Good afternoon. And welcome to todays distinguished speakers scare on series. And to open the program to lay we are delighted to open up for this very special event and in the history of Dicks Sporting Goods which i could get the book early and read its a great book and a great story if you have not gotten a chance i strongly urge you to do that we are glad to have you here today and welcome you home. Welcoming our invited guest in particular to the new Vision Business Academy students and the district of our region here today in particular if you are not familiar with University Forum its a Membership Organization to bring together people who share a commitment to the university and our Great Community to strengthen the bond between the two our mission is to enter energize and engage in in which the university as we work to establish the premier university and welcome any of you that are interested to join the membership it brings great people together for outstanding events just like this we have people in the lobby from current members and Staff Members are happy to give you more information if you would like to join please check to be sure your phones are silent and we will have the opportunity to ask questions and then we have microphones available the staff will come over to get you the microphone so as you finish your meal and dessert its my pleasure to introduce our great president. [applause] thank you jason welcome to members and guests its great to see so many people here its a great event one of the long time supporters for what he has done for us over the course of his career but also the new Distribution Center and the belief and thank you for all that. Thank you very much. [applause] of course he wont be talking about that. We are talking about his book today how we play the game you cant see it that my dog enjoyed mine. But it has been an exciting semester did you hear one of our faculty members won the nobel prize . [applause] in chemistry. And stanley joined the faculty in 1988 we put them on a management track and took him out of science he said i had to go to a place that would support me he couldve gone anywhere he will be receiving the nobel prize what a humble man we had any fit for him last friday he gave his remarks we had the chairman remarks were wonderful but it was the hundreds of students that came up to him and he did not leave that room until he signed autographs and they finally had to carry him away to the room because he had another event there was a Chinese Opera performance but he gave remarks and stayed on stage and show cans with everybody there and was the last one to leave hes also a great man and a gray ambassador for being of university. The freshman class is all in and accounted for 1000 transfer students 1500 new graduate students thats a record for us working really hard to increase graduate enrollment we have 91 new students that doctor of Pharmacy Program one student over the goal we have 231 students the cohort will bring them around 330 in the spring of 2021 its a Long Time Coming for that a little more than 14000 undergrads which is a number we want to maintain with a high school gpa is a great group of students and they all support in so many ways even through their volunteer work we also celebrated a new name returned it to the college of nursing its now known as the Decker College there are Board Members here today and the Decker Foundation thank you so much and with that we will be expanding that college into speech and language pathology. That is exciting construction and is still ongoing you have plenty of time to go over there and watch the renovation it is quite a transformation they are doing to the building it is a stateoftheart facility its one of the original buildings that was built here also in r d building and also acquired park street and the state has given us funds to renovate to innovate the pharmaceutical sciences with the rest of University Also opening an elder care clinic still a supporter of all the activities there but looking at our building is now a parking lot but industry would like to partner with us is all i have to say today all stand all the tim time. We will talk more about winningham and the achievements so thank you for being here so now to introduce him mister myers who will introduce him. [applause] first of all thank you for coming today and i am thrilled to introduce my father author of the book how to play the game in the words of the great yankee i would like to say thank you for making this. [laughter] i can promise you will not be disappointed with what he has to say about the history and just a few blocks up the road that before he comes up here as someone who has known him longer than everyone else i want to tell you a few things like back when our stepmom sister died of cancer he decided to do something to sponsor a Fishing Contest with all proceeds going to the american cancer society. He wont tell you that when calvin charities was tried to feed people on thanksgiving he donated over 100 turkeys and when he got word there was not enough he donated more we were robbing peter to pay paul as a business he will tell you about his laser focus and mission to expand the store because thats the way we referred to it growing up because what other store was there . His focus was also on the betterment to recognize the life lessons following our dads example and created sports matters foundation. And he also wont tell you and after the area was hit with the most horrific flood what do they need . I said they need anything and everything we got. Because families in need. The next day truck after truck after truck came rolling into our area hundreds of thousands of dollars of worth of coats him backpacks and clothing and sneakers. You also wont tell you that when the company needed a new Distribution Center to service the northeast corridor it was his first choice of those 400 jobs that created the Distribution Center open 10 miles up the road. One of the many cliches never forget where you came from. He never forgot where he came from. Yet another School Shooting happened in parkland florida and he wont tell you is when he called me to tell me of his commitment to do something. What i will tell you is the voice was not that of the ceo of a corporation he was just my brother, a kid who was angry and led to do something. And to say this will be bad this will cost us a fortune , but i dont care. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome home my big brother and ceo of Dicks Sporting Goods. [applause] thank you everyone for allowing me to be here so congratulations. When my sister again, kim thank you for the introduction if they said they would introduce you like this. [laughter] and you thought of all the things you did to them when you were a kid it would make you pretty nervous because some of the things i did to my poor sister was just terrible she always told me she would get me back and she never did. I thought this would be at. She was making fun of me one day and she wanted to go water skiing. She was just like a little sister to be a pain in the neck i said i will take you. So we went around the lake twice and the second time there is a huge section of only pad you dont want to go swimming in those but i took a right to the lily pads she got right in the middle and i slow down. [laughter] and i dropped her right into them she was yelling and screaming. [laughter]. A thank you for allowing me to be here today to talk about basically three things. They allow sports and whats happening in the new sports today and how important it is for our kids and then a bit about what we did from the firearms standpoint and why i actually wrote the book. Not far from where we are now this is the original store that my father started a. Of the way he started this business, he was a kid working not far from here and his dad was killed in a car accident when he was young so he spent a lot of time fishing in the rivers of his grandfather and it started t to dry up in 1948 or o and he said to my father i know you are a big fisherman. He put together in order for us to get into the tackle business. My father put hi his or her together to get into the tackle business and he told the story, and i talked about this in the book, he told the story every year he stayed up a little bit later. By the time he told my kids, he stayed up all night long but it was only two sheets of paper so i have no idea what he was doing all night but he said he did. He went back the next day, gave the order and it was obviously a bad mood today. He told my dad he didnt know what he was doing. My father grabbed a piece of paper and never went back, went to his grandmothers house and was really upset. This was a depression ridden den family. They had nothing. His grandmother finally said what would it take for you to do this ourselves. He said 300. She walked to the back of the kitchen and reached into the cookie jar and took out 300, gave it to him and said go start your own business so he went to start this business and it started really small. We used to tease him about how small it was because if you look right here, it was so small the post office didnt give it a full mailing address. 453 and a half quart street. That is a pretty small place. He ran his place of business and did well some years and not so well other years. Then he went out of business. He opened up a second store and went out of business. Six weeks or eight weeks later got back into business but when he went out he made sure nobody lost any money. He made sure he gave all the products he could to the suppliers, he sold his house and car come had to mov, had to movh his mother. My mother just had me and was pregnant with kim. She had to move back in with her parents but he made sure nobody lost any money. About eight weeks later he got back into business and back on court street and always kind of did okay but he was always in debt. He had a great story he would always look at me and say which i didnt understand at the time he would say if i had when i moved i would truly be a wealthy man and a lot of people feel that way. But he had a great empathy for kids. He was a tough guy. He was a tough old school guy. He wasnt this warm and cuddly guy on the outside but he had a really good heart on the inside and one of the things he did was he read it how Little League was played. There used to be 14 in binghamton, one on the north and east, south and west. He thought that wasnt right that more kids should have an opportunity to play so he got together with his buddies from an insurance agencies and a few others and pu have put togethers league and he had four teams on each side of town. Now instead of 60 kids being aboubeing outof place, there wet could play plus its a farm league together so about 400 playing organized baseball, they have a place to go, a place they could go and stay out of trouble. He did that with one pre requisite. You couldnt buy the equipment because he didnt want it to look like he was doing it to feather his own nest so to speak. He started Little League and i dont know how many thousands and thousands have come through that. We are redoing the field and its so great to be able to go back to the field today and see the place that we grew up and had so much fun with. My father was binghamton and always felt the community had to do well in order for him to do well so he told me when i was 13yearsold he was going to put me to work and teach me responsibility. So when i was 13yearsold i went to work in the story about 15 i started working fulltime, summer vacations and christmas vacations. I did that all through high school and i can tell you right now honestly i hated every minute of it. [laughter] i wanted nothing to do with it. I got ready to go off to college and thought im never going back to that business. I remember my father and donna dropped me off at school and we had the National Lampoon vacation Station Wagon with billboard on the side. Ours was white as opposed to green but i remember watching them leave. I didnt want anything to do with the business. I wanted to do Something Else. I remember watching them drive away and the only thing that came into my mind was Martin Luther kings famous speech of free at last, thank god im free at last ive never got to go back to that place. As i got ready to go back my freshman year i got a job as a law clerk i was so proud of it i told my father and going to work, and going to be a law clerk which is like a gophers go for it is going to be there and i was excited. She looked at me and i cant tell you exactly what he said [laughter] but he said you are working in this store. Its what puts food on the table, its why you were going to college, you are working here so i worked there. I worked there again and tim was there by this time and i can tell you that i still hated every minute of it. I wanted nothing to do with it. I get ready to ditch out of college and had no interest in getting into business but my dad got sick. He had a double bypass operation back in 1975 and never quite made it back emotionally or physically from that experience and so all of the time im thinking im going off to work at Price Waterhouse and want to go to law school and i found myself having to come back into the business to help my father who was sick. I was the oldest of five and came back to these stores in binghamton into something happened i dont know if it was six months, eight months, nine months but at some point i fell in love with the business and its a love affair that i talked about so is on fire today. I love getting up in the morning and going to work. I love the business end of the people i work with and i love that it gives us an opportunity to try to make a difference in some things in this world whether it is in the sports piece or firearms piece. If you work in retail, im going to tell you you get to see people at their very best. You see people with their very best and one of the times you can see people a people at theit christmas time. I remember it was around 4 00 in the afternoon Christmas Eve and this woman comes barreling into the store. I said how are you doing can i help you with anything and she said i have to find a gift for my sisterinlaw. I said no problem, we have these sweaters and it took her over to this stack of sweaters we just marked down that were not selling very well. She looked at them and looked at me an and said those are the ugliest sweaters ive ever seen and i looked at her and they said they really are thats why the marked them down but over here we have some others and i looked over at her and shes Still Standing there so we walk back over and that i have some other ones over here. She picked up this ugliest one of the bunch looks at it and says i will take this one. My sisterinlaw is the biggest bitch ive ever met. [laughter] i said Merry Christmas and off she went. [laughter] so, a couple things. Im going to embarrass a couple of people today. Im going to tell you a couple stories about some people in Binghamton Mets hav that had anl impact on my life and is Katie Madigan here . Stand at the second. [applause] going to tell you the Katie Madigan story. I wasnt the best student in the world. Katie, when i told her that, we talked a few years ago and i thought she would say you werent that bad, she looked at me and said yeah you really werent. [laughter] i didnt apply myself as much as i should have. So i was taking french from tv and we were getting ready for the region finals and she said you are not going to pass the finals and i said i know. [laughter] she said listen, i tell you what if you write a paper on a french author, french artist, anything french, three page paper i will exempt you from the final. I said thats great. She said theres one more stipulation. I said what is it, i will write the paper. She looked at me and said that last stipulation you have to promise me you will never take another french class so i never took another french class. Td is the one that pushed me to st. John Fisher College and was a big impact. I think teachers dont realize the impact they have on kids when they are having the impact on them. I know i talk about mr. Feldman who was a teacher at north high and im not sure what ever happened to him but he had a big impact on my life in a public speaking class. I think teachers are so underrated, underpaid, underappreciated. One of my favorite movies is mr. Hollands opus. The teacher had no idea the impact he had on those kids until long after they graduated and he was ready to retire. So katie, thank you very much. [applause] my clicker isnt working very well which means im going to have to embarrass somebody else. Wheglenn small, where is the gl . If it were not for glenn small, we wouldnt be here today. We lost our banking relationship with First City National bank years ago. It was around the savings and loan crisis in 1987. Regulators got really tough and binghamton First City National bank said we cant think with you anymore. We never missed a loan payment, we were never late, cleaned up online at the end of 30 days but they said youve got 60 days to get another loan. We cant think with you any longer. We always were in debt to fund our inventory and all that. Later he said to me theres a guy at the Binghamton Savings Bank named glenn small you should probably talk to him and maybe he can help. So we sat down and i told him kind of what was going on. Glenn and bill brinker from the savings bank stepped up to provide us a line of credit in order for us to stay in business anif it hadnt been for him, the bank taking a chance on us, we wouldnt be here today so thank