The Litigator

To appraise the career of Proskauer’s Howard Ganz is to traverse the last half century of American pro sports, when it mushroomed from a regional business into a nationwide corporate enterprise.

During that half-century ride, Ganz, co-head of Proskauer’s Sports Law Group, has been an integral part of some of the most significant changes  in sports, including every NBA collective-bargaining agreement since 1967 and every MLB CBA since 1999.

As a hybrid labor lawyer and litigator, Ganz was outside counsel for MLB and the NBA during such seminal events as the ABA/NBA merger; the Knicks/Heat bench-clearing brawl during the 1997 playoffs; Pete Rose’s gambling transgressions and subsequent ban from baseball; the creation of the WNBA and its first CBA; performance-enhancing drug abuse, from Rafael Palmeiro to A-Rod; the Latrell Sprewell coach-choking incident; and John Rocker’s suspension after he said the 7 train to Shea Stadium was “like you’re riding through Beirut,” the first time an MLB player was suspended for something he said. When Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf refused to stand when the national anthem was played at NBA games, Ganz was knee deep in that — more than 20 years before NFL players were taking a knee during the national anthem.

The sports law group Ganz co-chairs also represents the NFL, NHL and Major League Soccer along with some pro teams, colleges, conferences and the ATP and WTA tours, making Proskauer arguably the most influential law practice in the business.  

Born in the Bronx and raised 20 blocks or so from Yankee Stadium, and later in New Rochelle, N.Y., Ganz had a father who was an accountant, one uncle who was a lawyer and another a doctor. So a career as a professional was predetermined, but it was a specific area of the law that intrigued him.

“Law practice divides itself between dispute resolution and transactional,” Ganz said. “I always knew that I wanted to be a dispute-resolution guy. … I was always fascinated by the aura of trials, cross examination and arguing with people.”  

Therefore, a litigator he became.  

While Ganz worked in sports during arguably its most transformative period, he insists he “fell into” the labor practice at Proskauer, following Columbia Law classmates David Stern and Michael Cardozo to Proskauer after clerking for a federal judge.

Once at Proskauer, Ganz started working on labor litigation. “There really was no sports law — I liked the people there in labor and it stuck,” said the eternally self-effacing Ganz. The force majeure within Proskauer’s labor department at the time: Ed Silver, father of the current NBA commissioner.

See also

As Ganz recalls, Proskauer’s sports practice began in earnest in the mid-1960s when the law firm Simpson Thacher determined that representing the Feld family, owners of Madison Square Garden and the New York Knicks, meant that also representing the NBA would be a conflict. So, George Gallantz brought the NBA business to Proskauer, and served as general counsel under three commissioners during the 1960s and ’70s.  

One of Ganz’s early sports labor cases was working with Gallantz on the NBA CBA when Oscar Robertson was president of the players association and was suing the league in an antitrust matter. Times were different: The NBA had just 12 franchises and players weren’t paid for preseason games. The CBA they completed was all of three pages. The NBA’s current CBA is hundreds of pages — without addendums like the salary cap minutia.

“I will admit,” Ganz said with a smile in his Times Square office, “the CBA has morphed into something biblical in its proportions and Talmudic in its complexity.”

Sound judgment

Early on, Ganz established a reputation for possessing an encyclopedic knowledge of the law, a staunch work ethic and sound judgment.

“The toughest part about being a lawyer is not the knowing the law part, it’s the judgment part,” said MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred. “Howard Ganz is an A-plus when it comes to judgment.”

Ganz is revered across sports for his ability to “keep your wits about you while all others are losing theirs, and blaming you,” ala Kipling.

Since he was usually involved in contentious situations, that’s the quality colleagues refer to most frequently when asked about Ganz.  

“Howie was the perfect outside counsel,” said former MLB Commissioner Bud Selig. “Oftentimes, when things are emotional and tense, you learn a lot about people. He was always great to have around, both for his base of knowledge and from a temperamental standpoint. And he was one of the great management labor lawyers I’ve ever known.”   

Added Stern, the former NBA commissioner and Ganz’s Columbia classmate, “Howie was always the calm in the storm. We had many tussles and he was always the one in the room who made sure we didn’t lose our heads as well as our minds in any hotly contested situations.”

Stern’s departure to the NBA as general counsel in 1978 cemented the entrenched Proskauer-NBA connection, which continues to this day.  

Ganz is renowned as someone with a sharp wit — one as disarming to those on the other side of the table as it is charming to colleagues. Long before SportsBusiness Journal was around, another magazine profiled Stern, including an anecdote that had the sometimes volatile former commissioner jumping on a table to make a point during an NBA board of governors meeting. There was some doubt about the anecdote’s veracity. At the time, Ganz said of his classmate, “I wasn’t there, but I don’t believe it, because David is not that agile.”

On another occasion, National Basketball Players Association lead attorney Jeffrey Kessler was quoted by the New York Law Journal during a period of protracted negotiations at Proskauer as saying that the firm’s food wasn’t good. The friendly riposte from Ganz: “You’d never know that from the quantity of food he consumed.”

NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, who followed Stern from Proskauer to the NBA in 1981, recalls feeling a bit intimidated when he joined the firm. “There was this group of Howie, David Stern, Michael Cardozo and Bob Batterman that were like the Mount Rushmore of sports law — and the reason Proskauer built a significant practice,” Bettman said. “Howard is smart, articulate and fast on his feet. Nobody works harder and nobody’s more pleasant to deal with — regardless of how unpleasant a specific matter might be. That’s a pretty potent combination.”

Still, there’s no shortage of smart, well-educated labor attorneys in New York City. Few are as lauded for an ability to charm both sides of a bargaining table as Ganz.

“What’s made Howie such a successful labor lawyer and litigator is his ability to be empathetic,” said NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, who first met Ganz as a teenager. “He accepts that often the best result is a negotiated resolution, rather than to fight to the very end and risk an all-out victory — perhaps at the expense of an all-out loss.”

Marriage counselor

At the bargaining table, Ganz’s ability to keep things in order — and in perspective — proves valuable in the most difficult of situations.

“He’s a great organizer of the facts in any case and he always understood the importance of maintaining good relationships,” said Kessler, who as Winston & Strawn co-executive chairman has been a consistent adversary during his years representing the NBPA. “The relationship between players and owners is like a marriage — except that neither side can get divorced. Howie always knew that.”

Added former NBA COO Russ Granik, now vice chairman of Galatioto Sports Partners, “Howie’s not the kind of labor lawyer who bangs on the table. He could always deal with the other side without any acrimony — which is not always easy — so they didn’t think he was always trying to take advantage of them.”

That seems to make Ganz a notable exception. “In more than three decades of working with the guy, I’ve never seen him lose his temper,” said Proskauer Chairman Joe Leccese, who also co-heads the firm’s sports group of around 50 attorneys. “CBAs and litigation generally — inside or outside of sport — can be very emotional, but I have never seen Howard once lose his composure or come anywhere close to losing his composure.”

That “no-scorched-earth” policy is a tenet Ganz holds dear. It’s clear where that originated. In Ed Silver’s New York Times obituary, the union leaders with whom he negotiated eulogized him with the same high praise. Accordingly, to this day, Silver is the only person Ganz calls a mentor.  

“Ed’s word was relied upon by anyone he gave it to on either side of the table,” Ganz said. “He had as much respect from the union people he dealt with as the management side. So I never try to fool anybody.”

While with the New York Jets, longtime NFL personnel executive Mike Tannenbaum recalls working with Ganz on a number of cases involving the New England Patriots, the Jets’ arch-rival. Even with that charged atmosphere, “he was an incredibly calming influence and a great combination of being smart, yet pragmatic,” said Tannenbaum, now executive vice president of the Miami Dolphins.  

Joel Litvin, former NBA president of league operations and a 27-year employee of the league, admired Ganz’s roll-up-your-sleeves approach.

“Howie wasn’t afraid to get into the weeds on some pretty arcane subjects, including the salary cap,” Litvin said. “A lot of senior partners would leave that kind of work to someone more junior, but not Howie.”

One of Ganz’s most celebrated cases ended with him not receiving credit for the win. It was the Knicks/Heat playoff brawl in 1997, which resulted in six players being suspended. The NBPA appealed and Ganz helped the league prevail. The next day’s New York Post had him on its cover — misidentified as “Harold Hynes.”  

A framed copy of that 21-year-old newspaper page still hangs on Ganz’s office wall, along with pictures of his two New York City Marathon finishes, and one of Joe DiMaggio.

After so long on the job, Ganz quips that he’s reduced the practice of law to just two principles: “Never do today what is not due today” and “If you wait long enough, the other side will ask for an adjournment.”

Still, after watching so many collective-bargaining sessions end in the wee hours, could he suggest a better way?

“To a certain extent, it’s about holding out longer,” Ganz acknowledged. “It certainly could be a more efficient process, but so could many things.

“It should not be an objective to end up in strike or lockout. Having said that, you can’t be too afraid of it. … You have to be tough and resolute, but you have to know what it is you are being tough and resolute about, and whether that is worth it.”

With more than 50 years on the boards, the question of how much longer Ganz has until retirement seems appropriate.

“The answer is not very,” he said. “One of my obligations is transition my clients to other people, and I have been doing that for some years now.”

The sports industry has grown geometrically during Ganz’s tenure. That growth is something he does not see abating — even when changes in media consumption have everyone questioning what the new model for sports will be.

“Over the years, we’ve seen modest declines, but it’s been pretty much straight up,” he said. “You’d think at some point, either the fans would say, ‘I’m not paying for that’ or teams would say to their athletes ‘We can’t pay you that anymore.’ I don’t see that happening in my lifetime.”

Even a longtime litigator won’t argue against that.