by the City of Atlanta, the Tampa Bay area's efforts to attract a big league baseball team dominated the local mindset in both sports and business development circles. And the unrelenting failure of the region's business community to produce a team by 1992 played a major factor in Tampa Bay's rapidly diminishing self-esteem as a metropolis.
* * *

Professional sports were different during the 1970s. New leagues formed, existing leagues expanded and long-suffering teams moved to greener playing fields, mirroring the southern flight of Americans from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt. As the population boomed from Florida to Texas, the demand for pro sports in these states intensified dramatically.

Florida hosted just one big league team in those days, the NFL Miami Dolphins. From Atlanta to Miami, the Dolphins were the only pro game in the Southeast.

That changed on April 24, 1974, when the National Football League announced its 27th and 28th franchises would be awarded to Seattle and Tampa Bay.

Champagne corks popped all across Tampa Bay. Good times rolled. The new team hadn't an owner, player, coach or name, but Leonard Levy -- a local printer and the architect of professional football in the Tampa Bay area -- asked, "What do we have to do to get a Super Bowl?"

Tampa Bay was that kind of place, young, ambitious, on the fast track. While Levy went after Super Bowls -- eventually bringing two of them to Tampa Stadium -- Jack Lake built a consensus desire for baseball.

Not long after the American League created new baseball franchises for Seattle and Toronto in 1976, Lake addressed the Pinellas Suncoast Chamber of Commerce on the subject of bay area baseball. His point was simple: now that the AL had 14 teams, the National League (with just 12) would soon have to catch up.

Once the notion hit him, Lake couldn't help himself. He boasted St. Petersburg's potential for baseball to anyone standing still. Retired municipal judge Henry Esteva suggests that being publisher of the Times didn't hurt Lake's credibility or dampen anyone's willingness to pay attention. In addition to local support, he reeled in endorsements and encouragement from baseball owners, players and sportswriters.

"Every mission starts with some individual's vision," St. Petersburg councilman Bob Stewart says. "Clearly the point of all this starts with Jack Lake. He had a vision that this area could support baseball long before anybody else believed. Jack was in such a position of pre-eminence, he could force the issue not to be ignored as a whim. You had to have the foresight. Then you had to have the prominence to force it to happen. He had both."

Lake, who expected it would take five years or fewer to land a team, turned his energies in 1976 toward the establishment of a countywide sports agency.

Luring a baseball team was to be the Pinellas Sports Authority's focus: build a stadium, find a team.

Of course, not everyone was enthusiastic.

"The idea was even beyond the comprehension of the Pinellas Sports Authority," Lake later told Tampa Tribune sports columnist Bob Chick. "You could see it by just looking at some of their faces."

Indeed. Although the idea of baseball in Tampa Bay had universal appeal, there was no consensus on where it should be played, who should build a stadium or who should pay for it.

In those days, however, Lake was supported by business interests in St. Petersburg and Tampa, the latter generally approving efforts to bring baseball to central Pinellas County, northeast of St. Petersburg, believing football in Tampa and baseball in Pinellas would give the entire area a boost.

"Without Jack Lake," Chick says, "this effort would not have started. Maybe somebody else would have picked up the ball, but I doubt it. He had so much clout in the community that few people doubted his word or intentions. I always admired the sports-oriented people in Tampa, the movers and shakers. When they wanted something, they had the people to get it accomplished. I always felt St. Petersburg didn't have that kind of leadership. It was Lake that pulled people along here."
* * *

Jack Lake loved baseball.

Born and raised in West Virginia, Lake didn't play the game well but he loved to watch. When the Lake Family moved to Mansfield in central Ohio, Jack's father bought season tickets to Pittsburgh Pirates games. But as he matured, Jack's loyalties in Ohio were split: he also became a fan of the Cleveland Indians. Years later, as an adult living and working in Elizabeth, New Jersey, it would be the New York Yankees. His most prized possession remains his boyhood scrapbook of baseball cards and hard-won autographs of all-time greats like Carl Hubbell and Bill Terry, scrawled on lined paper from a schoolboy's notepad.

Lake attended one year each at the Ohio State University and the University of Alabama, an education interrupted by his enlisting in the Navy for four years during World War II. Three of those years were spent on a destroyer in the Pacific.

Returning to Ohio after the war, Lake turned up in the state capital, Columbus, where a girl he knew from Mansfield fixed him up with her roommate, Katharine Ann Kerr.

Katharine Ann was a secretary to Ohio's popular governor, Frank Lausche. Their first date was for lunch, but from then on Katharine Ann found herself going to a lot of sporting events with her new beau.

"He married me for my Ohio State football tickets," she says, laughing. "The Governor always had a box at the game. One day an assistant coach asked if I wanted tickets. Wonderful seats. Jack and I went out to dinner and I showed him the tickets. He dated me for the whole football season. When he found out I could get tickets for the Army-Navy game, oh! We sat on the 50-yard line."

Lake asked Katharine Ann if she could pull a few strings to get him a personalized license plate for his car. Sure, she said.

"I got him 'JBL'," she recalls. "He thought he had really arrived then."

Following their engagement, Katharine Ann's father, Lancaster Eagle-Gazette publisher R. Kenneth Kerr hired Lake as a classified advertising salesman. "My daddy said, 'If you can sell her, you can sell me.' Daddy knew Jack was a natural salesman."

Jack and Katharine Ann married in 1947. He joined the Ohio Air National Guard and was called to active duty again as an Air Force captain in Korea in 1952. In December of that year, Jack was one of a handful of men interviewed by CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow and given the opportunity to send a Christmas greeting back home to the states. Tipped off that a message was coming, Katharine Ann, her mother and friends gathered around the radio on Christmas Eve. Jack Lake's intercontinental broadcast message to his wife? "Keep your nose clean."

Following his military service, Lake returned to the Eagle-Gazette as advertising director and assistant to the publisher. But in 1956, he took a job as advertising manager of the Elizabeth (N.J.) Journal, relocating Katharine Ann and their three daughters to the East Coast.

When St. Petersburg Times publisher Nelson Poynter invited Lake to St. Petersburg in 1960 to be his advertising director, the idea of working within walking distance of Al Lang Stadium, the spring training home of the St. Louis Cardinals and New York Yankees, was better than any perk his new employer could offer.

Lake didn't waste any time getting out into the community. He threw a party and invited his contemporaries who were active in St. Petersburg business and politics. Henry Esteva became one of Lake's first and longest-lasting pals.

"Jack Lake is probably as charming and sophisticated as any business person I've ever met, and I've had dealings with quite a few," Esteva says. "He could sell anything. If he had a product, he knew how to present it. I've seen him make presentations where the whole group was mesmerized. Of course, Jack is the epitome of integrity. And he was a handsome devil. He was involved at one time in local theater. When a road company of Guys and Dolls came to his town in Ohio, they picked him as a local stand-in for the role of Nathan Detroit. Unfortunately, the lead actor never failed to show."

Still, Esteva recalls, Lake loved to break into song with a lyric from Guys :

I got the horse right here

His name is Paul Revere;

Can do, can do . . .

"To this day," Esteva says, "I call him 'Nathan Detroit.' And he calls me 'The Kid.' "
* * *

Professionally, Jack Lake is best remembered at the Times as the man who successfully pushed for more color advertising in the paper, which created greater opportunities for color photos and graphics on the editorial side. A color paper was a Poynter dream that Lake brought to reality -- not to mention profit and national recognition.

Nelson Poynter appreciated the way Lake executed not only the business side of the Times but also its social and community responsibilities. He was only too happy to have Lake represent him. As president of the St. Petersburg Area Chamber of Commerce, for example, Lake made a good public showing while Poynter got on with the serious business of putting out the daily paper.

"Never in my association with the Times did we have someone more influential in the community than Jack Lake," retired Times corporate marketing director Sanford "Sandy" Stiles says. "He was the perfect point man for Nelson Poynter. Nelson was somewhat hesitant to get out and mix in large community crowds. I don't think he could stand the criticism and be able to comfortably fit in the way Jack could. Jack had a thicker skin."

Poynter was recognized nationally for his philosophy and unyielding commitment to journalistic integrity. Lake was an advertising man, one of the best of his generation. He knew how to slap the right backs, make the right friends. And he could bully the best in the community to achieve his major goals.

"I don't think the Times [employees] felt the same way about Jack as they did Nelson," Stiles says. "Nelson was more personnel-oriented. His commitment was to the staff and to each staffer. Making each feel he or she was integral endeared people to him."

Poynter's view included Lake, too.

"He was keeping Nelson out of committee meetings and the Yacht Club and all these social things," Stiles says. "Nelson thought Jack was the greatest."

Lake felt the same about Poynter. "Nelson was rah, rah, rah," Lake recalls. "He was supportive of whatever I would do."

Thanks to the leadership of both men, the Times became a better all-around newspaper and circulation soared. At one time, five of its executives were presidents of national newspaper associations. The paper was a fun place to work during the 1960s, '70s and early '80s, a period of phenomenal growth.

After six years with the Times, Lake was named general manager in 1966. He advanced to executive vice president in 1969 and publisher in 1972, only the second person to hold the post since the Poynter family bought the paper in 1912. He kept it for the next 12 years.

"Before I ever came to St. Petersburg," retired Times editor Eugene C. Patterson recalls, "I asked Nelson Poynter, 'Tell me about this guy Jack Lake.'

"Nelson told me two things. 'Number one,' he said, 'Jack Lake may be the best newspaper executive I've ever seen. The second thing is, Lake is such a sports nut that if the only game in town was a game of billiards down at the local pool hall, he'd stand there all afternoon watching.' "

Most days Lake could be found in his office, ear glued to the telephone. Employees knew they were welcome in his office but also knew they would have to get him off the phone. He'd see visitors at his door, beckon them to enter with an outstretched finger, then point to a comfortable chair. (There were lots of soft, inviting chairs and couches in Lake's office. If he was going to hold a meeting, he thought people should be comfortable.) Lake didn't move around the building as frequently as Poynter did; there was little chance of seeing Lake in the composing room or even in advertising.

Lake did not influence corporate philosophy or daily news coverage. That wasn't his job and Poynter would never have allowed it. "The Times always separated 'church' and 'state'," Patterson says. "The editorial and news departments were not answerable to Jack. Jack understood that; never gave me a problem. He went out like any other businessman and tried to bring home the bacon. When people berated him about editorials or news coverage, he'd say, 'Call Patterson. I've got nothing to do with that.'

"All the years Jack was boosting baseball," Patterson says, "he had no influence on what the sports or news editor was going to express. He represented the company corporately. He did what the news side couldn't, and vice versa. Lake would complain to me -- not ever to anyone else on the news side but on some editorials he'd say, 'Have you guys lost your minds?' I'd say, 'I appreciate how you feel, but that's the way we feel.' We had one guiding policy: once we came to an editorial position, our business side would be in accord."

As retired Tampa Tribune managing editor Paul Hogan put it, "He had a helluva lot of influence in the community -- without the support of editorial."

"If this is hard for the public to understand," Patterson says, "I can believe it."
* * *

The St. Petersburg Times supported baseball for Tampa Bay by allowing Jack Lake the time and resources to build synergy in the community. Later the paper's editorial page and sports columnists came out for a stadium without waiting for a team -- the "egg" theory. All of this made it possible for Lake to pursue his dream.

As people in the community got to know Jack Lake, they also learned that the businessman atop their local newspaper was a sports nut. He loved baseball, football, basketball, soccer and just about anything competitive.

Long past his prime as a player, Lake loved to watch the games in person and on television. He spoke the language of sports and players. During spring training each March, Lake was a regular at Al Lang Stadium on the downtown St. Petersburg waterfront. He made friends with the St. Louis Cardinals and New York Mets brass and players.

"He was as well-liked and well-connected in sporting circles as any guy that ever lived in this town, more than (retired baseball star and Tampa native) Al Lopez himself," St. Petersburg businessman Mike Davenport says. His father and grandfather were contemporaries of Lake, says. "Jack would walk into a room, wearing the most God-awful plaid slacks you ever saw. He'd have the loudest sport coat and tie. You'd think he was [sportscaster] Lindsey Nelson. Jack Lake, to me, was a local Louis Nye. He looked like him. And Jack had a real sharp tongue, didn't mince words. Shot from the hip, took no prisoners.

"Jack Lake offended some people. He was brash. He'd call you a 'shithead' in a meeting. If you were thin-skinned, you didn't appreciate that. I can't tell you how many times I was in a meeting and Jack said, 'We need to do such and such.' You might've thought the idea sucked, but it got done. And if you couldn't get the job done, he'd find somebody who could."

That wasn't just one man's opinion of the newspaper publisher.

"Jack's approach to a situation was always to use a sledgehammer, whatever the issue," St. Petersburg assistant city manager Rick Dodge says. "He would come into a room and take over whatever the meeting was about. Very powerful in every sense of the word. He was a very confrontational, aggressive guy."

(Sandy Stiles says Lake was the same way with newspaper staffers: "He put great faith in the ability of his lieutenants to get a job done. If you failed, he'd let you know. He'd call you in and say, 'What the hell are we doing this for?")

"Back when I was chairman of the sports development committee at the chamber of commerce," Davenport says, "the Bucs had their one winning season. Lake said we need to have a function recognizing the Buccaneers. Anybody I'd go to who would say, 'That's a stupid idea,' I'd say, you ought to tell Jack Lake about it. They'd say, 'Jack Lake is behind it? Oh, well, in that case . . . ' He was a pied piper."

Davenport credits Lake and Lake's long-time assistant Stiles with creating the City of St. Petersburg's annual Sports Salute as a way of recognizing local amateur athletes. The salute attracts top athletes as featured speakers; the first year it was Miami Dolphins head coach Don Shula and 20 years later it was Tampa Bay Lightning president Phil Esposito and St. Petersburg's own Olympic gold medal swimmer Nicole Haislett.

Stiles recalls how Lake also initiated the annual collegiate "Big Sun" basketball tournament.

"Early in January 1971, he called me in the office and said, 'We ought to have a major basketball tournament here around the holidays. All the kids are home, we don't have a college team. Why don't you see what you can do?' " Stiles says. Two years later the Times and the city co-sponsored Big Sun, which continued successfully for many years.

Lake also organized annual pilgrimages of up to 80 pals -- including Stan Musial -- to 23 of the first 25 Super Bowls.

"He was a sports nut for all seasons," Stiles says. "If it was baseball, he was always at the World Series. If it was racing, he was at the Kentucky Derby. He was almost a ticket broker for the Super Bowl. I don't know where he got the contacts."

The St. Louis Cardinals reportedly once invited Lake to be on the team's board of directors but the newspaper publisher declined, citing a potential conflict of interest.

Bob Chick was sports editor at the old St. Petersburg Evening Independent, an afternoon newspaper published by the Times until the Indy 's demise in 1986. He saw Lake as "the ultimate professional."

"He was a publisher first and a baseball man second. He worked a full load with the Times. Then he worked on baseball. But I think if he had the wherewithal, he would have put baseball first and publishing second. He had an undying love for baseball," Chick says.

Lake always had access to insider baseball information during the '70s and '80s but he wouldn't call a reporter and tell him to call so-and-so. But if one of his reporters called and asked him . . .

"If [Times sports editor Hubert] Mizell or Chick or anybody wanted to know something, they would go up and see Lake," Patterson confirms. "But you never saw Lake in the newsroom feeding anybody. When any newspaper executive gets in the news, it's awkward for reporters. Lake was not often interviewed as the years went on. He had enough poise to understand he was not the guy who should be quoted."

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