Winger has inherited a team that appears stuck in waist-deep mud, not good enough to contend for a championship and not bad enough in most years to win an early pick in the annual draft lottery. Winger is 43 now, with a wife and children of his own, and no one within the basketball industry would describe him as a “stray.” Late last month, Ted Leonsis, the CEO of Monumental Sports & Entertainment and the Wizards’ principal owner, hired Winger to resuscitate the Wizards as the new president of Monumental Basketball. “That’s just who they are as people: ‘Stray cats? Bring ’em in.’ And I was a stray cat.”
“That underscores Ron and Cathi,” Winger says. And the Shapiro family - which includes Shapiro’s wife, Kathryn Adams Shapiro, and seven children - treated Winger like one of their own. Shapiro became not just a mentor but also a father figure. Over the next several years, Winger and Shapiro developed a bond that endures. Winger wanted advice on how to enter the sports business.
There, on a routine walk through a school building, he and another undergraduate spotted a placard: Ron Shapiro, a powerhouse agent for baseball players, was scheduled to give an on-campus talk.
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