Shootings. Shootings. Good afternoon. And welcome to todays distinguished speakers series. A proud superintendent of the Windsor School district and the chair. And out to Community Members for this very special event where we c can to highlight Dicks Sporting Goods in his new book which i could get a little early to read its a great story. And we are thrilled to have you here today to share your w story. And then to draw attention to the Business Academy students and we are thrilled to have them here today in particular. And with that forum is a Membership Organization of how they share a commitment then to strengthen the bond between the two. And then to enrich the university as we work to establish the premier university we welcome only those that are interested to that Incredible Organization that brings people together for events just like this. For those Staff Members that are happy to tell you more information if you would like to join. As a courtesy check to be sure your phones are silent. And then to ask some questions at the microphone that will be available if you raise your hand staff will come over with the microphone. It is my pleasure to introduce ourde great president of the university. [applause] thank you to all our members. And of the big and tom area but what he has done for us over the course of his career and of those investments the corporation has made in this area and the belief that they deserve the Distribution Center thank you for all of that. [applause]ll i bet a lot of you have read through it my dog enjoyed mine. But it is an exciting semester. But did you hear a faculty member won the nobel prize . [applause] chemistry. And to be of faculty 51 31 years after he left exxon. He said i had to leave to find a place that would support me. He couldve gone anywhere. And with a humble man we had an event for him last friday. And the chairman but what is reallyaf wonderful are those students that came up to him he did not leave until he signed autographs and took adpictures with every single student that we had it taken to another event to another performance that night but again he gave remarks and stayed on stage a after pictures and shook hands at everybody there. He was a last one to leave. And a great ambassador in the future. 2900 freshman, 1600 new graduate students thats a record for us we are working really hard to increase the graduate enrollment. Ninetyone students in the doctor of Pharmacy Program which was one student over our goal now we have 231 students in the program. In that cohort next year then they will graduate their first class in the spring of 2021. Little more than 14000 undergraduates really smart kids the average store score 1370 so its a great group of students. And then to bring their money from long island to spend it here. [laughter] also a new school of nursing is change to the college of nursing now the Decker College i noticed some Board Members from decker are here today. Thank you so much. [applause] and with that are physical therapy programs with speech and language pathology and the construction is still ongoing if you are a construction geek like im. And then to be a stateoftheart facility one of the original buildings and then to construct that r d building and the pharmacy and also the old yellow building with those Industry Partners with those Co Working Spaces with the rest of the university. And then to open the elder claire on older care clinic a supporter of all the activities there but if you look at 4246 that building is gone now it is a parking lot for now but we are holding it in case industry would like to partner with us sparkle thats all i have to say today. All stand all the time so we will talk a lot about it to see those great achievements so thank you for being here at first i like to introduce his sister. [applause] first of all thank you so much for coming here today as well to introduce my fathe father, author of the book. And new york yankee new york yankee pitcher yogi berra. Thank you. S [laughter] you will not be disappointed about the history of a bait and tackle shop just a few blocks up the road from the very location someone more than anybody else i will briefly tell you a few sentences. Like back when he only had two stores in my stepmom sister died of cancer decided to do something. And had a bass Fishing Contest he will not tell you when the charities are trying to feed the families to donate over 100 turkeys when word got out there was not enough he donated more. Keep inn mind this is when we were robbing peter to pay paul. He wont tell you about his laser focus in the Incredible Mission to expand the store with manifest destiny. And Dicks Sporting Goods thats how we referred to it growing up. And also on the betterment to recognize the life lessons the team can instill in the individual. And then to have Sports Matters Foundation which i will tell you aboutmo later. He also wont tell you about the phone call he got from me in 2011 when we were hit with a flood and said what do they need i said anything and everythingy we got. He said how do you distribute it i said through the school because they know the families in need. The next day truck after truck after truck came rolling into our area hundreds of thousands of dollars in backpacks and clothing to help those who had lost everything he also wont tell you that when the company needed a new Fulfillment Center or Distribution Center to service the northeast corridor binghamton was his first choice of those 400 jobs created with the new stateoftheart Distribution Center0 now open 10 miles up the road. One of theul cliches is never forget where you came from. He never forgot. This is where we came from. Yet another School Shooting happened in parkland florida. For what he called me to tell me of his commitment to do something, what i will tell you his voice was not that as a ceo of a milliondollar corporation. He was just my brother, a kid from binghamton angry and wanting to do something. Ks spod stack. [applause] in queue. Thank you. Thank you everyone for allowing me to be here thank you to my sister, president stenger, everyone else that is here and to transport university the nobel prize is like us so congratulations. That is a terrific. When my sister again, kim, thank you for that introduction so for all of us who had siblings, brothers or sisters, how many . If they said they would introduce you anything like this and you thought about all the things you did to them when you are a kid they would probably make you pretty nervous. Come all the things i did to my poor sister was just terrible. I remember one time she always told me she would get me back for it and she hasnt yet. I thought this would be it. [laughter] there are two things i did to her that were all of you brothers here if you would understand this so she made fun of me one day we had a cottage at the lake and she wanted to go water skiing but she had been busting me just like a little sister who can be a pain in the neck and i said yeah, ill take you waterskiing. Sure. We got waterskiing and we used to go around the leg twice a week go around the lake the second time and if she went around the lake there was this huge thing of lily pads. You dont want to go swimming in the lily pads so i took my sister right through these lily pads and as she got the middle of the lily pads i went [laughter] and drop that engine and dropped my poor sister in the lily pads. She was yelling and screaming and i had not heard the words she was screaming off back then i pulled her back out. I thought that was one thing she do and tell that story and get back at me. Another thing i thought she might say is that we were at a event and our kids were little and she looked at me and i was always playing tricks on my sister and she looked at me and said that woman over there, her son goes to school with timmy, whats her name . I said thats mary. She said okay, great. Goes running over and talk to her and she comes back and she punches me as hard as she could and said you are such an hole. Ive never seen a woman before in my life. [laughter] thank you for that. I thought you could have been you could have busted me and you wouldve had every right to do so. I thank you for allowing me to be here today to talk about basically three things. How that got started and how we grow our business and then around sports and whats happening and you sports day and how important that is and about our what we did for a firearms standpoint and why i wrote the book but first of all i like to talk about how this business originally started not far from where we are right now in binghamington but this was the original store my father started paid the he started this business he was a kid working at burgers not far from here and he was an avid fisherman. His dad was killed in a car accident when he was young so we spent time fishing in the rivers with his grandfather and so the army surplus was starting to dry up in 1948 or so and [inaudible] said my father and said i know youre a big fisherman so can you put together an order for us to get into the tackle business so my father went home and put this order together to get into the tackle business and as he told the story and i talked from the book every year he told this story he stayed up later. By the time he told the story to my kids he stayed up all night long and it was only like two yellow sheets of paper so i have no idea what he was doing all night long but he said he stayed up all night and went back in the next day and gave the order to [inaudible] and he was in a bad mood that day and told my father he was a dumb kid did not know what he was joined by my father grabbed a piece of paper, walked out the story and never went back it went to his grandmothers house and talked to his grandmother about it and he was upset and this was a depression written family bird they really had nothing but daddy script and scrape for every thing they had. His grandmother finally said what would it take for you to do this yourself and he said 300. She got up and walked to the back of his old kitchen into this cookie jar and reached into this cookie jar and took out 300 and gave it to him and said go start your own business. He went to start this business and it started really small and we always used to tease him about this about how small it was because if you look right here this business was so small the post office did not give it a full Mailing Address because it was 453 and a half court street. Thats a pretty small place. He ran his business and did well some years and knots while some other years and actually went out of business and opened up a second store and went out of business. Six weeks or eight weeks later or so got back in the business but when he went out of business he made sure nobody lost any money. He made sure he gave all the product he could back to the suppliers and sold his house and car and had to move back in with his mother, my mother was pregnant with kim and she had to move back in with her parents but he made sure nobody lost any money. Eight weeks later he got back into business and back on court street and always did okay but was never he was always in debt but had a great story that he would always look at me and say which i did not understand at the time but he always look and say if i had what i owed i truly would be a wealthy man. A lot of people feel that way. He had a great empathy for kids and was a tough guy but my father was a tough Old School Guy and he wasnt this warm and cuddly guy on the outside but he had a good heart on the inside and one of the things he did was he treated how Little League was played in binghamington. There used to be four teams that had Little League in binghamington, one on the northeast and south and west side and he thought that was not right that more kids should have an opportunity to play but he got together with his buddies and a junior high pharmacy and put together these league had four teams on each side of town. Now instead of 60 kids been able to play there were now two and a 40 kids who could play plus they put a farming together and they were playing orb organized baseball and they had a place to be coached and men toward and they could go and stay out of trouble. He did that with one prerequisite only. That prerequisite was you cannot buy the equipment to start the league from his business because he did not want to look like he was doing that to better his own nest, so to speak. He started Little League and he did not know how many thousands and thousands of kids came through that Little League right now and we are redoing the field up there and it is so great to go back there to that field today and see the place where we grow up and had so much fun with. My father loved binghamington and always thought you had to the community had to do wellin order to do well. He told me when i was 13 years old he would put me to work because he would teach me responsibility. When i was 13 years old i went to work in the store and when i was 15 i worked fulltime in summer vacations and christmas vacations and i had to do that all through high school and i can tell you right now honestly, i hated every minute of it. I wanted nothing to do with that business. I got ready to go off to college and thought id number going back to that business. I remember my father drop me off at school and we had the National Lampoon vacation station wagon, wood on the side and ours was white as opposed to green but i remember watching them leave because i did not want anything to do with that but i remember watching them drive away and i remember the only thing that came into my mind was Martin Luther kings famous speech that free at last, free at last, thank god i am free at last. Im never going to go back to that place. As i got ready to get out of my freshman year i got a job as a law clerk and was so proud of it and came back until my father going to work and i will be a law clerk which is a gophers gofer but i would be there and i was excited and he looked at me and said i cant tell you exactly what he said [laughter] but he said you are working in the store but this is what put food on the table and what gets you to go to college so you are working right here. I worked there. It all worked there again and tim myers was there by this time and i can tell you that i still hated every minute of it. I wanted nothing to do with it. As i get ready to get out of college and no interest in coming back into the business. My dad got real sick and had a double bypass operation back in 1975 and he never quite made it back emotionally or physically from that experience and so i think im going off to coopers or Price Waterhouse and i wanted to go to law school and i found myself having to come back into the business to help. My father was sick and i was the oldest of five and i came back into these two Little Stores in binghamington, new york and something happened, i dont know if it was six months, eight months, nine months but at some point i fell in love with the business. Its a love affair that i talk about that is still on fire today. I still love getting up in the morning and going to work and love the people i work with and love that it gives us an opportunity to make a difference in somethings in this world whether the sports piece or firearms piece. When you are working in retail you can see people at their very best. You get to see people at their very best and one of the times you can see people at their very best is at christmas time but i remember it was around 4 00 oclock in the afternoon and Christmas Eve and this woman came barreling into the store and she says i see her and i say can i help you and she says i have to find a gift for my sister in law. I said no problem weve got these sweaters right here and i took her to this stack of sweaters we just mark down and they were not selling very well because they were marked down and i said we got these sweaters are tier and she looked at them and looked at me and said those are the ugliest sweaters ive ever seen. I looked at her and i said yeah, they really are and thats why we marked them down but right over here we got other sweaters and i looked over at her and she Still Standing at these other sweaters so i walked back over and said ive got other ones over here and she picked up this sweater, ugliest of the bunch and said you know what, i will take this one for my sisterinlaw biggest [inaudible] ive never met. I said Merry Christmas and off she went. [laughter] a couple of things. I will embarrass a couple of people here today. I will tell you a couple of stories about people in binghamington who had an impact on my life. Katie, is she here . Katie, standup one second. [applause] i will tell you a katie story. I wasnt the best student in the world. Katie when i told her that we talked a few years ago and i thought she would say no, you are not that bad but just like when she said no, you really werent. I did not apply it myself as much as i should have. I was taking a friend from katie and we were getting ready for the final and she said and looked at me and said eddie, you will not pass the final. I said i know. [laughter] she said listen, i will tell you what. If you write a paper on a french author, french artist, anything french, threepage paper she said i will exempt you from the final. I said kate, thats great. She said one more stipulation. I said what is it to . I will write the paper and she looked at me and said last stipulation is you have to promise me you will never take another french class. [laughter] i never took another french class. So underrated, underpaid, underappreciated and one of my favorite movies is to stir hollands opus. The teacher had no idea the impact he had on those kids until after they graduated and he was ready to retire so thank you very much. [applause] my clicker isnt working which means i lov will have to embarrs somebody else. Glen small, where is he . I saw him somewhere. If it were not for him, dicks sportinggoods wouldnt be here today. We lost our trust with the bank years ago. We never missed a loan payment, never late, cleaned up our lane at the end of 30 days but they said you have 60 days to get another. We cant bank any longer. There is a guy uses probably talk to him and maybe he can help out so i sat down and told him kind of what was going on. They stepped up and if it hadnt been for glenn, the savings bank taking a chance on us we wouldnt be here today. Thank you very much. We appreciate it. [applause] heres another thing my father taught me a lesson about how important sports were and that lesson was taught to meet a kid had come into the store, store and stolena baseball glove and. One of the guys brough guys brok in and he was probably 9yearsold. You could tell he came from a family that didnt have an awful lot. My father walked over and said ive got it and put his hand on this young mans shoulder and started talking to him. I was maybe 15, 20 feet away watching this thinking i wonder what hes going to say and i wonder what hes going to do because i knew exactly what he would do to me if i had done that. So i was watching him and he said why did you steal baseball gloves and thglove and the kid t him with the big crocodile tears coming down his face and he looked at my father and said i just wanted to play baseball. I just want to be able to play baseball. My father gave him a couple life lessons about you cant steal. You need to be good, you shouldnt do that when he put his arm around him, walked into the baseball while and decided to pick out a glove, pick out tt the bad, takeout double. Go play baseball and stay out of trouble. We dont know whatever happened to that kid, but i suspect thats one of the things that had a big impact on him. He went and played baseball. Weve always been really focused on kids. Whether its with my father did with Little League and then teenage baseball. And what he did with young man that stole the baseball club. We always felt a sports were so important. Theres so many things going on from a sports standpoint today that these kids cant play. So many budget cuts into roughly 4 billion of budget cuts over the last number of years in the youth Sports Programs where these kids cannot play. We started with the call over Sports Matter Foundation because we think that sports matter in life. Kids need a place to go to feel like they belong. A couple of years ago, we went up to alaska to this Girls Hockey League that was going to go defunct. They were not going to be able to play hockey any longer. We went to alaska because for one reason and one reason only, similar to what my father said about you couldnt start buying the equipment for Little League. We went to alaska to do this because he had exactly zero stores in alaska and we didnt want anybody to think we were doing this to drive our business off. I want to show a video about four minutes long about these girls in alaska who just love to play hockey and how important it is defense can w to dems can wee video, please. We are born on skates just about. Ive always looked up to the girls on the team. My team is my family. The funding disappeared overnight. We got approached by the community asking us to step in and help salvage the program and we salvaged it for three years but the finances are a concern. The girls have been using the same jersey for at least four seasons now. Nobody really cares about hockey as much. By the end of the season we will probably be in the red so we think we have to shut the Girls Program down. The idea that we couldnt find another funder is devastating socially, academically and devastating for the personal growth. Girls who have College Scholarships on the horizon, we are sending a terrible message. These young women and four to seven years are going to be working professionals and we are telling them they are not equal. [cheering] hi, everyone. My name is frank and i work at dickdicks sportinggoods and i heard you were not going to be funded next season. We felt like we had to do something. Teams like yours all across the country are not able to play because of a lack of funding and that is a problem. We think its a big problem because we think all kids should have the chance to play. I can tell its important to your community. [cheering] so this christmas we want to give you a special present. [cheering] in the locker room we have another special surprise for you. [inaudible] Merry Christmas, you guys. I thought this was going to be my last year. Im so thankful for you guys and what you are doing. Words cant explain how happy i am. [applause] these programs are so important to our kids. Kids need a place to go after school. They need a place they can be with their friends in a place where they feel like they belong and they need a place they can find their selfesteem. They need a place they can be mentors by these coaches. A lot of times these coaches have more of an impact on these kids to do their homework done and all those things because they make the decision thats most important of these kids and thats who gets to play on friday night. These programs it is so hard to grow up today i think. I think it is much harder to be between 13 and 16, 17, e. Team today than it was back when a lot of us were growing up. Kids today absolutely need to find a place where they can find their selfesteem. They can shoot a basketball or sing in the school play. Its not just his extracurricular activities. Its important to be able to have a place for these kids to go and right now this is a little bit older, the video we showed you, plus 27 of the public high schools in this country that dont have a Sports Program. If you think about that, its catastrophic for these kids. They have no place to go. They get out of 2 30 in the afternoon and what are they going to go do . We had a movie a few years ago called we could be king which was about the doomsday budget in philadelphia where they close so many schools an and some in the Extracurricular Program and we also many teachers and combined schools. They combined the two schools, two rival schools that were put together and this teacher was 26yearsold i was laid off came back to coach these kids from a football standpoint because he knew how important it was for these kids to be able to play and he didnt want him on the street because of his best friends was killed by gun violence, gunfire when he was 16yearsold. So he came back to coach these kids and we found that these kids every place. Home, classroom, we filmed them in practice, industries, games, and you watch these kids have practiced being mentors by this coach who loved these kids and you watch these kids have practiced and hugo, you think if they are not at practice, whats going on . You cant get to a good place. Its so important for them to have a place. We filmed a board of education meeting and i was shocked they went to the board of education and one of these kids that played football said without a football team, im not coming to school. If you think about that, what that does to kids who leave school because there isnt a Sports Program for mothers and other extracurricular biddies or they find their selfesteem to be part of a group that is in a game, think about what that does to the fabric of the country five, ten, 15 years from now. These Sports Programs are so, so important and we are trying to fight to do this. We partnered with a company where is the team needs funding they can sign up with donors choose. Org and if they raise the need for big sales, car washes, we will find half and theres a lot of teams they dont quite get what they need so we funded them anyway. Over the last four or five years we have touched a million kids are still able to play sports i wouldnt have been able to play sports with all this. We didnt do it alone. We have partners like nike and adidas and others focusing with us right now. Ive always felt that our kids are the countrys most precious natural resource. We dont spend enough time on them, we dont spend enough money on them or talk about them, they dont get to talk in the National Political debate itself there right now. The kids are our future and we need to find a way to educate every single one of them whether they live in a rural area, suburban, urban inner city, wherever it is and one way to keep our kids in School History help keep the Sports Programs. The other things we talked about is what weve done from a firearm standpoint. Again, can you move it along please. Weve been in the gun business since i can remember. My father started tackle and what was the firearm business, ive been around my entire life and ive sold them and shot them. They were always kind of Second Nature to me about what would happen if gun violence in the country today with these kids and what happened at sandy hook we decided to take all of the assault weapons out of the stores. [applause] and we got a lot of blowback from that and people upset with us. But it didnt compare to what happened after parkland. I am going to show you a video that we did was for internal use only that we were showing to people who work in the company, but about this and how we feel in the stands tha stands that wi will talk a little bit more about it im going to show you this video and our thoughts on the gun violence peace. Roll the video. When we say we are part of the communities we serve, what do we mean . There are stories we want not to be part of. We did everything by the book that we were supposed to do from we precipitated from a legal standpoint and somehow this kid was still able to buy a gun from us. We dont want to be part of the story any longer. 100 students taking their fight. We as a country have failed our children. People will continually end up dead. We took a stand that demonstrated leadership. In our community, refunds. [inaudible] under pressure about this impact. They are going to be turning their back on a fair amount of the market. They are not saying you cant have your guns. They are saying we have to do better. A shock to some, please do some and upset others. That announcement isnt sitting well with the nra. Its about meaningful change. We hope that the effort will come together to t through to fa source of the problem. Its about doing what it takes. Today and for generations to come. I still have a hard time talking about this. Whats needed is said we wouldnt so assault style rifles in any store. We had taken them all out. We wouldnt sell high capacity magazines or guns to anyone under 21yearsold and so as we made that announcement, we were invited by the families from parkland to come down and meet with them. I promised i wouldnt do this. People argue their point you rationally. Rational people argue their point you rationally. My wife and i went down and talked to those families who lost a child or a spouse and not one of them said t ban all guns, not one of them said guns have to go. All they said is we need to find reasonable gun reform so what happened to my child or my family never happens to anybody else. That gave me hope we could get something done in washington. Because if there was ever a group of people who are rational people who had the rights to argue their position internationally, it was this a group of people, and they didnt do that. So i went to washington and sat down with a number of senators and congressmen and you want to talk about rational people are doing things your rationally, it was so disappointing, surprising and maddening that we cannot get anything done on this particular issue. They should talk to the woman i talked to and had breakfast that day that we sat and talked. If you are a parent, you cant even imagine what this had to be like. I sat with this woman who looked at me and said its been a month since my son was killed. I go into his room every night, sit on his bed and talked to h him. Imagine that. And washington cant even do background checks . 90 of the people in the country believe there should be background checks. Weve got to do something about this. I try to talk to congress about the inconsistencies in the gun law. I talked to a couple of them and told them these inconsistencies and you know what a lot of the response was . Are you sure . You have to be 21yearsold to buy a handgun from a federal license or a dealer like us. You can buy the assault style weapon was used i that was usedy hook or orlando nightclub, san bernardino, all these others, you can buy that gun . It makes no sense. You need a background check is to buy a gun on the internet intrastate. If i want to buy a gun from somebody that lives in new york i have to have a background check. If i live in pittsburgh if i want to buy one over the internet from somebody that lives in philadelphia, no background check, just by the gun and off you go. We need to change these inconsistencies. One of the things the families said, i asked them when i left this morning, which is a day that i will never, ever forget. I asked them what would you like me to do and they said we would like you to keep this conversation going. We would like you to not give up. So and i promised i would do that. So whenever i get an opportunity to talk like this, i take it to try to talk like this. There are three reasons i wrote the book. One was to talk to entrepreneurs starting a business that your business isnt going to go in a Straight Line so its your business or career and if im fortunate enough to be asked in a College Campus your career nor your business is going to go in a Straight Line. There will be ups and downs. If you try to start a business, you will have good days, bad days and really bad days and you will have some of those quiet introspective moments that you are going what am i doing, how can they succeed . I am just worn out, but youve got to keep it going and one of the reasons i wrote the book is a sam walton wrote a number of books and he talked in his books he was very honest, some people talk about the book and say you were really honest and open. I cant believe some of the things you talked about and the troubles you had. He did that. He talked about the ups and downs that he had and i think he started the business three times before he finally got it right and that was in a way inspirational for me when we were having difficult times and we almost went out of business twice. I told you about one through no fault of our own and another time we almost went out of this us when we went to pittsburgh and the reason we almost went out of business if i was stupid. We grew too fast but i wrote it so those other people might have that inspiratiothe inspiration t if they can. The second reason was a lot of this whole sports matter peace and how important this is to our kids. Those girls were not going to be able to play the next year, the league is still going into the next year they went to the national championship. Imagine that. [applause] they would have had the rug pulled right from under them and they wouldnt have been able to go to the national championship. Thats pretty awesome. And then the last thing was about the firearm peace and what we need to do from the guns standpoint to get the reasonable gun reform to try to stop some of this senseless killing. Ive often said and people have said to me and some of you have heard me say this in a couple of interviews ive had, people say if we do what you want to do, its not going to stop the mass shootings. These mass shootings. And if the answer is you are right. But if we did what we wanted to the event, he couldnt have bought a gun. He was too young. He couldnt have bought any gun. And it may not stop all of these mass shootings, but i firmly believe that if it saves one life, its worth it and weve got to find a way to get that done. As a part of the reason to write this book was to continue to fulfill the commitment of the families in parkland who lost their child that would keep the conversation going. And with that, theres one last video im going to show around a sports matter peace and then we will open up for questions at the start of time. This is when the foundation put together to talk about whats happening, the funding taking sports away from kids that have no place to go. Roll the last video, please. You played your hearts out all season. Unfortunately, we have a bit of bad news. Due to budget shortfalls, the Baseball Program we regret to inform you due to budget shortfalls it is suspended. To whom it may concern, every kid deserves a chance to play. [applause] i think we would all agree every kid deserves the chance to play and we have to find a way to let them do that. Thank you very much. [applause] if you have a question if you raise your hand, and we have some microphones we will bring around so just a few questions before we send you off to the rest of your day. Questions. One right here. My name is suzy from new york that i live in fort worth texas. I was a kid with no money. [inaudible] i went to your dads store and saw him advertising for the press and he said [inaudible] i would go every week for a year and he said why dont you quit calling on me and i said i cant come you have to advertise in the debate. The moral of the story is dont ever give up. He taught me that. I agree. Thank you. [applause] thank you very much for the foundation and the work you are doing to help kids. By way of providence, chicago, baltimore and other places. Sports was such an important factor in my familys life growing up and going to college and sort of forming my values so i really cant identify with what you are doing and the importance. The issue of where our institutions are spending money not on sports on Something Else, not on education but Something Else is pervasive and i think the issue with the people that are talking here rationally about sports are doing so on a bunch of other issues so the question is it seems like this whole funding issue of sports in schools is a much deeper issue in society and i wonder if you could comment a bit on your thoughts on that and how we may reverse the trend because in my perspective, and i dont know if anybody else shares this but the world event i grew up in is totally different and i think maybe not as good today as it was then. Thank you. I think it is a real issue and part of a solution as we dont do in the country today so we have to find a way to have the public and private sector come together to solve these problems. We have kind of the Public Sector whose governments wants to do a. , b. And c. And they dont want to talk to the private sector. If we can find a way to put them together to solve some of these problems, we could get a lot of the problems solved. Companies like us, nike and others who want to focus on the arts, not everybody is an athlete. Some kids will find their selfesteem because they can sing in the school play or they are in the band or something. They just need a place to go after school. Weve got to have a think weve got to stop this big divide between the Public Sector and private sector that they cant come together. There is a business is out there that really want to help, whether its us or on a numberf other businesses, but we cant find a way to get a partnership between the public and private sector and that is a big answer to this issue here confronting us. I think it isnt as good now as it was when we were growing up i dont know you might be right, but the point is we shouldnt resign ourselves to that fact. We should say what are we going to do to make it better and give them an opportunity and educate our kids. If we dont educate our kids, we have a big problem down the road. Ive always felt income inequality is one of the biggest issues we have in the country today but i think its misdiagnosed. The root cause of income inequality i believe is educational inequality. And until we fix the Education System across the entire system, rural, suburban, we are not going to get there. The root cause is educational inequality in the public and private sector need to come together to solve the problem is that as alasit is all of our pr. We are going to grab a microphone for you. Does morality have a part in your decision as a part of the answer . We all should be immortal. Morality is something that we all need to be aware of and id like to thinilike to think thate right thing. Ive always said that i dont think its hard to do the right thing. Sometimes the consequences you have to deal with there can be consequences you have to deal with but i think its always easy to do the right thing, and i hope based on these issues that we have raised we are doing the right thing. We feel that we are doing the right thing. We talked about this internally that if we had to do that all over again we wouldve at the samwould do it thesame way and. Final question. I work at a communit communie and a foundation and its not really a question but a comment. On behalf of all the mothers in the room, i want to thank you for your courage and for doing a what we have called service above self and i want to pledge anything we can do to help you in making a decision that wasnt necessarily the best financial move for you, you are into so much more and a lot of that is our respect. We thank you and we are so proud of you and your families. [applause] on behalf of the university for him, i want to thank you for being here and more importantly for your leadership. You have a lot of educational leaders in the building, in this room, and this could be a teachers conference is the topic of the same issues. Its great to have the chief executive officer of this Great Corporation be one of those who is concerned, so we thank you for that. Also want to thank all of you for being here today. If you havent gotten a chance to pick up your copy of the book, please do so. I also want to mention all the proceeds, and this may not surprise you, all the proceeds from the sale of these books goes to the foundation, goes to the sports backers foundation. We do have some left in the lobby if you havent gotten a chance also just if you are interested in a membership, then we encourage you to think about the Binghamton University for him. The next event, the invitations are in the mail and the Student Theater production of a man of no importance, a soulsearching musical from the streets of dublin i didnt write that, but thats what it is, we hope you are able to join us for the production preview from the director of the play. Thank you all for being here today and think you again to ed. [applause] at an event hosted by the San Francisco commonwealth club. Good evening, everybody. Weve got to try one more time. I know you have great energy. This comes like an excited highenerghighenergy grooves oy one moim