Politics & Government

Capitol Hill Lobbyist Digs Big Day for Giants

Rocky Fox of Novato was front-and-center when the San Francisco Giants held court with President Barack Obama at the White House.

Bill Fox was beaming a couple of months ago when he found out his son had made it into the White House for the San Francisco Giants’ congratulatory ceremony during which President Barack Obama hailed the team for winning the World Series.

“It’s pretty neat to think the little kid who rode his bike around town and went to school and played Little League in Novato would make it to the White House with the Giants one day,” Fox said.

How the heck did William R. "Rocky" Fox, 31, chalk up such a bucket-list event?

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The 1998 graduate is a lobbyist for the Washington, D.C., firm of Cassidy & Associates. He focuses on the topic of online poker — even though he’s not a player himself.

“I’m the bottom man on the totem pole,” Rocky Fox said with a chuckle. “The government wants online poker taxed and regulated because they view it as different than anything else in online gaming. But it’s a skill, not a game of chance.”

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Fox worked for the House Transportation Committee for two years, specifically for the Republicans in a subcommittee on railroad transportation. In 2008 he lost that position because of the Democratic takeover of Congress.

“They went from 60 jobs to 20 jobs,” he said.

He joined Cassidy & Associates and started learning more about how the private sector and public sector interact inside the Beltway. He just started working directly with clients in the past year.

“It’s all about what Congress is doing that will affect your client,” he said.

Getting back to the Giants …

Fox, whose father was a well-known Bay Area before his recent retirement, has been a Giants fan for as long as he can remember. When he first graduated from the University of San Diego in 2002 and moved to D.C. for grad school at American University, he figured out that he could see Giants games on the road almost more easily than if he were home. He saw games up and down the Eastern Seaboard and attended as many playoff games as he could.

Last year, Fox cashed in some frequent flier miles and saw the Giants play Games 4 and 5 of the World Series in Texas and went nuts with every other Giants fan when the team clinched the title.

“I thought something bad was going to happen, and it just never did,” he said. “I took video of my mom screaming. It was so fun. And then it was like, all of this waiting for 30 years for this to happen … is it all over now? Then it starts to sink in … yeah, all of the past sins have been absolved.”

Fox isn’t about to “out” his enablers, but he got into the White House ceremony in July. He took photos with his cell phone and got some autographs on his ticket stubs.

“You might remember, they were supposed to come the day they killed bin Laden, so they had to scrub it,” he said. “But when it came time again, I had just enough connections where they got somebody to help me out.

“My parents were so pleased that I could get into the White House to see the Giants. Everything broke just right for the team in the Series, and then everything broke just right for me to get in that day.”


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