SUPER BOWL XXI : THE NFL OWNERS : THE AFC WEST

EDITOR’S NOTE

Who are the people who own the teams that compete in the NFL, and strive each year to make it to the Super Bowl? What kinds of people are they? Are they all rich? Are they all self-made? Do they own teams because they love the sport, or because the teams are good investments? The Times assigned staff writers Bob Oates and Earl Gustkey to research and write about the NFL owners with these, and other, questions in mind. Their stories appear in the adjoining columns. Oates writes about the AFC’s owners, Gustkey the NFC’s.

PAT BOWLEN, Denver Broncos

By the time he was 39, which was three years ago, Pat Bowlen was the president or board chairman of, and a major stockholder in, seven companies in Canada and America.

He was in real estate, oil, gas and other natural resources. He had Canadian dollars coming out of one ear and American dollars coming out of the other.

That was the summer, Bowlen recalls, that he told himself: “Pat, it’s time for you to make a career decision.”

Some people thought he’d already made it, about 20 years earlier. But there was Pat asking himself: “What do you want to do with the rest of your life?”

He could keep on selling natural resources until he had a billion dollars. Or he could buy a football team and go broke.

He chose football. And pledged to run the team profitably, somehow, although the purchase price was $70 million.

So far, things have gone swimmingly for both Bowlen and the Denver Broncos, who, under his stewardship, have gradually reduced the largest player payroll in the league and have won a lot of games besides.

Indeed, considering strictly field success, no other owner in NFL history has broken in as spectacularly as Bowlen.

Since he moved into the president’s office in Denver, the Broncos, as coached by Dan Reeves, have gone 13-3, 11-5 and 11-5. And today, they’re in the Super Bowl.

But who is Pat Bowlen?

One of the least-known owners in sports, he is, for one thing, an athletic, pleasant lawyer who looks as if he might be Frank Sinatra’s 42-year-old kid brother. With his wife, Annabel, and children, Bowlen maintains homes in Denver, Edmonton and Honolulu.

For another, he’s an American-born, Canadian entrepreneur who, as the leader of many capitalistic enterprises, has always seemed a little restless in that role.

One outlet has been triathlon racing. He prefers the Ironman triathlon in Hawaii, in which, consecutively, he and the others swim 2.4 miles, speed 112 miles on bicycles, and run 26.2 miles.

But mainly, since college days at Oklahoma, where he studied business and law, Bowlen has been searching for something like a football team. He didn’t realize, though, that it would be a football team until six months before he bought in.

“In my late 30s, I got serious about doing something different,” he said. “I wanted to be deeply involved in an exciting people business of some kind.”

He finally settled on the NFL.

“Only about 25% of my work time now is spent on other businesses,” he said. “I’m giving more than 75% to football--on the club and league level both--and that’s the way I want it.”

Bowlen still heads the various family firms, but his brothers, Bill and John, who are both on the Bronco board of directors, have taken charge north of the border. With their mother, who lives in Palm Springs, the Bowlens own 100% of the Broncos.

Pat and his mother are natives of Prairie du Chien, Wis. but as an adult, he has mingled U.S. and Canadian interests.

“When you’ve lived for a while in Canada, in lovely places like Edmonton and Calgary, you never want to live in a different kind of environment,” he said. “Denver--the Rockies--are similar. Denver is my kind of town.”

And the Broncos are his kind of team. They cost him $70 million, but if you want it, you can get it--if you’ve got it. AL DAVIS, Los Angeles Raiders

To those who know him well, Raider owner Al Davis is the brightest football man of all.

His friends like to tell a story about him that was fabricated, they say, by the NFL nearly 20 years ago, when the old American Football League and NFL teams were fighting to sign the same college players.

Davis at that time was on the road for the AFL Raiders, the story goes, when he ran into an NFL scout, Gil Brandt of the Dallas Cowboys, in a hotel men’s room.

Davis then went to a house phone and told the hotel operator: “This is Gil Brandt. I’m tired and don’t want to be disturbed. Please don’t put any calls through to my room until morning.”

The operator said, “Yes, Mr. Brandt,” and broke off all contact between the Dallas executive and the two players he expected to hear from that night.

Davis then signed both players for the AFL.

Or so they say.

Asked about it, Davis said: “You know I wouldn’t do anything like that.”

Is he really the NFL’s most shrewd owner? The record should tell. Does it?

Despite an 8-8 finish this season, his team still leads not only the NFL but every other pro sport in percentage of games won since 1963, when Davis joined the Raiders as their 33-year-old coach and general manager. His team has been in four Super Bowls, winning three in the last 10 years.

In a period of six months in 1966, Davis went from Raider coach to AFL commissioner--where, by raiding the older league’s quarterbacks, he provoked the NFL to sue for peace--to Raider managing general partner.

In a recent Sport magazine poll, Davis was ranked as one of the 40 people who have made the greatest impact on U.S. sports in the last 40 years.

According to a Business Week magazine report last month:

--Davis bought 10% of the Raiders for $18,500 in 1966 and is now the club’s largest shareholder with 28%.

--The Raiders earned at least $5 million this season on an estimated $40 million in revenue.

Hard-driving, combative, resourceful, Davis is a 57-year-old autocrat who looks like a 1950s rock star. Or the leader of a motorcycle gang.

He can be as difficult as a motorcycle gang leader or as affable as a singer collecting $50,000 for a one-night stand.

A former player, John Matuszak, calls him a mature James Dean, “a rebel with a cause.”

Davis maintains that the Golden Rule is dead wrong. “I like to treat others the way they want to be treated,” he says.

A native of Brockton, Mass., he was the second son of a well-to-do garment manufacturer. His wife, Carol, the mother of his son, prefers to live at their home in Piedmont, near Oakland, though he coaxes her into spending some time in their apartment at Marina del Rey.

It’s a sea-level apartment with a close-up view of the harbor. Traveling with the Raiders, he always takes a ground-floor suite. He doesn’t like to waste time in elevators. Besides, the front door is closer if there’s an earthquake.

Davis inherited the Raiders’ pirate symbolism from the first owners, but then built on it, happily, because he’s color blind and reacts only to deep black or shining silver. He always dresses in some combination of silver and black, usually an expensive combination.

As a teen-ager, Davis went from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn to Syracuse, playing a little football and graduating in 3 1/2 years.

He has been in football ever since--he has coached both in college and the pros--most profitably with former coach Sid Gillman. “Working for Sid is like going to a coaching clinic every day,” he said.

At a restaurant one night recently, Davis got his companions to play his favorite word game. “What means the most to you?” he asked. “Love, power, glory, achievement or money?”

Three took love. Two realists chose money.

“Love, money and glory are the least important of the five,” Davis said. “I’ll take power--not ruthless power, but control.”

That’s why he’s always wanted to own his own team.

“Coaching isn’t enough,” he said. “The only sure way to run it is to own it.” LAMAR HUNT, Kansas City Chiefs

Whenever the NFL’s club owners hold their annual spring meeting at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, some of the reporters from the mainland make arrangements to stay in the hotel’s beach-side tower.

The view from there is spectacular, and the surf pounds musically day and night. The only negative is that the rooms are small.

Thus the owners all book themselves into spacious, expensive suites in the main hotel--all, that is, except one, Lamar Hunt, the unconventional owner of the Kansas City Chiefs.

Hunt and his wife, Norma, can be found in the tower, where they share a small room identical to those booked down the hall by sportswriters from, say, Fort Worth or Buffalo.

“Lamar tends to be rather careful with his money,” says owner Art Modell of the Cleveland Browns. “That’s one reason he has so much of it.”

Another reason is that his father, oilman H.L. Hunt, was perhaps the richest man in America before he died at 85 in 1974, when he left an estimated $4 billion.

Lamar Hunt, an oilman himself, also founded the American Football League, which brought 10 cities into the NFL in the merger of 1970.

Some of these cities--Denver, say, or Houston--might not have pro football yet but for Hunt. Traditionally, the NFL only expands by adding a couple of new teams every decade or so.

Hunt’s was a Hall of Fame achievement. Elected in 1972, he was the first to get there from the AFL, which survives today, vestigially, as the AFC.

It was also Hunt who named the championship game the Super Bowl.

A lifelong Texan who could pass for a San Antonio librarian--an athletic San Antonio librarian--Hunt was born in Dallas 54 years ago and completed his education there in 1956, graduating from SMU.

At 5 feet 10 inches and 180 pounds, he was a nonstarting SMU pass receiver his first two years. Then, surveying the competition as a senior, he felt sure of a promotion.

“The only guy I had to beat out was a skinny sophomore,” he recalls. “I knew I could take him.”

But he couldn’t. The thin sophomore became a Hall of Famer himself as a pass receiver--and later an NFL coach--Raymond Berry.

With his wife and four children, Hunt still lives in Dallas. His Kansas City residence is a luxurious apartment at Arrowhead Stadium.

In the NFL lately, Hunt has become the object of much curiosity. His net worth, according to Forbes magazine, still exceeds $250 million although his family has recently suffered two setbacks.

Strike 1 was the collapse of the world silver market. Strike 2 was the international plunge of oil prices.

Lamar’s brothers, Bunker and Herbert, did most of the family’s metal speculating, reportedly piling up $9.8 billion worth of silver at one point, or about half of all the silver in the world. Then the price dropped from $50 to $10 an ounce, and, in the end, Bunker and Herbert were left with $9 billion less in silver than they had once had.

In the oil turnabout, all three brothers are believed to have voted the family’s principal company, Placid Oil, into Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Their father would have approved of his sons’ risk taking. Although H.L. Hunt needed three co-signers to borrow his first $50, he ran it into a fortune at Arkansas poker tables after winning and losing as much as $30,000 a night.

This insured that his sons would spend much of their lives at different kinds of tables in corporate offices. At one such oil company meeting recently, as a dozen board members considered a new crisis, Bunker Hunt thoughtfully composed a note and passed it across to Lamar.

“We can afford to give up these three men and two first choices,” the note read, “for Vinny Testaverde.”

Lamar nodded solemnly but promised nothing. JIM and JOHN NORDSTROM, Seattle Seahawks

The Seattle Seahawks are the only NFL team owned by a department store.

That would be Nordstrom’s, whose co-chairman is John Nordstrom, the chief executive officer of the Seahawks.

John and Jim Nordstrom run a unique store. Their people work on commission, and sales quotas are all rigidly enforced.

Miss your quota and, according to Nordstrom employees, goodby, pal, you’re fired.

So it seems clear what Chuck Knox is up against in Seattle. If his quota is 9 or 10 wins a year, he’d better meet it, pal, or he’ll eat it.

The details can’t be checked, though, because the Nordstrom brothers don’t talk to sportswriters. That is in line with company policy, which accents secrecy.

For example, the brothers normally refuse to pose for pictures. At the store, reportedly, they want the focus on their clerks, not the owners.

At the Seahawk office, reportedly, they want the focus on the day-to-day decision makers--Coach Knox and club President Mike McCormack--not the owners.

Although there are newspaper photos of them, there are none of the Nordstroms in the club’s public relations file. The owners aren’t even named in the team’s press guide.

John Nordstrom does make the NFL meetings, though, where he can be easily identified, even from a distance, as he hurries into the conference room. Though 49, he looks like a high school basketball center who is still growing--a Scandinavian basketball center.

Lanky, almost gawky, he is a jogger who on work days in Seattle is a familiar sight downtown. At noontime, he skips lunch and runs along the city’s streets with a group of other business and professional people.

Reportedly, he runs 60 miles a week. And often, in the rain.

It certainly isn’t for lack of meal money, however, that John skips lunch. On Forbes magazine’s list of American multimillionaires, the Nordstrom family is credited with a net worth of $400 million.

Significantly, though, not even Forbes could penetrate the family’s screen of secrecy to decipher the worth of each Nordstrom brother, John, Jim and Bruce. The magazine can tell you what each of the Hunt billionaires is worth. But when it comes to the Nordstroms, Forbes only knows that somewhere--in their basements, or their mattresses, maybe--they have $400 million. Either that or a ledger to prove it. Reportedly.

Their assets include 51% of the Seahawks, a 1975 expansion team then priced at $16 million. Other Seattle citizens own the rest. The Nordstroms decided to participate at the request of the sports fan in the family, John’s uncle Lloyd, who subsequently died playing tennis.

The family’s financial interest in the football team, initially valued at a few dollars over $8 million, has grown to a book value of more than $35 million--which gives John something cheerful to think about as he jogs through the Seattle rain.

The first American Nordstrom, John’s grandfather John, was a logger, not a jogger. That John worked for a logging company in Sweden before migrating to Alaska, where he struck gold worth $13,000.

That was in 1900. In the dance halls and gambling rooms of the Klondike at the time, some of the sweetest people in the world could be counted on to get $13,000 away from anybody as easily as $13.

But they couldn’t get 13 cents away from grandfather Nordstrom, who put the whole stake into a shoe store. By the 1930s, he and his three sons had 27 shoe stores. By the 1960s, they were selling women’s clothing, too. And by the 1980s, the third generation--that’s John and his brothers--had more than 40 department stores, most of them on the West Coast.

Steady customers swear by Nordstrom’s, mentioning company service first. Anything can be returned anytime, reportedly. You can buy a coat at J.C. Penney’s, wear it a year, return it to Nordstrom’s and get your money back. ALEX SPANOS, San Diego Chargers

They were in New York on a charity tour, and the billing was impressive: “Tonight at Carnegie Hall: Bob Hope & Alex Spanos.”

Everybody who was anybody was there, of course. Almost everybody, that is. Well, almost everybody who knows Alex Spanos, anyhow. And who happened to be in New York at the time.

Apparently, they all got their money’s worth. Although Hope and Spanos have performed their song-and-dance act many times in the minor leagues--wearing top hats and tails and belting “There’s No Business Like Show Business” in some kind of harmony--this was their first shot in the majors.

More precisely, it was Spanos’ first shot.

“Mind you, that was Carnegie Hall--and I got four curtain calls,” he recalls, still thrilled. “It was my proudest moment until you know when.”

You know when was the day he bought the Chargers. That was later that summer in 1984, a time he will always cherish, he says, as the most splendid of his life.

The Chargers went for $70 million, a sum that didn’t bother him a lot. His net worth is listed at $200 million by Forbes magazine.

“My only dream for 30 years was to own an NFL team,” said Spanos, who in his other life has recently built more apartment houses than anybody else.

“What else is there to do with ($70 million)?” he asked. “If the Chargers hadn’t been for sale, I would have just had to reinvest the money. I feel kind of sorry for people who think ($70 million) is more interesting than a football team.

“Nobody tells them, ‘My, it’s nice you have all that money.’ Nobody even notices them. But an NFL owner is noticed. There are only 28 of us in a big country. And frankly, it’s kind of fun to be noticed.

“I’d have paid a lot more for the Chargers. I’d have paid anything--anything within reason. You can always get it back, you know, or most of it, or more.

“When I walk down the street, I’ve never heard anyone say, ‘There goes the top apartment builder in the U.S.’ But 9-year-old kids--and their fathers--come up to me now and say, ‘We’re so proud of the Chargers.’ ”

At 63, he is a dynamic, flat-tummied, crew-cut ringer for a Marine drill sergeant. He exercises in front of full-length mirrors in his office, where he runs a nationwide construction empire that his family helps supervise with the help of a fleet of private jets.

Though Spanos still lives in Stockton, where he was born, his jets are a far cry from his boyhood means of transportation.

“We were so poor that we had to take our shoes off after walking home from school,” he said. “We had to save the wear and tear on the soles.”

His father emigrated from Greece, and as the second in a family of five boys and two girls, Spanos went to work at age 8 in the family bakery and restaurant.

Work is still a family tradition. Spanos and his wife, Faye, have four children who like to work, or say they do, and six grandchildren who will, or who had better.

Spanos’ fondness for football dates from school days at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and College, now University, of the Pacific. Then, dropping football for a while, he borrowed $800 to buy a truck, and went into business for himself--as a farm-country sandwich peddler. Each morning, his wife got up first and made the sandwiches.

“From the start, I was confident that I could sell,” he said. “The only quality that all good businessmen share is confidence.”

It turns out he had plenty of confidence in himself and football but not much in baseball or basketball.

“I could have bought an NBA team or two,” he said. “Charlie Finley offered me the (baseball) A’s for $9 million two years before he sold out for $12 million. But I’d rather pay ($70 million) for an NFL team than $9 million for a baseball club.”