Polak blazed trail as GM of city's Riders
As Ottawa Rough Riders GM, Polak plowed through sport's gender barrier and blazed a trail for female executives
When we were signing the contract, they said to me, `Wait until the other guys in the league find out we hired a woman.'
Her first day on the job as the general manager of the Ottawa Rough Riders, Jo-Anne Polak settled into a chair at her desk and nearly threw up when she looked down and saw a brass spittoon, half full of gooey, spitout chewing tobacco.
As disgusting as that was, it probably wasn't the worst thing she saw that first day, when she found out her CFL team was $1.2 million in debt, with no money in the bank and all the season-ticket money spent.
Thirty-two years before the Miami Marlins' historic hiring of Kim Ng, a longtime Major League Baseball employee, to be their general manager, Polak made a story of her own.
A woman in charge? Some laughed, others ridiculed the then-29-year-old Polak. But, stepping into a big steaming mess with debts piling up and her team barely hanging on, Polak wasn't thinking much about the significance of her hiring.
“I jumped into the deep end with an anchor around my neck,” said Polak, now a vice-president of communications for Canada Post after 14 years as a VP at Hill and Knowlton. “The enormity of the job seized me immediately, I had basically walked into a bankrupt franchise. I didn't have time to think about, `I'm the first women (GM).' It was, `How do we make this franchise sustainable? How do we pay the bills? How do we get fans in the door?'
“When everybody's paying attention to you, you've got to get it done. There were lots of times I didn't think we'd pull it off. I was terrified of being the first woman and being at the helm when that franchise folded. I was seized with fear for three years. And fear's an incredible motivator.”
Polak walked into the middle of the old boys' network. You had to have played or been around football for a lifetime to get a high-profile job in the game.
“It wasn't just that I was a woman, it was that I wasn't a football person,” Polak said.
While she loved watching sports, she never was much of an athlete. One of five children (brothers Michael, Paul and David and sister Susan) and the daughter of Mike (a pathologist) and Bun (a nurse) Walsh, Polak was in the choir and involved with the Young Conservative Party when she was 14. In 1978, she was the first female student council president of Eastview Secondary School in Barrie, Ont.
“I was unco-ordinated, incapable of playing. My family laughed at how awkward I was,” Polak said. “We liked sports, but we did not have the genes. One thing we could do: We could all talk.”
Ng's hiring was the first time a woman had been made a GM in one of the Big 4 in North American pro sports. Maybe one day colour and gender aren't part of the headline about a hiring, maybe one day there really will be equal opportunity for all.
“In order for that to happen, it has to happen a few times, and we're a long way from that,” Polak said. “The fact (Ng's) the first, that's a big story. I don't see a lot of people in the pipeline that means the door is going to open and this is going to change quickly; it doesn't work that way. One of the things that struck me was she talked about how it's taken decades of determination. This is a woman who's been working in the system for so long. A lot of people — men or women — don't pursue it to that kind of degree.”
That brings us back to Polak, a trailblazer at a young age. A Newfoundlander, born in St. John's, she moved to Barrie with her family in the 1960s and to Ottawa in 1984. As a football general manager, Polak — nicknamed JP Superstar by columnist Earl McRae — plowed through the gender barrier.
“It blows my mind we're still talking about it 30 years later,” she said. “One of the things Kim said is you really need bold, courageous, gender-blind owners. Our owners ended up being that, but they were that for a different reason … It was because they were so desperate. It required a very different perspective, viewpoint and skill set to be brought in.”
Polak had been working with an agency hired to do communications support for the Rough Riders. The team, owned by Allan Waters from 1977-87, had been sold for $1 to a group of 27 community partners, including Sol Shabinsky and Hap Nicholds. When Paul Robson was fired as the team's general manager, Polak remembers thinking: “`Gee, I hope whoever comes on board lets me stay involved,' never thinking it would be me.”
Fast forward to a Grey Cup dinner in 1988, with the CFL championship in Ottawa that year. On her way back from the washroom, Polak was intercepted by Nicholds and Shabinsky, who said they'd like her to be Rough Riders general manager.
Thinking they were joking, Polak went back to her table and told everyone. They all had a good laugh. But later the owners cornered her again and told her she'd be perfect for the job.
“When we were signing the contract, they said to me, `Wait until the other guys in the league find out we hired a woman.' And I said, `Wait until the other guys find out you hired a 29-year-old woman.' They almost dropped the pen. They had no idea I was 29.
“It was like, `Jo-Anne, you're going to be the one who gets us a new stadium deal, you're the one who gets a new concession deal.' There was all of that other stuff on top of running a day-today operation. It was completely overwhelming most of the time. You had to brace yourself and suck it up.”
It was never going to be an easy job. While having a strong season-ticket base, the Rough Riders — so powerful with four Grey Cup wins from 1968 to '76 — had become a bad football team. In 1986, they won just three times (plus a tie); in 1987, they won three; in 1988, they won twice. With Polak as GM, the Riders won four games in 1989, then seven in both 1990 and 1991.
“The league was in big, big trouble,” Polak said. “We had lost the CTV television contract. It was basically a cobbled-together Canadian Football Network, which didn't have guaranteed revenue. Montreal had folded (in 1987). So, if another team folded, it was pretty much thought that was it for the league.
“Times were desperate. We had this old, dilapidated scoreboard that couldn't be fixed; it used little bulbs you couldn't even buy. I remember (Toronto Argonauts owner) Harry Ornest saying, `You need a new stadium.' I said, `Are you kidding? We can't even get a scoreboard.'”
There were skeptics, plenty of them — people who didn't think Polak, or any woman, should be a general manager in a professional football league.
“At that time, there was a coach — I won't say who he is — but, when we were looking at the coaches before Steve (Goldman) got hired, the word had leaked out I was (being hired),” Polak said. “One of the coaches who was being considered said on TV, `There's no way I'm going to work for a woman.' You could say that because that's the way things were back then.
“We had a Coach of the Year dinner in Edmonton. It was being broadcast live on TSN. I was at a table in front. A camera was parked next to me. Through the night, the coaches were telling raunchy Jo-Anne Polak jokes. They would tell a joke, then the camera would go on me. I was thinking, `OK, I can't laugh too hard and I can't not laugh or they'll think I'm a prude … just keep a straight face.' I left the ballroom and went back to my room, the phone message light was on. It was my mother. She was bawling. She couldn't believe they were saying that about me. She wanted me to quit.”
Polak learned on the fly, not only on the business side, as she also paid attention to what happened on the field. At late-afternoon practices, she would sit on the bench and watch. One day, she would focus on the offensive line, the next the receivers — a different position each day. She became a student, obsessed with the strategy, the physicality and the beauty of the game. She wanted to succeed, she wanted the team to live long and prosper.
“We only won four games
(in 1989), but our attendance went up by 26 per cent,” she said. “Players wanted to play in Ottawa. Before it had been, `I don't want to go there under any circumstances.'”
So many years later, Polak is in a good place. Her time with the Rough Riders — at times exasperating and mind-numbing, also at times exhilarating — have helped shape and prepare her for what was to come.
“I still have lessons I learned from my time with the Rough Riders in the back of my head. After going through what I did, I feel there is nothing I can't do. No regrets. I don't believe in regrets; that's a poisonous way to think. My best friends are the ones that were in the trenches with me through that time. I was only there for a snapshot in time and it's so much bigger than me. I'm so proud when I sit in the stands and to have been part of a moment in time.”