Where We Belong (8 page)

“He cut a little hole in the football and filled the football with sand. So, instead of the football weighing a pound, it weighed fourteen pounds,” Craig explains. “We would play catch with this heavy football to strengthen my arm. We’d also play catch on our knees. It was really fun.”

And it paid off. From 1969 to 1973, Craig started as quarterback for the Lynbrook High School football team. He was determined to reach his goal of playing college football.

“I wasn’t a partier; I wasn’t a runner with a bunch of girls. I always liked having one girlfriend. I’m one of the few guys in North America who never smoked pot. I never got thrown out of school. There wasn’t any real edge to me as a kid because the focal point was that I wanted to go as far as I could with my sport. I was compromised as an athlete, and I knew the only way I had a chance to keep going was to not take chances and to maximize whatever limited talents I had.”

Financial resources for the Juntunens were also limited. His mother and father both worked, but money for college would have to come by way of an athletic scholarship. Craig assumed that was the case but still remembers the Saturday afternoon when his father mentioned, as they routinely cleaned up the garage, that he had something to tell him.

“I thought he was going to say, ‘We’re having hamburgers tonight,’ ” Craig recalls with a laugh. “But he said, ‘If you want to go to college you’re on your own.’ And I said, ‘Okay, I got it.’ I really admired the fact that he said it because I think it was hard for him. I think it was something that was eating at him for a while and he had to get it out.”

Eighteen miles northwest of San Jose was Craig’s dream team: the Stanford Indians (now the Cardinal). During high school, he made extra money on Saturday afternoons selling ice-cream malts at Stanford football games.

“I was a horrible malt salesman because I’d watch the game instead of selling malts,” he admits, “but I dreamed of playing on that field. But that dream never materialized. I just wasn’t good enough.”

Members of the Indians football program encouraged Craig to try to improve his slight build at a junior college. He enrolled in De Anza College, a community school in Cupertino, California, from 1974 to 1975. To his frustration, Craig’s efforts in the weight room were not effective enough. Playing football at Stanford would remain just a dream.

As Craig got busy looking for other college opportunities, serendipity got to work behind the scenes. In Moscow, Idaho, coaches for the University of Idaho Vandals were watching a recruiting film featuring the center for Craig’s high school football team. But it was Craig’s performance in the quarterback position that caught their eye. The staff liked what they saw and offered him a full ride.

“I remember when they called and offered me my scholarship. My father was right around the corner listening, and I said into the phone, ‘I will accept this.’ We high-fived and hugged; it was as if we had reached the top of Mount Everest together.”

The U of I football program lacked the cachet of storied Stanford, but Craig was gratified that instead of dreaming about Division I football, he’d now be playing it. In 1976, he led the Vandals to a 7-4 record and a second-place finish in the Big Sky Conference. He cocaptained the team in 1977 and won the offensive MVP award.

(Courtesy of the University of Idaho, 1977)

“Idaho was a great learning experience for me. It wasn’t the big time relative to college football, but the basic experience is still the same,” says Craig. “You have the camaraderie in the locker room, you’re part of a team, there’s a band of brothers, and you’re working together to achieve a common goal. That was the real enriching part of the experience.”

Craig’s success on the college level paved the way for the next part of his dream: playing professional football. The National Football League in the late seventies was interested in tall pocket-passing quarterbacks. Because Craig was a relatively small running quarterback, he headed north to the Canadian Football League. In 1978, he was signed by the Calgary Stampeders as a quarterback. That same year he married the girl he’d been dating since high school. Together they moved from city to city as he was hired and cut by football teams.

In May 1980, Craig entered training camp to vie for a quarterback slot on the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. His two decades on the gridiron would come to an end; he was cut from camp. At twenty-five years old, Craig would now have to walk off the football field and begin pounding the pavement for another line of work.

The year before, during the off-season, Craig met a man who described to him the lucrative industry of headhunting. Craig contacted the acquaintance and, in 1981, landed a headhunting job in Palo Alto, California. After just one year in the business, Craig decided to venture out on his own with a business partner.

That same year, he and his wife were divorced. “We were too young when we got married,” Craig says.

Single and focused on his new career, Craig began to build a successful search business. His goal was to retire by age forty and enjoy a life of freedom and spontaneity, two things he valued greatly. He would consider marriage again but never saw himself having children. His limited exposure to kids was mentoring young football players who visited training camp during college.

“I always found that interaction to be enlightening and charming and fun, but then they went home at night,” Craig says. “I saw the distinction between interacting with kids and then the burden of a twenty-four/seven operation. That to me looked overwhelming.”

He also knew what good parenting looked like from his own upbringing and knew he lacked that level of dedication.

“I don’t like to be conflicted. I didn’t want to be in a meeting in my office looking at my watch, especially knowing that my father would sneak out of work to watch me play. They sacrificed so much to go to stadiums to watch me play. It really was a remarkable thing that they did, and I didn’t want to be the dad who didn’t do that.”

By 1985, Juntunen Inc. was lucrative and growing. Craig was thirty and dating a woman who was fully on board with a relationship that did not include having children. She and Craig discussed the option of his having a vasectomy.

“To me it was such an easy and simple solution that I said, ‘Well, let’s just do that.’ ”

Let’s do that. Just like that. A vasectomy at thirty years old.

“I never gave it a second thought,” he says. “It was literally no big deal for me.”

Craig drove himself to the urologist. The doctor told him the procedure could include attaching a plastic hose with a valve in case Craig ever wanted to change his mind, or he could perform an irreversible vasectomy. Craig chose the simpler version.

“I remember the day I had the procedure and how incidental it was to anything. I just wanted to make sure my parts would still work in a few days. I was more concerned about missing a half day of work that day.”

Twenty-five minutes later, Craig drove himself home, limped up the driveway, watched a movie, and went to bed with peace of mind.

In 1988, two years after marrying the woman he’d been dating, Craig and his wife realized they were not meant to be a couple for life. He ended his second marriage and began his second divorce.

“I had this deal where I was a football star and fairly successful, but going through another divorce. I was questioning my attractiveness; maybe I had lost my touch,” he explains. “It just felt like I should go out and date, but the dating thing was not fun. It was work and laborious. I had all these people set me up, and you know instantly when it’s not right, and it’s just a series of disappointments.”

Work was also busy as Juntunen Inc. grew and prospered.

“It was a time in my life when I was around a lot of people, but I was extraordinarily lonely. I just felt really empty and shallow.”

In 1989, after eight years in the headhunting industry, Craig felt that by diversifying the company’s business model, Juntunen Inc. would become a more salable asset. His partner disagreed.

“Everybody thought I was nuts. I was suggesting something that had never been done before. There was a lot of resistance within my company. It wasn’t necessary to take this risk; things were good. But I really felt there was an opportunity that supported going down this path.”

The only way to resolve their different visions for the company’s future was for Craig to execute a buyout. He took his parents to dinner to tell them that in order to secure the funds he needed for a buyout, he would have to put his own home and the home he’d bought for them on the line. Craig knew the risk required would not sit well with his father, a child of the Depression who understood how hard life could be amid excessive loss.

“I remember taking my parents to dinner and telling them, ‘I’m going to buy my partner out and I think it’s the right thing to do and it will allow me to have an exit strategy and retire on my plan.’ My mom said, ‘Go for it, son,’ and my dad . . . my dad’s eyes were like Slinkies that came out of his eyes. That just wasn’t the way he thought because he knew how
bad
bad can be.”

At the same time, Craig began dating an accomplished business executive named Kathi Adler, who was a vice president at a software company and responsible for more than $8 million in revenues. Before they ever went out on a date, the two had occasionally crossed paths after work in the weight room of the Decathlon Club in Santa Clara. Both were seeing other people and neither knew what the other did for work. But in 1989, Kathi ran into Craig in the lobby of his company. She was in search of a new job and needed a headhunter.

“I had no idea that he ran the company,” Kathi explains. “I said, ‘Oh, gosh . . . funny seeing you here! What do you do?’ And he said, ‘Oh, I do everything. I sweep the floors, I clean the bathrooms.’ I just thought,
Oh, okay
. And then after my interview, I learned he was the president of the company. He wasn’t my type at all, but I was so impressed by his humility and his demeanor that I thought,
He seems like a nice guy. Maybe I should go out with him.
”

In January 1990, Craig asked Kathi to lunch. Since his divorce, he was implementing an “honesty is the best policy” approach on first dates with women. It sounded like this:

“I am never going to get married again, and I had a vasectomy, so I will never have kids.”

Awkward pause.

“They were stunned by my position,” says Craig. “Like, ‘Wait a minute—you seem like such a good, wholesome guy. And you don’t want to have kids? You don’t want to get married again?’ But I wanted to get it over with. I didn’t want it to come up months later. I think I was just exasperated and worn out from the whole dating thing.” He was also still hurting from his two divorces. “I just didn’t want to have to go through that again.”

On his first date with Kathi, Craig stuck with the brutal-truth policy and unleashed the verbal hounds:

“I am never going to get married again, and I had a vasectomy, so I will never have kids.” He threw in: “Don’t count on me ever sending you flowers, because I don’t believe in that.”

No awkward pause this time.

“I actually just started laughing,” Kathi says as she laughs again thinking back on the lunch. “I said, ‘That’s way more information than I need to know right now because this is really just our first date and I’m seeing other people. Thanks for letting me know.’ ”

Still, Kathi found Craig refreshing and fun. They soon discovered that they shared an enthusiasm for hard work and recreational sports.

“On our second or third date,” Craig recalls, “she had to get something out of her car trunk and I followed her. She had a bat and a glove in there.”

Kathi laughs. “I always kept sporting equipment in my car—baseball stuff or basketball stuff. That’s just me—in case someone wanted to play a pickup game.”

Craig’s parents had kept track of his lively dating life following his divorce. So, after he met Kathi, he said to them, “I think I found one.” He recalls, “I said, ‘Mom, she had a bat and a glove in her trunk.’ My mom said, ‘She’s a keeper.’ ”

Craig was thirty-five with two failed marriages, completing the buyout of his partner and restructuring Juntunen Inc. Kathi was thirty-one and had been married to a professional football player for five years. Both had high-pressure jobs but worked hard to carve out time for each other. Kathi got a glimpse of the pressure Craig was under when she spent the night at his house several months into their relationship. He rolled out of bed and “literally passed out.” She says, “I was thinking,
Wow.
” She adds jokingly, “
Were things that great between us that I killed him?
But what really happened was that he was just under so much stress at that time with his business that he literally got up and passed out.” (He came to within minutes.)

Kathi had worked hard for the life she’d built so far—an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, a high-powered job, her own home—but she was falling in love with Craig. Six months after they began dating, they decided Kathi would move in with him. A small crack formed in the wall Craig had built up to ward off commitment.