You Don't Know Jack

The many faces of a master spokesman.


By Bill Kirtz

He’s demanding, nurturing, grudge-holding, pathologically averse to claiming credit, hot-tempered, and the best teacher some Northeastern students ever had. He’s Jack Grinold, Husky sports ambassador nonpareil.

Grinold’s official titles—sports information director and associate director of athletics—only hint at his status as NU’s urbane representative at the rink, on the river, or in an art gallery.

A tweedy presence here since 1962, when Northeastern fielded eight college division teams, he’s seen the program expand to nineteen university-level sports. Yet he remains as concerned about resolving a junior’s housing problems as about recruiting enough cable pullers for a televised hockey game.

Grinold’s honors include induction as the only noncoach and nonathlete in the Northeastern Sports and the National Football Foundation halls of fame. If there were a schmoozing hall of fame, he’d be in that, too. He can charm as easily as trash-talk. And he comes through.

A new student has singing ambitions? Bada-bing, bada-boom: Grinold has her opening a men’s basketball game with the national anthem. Another hopes to work at an Ivy League sports information department near her hometown? Bada-boom, bada-bing: Jack makes a call.

He’ll give a high school coach’s son grad-school advice while mentioning how he “despised” a departed administrator. He’ll explode at a reporter who printed allegedly confidential information, then apologize when informed it wasn’t. He expects affluent alumni to contribute to his “intern fund.” The ones who don’t, however kindly they feel toward Grinold, are off his list—not a comfortable place to be.

For many who’ve worked for him as sports assistants, Grinold’s at the top of their list. Philip Lotane, AS’84, now a Boston litigator and corporate counsel, calls him “a good mentor, a great guy to work with. He had a gruff exterior, and a hot temper. He was a real taskmaster, an old-school guy: ‘Show up on time, and don’t goof around.’ But nobody would have taken another job.” In fact, sports assistants like Lotane would often opt to stay with Grinold past graduation.

Lotane notes Grinold’s “reverence for the spoken and written word—a passion,” displayed in his elegantly written introductions for newly inducted Hall of Fame members. “He wasn’t warm and fuzzy, but had a deep and caring side,” Lotane adds.

Like many others, Lotane remembers Grinold stepping aside so his aides could bask in media attention. He says that at an NCAA basketball tournament “[Grinold] let me talk to the press. He gave students an incredible amount of responsibility; he didn’t shove them out of the way for the glamour part.”

And Lotane remembers another aspect of Grinold: the vastly cultured side. “He was a classicist, a well-read guy. Jack kept telling me to go to a big Renoir exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts. When I told him my girlfriend was visiting, he said, ‘Meet me there,’ took us around, and his expertise drew a crowd.”

Grinold’s classiness again exhibited itself when it came time for Lotane to move on, to the sports information director’s slot at the University of Vermont. The Husky sports veteran gave him valuable encouragement and advice. “He didn’t have to do that,” Lotane recalls.

Christopher Mosher, BA’70, was another beneficiary of Grinold’s guidance, both in his undergrad days and after graduation. He says he received more practical advice from Grinold than from his English and journalism courses combined. Mosher spent twenty-five years here in public relations and fund-raising posts and is now director of development at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He still remembers those bygone days of “liquid lunches” (Grinold now sticks to ginger ale or iced tea), when Jack was “the Duke of Huntington Avenue” and Punter’s Pub was named after one of his black mutts. He calls Grinold a “mentor and a role model, a master, a good man. He taught all kinds of lessons: the importance of relationships, of meeting deadlines.”

Grinold’s own first deadline came by chance. A Bowdoin English major who’d played basketball and captained the tennis team at Browne and Nichols Country Day School, he spent a couple of years on merchant marine ships to North Africa and doing odd jobs around the Boston area. When a particularly stormy passage washed him up on Cambridge shores in 1959, Boston Patriots founder and family friend Bill Sullivan gave him $40 a week to help handle mail response to a “name the team” contest.

A few months later, Sullivan asked him if he could write a press release. He could, did, and “that was it—I never got back on a boat.” Two years later, Northeastern’s public relations chief, the late George Speers, hired him as sports information director—a job Grinold has since expanded to include sports marketing and ticketing, radio and television packaging, and fund-raising.

“When he leaves, it will be the end of public relations in New England as it used to be practiced—the personal connection and the ability to put people together at the right time,” says his longest-serving assistant, Bill Doherty, BA’78. Doherty, a St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center counselor, Northeastern hockey radio commentator, and Grinold’s sports assistant from 1980 to 1995, calls Grinold “a real pro, a pain in the ass at times, with his own set ways. He has a temper, can definitely boil over and change a few colors—but his entertaining personality takes the edge off it.” Over the years, Grinold has developed myriad press contacts, maintained close media friendships without playing favorites, and skillfully navigated the inevitable bad-news shoals.

What’s his secret? “Good public relations is just common sense, that’s all,” he says over a bacon-and-cheese omelet at the Claremont Café, a spot near his picture-cluttered Matthews Arena lair. “You constantly try to be fair.”

Isn’t his job trying to get NU a break in the press? “I don’t think you need a break. You try to get people to look at the fair side of things, that’s all.” And he remarks that, after forty years, “you’ve kind of seen it all.” For Grinold, the all-time high spot was NU’s 1980 Beanpot title, its first in the hockey tourney’s twenty-eight-year history. Before that unexpected triumph, he remembers, some alums wanted the Huskies out of the contest because their failure was an annual embarrassment. So when the Huskies scored successive overtime victories over highly rated Boston University and Boston College, “it was a perfect script,” recalls Grinold.

The man whose overtime goal won the championship adds to the story. Wayne Turner, BS’81, a Husky Hall of Fame member who now works in MIT’s computer services department, says, “Jack didn’t care if you were a star or the team’s worst player. His door was always open. He’d always ask, ‘How are things going?’ which was good for freshman kids away from home for the first time.”

Grinold’s lowest moment? “No question,” the 1996 Intercollegiate Rowing Association championships, where an athlete’s ineligibility forced the top-ranked Northeastern boat from competition midway through the meet. The team forfeited its five regular-season victories and withdrew from national championship and Henley Regatta competition. “It was a clerical error—a misunderstanding,” Grinold says slowly. “Here was this great undefeated crew.”

The sadness was compounded because crew is the sport closest to Grinold’s heart. A perennial press steward for top rowing events, including at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, he fought back tears in 1981 when Northeastern named a shell for him, and he confesses to shedding them when the Husky heavyweights won the 1972 Eastern Sprints.

Of course, NU’s grimmest sports chapter is the 1993 death of—and subsequent allegations of cocaine use by—former Husky basketball star Reggie Lewis. Grinold, tight-lipped about the case, says only that the president’s office fielded all press inquiries about the matter. Doherty says Grinold “made Reggie Lewis feel comfortable, coached him on how to deal with the media, and handled [the investigation] with aplomb.”

Two days before the Celtics captain died of a heart attack while shooting baskets at Brandeis, Grinold says, they talked about “tons of projects” to help NU sports, including a “Reggie’s Corner” promotion, in which boosters would contribute $1 to the basketball program for every point Lewis scored. Never, Grinold says, did he see signs of drug use.

Now 65 years old, Grinold has just gone on two-thirds time for the next two years. And retirement? “Who knows?” He may work out another two-thirds time deal, “but that’s too far away. If not for co-op, I wouldn’t have hung around as long as I did. The constant influx of kids makes it fun day to day.”

You get the feeling the kids would return the compliment.

Bill Kirtz is an associate professor in the School of Journalism.