hippie lou meets kahn

This is the story of Kahn, and I can’t tell it without telling…

THE STORY OF THE CARD

It was June 12^th, 2000, and I was working for a large corporation. I got a call from my boss, who said, “David, why don’t you come over? You’re going to be able to hire another person for your department, and I want to discuss the details of his inclusion into your department.”

So I went over to my boss’s office in the executive wing. And when I walked in, it was like the scene in Goodfellas where Joe Pesci thinks he’s about to become a “made” man—then walks into the empty room or whatever it was, and knows immediately that his minutes on earth are numbered. I had a similar feeling.

My boss was seated next to the vice president of Human Resources, and he proceeded to recite from a script that he had probably read more than once. Then I was handed a packet of papers, which I was told contained the terms of my departure if I chose to sign it, and was escorted into the next room, where there was a social worker. He gave me his card and asked me if I was OK to drive home, and if I wanted to talk about what I was feeling. I assured him that I was OK to drive, and asked if I could be excused. Then I was escorted back to my office by a handsome young man who worked for the security division of the company, I frantically grabbed a few personal items, and I was escorted to my car and off the premises.

Driving home, I felt a strange sense of relief, because I had always wanted to build and create something I believed in and I finally felt I had something to offer in terms of service, at least to the business community. I knew that because I had made $50 million the previous year for the company that had just fired me.

Sometime the following week, I got together with a good friend of mine who is nicknamed Frogman. He had worked in the advertising business in its heyday in the 1980s and still freelances as an art director. Although his work was always visually compelling, I considered him much more balanced: He was a great writer, he had a great visual aesthetic, and, as he described ad men and women, they were “frogmen and women of the mind.” He certainly was that: He’s one of the smartest and most intuitive guys I’ve ever met.

So we got together. And, as always, I had a hard time defining who I was and what I had to offer and what my new company would offer clients—what made us special. I knew I didn’t want to have a menu of services like every other consulting firm on the planet, where you could order the egg roll or the shrimp-fried rice. But what I had to offer was bit nebulous. So I spent some time with Frogman and his wife, talking and trying to micro-manage things. I thought I knew what I had to offer, and I was spewing forth. Frogman was great: He sat there and listened to about an hour of my bullshit, and then he said, “I’ve got it. Here’s what we’re going to do. The headline is, ‘This guy made $50 million in one year.’”

And within a day, I had a printer-ready version of a card—a duofold—which looked like a business card. It was like a birthday card, except that it was on its side, and its headline was, “This guy made $50 million in one year,” in white impact typeface in relief against a purple background. That was on the front, and when you opened the card, it was a business card, with my name and phone number and new consulting firm.

Then I went to the Dunn & Bradstreet database at Lehigh University, which I could sneak into and use at no expense. And I picked a couple of SIC codes, which are industry codes: If you’re targeting a certain type of industry, you can punch in the SIC code and get the names of the companies in that industry.

I was interested in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, so I punched in that code and pulled up about a thousand firms. I picked the CEO of every firm and made a mailing list and proceeded to get special white envelopes that looked like they contained wedding invitations. We didn’t want our audience to think they were being solicited by a consulting firm—we wanted them to think they were getting a wedding invitation or an invitation to a summer party in the Hamptons.

A lot of big-shot firms were listed in the database and all of them were in the northeast corridor, within a 250-mile radius of where I lived. I think one of the SIC codes was actually for research-and-development-based (R&D) firms, which were predominantly in the biotech industry, but there were others, as well.

We stuffed our envelopes and scattered the cards to the wind. So they went to the wind and I got a couple of calls. One guy, who I think was in his sixties and had been in business for twenty years, called up just to say, “I have never, ever responded to direct mail in my life, but I just had to call to see who sent out this card!” That was a very nice call to receive, but no business. There was another guy who called and said a similar thing, and basically tried to pick my brain about a legal dispute he was involved in, but wasn’t looking to hire me—the first of many who didn’t.

HOW I MET KAHN

Then, several days hence, I picked up a voicemail. I was in my first office in Allentown, which you might have read about in the story of W-LAND. And this voicemail says, “Hi, my name is so-and-so, and I’ve got this combinatorial chemistry technology, and I thought you might be able to help me out.”

I didn’t even know what combinatorial chemistry was. The only thing I knew about chemistry was that it was my Waterloo in high school. I think it was one of the few classes that I got a “C” in, though I think I actually got a “D” in physics the spring semester of my senior year. By then, though, I was already safely ensconced in the college of my choice. But in tenth grade, I just could not get the concept of the mole. It was my Waterloo, and it was the last time I had tried to deal with chemistry.

Now, this is the greatest story, and it’s great for a couple of reasons. One is that it’s why I believe we are entering a new age of self-determinism and tremendous opportunity for creators. Ultimately, what I had to offer clients was the ability to think and provide a fresh perspective for them, and an independent view on matters that were important to them. And I always say that if I had tried to open my firm twenty years earlier, in the 80s, I would never have gotten my first client. You’ll understand why, momentarily.

I got the voicemail—thank God I didn’t answer the call live. I actually didn’t even understand his last name at first, because he said it quickly and it was unusual. But I Googled the name of his company, and he was on that page. Then I Googled combinatorial chemistry and I think I stayed up all night on the Internet in that tiny office in Allentown. By the morning, I knew about Kahn, I knew about his company, and I was fairly conversant in combinatorial chemistry, which had hit the pharmaceutical industry in 1998, so it was approximately two years old at that point.

There were all sorts of things on the Internet. There had been conferences on combinatorial chemistry, and I could find scientists involved in it; there were chemistry publications online about how it was being used in the pharmaceutical industry, etc. In short, there was a wealth of information about Kahn, his company, and at least the functional area that his technology was being targeted for. I also found information on some companies that were producing combinatorial chemistry machines and were selling them to the pharmaceutical industry. By the next day, when I called Kahn back and we spoke, I guess I could bullshit well enough and was conversant enough in combinatorial chemistry that I piqued his interest.

I MEET KAHN

One thing led to another. Kahn was working with an eminent scientist from GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) who is considered the grandfather of combinatorial chemistry, and he invited me to a meeting with this scientist to talk about the project. None of this was paid—we didn’t have a contract or anything—but I was tremendously excited. Coincidentally, my cousin-in-law was an expert in combinatorial chemistry and had worked in the pharmaceutical industry for fifteen years. So I called him up and spoke to him at length, and he told me the good, the bad, and the ugly. I was also able to track down some of the scientists who had been at the conferences and I contacted them, and did a lot of other research. By the time our meeting rolled around a couple of weeks later, I was very conversant in combinatorial chemistry.

Had it been 1980, I wouldn’t have had access to any of that information. The best I could probably have done was to go to the Library of Congress, which would have probably have had the most comprehensive and publicly accessible information about combinatorial chemistry. But it would have taken time, and the materials would have been out of date. Who knows if I could have been as responsive, and could have come up to speed as quickly—in time to capture the interest of Kahn.

I probably did half the project before I was even hired to do it. It was just that sort of thing—a desire to help Kahn. I had a tremendous interest in the subject matter because it was something I had never done before, and I was really excited about being able to help him out.

Lest you think this is a story about me, it’s really just the first indicator about Kahn—the fact that he would get this card I sent out and would think to give me a shot. To me, that speaks volumes about him. He’s a very driven, smart, accomplished man, but he was open to a purple card that came in a wedding-invitation envelope, and was willing to give it a crack.

Kahn embodied my ideal client. The entire time I had my consulting firm, from 2000 to 2008, I kept trying to repeat my experience with Kahn—helping him out and getting clients like him. So I find it strange that he was my first client, and an ideal client in every sense of the word.

Anyway, I met Kahn when I went up to where his company was. I met him and the folks that worked with him at his company, and his collaborators. And the thing that struck me most about him was that he was sort of what I aspired to be, and he had done it in a very accomplished way.

He is the youngest tenured faculty professor in the history of the Ivy League school he was affiliated with—he got tenure at some insane age like twenty eight. He had also gotten a PhD in chemistry and physics from another pre-eminent university by the time he was in his early twenties. So he was an intense guy, but he also seemed very down-to-earth and cool. He had a great sense of humor, liked joking around, and was very welcoming. In my experience with people at institutions of higher learning who were similarly accomplished, there were not many folks of Kahn’s ilk.

OUR SHARED PURPOSE

Kahn really wanted to apply his science to challenges faced by businesses and industries, which was exactly my desire. I considered myself a scientist—not a physical scientist, but a scientist, nevertheless—because at the University of Chicago, where I was trained as an economist, they viewed economics as a hard science and held to all of the tenets and practices of hard science. We formed hypotheses that we tested and refuted, etc. And I really wanted to apply that science and technology to problems in the real world—in particular to commercial and business problems, which fascinated me.  

I think Kahn was very similar in that regard and he’d already constructed a company that had become a success by creating technology based on his world-class science. He had several clients that were paying his company good money, and he was looking for other things to invent and other business problems to solve. The particular one that he initially hired me to evaluate was the invention he was collaborating on with the scientist at GSK, which was to build a technology that would speed drug discovery through creating chemical compounds that might turn into new drugs. This would make the discovery process exponentially more productive, both in terms of the number of compounds produced and in reducing the time it took to produce those molecules.

It fascinated me! I flew down to North Carolina to the lab of the scientist who was going to collaborate with Kahn—the place where this scientist took his knowledge of chemistry and physics and built things. If I were doing it, I’d worry about something exploding or going awry. But they were just using their knowledge of the basic principles of chemistry and physics, along with some clever thinking, to construct contraptions that did incredible things. And, although I ever visited Kahn’s lab, my sense was that he was doing exactly the same thing. That was fascinating! This guy was taking an industry and looking at its main challenge—and the main challenge for the pharmaceutical industry at that time is still the main challenge today, in 2008—which is for their labs to discover drugs. Kahn had assessed that need and had come up with a clever way to help them do it.   

HOW KAHN GOT HIS NAME

The reason we developed the name “Kahn” was that there was already a machine on the market that did something similar—not as well as Kahn’s proposed machine—but the company had a pretty well-established position and had sold a number of their machines to the big pharmaceutical companies.  And they were like the Three Little Bears—with a big machine for the massive companies with massive budgets, and a smaller one for companies with more limited budgets.

Kahn and I joked around, as scientists are wont to do, because coming up with ideas is a tough business. A lot of your ideas don’t work out, and it’s a lonely existence because you often wonder if they ever will and what will happen even if they do. You really need to have an almost unhealthy belief in yourself and your powers.

Kahn and I shared that disposition, and it manifested itself by our making fun of the closest competitor. We developed this big joke, and called each other “Kahn.” In the same way, when I was creating my consulting firm—and throughout its existence—I always viewed other consulting firms that did strategy-work, which I considered our domain, as never doing anything right or worthwhile or useful. So this is how we got the nickname of Kahn, and why we used to call each other that—sad, but true!

Anyway, a series of events happened that drew me in and really made me passionate about Kahn, and a big believer in him. What touched that off was what happened when I concluded that if Kahn built this machine, he would probably not make any money, and actually stood to lose a tremendous amount.

There was a time when the pharmaceutical industry was open and welcoming to the technology, and was willing to spend money on that type of combinatorial chemistry.

But that day was gone. The main reason was that the technology that got into the market was fraught with problems and created a lot of false leads that burned up the scientists’ time—particularly the biologists’ time—and biologists got mad and basically wanted to throw out the technology. It didn’t seem worth it, because you had to spend a lot of time chasing down stuff, and when you figured out what had happened and tried to recreate it, you couldn’t do it.

So there was a big negative stereotype in the pharmaceutical industry against that class of technology. And even though Kahn had built a much better mousetrap, that negative perception was going to be hard to change. Another challenge was that there was a lot of consolidation in the pharmaceutical industry. There were only about ten companies you could sell to, and once you had sold to them, you were done. Furthermore, there was no guarantee that you could sell to all of them.

KAHN’S CHARACTER AND SAVVY

For a number of reasons, therefore, we gave that idea the thumbs-down, which was not without risk.  To his credit, however, Kahn read my report, stress-tested it, asked the tough questions, and then followed my advice. And as it turned out, he seemed pretty happy about his decision not to invest several million dollars in trying to bring it to market, and ended up being able to spend that money on the development of other technology.

That was a great testament to Kahn and his thoughtfulness and business savvy. He obviously wasn’t a scientist who just wanted to pursue ideas for their own sake. He wanted to build a viable engine for his creativity that would reward the people who had invested their money in his company. That’s the hallmark not only of a creative scientist, but of someone who understands that it isn’t all about the science—that, at the end of the day, it’s about getting stuff into the hands of the people who need it and getting some sort of exchange for it.

Over the next several years, I really became amazed by Kahn, whom I visited regularly. He was astoundingly inventive and developed a number of products with a wide range of applications for a wide variety of industries.

KAHN’S EXCITING NEW INVENTIONS

There are other ideas that Kahn is working on and will work on in the future. And I’m thoroughly convinced—I know it in my bone marrow—that this is a guy who has the potential to come up with ideas that would create new worlds in ways that I can’t even imagine. I’ve seen him do it five or six different times in completely different applications and industries—in medicine, in media, in energy, and in drug discovery. The possibilities are endless, so I’m very bullish on Kahn and I really believe in him.

THERE MUST BE A BETTER WAY

The other aspect of my experience with Kahn over almost a decade of following him and being involved with him is the complete inadequacy of current methods of financing to make the fullest and best use of his efforts. Over the decade, my perspective of his company is that he has had to spend a significant amount of his time trying to raise money, and dealing with the people he raises it from. And it seems to have come at tremendous cost. He spends an inordinate amount of time refereeing disputes, involved in legal proceedings, talking with venture capitalists that are looking for the latest and greatest thing, and involved with people who think they know how to manage his company and his technology better than he does.

From my view, there has to be a better way. There have been times in his tenure when he spends very little time discovering and creating and selling into the market, and it’s because of the Faustian bargain he must make to secure funds and keep the company alive. So it’s a real testament to his resolve and persistence that he has managed to keep the company alive over the last ten years. He’s built a credible business and is very optimistic about the future.

What’s really been great about knowing Kahn and having the privilege to work with him and try to help him out is it’s always a two-way deal—actually, more than a two-way, because I’ve brought in some people to help Kahn who had influenced me. So I don’t want to make it seem like just a two-way, but it certainly is at least that.

And four or five years ago, when I was thinking heavily with another colleague, we came up with a new way to organize R&D to make it more a lot more productive. It was a fairly comprehensive and thoughtful scheme, and was actually based on underpinnings from science and natural laws. It was completely novel—so much so, that—as I remember, I took it to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and tried to sell it to two gentlemen who oversaw what was probably the second- or third-biggest pharmaceutical R&D budget in the world.

For reasons I won’t go into, they were not buying it. But that night, I hung out with Kahn and we brainstormed about it. And he had a great insight, which was that one of the challenges in the pharmaceutical industry that contributes to problem of R&D productivity is the fact that there’s a very long time between building a better mousetrap for doing R&D, and knowing if it actually works. In the pharmaceutical industry, you don’t know for ten to twelve years if it’s producing better results, because that’s how long it takes for a discovery to get to the market. So there’s a long period of time when you’re trying to evaluate whether the fact that you built a better mousetrap ten years ago is now producing more than the old mousetrap would have. It’s a very difficult question and it takes a long time for people to figure out.

So Kahn made a very simple suggestion—which now seems obvious—to take the new way we had developed to organize R&D and sell it to companies that had shorter product-development times. That way, we could demonstrate a big increase in productivity, and, with that success, we’d perhaps have a better chance of convincing other folks that we really had something novel and useful.

That’s just one example of the many areas in which Kahn has improved my thinking by several orders of magnitude. As is the case with all of the people identified on this site, not only do I help myself through helping them, but I always seem to get back more from them than I feel I give. And that’s something I want to continue to do and celebrate and foster.

late spring, 2008.

story produced in collaboration with Corinna Fales.         

she was born and grew up in budapest.

It is an honor and a pleasure to share my thoughts about the extraordinary person Sally, Henry, David, Steven, and I were privileged to have as our mother. 

She was born and grew up in Budapest.  During her early childhood years, she lived comfortably with her parents and sister in an apartment three blocks away from the ornate Parliament building that is Budapest’s foremost landmark.   Education was an important part of my mother’s upbringing.  By the time she was 10, she was fluent in Hungarian, English, French, and German.  She maintained her proficiency in all four languages for the rest of her life.

Two events changed my mother’s life dramatically well before her teen-age years.  Her father died when she was 10 years old.  Nearly two years before his death, World War II began.  Hungary was spared that war’s intensive fighting until its last year but daily living nonetheless became increasingly difficult.  By late October 1944, the war had reached the outskirts of Budapest.  The advancing Russian army was determined to drive the Germans from the city and the Germans were intent on resisting till the last man. 

From November 1944 through March 1945, Budapest was under siege and subjected to constant heavy bombardment, artillery fire, and other forms of intensive combat.  During those five months and for many months afterwards, my mother lived with my grandmother and aunt in the basement of their apartment building, along with many others.  Food and water were in very short supply.  One day during the siege, my mother had to travel to another part of the city.  Her journey involved crossing the Danube River on one of the beautiful bridges for which Budapest is well known.  Just after she got off the bridge, it was blown up.  It was a miracle that my mother survived that day and the other days of the siege.

The European portion of World War II ended in May 1945 but Russian troops remained in Hungary.  When my mother finished a secondary school affiliated with the Catholic Church in May 1948, the Hungarian Communist party was firmly in control of the government.  My mother wanted to attend the university and study chemistry.  However, that option was closed because she did not come from a working class or peasant background. 

To obtain the opportunities she desired, my mother decided that she had to leave the country she loved deeply.  All of Hungary’s neighbors except Austria had communist governments.  Consequently, the only route to freedom was to cross the heavily fortified and mined Hungarian border with Austria.

Without telling my grandmother, my mother took a train from Budapest to a town near the border one day in June 1948.  That evening she walked across the border into Austria.  Again, it was a miracle that she was not hurt or killed. 

My mother spent five months in a refugee camp in Austria while she waited to be processed for admission to the United States, where her uncle and aunt had settled.  On Christmas Eve of 1948, she arrived in New York City to live with them.

These intense experiences my mother had as a teenager shaped her character and her outlook on life.  Thankful for the opportunity to pursue what she wanted to do, my mother was determined to make the most of it.  This drive to excel was evident from the moment she enrolled at Bryn Mawr College in January 1949.  She finished four years of college in 2.5 years, graduating magna cum laude in June 1951.  She went on to obtain a Master’s Degree in chemistry from Harvard.  Between graduating from Bryn Mawr and enrolling at Harvard, my mother married my father, adding a whole new dimension to her life.  They had a happy and strong marriage for nearly 61 years.    

My mother excelled at everything she did, including her professional work, growing orchids, playing tennis, and cooking delicious meals and wonderful desserts for her family, relatives, my father’s professional colleagues, and my parents’ friends.  Dinner parties and other functions she hosted were always beautifully done with every detail addressed.  Like my father, she was an excellent conversationalist, displaying constant interest in others and their activities and discussing numerous issues knowledgeably.  Not surprisingly, my parents had a wide circle of friends and an active social life in their younger years.

My mother was also very pragmatic.  She recognized there were things in life that could not be controlled but that it was important to take advantage of whatever opportunities were present and look to the future with hope and optimism. Time and again, she adapted to new circumstances, making homes for her family in Wellesley, Massachusetts; Miami; and finally in nearby Bethesda.  She did the same in her professional life, constantly reinventing herself long before that concept became in vogue.  Though my mother had a bright future as a chemist, she gave it up to raise five children.  Once her first two children were in elementary school, she developed new areas of professional expertise, working as a therapist for children with specific reading disabilities at the Massachusetts General Hospital and in schools in Wellesley and in Bethesda.  She subsequently was a research assistant in clinical psychology at the National Institute of Mental Health and then worked as a budget analyst there.   

While always the quintessential lady, polite and respectful to others, my mother had strong views and was not afraid to express them.  She never left anybody in doubt about how she felt about an issue.  When so many of us say what we think others want to hear, my mother’s candor was utterly refreshing. 

My mother was extremely generous with her time, labor, and talents to assist others.  She helped my aunt and uncle and my grandparents resettle in the United States when they left Hungary after the failed 1956 uprising against the communist government.  She volunteered at a hospital and at the Hillwood Estate Museum and Gardens in Washington for many years.  She was a long-time member of the budget committee of the Board of Directors of the apartment building in which my parents have lived since 1987.        

My mother lovingly expected her children to meet the same high standards she set for herself.  She lavished praise when we performed well but it was also made clear to us when we needed some improvement!  My siblings’ and my professional and other successes are due in no small part to the example my mother set and her values of self-discipline, hard work, organization, and excellence.  It’s no wonder she found my father to be an outstanding partner; he, too, excels at life’s core skills. 

When a debilitating illness affected my mother during the last 10 years of her life, she gave her all to get better.  However, she made the most of her condition, up to the very end.  Sadly, my mother is no longer with us.  However, I am sure she is busy working in Heaven, helping the Lord make it an even better place than when she arrived 10 days ago. 

I could not have asked for a better mother.



march 4, 2012
by christopher white webster

hippie lou meets coach pam

WE MEET

Coach Pam and I met in an alley in northwest Washington, DC, on “K” Street in-between 16^th and 17^th. And it’s a funny story.

I was a bicycle messenger and Pam worked in an adjacent building on the evening shift. The bicycle messengers used to come up the alley because we had to enter our dispatch office that way. When they didn’t have a job for you, they’d call you back to this nerve center of the operation, so the guys would hang out in the alley and do all sorts of nefarious and illegal things. Some of the more intrepid characters used to chat up any woman that might venture into the alley. But I was not one of those—I was a shy boy.

One afternoon when I was leaving the alley, I saw this nice-looking young lady, and I probably looked at her and smiled as I passed by. She winked at me, and I got scared and ran away! I don’t remember if I hopped on my bike, or what, but I skedaddled. I was not used to getting “cracked on,” as they say in DC.

But the next day, I went into Burger King and there she was again. And if I get that obvious a “go” signal, I usually have the courage to at least start a conversation, which I did. We had a good chat, and over the next several years we fell in love.

I was twenty when I met Pam, and as I got to know her, what really attracted me was that she seemed to have an innate sense of who she was and who she was not. She seemed to have an internal compass, and the needle would stay where it was no matter what life threw her way. Maybe she was born with it—I don’t know—but she’d had it ever since I knew her and it really attracted me because I didn’t have it at all. And most of the people I had known, or had bounced into, didn’t have it, either. So I found it strangely secure and comforting. It felt like something I was seeking, and I thought if I had it, I would be a happier person with a better relationship to the world around me.

PAM LOVES BASKETBALL

Coach Pam had grown up in the Anacostia housing projects in Washington, DC. And, during the course of our long relationship, which included having a child together, she always spoke fondly about two things: playing basketball “down at the rec”—the rec center near the apartment where she grew up—and photography, which she had worked on sometime before meeting me. But she really loved basketball, and she was pretty good. She could dribble pretty well and she had all these street moves, like dribbling in-between her legs and behind her back.

We used to play basketball together early in our relationship. We lived in a house in Adelphi, Maryland, and there was a court nearby. We also went down to the University of Maryland and had these great one-on-one games. And I could never figure out why I was always doubled over and breathing hard, when she was the one who smoked a pack a day!

We had a lot of fun. I was heavier than she was at that time, and at various points in my life. Sometimes I had sixty or seventy pounds on her, so I would try to back her down and throw my weight around, etc. But we always had a lot of fun playing each other, and really enjoyed it.

Then we went through a period of about ten years when we didn’t play. During that time, we lived in Chicago, where our daughter was born and raised, and then we moved to a small town in Pennsylvania, close to the New Jersey border.

WHAT IS WORK?

Through the course of our marriage, Pam worked a string of supremely unsatisfying jobs, though I guess they were satisfying in the sense that she loved to work. She was working when I met her, and she had a big sense of responsibility and loved to earn money and be able to provide for herself, but the work itself wasn’t something she seemed to want to jump out of bed and do. When we met, she was a cashier at a breakfast shop for a hotel in DC, and in Chicago, she worked for an auto-body store doing office work and had several other jobs. In Pennsylvania, she cashiered for a large Brinks-type operation, and also worked briefly in the office of a racetrack.

And she worked in a textile mill amidst massive machines. I used to pick her up at work and the older people who came out of the mill looked horribly deformed. They were bow-legged and their joints were all out of place and they had lost fingers by catching them in the machines. It didn’t seem like a picnic by any means.

For Pam, though, it just seemed to be a job. And one of the things that we talked about a lot—but perhaps had different points of view on—was that I was always seeking work that was meaningful to me and that I was passionate and really excited about doing. I was in constant search for that, especially when I was working on jobs that bored me or were unsatisfying. It was a big issue to me, but I always got the sense from Pam that work wasn’t supposed to be fun. It was a way to earn money, and that’s all it was. One’s ability to find something that they actually liked to do, and got a lot of non-monetary rewards from, was really just a pipe dream, and the sooner one accepted that, the better. So it was interesting to see how our differing perspectives played out in our lives.

PAM COACHES

The story of Coach Pam begins before I met her, when she fell in love with basketball. And one of the most exciting things that ever happened to me, in my entire life, was to watch her story develop. To me, it encapsulates many things.

We had moved to Pennsylvania and I was working for a pharmaceutical company and wasn’t home very much. I had an hour’s commute to the job and was trying to make vice president in two years or less, so I was often at work even on the weekends. We had just moved into the neighborhood, which was kind of a strange neighborhood relative to the ones we had lived in before. For example, the first day we were there, our next-door neighbors came over and asked us if we’d like to join them on their nightly walk. That was certainly a new experience for us!

Anyway, Pam got to know our next-door neighbors fairly well, and they had a daughter named Claire who was the same age as our daughter. Claire and our daughter never became friends or buddies, but Pam took an interest in Claire. And one day when Claire was ten or eleven, Pam saw her shooting around at the basketball hoop her parents had put up in their driveway.

I don’t know the exact details of the story, but my understanding is that Pam went over and started helping Claire—showing her a few tricks and giving her tips about her shot and encouraging her and having fun with her and playing around and being good company, I’m sure. I don’t know how long this went on, but apparently Claire’s mom took notice and really appreciated the time Pam spent with Claire and saw that Pam had a lot to offer.

Being the activist mom she was, Sue went to the coach of Claire’s team, which was an intramural league, not the public school league, and encouraged him to take Pam on in an advisory role or as a co-coach. And to his credit, he did.

In retrospect, I think he recognized in Pam—probably pretty quickly—that she had a knack and an intuition for the game, and that she worked well with the girls. And that was something he probably felt was missing in their experience. So they teamed up and started working together.

COACH PAM’S FIRST TEAM, AND HER SPECIAL GIFTS

The first team Pam coached was a group of Claire’s friends and assorted peers who had known each other for a long time, probably since early elementary school. Pam and her co-coach, Mr. Lawrence, coached them for four or five years, and their team had a nemesis—Palmer—whose girls always seemed to be three feet higher than they should be for their age, and they were well coached. But Coach Pam’s team got better and better each year, and in the fourth year—I believe it was—they won the intramural championship in the summer league. It was a crowning achievement and was very exciting, because the girls had been together for so long and had worked hard and finally won.

And it was the most exciting game! I think they were behind by about six points with a minute to go, and one of the girls hit a three-point shot. And then, as I recall, the game was tied, but one of Palmer’s girls was fouled as time ran out. So if one of Coach Pam’s girls could make a free-throw, they would win the championship. She missed the first one but sank the second! Coach Pam was about three feet off the ground and the girls were ecstatic.

What was very interesting about that team was that Coach Pam had an innate ability—which I could see that coaches on other teams did not have—to size up each girl and her strengths, and put each player in a position on the team where they would be successful. And it was often counter-intuitive. The girl who sank the free-throw to win the championship was relatively short, and she was stocky. Most coaches would put someone short in the guard position, and if they’re tall, they’d put them down low where they can grab rebounds and shoot close to the basket.

But Coach Pam saw that this girl, whose name was Jess, was very good inside, even though she was short. She could catch the ball, she was quick, and she had these great moves where she would duck under taller players. She had a low center of gravity and was aggressive, so when she caught the ball, she could move quickly and forcefully to create open space, and wasn’t afraid to go very strong to the hoop. And she was lethal under the basket. But when Jess played for the school teams, they always put her at shooting guard, where she was much less effective.

Mr. Lawrence’s daughter, Elissa, was also on that team. She was quite tall for her age, but was very quick and had great leadership qualities—she could see the floor and was good at distributing the ball, etc. So Coach Pam had her in a guard position, and oftentimes Elissa brought the ball up and ran the offense. She had a lot of energy, and when she was running the offense, the team really got up. She also had a fighting spirit, and if the team was behind, she would sacrifice her body—she was a real hustler. So Pam had her as the floor general and the quarterback for the team, which, again, was completely counter-intuitive. And when Elissa played for other teams, the coaches, who used the old rule of height equals down low, put Elissa down low, where she was much less effective. She was lithe, light, and lanky, with long arms and legs, and when she got down in traffic, it was probably hard for her to operate.

These are examples of Pam’s innate sense in terms of players’ physical attributes. But she was also intuitive about where every girl was at that point, not just in relation to basketball, but in relation to their confidence about life in general and their relationship to the other girls—all these factors. And Coach Pam seemed to just know how to put them in positions where they could be successful and grow.

SHE WAS BELOVED

She used to get extraordinary letters from the girls’ parents after every season. I was running a consulting business by then, and I used to tell all my friends that if I got even one letter like that from my clients, I’d take the next six months off. The letters these parents wrote her were just beautiful, and said things like: “My daughter has never enjoyed basketball, but this year she really had fun and she’s really developed.” In essence, they’d say, being on the team had changed their daughter’s life. And they’d remark that there had always been a lot of drama on the team in previous years, and a lot of conflicts between the girls, but on Coach Pam’s team, there didn’t seem to be much of that.

These are just the first of many incredible things about Pam’s teams. One time, I took my friend Paul to watch a game, and he’s a basketball aficionado. He has courtside seats to the New Jersey Nets, and his son is a high school phenom—a shooting guard—whom Paul has taken to tournaments all around the Northeast corridor since he was knee-high. When Paul came to the game, he said that Coach Pam’s team was extremely well-coached, and what struck him the most was the girls’ unselfish playing. They would pass the ball unselfishly and look for the opening and get the ball there, which was uncharacteristic of teams, especially when the players were going through puberty or were post-pubescent and in high school!

It’s interesting how Coach Pam’s career developed. By the time she won the intramural championship, I guess word-of-mouth had gotten around about her, because parents lobbied the public school to have her come and coach the girls. She took that opportunity for a season and coached the 7^th grade girls to a 22-2 record. It was the best record of any girls’ team at the school, including JV and Varsity, and who knows if it was the best record for many years previous and hence. It was quite an accomplishment, because most of the “stars” of the 7^th grade had been selected for the 8^th grade team, so Coach Pam basically took a team of girls who had not been picked, and turned them into champions.

One mother commented on the fact that Coach Pam patted her girls on the head when they came off the floor and onto the sidelines. And I think the reason that Coach Pam is so special—which fascinated me and I tried to understand it—is that she was coaching these 7^th and 8^th grade girls at a time when they were going through a lot of changes, questioning themselves and their life and their relationships with others, and trying to make sense of it all. And Coach Pam had a quality that none of the other coaches had, as far as I could see. In particular, many of the coaches were white and male. We lived in a predominantly white neighborhood—almost exclusively white—and I can’t recall one black player on any of the teams. I haven’t mentioned it before, but Coach Pam is black—and proud! And I saw a lot of the male coaches relate to the girls in a way that felt really wrong. They were not positive or encouraging, and they used to demean the girls publicly. For example, if one girl passed the ball to someone who dropped it, the coaches would say—right in front of the whole team, the parents, everyone—“Don’t throw it to her. She can’t catch.”

I remember going to a practice, and there was one girl who was overweight. The male coach made her run around the gym the entire time that the other girls practiced their shots and scrimmaged. I thought it was a very demeaning thing to do.

WHY THEY LOVED HER

I also saw some female coaches who couldn’t relate to the girls the way Coach Pam did, but it was primarily the males who yelled at the girls and demeaned them. Sometimes I’d watch the men Coach Pam’s teams, and it was like night and day. It was obvious that the girls did not want to play for those coaches, but when Coach Pam was coaching, they would have taken a bullet if someone shot at her. They really wanted to play for her and do well—they loved her and they loved playing for her. And the only way I can make sense of it is that she was giving them the same thing, if not more, and they wanted to show their appreciation.

My sense is that a combination of things attracted the girls to Coach Pam, but one of them was the same thing that attracted me: that clarity about who she is and who she isn’t. And the girls saw it tested under all sorts of conditions—during games, when they were losing by a lot—and in all sorts of scenarios. One time, there was a man in the stands from the opposing team who was talking trash to Coach Pam. I can’t remember if he gave her the finger in the middle of the game, or what, but she turned around from the bench and said, “Come see me after the game.” They went out in the hall and Coach Pam was Coach Pam. She got up in the guy’s face and gave him a lot more than he’d probably bargained for!

Another time, the team went to a neighborhood where the ref had to kick the entire opposing team’s cheering section out of the building because things had gotten violent. One of the opposing players had hauled off and punched one of Pam’s girls in the face. So Coach Pam had to manage that and finish the game and coach the girls and the girl who had been punched. And afterward, the whole crowd was waiting outside for Coach Pam and the team, and she had to make it to the bus and out of the parking lot, etc.

There were all sorts of situations that Coach Pam faced with the girls, and I think they came to see that she knew who she was, and they were drawn to that and respected it, and saw it as something they wanted in themselves. I think the other thing is that she is a powerful combination of encouragement and love, in the stereotypical mother sense, but she’s also very tough, in the stereotypical male sense. And they’re all in the same package. She can stick a foot in your butt if you’ve crossed the line or done something uncalled for, but she also knows when you need love and encouragement, and she can give that, too.

The bottom line was that she wanted playing to be fun for the girls. She wanted it to be fun.

Even when she got mad, there was always a sense of joking around and playfulness, as opposed to other teams with other coaches. And when you watched her teams play, they seemed to be having a lot of fun, because they were. She brought that to her teams.

I also noticed that there were girls who changed their opinion of Coach Pam between the time they first came in contact with her at an young age, and the time they had grown older and were on the high school varsity teams, where coaching was much more about Xs and Os, etc. Perhaps Coach Pam wasn’t an Xs and Os superstar, or as cerebral as some of the coaches they had in other venues, but many of those girls came to respect her.

She was also an extremely good manager, which I think is an almost impossible task. You have to be great with the girls, you have to manage the playing time, and you have to manage the parents, which is probably three-quarters of your job. I thought Coach Pam was very artful in helping parents understand that the goal of the team was to win and there were times when they needed to give their best players a disproportionate share time on the floor. But she also involved and encouraged everyone and went to great lengths to make sure that she did. She used to stay up the night before games, plotting out the different sets she was going to have and how much time each one would get. She almost planned the entire game in order to ensure that all the girls got the same amount of playing time.

We used to talk for hours at length about how to manage a situation with a parent, or which girl should go where and who should do what. I added nothing to the conversation—I just listened to her and I could tell that she was working out these ideas in her head. And when it worked out well, she was really happy. But it was effortless for her, she really enjoyed it, and it was unlike any of the previous work experiences she’d had. It was a great thing. She gave it her all, and got it back in spades. And it was beautiful to watch Coach Pam go into the world and do something she really loved.

COACH PAM AND HER “LADIES”        

I remember the last game I saw her coach. She had coached at the school for a year, but she liked the intramural league better because she had more control. In the school, there were a lot of internal politics, etc., and it wasn’t as pleasant an experience. But at the intramural league, she could basically manage things as she saw fit. She had a great team and got such a reputation that I think a lot of the girls and their parents followed her wherever she was. If she wasn’t coaching at the school, the girls didn’t go out for the school team—they went to the intramural team. And many of the parents who were dissatisfied with the school coaching regime moved their kids into the intramural league, which I thought was great, because that’s the benefit of competition: you go to where the quality is. And I think a lot of people thought Coach Pam was quality—cubed.

I remember the last game I saw her coach. The team had a successful season and made it to the finals, where they played a team that they had played twice in the regular season, and Coach Pam's team had won both games, but only by a point or two. For the final game, the stands were packed. I would guess there were at least two hundred people at that game and everyone knew that the teams were arch rivals. They were vociferous in their support or detraction.

Coach Pam’s team was ahead for much of the game but the other team closed and put the game into overtime—two overtimes, actually, if I’m not mistaken—and ended up winning it. But the most amazing thing happened right after the game, which is when they typically take pictures of the champions and then pictures of the second-place team. The girls had friends in common on both teams, and it was a testament to the sportsmanship that had been cultivated by Coach Pam and the other coach, that the two teams took their picture together. Some of the girls were in tears, but Coach Pam gave them a rousing speech and always called them “ladies,” which I loved and the girls loved—they started calling each other ladies. It’s not a term that young girls use anymore, but Coach Pam used it and always gave the word and the people associated with it the utmost respect, so it became a term of endearment to all.

Anyway, Coach Pam gave them a rousing speech and told them to keep their chin up. Believe me, no one likes to win more than Coach Pam—she’s a fierce competitor!—and it was another hallmark of their teams that they never gave up. But they were very graceful and gracious in defeat, and I think that’s the sign of a real champion.

Coach Pam became close with several of the parents and I think they so appreciated the impact she had on their girls and their families and their teams that she was invited to coach the girls’ lacrosse team for the public high school. Now, having grown up in the inner city in Washington, DC, I doubt Coach Pam had ever seen a lacrosse stick! I don’t think she could have picked one out of a lineup, though I could be wrong. She had no clue about lacrosse, and everyone on the board of the lacrosse team knew that. But, in another testament to the intangibles that Coach Pam brings to everyone she’s involved with, I think they rightly realized that the content was immaterial—that she would pick it up and learn the game, and that what she really brought to it were all the intangibles I’ve referred to.

So, Pam became a lacrosse coach and really enjoyed the game. It was funny, because she had developed these Ten Commandments for basketball, and it turned out that eight of the Ten Commandments were exactly the same for lacrosse. And when she showed them to one of the other lacrosse coaches, he said, “This is great!” He made a few edits for lacrosse terms versus basketball terms, and they went to town with them. What a story!

BREAKING A MOLD—WHAT GREATER IMPACT?

I noticed something that’s all over the culture at the personal level and that you see in many areas of society. We look at people who come from Anacostia, or from other parts of the country where a lot of the folks are on welfare and there’s a lot of inner-city poverty, and most of us think, “These people need help. How can we, in white, cultured society, help them out and give them a great vocabulary and dress them up in a nice suit and teach them good table manners?” In short, we have so much to offer them, and there’s nothing they can offer us. But what I saw was that Coach Pam had an astounding amount to offer—not only to me, personally, but also to all the girls and families of this community. That was wonderful.

And one of the things I realized was that those girls will go into the world and hear about black people and poor black people, and about black people who have come from the inner city. And none of that will take root because they have had the experience of being with Coach Pam. She’s coached hundreds of girls, and I think she’s had an impact on their lives and their parents’ lives. I don’t know if she was the first black person that many of the parents had met, but I would venture to say that she was probably the first black person that many of them had a close working relationship with. And I think she really changed minds about what black people have to offer white people, and what black people who come from the inner-city have to offer.

If anyone is involved in a team competition of any kind, I think Coach Pam will have something to add. Ultimately, though, I think there are a lot of young girls growing into women who will look back fondly on the twists and turns of their lives and reflect on the lessons and inspiration and the example that Coach Pam set for them. What greater impact can one have?

But it all started by her just wanting to help a girl next door. She didn’t plan it at all—she didn’t have some grand scheme to try to become a basketball coach or to try to get invited to the school to coach the teams, or anything. She just got up one day and went next door and helped a girl who was trying to get better at basketball. And that was beautiful.

I think of Coach Pam as a seed of the new world. She came to a community and had a deep impact on the girls and on their families. I think she taught them a lot—and, just by her example—changed their thinking about themselves and the world at large. That’s Coach Pam: a seed of the new world.

spring, 2008.

story produced in collaboration with Corinna Fales.