Hal Brown is the kind of guy you'd think should host a big holiday shindig. He's friendly, and when he greets you he grasps your hand in a firm shake and gives you his full attention - and a smile that stretches his mustache and crinkles the corners of his eyes.

    That posture - and his familiar red jacket - will serve Harold K. Brown well in coming weeks. As president of the 20th annual Plymouth Holiday Bowl, San Diego’s homegrown college football bowl game, Brown will preside over several days' activities, culminating in the Dec. 29 game between, as yet, undetermined teams.

    It’s too early, Brown concedes, to predict which teams will play, but he hopes it will be "teams that will give us a good game and bring a lot of fans."

    The pre-Bowl hoopla is well under way. The first-ever Holiday Bowl-related vintage car race, the Chrysler Classic Speed Festival at the Naval Air Station North Island in Coronado, a hole-in-one golf event and a basketball tournament are recent history. Other related events, drawing an impressive list of sponsors, include a kickoff luncheon, a team day at Sea World (the original Holiday Bowl sponsor), a team day at the San Diego Zoo, a band festival and Navy luncheon. On game day, a parade with Cathy Rigby as grand marshal starts festivities, followed by an end-zone party, a reception, a tailgate party and finally, the game itself with festive and colorful pre-game and half-time celebrations involving the two university bands and 1,500 West Coast high school band members. A fireworks spectacle concludes the evening.

    As preparations are under way, Brown, 63, presides over a myriad of board meetings and other related Holiday Bowl commitments. A "red coat," or Holiday Bowl committee member since 1991, Brown acknowledges the prestige in such an appointment. Maximum committee membership is 100, with 93 self-sustaining people now donning red threads. Those on the committee recommend others, the board votes on those nominations and those selected are invited to participate, explains Brown.

    He was a natural to be asked to join the committee, considering that he calls his "hobby" his community involvement. "I really don’t have any hobbies; I’ve never had time for them. I guess you could call doing civic work my hobby." It is a hobby he has practiced widely since moving here in 1953.

    Overseeing all the Holiday Bowl planning has kept Brown busier than usual, although the retired associate dean of San Diego State University's College of Business Administration is never idle. Along with his civic activities, he works as a half-time consultant as director of the SDSU business college's Community Economic Development Certificate Program. Brown's interest in football always has been as a fan and spectator, never a player. As an athletic young man, he favored basketball - his motivation for entering Penn State University after he was graduated from high school in York, Penn.

    There he was an all-state basketball player as a freshman. He earned his bachelor's degree from SDSU, where again he played basketball, and his coach was Noel Mickelsen. Now, 40 years later, Brown and Mickelsen work together as red coats. "Hal, as a player, had a lot of athletic skills," Mickelsen remembers. "He was a fine athlete and a good team player." Through the years, since that time in the late '50s, their paths have occasionally crossed in civic activities.

    "Coming out of that experience, he showed he had leadership skills," Mickelsen says. "You could see he would be a leader, and he is."

    This landmark Holiday Bowl year - the 20th - challenges Brown and the other red coats to top increasingly high records from past years. When the Holiday Bowl was born in 1978, the economic impact to San Diego was $579,000, and the team payout was $218,645. For the past four years, the economic impact has averaged around $13.5 million, says Bruce Binkowski, associate executive director of the Holiday Bowl.

    "We are hoping for an economic impact in the same region this year," he says, a reasonable expectation because two out-of-town teams, one of them "most likely the WAC champion," will bring fans with them. This year’s team payout will equal last year’s highest figure since the bowl began, $1.4 million.

    Ten of the 20 bowl games have been sellouts, although none in the last six years. Game attendance, Brown says, has a lot to do with the teams selected and their ability to draw fans to San Diego. It also has to do with size of the stadium and the interest in the game itself, Binkowski adds. Attendance peaked in 1987 at 61,892 when Iowa and Wyoming played, but it hasn't topped 60,000 since 1991. "If we were to open the doors tomorrow," says Binkowski, "we would get around 45,000 to 50,000. We will be disappointed if we don’t get 60,000."

    Brown listed several personal goals he has as bowl president, and one is to generate more local interest in the game. "I'd like to find ways," he says, "to get more people involved and to get them to feel like it’s their bowl."

    Although Brown came to San Diego in the '50s, he moved around a bit. He earned his master's in business administration from Fordham University in New York City, and he has done work toward a doctorate at Claremont Graduate School of Business Administration. During the 1960s, Hal Brown was known in San Diego as an outspoken proponent of civil rights, gaining national attention as an articulate race relations spokesman.

    Before joining the faculty of SDSU in 1971, he taught junior high school in the San Diego Unified School District, did a tour as deputy director of the U.S. Peace Corps in Lesotho, Africa, and worked as an industry vice president and a commercial loan officer with a New York bank. At SDSU, he concentrated on helping local students succeed in small businesses. In 1987, when the Holiday Bowl was having its banner year, Brown had a banner year of his own of sorts. He, with Dr. JoAnn Cornwell and Joe Outlaw, co-founded the Black Economic Development Task Force. He served as its president until 1995. That task force has become the Community Economic Development Corp., Brown says, changing its name "to make it more inclusive."

    Today Brown has traded his basketball hightops for walking shoes that he wears when he and his wife La Verne take to the streets. They can be spotted all over San Diego. "On weekends," he says, "we walk six, seven, maybe even 10 miles each day." His football fan status extended to watching his son, Michael, play at San Diego State University. Michael and Brown's other son, Stephen, followed in their dad's basketball footsteps, Michael at SDSU and Stephen at Stanford. One of his joys when he slips away from Holiday Bowl duties is spending time with his only grandchild, 2-year-old McKenna.

    Hal Brown is a fine choice to chair the Holiday Bowl, which is considered, he says, "to be one of the country's more hospitable bowls." He is used to welcoming the outsider, as evidenced by his many roles from teacher to equal rights advocate to promoter of enterprise. Now he's welcoming the world to San Diego, striving to make this 20th the best Holiday Bowl yet.

James E. "Jim" Brown has taken on a job that only 31 men before him have attempted. He is chairman of the Task Force for Super Bowl XXXII, an appointment for which business and personal lives take a back seat for years prior to the event. But Jim Brown knew all of that going in; he's been in training to lead San Diego’s 1998 Super Bowl efforts for the past 30 years.

    A civic and business leader since age 25 when his father, Cadillac dealer Marvin K. Brown, suddenly died, Jim Brown has carried on the family legacy. Through the years, the car dealership and he have been involved in many of San Diego’s community activities - from donations to charitable groups' fund-raisers to heading up weighty civic efforts for the Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce.

    More to the current point, Brown has paid his dues in San Diego’s sports community by doing time on all the major committees - San Diego International sports Council, chairing the "Committee to Build San Diego Stadium" in 1967, Plymouth Holiday Bowl, San Diego Hall of Champions and 1992 Major League Baseball All Star Game - and sees the Super Bowl assignment as "the culmination of all those chairmanships. I’m 58 years old," he says. "This is sort of my swan song."

    When he was tapped to be chairman of the Task Force back in 1992, Brown characteristically took the idea under submission and went out "and sat on a rock" to mull it over. "I really thought about it long and hard. Sure, I was flattered, but I wanted to be sure the committee had chosen me for the right reasons and that I would be accepting for the right reasons." The genial Brown says he often finds the answers to tough, personal questions and quandaries by leaving the office, getting into the car and driving to a remote location where he solitarily makes lists of pros and cons while wrestling with a decision. Afterward, he locks the notes into his safe and refers to them from time to time. "It’s an exercise that forces me to get away, change the scenery and deal with myself."

    Brown came away from this particular rock-sitting session with a long list of reasons to accept the challenge, as well as answers to how to manage the Super Bowl's demands on his business and personal life. Dave Grundstrom, a 20-year employee and general manager of the dealership, was made a financial partner in the privately held company and took on the daily running of the business; Jill Brown, his wife, signed on to a number of committees and works alongside Jim. Their four children are grown and involved in careers ranging from computers to fashion.

    Bob Payne, president of Multi-Ventures Inc., a longtime sports booster and himself in that rarified company of 32 Super Bowl chairs (for San Diego’s only other game, in 1988), says plainly, "Jim fit all of the characteristics for a successful chairman; he came up through all the sports chairs, he's the right age, and he was able to restructure his business so he could take the time to do this. The level of sophistication it takes to put one of these things on keeps escalating . . . I mean, 31 years ago, the NFL decided to have a football game, opened the doors and everybody came. These days, it’s an extravaganza that happens to have a football game at the end."

    Brown agrees, recalling that at last year’s Super Bowl, when he finally eased himself into his seat at the stadium in Phoenix after an exhausting week-long, up-close-and-personal immersion into that city's effort as part of his on-the-job-training, he turned to Jill and said, "I can’t believe, after all of this, there's only a football game." For all the planning, pomp and pageantry, "the Christians and the lions should be on that field."

    Brown has one more important qualification for this job: his demeanor. Friends and acquaintances alike unfailingly describe him as humble, honest and upbeat. "To Jim, the glass is always half full, never half empty," says one board member. "He doesn’t lie in the weed she is upfront and sometimes shoots from the hip."

    "Your first impression of Jim, a sweet guy who tries to do the right thing, is exactly what he is," says a longtime customer and friend. "He always gives things a positive spin simply because that’s the way he sees them." Patti Roscoe, one of Brown's recruits to the Super Bowl Task Force as chairman of the community relations committee, adds, "Jim has the most subtle method of arm-twisting I’ve ever encountered."

Community Contributions

    As far back as he can recall, Brown worked for his father. Not only did he learn every detail of the automobile trade - from washing out the service bays to managing the used car lot - but also the responsibilities that go along with owning a successful and prominent business. "My dad always emphasized contribution to the community, that giving back was as important a lesson as selling cars," says Brown. "He not only told us (Brown and his sister) that, but he also lived it."

    As he moved into manhood, playing basketball at La Jolla High and hanging out with his friends, he also was imbued with social skills, and was expected to hold up his end at dinner table conversations with the likes of late financier and former Mr. San Diego C. Arnholt Smith, Lane & Huff's Jim Lane and other of his parents' prominent friends.

    Brown was graduated from the University of Arizona in 1961, went on to finish Advanced Dealership Management courses from the General Motors Institute. The early '60s found him newly married and managing the used car lot at Marvin K. Brown Cadillac. On the evening of May 8, 1964, Brown went from "a punk kid of 25, hanging around with the guys to hanging around with their fathers." That was the night his father died, after emceeing the retirement party for a La Jolla Country Club locker room attendant.

    "We suddenly had to do things differently. Jill and I started attending social events that we didn’t even know had existed before," Brown says. "I knew what was expected of me, how I was taught to pay back my community when I grew up and overnight I grew up in a hurry."

    Even after 33 years, Brown doesn’t complete a round of golf at La Jolla Country Club without visiting the plaque commemorating his father, installed by friends who also planted a tree at La Jolla Country Club's ninth green. "You see it there, just before you go up to the clubhouse for a drink."

    Brown's gentleness and sincerity seem at odds with the mainstream view of auto dealers. He brushes such comments aside and focuses on how business is done at "our company." When new sales personnel are brought on, he said, they are intelligent, speak well and have presence and good grooming. What they do not have is prior car sales experience. "We have found that breeds more bad habits than anything else." The number one rule for all Marvin K. Brown Auto Center employees is empathy with the customer.

    "If our sales staff can close between 25 percent and 35 percent of all contacts, that’s very successful. That's like being a .300 hitter, "The toughest thing in this business is being able to shake off that other two-thirds (of potential customers) who say 'no.'" And once again, he reaches back 33 years and recites "Dad's rules: 'You can’t take customer rejection personally; and don’t Monday-morning quarterback your decisions.'"

Not Just Cadillacs

    Marvin K. Brown Auto Center - "NOT just Cadillacs," Brown laughs. "No matter where I am, even if people are reading from a prepared bio, I am always introduced as head of Marvin K. Brown Cadillac" - is now a $60 million a year business, employing about 120 people full time. He supplemented the luxury cars with GMC trucks in 1988, added Buick products in 1990 and became the county's sole Hummer dealer in 1992. The Hummer addition "was never about huge volume, it’s just fun," he says, adding that 28 were sold in 1996.

    Brown's job as head of the Host Committee is picking the right people for the jobs and overseeing "an extravaganza with incredible economic value," says Payne. Boosters claim that San Diego will reap about $230 million from the week-long party and game, not including the national and international publicity the city will enjoy. The NFL has agreed to perform an economic analysis at the end of this year’s Super Bowl, better to gauge its impact for future years. And every year, it grows larger and larger.

    Brown is confident that Super Bowl XXXII "will set a new template" on how Super Bowls should be run, from the finances to including every faction of the community into the festivities. At this writing, the NFL's demand for $3.6 million has been raised and a small pot of money has been set aside to woo the Super Bowl to San Diego in 2002. "Some corporations that initially turned us down have come back to us," says Brown. "Instead of us hustling them, they're coming to us. In the car business, we’re not in that position very often."