Fritz
08-18-2003, 09:55 AM
http://www.profootballweekly.com/PFW/Commentary/Columns/2003/edholm081503.htm
Snyder's latest firing shows Redskins owner's motivations haven't changed
There are two possibilities at work these days with Redskins owner Dan Snyder: Either he has gotten a lot better, or he’s the same old guy. Depending on whom you talk to, you get a different answer.
Since taking control of the team in 1999, the controversial owner has created a negative image of himself by firing countless employees — several of them in middle- and low-ranking positions such as secretaries who had been told their jobs were safe — and fostering a nonexistent relationship with the media.
Snyder also canned three head coaches in a 13-month period and upset diehard fans by, among other ways, charging admission for training-camp practices and jacking up season-ticket prices. His biggest stroke of separating himself from the previous ownership of Jack Kent Cooke was selling the naming rights to the stadium.
His desire to win right away was evident when he orchestrated several veteran free-agent signings in the summer of 2000, adding Deion Sanders and Bruce Smith to a veteran 10-6 squad coming off a division title. Instead of putting the final pieces into a Super Bowl team, he dug his team into immeasurable financial woes, and the team struggled to an 8-8 finish.
But we heard this summer that things were better. We heard that Snyder was listening to his veteran staff about personnel decisions and trying to work with the media to create a better image. We even heard that Snyder was just a nicer, more mellow guy who was really concerned about the morale of his office.
Apparently, all of that was just talk.
The latest example of Snyder’s old ways being unearthed again was his firing of vice president of communications Julia Payne, whom Snyder had hired just three months ago to replace the much-scorned Karl Swanson. By all accounts, Payne was a godsend, helping bridge the widening gap between the Washington media and the team and reinvigorating a beaten-down public-relations staff. A former White House P.R. assistant holding various titles under the Bill Clinton and Al Gore teams, Payne is the owner of a sterling résumé.
Having just completed another tour of duty in Clinton’s office in New York City as a director of communications and spokesperson, Payne, 34, returned to Washington not sure what she wanted to do with her life. Politics had been her career since graduating from college in 1991, and she told friends she wasn’t sure what her next career move would be. She was a little burned-out after a 10-year career in politics, and despite being contacted by all the presidential candidates, Payne was looking for a new challenge.
Knowing Payne was a big sports fan, a friend of a friend — a typical Washington thing — had heard about the Redskins’ opening and passed on Payne’s résumé to Snyder, whose staff members called Payne the next day. After a series of meetings with Snyder spanning a few months, Payne was offered the job just as the team was capping off its much-ballyhooed free-agent bonanza this offseason.
She jumped right into the role as the team had its first minicamp this May. At age 34, Payne is a major player in the field of P.R., and her professionalism was evident to the sports media almost immediately upon taking the job. In less than a week, she had won over hardened local writers and skeptical national media who had long since written off Snyder and Swanson as impossible to deal with.
Payne told a source close to the team that she knew she had the skills to fix the negative attention if she had an owner who was willing to go along with it.
If only she had known.
In Washington, D.C., where the only thing that can bump politics from the above-the-fold portion of the front page is the Redskins, Payne was a big fish in a big pond, appearing to be one of the few people capable of handling the icy-hot ire of Snyder and the pressure of one of America’s most pressure-packed sports gigs.
“Boy, she was good,” Rick Gosselin, the respected national NFL writer for the Dallas Morning News, said. “I went to the (Redskins) training camp, and I didn’t even know she was in charge there. All I know is that the bar had been raised. If you wanted someone at the Redskins’ complex, she got them for you. I was shocked.
“I thought she was doing a fabulous job generating a feeling of goodwill, because they have struggled with their public relations under Dan Snyder. It was a 180-degree turn — night and day — with her in there. I had the best experience I ever had there with her.”
“I've never seen a group of reporters more stunned or upset than when she was fired,” said John Keim, a reporter for Journal Newspapers who has covered the team for 10 years. “She was amazing. In three months she managed to win over the players' respect, the coaches’ respect and the media's. That's a tough thing to do in such a short period. It was the first time in Snyder's tenure that the media seemed thrilled with the entire operation.”
Payne knew she had a tough chore ahead, but her intentions were good. Her mission was twofold: focus on repairing Snyder’s public image by deflecting the attention from him and focusing on the organization’s long and continuing record of charity work.
She told friends she wanted people to know about the kind of people Snyder had around him, the sort of decisions he makes for the team and what he gives back to the fans: such as improving the stadium, getting better players, and his commitment to winning. The team also has a long-standing commitment to the community with the team’s foundation, another way to shed a positive light on a once-darkening image.
It was the kind of situation, sources close to Payne say, in which the team’s bad or nonexistent relationships with the media caused much of the ill will toward Snyder, and Payne made it her goal to solve it. Just because a player fumbles — especially a player whom Snyder had signed — doesn’t transitively mean that Snyder himself coughed up the ball.
No, he did that later when he canned Payne.
Sources — all of whom requested anonymity with Big Brother standing over them, and who can blame them? — say that initially Payne was stunned by the negative coverage of the owner. And for someone who spent nearly a decade with Bill Clinton, that’s saying something. Her message to the media right off the bat: You just have to give this guy a chance.
Too bad Payne didn’t get the same chance from Snyder that she was apparently willing to give him.
What happened next was unexplainable. In the weeks following the death of Snyder’s father — a part-owner of the team — in May, right after Payne was hired, she became the target of much of Snyder’s ire. He threatened to fire her a little more than a month into the job despite the inroads she had made in such a short time, reportedly questioning her loyalty to the front office. Progress, several media members said, that Swanson could not make in the four years he held the post.
Like the smart woman she is, Payne sought the advice of three senior staff members. Keep doing what you are doing, they said. Don’t worry about him. We know you are doing a great job. He’ll see it eventually.
One national media member put it this way: “It was like a completely different team. I got whatever I wanted. The beat guys were telling me, ‘Wait until you see how things are run now. You won’t believe it.’ And they were right. I couldn’t believe it. The coaches, the players — everyone was working together so well. And then she was fired …”
And that’s about how it happened. Friends say Payne worked a full day last Thursday, staying in the team offices when most other people had gone home. Sometime around 7 p.m., two of Snyder’s minions called Payne in and delivered the news: It wasn’t working out. Today was her last day. Pack up and head out.
Stunned, shocked and angered all at once, Payne asked for a reason why she was being let go. She got none. She has told friends that she wanted constructive criticism, asking the two staff members for something, anything she could take to her next job and turn it into a positive. She got nothing. Instead they said: “We are not in the business of criticizing Julia Payne.” Snyder was nowhere to be found.
Payne’s firing set off an internal collective gasp of, “What?” No one could believe what they had heard. After years of cold disconnect, they finally had a person who had not only bridged the gap with the media but also empowered a staff that had been intimidated and rendered supine by the way things were.
After Payne’s first meeting with her new P.R. staff, during which she gave them more responsibility and motivation than they ever had under Swanson, “the looks on (the staff’s) faces,” a source close to the situation said, “I’ll never forget them.”
Star LB LaVar Arrington and coach Steve Spurrier, upset by Payne’s firing, each told the owner he was wrong. That takes some serious onions, and it says a lot about their character and the job Payne was doing for them to face off against their boss. And of course, the fact that Payne had made such close relationships with Arrington and Spurrier had to be doubly grating to the insecure Snyder.
In a not-so-veiled comment to the media the next day, the straight-shooter Spurrier — asked about whether FB Bryan Johnson and TE Zeron Flemister might get cut because of their ongoing cases of the dropsies — said: “You can’t just fire someone because they dropped one pass.” Interesting choice of words, Coach.
As if letting Payne go wasn’t enough of a slap in the face, Snyder one-upped himself. Swanson, the man Payne replaced, was brought back as vice president of communications. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. The old regime was back. It should be noted that everyone I talked to told me they genuinely like and respect the P.R. staff that they work with on a daily basis; it’s the coldness of the Snyder-Swanson duo that makes their lives tougher.
Swanson told Pro Football Weekly that the decision to let Payne go was a “personnel matter” and that Snyder had no comment otherwise. He said that Payne had a 90-day contract (even though she worked there 96 days), calling it a “transition period,” and that her contract had simply run out, with the team choosing to go in a different direction.
That direction, of course, was back to the same old style of intimidation and detachment. As one overworked, underappreciated staff member asked: “Why did this have to be done by subtraction? Why couldn’t he have done it with addition?”
The question is valid. Apparently Snyder didn’t think Payne was doing a good enough job of protecting him, the extent of Swanson’s job description for four years. But with her skills and amazing work with the media, friends of Payne think the two could have worked together perfectly — something Payne told them she was more than happy to do.
There is a reason why most of the people I spoke to did not want their names used. Snyder uses fear as his weapon, and no one is clear of it. A source said: “There’s a real climate of fear and insecurity that permeates that building, and it’s wrong because there are a lot of good people there who do a lot of good work that he has no idea about.”
Friends say Payne still speaks in terms of “we” and “us” when talking about the Redskins and her former position, but this is not a woman in denial. Rather, this is someone who still genuinely and intimately feels, to this day, connected to the work she tried to accomplish in her brief time with the team but also utterly frustrated by not being able to complete the task — the unenviable task — of polishing a difficult man’s tarnished reputation.
Payne has told friends she is not sure what her plans are, but she is reportedly looking at all avenues. With her impressive credentials and vast political connections, there is no doubt that some CEO would do himself quite well by bringing her on. Even Larry King’s promoter confirmed that King is passing Payne’s résumé around. That’s clout, folks.
Even the local media have made it a point to band together and get the word out about her unjustified firing, extolling her virtues to anyone who will listen, from Greg Aiello, the league’s director of communication, to their contacts with other teams and other sports. They all have one simple message: Hire this woman. The NFL needs people like her.
While football often trumps talk about politics in D.C., one thing that permeates both is the will to win. No one doubts Snyder’s determination to build a winning football team and deliver a marketable product to the fans. It’s the process that bugs people.
It’s the way he makes people call him “Mr. Snyder.” It’s the way he tells secretaries and office workers their jobs are safe and then fires them. It’s the football team. The expensive toys and the cigars. It’s the way he expects total loyalty to him even if it means sacrificing a person’s responsibility. And the way he fires people without even being in the room. The man controls everything, and he lets people know it. Give Snyder credit that he did not trash Payne in the media in order to justify the move (remember Joe Mendes?) before firing her.
Like my old buddy Lord Acton once said, “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
The job of any good NFL P.R. person certainly entails protecting and promoting the team’s owner to the general public. It’s about facilitating media members in building a working relationship with the players, coaches and front office. But what Snyder should have put on the job description is: “WANTED: Henchman for hire.”
I see now why Snyder fired Payne. She is just not cut out for that job.
Snyder's latest firing shows Redskins owner's motivations haven't changed
There are two possibilities at work these days with Redskins owner Dan Snyder: Either he has gotten a lot better, or he’s the same old guy. Depending on whom you talk to, you get a different answer.
Since taking control of the team in 1999, the controversial owner has created a negative image of himself by firing countless employees — several of them in middle- and low-ranking positions such as secretaries who had been told their jobs were safe — and fostering a nonexistent relationship with the media.
Snyder also canned three head coaches in a 13-month period and upset diehard fans by, among other ways, charging admission for training-camp practices and jacking up season-ticket prices. His biggest stroke of separating himself from the previous ownership of Jack Kent Cooke was selling the naming rights to the stadium.
His desire to win right away was evident when he orchestrated several veteran free-agent signings in the summer of 2000, adding Deion Sanders and Bruce Smith to a veteran 10-6 squad coming off a division title. Instead of putting the final pieces into a Super Bowl team, he dug his team into immeasurable financial woes, and the team struggled to an 8-8 finish.
But we heard this summer that things were better. We heard that Snyder was listening to his veteran staff about personnel decisions and trying to work with the media to create a better image. We even heard that Snyder was just a nicer, more mellow guy who was really concerned about the morale of his office.
Apparently, all of that was just talk.
The latest example of Snyder’s old ways being unearthed again was his firing of vice president of communications Julia Payne, whom Snyder had hired just three months ago to replace the much-scorned Karl Swanson. By all accounts, Payne was a godsend, helping bridge the widening gap between the Washington media and the team and reinvigorating a beaten-down public-relations staff. A former White House P.R. assistant holding various titles under the Bill Clinton and Al Gore teams, Payne is the owner of a sterling résumé.
Having just completed another tour of duty in Clinton’s office in New York City as a director of communications and spokesperson, Payne, 34, returned to Washington not sure what she wanted to do with her life. Politics had been her career since graduating from college in 1991, and she told friends she wasn’t sure what her next career move would be. She was a little burned-out after a 10-year career in politics, and despite being contacted by all the presidential candidates, Payne was looking for a new challenge.
Knowing Payne was a big sports fan, a friend of a friend — a typical Washington thing — had heard about the Redskins’ opening and passed on Payne’s résumé to Snyder, whose staff members called Payne the next day. After a series of meetings with Snyder spanning a few months, Payne was offered the job just as the team was capping off its much-ballyhooed free-agent bonanza this offseason.
She jumped right into the role as the team had its first minicamp this May. At age 34, Payne is a major player in the field of P.R., and her professionalism was evident to the sports media almost immediately upon taking the job. In less than a week, she had won over hardened local writers and skeptical national media who had long since written off Snyder and Swanson as impossible to deal with.
Payne told a source close to the team that she knew she had the skills to fix the negative attention if she had an owner who was willing to go along with it.
If only she had known.
In Washington, D.C., where the only thing that can bump politics from the above-the-fold portion of the front page is the Redskins, Payne was a big fish in a big pond, appearing to be one of the few people capable of handling the icy-hot ire of Snyder and the pressure of one of America’s most pressure-packed sports gigs.
“Boy, she was good,” Rick Gosselin, the respected national NFL writer for the Dallas Morning News, said. “I went to the (Redskins) training camp, and I didn’t even know she was in charge there. All I know is that the bar had been raised. If you wanted someone at the Redskins’ complex, she got them for you. I was shocked.
“I thought she was doing a fabulous job generating a feeling of goodwill, because they have struggled with their public relations under Dan Snyder. It was a 180-degree turn — night and day — with her in there. I had the best experience I ever had there with her.”
“I've never seen a group of reporters more stunned or upset than when she was fired,” said John Keim, a reporter for Journal Newspapers who has covered the team for 10 years. “She was amazing. In three months she managed to win over the players' respect, the coaches’ respect and the media's. That's a tough thing to do in such a short period. It was the first time in Snyder's tenure that the media seemed thrilled with the entire operation.”
Payne knew she had a tough chore ahead, but her intentions were good. Her mission was twofold: focus on repairing Snyder’s public image by deflecting the attention from him and focusing on the organization’s long and continuing record of charity work.
She told friends she wanted people to know about the kind of people Snyder had around him, the sort of decisions he makes for the team and what he gives back to the fans: such as improving the stadium, getting better players, and his commitment to winning. The team also has a long-standing commitment to the community with the team’s foundation, another way to shed a positive light on a once-darkening image.
It was the kind of situation, sources close to Payne say, in which the team’s bad or nonexistent relationships with the media caused much of the ill will toward Snyder, and Payne made it her goal to solve it. Just because a player fumbles — especially a player whom Snyder had signed — doesn’t transitively mean that Snyder himself coughed up the ball.
No, he did that later when he canned Payne.
Sources — all of whom requested anonymity with Big Brother standing over them, and who can blame them? — say that initially Payne was stunned by the negative coverage of the owner. And for someone who spent nearly a decade with Bill Clinton, that’s saying something. Her message to the media right off the bat: You just have to give this guy a chance.
Too bad Payne didn’t get the same chance from Snyder that she was apparently willing to give him.
What happened next was unexplainable. In the weeks following the death of Snyder’s father — a part-owner of the team — in May, right after Payne was hired, she became the target of much of Snyder’s ire. He threatened to fire her a little more than a month into the job despite the inroads she had made in such a short time, reportedly questioning her loyalty to the front office. Progress, several media members said, that Swanson could not make in the four years he held the post.
Like the smart woman she is, Payne sought the advice of three senior staff members. Keep doing what you are doing, they said. Don’t worry about him. We know you are doing a great job. He’ll see it eventually.
One national media member put it this way: “It was like a completely different team. I got whatever I wanted. The beat guys were telling me, ‘Wait until you see how things are run now. You won’t believe it.’ And they were right. I couldn’t believe it. The coaches, the players — everyone was working together so well. And then she was fired …”
And that’s about how it happened. Friends say Payne worked a full day last Thursday, staying in the team offices when most other people had gone home. Sometime around 7 p.m., two of Snyder’s minions called Payne in and delivered the news: It wasn’t working out. Today was her last day. Pack up and head out.
Stunned, shocked and angered all at once, Payne asked for a reason why she was being let go. She got none. She has told friends that she wanted constructive criticism, asking the two staff members for something, anything she could take to her next job and turn it into a positive. She got nothing. Instead they said: “We are not in the business of criticizing Julia Payne.” Snyder was nowhere to be found.
Payne’s firing set off an internal collective gasp of, “What?” No one could believe what they had heard. After years of cold disconnect, they finally had a person who had not only bridged the gap with the media but also empowered a staff that had been intimidated and rendered supine by the way things were.
After Payne’s first meeting with her new P.R. staff, during which she gave them more responsibility and motivation than they ever had under Swanson, “the looks on (the staff’s) faces,” a source close to the situation said, “I’ll never forget them.”
Star LB LaVar Arrington and coach Steve Spurrier, upset by Payne’s firing, each told the owner he was wrong. That takes some serious onions, and it says a lot about their character and the job Payne was doing for them to face off against their boss. And of course, the fact that Payne had made such close relationships with Arrington and Spurrier had to be doubly grating to the insecure Snyder.
In a not-so-veiled comment to the media the next day, the straight-shooter Spurrier — asked about whether FB Bryan Johnson and TE Zeron Flemister might get cut because of their ongoing cases of the dropsies — said: “You can’t just fire someone because they dropped one pass.” Interesting choice of words, Coach.
As if letting Payne go wasn’t enough of a slap in the face, Snyder one-upped himself. Swanson, the man Payne replaced, was brought back as vice president of communications. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. The old regime was back. It should be noted that everyone I talked to told me they genuinely like and respect the P.R. staff that they work with on a daily basis; it’s the coldness of the Snyder-Swanson duo that makes their lives tougher.
Swanson told Pro Football Weekly that the decision to let Payne go was a “personnel matter” and that Snyder had no comment otherwise. He said that Payne had a 90-day contract (even though she worked there 96 days), calling it a “transition period,” and that her contract had simply run out, with the team choosing to go in a different direction.
That direction, of course, was back to the same old style of intimidation and detachment. As one overworked, underappreciated staff member asked: “Why did this have to be done by subtraction? Why couldn’t he have done it with addition?”
The question is valid. Apparently Snyder didn’t think Payne was doing a good enough job of protecting him, the extent of Swanson’s job description for four years. But with her skills and amazing work with the media, friends of Payne think the two could have worked together perfectly — something Payne told them she was more than happy to do.
There is a reason why most of the people I spoke to did not want their names used. Snyder uses fear as his weapon, and no one is clear of it. A source said: “There’s a real climate of fear and insecurity that permeates that building, and it’s wrong because there are a lot of good people there who do a lot of good work that he has no idea about.”
Friends say Payne still speaks in terms of “we” and “us” when talking about the Redskins and her former position, but this is not a woman in denial. Rather, this is someone who still genuinely and intimately feels, to this day, connected to the work she tried to accomplish in her brief time with the team but also utterly frustrated by not being able to complete the task — the unenviable task — of polishing a difficult man’s tarnished reputation.
Payne has told friends she is not sure what her plans are, but she is reportedly looking at all avenues. With her impressive credentials and vast political connections, there is no doubt that some CEO would do himself quite well by bringing her on. Even Larry King’s promoter confirmed that King is passing Payne’s résumé around. That’s clout, folks.
Even the local media have made it a point to band together and get the word out about her unjustified firing, extolling her virtues to anyone who will listen, from Greg Aiello, the league’s director of communication, to their contacts with other teams and other sports. They all have one simple message: Hire this woman. The NFL needs people like her.
While football often trumps talk about politics in D.C., one thing that permeates both is the will to win. No one doubts Snyder’s determination to build a winning football team and deliver a marketable product to the fans. It’s the process that bugs people.
It’s the way he makes people call him “Mr. Snyder.” It’s the way he tells secretaries and office workers their jobs are safe and then fires them. It’s the football team. The expensive toys and the cigars. It’s the way he expects total loyalty to him even if it means sacrificing a person’s responsibility. And the way he fires people without even being in the room. The man controls everything, and he lets people know it. Give Snyder credit that he did not trash Payne in the media in order to justify the move (remember Joe Mendes?) before firing her.
Like my old buddy Lord Acton once said, “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
The job of any good NFL P.R. person certainly entails protecting and promoting the team’s owner to the general public. It’s about facilitating media members in building a working relationship with the players, coaches and front office. But what Snyder should have put on the job description is: “WANTED: Henchman for hire.”
I see now why Snyder fired Payne. She is just not cut out for that job.