Legal News

Law Blog Lawyer of the Day: John K. Mara, Esq.

By Peter Lattman

We’re still flying high after the Giants gigantic win, and it’s going to take some serious will power not to scoot across the street from Law Blog headquarters to watch Big Blue parade down the Canyon of Heroes. Joining his team on the celebratory drive down Broadway will be John K. Mara, Esq., the team’s president and CEO. Mara joined the Giants — his family’s business — in 1991 after — what else — practicing law.

Mara (BC, Fordham Law) practiced law for more than a decade before joining the Giants He began his career as a lawyer at Vedder Price, where he specialized in labor and employment law. A couple of years later he moved to Shea & Gould, where he practiced until joining the Giants in 1991. He is one of 11 children of Wellington Mara, an patriarch of the NFL who died in 2005. Wellington’s father Tim, a bookmaker, bought the team in 1925 for either $500 or $2,500, according to the Times obit.

In 2006, Mara told the New York Post that he came close to never becoming a lawyer. At Fordham Law, a professor ticked him off. “I was sitting in the law library . . . and this one law professor I had, he was kind of a wiseass,” Mara told a reporter. “He was somebody who would tease me from time to time about the performance of the Giants. He kind of pointed at me, laughed at me and were it not for a friend of mine sitting next to me, restraining me, I think I would have killed him. Thank God, I didn’t. I never would have gotten my degree, much less been admitted to the bar.”

Back in November, the Law Blog went to the Giants-Cowboys game at the Meadowlands. Our team lost 31-20 in an incredibly frustrating defeat and we’ve got to admit, we had had it with the team. On our way back to the car, the Law Blog remembers telling our buddy that we were tired of the Coach Coughlin-Eli Manning era and thought the team should move on. Ye have little faith Law Blog! The Giants never forgot that “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” Remember that phrase we highlighted yesterday? We brought in George Will’s “Men at Work” so we could share the following passage:

Pitching, like politics and marriage and other difficult undertakings, illustrates the axiom that “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” Which means: In the real world, be ready to settle for something short of everything. “There are pitchers,” Rick Dempsey says, “who, when you score a run off them, you can see you’ve ruined their perfect day and they lose their competitive edge. Then the dam breaks and they give up six, seven runs.” Does Hershiser go to the mound in the first inning planning to pitch a complete game? “A perfect game,” Hershiser replies. “If they get a hit, then I am throwing a one-hitter. If they get a walk, it’s my last walk. I deal with perfection to the point that it is logical to conceive it. History is history, the future is perfect.”

Congratulations Giants! What a season!

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 05, 2008 (boomark / email).