Pucking Around With Sun's CEO

Scott McNealy almost bought Apple in 1996. I learned a lot about him by playing on his line in a hockey game.

It’s hockey playoff season, which prompted me to pull out this old story…

In the 1990s, in the middle of the dot-com boom, Sun Microsystems was one of the most explosively hot companies in the world.

While mind-boggling to consider today, in 1996 Sun got to within a few hours of announcing that it was going to buy Apple for around $5 a share. Apple was a train wreck. Steve Jobs had not yet returned. Sun was worth billions and its CEO, Scott McNealy, was a tech industry giant. The $5 a share offer was actually a huge premium. Apple shares that year had fallen below $1.

“We wanted to do it,” McNealy told a Silicon Valley dinner crowd in 2011. “There was an investment banker on the Apple side, an absolute disaster, and he basically blocked it. He put so many terms into the deal that we couldn’t afford to go do it.”

McNealy added: “If we had bought Apple, there wouldn’t have been iPods or iPads … I’d have screwed that up,”

It’s hard to even imagine what the world would be like right now if Sun had succeeded in scooping up Apple. No iPhones. No Apple TV. Maybe not even an Apple brand.

Anyway, since McNealy was such a huge character at the time, and I was a technology journalist for USA Today, I wanted to write a feature story about him. But I wanted a unique way to do it. So, I played ice hockey with him on his team.

By 1996, I had talked to McNealy many times – sometimes for interviews, and sometimes more socially at conferences such as PC Forum. I liked him. He was insightful about where technology was heading. Just as the consumer internet was being born, McNealy’s prescient motto – which became Sun’s motto – was “the network is the computer.” He was funny and irreverent. He’d say insulting things about Bill Gates during a time when Microsoft was the superpower of the tech universe. He loved mocking big consulting firms, saying in a talk I attended that their slogan should be: “You’ve got money; we’ve got a Hoover.”

Somewhere along the way, I learned that McNealy, who grew up in the Detroit area, played hockey. I grew up playing hockey in Binghamton, N.Y. So, sometimes we’d talk about our shared sport. That’s how the story concept came to mind. As far as I knew, I was the only technology journalist who played hockey, and so if I could play hockey with McNealy, I’d be able to write a story from a perspective that no one else could touch.

To McNealy’s credit, he thought this sounded like a “cool” idea. (He liked the word “cool.”) I packed up my hockey gear, flew to San Francisco, and met McNealy at a not-very-impressive rink behind a shopping center in Cupertino, Calif. He was then 41, and I was 36.

I was to play on McNealy’s team in a well-organized pickup game. A group from Sun met at this rink every week, split up into two teams, and played for about 90 minutes. To get really up close and personal, I played on his line – McNealy played center; I was his right wing.

This was not like Trump playing golf and “winning” every tournament. Or like Putin playing hockey and miraculously scoring eight goals in a game. Most everyone on the other team were Sun employees. They didn’t cut McNealy one bit of slack.

I wrote that the other players “tangle with him on the boards, run into him, steal the puck from him.” I gave McNealy one pass that sent him in on a breakaway, one on one against the goalie. The goalie stuffed him. After the game, I talked to the goalie – Jeff Zank, then an engineering manager at Sun. “Sometimes I joke that I have to let him score one or two to keep him happy,” Zank said. “But that’s not reality. He doesn’t get any special treatment. In fact, it might go a little the other way.”

McNealy didn’t cut me any slack, either. No coddling the journalist. He fed me one pass and I shot the puck over the net. He griped, “We don’t have any finishers on this line.” (I finally scored late in the game when I tipped in a shot from the blue line. He, I will note, did not.)

But actually, the whole evening was a blast. I enjoyed playing with him. I wrote in the story that he was a good passer, could hold the puck well in tight spaces, and worked hard to get to loose pucks and help in defense. Also, I said in the story that he was “stinky” under all that hockey gear – which he needled me about for years after.

Of course, the story was meant to shed some light on McNealy, not just report on an amateur hockey game in a rickety rink. He co-founded Sun in 1982. It started out making powerful desktop computers for business, dubbed “workstations” back then. Once the internet arrived, Sun made servers that could host web sites. The company helped develop the open-source software movement, and created the Java language for mobile computing. At its peak in 2000, Sun was valued at about $200 billion — super impressive in those days.

When I first met McNealy, Eric Schmidt, later of Google fame, was Sun’s chief technology officer. Ed Zander was president – he later became CEO of Motorola. One of Sun’s co-founders was Vinod Khosla, now a major VC. Kim Polese was a key member of the Java team. McNealy knew how to surround himself with top talent.

The hockey story was a window on all of that. “In business, his hockey playing adds to his aura,” I wrote. “It says he is competitive, unique, tough, fun, and even a bit childish – all adjectives that carry over to his management style.”

The post-2000 dot-com crash proved to be brutal for Sun. Sales of new machines dried up. Worse, as internet companies folded by the hundreds, they put their perfectly good Sun machines up for sale, flooding the market. Sun’s stock price collapsed and the company never got its glory days back. In 2009, Oracle bought Sun for $7.9 billion.

The way my story ended says as much about McNealy as anything.

Outside the rink, after hockey has cleansed McNealy of the executive mantle, it’s easy to see Scott the Hockey Player. The average Joe. McNealy calls his wife, Susan, on a payphone to say he’ll be home soon. He sits on a metal bench, dressed in a golf shirt, jeans, and moccasins with no socks. He sips Gatorade and becomes chatty. He pulls out a picture of his 4-month-old son Maverick and talks about the day Mav can start skating. He could be anybody.

Then he gets a thought. What if Bill Gates played hockey? What if McNealy could check him into oblivion? “That would be cool!” he says, showing that hockey and business do indeed mix.

McNealy is still very much around as an investor and board member.

Oh, and little Maverick McNealy? Yeah, he played hockey through high school. But now he’s a star on the PGA tour.

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This is the story as it appeared in USA Today on April 2, 1996. It was accessed through Newspapers.com.