Well surprise, surprise

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/06/2009 (6198 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

He’s the executive vice-president and chief administrative officer of the National Football League, the former senior counsel to the National Hockey League and a leading expert and lecturer in sports law.

And as the NFL’s lead negotiator on the league’s television and labour agreements, he also has been ranked as one of the continent’s most powerful sports executives.

 

And yet, despite a professional life immersed in sports at the very highest levels, there is but one piece of sports memorabilia in all these years that Jeffrey Pash has retained.

It hangs in his plush office at NFL headquarters in midtown Manhattan. It is the last thing you would expect to see hanging there.

"It’s a Winnipeg Blue Bombers jacket. I kid you not. I’m looking at it as we speak," Pash said in a phone interview from New York last week.

"I wear it too. I don’t wear it in June, but I wear it. It has leather sleeves and kind of a, well, here, I’ll read the label to you — ‘Outer shell, 20 per cent nylon…’"

So why on earth does one of the most powerful men in sports — a man who negotiated the last TV deal for the NFL, hailed as one of the richest in the history of sport — have a Bombers jacket hanging in his office?

Because Jeff Pash — Harvard grad, Georgetown lecturer, NFL big shot — is the son of Earl Pash, Ash Street, Winnipeg.

And there’s one thing that Earl Pash always told his children. " ‘Never forget from whence you came,’ he’d tell us," his son recalls now.

"There’s a couple of things that you still remember when you get older. And that’s one of the things I’ve never forgotten."

And so it is that Pash will travel to Winnipeg today where he will be honoured tonight at the 37th annual ‘Y’ sports dinner.

Pash is being honoured in part for his many contributions to the Y dinner over the years and also as tribute to his late father’s deep roots in Winnipeg’s Jewish community. And it should be quite a night, with Indianapolis Colts QB Peyton Manning giving the keynote speech and over 1,600 people expected to be in attendance — making it the best attended Y dinner in history and what organizers believe just might be the biggest sports dinner in all of Canada this year.

"They told me tickets were selling well," laughs Pash, "And I told them, ‘Well, I’m glad that Manning guy isn’t holding us back.’

"Seriously, I’m not a big honours or awards person. I do very little of this. But I’m doing this is because of my father and his family."

Pash’s grandfather, Louis, was one of the thousands of Russian Jews who immigrated to Winnipeg in the early 1900s. His father grew up in River Heights, served in the Canadian military during World War II and then got his medical degree from the University of Manitoba.

That the elder Pash was able to attend the U of M at all is an important chapter in Manitoba history. "It was a big thing" says the son. "I’ve heard him and others talk about how the Manitoba legislature pushed very hard after the war to make sure Jews could be admitted to the university. It was OK for them to go fight and the feeling was it should be OK for them to be admitted to the university.

"So there was a big push for the university to eliminate the Jewish quotas."

Dr. Earl Pash worked as a general practitioner in Winnipeg for a short time before moving first to Minneapolis — where Jeff Pash was born — and ultimately to Fresno, Calif. — where the younger Pash grew up.

While the family became hugely successful — the elder Pash ran the radiology department at a hospital in Fresno while his son got a law degree from Harvard en route to his career in sports law and management — they never forgot their roots.

A few years ago, the family dedicated the Dr. Earl Pash Research Centre in the library at the U of M medical school. Jeff Pash flew in for the dedication, as he has for family events in Winnipeg all his life. He regards the city as his second home and says he feels a debt to the city for the ‘pick yourself up by your own bootstraps’ work ethic it instilled in his father — a prairie work ethic that has in turn served the son very well in the world of sports as high finance.

"My father would tell us, ‘You weren’t born with a title or a heritage or anything other than what your mother and I were able to do. You have to do the rest.’ "

And that is the tale of why every winter in midtown Manhattan, there’s a big-shot sports executive walking around in a nylon Bombers parka.