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Two days after he became managing general partner of the Giants, Bill Neukom left his San Francisco hotel in search of the perfect latte. He needed something strong enough to help him reanimate a team that had just finished the 2008 season 72-90,Find a fashionable range of
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Neukom has favored bow ties since he attended San Mateo High School, and at 69, he has a pile of white hair that rises above his head like freshly steamed foam -- making him easily recognizable. But on that October morning, he passed through the crowded streets unnoticed, a virtual unknown in the city whose baseball fortunes he would now guide.
He had once been lawyer to the richest man in the world, presiding over a legal team that for five years fought the United States government as an equal. In the process, Neukom helped earn for Microsoft -- the company he represented for more than two decades -- a reputation as the tech world's Evil Empire. But as a newly minted baseball executive, he assumed he wore a cloak of anonymity.
As Neukom turned up Grant Avenue, he noticed an approaching figure. "He's shuffling along, plainly a homeless person," Neukom says. "He had a lot of scraggly hair under a baseball cap and a plastic bag over his shoulder. As I get closer, I identify an A's logo on his hat."
The two men -- headed in very different directions -- made eye contact.More information about
nike air max 97 shoes including release dates and prices. "And just as I'm passing him," Neukom recalls, "he says, 'Good luck with the Giants, kid.' "
Just two seasons later, an exultant -- and no longer anonymous -- Neukom was accepting the World Series trophy from baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, following the Giants' improbable championship run that ended with a beat-down of the Texas Rangers. He had been a fan of the team for 50 years by the time he gained control of it -- at Stanford Law School, Neukom listened to games on a transistor radio -- and he became so consumed with winning during the playoffs he picked the socks he wore based purely on clubhouse superstition.
"I didn't bring an orange bow tie to Texas for fear it might jinx us," he says. Neukom's wife, Sally, bought one after the Giants won Game 4 and he wore it for the trophy presentation the next night. When he ran into pitcher Tim Lincecum later in the locker room,Love womens
Wedge Shoes? So do we. the team's principal owner -- who has four grown children of his own from an earlier marriage -- felt the tie in his jacket pocket and handed it to his star player.
Lincecum, whose long hair is in keeping with a "hippie" upbringing, asked Neukom earlier in the season to teach him how to tie a bow tie. Now the two-time National League MVP became a little boy again, examining the bow tie with wonder. "He looked at it and said, 'Is that for me?' " Neukom remembers. "That was a sweet moment."
Organizational clarity
Since their last World Series appearance in 2002, the Giants sometimes found themselves tied in knots as an organization under managing partner Peter Magowan, who ran the team for 16 years. Neukom, who began buying blocks of the team's stock in 1995 with the millions he earned as Microsoft's general counsel, was determined to bring the same organizational clarity to baseball he had imposed while building a high-tech legal department of more than 650 people.
"Bill believes in process," says Giants general manager Brian Sabean. "You don't have much second-guessing in an organization if everybody's in on the first guess." Still, Neukom loves drilling into details, like swapping information with scouts about players throughout the team's far-flung farm system. "You can ask him about any of these minor league kids," says manager Bruce Bochy, "and he'll tell you all about them."
At the team's spring training camp in Arizona, Neukom frequently was greeted like a rock star by fans as he made his way through the stands. During batting practice before one game, Steve Wong, of San Jose, asked Neukom to sign a baseball, then circled around and joined another crowd of autograph-seekers to get Neukom's signature on a second ball. And when the defending champs play their season-opener Thursday against the Los Angeles Dodgers, Neukom will remain the big difference in the front office.
In two of the pastimes that matter most in the Bay Area -- computers and baseball -- Neukom's inability to let up, even after he has won, has led to a scorched earth record of success. As Bill Gates' hand-picked general counsel,
womens sandals are not only popular today, but have been popular throughout the ages. he waged a bruising battle to prevent the government from breaking up Microsoft. Other lawyers envied his success, and friends frequently reminded him of the company's skyrocketing stock price.
"People would say, 'You must be having a ball. You've got the best law job in the world,' " he recalls. "When you're in a high-visibility, high-stress, high-stakes situation, there are parts of it that are very rewarding, but the way I'm wired it's not fun."
And the pressure has only increased now that he's the public face of another storied franchise. "It had been pretty public at Microsoft, given the litigation and the success of the company," Neukom says. "But this is of a different magnitude."
