A 'Man of Mystery' Steps Into the Spotlight

Principal Owner Theodore N. Lerner Prefers to Let His Ownership Team Do the Talking

Glasses clinked and there were smiles and hugs in the Roosevelt Room of the Fairmont hotel last night as the new owners of the Washington Nationals waited to make their debut.

But Theodore N. Lerner, patriarch of a real estate empire, did not smile. His first news conference was clearly not something he looked forward to. "How do you deal with this?" the notoriously reticent Lerner asked sportscaster and partner James Brown, muttering that he certainly hoped this would be the last news conference he ever attended.

Then a publicity man shouted for everyone to line up. It was time to walk across the hall and meet the world. Lerner frowned as he took his seat at the front of a packed dais, flanked by his son Mark on one side, team president Stan Kasten on the other. Packed around them was a rainbow coalition of minority partners, whose existence has been the subject of so much consternation.

"I had not realized I was such a man of mystery until I read a couple recent newspaper articles," Lerner told the assembled throng.

"Let me tell you a little bit about me," he said.

Lerner tried, waxing nostalgic about selling Liberty magazine and the Saturday Evening Post door-to-door to earn the quarter that would gain him entry to the Griffith Stadium bleachers where he watched Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Ted Williams play.

But then came the questions, four of the first five of which had to do with either why Lerner refuses to speak to the media or how serious a role his minority partners would actually play.

Lerner responded by leaning back in his chair and deferring to his son and Kasten, making it clear that the former Atlanta sports executive would be the public face of the franchise.

At one point, a reporter tried three times to ask Lerner about his competitiveness only to have Kasten, son Mark D. Lerner and son-in-law Edward L. Cohen answer instead. Ever persistent, the reporter tried a fourth time and Lerner finally responded by saying, "I concur with everything that's been said."

Soon the questions stopped being about Lerner at all, and shifted to race. As in the frantic scramble some have suggested the Lerners made to grab African Americans to join their group and match the diverse makeup of rival groups in an effort to placate Major League Baseball.

Among those around him were Brown, Rodney E. Slater, the former U.S. secretary of transportation, Paxton K. Baker, executive vice president of Black Entertainment Television's digital networks, and B. Doyle Mitchell Jr., the CEO of Industrial Bank N.A.

"We're all Americans -- Hispanic Americans, African Americans," Baker said.