<div class="quote_poster">Quote:</div><div class="quote_post">Ed Tapscott's going away party was Wednesday night. He didn't want to leave, and few wanted him to. He is the rare executive in or out of sports everybody likes. Tapscott was the first Charlotte Bobcats hire. Although the team is like a vapor, floating above Charlotte without really being part of it, Tapscott dug in. He was in the restaurants, on the boards, at the function and the meeting and the charity gala. He returned telephone calls and he lived in Charlotte. The president and chief executive officer, Tapscott resigned nine days ago when Bob Johnson, the Bob in Bobcat, demoted him. Demoting meant firing. Johnson knew Tapscott would walk. The organization's problems, however, will not go with him. Morale is low, turnover extraordinarily high and almost certain to become higher. The Bobcats are a testament to mismanagement and somebody has to be blamed and one of the neat things about being owner is you can assign the blame the way you would assign somebody to pick up your lunch. Every week seems to bring a surprise. Many employees have not been properly compensated for the extra hours they've put in, and the team has paid thousands of dollars in retroactive overtime. Season-ticket sales, the lifeblood of any franchise, have declined by about 3,000 since the team's inception. The number is staggering when you consider that the Bobcats played their first season in dank, discredited Charlotte Coliseum, and their second in gleaming new Charlotte Bobcats Arena. The arena generated excitement. But the excitement was more than offset by a whopping increase in ticket prices. C-SET, the digital cable network Johnson began and, to his credit, abandoned, is the gift that keeps on taking. It married the Bobcats to Time-Warner Cable, which limited the team's exposure and the millions of dollars that exposure could generate. Any local guy would have vetoed the network, and any sensible owner would have listened. The Bobcats desperately need a Charlotte presence. The folks that run the organization come from the big city, and I'm sure our ways seem quaint. Our ways are quaint. But Charlotte does business the way most mid-sized cities do. We kind of like the owner to walk among us. Johnson does own a place in downtown Charlotte, but he lives in the District of Columbia. The perception is that he takes in a game on the way to Aruba or Cancun or dinner with Mike (Jordan). Can you run a fledgling business from a distance of 400 miles? If you're not known for delegating, can you make an organization a success when hands on means hands on a cell phone?</div> Source
