Michael Meczka may be gone and we may be sad or grieving, but I guarantee if you can be a little more like Mike, his gentle, kind and massive spirit will live on in all of us and those we touch. You remember where you came from while you get to where you are going. You do anything for your friends and your real friends do anything for you. You are never really "working," because work is a chore and you make it a joy. You are not just having fun, you are making fun happen. You are always looking to learn as you look to share learning. To be like Mike Meczka, you are smart but unassuming. Mike and Elaine's children, Elizabeth, Katherine and Matthew were all adopted and they were loved and treated better than any biological children I have known, because Mike and Elaine truly appreciated what these three great kids brought to their parents' lives. Michael Meczka and his wife, Elaine, oozed love when you saw them together, no matter where they were and what they were doing. To be like Mike, you care, you truly care about your family and never put them second while you carve out an unparalleled career for yourself. Or who reached out more often, who called out of the blue just to "see how you were doing," or to chat about things that successful executive consultants NEVER call to chat about. I have never seen anyone in the often territorial and hard charging gambling business who had more friends than Mike Meczka. To be like Mike, you build relationships, not a client base, or contacts, or acquaintances, or sales leads. Sure, Mike might have often been "the smartest person in the room," but his mastery and gift was communicating that YOU were smarter than HIM (at least in YOUR business), but ultimately that your CUSTOMERS were smarter than all of us. To be like Mike Meczka, you brighten up every room you walk into, with a big Polish smile, a booming voice and an uncanny ability to put everyone at ease immediately. But Mike didn't treat me like a meaningless speck on the casino food chain. When I first met Mike some 35 years ago, I was a nobody who had a clownish role called Captain Casino, wearing a silly costume and having a silly banter in a too serious casino world. To be like Mike Meczka, you treat EVERYONE with respect and concern. Yes, we should all wish we could be like Mike. There is so very much and it is what made him such a great, impactful, loving person. In this time of grief and sadness, I prefer to focus on what Michael Meczka taught me, taught all of us, to make us better people. Suffice it to say that he didn't just give clients "customer feedback" or "focus group findings," no, he gave them candor, relentless logic and "ignore at your peril" advice. I will leave it to others to applaud Mike's many achievements and honors as the pre-eminent market researcher to serve the gambling business, as he did so well for some 50 years. Probably because he gave away so much of that heart over a lifetime of giving and sharing with everyone he knew. He passed away recently, sadly, from Covid-19 and a weak heart that finally gave out. Mike was a dear friend of mine for 35 years. SUBSCRIBE TO THE BULLS TALK PODCAST FOR FREE.Michael Meczka had the most mispronounced name in the gambling industry, but how you said his name never mattered to him. RELATED: Tim Anderson leads growing White Sox toward contention: 'He's a man' In an abbreviated campaign flush with unknowable variables, anything certainly seems possible. In some ways, that picture symbolizes the precipice of Jordan’s transformation from phenom to legend.Īnd while no one is expecting a run of the same dynastic proportions as the 1990s Bulls from this iteration of the White Sox, seeing Anderson embrace the city’s sports tradition, and his own potential, is a fun sight for fans of any distinction.Ĭould the Sox make a run at contention this year? Could Anderson take another leap towards established superstardom? Or will this season mark the South Siders' final tribulation before breaking out of their rebuild, à la the Bulls of yesteryear? The next year, 1991, marked the beginning of the first three-peat. Gary Nolton, the photographer who took the Jordan picture, said in an interview with Highsnobiety that he believed the original photo was taken some time in the summer of 1989, which would have marked the offseason before the Bulls’ final defeat at the hands of the Bad Boy Pistons.
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