Current Biography Excerpts: Sports Business

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BERLOSCONI, SILVIO
DAVIS, AL
DOUBLEDAY, NELSON
EBERSOL, DICK
HUIZENGA, H. WAYNE
JONES, JERRY (with photograph)
KING, DON
MONAGHAN, THOMAS
SAMARANCH, JUAN ANTONIO
SCHULTZ, RICHARD D.
SHRIVER, EUNICE KENNEDY
STERN, DAVID
TAGLIABUE, PAUL
UEBERROTH, PETER
VINCENT, FAY

BERLOSCONI, SILVIO
(buhr-loo-SKOH-nee, SIL-vee-oh)
Sep. 29, 1936- Prime Minister of Italy; businessman.

The Italian business tycoon Silvio Berlusconi saw his almost lifelong string of successes capped when, in March 1994, a political coalition headed by his four-month-old Forza Italia Party triumphed in the Italian general elections and led to his replacing Carlo Azeglio Ciampi as prime minister. Berlusconi had previously enjoyed an international reputation as the dominant force in Italian television, with three national networks under the umbrella of his Fininvest holding company, which also controls some 150 other businesses. Berlusconi formed Fininvest in 1975, after having established himself as a developer of residential villages. He entered the television business in 1980, when he launched Italy's first commercial network, then went on to become the owner of an array of other enterprises, including the largest department-store chain in the country and a publishing company that produced newspapers and more than thirty magazines. Fininvest is also involved in film production, having provided nearly half the investment in Italy's film industry.

Berlusconi cemented his celebrity in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the purchase of the soccer team AC Milan, which he developed into Europe's most successful sports franchise. According to Ed Vulliamy, writing in the Manchester Guardian Weekly (April 3, 1994), the word Berlusconism thus "entered the Italian vocabulary, meaning a way of life where people live in houses built by Berlusconi, watch TV controlled by Berlusconi, shop at supermarkets owned by Berlusconi, relax on tennis courts and in restaurants built by Berlusconi, and adore a soccer team bought by Berlusconi." The entrepreneur's victory in the 1994 elections paved the way toward his leadership of a country exhausted by a two-year corruption scandal that ended the half-century reign of the coalition led by the Christian Democrats. "I'm happy," Berlusconi declared, "about...the choice of something new."

Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1994 Current Biography Yearbook.

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DAVIS, AL
July 4, 1929- Football executive.

An ever-controversial rebel, Al Davis is the managing general partner and "total boss" of the fabled Los Angeles Raiders. Often abrasive and sometimes devious, Davis has not hesitated to buck the powerful National Football League and Commissioner Pete Rozelle to achieve his goals. In 1982 he transferred his team from Oakland to Los Angeles in defiance of the league's rules, a move upheld after years of court battles. Long known as "the Genius," and as an innovative strategist and hard worker, Al Davis acquired his football smarts in a turbulent career as head coach, general manager, league commissioner, and part-owner that began in 1963 when he set about refashioning the Oakland Raiders in his image. Brawling their way to the top record in professional sports--217 wins, 11 ties, and 87 losses in twenty winning seasons--the Raiders have won the world championship three times, in Super Bowls XI, XV, and XVIII.

Alluding to the contradictory images that Davis presents to football pundits, Al Stump noted in Los Angeles magazine (November 1984) that "whatever Davis really is--power monger, mad genius, super egoist, brilliant strategist, renegade opportunist, skilled motivator--he's got one big thing going for him. Everybody loves a winner. And how can you help but love someone whose only goal is Just Win, Baby, Win'?"

Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1985 Current Biography Yearbook.

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DOUBLEDAY, NELSON
July 20, 1933- Baseball executive; former publisher.

Nelson Doubleday, the scion of one of the major American publishing dynasties, has parlayed an unlikely partnership between the family book company and a major-league baseball franchise into a winning investment. Doubleday is the grandson of F. N. Doubleday, the founder of Doubleday & Company Inc., and the great-great-grandnephew of Abner Doubleday, the apocryphal "inventor" of baseball. Working his way up the executive ladder in the publishing company, he became its president in 1978. Two years later the company bought the then lowly New York Mets, the National League baseball team, and Doubleday became chairman of the Met board as well. Over the next six years, the Mets developed into a championship team, while Doubleday & Company showed signs of foundering. In 1986 Nelson Doubleday carried off a double coup, personally buying the baseball team from Doubleday & Company for a record $100 million in partnership with Fred Wilpon and, in a separate transaction, selling the publishing company to Bertelsmann A.G., the West German communications conglomerate, for a reported $475 million.

Nelson Doubleday is the son of the late Nelson Doubleday Sr., who built the company founded by F. N. (Frank Nelson) Doubleday into a mass-market giant among trade publishers, and the late Ellen McCarter (Violett) Doubleday. His ancestor Abner Doubleday actually existed and may have contributed to the popularization of baseball, but he certainly did not invent the game. Nelson was born on July 20, 1933, in Oyster Bay, Long Island. During Nelson's infancy the aging Rudyard Kipling, one of the Doubleday company's many illustrious authors, dedicated his poem "If" to him. Growing up in Oyster Bay, Nelson and his sister, Neltje (who now has the last name Kings, from her second marriage), lived, in Neltje's words, the "very isolated life" of "two rich kids sitting in a big house with lots of nannies and maids." According to Neltje, Nelson, a "very silent" child, was much more interested in baseball than in books. "He went to day camp and hated it," she remembered, as quoted by Christine Dugas in Business Week (August 4, 1986). "He wasn't much of a participator. But he liked to listen to Dodgers [baseball] games on the radio." Like his father, Nelson was "not a reader," Neltje said. "I think in many ways he mimicked our father, who always said, I don't read books, I sell them.'"

Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1987 Current Biography Yearbook.

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EBERSOL, DICK
(EH-buhr-sahl)
July 28, 1947- Television executive.

In December 1995 Dick Ebersol, the president of NBC Sports, made an announcement that stunned the television industry: the broadcast rights to the Olympic Games in 2004, 2006, and 2008 had been purchased by NBC. That news came only four months after Ebersol had garnered the rights to the Games in 2000 and 2002 for his network. "What sets Dick apart is his ability to establish a level of comfort with his partners," David Stern, the NBA commissioner, who has negotiated basketball agreements with the hard-working NBC executive, told a New York Times reporter. "This Olympic deal is classic Dick Ebersol."

Ebersol's career in television began while he was in high school, when he got a part-time job as a gofer for ABC's Wide World of Sports. By the time he was in college, he was a producer and assistant to that network's sports president, Roone Arledge. Hired away by NBC in 1974, Ebersol was assigned to create youth-oriented, late-night programming, and with the producer Lorne Michaels, he devised Saturday Night Live, which became a big hit. Shortly after the show's 1975 debut, he was promoted, becoming at the age of 28 the youngest vice-president in the network's history. In 1989 Ebersol was named head of NBC's sports division as well as the senior vice-president of news. In the latter capacity, he was put in charge of the Today show, where his decision to promote the newsreader Deborah Norville to the position of cohost with Jane Pauley and Bryant Gumbel led to Pauley's departure, alienating many viewers. Owning up to his mistake, Ebersol took leave of Today. He has spent most of the last five years building up the network's sports programming. In addition to the Olympics and NBA contracts, he has made megadeals involving football and baseball broadcasts. "The implications for the other networks are potentially devastating," a writer for Sports Illustrated recently noted, "because Ebersol has now all but cornered the market on premier sports events."

Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.

The complete article can be found in the July 1996 issue of Current Biography. An updated version of the article will appear on the 1983-1996 Current Biography CD-ROM ( released in January 1997) and in the 1996 Current Biography Yearbook (to be published in December 1996).

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HUIZENGA, H. WAYNE
(HY-zeng-uh)
Dec. 29, 1939- Corporation executive; entrepreneur.

"I enjoy building something good and having a successful product and making money," the entrepreneur H. Wayne Huizenga has said. The hero of a real-life Horatio Alger story, in his early twenties Huizenga worked as a garbage-truck driver. Striking out on his own, he started a one-man trash-collection operation that, within a decade, had grown into a highly profitable enterprise providing employment for several dozen people. In 1968, combining his business with three other companies, he created Waste Management, Inc., which, when he resigned as president and chief operating officer in 1984, having decided to retire, ranked as the largest trash haulage and disposal business in the world. Bored with inactivity, he began buying properties in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, his adopted hometown, and soon became a major player in the city's economy.

In 1987 Huizenga and two partners acquired a nineteen-store chain called Blockbuster Video. As chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Blockbuster Entertainment Corp., he used his skills as a master deal maker to help transform the business into the world's largest video-rental chain and, in the words of one reporter, into "the company that is to videos what McDonald's is to hamburgers." With revenues of more than $2 billion in 1993, its share of the market has reached 20 percent, and it has reportedly grown larger than the next 550 video-rental chains combined. After Blockbuster's merger with the media giant Viacom, in 1994, Huizenga was named vice-chairman of Viacom and chairman of a new entity called the Blockbuster Entertainment Group. In 1995 he left Blockbuster to become the chairman and chief executive officer of Republic Waste Industries, a relatively small solid-waste collection business. As the owner of the Miami Dolphins football team, the Florida Marlins baseball team, and the Florida Panthers hockey team, Huizenga is the only person in the United States whose holdings include three professional sports clubs.

Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1995 Current Biography Yearbook.

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JONES, JERRY*
Oct. 13, 1942- Businessman; football executive.

In 1989 Jerry Jones risked the fortune he had amassed in the energy-exploration business to buy the Dallas Cowboys, a once-mighty NFL franchise that had fallen into disarray. Many football fans were shocked when, in one of his first moves as the team's owner, he abruptly ousted Tom Landry, the only coach in Cowboy history, in favor of Jimmy Johnson, a brash college coach who had been Jones's teammate at the University of Arkansas in the early 1960s. Nevertheless, the two "J. J.s," as Jones and Johnson were called, quickly revived the Cowboy mystique, turning the league's worst team into a title contender in 1991 and a Super Bowl champion in 1992. After Dallas won a second consecutive NFL championship, the two men terminated their relationship in March 1994, amid a well-publicized spat.

Even without Johnson, however, Jones has kept the Cowboys among the league's elite teams while redefining the role of activist owner in a new era of escalating expenses, payroll salary caps, and player free agency. As the team's general manager, he negotiates contracts and participates in the college draft; as the NFL's most visible owner, he stoked the star-making machinery of the Dallas Cowboys in 1995 by adding the high-priced free agent Deion Sanders to a glittering roster of wealthy, mediagenic superstars that includes Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith, and Michael Irvin. "There was no way I was going to come in and not make money--big money--from this team," Jones told Dan McGraw of U.S. News & World Report (September 26, 1994). "To win [games] and lose money would be a failure. In order to be successful, I always felt we had to [win] both."

Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.

The complete article can be found in the May 1996 issue of Current Biography. An updated version of the article will appear on the 1983-1996 Current Biography CD-ROM (to be released in January 1997) and in the 1996 Current Biography Yearbook (to be published in December 1996).

* Photo courtesy of the Dallas Cowboys.

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KING, DON
Dec. 6, 1932- Boxing promoter.

"There ain't no others like me," booms Don King, who bills himself as "The World's Greatest Promoter," and with good reason, since he is indisputably the most powerful promoter in boxing today. King's flamboyant public image is marked by his wild hairdo, flashy jewelry, and evangelical monologues embellished with quotations from Shakespeare and other literary immortals. A former numbers czar from Cleveland, Ohio, who was once convicted for manslaughter, he suddenly became a millionaire about two years after his release from prison. Beginning in 1974 with the George Foreman-Ken Norton fight in Caracas, Venezuela, King set the scene for such pugilistic extravaganzas as the Ali-Foreman "Rumble in the Jungle," the Ali-Frazier "Thrilla in Manila," the Larry Holmes-Gerry Cooney "The Pride and the Glory," and the doubleheader "The Crown Affair." In his ten-year career as a boxing entrepreneur, Don King has shifted control of the power structure from the traditional white brokers to black entrepreneurs, has expanded the perimeters of the sport to the Third World, and has raised many millions for prizefighters.

Since the days when he promoted the career of Muhammad Ali, Don King has signed up "almost as many world champions and contenders," as one sportswriter has noted, "as the rest of the world combined." His stable has included Greg Page, Michael Dokes, Victor Galindez, Sugar Ray Leonard, Roberto Duran, Wilfredo Gomez, Leon Spinks, Aaron Pryor, and Larry Holmes. Most of the major fights in the last decade have been promoted by King and his closest competitor, Robert Arum. When asked in a Penthouse interview (January 1984) whether it is true that he and Arum control boxing promotion in the United States, the controversial King, whose operations are constantly under investigation, responded: "We put on the most promotions because we work hard at what we do.. . . You have to deliver. I'll deliver, Bob Arum will deliver. And the rest of them will fall short."

Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1984 Current Biography Yearbook.

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MONAGHAN, THOMAS
Mar. 25, 1937- Corporation executive; baseball-team owner.

Historians trying to describe the social climate of the United States in the 1980s will likely be hard-pressed to do so without mentioning, at least in passing, Domino's Pizza. Fueled by the nation's exploding population of singles and two-income, childless couples as well as by the "couch-potato" trend of that decade, Domino's, which features free home delivery of a hot pizza in thirty minutes or less, grew from 290 stores in 1980 to more than 5,000 by 1990. The chain's founder and chairman, Tom Monaghan, is a straight-arrow type whose life story follows the classic Horatio Alger pattern. Raised in orphanages and foster homes, Monaghan graduated last in his high school class, was expelled from a Catholic seminary, and attended college six times without getting past the status of freshman. In 1960 he and his brother, Jim, borrowed $900 and bought a foundering pizzeria in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Although Jim pulled out of the business less than a year later, Tom hung on, slowly opening new stores and surviving two near-bankruptcies, a devastating fire to his headquarters, and a five-year legal battle with the Amstar Corporation over trademark infringement. His perseverance paid off. By 1989 Domino's had 5,100 outlets and annual sales of $2.3 billion, and Tom Monaghan's personal fortune was estimated at $480 million.

Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1990 Current Biography Yearbook.

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SAMARANCH, JUAN ANTONIO
(Sa-muh-RAHNCH)
July 17, 1920- Spanish sports official; banker; industrialist.

As the president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Juan Antonio Samaranch is widely considered to be "the most powerful sports figure in the world," in the words of George Vecsey of the New York Times (November 27, 1985). When Samaranch succeeded Lord Killanin (Michael Morris Killanin, 3d Baron) of Ireland to the presidency, in 1980, financial difficulties plagued the Olympic movement, and interest in the Games seemed to be waning. Under Samaranch's leadership, the popularity of the Olympiads has swelled worldwide, and the movement has been transformed into an enormously profitable enterprise that has been likened to a multinational corporation, a "mighty engine of commerce," and an empire. Samaranch engineered that transformation by means of lucrative deals between the IOC and corporations that sought to boost their sales by linking their names with the symbols and glamour of the Olympics. By permitting famous professional athletes to compete, he has heightened the aura of glamour surrounding the Olympics and, at the same time, altered the very nature of the Games, which, since their revival in 1896, had been intended to serve as an arena for amateur athletes only.

Samaranch's policies have provoked much controversy, with his most impassioned critics condemning what they regard as the destruction of the Olympics' guiding ideals. Samaranch has maintained that by generating much-needed funds, commercialization has helped national and international sports associations as well as athletes and that the inclusion of professionals in the Games simply reflects the realities of a changing world. "Maybe you in the United States have the perception we are opening the Games to professionals," he said during an interview in 1992. "But for many years in the Olympic Games, professionals from Europe were playing. Spain. Italy. France. Germany. And not only from these countries, but 100 percent of the athletes from the Communist countries. They were more professional than the professionals from the United States. What we are doing now is providing the possibility to have all the best in the Games." Traveling more than one hundred thousand miles each year while carrying out his administrative tasks and promotional projects, Samaranch is the first IOC president to work virtually full-time at the job. He is also the first Hispanic to head the IOC.

Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1994 Current Biography Yearbook.

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SCHULTZ, RICHARD D.
Sep. 5, 1929- Organization official.

On September 1, 1995 Richard D. Schultz, a former executive director of the NCAA, was appointed by the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) to serve as the organization's eighth executive director, one of the most powerful positions in amateur athletics. The genesis of the USOC, the custodian of the Olympic movement in the United States, took place two years prior to the first modern Olympic Games, which were held in Athens in 1896. Beginning as a one-man operation administered by the American delegate to the International Olympic Committee, the organization went through several name changes between 1900, when it was called the Amateur Athletic Union, and 1961, when it became the USOC. Headquartered in Colorado Springs since 1978, the USOC comprises 72 member organizations: 37 Olympic associations in sports ranging from archery to wrestling; 4 groups in the Pan American Division, covering bowling, racquetball, roller skating, and tae kwon do; 7 affiliated sport organizations; 12 community-based multisport associations, including the YMCA and YWCA; 4 that are related to education, including the NCAA; 1 belonging to the armed forces; and 7 groups for the disabled, including Eunice Kennedy Shriver's Special Olympics International.

Before assuming the leadership of the USOC, which involves the coordination of all athletic activities in the nation related to international competition, Schultz had been president and CEO of the Westwood, Kansas-based consulting firm Global Sports Enterprises, which he had established in the previous year. As executive director of the NCAA, from 1987 to 1994, Schultz instituted many far-reaching reforms aimed at restoring the integrity of college athletics, which had become tainted by corruption during the previous decade. Most of the programs he launched were geared toward regaining institutional control over athletic programs. He also initiated a study of gender equity and negotiated a seven-year, $1 billion television deal with CBS to broadcast the annual NCAA basketball tournament. During the last four years of his tenure at the NCAA, he served concurrently on the executive committee of the USOC, which enabled him to strengthen the relationship between the two organizations. From 1981 to 1987 he worked at the University of Virginia as the school's director of athletics, a position he had held previously at Cornell University. He has also coached basketball and baseball at the college level.

Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.

The complete article can be found in the July 1996 issue of Current Biography. An updated version of the article will appear on the 1983-1996 Current Biography CD-ROM ( released in January 1997) and in the 1996 Current Biography Yearbook (to be published in December 1996).

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SHRIVER, EUNICE KENNEDY
(YOO-nis)
July 10, 1921- Organization official; social activist; social worker.

Since the mid-1950s, when she became the executive vice-president of the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation, Eunice Kennedy Shriver has been a leader in the worldwide struggle to improve the lives of people with mental retardation. Through her fierce determination and unrelenting efforts in their behalf, Shriver sparked nothing less than "a revolution in research on the causes of mental retardation, the care of the retarded, and the acceptance of the retarded by the community," an accomplishment for which she was honored with the prestigious Albert Lasker Public Service Award, in 1966, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 1984--the nation's highest civilian award. During the administration of President John F. Kennedy, Shriver played a key role in gaining the involvement of the federal government in that revolution. In 1968 she founded Special Olympics, which, with more than one million athletes and half a million coaches and other volunteers participating, has become the largest year-round program of sports training and competition in the world for mentally retarded children and adults. An international endeavor that has been labeled "a precursor of the larger disability rights movement," Special Olympics has demonstrated the humanity and long-unsuspected abilities of retarded people and thereby has helped to remove barriers that separated them from their neighbors and society as a whole. In an address that she made at the fifth International Summer Special Olympics Games, in 1979, Shriver told the athletes, "What you are winning by your courageous efforts is far greater than any game. You are winning life itself, and in doing so you give to others a most precious prize--faith in the unlimited possibilities of the human spirit."

A sister of President Kennedy (whom she always called Jack); Senator Edward M. "Ted" Kennedy of Massachusetts; Robert F. Kennedy, a United States attorney general and senator who was assassinated in 1968; and Rosemary Kennedy, who is mentally retarded, Shriver began her career in public service in the mid-1940s, when she worked with female prisoners, juvenile delinquents, runaways, and abandoned children. Currently the honorary chairman of Special Olympics International, she is also the president of Community of Caring, a program that she founded in 1981 to reduce the incidence of mental retardation among the babies of teenage mothers and that has since been expanded to address such problems as substance abuse by teenagers.

When, in 1966, a reporter asked her what had attracted her to social work, Shriver said, "I think that really the only way you change people's attitudes or behavior is to work with them. Not write papers or serve on committees. Who's going to work with the child to change him--with the juvenile delinquent and the retarded? Who's going to teach him to swim? To catch a ball? You have to work with the person. It's quite simple, actually." "When the full judgment of the Kennedy legacy is made--including JFK's Peace Corps and Alliance for Progress, Robert Kennedy's passion for civil rights, and Ted Kennedy's efforts on health care, workplace reform, and refugees--the changes wrought by Eunice Shriver may well be seen as the most consequential," Harrison Rainie wrote in U.S. News & World Report (November 15, 1993). "With a lot of help from her very powerful brother Jack and inspiration from her powerless sister Rosemary, Eunice Shriver helped move the nation for good and for all."

Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.

The complete article can be found in the July 1996 issue of Current Biography. An updated version of the article will appear on the 1983-1996 Current Biography CD-ROM ( released in January 1997) and in the 1996 Current Biography Yearbook (to be published in December 1996).

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STERN, DAVID
Sep. 22, 1942- Sports executive; attorney.

One of the most remarkable sports stories of the 1980s was the dramatic turnaround of the National Basketball Association under the leadership of David Stern. In the early years of the decade, the NBA was the laughingstock of professional sports, riddled by runaway salaries, quarrelsome owners, and widespread drug abuse among its players. Television ratings, attendance, and corporate sponsorship were all in decline, and several franchises were on the verge of bankruptcy. The NBA's path to recovery began in 1983, when Stern, who was then the league's vice-president for business and legal affairs, and Larry Fleisher, the head of the National Basketball Players Association, hammered out a revolutionary collective-bargaining agreement that introduced, for the first time in an American sports league, revenue sharing and a per-team "salary cap." Later that year the league, with Stern again playing a major role, introduced a drug-abuse treatment program that many observers consider a model for combining firmness with compassion.

Stern, who succeeded Larry O'Brien as the commissioner of the NBA in February 1984, soon set about further transforming the league by aggressively marketing it as an entertainment company that employs the greatest athletes in the world. Aided by ever-increasing revenues and by the presence of such spectacular and popular players as Larry Bird, Earvin ("Magic") Johnson, and Michael Jordan, the NBA under Stern became the world's most stable and successful sports league and the second-most-widely distributed sports property worldwide, after the Olympic Games. In 1990 Stern, who had been named the sports executive of the decade by the Associated Press, also earned Sport magazine's accolade as "the best commissioner in organized sports." "David has taken us to another level," Magic Johnson told David DuPree of USA Today (February 20, 1990). "He's a great commissioner but also a mastermind at marketing, and that's where he's passed everyone else in sports....We're the hottest league in the world, not just the United States, but the world, and he's the reason why."

Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1991 Current Biography Yearbook.

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TAGLIABUE, PAUL
(TAG-lee-ah-boo)
Nov. 24, 1940- Sports executive; lawyer.

When Pete Rozelle stepped down as commissioner of the National Football League in 1989, he was one of the toughest acts to follow in the business world. Since becoming commissioner in 1960, Rozelle had presided over the merger of the American Football League (AFL) with the NFL, the growth of the Super Bowl from a mere championship game to an astonishing spectacle of modern marketing and media-driven hype, and the ascension of professional football to the top of the television heap among the major broadcast sports. Under Rozelle's guidance, the NFL became the very model of the successful modern sports league. However, in the 1980s the league entered a fractious, litigious era, during which it has fended off a series of antitrust lawsuits and twice endured strike-shortened seasons. After twenty-nine years, Rozelle called it quits, sparking a seven-month-long squabble among the team owners over who would become his successor. In the end, the owners turned to the ultimate NFL insider, Paul Tagliabue, a senior partner at a powerful Washington, D.C., law firm who had served as Rozelle's chief legal counsel for two decades. A former basketball player and by all accounts a brilliant man, Tagliabue quickly demonstrated that he was energetic and nimble in the manner of the young Rozelle and more than capable of overseeing the league's expansion into international markets as professional football heads into the twenty-first century. "He's really involved at every level," Pat Bowlen, the owner of the Denver Broncos told Peter Finch in an interview for Business Week (January 28, 1991). "I have not been in any league meeting, from finance to broadcast to labor, where he was not present."

Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1992 Current Biography Yearbook.

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UEBERROTH, PETER
(YOO-buhr-roth)
Sep. 2, 1937- Baseball commissioner.

Although he was a brilliant entrepreneur, the multimillionaire Peter V. Ueberroth was relatively unknown before he became president of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee in 1979. His skillful management of the summer games--the first ever to be financed exclusively from private funds--netted a remarkable surplus of over $200 million for the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee and earned him the title of Man of the Year from both Time magazine and the Sporting News. Taking on another challenge after the Olympics, Ueberroth succeeded Bowie Kuhn as commissioner of baseball. His forceful style and business acumen have led many observers to predict that he will be baseball's most impressive commissioner since Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who originated the position in 1920.

Peter Victor Ueberroth was born in Evanston, Illinois on September 2, 1937, the son of Victor Ueberroth, an aluminum-siding salesman, and Laura (Larson) Ueberroth. His mother died when he was four, and after about a year his father remarried. He and his second wife, Nancy, an accountant, had a son six years later. During Peter's childhood, the Ueberroths lived in Madison, Wisconsin, Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, and Davenport, Iowa, but they finally settled in Burlingame in northern California. He became involved in baseball at an early age as a third baseman, catcher, and pitcher on American Legion and sandlot teams, but he insists that he was merely a mediocre player. Ueberroth continued his interest in sports at Fremont High School in Los Angeles, where he earned letters in baseball, football, and swimming, though sports were not his only extracurricular activity. By the time he entered high school, he was self-supporting, and in his sophomore year he moved out of his parents' home to live and work at Twelveacres, an orphanage for children from broken homes, where he earned $125 a month as its recreation director.

Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1985 Current Biography Yearbook.

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VINCENT, FAY
May 29, 1938- Sports executive; lawyer.

No commissioner in the history of major-league baseball has endured as tumultuous a first year in office as Fay Vincent, who assumed his position in September 1989, following the death of his close friend A. Bartlett Giamatti, under whom he had served as deputy commissioner. During his first year at the helm, Vincent was forced to deal with three major crises: an earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area that halted the 1989 World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics for ten days; a thirty-two-day "lockout" of spring-training camps by the major-league owners in 1990, which delayed the opening of the regular season for a week; and a lengthy investigation into alleged improprieties by George Steinbrenner, the principal owner of the New York Yankees, which resulted in his being ousted from that position in the summer of 1990. In the opinion of most observers, Vincent's actions in each of those cases were those of a man possessed of uncommonly good judgment, grace, and perseverance. "He has already shown us a lot of qualities as an individual," David Dombrowski, the general manager of the Montreal Expos, told Greg Boeck during an interview for USA Today (August 1, 1990). "He showed compassion and understanding in the way he handled the earthquake. And he showed toughness, integrity, and the ability to command respect with the Steinbrenner decision. The list goes on."

Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1991 Current Biography Yearbook.

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