Cover Story

New York Gold

Former Detroiter Daniel Doctoroff embraces

the Big Apple and an Olympic dream.

COLIN MINER
Jewish Renaissance Media

New York City
aniel Doctoroff is standing in a private
room on the fourth floor of the 21 Club
in midtown Manhattan, telling people for
what must be the millionth time about
how someone thought he was crazy.
"He was very quick to put me in my place," says
Doctoroff, New York City's deputy mayor for eco-
nomic development and rebuilding. "He was very
clear about what he thought about what I was doing."
Doctoroff, 44, is talking about Mike Moran, the
former communications director of the United States
Olympic Committee and a newly hired consultant for
NYC2012, the group — started by Doctoroff in
1996 — that's trying to bring the world to New York
for 16 summer days nine years from now
When Doctoroff started NYC2012, Moran let him
know in no uncertain terms that it was beyond
unlikely the summer Olympic Games would come to
New York in 2012. Or ever.
While it's not clear how things will turn out — the
International Olympic Committee doesn't make its
decision for two more years — this much is certain:
Moran is now helping Doctoroff spread the word. He
is just the latest skeptic to be won over by Doctoroff,
a Detroit boy turned New York City's biggest booster.
"It was very wonderful place to grow up,"
Doctoroff says of his upbringing, first in Royal Oak,
where he lived until he was 11, and then
Birmingham. "It was idyllic in many ways. Kids were
free to roam the streets. We played a lot of sports; had

D

Colin Miner is a reporter for the New York Sun.

4/18
2003

56

a lot of fun.
"It was a free and open space — a confined, rela-
tively small neighborhood that was the world to us."
Doctoroff, with his three younger brothers, grew up
in a stable, well-rounded home. His dad, the late
Martin, a former FBI agent who became a lawyer and
then a Michigan Appeals Court judge, and his moth-
er, the late Allene, a respected clinical psychologist,
were married for 43 years.
And all four Doctoroff sons have translated their
upbringing into successful careers: While Dan, who
was actually born in New Jersey, may have the highest
profile, his brothers are no slouches. Andrew is a suc-
cessful lawyer in Detroit; Thomas lives in Shanghai,
where he works for the largest ad agency in China, a
subsidiary of J. Walter Thompson; and Mark, after a
career working for Goodyear in Russia, is back in the
United States where he has started a culinary insti-
tute.

Michigan Moment

As Dan is quick to point out, his dad also taught
them to appreciate a certain amount of hero worship.
"It was, by far, one of the more formulative
moments of my life," Doctoroff says of October
1968, when his father took him to Tiger Stadium to
see Detroit battle St. Louis in the World Series. "I
remember so much about that game, that team, that
season."
It is a moment that he ranks with his wedding and
the birth of his children.
If anything was missing from this slice of heaven in
Michigan, it was religion.
"Let's just say my upbringing was ultra-Reform,"
says Doctoroff. "I wasn't even bar mitzvahed as a kid.

I kind of gradually learned to speak Hebrew as I was
getting ready to get married. My parents certainly had
mixed feelings about how traditional our home
should be."
It wasn't until Doctoroff — who went to
Birmingham Seaholm High School where he was one
of about 15 Jews in a school of about 700 — headed
off to Harvard University and met Alisa, now his
wife, that religion started to become important.
From the time they met freshman year, he quickly
realized there were things he just never experienced
growing up.
"When I first asked her out, it was for a Friday
night and she said OK, but she couldn't ride any-
where and I had no idea what she was talking about,"
he remembers. "Over the past 25 years, though, that's
changed and it's gradually become very important in
my life."
Alisa also became very important to him as they
stayed together through Harvard, then moved to
Chicago where Dan attended the University of
Chicago Law School.
Then came 1983 and a job offer for Alisa in strate-
gic planning for Home Box Office. There was one
problem. A big problem.
"The job was in New York and it just seemed like
such a horrible place to live," Dan Doctoroff says. "It
was big, impersonal, intimidating — a place that
seemed to make people seem insignifcant. It was too
fast, too sophisticated, not a place to start a family."
But he loved Alisa and he moved, finishing his law
degree at New York University. Then, despite no
background in finance, he went to work in invest-
ment banking at Lehman Brothers, a job that, three
years later, led to Texas billionaire Robert Bass wooing
NEW YORK GOLD on page 58