Bob Bowman resigned from MLB, although it appears resigned is a euphemism.
But a Wall Street Journal report Thursday indicated that Bowman shoved a member of the Boston Red Sox ownership group at an All-Star Game function in July and more recently verbally berated a staff member in the weeks before his departure.
More disturbingly, according to the Journal, citing people familiar with Bowman, he cultivated an atmosphere toxic to women employees, including propositioning them, engaging in relationships with subordinates and using pejoratives directly in their presence.
Then-commissioner Bud Selig was made aware of Bowman’s behavior by former chief operating officer Robert DuPuy. Yet no apparent action was taken against Bowman as he was building MLB’s advanced media wing into a virtual cash machine.
It seems to be a pattern lately that when one of these moguls starts to fall, the bad blood built up of the years comes back to haunt them.
I’ve been around a long time. I was in my early 20s when I came across the kind of behavior that hyper-competitive athletes exhibit, but it really generalizes to all professions. Some people just need to be the best, and will destroy anyone in their way. After a while, they don’t have any friends, and wonder why. They see themselves as someone striving to be the best, and don’t understand how they alienate people.
The joke when I worked at ESPN was that you cannot have a friendly game of checkers with a professional athlete. The athlete always felt the need to win. Ray Knight and Nancy Lopez could not play golf together because they could not turn off their competitiveness to enjoy a game as a couple. I suspect most of the people recently brought down by scandal are the same way.
They were all extremely successful, however. I like to think that the need to have the most money, the most women, the most trophies, isn’t required for great success, but right now it sure seems that way.
from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2kVWaZ6
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