From Jim Metrock:
It’s May, 2011. Channel One News is dying. It’s a slow death, but it is fading away. Channel One News has been losing schools and revenue since 1997 (the year Obligation began this web site).
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What Is Chris Whittle Teaching Our Children?
Published: May 19, 1991
It was warm in the living room of Chris Whittle’s relentlessly neat living quarters. Outside, rain began to spit from the troubled Tennessee skies, spoiling the arboreal view. Sitting on the couch, straight as a furled umbrella, Whittle placed a phone call to Phil Guarascio, the head of advertising at General Motors. Earlier, he had booked a call with him at this time. But Guarascio was not there. Whittle gave a withering look. “Some day, someone is going to invent a phone system that will automatically find people,” he said. “They could be in another city, but the phone will get them. It has to happen. One of the biggest wastes of time is not being able to reach people, even if, like now, you’ve made an appointment to call them.”
The way Chris Whittle figures it, if he doesn’t like something, then someone — often himself — ought to reinvent it. Over the last two decades, Whittle has acquired a national profile as something of the bete noire of the media industry. His proliferating array of unorthodox magazines, posters and video systems go out to highly targeted audiences or are planted in veterinarians’ offices, dentists’ offices, health clubs, doctors’ waiting rooms and schools. He once considered muffler shops.
Whittle has almost no compunctions about where you can put advertising, and thus in propagating his projects he has tapped into some raw emotions. Last year, much of the nation seemed caught in passionate debate over the ethics of Channel One, Whittle’s newscast for secondary schools that contains plugs for hamburgers and corn chips. The uproar over Channel One has quieted down, but last week Whittle was all set to stir up fresh commotion with the disclosure of his most ambitious and jarring undertaking. He plans to establish a laboratory called the Edison Project in Knoxville, Tenn., where his Whittle Communications empire is based, staffed by 100 yet-unselected people culled from education, business and science who will try to sketch out a blueprint for a new breed of elementary and secondary schools.
Once the outline is complete, Whittle intends to build 200 schools around the country, to open in the fall of 1996. The cost, he imagines, could approach $3 billion, which he might raise by selling shares to large companies. Within 15 years, Whittle foresees 1,000 Whittle schools educating as many as two million students. Whittle’s initiative will run parallel to the new education plan unveiled by President Bush and Education Secretary Lamar Alexander (a Whittle friend and former member of the Channel One board), which calls for grants to invent experimental public schools and for the building of 535 model schools by 1996.
What makes Chris Whittle think he can educate our kids? After his bruising experience with Channel One, his bravura has clearly increased. He is bent on transforming Whittle Communications into a multibillion-dollar company that will touch people virtually every place they venture.
WHITTLE HAD BEEN GNAWING ON A PEN, DRINKING in the zealous discussion among his development team of a project code-named Doc TV. Whittle’s expression had veered from quizzical to displeased to keenly interested. Now he absently pulled at his ear and asked what he ultimately always wants to know: What’s the potential?
“It doesn’t sound completely crazy to me that this is a $200 million property,” someone said. “The possibilities are 100,000 doctors have the system and 50,000 watch it daily.”
Wearing his trademark bow tie, with his floppy brown hair jouncing about, Whittle drifted over to a side table, where there were piles of sandwiches and fruit salad. He asked, “How much is spent on medical detail forces?” (The drug company salesmen who personally visit doctors.)
“Merck alone spends half a billion bucks,” came the answer. “We want to tell them to fire 10 percent of these people, pocket $30 million and give us $25 million.”
“Sounds good,” Whittle said grandly, and a vulpine smile crossed his face. “Sounds very good.”
The airy conference room at Whittle’s New York offices in the Seagram Building contained seven members of a development team, gathered several months ago to plot Doc TV, a product still a year away from being tested. It was to be a television system to go into either doctors’ offices or their homes. Every day, a 12-minute broadcast informing physicians of the latest doings in their specialty would be sent via satellite or cable and automatically recorded on video tape. (As with Channel One, Whittle would chip in all the electronic gear.) Each of the daily programs would carry a commercial plug from a drug company.
Several constituencies are likely to bewail the project. Whittle expects to grab perhaps 20 percent of the $452 million of ads carried by medical trade journals. He smugly says some journals will doubtless fold. Further money should be siphoned out of the vast outlays by drug houses on detail men. A fair number of them, Whittle believes, will lose their jobs.
As the development meeting wore on, someone said, “Now we ought to think what else could we do to make this thing as attractive as possible.”
Whittle joined the discussion: “How about, you push a button at the end of the show and samples come pouring out like a slot machine?”
That got excited nods.
Alan Greenberg, a Whittle vice chairman, said: “Well, there could be sweepstakes.”
“Yeah, Wingo,” someone threw in.
Everyone seemed really happy.
At the age of 43, Herbert Christopher Whittle is both lampooned as a flimflam man and hailed as an ingenious marketer.
“He has set the bar rather high for expectations of advertising creativity,” says David R. Verklin, senior vice president and corporate media director of Hal Riney Partners.
On the other hand, Whittle gives competitors conniptions. “He tells people: ‘Why are you bothering to buy space in that magazine that doesn’t care about you? All I care about, Mr. Advertiser, is selling your product,’ ” says John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s Magazine. “We hear all the time, ‘Why can’t you come up with a Whittle-like package?’ We’ve been asked to do a short-story contest where the winner has to name the advertiser’s product in the story. We constantly get asked to sell the Harper’s Index, have it be the Acme Screw Index or something. We say no to this stuff, but we do it at our peril.”
Increasingly, marketers have concluded that traditional mass-market media are flawed. Thus, Whittle has managed, beneath his somewhat fulsome hype, to persuade a small but swelling list of about 30 clients that his products do work. And while both Whittle and his customers are wary of sharing specifics, Whittle spent several hours with me poring through studies that indicated products advertised in his media gained in consumer awareness. One well-known service firm, according to one report, picked up 8 percent in brand awareness in a print project. A snack advertiser on Channel One went up from a 29 percent awareness to 53 percent.
For 17 years, Nissan has been merrily sponsoring Whittle’s biannual Student Traveler magazine for college students. Francis Gace, the president of Lewis & Gace, an advertising agency that has used several Whittle medical publications, says: “Whittle has produced some very convincing independent research that shows his products stand up. In a cluttered world, here is a less cluttered medium, and that makes it attractive.”
Nevertheless, all research can be ambiguous, and since so many Whittle properties appear in odd locations, advertisers have trouble judging the true size and attentiveness of the audiences. At times, the task can seem as slippery as trying to gauge how many motorists flashing by a billboard actually spied the sun-screen ad. Moreover, marketers say Whittle generally seeks a fat premium over comparable ways to spend marketing dollars. Part of Whittle’s wiliness is that he has invented products that are maddeningly difficult to compare with anything else. Still, agency people estimate that Whittle prices sometimes run two or three times above competing possibilities. Often, princely sums are paid well before a new idea has proved itself, a practice that makes some marketers feel as if they’re being asked to fund a wild-eyed experiment.
“The world of media is changing, and he’s going in the correct direction,” says Jack Irving, head of media operations at the Saatchi & Saatchi agency. “But there’s been no overwhelming evidence yet to convince the ad community that his properties work.” What’s more, Whittle’s biggest products — like Channel One and Special Reports TV, a feature-type television system that began in October 1990 in doctors’ waiting rooms — are still young and face intensifying competition. Healthlink, for instance, is a rival doctors’ system, and Turner Broadcasting runs a plug-free program for schools.
But the Whittle bandwagon rolls on. Last year, Whittle introduced a series of short books called “The Larger Agenda,” written by respected authors and sent free to 150,000 politicians and officers of influential corporations. About six books appear each year, all sprinkled with advertisements from Federal Express. The series has been so profitable that he just began another series, and has organized a book division presided over by William S. Rukeyser, a former managing editor of Fortune magazine, and Hamilton Jordan, chief of staff for President Jimmy Carter.
Next year, Whittle expects to try displaying consumer products in malls. He won’t reveal the products, though he has attracted interest among manufacturers. The idea would work like this: Whittle stores would show models of competing brands of a product — say, lawn mowers. The mowers, according to Whittle people, would be more attractively displayed and in wider assortment than in conventional stores. Since the Whittle outlets would contain nothing else, the mowers presumably would lure a focused audience. There would be no stock. If you found the mower of your dreams, you would snatch up a phone in the store and order it for shipment to your home.
Whittle’s pride and hope, however, are what he calls place-based television systems. These systems can be viewed only in locations outside the home, where Whittle knows precisely who is watching. This is a world in which there are no remote controls to switch stations when commercials blare, because there are no other channels. Whittle envisions systems for bankers, school administrators — who knows, maybe circus performers. His projection is that revenues from place-based TV will grow from less than $100,000 in 1990 to almost $3 billion by the year 2000. The entire cable industry has revenues of about $2 billion. The three commercial networks together bring in $9 billion.
“WE’LL DO $220 MILLION in revenues in 1990,” Chris Whittle said. “We have 1,000 employees. Increasingly we will be a television force. We are one of the media industry’s fastest-growing companies.”
Whittle was addressing executives from FCB/Leber Katz Partners at the ad agency’s Manhattan offices, his notable reserves of charm on glaring display. He had recently begun paying courtesy calls on agencies to try to redress past snubbing. In doing his selling, Whittle had typically called directly on advertisers and bypassed their agencies, unlike conventional publishers and broadcasters, and there is a chasm of animosity and suspicion between many agencies and Whittle.
Whittle has come a ways. Five years ago, his company, which for the last two years has been half-owned by Time Warner, collected just $80 million in revenues, and the largest property was a poster in dentists’ offices that brought in $7 million. Whittle says pretax earnings averaged 15 percent of revenues over the last five years, with the bulk of the profits from a total of 30-odd magazines and wall posters devoted to such advertiser-friendly subjects as travel, health and beauty.
Whittle told the Leber group that his company has two major goals: to provide new services to advertisers and readers and to bring greater value to advertisers. “I’m going to pick one arena to illustrate this — television.”
He went on: “When we look at television, we see a medium in serious decline. We think the commercial audience erosion is worse than admitted. We think the remote control has been a disaster in this regard and the full story of this has not been told. ”
Laurel Cutler, the agency’s vice chairman, nodded, and said, “I watch my teen-agers and they watch with their thumb.”
“We estimate that upward of 40 percent of Americans rarely see commercials, even the biggest campaigns,” Whittle said. (While network officials admit that many TV viewers otherwise occupy themselves during commercials, they contend that the figure is far below 40 percent. Yet no one knows for sure.)
Whittle went on to tell about his plans for place-based networks: “What are the advantages? There is much greater targeting. I can promise you that everyone in a high school is a teen-ager. I can promise you everyone in a pediatrician’s has a child.”
He paused, then sped on: “This fact will surprise you. Ninety-five percent of television activity is followed by one activity — sleep. Because it happens at night. That’s not true of place-based television. For example, some 61 percent of people who leave a doctor’s office have a prescription. They are going to a retail environment. So that changes the impact of the commercial.”
(Subsequently, Whittle admitted he couldn’t support the surprising sleep “fact.”)
“We look at media differently,” Whittle continued. “We ask, ‘Is a commercial that is seen more valuable than one that is not?’ Most media evaluations don’t take that into account. In homes, what is the zap level? We ask, ‘Is the first impression on an individual more valuable than the 100th?’ ”
Joseph W. Ostrow, the Leber agency’s worldwide media director, said: “We have a client who feels that a commercial seen the 100th or 99th time is wasted money. So we set frequency levels.”
Whittle nodded and went on: “Is a person who will never see your competitor’s commercial more valuable than one who will see it 100 times? We think absolutely, yet most agencies don’t care about proprietary levels.”
Cutler: “I think that is overstated. You say ‘never see your competitor’s commercial.’ But take your waiting-room example. You only own that person for an hour.”
“It is overstated to make a point,” Whittle conceded.
Whittle invited ideas, and Ellen W. Oppenheim, the senior vice president and media director, said: “I’d like to see you come to us during the planning stage of a project. And listen. Because as much as you accuse the agencies of not listening, I don’t think you always have. It’s been, O.K., if we don’t get what we want today, we’ll go to the client. Goodbye.”
IN THE AIR, FLYING between Knoxville and Columbus, Ohio, Chris Whittle said: “One of the frightening things is the media terrain is going to radically change. It’s not frightening to me, but it will be to others. I don’t think the major media will become extinct, just smaller and different.”
Of course, not all Whittle media work, either. The latest of the dozen or so failures over the years include American Style, a magazine for beauty parlors, which was unable to capture requisite advertising and was recently shut down. It meant a loss of several million dollars, the worst Whittle flop. He hit rocky shoals, as well, with his six magazines for doctors’ waiting rooms. By bungling relations with ad agencies, Whittle caused them to bad-mouth the project; some advertisers withdrew. So Whittle brought out a television system, reduced the magazines to three publications and gave advertisers who buy spots on the TV system free ads in the magazines.
If the Whittle ventures sound more like marketing than media, it’s because marketing is all he has ever known.
He grew up in Etowah, Tenn., the son of a country doctor. While attending the University of Tennessee, he embarked on a college magazine project called “Knoxville in a Nutshell” with Phillip Moffitt and two other students. They formed a company called 13-30, alluding to the age group they wished to reach, and out of a former pillow factory engineered Nutshells for other campuses. Whittle was always the glad-handing salesman.
The company grew too fast, the other Nutshells fared less well and 13-30 creaked with debt. One magical day, it found bliss when it agreed to develop a magazine for Nissan in which the car maker was the sole advertiser. This single-sponsorship notion caught fire and life went along beautifully. Still, the company was obscure until 1979, when it bought and revitalized Esquire magazine. In 1986, Whittle and Moffitt tired of each other, and a vinegary divorce took place. Moffitt retained Esquire, which he soon sold to Hearst. Whittle kept the stable of magazines and wall posters and renamed the company Whittle Communications.
Even as it has expanded, Whittle Communications has operated in emphatically entrepreneurial fashion. The fuel of the company is ideas. At any given time, some 20 development teams are devising fresh possibilities, and employees often find themselves shuttled from development team to working property back to development team.
Whittle readily confesses that he is not much of a reader or watcher: he sees news and movies on TV and reads a daily paper, but he studies no magazines on a regular basis and finishes perhaps three or four nonfiction books a year. If an advertiser wishes to catch Whittle’s attention, he says, “I am damn near impossible to reach.” But he does act on ads that do penetrate him. He recently spied an ad for Polo/Ralph Lauren pants and went out and bought some.
While most of Whittle’s magazines and wall posters are no longer backed by a single advertiser, competing brands are forbidden. Although the publications are slick-looking, the majority are rather pallid echoes of well-established magazines like Time or The Atlantic. Who gets them is strictly controlled.
David Halberstam has mused a good bit about Whittle. He contracted to do a Whittle book, but withdrew when he encountered editorial resistance. Published by Morrow, “The Next Century” became a best seller. Despite that episode, Halberstam says he likes Whittle and feels the book idea is a sensible one. But he dislikes Channel One and he wonders about Whittle’s convictions. “I don’t want to underestimate what he is,” Halberstam said. “He’s smart. His ideas are original. There is no doubt he has an instinct for marketing. But I didn’t get a feeling that anything matters to him. I don’t know what he really cares about.”
JOE MANCINI squinted down the hall, bustling with students flowing to their next class. Then Mancini, the principal of Bishop Ready High School in Columbus, Ohio, turned his attention to his special guests. “Welcome, and c’mon into my office,” he said. Straightening his bow tie, Chris Whittle, trailed by Bill Rukeyser, followed him into a drab room.
Since Channel One has been his biggest gamble (for one thing, Whittle last year spent $70 million for about 9 percent of all the 19-inch color TV sets sold in this country) and since he is plunging deeper into education, Whittle likes to make periodic trips to see how things are going.
Channel One can best be described as an MTV-like newscast — a compression of news, features tailored for teen-agers, trivia questions and a series on a topical issue like the Soviet Union or the handicapped. Everything is boppy. The smily anchors are in their 20’s, and the pace is snappy and the graphics flashy. The commercials, though sometimes identical to those on regular TV, are increasingly shot specifically for Channel One. While many shamelessly encourage consumption of candy bars and costly footwear, some are message-oriented. Burger King ran a five-part ad that chronicled the pitiful plight of “Tiny,” a school dropout who degenerated into a prostitute, drug addict and alcoholic.
“How long you been on?” Whittle asked.
“March 4,” Mancini said. “We were on the first day. Our kids are excited. We like the quality. We have, though, made some calls with some complaints. Slow down the presentation was the main one.”
“What about the parents?” Whittle asked.
“They’re thrilled,” Mancini said. “Of course, I also get the nasty letters about why are you tainting our kids.”
“What can we do better?” Whittle asked.
“Well, we have a problem with geography here,” Mancini said. “You have these flat maps that are sometimes hard to understand where something is. Maybe you could make them spin like they do on ‘Wide World of Sports.’ ”
While many teachers and students extol the 12-minute newscast, others will never accept the infusion of commercialism. Whittle often likes to defend the project by pointing out that there is already commercialism in the free skin creams given out in home economics classes and the ads on stadium scoreboards. For Whittle the matter has largely been detoxified by the project’s economic viability. Whittle has gotten the 8,600 schools he sought to cover his capital costs and achieve the audience size he felt would interest advertisers. (As an incentive, Whittle rains $50,000 of free TV’s, VCR’s and satellite dishes on schools that take the system.)
Whittle now envisions further expansion, and does not rule out a program geared for elementary grades. It is little known that for years Whittle has had a wall display called “Big Picture” (actually a set of three wall posters boasting short articles and graphics with ads running along the bottom) in 11,000 elementary schools, and it is not uncommon for grade-schoolers to be surveyed by Whittle-funded researchers to see how vividly they recall brands like M & M’s that advertise in Big Picture.
At some places, Channel One has roused boiling emotions. There was a walkout of students in Fargo, N.D., protesting what they felt was dull and condescending programming. Rhode Island and New York prohibit the system in public schools, and similar legislation has been introduced in California. What’s more, Whittle finds it necessary to agree to occasional odd stipulations. Whittle said one that school demanded contractual assurance that the programming would contain no subliminal advertising. School board members mentioned that they feared that the Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi might sponsor subliminal messages. Whittle swears he is not kidding.
Under a sun that glazed the trees, Whittle was taken on the 20-minute drive to Grove City High School. Thomas D. Rutan, the principal, told him that teachers had complained that the school personnel weren’t always starting the show at the same time, and so three alarm clocks were arranged atop the receiver set to shriek at the appointed moment. Whittle chuckled.
“What do the teachers think?” Whittle asked.
“Some really like it,” the principal said. “And some get so engrossed in what they’re teaching that they get annoyed when the TV comes on and they just pull the plug.”
Whittle looked horrified.
Upstairs, in a sophomore English class, Whittle wedged himself into a desk to watch the day’s broadcast. It embraced some coverage of the gulf war, a study suggesting that too much TV viewing could be bad for the heart, a feature on agriculture, a segment on mentally handicapped students and part of a series on American Indians.
After the show ended, Whittle rose to ask questions. The class was sullen and reticent.
“Have you learned where places are?” Whittle wondered. “For instance, have you learned where Hussein lives?”
“Not really,” a boy said, “because we already learned that on other news or in the newspapers.”
Whittle had noticed that a number of students did homework or doodled throughout the program. The teacher said the rule is that they don’t have to watch, but they must be quiet.
“Was this a typical experience with just a few doing homework?” Whittle said.
“I think more were watching it because you were here,” another boy said.
The teacher added, “I would say half work on homework and half watch.”
Driving away with Rukeyser, Whittle said, “Interesting visit.”
“Every one’s different,” Rukeyser said.
OUTSIDE THE CAR window, leafy streets, tracts of lush farmland and then a tight strip of commercialism flicked by beneath the emergent light. Accompanied by a bleary-eyed team, Whittle has been rousted out of bed early to descend on a small Midwestern city to try to wring $5.5 million from a major advertiser, a maker of household products, for Whittle’s waiting-room television system.
On sales pitches, Whittle’s pattern is always the same: two or three people show up with a tornado of charts and printed material and, for a video sale, a television and a VCR. Whittle also insists on two hours of the client’s time. If he shows up for an appointment and is told there’s now only an hour, he will reschedule. Sometimes he flies hundreds of miles only to make a new scribbling in his appointment book.
Whittle spoke in a soothing, sociable voice, often in a tone of wonder, and in short, simple sentences. “In conventional media, there is no competitive advantage,” he said. “You have to outspend or outcreate. You don’t outflank. We allow you to outflank.”
Then he let Bill Connell, president of Whittle Communications, say a few words before Alan Greenberg delivered the core pitch. “You’re doing a good job on commercial television,” he said to the group, “but I’ll tell you, 40 percent are not seeing your ads. We have the ability to fundamentally change the way in which spending is delivered to consumers.”
Whittle cut in: “A typical response of an agency is, ‘We buy around that.’ You can’t buy around that. You can’t get people who don’t watch television to watch television.”
“With us,” Greenberg said, “you can’t zap, you can’t graze, you can’t plug your Nintendo into the set.”
The case was hitting the right ears. The company had recently hired a new president who wanted to market the company’s products more effectively. In particular, the company needed to reach mothers, and it had found commercial television frustratingly inefficient.
Whittle spoke about how company trucks delivered magazines and new broadcasts to the doctors’ offices every two weeks. “One thing to think about,” he said, “is those trucks have room on them. We could take other stuff. Samples of yours.”
Once the presentation was over, the president leaned back and said: “This just fits so perfectly. And it ought to be something we’ll say yes to right now, and we’ll figure out the details later.”
Just like that, $5.5 million was committed.
“In closing,” Whittle said, “I’d like to say that, like all media, we’re not perfect. After a meeting like this, people say, ‘Hooray, we’ve found the Holy Grail.’ We ain’t the Holy Grail. But we’re far better than anything else out there.”
That said, the team dispersed. On the way to the airport, Whittle allowed his grin to widen until it was huge.
THE DINNER HOUR was ripening, and as a ragged line of tables at the stylish Memphis restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan filled up, voices lunged forward and overlapped one another. Around the long dark bar, men and women stalked one another.
Whittle and Rinker Buck, the editorial director of AdWeek’s Marketing Week, were meeting to get to know one another better. Whittle had made the overture because he had been miffed at some rather blistering coverage in Buck’s publication.
Whittle sipped a drink, as Buck spun an anecdote that had to do with keeping recipes on his refrigerator.
“We’ve thought of ads on refrigerators,” Whittle interrupted.
Buck laughed.
It wasn’t a joke.
In fact, Whittle later told me, the company had thought of trying to interest a maker like Whirlpool into building frames for wall media on its refrigerators, and then homeowners could pick up the material at the supermarket and slide it in.
Buck lit into Whittle on Channel One. He told Whittle how irritating it is to watch commercial-ridden Saturday-morning television with his 5-year-old daughter. “The other day, I asked her what she wanted to do,” he said, “and she said, ‘I want to be an actress in commercials.’ Not movies or TV, in commercials. So I pretty profoundly disagree with the concept of Channel One.”
“Advertising is making available a good program,” Whittle said. “It is a trade-off.”
After some back and forth, Buck said, “Listen, you’re an alternative medium. You consider the high schools a segment. Have you considered the churches?”
Slight embarrassment prickled his face, but Whittle just laughed. (Later on, he told me he hadn’t ruled out churches, but couldn’t think of anything he might do there.)
I walked a few blocks with Buck. “You look at Whittle and you have to realize he still doesn’t have that much of a track record,” he said. “Something doesn’t work, and he’s quickly into something else. He’s like a chameleon. If something doesn’t work, he becomes something else.”
THE HOME CHRIS Whittle owns in Knoxville resembles an old mansion of buff bricks. In fact, it is a converted apartment house with four sizable three-bedroom apartments. The place suits Whittle fine, though most nights he’s there alone. He was married for the first time last August, to Priscilla Rattazzi, niece of the Fiat magnate Gianni Agnelli, and in January they had a daughter. (She has a son by a previous marriage.) His wife prefers their showy New York dwelling in the Dakota apartment house, and so Whittle sees his family mostly on the weekends.
Channel One, Whittle said, has radically revised his career aspirations. Until a year ago, Whittle intended to retire from business in 1994 and enter politics. Not any more. “Channel One has such an impact on education that I realized I could never do anything like this in four years of politics. So I decided I would rather stay in business.”
It seems certain that Whittle will be the focus of continued truculence and agitation. In the years to come, he faces more serious obstacles. His projects are much riskier and his reach is bumping up against more powerful franchises and constituencies, none of which is likely to concede territory without a vicious battle. Whittle is unlikely to emerge unscathed.
Whittle grabbed some gym clothes and prepared to work out. As he bent into his blue Porsche, he admitted something about himself, perhaps a serious flaw. “I’m not a good competitor,” he said. “I don’t think competitively.” For a long time, he hasn’t really had to. He has gone where others have not, but now he is playing in a bigger and rougher league.
