You’re entering your 26th year with the Miami HEAT, now as the General Manager, but not many people know how you got to where you are. How did you get your start?
I was at St. Thomas University in the Sports Administration program [in 1988]. One of the requirements for the Sports Administration program was that you had to do an internship to graduate. I had a family friend that helped me get an interview with the Washington Bullets and I was an intern for them for the summer between my junior and senior year. I was there, primarily in the sales and the customer service departments. I also helped out a little bit in public relations. I used to help write a few stories and releases and met Mark Pray, who was the PR director for the Bullets at the time.
I come back [to Florida] for senior year and two weeks later Mark comes down and joins the HEAT. There is no PR office of any kind at the time. They had not hired the other assistant; they hadn’t hired any other staff. There was no media guide. There was nothing. Mark basically had to create a staff from scratch, a media guide from scratch, and this is like September 5th, so you can imagine what it is to put together a book from nothing. Literally no bios of owners, no bios of players. There was nothing, no history at all.
I had kept in touch with one of the Bullets assistants and he said, ‘Hey, Mark was looking for you, and wanted to see if anyone knew how to get in touch with you.’ I called Mark and he said, ‘Hey, can you help me get this office started up? Can you help me with the media guide? Can you help me write a few things?’ I of course said "yes" and I basically started a 2nd internship. I began by helping to write up some bios of the players and bios of the owners and started writing up a few other things as Mark started on that first media guide. I was doing that and I just sort of kept hanging around helping out. I just kept doing little things, a little bit here, a little bit there. The organization was very small, around 20 people, so everyone was involved in everything, especially on the business side.
When we first started up it was an organization that no one had ever really, by design, worked in sports before because they wanted a different view of thinking. So those first few games it was crazy because no one had any idea what they had to do. There was a handful of people who had experience in sports, but the majority of the staff did not. So those first few games were literally our first few games.
Mark always used to tell me during the first few weeks to, ‘Just do it the way we did it at the Bullets’. so I basically said, “OK, sure no problem.” Of course I never worked a game in Washington as I had just been there during the summer. It took about two or three weeks into the season before Mark finally turned to me and said, ‘You never actually worked a game at Washington did you?’ I said, ‘No,’ but there was no one else who knew what to do and there was no one to ask for help so you just had to figure it out. Those were just the first of many "Make it work" moments over the last 25 years.
That year, I had 15 credit hours of school, I was Editor for the school paper, I was active in school life and I was working 20 hours a week here plus games. So it was an absolutely crazy semester. It’s one of things that if you think about it beforehand, you have no idea how you can do it. I didn’t think about it, I just did it. You learn how to do a lot of work at three o’clock in the morning or four o’clock in the morning. It is one of the great advantages of being 20 or 21 years old.
My second semester I just needed two classes to graduate so I essentially worked here full time until I graduated in May. As I like to say, ‘I graduated on Monday and started full time Wednesday morning.’ I have been unemployed for 36 hours in my life.
How did your involvement on the PR side of things progress with the basketball side of things?
When I started off the organization was a completely different business. As I said, there were only 20-plus people here the first year. There were separate departments but everybody did everything. It was all hands on deck on lots of different things. It was a wonderful, incredible training ground environment for me and for all of us that started off because you learned how to deal with all different kinds of things.
There weren’t as many people, so you helped out with video or you helped out with statistics or you helped out with operations. You helped out rolling posters or moving boxes or whatever needed to get done, everyone sort of did. You cut across all different kinds of boundaries and kind of helped wherever needed to be helped.
The turning point for me, where I really started on the salary cap information was about the second or third year when they started using a sort of basic email system. At this point, there wasn’t email and there was no significant internet. You had to direct telex machine when you’d do your roster moves. And then they came with this sort of basic email system, which I was familiar with. In high school back in the early 80's, I had used the old Compuserve, which was your first very basic internet. I was very, very fortunate because my family had a computer when I was in high school and I had a computer when I was in college. Which today doesn’t sound very unusual, but in the 1980s there weren’t that many people who had computers. So I was reasonably versed on how to use a computer. So they brought in the first really direct link computer system and as they usually did with things at that point in time, they said, ‘Andy, figure it out.’
When the new computer system came to the Heat, I started keeping the information. They started putting salary information on it and they would put in these reports on the system. Before that they used to just send you a salary book every year, and would basically say, ‘Here’s the information’. Now, you could print and download the contracts. And so I started keeping that information for the General Managers, I started paying attention to how trades were done and looked and said, ‘OK, this moved here and this moved there,’ and I started seeing different things. I started studying each trade and how it came about, how it happened and where things started.
Now instead of just doing pr and operations I was now doing pr, operations and salary cap. After seven years in the organization, the Arison’s took over the management and control and they started shifting things around and that’s where with Dave Wohl and later with Pat Riley, they gave me the opportunity to move on to the basketball operations side full time as opposed to just doing it part time. Over the years, as things moved along and people left and people changed, suddenly you’ve been doing it longer than almost anyone else and at some point in time you become one of the salary cap people.
What were the first meetings like with Pat when he came down here? Did he immediately start going to you for things or did you sort of have to build up a trust?
We started working and he trusted me. Before he came, I had a good history with the people who were his assistants. I had known Dave Wohl for a lot of years. Dave had been an assistant coach and broadcaster with us during the first few years of the franchise. I also knew Randy Pfund from when he had been a coach in the NBA with the Lakers. So I had a trust level with them and that gave me the opportunity to sit down with Coach [Riley]. And Coach kind of gave me the opportunity, which I will always be grateful for.
The first time I met Coach was just after the day that they came to an agreement between the Knicks, NBA and the HEAT. It was on a Friday and they had a meeting for some of the staff that afternoon, a meeting that I will truly remember for the rest of my life, and told us that, ‘Pat’s coming in tomorrow.’ That’s where you know things were going to be very different for the Miami Heat. Then they had the press conference on that Saturday and that Sunday I sat down with Pat for the first time ever. And it was to talk about the salary cap. I started keeping information for him and it just sort of spiraled after that.
Something that’s tough to explain is how much loyalty means to this organization. You see with some of the moves that are made and the way people are treated, loyalty matters a lot. It’s not always something you see, in practice, with sports franchises. Is loyalty something that has always been important to you?
There’s a real passion for family and we’re all in this together. This isn’t just a job, this isn’t just a place you come to and you make your living and everyone just leaves at the end of the day. It’s a passion. The people who are here are people that truly believe in the franchise and in all that we do. This is where you want to do it. You go through your up times and your down times, but whatever it has been, we have been through the good and bad times together. That’s why you see such a large number of people that have been here for as long as they have been. You see it from players that have been here for a long time and from staff that have been here for a number of years.
There’s ten of us that are here fulltime from the first year, as well as the Arison family, but there’s also a significant number of people that have been here for over 20+ years. For Coach Riley and Coach Spoelstra and several others, this is their 19th year here. If you think about the number of people that have been here 19 years, 20 years, 25 years, that’s is something I think we’ve all taken a lot of pride in. There are not many places today where if you having been working here 10-12 years, you're still considered a newbie.
With that in mind, can you think of a time when that atmosphere and what you believe in so much, when that really made it hurt to make a move.
You have players that are really passionate about the team and they care about the team and they totally buy in, it’s hard. It’s hard to make those trades or roster moves or waivers. It’s never anything that is pleasant or anything you love to do, but it’s part of the business. It’s part of the job. It’s just makes you sometimes agonize a little more over some of those.
Did you allow yourself to feel any amount of pride in 2010 with what you were able to accomplish?
The thing I feel the most prideful about ’10 is that this was an environment that players wanted to come to and players wanted to stay. That to me is a foundation of not just what happened in the summer of 2010 but it’s happened over a period of time – every day, day after day, the things that people do here, that make this a place that players want to come to and stay in. It starts with the Arison’s and the Riley’s and what they do sets the tone.
From a technical standpoint regarding the salary cap, was that the most complicated time you’ve had at your job.
It was challenging. The challenge was obviously keeping to the discipline. It took us four years. Sometimes you made moves that put money into the summer of 2010 and then you had to make moves that took money out of the summer of 2010. It was a long period of time of making moves and not making moves, all not necessarily knowing where it would lead to. At the end of the day, it was everybody’s creativity and desire to finding a way to make it work so that everyone was able to get what they needed. It was really a collective effort.