The First Love of Twin Owner Is Football : Vikings: Pohlad, who worked his way through junior college by selling cars in Long Beach, says he would sell baseball team.

Carl Pohlad, the banker who owns nearly 100% of the Minnesota Twins and more than 25% of the Minnesota Vikings, prefers football, he said the other day, because he used to play the game in Long Beach and at Gonzaga University.

In the 1930s, Pohlad was heading for USC, he said, even after talking with Gonzaga recruiters at Long Beach.

Then he had an unexpected visitor, singer Bing Crosby, a Gonzaga alumnus who drove down from Hollywood and took Pohlad back to the Beverly Hills Hotel.

There, Pohlad said, “Some college girls and a few other football players were waiting for Bing and me. And we had a nice party. That sold me on Gonzaga.”

A Spokane (Wash.) school, Gonzaga at the time was one of four or five Catholic football powers in the West. Each year it played its big game against St. Mary’s, a Moraga (Calif.) school whose team was led by Slip Madigan, one of the most famous of 1930s coaches.

One year, as usual, St. Mary’s was unbeaten, untied and heavily favored over Gonzaga--but unhappily for the Moraga team, Gonzaga had Carl Pohlad.

A two-way end who played 60 minutes that day, Pohlad broke through the line early in the second half and blocked a punt, putting enough pressure on St. Mary’s to preserve a moral victory for Gonzaga: a scoreless tie.

“It was our Rose Bowl game,” Pohlad said.

He has gone on from that to other triumphs in Iowa and Minnesota, building a personal fortune that has reached $680 million, Forbes Magazine estimates, putting him up there with the 100 richest Americans.

At 75, Pohlad is a stocky, gray-haired, aggressive co-investor in the corporation-buying business with another Minneapolis multimillionaire, Irwin Jacobs. And together they have already acquired 50.6% of the Vikings.

Asked if he’s a corporate raider, Jacobs said: “My life is an open book.”

Pohlad said he buys stock in the expectation that its value will rise.

“I don’t call that raiding,” he said. “Raiding is taking something that doesn’t belong to you.”

He and Jacobs, representing the new money in the Vikings, are trying to get control. They are suing the old-money faction that owns the other half of the club, and they are also putting their case before Paul Tagliabue, commissioner of the NFL, a league that frowns on cross-ownership of baseball and football teams.

Many in Minnesota are frowning, too.

“The public interest isn’t served when the same man owns two teams,” said Jim Klobuchar, a columnist for the Star Tribune of Minneapolis. “In an argument with the city, he could move one team to Spokane and the other to Des Moines.”

Said Pohlad: “I’ll comply with whatever the NFL says. If they want me to sell the baseball club, I’ll sell. I’m gradually turning (the Twins) over to my (three) sons, anyway.”

But, Klobuchar said, “It’s all in the family.”

A fan of both the Vikings and Twins, Pohlad expects to live to see both win many World Series and Super Bowl championships in his lifetime.

“My mother just called (for money) from Las Vegas,” he said. “She drove herself there from her home here. She’s 99 years old.”

If Pohlad and Jacobs take over the Vikings, they are expected to fire veteran Coach Jerry Burns and bring in a buddy, Notre Dame Coach Lou Holtz, despite a recent complication: In a St. Paul Pioneer-Press poll, 948, or 82%, of 1,156 sampled said they don’t want Holtz, who was at the University of Minnesota when South Bend called.

The candidate, however, has the votes that count. Holtz gave Pohlad the game ball after the Irish beat West Virginia in the 1989 Fiesta Bowl, 34-21.

As an entrepreneur, Pohlad began as a buyer and seller of used cars. He moved to Long Beach after high school and worked his way through junior college with a car lot on American Avenue. As a Gonzaga student he got his first stake, again in used cars, and his business career took off.

“I’ve never worked for anybody else,” he said.

The Pohlad fascination with cars remains. Until well into his 60s, his life outside of banking hours was fast cars and touch football. He followed Indy and Formula One racing whenever he could get away, and, until a fateful day at Long Beach in 1979, he played touch football whenever he could.

During the week of the race that year, Pohlad, whose best friends were race drivers, organized a touch football game in the courtyard of the old Queensway Hotel, the drivers’ hotel.

“It was a brutal game,” he remembers. “Nobody won.

“On one play, Jackie Stewart was trying to tackle the ballcarrier when he broke a finger so badly that it’s been crooked ever since.

“Jody Scheckter, the (Formula One) world champion that year, sprained an ankle and couldn’t operate the clutch properly in the race. He was favored, but lost.

“I didn’t even get to see the race. Running with the ball, I slipped on a wet spot on the field and tore the cartilage in my knee, which led to a hip problem, which led eventually to a hip transplant.

“It was my last football game. I’m just glad I can still walk.”