A Pollyanna — with battle scars: Blank’s weakness? He trusts people, and says being fooled by Vick and Petrino won’t change that. on Home Services

Jan

A Pollyanna — with battle scars: Blank’s weakness? He trusts people, and says being fooled by Vick and Petrino won’t change that.

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Arthur Blank, the vulnerable billionaire, paused to consider the source of his trusting nature.

It’s a trait that has been sorely tested recently. But not broken, he quickly added. Even after the fall of his franchise quarterback and the desertion of his coach, the Falcons owner insisted he will continue to believe the majority of mankind is not out to embarrass him on “Monday Night Football.”

“It’s probably pretty deeply rooted,” he said from his foundation offices last week.

He thought some more and it came to him, in almost a revelatory flash. Years after his father died, as Blank surveyed friends and family for more details of an abbreviated life, he kept hearing the same thing: Max Blank panned for the gold in everyone he met, almost always finding at least a fleck.

His mother, when it came time to condense the essence of her husband to fit on a headstone, ordered these words: “Always Found the Best in Others.”

“I don’t want to lose that,” Blank said, as if this were the most treasured heirloom his father could give him before dying at age 44, when Blank was only 15.

“Arthur is the type of person who looks at people through rose-colored glasses,” Blank’s wife, Stephanie, said soon after Bobby Petrino abruptly quit the Falcons to coach Arkansas - after reassuring Blank he was staying. “He always expects the best of people, until he’s faced with something like this. I think that’s one of his best qualities. But it sometimes will bite you in the heinie. But you know what? I wouldn’t have him any other way.”

Others who have known Blank for decades, including Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, share her view.

His very nature, in concert with his very hands-on ownership style, is under review now, given the state of his football team. He stayed with Michael Vick - handing him a 10-year, $130 million contract - through a compounding series of incidents until finally felony dog fighting dragged the quarterback under. On Monday, Vick was sentenced to 23 months in prison.

The night of the sentencing, Blank was extolling the virtues of his coach to the “Monday Night Football” audience while his team was getting kneecapped by New Orleans. Twenty-four hours later, Petrino was accepting the Arkansas job, he and his family celebrating with a rousing, “Wooooo, pig, sooooey!”

Blank could not have read two people any worse, and now his football season seems to be playing out like a Shakespearean tragedy.

Along with Marcus, Blank built Home Depot into the world’s largest home-improvement retailer. In that role, Blank navigated the choppiest waters, dealing with all manner of people. He also became a generous philanthropist.

His personal life was a matter of optimism winning out over all else. For a native New Yorker, Blank seems remarkably untouched by the famous crustiness of the place.

After his father died and the family restructured with his mother taking over the pharmaceutical business and raising two sons, never did he seem to break stride. Blank commuted from Queens to Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High, one of New York’s schools for gifted math and science students.

By the time he reached Babson College in Massachusetts, Blank already was thinking like an entrepreneur. His college roommate, David Kurland, remembers his friend running businesses as diverse as a check-cashing place and a cleaners.

Kurland remembers, too: “He’s a great believer of character, and when people let him down, he feels it.”

His entrepreneurial life had its inevitable share of palace intrigue. In 1978, he and Marcus were fired from their seemingly secure positions at the Los Angeles-based hardware chain Handy Dan. It was a stunning reversal, but it would be the catalyst for the formation of Home Depot.

In building a platform for Home Depot, he and Marcus would have to overcome all kinds of relationship problems. “When you’re dealing with thousands of people, you end up with some who disappoint you terribly,” Marcus said.

Even Blank’s departure from Home Depot in 2001 was tinged with disappointment. Blank retired as CEO earlier than he would have liked because the board wanted to make room for a new chief executive, Bob Nardelli, who would radically change Home Depot’s culture. That made the separation even more painful for Blank. Longtime associates said they felt as if they were going through a divorce.

Yet, for all that, Blank reserved words like “betrayed” and “abused” for Petrino, an itinerant coach. Blank is 65 and said he could not remember feeling quite so double-crossed as when Petrino bolted. “I would say this is definitely the most severe.”

“When you deal in the business world, you know you’re dealing with sharks. You know what you’re dealing with,” Blank said.

In the inspired parenting of Home Depot, Marcus always was seen as the guy in charge of the grand plans and the charismatic connections. Blank, an accountant in his early days, was the grounded numbers guy who executed the strategies.

On their face, numbers don’t lie.

But people often do.

They look you straight in the eye and tell you, “No, I didn’t know what was going on at 1915 Moonlight Road, and, really, I love dogs.”

Or they shake your hand and say, “You have a coach,” and then hours later are up on a stage in Fayetteville, Ark., announcing a job change.

The very worst parts of the culture of modern sports have called a convention atop Blank’s big office desk.

What is a man to do when his heart tells him that people are basically honest and good, but his wounded football team proves some particularly crucial ones are capable of profound disloyalty?

“He has to be more careful before he falls in love with someone,” Marcus said. “You can’t open your heart to everybody.”

“I think I’m pretty careful about falling in love, I try not to do it every day,” Blank said with a chuckle. “I don’t think I was in love with Bobby Petrino. I was trying to have a supportive personal relationship with him, which wasn’t always easy, because he’s not the greatest communicator.

“Talking to Bernie, he would always say he was much more cynical than I was. He would laugh about that. Bernie would have all these Machiavellian theories about things in business,” Blank said.

Ironically, Marcus said he sent Blank an e-mail in the wake of Petrino’s departure, urging him not to turn cynical and lose his faith in others.

Season looks lost

This season has not been kind to Blank - his Falcons are 3-10 with three games left to play. Critics can overlook the won-loss record in the context of all the trials the team has faced. They have more difficulty dealing with the decisions he and General Manager Rich McKay made on the people side, most notably with Vick and Petrino.

Blank’s up-close style of ownership is obvious. While most owners keep to their private boxes during the game, Blank mingles with the team on the sideline in the final quarter.

One of the most enduring images of his six-year run with the Falcons is that of Blank pushing Vick around in a wheelchair after the quarterback injured his ankle in 2003. Your typical NFL owner just doesn’t do that.

Friday, Petrino’s agent began digging out from the avalanche of criticism his client was under. “One of his main issues was the owner’s involvement in the football program,” Russ Campbell told the Birmingham News. Blank’s meddling - he even once pulled Petrino aside to complain about the wording of a pre-game prayer, Campbell claimed - was at the heart of Petrino’s discontent.

If Blank could fire a renowned coach like Dan Reeves with three games left in a season (2003, when he was 3-10), why then, was it so unfathomable that Petrino would leave Blank at the same point, Campbell wondered?

Asked if he felt a need to rein in his interactions with his team, Blank quickly responded, “I don’t think so.”

There seems to be a disconnect between Blank’s business style and his hiring of Petrino. In a recent speech at Emory, Blank outlined six core values to his business plan:

Put people first.

Listen and respond.

Include everyone.

Innovate continuously.

Lead by example.

Give back to others.

Which raises the question: What part of those principles did Blank see in Petrino? He was well-known to be a difficult sort at Louisville and had flirted with many other college and NFL jobs soon after signing a long-term contract with the Cardinals. The man didn’t seem to mesh with the Blank method.

Loyalty is such an important weight-bearing beam to the Blank plank. When it is broken so resoundingly, and with such long-term consequences as with Vick and Petrino, that is bound to raise other questions about both the design and its author.

Was Blank too trusting, and when does that characteristic become a flaw?

“As a businessman, you have to trust people,” Marcus said. “To find two people who lied the way [Vick and Petrino] lied, that’s unique and that’s not Arthur’s fault. It’s not a flaw of Arthur’s. It’s a flaw of these two guys.”

Looking forward, Falcons fans want to know if the man who, like his father, believes the best of others, will ever make them believe the best of the chronically woebegone Falcons.

The ultimate test of Blank’s business ideal may not be in building a home improvement kingdom but in trying to straighten out one wandering NFL franchise.

“I’ve seen him handle a lot of different things,” said John Imlay, a Falcons minority owner who helped pave the way for Blank to take over the team.

“This particular time, when he loses the trust of a person, it’s very serious personally to him. However, he doesn’t get down about it. He rededicates himself, whatever it may be.”

This is where Blank has to find the best in himself.