Even though Nick Arison started at the bottom, his father, having joined the family business, knew his son would hear the entitlement whispers.
“I went through similar experiences where people always questioned whether I’d earned the role I had,” Micky Arison said. “He learned it from the ground up, every way you could learn it. It’s in his blood.”
Blue Blood
In one respect Nick Arison’s blood is blue.
Basketball, by happenstance, played a prominent role in Nick winding up at Duke University, which was just one of the schools he was considering. His visit, according to Micky Arison, coincided with the game against North Carolina.
“That was it,” Micky Arison said.
Only Nick Arison wasn’t content to watch games with his fellow Cameron Crazies, as the inhabitants of the Duke student section are known. He spent four seasons as team manager under Hall of Fame coach Mike Krzyzewski who, according to former Blue Devils player Shane Battier, brings the same detail and discipline to his program that he learned at West Point.
“Being a manager at Duke under Coach K is probably more stressful than being a player. The standard by which they’re measured is almost a military level,” said Battier, who won a national title at Duke and who now plays for the Heat. “To be a freshman manager at Duke -- talk about low man on the totem pole. The beauty of Nick is that he’s earned his stripes.”
Team U.S.A.
When Jerry Colangelo asked Krzyzewski to coach the U.S. national team, he got the coach’s staff, too, including the billionaire’s kid who never complained about performing the most menial tasks.