Oregon Register-Guard: Ron Bellamy: Oregon's stock fragile with loss of Bartko

(Note from Blog Editor: It appears that in addition to recruiting top players and assistant coaches, Tedford has landed someone who can get the stadium built.)

 

The Register-Guard

Tuesday morning, several huge cardboard boxes occupied the floor of Jim Bartko's office in the Casanova Center, in various stages of packing, and Bartko wondered where he could store almost two decades of Oregon memorabilia.  Monday evening, in the Bay Area, Bartko met with some Cal donors, at the home of football coach Jeff Tedford, in his new role as a senior associate athletic director for the Golden Bears. Today, someone will repaint his old office.  By a week from Friday, after going-away parties at Oregon and at Nike, Bartko will officially be done at Oregon after 17 years as a key fundraiser, dealing with major accounts from the late Harold Taylor to, for more than a decade now, Nike co-founder Phil Knight.

If you're an Oregon fan, you have every reason to be worried that Oregon is losing such a vital personal link to its most important donor, at a time when the proposed new basketball arena, a $160 million project that has been Bartko's almost-exclusive focus for more than a year, is still that, a proposal.  Take it from Knight himself.  "I would just say this doesn't help it, doesn't help my involvement with the basketball arena," Knight said in a telephone interview Tuesday.  "He's become more than just somebody to work with," Knight said. "He's become a very close friend. We're going to miss him a lot."  Knight said he'll still work with the UO and its athletic department, and that he is "continuing to talk to Oregon about all kinds of projects, including that one."

However, Knight, who had been targeted as a contributor for a significant portion of the $130 million in private funding for the arena project, said "at the end of the day, you basically want to have your charitable contributions go where they'll be used well, and there are a couple of clouds on that.

"I don't want to be any more specific than that."  Oregon athletic director Bill Moos said Tuesday that he continues to be "optimistic that the arena project will go forward," and that he is "certainly hopeful that Phil and Penny Knight will be involved with it." But Moos admitted that his hope of having the arena open for the 2009-10 season "may be unattainable as a goal."

It's fair to say that Bartko can't get enough credit for his role as a liaison to Knight during the latter's 17-month estrangement from his alma mater over the Worker Rights Consortium issue. He kept that relationship alive, and when Knight resumed contributions to Oregon, he was the major donor to the expansion of Autzen Stadium.  More recently, Bartko has been vital during a period of strained relations between Knight and Moos, stemming in part from Moos' display of interest in the Washington job and, last year, his handling of the resignation of track and field coach Martin Smith, which deeply angered Knight, upset that he and Nike were perceived to have forced Smith's ouster.

It's fair to say, too, that to some degree Bartko has been caught in the middle of the tension between Knight and his boss, though Bartko wouldn't acknowledge that as a factor in taking the Cal job, and Moos said he offered Bartko a pay raise - and sole responsibility for fundraising for the new arena and for the Olympic Trials - to remain at Oregon.

Read the rest of the article here.

 

Notable excerpts:

“Bartko, 41, considered a position at Cal three years ago, with Tedford's encouragement. The timing wasn't right then, he said, but is now; his son, A.J., is going into the fourth grade, and his daughter, Danielle, is just 3. Though Bartko and his wife, Eileen, have strong family ties in Oregon - his parents live in Portland, hers in Corvallis - they have relatives and friends in the Bay Area. On the face of it, the Cal job would enhance Bartko's credentials as a candidate for an AD job someday; it's not a job he's sure he wants, however, and whether that opportunity would have come around at Oregon after Moos retires, especially with the presence now of former Oberlin AD Vin Lananna on the staff as director of track and field, is uncertain.”

“At Cal, Bartko sees arguably the best public academic institution in the nation, with good all-around sports programs, but needing improvements in facilities - especially for football - and growth in the budget through fundraising. Both are his areas of expertise.  "There's the desire to be great," he said of Cal. "It's maybe where we were in the late 1980s or early '90s, where we saw a little light at the end of the tunnel where we could go for it. I think the upside is huge. It will never diminish my love for Oregon and the fans here, ever. No one can say, after 17 years, that you're not loyal. I'll cherish friendships here forever."  Among those will be the friendship that Bartko developed with Knight and his family.”

“At Oregon, Bartko played roles in the expansion of Autzen, the construction of the Moshofsky Center, the redesign of football uniforms and the innovative marketing of Oregon athletics through billboards, including that banner of Joey Harrington in New York City.”