The Making of a President

After years of searching, Kasten found that deal and that team in the Nationals.

John Moag, whose Baltimore-based sports management group is advising Kasten, recalled a conversation with Kasten early in the Nationals' sale process. "He said, 'This is arguably the most exciting sports project to come along in quite a while, and that's the one I want,' " Moag recalled Kasten as saying. "He looks at Washington as one of the most exciting opportunities anywhere. Not only is it in the nation's capital, but it also requires someone to build a franchise and build a stadium. Notwithstanding the one year they've already played in Washington, the Nationals are very much a blank slate."

Fighting His Way Up

When the Atlanta Hawks made a goodwill tour of the former Soviet Union in 1988, Stern and his wife, Dianne, tagged along, spending a few extra days at the end sightseeing with Kasten, then the Hawks' president, and his wife, Helen. One night, the couples stayed in a grand old hotel in Leningrad that unfortunately had no screens on its windows. Overnight, a swarm of mosquitoes attacked, leaving the Sterns full of red bites and the bitter air of the utterly defeated.

In the Kasten's room, however, it was a different story: It was a massacre, Stern recalled recently, with mosquitoes splattered all over the walls and the Kastens, though bitten a few times, none the worse for wear.

"Stan," Stern said with a laugh, "had fought the good fight."

Kasten, in fact, fought the good fight -- at least as he and his allies would term it -- for 27 years in professional sports, beginning in 1976, when, after a chance meeting, he approached Turner at a baseball game and offered his services. Turner gave Kasten his business card and told him to write a letter. Weeks later, Turner offered him a job.

In 1979, Kasten became the youngest general manager in NBA history when Turner promoted him to that position with the Atlanta Hawks. Kasten later won NBA executive of the year awards in back-to-back seasons. In 1986, he ascended to the job of Hawks' president, and eight months later took over the same duties with the Braves. Finally, in 1999, Turner added the duties of president of Atlanta's professional hockey franchise, the Thrashers, to Kasten's plate.

NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, one of Kasten's best friends dating from their days together in the NBA in the early 1980s, recalled that Kasten decided to take up ice skating when he became president of the Thrashers, as a way to better understand the movements of hockey. "But I don't know -- it may have just been a midlife crisis," Bettman said, "because he also started learning to play the banjo."

Among Kasten's legacies in Atlanta was trading for (and later trading away) NBA all-star Dominique Wilkins, hiring Braves General Manager John Schuerholz, signing pitcher Greg Maddux and overseeing the construction of both Philips Arena, a gleaming glass edifice that is considered one of the most innovative basketball and hockey venues in the country, and Turner Field, the Braves' ballpark, which evolved from the Olympic Stadium that served as the centerpiece of the 1996 Atlanta Games.

If there is a knock on Kasten in Atlanta, it is that he won just one championship -- the Braves' 1995 World Series victory over the Cleveland Indians. "I wish we had won more," Kasten said, "but I'm proud of all the things we did do in Atlanta -- especially given the fact all three teams, when I took them over, were either dead last or an expansion team."

High Praise in Tough Times

On Dec. 22, 1999, Kasten was on a skiing vacation in Colorado when his cellphone began ringing. Sports Illustrated was about to publish a story about Braves closer John Rocker in which Rocker made inflammatory comments about minorities, homosexuals and immigrants.

Kasten, the son of two Holocaust survivors who emigrated from Poland after World War II, was angered as both a businessman and a second-generation American.