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• Author: LEWIS, DAVID

THE ENIGMATIC MUG OF US WEST'S SOL TRUJILLO PROMPTS THIS AMAZING CONTEST OFFER

Editor's Note: The following owing was written just before news broke of the US West-Qwest-Deutsche Telecom debacle. Therefore, in the following, please read "customers" as "shareholders and customers." Thank you.

I picked up the paper one day in March and there was US West Chairman and CEO Sol Trujillo, tanned, fit and ready to run, as they used to say about Richard Nixon. Trujillo, as you know, turned down a Qwest/US West four-year retention package worth $48 million to settle for a lousy $17.7 million in stock options instead.

I come here not to praise Sol Trujillo, but not to bury him, either.

Pushed off the Denver Rocky Mountain News business section front that day was a photo of Tom Detmer, whose stock had just risen almost $8 on the news that 24/7 Media Inc. had offered his Exactis.com $460 million. Like Trujillo, Detmer looked as happy as a clam at high tide, but not so suave and self-contained.

So this is no attempt to grouse about obscene corporate compensation. I say anybody who makes it earns it, even Darryl Strawberry.

I bring this up to say we're not going to let Trujillo's turnabout spoil our plans for the ColoradoBiz Sol Trujillo Headline-Writing Contest.(See photo.)

We want to go ahead with the contest because we want to remember the two faces of Trujillo, you might say. There is the image of him as Trujillo Triumphant, only 48, the picture of health, with a promising career or three ahead of him.

I don't mind that picture, the happy Trujillo picture.

The other one, of Trujillo taken at a news conference early this year, that's the one we're running here, because that's the one that haunts my dreams.

This was the press conference where Trujillo explained that US West had turned its poor service record around. Analysts quickly explained, however, that...