I’m sure Steve Blow is a heckuva nice guy. But Saturday night, when he emceed Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year Awards 2008 banquet at the InterContinental Hotel, the DMN metro columnist was about as exciting as Jim Nabors hosting a Kiwanis Club fish fry. His “opening monologue” included gas-price jokes (”gas is up to Starbucks prices!”) and recession talk (”In the newspaper business, we know we’re in a recession. …So, if I can sell just 10 subscriptions tonight!”) Then came announcement of the evening’s big winners, which follows after the jump.
E&Y’s regional award winners, who will now advance to a national competition in Palm Springs, Calif., were:
Joseph W. Craft III of Alliance Resource Partners (in the Energy, Chemical and Mining category); Greg L. Massey of First United Bank and Trust Co. (Financial Services); Charles E. Vogt of GENBAND (IT/Communication); and John M. Scott III of Rosewood Hotels & Resorts (Hospitality and Construction).
Other winners were Tom Ward of SandRidge Energy (Master Entrepreneur); Patrick Brandt of Skywire Software (Software); Rob Snyder of Stream Energy (Services); Guillermo Perales of Sun Holdings LLC (Consumer); E. Patrick Jenevein III of Tang Energy Group (Green); and Steve Lieberman and Alan Shor of The Retail Connection (Emerging).
You can read about all of them, by the way, in the July issue of D CEO magazine.
Ending the evening, Blow invited everyone to an after-party at Kempi’s nightclub, a once-notorious meat market located downstairs in the InterContinental. “People of a certain age will remember Kempi’s,” Blow explained. “They may have had a marriage start there … or a divorce.” As one who visited Kempi’s maybe once or twice in the ’90s–before hooking up with my Better Half, of course–I can report the after-party was about as wild as a fish fry, too.
3 comments
Glenn:
I am sure you’re a super-nice guy. I’ve never met you, but someone who edits such page-turners as the Dallas Business Journal and D CEO surely must be.
So here’s my gripe: You and your repeated hammering of the News and WFAA-TV. I get it. They’re an easy target. Anchors at WFAA sometimes mispronounce the names of main downtown Dallas streets. Should they know better? You bet. Steve Blow writes boring columns and is a horrible emcee. I get it again.
I don’t work for the News or for WFAA and I don’t care if they sell five papers or 5 million. I simply think your energies might be better spent breaking some business news once in awhile and laying of the cheap shots and self-serving plugs for PR firms.
No one called you out when misspelled KDFW-TV’s Steve Eagar’s name — after spelling it right the first time — in a post earlier this summer. And, after all, no one makes fun of you for writing for a skin magazine some years ago. Yet.
I was at the E&Y event and actually thought Steve Blow was cute. He did a good job and pronounced my name correctly during the presentation. What more can you ask for in an emcee?
Evidently someone just did call Glenn out for misspelling Steve Eagar’s name.
Sounds like Bring It is a pr person who hasn’t gotten his/her clients enough ink.