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Saturday, July 19, 1997

Hard work, perseverance are the hallmark's of Ussery's success

By DAVID A. MARKIEWICZ / Fort Worth Star-Telegram

DALLAS - Terdema Ussery, the elder, is sifting through some family photos in his Inglewood, Calif., home when he comes upon one that sums it up for him.

The picture shows his son, Terdema II, then 13, sitting alone in the dormitory bathroom of an elite boarding school in northern California, a table lamp next to him illuminating the pages of a textbook he's poring over. They are past lights out this night at the Thatcher School, and all of Terdema's classmates are in their bunks, but Terdema is still studying, trying to make up the ground between him and them.

It is the ground that lies between the riot-torn, drugs-and-gangs neighborhood where Terdema grew up in Watts, and the kind of neighborhoods that spawned his fellow students. To a boy, they are privileged, wealthy, white and schooled at only the finest institutions.

The smartest kid in the 'hood isn't exactly knocking them dead at Thatcher, and Terdema, the younger, won't have any of that. He's going to be the best, the best he can be, anyway, even if that means staying up all night reading Voltaire in the john.

"When I look at that picture, it still almost brings tears to my eyes," says the elder Ussery, 65, a grocery store owner and minister in South Central LA. "The sacrifices he's had to make just to compete.

"That picture almost tells you the price he paid."

They don't talk about the price of his success now. Just the spoils.

The bachelor's degree from Princeton. The master's from Harvard. The law degree from Cal-Berkeley. Then, the gig with the prestigious San Francisco law firm, the commissionership of the Continental Basketball Association, the executive post at Nike and, since April, the position of president and chief executive officer of the Dallas Mavericks.

In his new job, Ussery, 38, is the person ultimately responsible for the financial performance of what he terms "a $50 million business," and for "building equity in the Dallas Mavericks brand." He will be an integral part of the team's plans to build a new arena, and is the man charged with turning what was more of a family-style business under former owner Donald Carter into one equipped to compete in the modern era of corporate sports ownership.

"We wanted somebody who was hungry, creative, dynamic, a hard charger," says Mavericks owner Ross Perot Jr., who hired Ussery through an executive search firm. "He can run the business, he knows sports, and he came from one of the best sports marketing organizations there is, Nike. Plus, our chemistry was very good, and he comes from a strong moral base. He's a special man."

With the responsibility of running the Mavericks comes the six-figure salary, the swank home in suburban Dallas, glowing reviews in the press, the power to hire and fire.

So, call him "T", as his friends do, or Lamar (his middle name), as his mom does, or Terdema, like his dad - but call him a success. Perennially referred to as one of the highest-ranking African-American executives in professional sports, Ussery certainly has become one of the most powerful figures in team sports management, and one of the few black sports executives who didn't first make his name on a court or on a field.

Of course, to do so, he had to overcome what his father likes to call the "in spite ofs," the excuses people make for not achieving their goals.

Boarding school was a long time ago, but it might offer the most enduring example of the price Terdema Ussery II was willing to pay on the way up.

"You can't overstate how dramatic it was," Ussery recalls while sitting in his Reunion Arena office, a smallish, windowless room that still bears on its walls the framed cowboy-on-horse Western prints favored by a predecessor.

"In my neighborhood, I could've been a little celebrity, maybe, because I was a pretty smart guy," Ussery recalls. "I was in the honor society every semester in junior high, the debate team. I was marching in the high school band because I was a pretty good musician. I had a nice little thing going."

Then a counselor suggested this boarding school up north. The Ussery family didn't have the money for it, but the smart kid won a scholarship.

"All of a sudden," Ussery says, "I'm in an environment that's all white and all male. I'm up in the mountains, I had to have a horse, and I couldn't see my parents but three times a year. On top of that, when I got there, I struggled academically. All my life, I had taken pride in that."

"T" called home to his friends. That made it even worse. They told him about getting their first cars, dating girls, going to the prom ...

"All that stuff was just not part of my teen-age years," Ussery says. "I really thought about quitting."

He didn't, thanks to a long walk and talk with a teacher at the school who told him of short-term costs, long-term gains. The price you pay for success.

But the bill kept adding up. When Ussery returned home from school after his first year, his old friends told him he no longer fit in. As far as they were concerned, "T" had fallen over the fence between black and white society and landed on the white side.

Still, for Ussery, there were paybacks.

Not only did he turn things around at school, he learned how to fit into a mostly white, well-off world, one he'd operate in for much of his life.

"What it did was give me great preparation for Princeton," Ussery says of boarding school. "Because when I got there, shoot, I'd seen everything."

Young Terdema must have thought he'd seen everything back in South Central LA. Like the time his father was shot in an armed robbery at the family grocery. Or the time vandals, angered that he and his father had put barbed wire on the roof of the store to keep thieves off, burned down the market.

He learned a lesson from such experiences, though, something his father taught him, his younger brother, Ian, and his older sister, Melody: Stick with it, and you'll succeed. Bullet wound or not, bad neighborhood or not, the elder Ussery refused to give up his store, or his ministry.

"My father always instilled in us the idea that we could do anything," Ussery says. "He never talked about limitations."

All three children heard. Ian will soon become a lawyer himself, and Melody operates a day-care facility.

"We never used the terms 'poor' or 'disadvantaged,' " remembers the elder Ussery. "That's a negative force, an in-spite-of."

Back in LA, the younger Terdema Ussery had concentrated on the classroom, a wise move considering his lack of athletic prowess. Though he possesses the powerful torso and compact physique of a jock, Ussery's sports success was confined to a schoolboy interest in lacrosse and a cameo role as a walk-on running back at Princeton.

"I grew up around several great athletes like Roy Hamilton and David Greenwood (basketball), Darrin Nelson (football) and Reggie Smith (baseball)," Ussery says. "So I knew very early on that I didn't have the athletic ability to stand out in any competition. I was always around guys who were flat-out better than me. I knew education was the key for me."

The grades eventually came at boarding school, and again at Princeton and through law school. Still, though, there was a price to pay.

The father recalls the times his son looked up and realized that, pushing 30, he was still in school, so broke he had to borrow money to come home, and missing the wife and kids who filled the lives of his friends.

"You'll catch them," the father consoled. "They're ahead of you now, but you'll catch them."

After graduation from law school in 1987, he did catch them. And pass them. Personally - he is married, with a son and daughter - and professionally.

As a junior lawyer working on commercial real estate and banking deals, he traveled, made good money, gained confidence.

"I wasn't doing deals," Ussery admits. "But just being able to go into a competitive culture as the only black male there and compete and do well was important. It gave me the confidence to take the job with the CBA because I always knew I could go back to law and do well. I could take risks."

The CBA was a risk. Feuding owners, moving franchises and the lack of a national TV contract plagued the league. But when a professional acquaintance, who had hired Ussery as the CBA's main lawyer in 1990, left the commissioner's office in 1991, owners tapped the young attorney for the league's top post.

He restored order among owners, stopped franchise movement, won media coverage and instituted innovative drug and education programs for players.

"He very much kept that league together," says NBA commissioner David Stern. Ussery's performance with the CBA led to speculation he might someday run the NBA, although Stern suggests he may be best suited to head up an entertainment or sports marketing company, as well as a team, like the Mavs.

At the end of his CBA stint, though, Ussery had other plans. He wanted to go to work for Nike.

"A lot of people were critical of me for that move," he says, "but I felt that the piece of the puzzle missing for me was, where does the money come from that drives the sports business? It's coming from the Nikes of the world. I wanted to know how they use sports to connect to the consumer."

As with his move to the CBA and his choices of schools, taking the Nike job in 1993 involved chance.

"I'm a little bit of a risk-taker," Ussery acknowledges. "I like going into situations that people say are going to be tough. There certainly have been safer paths for me to go than where I've gone. I mean, I could have stayed with my law firm and become a partner."

At Nike, Ussery was president of Nike Sports Management, a new division of the company that handled player management and developed sponsorship programs for its athletes. Nike decided to eliminate the division, but not before Ussery gained experience and impressed his boss.

"Terdema did a remarkable job getting that organization up and running," says Nike executive Steve Miller. "He's an outstanding negotiator, dedicated, focused, and he knows sports, especially basketball, extraordinarily well."

Ussery was ready to go when Nike shut down the division.

"I really just wanted to unplug from all the hours and all the travel," he says.

A teaching post at the University of Denver appealed, but then along came Perot, who wooed Ussery with his youthful energy and the fact that, Ussery adds, "he wasn't tied down by conventionalism."

Coming to the Mavericks seems, to some observers, to be as risky a choice as leaving a gravy job with a law firm to run a minor basketball league.

Ussery is confident in his choice, however.

"I think I'm prepared nicely to run this organization into the next century," he says. "I happen to be a lawyer, and, today, you need someone who can at least spot a potential legal issue and put the fire out before it becomes a raging blaze. Plus, from a sports marketing perspective, I've run a league and dealt with all the same issues you do with a team - TV and radio contracts, airlines and travel, salaries, drugs, you name it. And going to Nike really sharpened my focus on the pure marketing side of sports."

Ussery knows the limitations of his job, saying that the Mavericks' on-court performance is the key to the sales of tickets to fans and suites (when a new arena is built) to corporations. That, he leaves to general manager Don Nelson.

There are things Ussery intends to change, though, including the corporate culture of the franchise.

"Sports has changed a lot just in the last few years with the (Rupert) Murdochs of the world entering sports and all the multimedia companies coming in and buying teams," Ussery says. "All of a sudden, there's a real intense focus on sports as a business."

So, things will be different in Dallas. The Mavericks, it seems, will be run even more like a business.

"What we have to do now is (convince Mavericks staffers that) they're running a $50 million business," Ussery says. "Profit and loss is important. Budgets are important. Fiscal accountability is important. People look at sports as fun, but the only way we're going to have success in this marketplace, especially with escalation of player salaries, is to be fiscally sound."

Even fiscally sound, the Mavericks stand to have their problems on the court again next season. That, cynics might say, gives Ussery an out, a reason to not succeed. After all, the price could be high.

But, as Terdema Ussery, the elder, might say: For the Mavericks, there are no more "in spite ofs."

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