I’m not much for hero worship. In a celebrity-obsessed culture, I wouldn’t ask Brad Pitt for a picture or an autograph if he was eating a cheeseburger next to me in the same restaurant. Ditto that for Britney Spears, a reincarnated Anna Nicole Smith, Paris Hilton, TomKat, or any of the other folks that grace weekly celebrity mags.
That said, there are less than a handful of people that have earned my deep admiration for their professional accomplishments. If I could build my Mount Rushmore with people whom I admire with a great respect and genuine humbleness for their particular genius it would have the following four visages:
Lou Holtz, legendary Notre Dame Coach, walks it like he talks it, a leader of men and master motivator. Quotable Lou:
“I never learn anything talking. I only learn things when I ask questions.”
Frank Sinatra, the Chairman of the Board, might have been the last real man, a legacy of a bygone era. Quotable Frank: “I like intelligent women. When you go out, it shouldn’t be a staring contest.”
Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player to ever lace up a pair of sneakers, had a will to win that surpassed his considerable God-given ability. Quotable Michael: “I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
Robert Mondavi, THE visionary for the U.S. wine industry we know today. Quotable Mondavi: “There are a lot of people with a lot of money, and I’m amazed they don’t understand what a great pleasure it can be to give.”
Unfortunately, if news accounts based on the new book on Robert Mondavi are true, it was precisely his philanthropic largesse that was his undoing.
I received my copy of “The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty” from Amazon.com yesterday. It’s a read I’ve been anxiously looking forward to.
Robert Mondavi accelerated my fascination with wine with his autobiography Harvests of Joy in the late 90s and I consider him (like many others) to be the preeminent figure in the modern wine industry. Likewise, I recently purchased the E&J Gallo autobiography published in the 90s so I could understand previous history—context if you will to know the past in order to understand the future.
I haven’t made it past the first chapter of “The House of Mondavi,” but the below articles all mention the book positively, with particular noteworthiness for evenhandedness.
If you haven’t planned to pick up a copy, you may consider doing so. Wine is a beverage to enjoy, but surely none of us would be sitting here writing about the good grape, fine wine, with such fervent interest if a market hadn’t been made some 40 years ago by Mondavi.
Article link: Virginie Boone, The Press-Democrat
Article link: Jon Bonne, The San Francisco Chronicle
Article link: Laurie Daniel, San Luis Obispo Tribune
Article link: Wall Street Journal Book Review
Article link: The Cork Board
Also, leave a comment. Who would be on your Mount Rushmore?