AD Mark Hollis overcomes painful past to guide MSU sports

EAST LANSING – Of the failures that came to mind, Mark Hollis was close to settling on a recap of the redesigned Spartan head logo — introduced in 2010, vehemently scorned and quickly withdrawn — when he looked out at his audience of college kids.

A featured speaker in a presentation called Failure: Lab on April 1, 2014 at Michigan State’s Wharton Center, Hollis decided to wing it with a story from his own early adulthood. He told of the day he came home to see his mother crying, learned his parents were divorcing and decided to run from both of them.

“I failed by not providing comfort to a woman who was in a lot of pain,” Hollis, MSU’s athletic director since 2008, said to the crowd that night. “In many ways, I feel like I’ve been running ever since. And I think it’s something that so many of us do.”

Two months later, Beverly Hollis died at age 73 of kidney failure in a care facility in Port Huron, a few miles from where she and Joe Hollis raised their only child in Lexington. She had several health issues and one psychological disorder that prevailed through her life, Mark Hollis said.

The story of her Munchausen syndrome, in which the affected feigns illness to gain attention, is part of the story of where MSU athletics is today. And it’s a story Hollis wants to tell, for anyone like him who faces depression and loneliness and isn’t sure what to do about it.

“It’s been hard through my life and I think it’s something a lot of people struggle with, and if you don’t talk about it ... talking about it is the best solution,” said Hollis, who has sought professional help at different times in his life. “As you get older, you try to instill in people, ‘It’s OK to make a mistake. It’s OK to be a little different, a little goofy. It’s OK to not have perfect life.’ That’s what I naively thought I had all through high school. And there is no such thing as a perfect life. There is no such thing as a perfect family.”

There’s no such thing as a perfect athletic department, either, but there’s no record of a better stretch in the history of Michigan State’s. With a new school year about to begin, MSU has the defending national champions in women’s cross country, a top-10 football team led by a coach Hollis targeted from the start of a 2006 search, and a men’s basketball coaching legend he has worked hard to keep in East Lansing.

Tom Izzo was asked this week if he’d still be at Michigan State if Hollis weren’t the athletic director.

“That’s a question nobody’s asked me and it’s a little bit loaded because I could give a bad answer,” Izzo said. “But if you want an honest answer? He has been instrumental in keeping me here.”

And that coaching search that brought Mark Dantonio?

“I’m sure he wasn’t everybody’s choice, (Hollis) kind of went out on a limb a little bit,” said Izzo, who was a member of that search committee along with then-athletic director Ron Mason and others. “I was blown away by the info I had in my hands on each candidate. I mean, an arm’s worth. That’s Mark Hollis. If he told me he was about to hire Jack the Ripper, I’d probably say, ‘God, he must have cleaned up his act.’ That’s how much I believe in Mark.”

The summer saw Hollis named the 2015 recipient of the National Football Foundation’s John L. Toner Award for excellence in athletics administration, chosen for the 2015 class of the National Association of Collegiate Marketing Administrators Hall of Fame and appointed 2016-17 chair of the Division I Men’s Basketball Committee — amid investigations into MSU’s softball coaches that Hollis called “dramatically stressful,” though no charges resulted.

There’s “an aura around Michigan State athletics right now,” Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione said, and there’s a brand name built largely on creative events. Hollis came up with the oft-imitated 2001 “Cold War” hockey game at Spartan Stadium, 2004 “BasketBowl” game at Ford Field and 2011 Carrier Classic basketball game on the deck of the USS Carl Vinson. And there’s more ahead.

“It’s been eye-popping, really, to see what he pulls off,” said Castiglione, one of Hollis’ closest friends in the business, who will chair the basketball committee this year. “That machine of a mind spits up those ideas, and the way he connects one group with another is just remarkable.”

And it started long before Hollis got to Michigan State.

Reconciling the past and present

The early Hollis events included make-believe basketball games in his basement — he was both teams and the announcers — and one-man plays he would put on for neighbors in the small town of Lexington. His father, Joe Hollis, managed a trailer park near Lake Huron, and at 8 years old the young Hollis created, mowed and lined a baseball field, using chicken wire for the backstop.

Hollis told the Failure: Lab crowd that his ideas, then and now, are about gathering people together and “trying to do something better than the thing before, for fear that people won’t come if you don’t.”

Joe Hollis was a preacher and a principal and later a lobbyist for Macomb County Schools, and he wasn’t around much for his son’s games. Mark Hollis coached all three of his kids — T.R. (22), Katy (20) and Mike (16) — and will be at as many of Mike’s Lansing Catholic soccer games as he can make this fall.

Like many, Hollis can see cause and effect in his childhood and his parenting. And when his MSU staff laments how long it takes him to make a decision, he said he thinks of the “high fear factor” he had as a kid, petrified of making a mistake and incurring the considerable wrath of his father.

“My dad, while he did a lot of great things, I’m not sure he was the best husband,” Hollis said. “They hid a lot of that from me, over my years as an elementary and high school kid.”

It was shortly after Hollis’ 1981 high school graduation when his parents told him they were divorcing, and when he realized they had held on that long only for him.

Michigan State became his world; serving as a manager for Jud Heathcote’s basketball program became his purpose; people such as Izzo, a roommate and his future best man, and Nancy Donnellon, his future wife, became his family.

Hollis reconciled with his father, though. And while they never became extremely close, Hollis realized how closely his father followed his career after a heart attack claimed 64-year-old Joe Hollis’ life in 2004.

“He kind of had his own life, and I kept my distance from that life,” Hollis said. “But I know, going through his clippings and what was left of his life after his heart attack, that there was a lot of pride there.”

Things were much more difficult with Beverly. Munchausen syndrome, also called factitious disorder, is a serious condition that is difficult to treat, and it was not diagnosed until after Hollis was gone from home.

Hollis said accounts from rapper Eminem about his mother’s struggles with it helped crystallize his own situation, and that depression and paranoia also plagued Beverly.

“It got worse as she got closer to passing away,” Hollis said of his mother. “In her mind she thought people were coming to get her. Thought people were trying to hurt her. One of my recollections as a child, against my dad’s desire she would cart me off to doctors and chiropractors to find things that were physically wrong with me. I was feeling fine. And I didn’t quite understand it then. She was always too sick to do anything, and I didn’t know why.”

Beverly was there on July 18, 1986 in Nancy’s hometown of Emmett for her son’s wedding, but the relationship remained strained and distant. She did not have much interaction with her grandchildren.

“I know she wanted to be close, but it was just hard for her, the way she was,” Nancy said of Beverly. “We loved her and it was hard.”

When real physical problems became apparent, Hollis tried to make up for lost time. He and Nancy took turns visiting her as her condition worsened, and Nancy was holding her hand when she passed away on June 11, 2014.

“We didn’t have much of a relationship up until right at the end,” Hollis said. “And I even asked myself, ‘Am I making these visits to take my guilt away, or am I making these visits to make my mom more comfortable?’ I’m not sure I ever got to the conclusion, but I did get to spend a lot of time with her.

“It was sad not to have a mom who knew the grandkids very well. She never came to visit. I know she loved me and I always sensed that she was proud of what I accomplished. She probably had a tough childhood of her own that led to a lot of her issues. We tried to have those conversations (about her condition), but they became very frustrating at times. So we just went more to compassion than confrontation, at the end.”

Hollis is rarely at a loss for words, but he had to stop and gather himself for a few seconds on that Wharton Center stage as he discussed his mother.

“I’m gonna walk off this stage and grab a napkin or a Kleenex,” he told the Failure: Lab audience. “But I ask you: When’s the last time you sat down with your family and had dinner? When’s the last time you gave a hug? When’s the last time you told your mom and dad you love them? When’s the last time someone did that to you?”

Walks and talks

Hollis sat in his Jenison Field House office last week after walking over to an MSU field hockey practice and chatting with coaches and players. Walks and visits like that are therapeutic for Hollis, and he said he needed this one after some frustrating financial news.

MSU will operate with a $107 million budget in 2015-16, an increase of nearly $5 million from the previous budget year. Its facilities are for the most part opulent and updated, and the past two years have seen record fund raising – $48.9 million in 2013-14, $46.6 million in 2014-15 – that have allowed more than $18 million to be put toward endowments.

Still, it’s a basketball and football world, the salaries and facilities aren’t getting cheaper and some of MSU’s 25 sports are ill-equipped to compete for championships. Sport cutting looms as a threat at MSU and elsewhere as the pressure to better compensate athletes increases — $850,000 has been added to this year’s MSU budget to fund cost of attendance beyond scholarships — and cable TV revenue is not guaranteed to continue mounting.

“We’re good this year,” Hollis said. “I’m concerned about the future. There are so many uncertainties in our business right now, that’s where the concern is.”

So Hollis took a walk, like he did through the streets of Indianapolis late on Dec. 3, 2011 after MSU’s crushing football loss to Wisconsin in the Big Ten title game. He had a conversation, like he did every day with Izzo during Cleveland’s courtship of the coach in 2010 — conversations Izzo said were a big part of him staying.

Those two hopped on a golf cart after a football loss late in the 2006 season, with John L. Smith’s era ending and Dantonio’s hire just weeks away. They drove around and talked to MSU fans, promised better days, joked around.

“It was just a cool moment, you know?” Izzo said. “I think about those things sometimes because probably no one knows about that except the few people we talked to that day.”

Hollis said he had a conversation about a year ago with a headhunter who warned him: “You don’t want to be the last one left.”

In other words, get out before Izzo and Dantonio leave. But Hollis, who was recently bumped to more than $900,000 a year – and who donated $1 million to MSU in 2012 – figures he’ll be around to hire their replacements whenever they retire.

There are more successes to chase, including a basketball game in Greece that remains a high priority for Hollis. And there are failures that continue to motivate.

“Everybody has families that have challenges,” Hollis said. “And in the end, you have to say, ‘OK, what my mom and dad gave me led to something that’s been pretty productive for Nancy and our three kids and Michigan State.’ I try to take the positives from both of them. But there are times when ...”

And then Hollis choked up, sitting at the round table in his office, briefly at a loss for words.

“There are times where depression or feeling lost were really strong emotions, throughout my life,” he said after gathering himself. “And to this day, obviously, to this day. And it’s what drives you.”