Dave Hyde: The Marlins' hire of hope — and the public reaction 'beyond my expectations'
Billie Jean King. Martina Navratilova. Venus and Serena Williams.
That’s the short list of women who have most profoundly affected sports over the past 50 years. They’re the ones who have changed the conversation of who women are and what they’re capable of achieving in sports. They’re also individual players in the individual sports of tennis.
Add Kim Ng to the list.
If King addressed gender equity, if Navratilova showed how women athletes can act, if the Williams sisters showed how female athletes can look, Ng sat on a stool by home plate at Marlins Park on Monday morning doing something just as revolutionary.
She showed women can get in the room where it happens in sports. Her dream to lead a team, a men’s team, a major-league baseball team came true. The Miami Marlins general manager hired Friday lined her three-decade journey with words such as “fearlessness” and “responsibility” and showed an open joy at being an example for young girls.
“The idea that it has affected this many people is just extraordinary,” said Ng, 52. “I thought it would be a big deal, but this is beyond my expectations. I think that really is just a testament to where we are. People are looking for hope, and people are looking for inspiration, and I’m happy that this is a part of it.”
This should be a front-row treat for South Florida to watch play out. Ng’s standing is different, her voice is unique. She doesn’t just understand what making history means. She embraced it. You heard it come through in discussing being a role model for young girls (“That means the world to me”) and giving them a visual to go with their tomorrows.
“There’s a line, ‘If you can’t see it, you can’t be it,’ “ she said. “Well, you can see it now.”
Ng talked of leafing through the Marlins media guide at the staff pictures and noticing the “great female representation,” in the scouting, analytics and medical departments” — as well as COO Caroline O’Connor.
“What was more striking was the vast amount of experience, the different perspective and different backgrounds, all these people come from,” she said. “With that diversity and what it offers, that’s how we’re looking to build a championship-caliber club.”
There’s where Ng’s job is strenuously different from her previous stops in baseball. She won with the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers, teams with full support that could buy their way out of any problem.
While CEO Derek Jeter and manager Don Mattingly have laid good groundwork in the Marlins rebuild, Ng’s decisions won’t be aided by an open checkbook like with her previous teams. And those 500 fans she directly heard from that are now Marlins fans with her hiring? This team could use them.
Ultimately, for all Monday’s applause, it’s one pioneering storyline to get the dream job. It’s another to succeed in it. Ng understands.
“There was a 10,000-pound weight lifted off this shoulder,” she said looking to one side. “And then a half-hour later I realized it’d transferred to this shoulder. I felt a lot of responsibility. I have my entire career. I know I’m quite visible. That’s been a big thing for me …. You’re bearing the torch for so many. That’s a big responsibility, but I can take it on.”
That will play out in the coming years. Monday was about change. About opportunity. It was about Ng persevering for decades, from growing up playing stickball to a love of baseball, going through interviews knowing she wasn’t given a realistic shot at the job and moving from Chicago to New York to Los Angeles to New York and now South Florida.
She was like any other executive hoping to land the dream job — but unlike every one of them in sports at the same time. That’s why she was put on a pedestal by the very women she admired growing up. When Navratilova heard Ng referenced her in Monday’s news conference, she tweeted: “How cool is that? Inspiring and humbling. And (by the way), I played and love stickball too.”
“Progress!” King tweeted about Ng’s hiring.
Add one to the select club. King. Navratilova. The William sisters. And now Ng.
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