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| photo of Andy Geiger by Mike DeSisti |
"The things that happened to me intellectually and spiritually as a rower at Syracuse taught me what I know about athletics," he said."
(text and photos courtesy of Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
Andy Geiger is one of the lucky people. All he ever wanted to do was be an athletic director. Except for a seven-year retirement after the demands of Ohio State became too great even for one of the giants in the field, it is all he has done since the Nixon Administration.
At age 32, he already was living his professional dream as the athletic director at Brown University. He later would oversee 27 national championships at Stanford and one colossal building project after another at Ohio State, which does it bigger and better than anyone in the country.
But Geiger is also one of the lucky ones because some of the most important things came to him later in life.
Twenty-five years into their marriage, Geiger and his wife, Eleanor, a math teacher who took advancing degrees at whatever college was next on her husband's career path, adopted their two sons.
"I think it was a way Eleanor and I renewed our vows in a spiritual way," he said. "Parenting changes your life. It brought us really close together. It's probably the healthiest thing I've done in my development as a human being."
Phil is now a swimming coach at a California high school. Greg, whose heritage is Nigerian, Greek and English - a "United Nations baby," Geiger calls him - is beginning his career as a junior executive with a temporary-hiring firm.
"They're both miracles, both very bright, not genetically related to us but in every other way they are our children and I am so glad we met them," Geiger said.
It was also in his late 40s that Geiger became friends with Stan Getz, the legendary jazz tenor saxophonist. Getz was the music department's artist-in-residence at Stanford about the time Geiger hired Dennis Green to coach the football team. Getz took the Geigers on tour with him to Israel and later presented Andy with a musical instrument that would change his life.
Once he picked up the sax and began to learn some of the improvisational riffs that had been filling his head for years, Geiger had found an outlet that took him away from the pressures of major-college athletics.
"Sports are my business," Geiger said. "But the music, that's a religion."
So it was no coincidence that Geiger was introduced as the new UW-Milwaukee athletic director three months ago to the sounds of John Coltrane's "Blue Train." Geiger keeps his horns in the UWM music school and practices after work. He combs his lower east side neighborhood near the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music for jazz concerts.
"It's a gift to be here," he said. "There is music in this town."
And here he is, at 73, again doing the only job he ever wanted in a place where sports blend with his off-the-field sensibilities.
Talk with Geiger for more than a few minutes and be prepared to have your mind shifted to a broader perspective on the games people play. Although Ohio State won a football national championship on his watch in 2002, Geiger would rather speak lyrically about the opportunity non-revenue sports provide most students who choose athletics as their extracurricular activity.
"The arts department" of the athletic business, Geiger calls volleyball, swimming, wrestling, his beloved rowing and the like.
"Andy is one of the icons in our industry," said Horizon League Commissioner Jon LeCrone, whose time with Geiger goes back more than 20 years when both were in the Atlantic Coast Conference. "Think of the perspective he brings to Milwaukee and our league after being in the Ivy League, the Pac-10, the ACC and the Big Ten.
"But he's also a renaissance man. That's what makes him such a good man, such good company and such a fascinating person to be around. He has an excellent mind and can talk about any topic, politically, socially or musically."
The music carried Geiger through an embarrassing public incident at Stanford, when, during a Pac-10 tour, he engaged a Seattle sportswriter in a heated argument and dumped a glass of wine on the scribe's head.
"He and I had both been over-served, and I have a temper," Geiger said. "I was mortified. It was a low moment."
Geiger immediately began attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and did not drink for years.
"I'm not a teetotaler now," he said, "but ever careful."
The music carried him through the trying times at the University of Maryland, which had lured Geiger away from Stanford to fix an athletic department that had been shaken to its core by the drug-overdose death of basketball star Len Bias.
And the music carried Geiger through the traumatic days at Ohio State. Although he had reached the mountaintop of his profession, the Buckeyes athletic empire, the richest and mightiest in the land, was crumbling beneath the weight of the Maurice Clarett and Jim O'Brien scandals when he voluntarily stepped down in 2005.
"I was weary, the kind of tired that a nap doesn't fix," Geiger said. "I was 66 and I felt I didn't want to do it anymore. I had lost the sense that it was fun.
"I was not feeling accomplished at the point. All I felt like I accomplished was fighting fires. The president wanted me to stay. I didn't. It was heartfelt. It didn't mean I didn't care about Ohio State or was angry. Frankly, I was worried about my health. I didn't like the way I was behaving. I was really heavy, I wasn't feeling very well and I thought, 'This is pretty dangerous.' "
Born and bred in upstate New York, Geiger had fallen in love with the Pacific Northwest during his time at Stanford. He and Eleanor retired to idyllic Port Angeles, Wash., far from the Saturday afternoon roar.
"We found a place on Olympic Peninsula where it doesn't rain, on the banks of a river," Geiger said. "I look north to Victoria, British Columbia, and south to the Olympic Mountains."
And there he stayed, playing his saxophone and occasionally teaching at the University of Washington, until Geiger received a stunning phone call last May.
Would he consider leaving retirement to redirect a struggling mid-major that had gone through three athletic directors in two years?
Geiger didn't need the money when he voluntarily walked away from Goliath in Columbus. Why would he take on the problems of David in Milwaukee when he could hear the soothing sounds of the Elwha River from the sanctuary of a retirement home literally at the end of the continental United States?
At Ohio State, Geiger oversaw 36 varsity teams when the NCAA requires only 18. An NBA-quality arena was built and historic Ohio Stadium was renovated on his watch. He had a $100 million budget and ran the largest athletic department in the country.
At UWM, he would have a $10 million budget, a deficit of up to $1.5 million annually, a handful of on-campus facilities and a low athletic profile.
Geiger likes to tell the story of Coltrane, the great jazz saxophonist, and Thelonious Monk, the legendary pianist/composer. Once while collaborating, Coltrane told Monk he could not stop soloing.
"Then take the horn out of your mouth," Monk told him.
It's Geiger's way of saying that decisions aren't that hard. Accordingly, it didn't take him long to take the one-year, $214,000 offer from new UWM Chancellor Mike Lovell to set the athletic department right.
"I don't know how to behave if I'm not on a college campus," Geiger said.
Geiger's arrival at UWM stunned many industry insiders, but LeCrone doesn't question the pairing. It is enough that he is thrilled to have Geiger in the Horizon League, which counts UWM as one of its signature members.
"Milwaukee is so important to our league," he said. "Now they have Andy, who can be a mentor to other ADs and myself. Think what he can do for the Milwaukee staff and coaches.
"He's seen everything good about college sports and everything bad about college sports as well. He brings a great perspective."
The duality of NCAA sports, from the relative purity of non-revenue teams to the corruption in high-stakes football and basketball programs, caused some to wonder why Geiger would return for any amount of time. For example, Mike McGee, Geiger's friend who retired from the pressures of directing athletic departments at Southern California and South Carolina, told Geiger he was crazy for getting back in the business.
Pat Richter, Geiger's adversary and admirer from their head-to-head competition in the Big Ten, good-naturedly questioned his sanity as well.
"I was very surprised," Richter said. "The last thing I'd do is jump back in that business."
At 71, Richter is happy to be the former Wisconsin athletic director. But Richter, who is credited for reviving the Badgers by retiring a $2 million deficit in the early '90s, believes the Panthers have the right man for the difficult job.
"If you're looking for a guy to come and try to fix things in a short amount of time, he's the perfect guy," Richter said. "He's a guy who will do things that need to be done and will slap people upside the head if he needs to."
Geiger immediately shook up the Milwaukee establishment by pulling the men's basketball team out of the downtown U.S. Cellular Arena and bringing it back to campus while he and school leaders try to figure out how to build their own multipurpose facility. It did not make the Wisconsin Center District happy, but it was the kind of quick and decisive move Lovell hired Geiger to make on behalf of an athletic department that had been adrift for too long.
"He's a bright guy who doesn't need a lot of time to solve a problem," Richter said. "He's very efficient with a lot of connections."
If anyone is going to help get an on-campus arena off the planning board at UWM, Richter believes it will be Geiger.
"He's a visionary in what needs to be accomplished," Richter said. "The thing about Andy is he was very aggressive in building facilities and was probably criticized for the cost, but I'm sure people (at Ohio State) are saying they're glad he did."
Geiger said feeding the beast that is Ohio State football was justified, even at the costs of massive financial investment and eventual trauma caused by fallout from the Clarett and Jim Tressel scandals. Because to Geiger's way of thinking, the money Ohio State football made gave fencers and gymnasts the chance to compete.
Geiger's sensibilities were formed when the 6-foot-4 freshman was picked out of the class-enrollment line by the rowing coach at Syracuse. Since then, his sympathies have been with Olympic sports.
"The things that happened to me intellectually and spiritually as a rower at Syracuse taught me what I know about athletics," he said.
So it wasn't surprising that Geiger said his best day on the UWM campus so far was meeting with the women's volleyball team on its first day of practice. Coach Susie Johnson immediately sensed the credibility Geiger is bringing.
"I feel like this is just what we needed for stability," Johnson said. "I've been here six years and this is my fourth AD. Enough is enough. I understand that maybe he's here for just a short time, but he's what we needed.
"It's more than just about winning. We need to build facilities and move forward. It's really great to have someone who has been there."
Geiger doesn't know if he'll stay beyond the length of his one-year contact that is served at Lovell's pleasure. "That may not be up to me," he said. "I'll also have to ask my wife."
It also remains to be seen if UWM will find the athletic direction it craves with the bold hire. But it's clear that Geiger has found peace in his second go-round in the only job he ever desired.
"I've done," he said, "what I always wanted to do."
