In Whatever Game He Played, Klein Was Usually a Big Winner

Eugene V. Klein was born to win the big one. Not one specific big one, mind you, just whatever big one he happened to be tackling.

Forget, for a minute, the world of sports.

Gene Klein had to win a lot of big ones before he could even think about buying into sports. You don’t go from being a Depression kid in New York City to a National Football League owner by getting lucky in a marble game.

“Whatever he touched,” said Johnny Sanders, the former Charger general manager, “he made it successful . . . starting with a used-car business in San Fernando Valley when he got out of the service.”

That, indeed, was the first big one Klein won. He put a few used cars on a vacant lot and ended up the Western States distributor for an unknown import car called a Volvo. OK, so maybe it wasn’t that easy and didn’t happen that fast, but the point is that he did it.

Klein, who had sold encyclopedias door to door during the Depression, was looking like a man who was born to sell.

Another quality would manifest itself in an almost entirely different field.

Leadership.

Klein became head of National Theaters & Television in 1961, when the company had $80 million in assets. Somehow, the name did not ultimately cover a conglomerate with holdings in movie production, real estate, savings and loans, book publishing, vending, merchandising and insurance. Renamed National General Corp., it sold 12 years later for $1.2 billion. What he did was roughly the equivalent of taking a shoeshine stand and turning it into a shopping center.

That was, in its way, a very big win.

But victories like that are accomplished very quietly, tucked away on the business pages. No one asks corporate moguls for their autographs. The networks would not be there with live coverage.

It just so happened that Gene Klein loved sports. Football was a natural for him to love, and so a football team was a natural team for him to own. Football, after all, is a game that rewards a blend of intellect, aggressiveness, toughness and loyalty, and those were all traits descriptive of Klein.

And so it was that he bought into the Chargers as part of a group in 1966.

Anyone who knew Klein’s history, of course, was not surprised that this giant of a man ended up owning a giant slice of the franchise.

But this was where winning the big one became a bit more elusive. In the NFL, 28 franchises are headed by 28 owners who have all won a succession of big ones to get to where they are. All have that one more big one they want to win.

The Super Bowl.

They apply the best of everything that got them where they are at, and 27 of them still come away losers by the end of each January.

Klein himself took a more hands-on approach to ownership after the 2-11-1 season of 1973, and that still didn’t get the job done. It got him close a couple of times, but never all the way.

Meanwhile, the headstrong owner was discovering that players and players’ agents could also be a headstrong bunch. Klein was never one to back down from a fight or a controversy, and he ended up in a succession of them.

What’s more, there was his bitter rivalry with Al Davis. During testimony against Davis in a 1981 lawsuit, he suffered a massive heart attack.

He won that one but started dropping hints that maybe it was time to get out of the NFL business. All the bickering might actually have been fun if the winning didn’t stop, but the club started to slip after those flirtations with the Super Bowl during the glory days of Don Coryell.

Gene Klein had one very big one to win for San Diego. His powers of persuasion in May 1984 brought the 1988 Super Bowl to San Diego. He made up for not getting a team into it by getting the town into it.

Shortly thereafter, he sold the franchise to Alex Spanos.

Klein, however, was not done with athletes. He got into thoroughbred horse racing. Horses turned out to be ideal athletes in that none of them had agents, none of them demanded to renegotiate and Al Davis didn’t own any.

Klein joined with trainer D. Wayne Lukas to form an alliance that produced 300 victories, $25 million in earnings and 12 Eclipse Awards over a 6 1/2-year period. Klein’s horses won one big one after another.

What’s more, a Klein filly, Winning Colors, won a very big one in 1988 . . . the Kentucky Derby.

“I never won a Super Bowl,” he once said, “so I can’t relate to it. But one of 28 teams is going to win the Super Bowl every year and only one of 50,000 foals can win the Kentucky Derby. The odds are pretty big.”

It would be almost impossible to estimate how many big ones this man won in his lifetime, quite often against odds that were likely pretty high at the time.

You had to know that Death had only one chance to catch up with such a man. It could only sneak up on him when he wasn’t looking, most likely in the middle of the night.

Of course, that was the way it happened. Eugene V. Klein had almost always won the big ones when he had a fighting chance. This time, he didn’t.