Mark Lamping rarely watched baseball games sitting in one place when he was the president of the St. Louis Cardinals.

Instead he paced, walking around the stadium he was responsible for, meeting the people who made it one of the best-attended professional stadiums in America by the end of his tenure, sometimes picking up trash if he saw it lying around.

"We would always get so embarrassed, 'Dad, what are you doing?' " his son Brian Lamping said, chuckling fondly at the memory. "He has so much pride in being part of a team."

Lamping missed that feeling - it's part of what drew him back to working for a team.

To hear him tell it, Lamping's career happened mostly by luck and fortunate timing. There was another element, too. It was Lamping's constant desire for a challenge.

Now Lamping finds himself embarking on perhaps the biggest challenge of his career - guiding the non-football side of a Jaguars franchise without the rich history of the franchises he worked with in the past - the St. Louis Cardinals and the New York Jets and Giants. It's a franchise that has to work harder than most NFL teams to draw interest and sell tickets, and one with a new owner in Shahid Khan, who expects and plans for that to change dramatically.

"He has very, very high expectations," Lamping said. "Expectations without commitment and resources are just false. But if you're in a situation where someone's going to give you the resources, they're going to make the commitment, they're going to give you the authority to make decisions, but then they're going to hold you accountable, you'd accept that every day.

"When you have all those things going for you but all you're being asked to do is be accountable, we all want to be in those situations."

RISING FROM BUSCH

Sports were always close to Lamping, he was a fan and athlete all his life. A college soccer scholarship enabled him to attend Rockhurst College in Kansas City, Mo., after a modest childhood as the son of a carpenter, one of eight children.

But he couldn't start his career in the low-paying sports industry, not with a young family to support.

So Lamping worked for Anheuser Busch instead, a St. Louis institution and a company he'd worked for in college. He worked in sales, marketing and new products until becoming the company's head of sports marketing. Lamping did that until 1994, when the yearning for a new challenge surfaced.

Rather than remain in what was a comfortable situation, Lamping quit Anheuser Busch to become the commissioner of the Continental Basketball Association.

"It's easy to look for challenges if you've been fortunate," Lamping said. "I had no idea the magnitude of the decision I was making when I left Anheuser Busch. The benefit of being young. Didn't know how much of a risk I was taking."

Just four months after he started at the CBA, Lamping got a phone call from the then-president of the St. Louis Cardinals asking to have lunch.

He and his wife, Cheryl, were vacationing at the Ritz on Amelia Island and Cheryl knew immediately.

"I bet they want you to be the president of the Cardinals," she told him.

Crazy talk, he thought.

BEYOND DREAM JOB

Lamping became the president of the Cardinals when he was 36 at a time when the team was looking for change with baseball's strike looming.

"It's the type of job that people would laugh at you - it's not even fair to dream that you'd get the type of job I got in St. Louis," Lamping said.

He spent 14 years guiding the franchise, helping to lift it to a World Series championship in 2006, changing its marketing and overseeing the construction of a new stadium. His family experienced it with him. They attended games and his oldest son Brian even had a part-time job with the Cardinals in high school.

They never thought about leaving St. Louis until their children were grown and had graduated high school.

Leaving St. Louis was easy professionally. Lamping was 50 and jokes that he hadn't been promoted in 14 years.

He told Cardinals owner Bill DeWitt, "I just don't see myself being president of the Cardinals when I'm 65. He said, 'Why not?' I said, 'Because that would've been like 31 years at the same job.'"

It was time for a new challenge.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

The Giants and Jets approached him to be their stadium CEO in 2008.

"He had a certain CEO-type quality about him," Giants owner John Mara said. "A quality that you look for in executives."

He, Giants co-owner Steve Tisch and Jets owner Woody Johnson were impressed by Lamping's presence and his history. In getting the new Meadowlands Stadium settled, they needed someone who had experience building a stadium.

It was part of the journey, not a destination.

"He played a big role in helping us secure the Super Bowl for 2014, and he had the building up and running in a very efficient manner," Mara said.

"… He made it clear when we first hired him that this was not going to be his last job. He wanted this challenge and at some point he would probably be moving on. … I would have preferred that he stayed on a little bit longer but these jobs don't become available very often."

That's why when Khan called Mara and Johnson to ask if he could interview Lamping to be his team president, the two agreed they should allow it.

"He has a lot of energy, that's why I think he's looking at this new job as another great challenge," Cheryl Lamping said. "… He still wants to work very hard and he's not ready to slow down. He wants to be challenged."

Tania Ganguli: (904) 359-4401