Rose Garden ...

Cheri Hanson is one of the top public relations executives I have ever met. Her story was chronicled by Harvey Araton of the New York Times in Friday's paper.

December 7, 2007
SPORTS OF THE TIMES
Winning Over Portland With One of Its Own

By HARVEY ARATON
When they knew each other in the San Francisco Bay Area, and later worked together at the N.B.A. office in New York, Mike Golub could not muster up the courage to ask Cheri White for a date. Last June, he did the next best thing. He recruited her to help the once-revered and recently reviled Trail Blazers win back the city of Portland.

Now Cheri Hanson, she had directed public relations operations for Golden State, Seattle and Milwaukee before returning this season to her hometown, where she began running Cokes and courtside statistics in 1974. At the time, she was 11.

Hanson’s father, John White, was 44 when he became the Blazers’ news media liaison upon the team’s inception in 1970. When the offer of vice president for communications came from Golub, she wished her father were “still alive to discuss it with.” Then it hit her: her next birthday would be her 44th.

Some things are meant to be, so she packed up in Milwaukee, moved west with her husband and two young sons, who were strapped into their car seats when Hanson drove a visiting reporter from his downtown hotel last weekend to the team’s suburban training facility.

Hanson has always been an astute organizational ambassador who delivers. She once practically dragged the Warriors’ Chris Mullin out of the shower by the ear when he was 20 minutes late for a telephone interview with a reporter (me) back east.
“Here’s Cheri, with her deep roots with the team and the city,” said Golub, the Blazers’ chief operating officer. “Her hire is one of the many statements we’ve made to the public that it’s a new regime, new players, a new time.”

What a concept, recognizing and admitting that your brand has become perilously tarnished after years of mismanagement, and embarking on a campaign of credibility restoration. Could the Knicks ever have such an epiphany in New York?

Perhaps, if their owner were a practical, self-made man like the Blazers’ Paul Allen, and not a spoon-fed, self-styled despot, which is how many have described James L. Dolan.

When I visited the Trail Blazers’ headquarters after covering the Davis Cup final earlier this week, Golub had just read in the weekly New York Observer about the Knicks’ dysfunctional relationship with reporters who cover the team. He hadn’t yet heard how news of the death of Stephon Marbury’s father, Donald, was withheld until very late Sunday night, after the Knicks had lost to the Phoenix Suns.

Astonishingly, and against every known marketing tenet, the Knicks allowed columns to be filed that were critical of Marbury on his night of personal tragedy.
For his part, Golub wasn’t surprised. Before joining the Blazers in 2006, he had a brief run in his native New York in a Rangers executive position that he said was the equivalent to Anucha Browne Sanders’s former role with the Knicks.

“I lived it,” Golub said, no doubt referring to Dolan’s tinderbox of a workplace, where employees dread his explosions and invariably surrender their professional judgment to a company belief that it matters little what people think as long as enough people pay. “Those people aren’t having fun,” Golub said, “and isn’t that what we’re supposed to be, a fun business that brings people together?”

It was typically that way in Portland, a one-team town swept up in Blazermania until a pattern of off-court transgressions earned the offending players a collective national reputation. Jail Blazers, they were called.

Before long, even Allen, the Microsoft co-founder, was wearing out his welcome, as he carped about losses in an arena arrangement gone sour, and explored selling or moving the team.

“The relationship had gotten really acrimonious here between the media and the team for a long list of reasons,” Golub said.

He arrived as a veteran roster was gutted and the 2006 draft was bringing the promising Brandon Roy and LaMarcus Aldridge. A winning lottery ticket last spring produced center Greg Oden, albeit in need of season-ending knee surgery. Not long ago, Allen reacquired the Rose Garden and its inherent revenue streams.

Sweeping changes continue. Allen recently replaced the team president Steve Patterson with Larry Miller, a former Nike executive who worked on the Michael Jordan brand. The Blazers are a long way from becoming Jordan’s Bulls, or even a winning team, but as Golub said: “All our markers are trending up — attendance, season tickets, television ratings, Web site hits. But this can be as ephemeral as the next layup. We have to continue to build back the trust.”

When you’ve been very bad, qualitatively and behaviorally, you would think a franchise’s first order of business would be to bow its head and beg forgiveness, not blame everything on the messengers.

In her new Rose Garden office, Cheri Hanson has a photograph that shows her at 14, sobbing in the moments after the Blazers’ only championship, in 1977 under Jack Ramsay. In Portland, where that team represents the city standard for smart, selfless play, much as Red Holzman’s 1970 Knicks do in New York, the Blazers want to build a bridge from the past to the future. They are opening their arms to the people they once pushed away.

In New York, meanwhile, the Knicks keep widening the moat around Madison Square Garden.

E-mail: hjaraton@nytimes.com