Jim Cramer talks about life, sports, and the pursuit of greatness.

by Bill Conlin

Assignment: Do a piece on Mad Money’s Jim Cramer. Hmm? I remind the assignment editor I write sports, not finance. To me, “calls” are something umpires make — safe, out, ball, strike. But I’m told interviewing Cramer won’t be a problem because he’s read my columns since he was a kid. And I’ll be honest, Jim’s rap is addictive, particularly when you’ve just cashed in on a couple of his plays.

Jim Cramer stands still about as long as a Phil Niekro knuckleball. He’s so fast that for four seasons — 1971 through ’74 — Jim and I worked together and I never saw him once. OK, I was in the press box as the Phillies’ beat writer for the Philadelphia Daily News. Jim was in the notorious Veterans Stadium 700 Level vending for Nilon Bros. Small coincidence.

Here’s a bigger one: Cramer and I lived in the Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn about 20 years apart. We lived on a very short street — Grace Court — which began at Hicks St. and dead-ended about a Ryan Howard homer later at a skinny culde- sac overlooking the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

There are three redbrick, six-story apartment buildings at the end of Grace Court, No. 1 and No. 19 on the north side and sprawling No. 2 running half the length of the block on the south side. I was raised in No. 2 Grace Court. Jim Cramer lived in No. 2 two decades later.

But the coincidences don’t end there. Read my question and- answer session with Jim to find out how I inadvertently played a role in the financing of his first car.

Conlin: It’s the ’70s. You’re in Veterans Stadium earning a few — very few — honest bucks. What was Jim Cramer, boy vendor, looking at for his future?

Cramer: I worked as a vendor from the summer of 1971 until 1974. I sold Coke the first two years and then I got promoted to ice cream. It was a dream come true. I was the only ice cream guy in the 600-700 Level. They were lining up for me.

I graduated from Harvard in 1977 and wanted to be a writer. I was under the mistaken impression I was rich because I got free room and board at college and a scholarship. I couldn’t make two nickels. That summer, after I got out of school, I spent a month at Eagles training camp at Widener writing a piece about whether the Eagles were a meritocracy. I spent a lot of time with Carl Peterson and Dick Vermeil. Peterson explained who he cut and why, and it was certain he was just going by sheer ability, no legacy, no loyalty. I was in heaven. I wanted to be a sports writer, maybe do some features writing. I wanted to be Bill Conlin.

Conlin: What were you studying at Harvard, how high were your SAT scores and what kind of student were you?

Cramer: I graduated magna cum laude in Government in 1977. My SAT scores were 1450.

Conlin: You were editor of the Harvard Crimson. Actually, the title is president. That’s about as prestigious as college newspapering gets. Has anybody from your Crimson staff become more famous than you? Notables from your term as president, please.

Cramer: From my class? Some hitters: Fred Hiatt, Washington Post editorial chairman. Two years after me, Jonathan Alter, Newsweek writer, and Mark Whittaker, former editor of Newsweek. But let’s cut to the chase. My general manager — the business-side guy — was Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. And I would say he’s pretty darn notable.

Conlin: As a crime reporter at the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, you were covering every grisly murder between Point Loma and Point Concepcion. One night, you returned to a bungalow that had been emptied of all your worldly possessions. You lived in your auto for six months and were essentially a homeless person. Were you living in or out of your car when you told yourself: “I’ve got to be diversified?”

Cramer: The car thing created someone who was so insecure about money that he decided he had to be filthy rich. I am not kidding. It made me who I am. I could not take being poor. I had a jaundiced liver, mononucleosis, loved the bottle and borrowed from everyone and stiffed every creditor — most of whom caught up with me in the ensuing years. I just refused to be anything but rich after that.

Conlin: Paul Owens was the general manager when the Phillies were enjoying the best run of their mostly miserable history. He was a great believer in what he called “bounceability,” the attribute that enables people to climb off the deck and keep fighting. When did your bounce come?

Cramer: I remember my luckiest moment in life, when I picked up your column a couple of nights before the famous New York City blackout [July 9, 1977] and clipped the Daily News Home Run Payoff coupon and got picked on the air by Harry Kalas. Greg Luzinski hit a 2-2 pitch over left center and the rest was history. That’s how I bought my car for $1,000, a silver Fairmont. It’s better to be lucky than good.

Conlin: A little over a year ago, you got a lot of people’s attention. The Bear Stearns mess had just thrown the economy for a loop and you did an amazing three-minute-and- 13-second rant on CNBC charging the Fed with being out of touch with reality. “My people have been out there for 25 years and they are losing their jobs and they [the Fed] have no idea.” Does anybody listen when a guy like you with a big audience makes sense?

Cramer: I made that call about a year ago when there was still time to stop the spiral. I believe they had tremendous contempt for me and the call and thought I had simply lost my mind or was just being theatrical. Actually, for 22 years I had been a professional money manager and the people I started out with are all running these really big firms now and were leaning on me heavily to use my pulpit to shout out what was really going on. I simply had done more homework and had much better contacts than a Princeton professor of economics ever could, and he should have known that. I was really trying to help. No one listened. It is eerie if you play it back how right I was, and I don’t say that out of hubris. It was just a very good call. They are very Ivory Tower and don’t really understand how the markets work.

Conlin: A poet named T.S. Eliot wrote, “In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions that a minute can reverse. . .” Has the boat sailed?

Cramer: The problems are too deep to do much about them except to suffer through them as millions lose their jobs and their homes. But they are not going to give me the Congressional Medal of Forecasting. My plan had been to swiftly cut the Fed funds rate to 2% — the two year was at 4% — and let the banks make lots of money investing deposits that they paid little for in Treasury that they could have picked up a 2% gain on. I wanted people to be able to refinance their homes before they lost them. Nothing happened and the rest is real bad history, but I know when this severe recession is over my hands will be clean and maybe my kids will know I tried. Maybe that’s enough.

Conlin: Did you have a rehearsed game plan when you started on Mad Money? Or did you just come out smoking when the red light came on?

Cramer: Actually, I had been doing Real Money With Jim Cramer in the vineyards of radio for four years. I was on the Big Talker for a little but they pulled me. First I was on Clear Channel and then WOR bought me and then WCBS. The show had real good numbers. It was basically the exact show I do now, right down to the Lightning Round and “Am I Diversified?” Written segments, then calls. The radio show was extremely lucrative. I did it in conjunction with TheStreet.com and it was also on the Web an hour after and the downloads were really big, so I knew I had a winner. For two years I did both, but I developed some bad nodes on my throat… I had to give one up, doctor’s orders. So I gave up radio.

Conlin: Were you surprised that a style that clearly turned off investment purists became so wildly popular with plain folks just looking for something smart to do with their money?

Cramer: Regular people really do love the show, and it is despised by every “academic” and graybeard out there. They truly can’t stand it. The antipathy and the love are both extreme; I mean, I can eat a dinner at La Dolce Vita in Belmar, N.J., and people crowd around me and booyah me. But if I were in a room with investment “pros,” they would only do the “boo” of the booyah.

Conlin: I’ve been told by “The Big They” that you’ve got a photographic memory. Is this true, and if so, how many megapixels?

Cramer: I have a really good memory for stock prices and for cards, very similar stuff. If you remember in Ball Four, I think it was ex-Phil Danny Cater who could calculate his batting average on the way to first after a single. It is a little like that. The real analog is with the Hirdt boys, old friends, from Elias [Sports Bureau], who know that the last time there were men at second and third with two out, bottom of the eighth of a World Series game, we got a three-run homer by Elston Howard, that kind of thing. I did my first Lightning Round in 1984 at a party thrown for me when I graduated law school. I just have a good ability to remember stocks, where and when they traded and where they trade now.

Conlin: Is it true a mere second could have determined your career path?

Cramer: I was very fast, a 49-second quarter miler — indoor and outdoor. I was captain of the soccer team. Quarter miler, soccer fullback. . . I loved sports, but I was not good enough to play at Harvard, although I tried out for both sports. If I were a second faster I could have run for Harvard. Because I wasn’t, I went out for the Harvard Crimson and covered soccer and track and worked myself up to president — the first guy ever from sports, so maybe it paid off because it is a lot easier in life after being the president of the Crimson, not that I made it that way. . . . Baseball, I liked second base, so I wanted to be Denny Doyle.

Conlin: So your sport wound up being trading. Is it true there is an addictive rush that goes with managing a hedge fund with enormous sums riding every day? And any truth to claims that the private hedge fund you started after you left Goldman Sachs didn’t make the numbers you claimed?

Cramer: Actually, I was bleeping fantastic at it and everyone knew it, so it always drives me crazy when some son of a bitch blogger says I sucked. I compounded at 24% after all fees for 14 years and I still have not found anyone to beat it. There was a great “rush” for years but then a deadening. I intend to go back after TV ’cause now I miss it and I think I could raise a couple of billion if I wanted to. But success? The idiots who criticize me criticize me for the wrong thing. I sacrificed everything to get those numbers. And eff ’em anyway. I gave a ton of it away to charity.

Conlin: Your first newspaper job was as a general assignment reporter for the Tallahassee Democrat. You were just in time to cover a guy who made Jack the Ripper look like an amateur, a mega-nutcase named Ted Bundy. What was that like?

Cramer: I was covering Florida State University stuff — some sports, some government, but I lived down the block from Chi Omega, where the tragedy occurred, and I was first on the scene. I knew he was a killer. He wore a wool fisherman’s sweater and it was never less than 100 degrees with 100% humidity. He always winked at me. I was at Big Daddy’s one night when he was there. It turned out to be my fave bar. I probably bought him a drink. I loved buying guys drinks.

Conlin: The buzzer just went off, but I’ll ask one more question. On the eve of the presidential coronation in November, you get a call from a member of the winner’s inner circle: “Jim, as you know, the country’s in much worse economic shape than we’ve let on. Would you consider serving as secretary of commerce?” Hysterical laughter or genuine interest?

Cramer: I would not only NOT laugh , but if I were called to do anything important to help save the economy by either candidate I would do it in a heartbeat. I am considered to be a gadfly, but it is clear from my historic rant this time last year, where I was reviled as a hysterical panicker who has lost his mind, that I was so right it is scary — and sad for the country. They really let us down — they and their non-regulation, laissez-faire academic bullshit. . . . They had NO IDEA what they were talking about. They were and are pathetic. My kids laughed when they saw it on the video... I know these guys in Washington are totally contemptuous of me, but there are so many times in my life where people have been contemptuous of me there’s not much I can do about it. I always figure I am a pretty hated finance guy who loves his kids.