Don Garber is a storyteller.
Over lunch at a Midtown Manhattan rooftop restaurant last month, as he chronicles his journey from Bayside, Queens to the NFL offices on Park Avenue to MLS commissioner, it is clear he knows it is the little details that make a story sing.
He didn’t just work at a gas station in high school, it was Barney’s Gulf, a sponsor of the Tony DePhillips Little League baseball team he played for. He didn’t just deliver newspapers, he learned how to properly fold up the Long Island Press to toss while riding his Stingray bike. He reels off the names of characters he has met along the way, like his wife Betsy’s boss at public relations firm Ruder and Finn, who told her she could find Betsy a better match “than this knucklehead”. “We’ll be married 39 years,” he notes. Or the man who ran the farmstand he worked at during summer break while a student at SUNY Oneonta.
He drops a few surprises, too. Garber’s resume may start at a vocational school near LaGuardia Airport, but his first year and a half after college was spent sleeping in a Ford van, working at bars and installing irrigation lines to pay his way across the U.S. and Mexico with some buddies.
“Old guys have great stories,” Garber says, with a smile.
Next month will mark 25 years for…
