THE NATURAL

As Los Angeles Dodgers CFO, Cris Hurley always plays by the checkbook

By Gary Libman

When Cristine Hurley joined the Los Angeles Dodgers organization four years ago, some people thought she was owner Peter O’Malley’s new assistant. “I was new and in a suit,” she says. “So the only thing I could be was an assistant or a secretary.”

Similar confusion developed on team flights. “When the wives saw me,” Hurley says, “they asked, ‘Who is that?’ ‘Who is that?’ ‘Who is that?’ They finally concluded I was a backup flight attendant, because there wouldn’t be any other reason for me to be on that plane.”

Today, no one has to ask who she is or what she does. Hurley, BA’89, is the Dodgers’ highly regarded vice president/chief financial officer, overseeing an annual budget that has reached as high as $250 million, vetting almost everything the team does involving money.

She’s part of a rare breed, one of only three women CFOs working for a U.S. major-league sports team. In fact—like Elaine Weddington Steward, a vice president with the Boston Red Sox—the thirty-five-year-old Hurley is one of the few women working in any upper-level management position in professional baseball.

Clearly, Hurley has learned how to succeed in the business behind-the-scenes of professional sports. More than that: She’s learned how to thrive.


Hit ’em where they ain’t

Determination and thoroughness underlie Hurley’s success. Last summer, for instance, she lugged her golf clubs to a municipal course in Los Angeles’s South Bay, to putt and chip with other beginners as an instructor explained golf’s techniques and strategies.

“There are five or six vice presidents in the Dodgers organization, and right now I’m the only one who doesn’t go to golf tournaments,” Hurley explains later, in her office overlooking a Dodger Stadium parking lot. She leans forward almost conspiratorially. “I’m very competitive—I want to be out there with the boys.”

Playing with the boys also means making sure her business presentations are pitched at exactly the right level, to avoid being branded with a word often attached to assertive women.

“You learn immediately,” says Hurley, her blonde hair pulled back and up, “that your presentation has to be more subtle [than the men’s], but not too subtle. Respect is not about who screams the loudest. Respect is earned.”

Hurley attracts kudos, says Dodgers president Bob Graziano, for her unique ability to report to a major corporate entity while serving different, versatile functions within the smaller Dodgers organization.

For instance, Hurley—hired as director of finance and accounting for the Dodgers, named CFO fifteen months later—developed a complex system for handling the monthly financial reporting to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation after the conglomerate acquired the team in 1998.

At the same time, Graziano says, Hurley has taken on many other projects, such as an inventory of equipment in the Dodgers’ clubhouse and an examination of the team’s food-services operation.

A certified public accountant, Hurley also assessed the tax consequences of the $10 million sale of the Dodgers’ Vero Beach, Florida, spring-training site. And she saved the team $250,000 a year by having it wait until 6 p.m. to turn on stadium lights for night games, thereby avoiding a power-company surcharge.


Getting the fundamentals down

Hurley attributes at least part of her effectiveness to her effervescence, a trait that sometimes confuses people.

“In college, I would go out and have fun,” she says amid the rows of financial reports in her office, “and be a little loud and joke a lot. Professors would say, ‘Cris, Cris, Cris! Come on. You’re distracted.’ But they didn’t realize I would go to a cubicle in the library to study two to three hours every day. Even my friends, when I graduated very high in my class, didn’t expect it. It’s all about perception. I don’t know if social people are expected to get high grades.

“I believe you have to laugh every day,” says Hurley, clasping with both hands the cup of tea resting on her large cherrywood desk. “I’m very relaxed. In some ways, the relaxed attitude I give off has been effective for me. Sometimes in negotiations or doing a deal, people underestimate me.

“But if someone goes over the line,” she says, “I’m going to handle it. I’m here to do the best job I can. I’m going to look out for the organization.”

Hurley’s approach seems to cause few problems with colleagues of either gender. For her part, she prefers not to dwell on women’s issues in the workplace.

“I don’t like the tendency to talk about the struggle,” she says. “I’d rather learn from people who have overcome obstacles. I’ve been very fortunate. I can learn from women or men. I don’t know that I like making distinctions between men and women because I don’t believe being a woman has inhibited me.”

Hurley’s position as one of the few women in upper-echelon baseball management is a little ironic: The sports world was never her goal.

Born in San Jose, California, she lived in Frankfurt, Germany, and Schenectady, New York, before attending Staples High School in Westport, Connecticut. She played soccer and softball on her high school teams, and also liked to ski and play basketball.

She never starred in any sport, she says, but she always plays to win. These days, she bikes, rollerblades, fishes, and works out daily at a gym, usually starting around 6:30 a.m.

While growing up enjoying sports, she also had a good role model for business success. Her father, Jim, was senior vice president of marketing and communications for General Electric. Mother Patti was a stay-at-home mom.

Despite her admiration for her father’s professional accomplishments, Hurley entered Northeastern unsure about what she wanted to do for a career. “But I found out that numbers came easy,” she says. “I understood correlations.”

After co-ops with IBM and Clairol, Hurley graduated summa cum laude, just a year behind another Northeastern alumna, her sister, Lisa, BA’88.


Rounding third, heading for home

Hurley landed a job with Ernst & Young in Boston, but six months later she visited friends in Los Angeles and liked what she saw. Ernst & Young granted her a transfer. “I was going to stay here only two years, to get it out of my system,” she says. “But I just love it.”

An encounter in West Los Angeles tested that sunny outlook two months after she arrived: She was robbed at an ATM in daylight by a knife-wielding thug.

“He took my car and everything I had with me,” Hurley says. “I was nervous, in shock. I thought he was going to cut me.”

Her devotion to the West Coast survived the trauma, and in 1992 she left her job as senior auditor at Ernst & Young for the same position at the Walt Disney Company. There, she assembled budgets and performed financial analyses for a marketing department, displaying the same versatility she’d later show with the Dodgers.

“When Disney started doing theatrical stuff like Beauty and the Beast,” says former Disney boss Michelle Perkins, “she jumped into that area—really, with very little guidance—and handled it from a finance standpoint very well. She’s one of those people who can just jump into a new project, and ask questions, and figure it out.”

When the Disney position began to seem not quite challenging enough, Hurley heard the Dodgers were looking for a new director of finance and accounting.

Though she had never been a big baseball fan, as a Northeastern student Hurley lived a block from Fenway Park, on Jersey Street. “If you heard an echo in the back alley,” Hurley says, “it meant the Red Sox were winning and everyone was cheering.

“I attended about ten games a year,” she remembers. “I’d go when a number of people were going—like a social outing. I liked baseball, but I didn’t love it. I never watched games on TV” (though she did work as a hostess at a restaurant frequented by Red Sox players, where she had her picture taken with Roger Clemens and Ellis Burks).

Hurley with Tommy Lasorda

Despite only a moderate interest in baseball, Hurley decided to interview for the Dodgers’ opening. As the appointment approached, she didn’t know what to hope for, fretting that “if I got the job, I wouldn’t have as much passion for baseball as I did for the films at Disney.”

The 5 p.m. interview started inauspiciously. When Hurley arrived at Dodger Stadium, Bill Foltz, then the team’s chief financial officer, told her he didn’t feel well and the discussion would have to be kept short. But the two quickly found a comfort level, and their conversation lasted for several hours.

“It was late in the day,” says Foltz. “I’m sure it had been a busy workday for both of us. She still had an energy level that had her on the edge of her seat and talking a mile a minute, like she normally does.

“You can tell that, besides her being a very intelligent woman, there’s a passion for business,” Foltz says. “She loves the financial side of business. She was talking about her experiences at Disney and her victories, analyzing what was out there, coming up with a sound direction for the team she was working with. Even though she wasn’t working with me, I could tell she had an intense loyalty to her boss.” After a second interview, Hurley was hired.

Ten months after Hurley joined the Dodgers, Peter O’Malley sold the team to News Corporation. Foltz left for a privately held company, and although Hurley felt unprepared to be the Dodgers’ CFO, she assumed many of the position’s duties.

“They were bringing in other CFO candidates,” Hurley says. “And I realized as I explained to them what they were going to be doing that I was already effectively doing it. Nothing was falling through the cracks. I started to see that if someone else came in, I didn’t know what their job would be—because I wasn’t going to give up what my job had become.

“About six months after Bill Foltz left,” she continues, “Bob Graziano called me in and said, ‘Do you still have the same opinion that you aren’t ready?’ I said, ‘No. Now if you bring someone else in, I’ll kill you. I can do it, and I want to do it.’”

“She says that type of stuff every day,” Graziano says, laughing. “I obviously agreed she could handle it.”


Loving the peanuts and Cracker Jack

The job has created an intense baseball fan.

“I will not miss a game,” she says. Last year, she remembers, when she attended a wedding, “I couldn’t wait to get out to my car and find out what was going on.”

She listens to or watches almost every game. If she works late at her office, she keeps the TV on to catch a few innings. Sometimes she comes in on weekends just to see a game live.

Hurley realizes her addiction to the Dodgers isn’t peculiar to her—and that in many ways she holds a dream position.

“She gets to sit around and think about how to make money playing baseball,” says Foltz, now a CFO for an equity investment firm. “It doesn’t get much better than that.” Hurley also works with Dodger players to resolve their insurance or payroll-tax questions.

With perks like these, people covet her job. “Every guy would love to be CFO of the Dodgers,” she says. “It’s fun, but it’s hard work. Even I did not realize how hard the job would be when I took it.”

Although she still works long hours, Hurley is seeking a better equilibrium between work and play, and recently bought a three-bedroom, 2,600-square-foot home four blocks from the ocean in Hermosa Beach.

She’d also like to marry. “I’m a little intimidating,” Hurley says. “I have a pretty good job. I’m also very independent, which is tough for some guys. But my balance of work and personal life is getting better.

“I worked exceptionally hard to get where I am,” she says. “I probably spent too many hours working. I ended up in a business environment where everybody works hard but also plays hard.

“I’m surprised that I like it. I like it a lot.”

Gary Libman, a former Los Angeles Times reporter and Minneapolis Tribune sports editor, is a freelance writer who also teaches at Whittier College and Whitney High School. He lives in Los Angeles.