Tory Nixon

Tory Nixon’s career is a tale of two cities and two professions. From 1985 to 1989, the former SDSU athlete played defensive back for the San Francisco 49ers, including a Miami Super Bowl victory in 1989 which featured the famous touchdown pass by quarterback Joe Montana with less than two minutes to go.

“In the off seasons, I was back in San Diego going to USD for my MBA, and I had decided when my football career was over I wanted to go into the financial world,” Nixon says.

The job market for investment bankers was difficult, so Nixon took a job as a commercial banker with Bank of America, working with the megabank till 1995 in San Francisco and then moving back to San Diego, where he worked at BofA for another five years.

He went back into sports briefly, heading up the San Diego International Sports Council for about 18 months before moving to California Bank & Trust in 2003. Since then, he’s headed up SBA and small business banking departments, before being named San Diego division president in January.

Now he’s responsible for 33 offices in the San Diego division, including branches in Temecula and Moreno Valley and Nixon says he’s “cautiously optimistic” about growth prospects in his territory. For example, Nixon cites real estate opportunities for $10 billion CB&T that have surfaced as other lenders back away in the sideways market.

About his personal goals, he says, “I love San Diego, and am thrilled to have a job that allows me to be here. I want to help grow the bank and do a better job of infiltrating the market. I’m looking to get out more and be more involved in the community. There’s a lot of opportunity.”

Nixon says his football career helps in his work, but not necessarily as a calling card. “I’m not a big name like Ronnie Lott,” he explains, “but other aspects of a sports career, like setting expectations, seeing a process and plan to get there, dealing with failure and success — those help in business too.”

Chargers or 49ers?

“Chargers. I’m thrilled with the team they’ve put together, and they’re right there, they just need to win the big game one time,” he says. “If you go back to our Super Bowl, when there was a minute and 40 seconds, we knew how to close it out because we had been there before and we knew Joe (Montana) would take us down to score. I think the Chargers are there, just not all the way there yet.”