News Nevada - Mark Amodei Learned Lessons in Responsibility from High School Hoops
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By Unknown
Mark Amodei learned about shouldering the responsibility for a constituency as a junior at Carson High School. It was a lesson taught to him during a whirlwind 72 hours during the 1975 Nevada high school basketball tournament.
Amodei was a reserve with the Carson Senators during the tournament at the Centennial Coliseum in Reno.
The normal pattern, Amodei recalls, was for the Northern AAA teams all to lose in the first round to their taller, faster and more skilled rivals from Las Vegas.
Yet Carson, the Northern AAA league champions, opened up by beating Bishop Gorman by a wide margin. The other teams from the north were eliminated in the first round, keeping with tradition.
The Senators became the darlings of Northern Nevada. Anybody who lived north of Hawthorne was suddenly a Carson High fan. Amodei and his teammates felt a great sense of pressure. They did not want to let down their army of newfound fans.
Amodei sees a parallel in representing Northern Nevada in a state tournament and running for the open seat in Nevada's 2nd U.S. House District.
He is the Republican nominee. He is shouldering a similar responsibility heading into the Sept. 13 election. He does not want to disappoint the GOP fans in the stands.
"There is a lot of responsibility," Amodei said. "You have been fortunate to be selected by the Republicans to be their candidate. The parallel is this: You have been chosen and you've got through the first round (nomination process). You have people saying, 'You are our person' and that is a big responsibility. A lot of people will stereotype it and say it is about you. No, it is about the people who chose you."
That state tournament remains one of Amodei's favorite memories.
"When we got through the first round and with everybody else gone, all of a sudden, all of those Reno people you had been fighting your whole career, now they were in your corner," Amodei said. "When I walked in there and saw the crowd (for the second-round game), all the Reno people who used to be your enemies were now right behind you. It was a goosebumpy kind of thing."
Senator fever hit the roof when Carson defeated Las Vegas High in the second round and advanced to the championship game against the Clark Chargers.
Demand for access to the big game at the Coliseum (now the Reno-Sparks Convention Center) was so crushing that the fire marshals barred entry to many.
Everyone in Northern Nevada was counting on the Senators. Carson High hadn't won a state basketball title since winning three in a row during the 1930s Great Depression, when former U.S. Sen. Paul Laxalt played for the Senators.
"In the culture of the 1970s, you always had that," Amodei said of Nevada's north-south sports rivalry. "It's like who gets the (Fremont) Cannon between UNR and UNLV. You felt that responsibility."
Amodei can only hope the election turns out as well as the state tournament. Led by tournament MVP Mike Longero, Carson beat Clark for the state title.
Now, 36 years later, that championship run is still unforgettable for Amodei.
"When you ask yourself what are the greatest things that have happened in your life?
That's got to be No. 2 with me," Amodei said. "That's no disrespect to my daughters, because their births are No. 1."
Amodei loved playing sports in high school. It sounds corny, but he came away learning some lessons for life from Coach Tom Andreasen.
"You knew exactly what the expectation was and it was your job to achieve it," Amodei said. "So I guess he was one of the folks who helped make you a result-orientated person."
Family life
Amodei likes talking about his daughters, Ryanne, 28 and Erin, 25. Ryanne is an engineering trainer for a surgical robotic company in San Jose, Calif. Erin is a nursing student at Truckee Meadows Community College.
"I've got some great kids," he said
Amodei, however is frank when talking about the girl's mother and his former wife, Sondra. They were married in 1979, when Amodei was 21. They had met at a co-ed softball tournament in Carson City. They divorced after 12 years of marriage.
"As a guy who has enjoyed a fair amount of success in a lot of the things he tried, quite frankly, I am embarrassed that I wasn't able to be successful in that (marriage). But that notwithstanding, Sondra's and my relationship is probably stronger with the way we have proceeded forward. I am very, very grateful. First, my girls have a great mom, and I am phenomenally grateful that we have been able to proceed together as partners with the girls and treat each other in a very respectful way."
Amodei say he is probably better suited to be single.
"For the life path I have taken, it is probably better that I am single," Amodei said. "Because when you talk about public service, when you talk about practicing law, I like to be a busy person. And quite frankly, time management has always been one of the issues."
Amodei's family has deep roots in Carson City. Both of Amodei's parents and daughters were educated in Carson schools. Sondra was also educated in Carson schools. Her father owned the A&W Root Beer drive-in in Carson during Amodei's youth, he recalled.
Political run
Amodei was the senior class president at Carson High in 1976. His first real political campaign was against incumbent Jill Derby for a seat on Nevada's University System of the Board of Regents in 1994. Derby beat Amodei by about 660 votes, Amodei recalls.
In 1996, he was elected to the state Assembly and was named Outstanding Freshman Legislator during the 1997 Legislature.
He jumped into a state Senate race in 1998 against Capitol District incumbent Ernie Adler. Amodei defeated Adler by about 1,400 votes, or by six points, in an election that had about 23,000 voters in total.
Amodei was never challenged again in getting re-elected to the state Senate twice. In 2002, he received 82 percent of the vote. In 2006, he got 78 percent.
Amodei is proud of his legislative career. He is best remembered for his $1 billion tax proposal in 2003, co-sponsored by Democrat Terry Care of Las Vegas. The proposal was never passed, but it showed an alternative plan to a gross receipts tax that was deemed dangerous to many Nevada businesses.
That was not the only controversial move Amodei made. During his last term in the state Senate, he took a job as president of the Nevada Mining Association, which also employs a small army of lobbyists at the Legislature. Some expected Amodei to resign his state Senate seat for the 2009 session. Instead, he resigned from the mining association, although some still questioned the cozy relationship.
In 2010, Amodei became the chairman of the Nevada Republican Party. It set him up well to gain the party's nomination for the 2011 2nd District special election.
Amodei's former law partner, Carson City District Court Judge James Russell, made the ruling -- later backed up by the Nevada Supreme Court -- that Nevada's political parties have the right to select there candidates for the special election. It paved the way to an easy nomination process for Amodei as he went from GOP chairman to GOP candidate.
Russell and Amodei also own a $500 mining claim in Storey County together. Russell never disclosed the business relationship with Amodei before making his ruling.
Amodei feels he gained a lot of practical and political experience in the Legislature. He said he is following the path of some of Nevada's most successful politicians, who have gone from the Legislature to Congress. Her mentioned Dean Heller, Harry Reid, Shelley Berkley and Jim Gibbons.
Although he has a long career in politics, he doesn't like to be called a "career politician."
"When you say 'career politician' I bristle a little bit because during that time (of my political career), I had a full-time job in the private sector for 25 years, which gives me a good perspective if you are going to be given that responsibility (as a congressman)," Amodei said. "And if you are a career politician whose job in the Legislature pays about $10,000 a year, then that is a career with a small C."
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