Lawrence native made meteoric rise from professional soccer player to president of New Orleans Hornets
By: Jim Green
Sometimes it still seems like something out of a dream.
When Paul Mott finds himself at meetings with the other 29 NBA team presidents and league commissioner David Stern, the Lawrence native almost has to pinch himself.
"It’s very cool," he said. "There’s 30 NBA presidents in the world. This is the National Basketball Association. It’s very cool. This is humbling. I’ve been blessed. I’ve never felt like I had a job I had to go to. I can’t wait to come to work everyday. I love what I’m doing. It’s wonderful."
And it’s a long way from the soccer fields at Lawrenceville School, where he excelled in numerous sports, including soccer, wrestling and track, before graduating in 1976. Nearly three decades later, he was named the president of the NBA’s New Orleans Hornets by owner George Shinn on April 28.
The fact that Mott, 47, is running a professional sports franchise isn’t a surprise the surprise is the sport. After graduating from Lawrenceville, Mott went on to be an All-American soccer player at the University of Dartmouth before becoming a first-round pick of the Tampa Bay Rowdies of the North American Soccer League in 1979. During his two years in the NASL, he played against such legends as Franz Beckenbauer and George Best before a severe ankle injury forced him to hang up the cleats.
Although his career on the field was virtually over, his life in sports was just beginning. After working for two collegiate admissions offices, and spending 11 years as the director of college counseling at a prep school in Texas, Mott found himself working for the Dallas Burn of Major League Soccer. From there began his meteoric rise to one of the most powerful sports jobs in the world.
"My wife (Quenby) said I was foolish not to see it coming," Mott said. "I was caught off guard. I’m just Paul. I’m just a humble guy from Lawrence Township. I’ve never taken myself that seriously. I guess I’ve always tried to be the absolute best I can be, and that’s led to some great successes."
Mott’s parents, Paul and Susan, have lived together in Lawrenceville since 1957.
"It’s pretty sensational," the elder Paul Mott said. "The interesting thing is he always loved soccer, and now he’s the big cheese in basketball. I’m really pleased for him, and I think he’s really good at it. The best part is that the team has not done well recently, so he can only go up. He has every reason to be successful."
Mott’s determination was evident from his earliest days as a soccer standout in Lawrence. Despite a slight frame he stood just 5-foot-2 and weighed 90 pounds as a 9th-grader compared to his current 5-foot-10 stature he starred for the Lawrence Hamnett club teams and was selected to a U-17 national traveling team at the age of 13.
"I found I had a tremendous joy from playing soccer," he said. "I was pretty small and pretty quick, so I was able to be effective. I turned 14 on the trip, and everyone else was turning 18. These guys were all 17, I was 13, and I made the team. That was very exciting to me. From then on, I never looked back. The players were really good. There were eight or nine of us that made it to the NASL."
Although he did not consider himself a star in high school, he helped Lawrenceville consistently stay among the top programs in Mercer County. As a center midfielder, Mott was more interested in ball distribution than making a name for himself by racking up goals and assists.
"I wasn’t a really highly recruited soccer player," he said. "Lawrence Township is a hotbed for soccer. The guy I wanted to be like was (Lawrence soccer legend) Glenn Myernick. I wasn’t good enough to capture the interest of those coaches; I was only good enough to capture the attention of the Ivy League coaches.
"Maybe I was a little bit slower to develop. We (at Lawrenceville) were always a very strong team, but we were always one victory shy of winning anything. I had some terrific friends on the team. We were a bunch of hard-working guys who played well as a team, but we couldn’t seem to win the championships."
Although he did not consider himself a star coming out of Lawrenceville, he certainly became one at Dartmouth. In his four years in college, the midfielder-turned-sweeper was named to the All-Ivy League team twice, was All-New England three times and reached the pinnacle of All-American in 1979. He graduated as the school’s 10th all-time leading scorer despite missing much of his sophomore season with a thigh contusion, and several years later he was named to the Dartmouth College Hall of Fame. Of all the accolades he achieved, though, one stands out.
"The one I cherish the most is being elected captain by my teammates," he said. "I’m a leader, but I had never been elected captain by my teammates."
He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in government and played in the Senior Bowl for collegiate all-stars in 1979 and then was selected as the Rowdies’ first-round pick. He went on to play two indoor seasons and one outdoor season for the Rowdies, aiding the team with his versatility, as he was able to play all over the field.
"It was unbelievable," he said. "I would say it was a dream come true, but I never dreamed it would happen. You mark Franz Beckenbauer, and you try to think, ‘Did I really just do that?’, and I have the photos to prove it."
While Mott was a valuable player for the Rowdies, a series of circumstances led to him being waived after his second indoor season. Most serious was the fact that Mott had been haunted his entire NASL career by an ankle injury he suffered during practice for the Senior Bowl in the summer of 1979.
"I reported to the Senior Bowl healthy and sprained my ankle in practice," Mott said. "I reported to the Rowdies right away. I was young and naive, and I was hell-bent on making sure I could get on the field and make the team. I played hurt the whole time. My ankle is permanently destroyed."
To this day, it is impossible for Mott to play sports that require him to cut on his ankles such as soccer or tennis for an extended period of time, but he has opted never to have surgery.
"At the end of my second indoor season, my doctor told me, ‘You’re a bright guy, and you have an ankle that will keep deteriorating over time. We’ll take away a lot of bone. My honest recommendation is that you move on,’" Mott said. "At 23, that’s a blow. He made the point, if you try to play on this ankle over time, we’re going to keep taking away bone, and you’re going to be a prime candidate for a replacement ankle at the age of 40."
As difficult as it was for Mott to give up his life as a professional soccer player, the idea of spending half his life with a replacement ankle convinced him to retire. Although the injury was the primary reason for the end of his career, Mott also feels he would have had a better chance of finding a niche in the NASL if he had been able to focus on one position rather than being shuffled all over the field.
"In that time, I played up front center, center midfield, left back and sweeper," he said. "It’s great, because you have a lot of value to the team, but it’s not great because you don’t nail down a position. I might have been better if I could have nailed down a position, but it was a great experience."
Although he had made up his mind to retire from professional soccer, Mott was given medical clearance to play one last outdoor season in the summer of 1981, which he spent with the New York United of the American Soccer League.
"My body was starting to break down," he said. "I broke the fifth metacarpal in my foot. It was a much more physical league. There were some dirty players, there were a lot of cheap shots going on. I started to lose the joy of playing."
After finishing his pro career that summer in the league championship game in front of 20,000 fans in Charlotte New York lost the game he took a job in the college admissions office of Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla. While there, he kept involved in soccer by helping out with the school’s fledgling women’s program, running practices for two years. He then moved on to Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., where he served as assistant director of admissions from 1983-85.
He likely would have stayed at Williams for some time, but in the summer of 1985, he received an offer he couldn’t refuse. He became the director of college counseling and a teacher of civil rights and civil liberties and varsity soccer coach of St. Mark’s School of Texas, and he relocated to Dallas.
Mott would spend the next 11 years in the position, with little reason to believe he would ever be doing something else. But when the World Cup came to the U.S. in 1994, his life began to take another dramatic turn.
"That led me here," Mott said. "That’s when I decided I wanted to do what I could to help the World Cup be successful."
He volunteered to be on the speaker’s bureau, for which he traveled around the country with the U.S. National Team promoting the World Cup. Through that experience, he became acquainted with many of the national team players, including Fernando Clavijo, whom he had played with on New York United 12 years earlier.
"That’s how I got back into the game," said Mott, who learned the game from his father, who had played for Yale University. "It was really exhilarating to me. I’ve always loved the game of soccer. I found myself wanting to do more. Because I’d be wherever the U.S. National Team was playing, I’d have time on my hands, and I volunteered with the U.S. Soccer Association. They asked me to do odd jobs."
Eventually, Mott worked his way up from assisting with event operations to being the field producer the person in charge of making sure the players and personnel are on the field for pregame events for World Cup Dallas.
"That kind of convinced me that that this was something I was interested in doing," he said.
One of the strings attached to the United States receiving the 1994 World Cup was that it would have to use some of the money generated to start up a major professional soccer league, so the MLS was born. Mott and his good friend David Maldonado, a Princeton University class of 1980 graduate, began a campaign to bring an MLS team to Dallas.
"I wanted young kids to have the opportunity to idolize pro players the way I idolized the North American Soccer League players," Mott said. "I volunteered with the committee in Dallas, and when the committee resigned itself that they couldn’t get a team and closed up shop, we went to work and negotiated the contract for the Cotton Bowl. I got the North Texas State Soccer Association to give its support."
It wasn’t long afterward that Mott received word via phone call from Clark Hunt son of Kansas City Chiefs owner and MLS founding owner Lamar Hunt that his campaign was a success and that Dallas would be awarded a franchise.
Mott had hoped to have a role in the operations of the soon-to-be-named Dallas Burn, but the group of investors he organized to purchase the team fell short of achieving its goal, and the club became league-ran.
"I helped out until they hired a general manager, then I stepped back, and I thought, ‘My work is done,’" he said. "I just wanted to have a team in Dallas."
But Burn president Billy Hicks was determined to have Mott come work for him, and within a short time, Mott was working as a consultant for the club, helping out on game day. Within two years, he was vice president of operations for the team.
"Which is something I never thought I’d be doing," Mott said. "I just wanted to be a soccer player."
Although he never imagined he would become a powerful sports executive, he credits much of his incredible rise to a solid foundation laid during his formative years in Lawrenceville.
"I was fortunate enough, when I was at the Lawrenceville School, to have outstanding teachers that inspired me," he said. "I had a similar experience at Dartmouth. I guess I always thought I’d be a teacher or a coach. I enjoyed that. We’d be in the locker room at the old Tampa Stadium, and I never knew there was a crew coordinating us. You’re getting yourself ready to play, and all of sudden the captain was saying, ‘Let’s go guys.’ I didn’t realize someone with a headset was telling the captain it was time to go. I didn’t have a conception of that. I just played soccer.
"When we put together the bid to win the team in Dallas in 1993 to 1995, all of a sudden, this whole new world was opened up for me."
After two years serving as Dallas’ VP of operations, Mott was put in charge of the franchise on an interim basis, as Hicks moved on to another position. MLS commissioner Don Garber interviewed Mott for the job of Burn president, but something surprising happened.
"I realized I didn’t want to be president," Mott said. "The first part was, I didn’t want to deal with the media and with the nay-sayers that were saying soccer would never make it. The second part was I had gotten tired of some of the developing attitudes of the professional players. Some of these guys who are making 75 thousand bucks a year, and they’re complaining about making appearances."
Mott, who fondly remembers simply being thrilled to have the opportunity to play professionally, wasn’t sure that he wanted to continue dealing directly with players who no longer seemed to appreciate how fortunate they were. Garber’s response was to offer Mott a job working directly for him in the MLS front office as vice president of special projects. Mott accepted.
"They didn’t really have a job in mind, but they knew I was knowledgeable about the game and passionate about the game," Mott said. "Paul Phipps is one of the great pro sports executives around, and I went to work with him for club services. It was a great learning experience for me, and we had some real success."
In 2001, he was recruited to the NBA in a seven-month courtship that tugged at his heartstrings.
"I said, ‘I’m not done with soccer yet," Mott said. "I feel like I’m on a mission. After seven or eight months, I decided the opportunity they were offering me was too good to turn down. Three-and-a-half years later, I find myself being offered the president job of the Hornets."
During his four years as senior director of team marketing and business development for the NBA, Mott grew close with Shinn.
"He became familiar with me, and he got very excited about me running the team," Mott said. "He offered me the job on April first, which is April Fool’s Day, so I probably should have asked him if he was serious."
Shinn was serious, of course, and he explained the hire in a press release April 28, the day Mott was introduced.
"This hire will help us become a premiere franchise in the National Basketball Association," Shinn said. "Paul’s remarkable experience in professional sports and the leadership skills he has exhibited throughout his career as an executive, an educator and a coach will help us enhance the position of our organization both locally and nationally. I believe I hired the best coach in Byron Scott, and now I’ve added the best front office man in Paul Mott."
In turn, Mott thinks equally highly of his new boss.
"George Shinn is the major reason why I’m here," Mott said. "I really like the man and respect him. He is a modest, unassuming man who cares about the right things. The NBA is filled with generous owners, and there’s no owner that’s more sincerely generous. His view on the people that are in the arena and in the community and in his staff he’s a visionary, he’s a leader. He needed a manager, and I think we’ve formed a very formidable duo. I believe in his vision, he believes in my ability to execute, and together I think we’re doing something pretty special in New Orleans."
All indications are that Shinn made a fine choice. In just four months on the job, Mott already has put his stamp on the organization.
"He’s an incredible boss," said Kristy Fitzpatrick, who serves as personal assistant to both Mott and Shinn. "I’ve been here for a year and half. He’s just been incredible. Since he’s been here, he’s overhauled the entire company and made it somewhere I don’t mind to come to work. Not that I didn’t love my job before, but he’s given the company new life. He has this way of getting to your strong points and pulling the best job he can out of you. He’s just an incredible guy to work for. This company is going to be one of the best places to work in couple of years with him as president."
Chase Jones, the Hornets’ manager of corporate partnerships, agrees.
"He’s fantastic," said Jones, who has known Mott since his days with the Burn. "I was thrilled when he started coming down here as part of his NBA duties. He’s a very sharp guy. He’s one of those people that you meet and is instantly impressive. He’s always been a good friend. When they dropped the bombshell that he was going to be coming over from the NBA to be the president here, I was thrilled. I thought it would be a great thing for the team. He’s always been a well-rounded guy. He brings a lot of ideas from different places. A lot of times, we tend to recycle whoever has the latest and greatest ideas and follow whoever is doing something interesting. When you find some ideas that are completely out of the box, hopefully we’ll have people following us in the near future."
In his role as president, Mott oversees all business aspects of the franchise, including strategic planning, business development, marketing and branding, and day-to-day operations. He also has a hand in player personnel decisions, although he has more of an input into the contract negotiations than the choosing of players. Hornets general manager Allan Bristow, Scott and NBA legend Willis Reed, the vice president of basketball operations, handle most of the player personnel decisions.
"We’ve got a terrific basketball operations group," Mott said. "That is what these guys do well. My job is to put in my two cents. Where I weigh in more is in the business side. I’m learning a lot. The basketball operations guys have welcomed me into the decision-making process. I think, over time, I will develop a keener eye for talent. I care a lot about character. I just see myself playing a supporting role to what they do and keeping an eye on what they do."
After all, acquiring great players is only part of Mott’s grander vision of what the Hornets can be.
"I believe that we can create a model organization that people can look to and create some management lessons on how to take care of customers," he said. "I’m loving it. I’m absolutely loving what I do."