One Word for Phil Anschutz: Private

I’ve been burned before, Lord knows, on this sports ownership thing. We are the City of Angels, yet we have a devil of a time getting it the way we want it.

We have lived through Al Davis, his Raiders and their Hells Angels fans. We have seen Al come and go and now want to come back again. We remember the fights in the stands and in the Coliseum Commission offices and we go to our knees, asking forgiveness for whatever we did to deserve this.

We have lived through Georgia Frontiere, a woman who donated so much to the community in charity work and charity dollars and whose Rams weren’t worth a plug nickel. We watched her win admirably at the charity balls and cocktail parties and lose miserably on the football field, and we exhaled deeply when she took her boys away to play next to a big river and a big arch, where the mosquitoes are as big as the offensive tackles.

We have lived through Bruce McNall, whose rare coins turned out to be, well, plug nickels, and whose Kings spiraled off into mediocrity as McNall spiraled off into a federal prison.

We continue to live through, and with, Donald Sterling and his hapless Clippers, who have shown us amazing loyalty by staying and playing in our downtown facility while many of the resident rats at the Sports Arena have sought better digs. Sterling will play in the new arena this season, but we are fairly certain that a change of address won’t stem the flow of material for Jay Leno.

All we ever wanted was for Jerry Buss, homebred and self-made, to keep giving Jerry West great gobs of money to buy us more Showtime and new Magic. But even that is no longer the slam dunk it once was.

And all we ever wanted was for the Cowboy to get lucky and get to the World Series with his Angels one time before he died, and for Peter O’Malley to keep presenting us Dodger pennants and Dodger contenders, with Tommy Lasorda in the dugout preaching about God and Dodger blue, not necessarily in that order.

But Gene Autry, the Cowboy, has passed away and his Angels, now owned for the moment by Disney, have become Mickey Mouse. Peter O’Malley, our man on the white horse, has ridden off into the sunset, leaving us with Rupert Murdoch, a handful of guys in three-piece suits calling the shots from high-rises in New York City and a team of whiny losers.

So here we are, a week away from the opening of our own grand new sports palace, the Staples Center, and we are on our knees once again, praying in the name of Walter O’Malley that we get a break, that we have suffered enough, that the new guy in town with the shiny new building and ownership of the Kings and some highfalutin ideas about sprucing up our downtown turns out to be the real thing.

Deliver us from evil, Phil Anschutz.

*

It is a weekday morning, any weekday morning, in Denver.

Philip F. Anschutz, who will turn 60 later this year, drives into a parking garage at his office, 555 17th St., beneath a large blue sign that says “Qwest,” and parks in a space at a sign that says “reserved.” No personalized sign for the CEO of the Anschutz Corp., listed recently by Forbes as the fifth wealthiest man in the world.

If you have a worth of $16.5 billion, as Forbes says Anschutz does, your life can easily become one of fanfare and limos. Not Anschutz’s.

“He’s just a regular guy, certainly not a guy who is full of himself,” says Cy Harvey, his longtime friend, business associate and current president of the Anschutz Corp., who will park across the way from his boss in a space also designated solely with a “reserved” sign.

Anschutz is also a guy who hasn’t given an extensive interview to the press in 25 years, so that information about him must be gleaned from business associates, friends, rumors and press clippings that repeat rumors.

It is likely on this weekday morning, any weekday morning, that Anschutz has been up since 4:30 and has either put in two hours in his office at his home or run 10 miles while training for a marathon. He has run a dozen or so of those, most of them under four hours, and started doing them after age 40, when his children got him started. A telling statistic: He has never failed to complete one.

He came close to bowing out of one that involved running uphill out of the Grand Canyon, but he labored on to the end. He also finished one New York City marathon despite a stress fracture in his foot.

He is an expert hunter, especially of doves; he is also an expert fly-fisherman. He is able to partake in both frequently at the 30,000-acre ranch he owns a couple of hours outside Denver.

His minority partner in ownership of the Kings and Staples Center, Ed Roski Jr. of the longtime Los Angeles real estate firm Majestic Realty, treasures his trips to Anschutz’s ranch.

“But I don’t walk near him when we are dove hunting,” Roski says. “He hits everything he aims at. There is never anything left for me. I walk down the road a long ways away from him so I can find my own birds.”

Harvey was asked if, in all the times he had been fly-fishing with Anschutz, he had ever seen Anschutz hook into a large trout and lose it.

“No,” Harvey says.

The fifth-wealthiest man in the world is also an A-level tennis player, an even better squash player and is fast becoming a decent golfer, although until recently, that was a sport that moved a bit slowly for him and took too big a chunk of his day to play.

“He is really getting better all the time, much better than he should be for somebody who almost never played at all until recently,” says Tim Leiweke, Anschutz’s point man from the start on the new arena project, who now carries the title of president of the Staples Center. “I used to be able to beat him, but I’m not sure now. He is consistently in the high 80s and low 90s.”

*

Anschutz grew up in Russell, Kan., as did Bob Dole. They know each other well, and Anschutz has worked on, and contributed to, Dole’s political campaigns. If Anschutz’s wealth isn’t hint enough, his Midwestern roots and connection to Dole are a fairly strong indication that his politics are those of a conservative Republican.

He graduated from the University of Kansas in 1961 and soon was in the midst of a roller-coaster business with his father, an oil wildcatter who drilled wells with a 95% normal failure rate.

Anschutz demonstrated what kind of businessman he would eventually become in a quick-thinking deal in 1967. He was 27. According to an article in the magazine Denver Westword, his oil company was then 3 years old and nearly bankrupt. One of the wells it was drilling blew up, spreading fire across the field to wells owned by other wildcatters. While the fires burned, Anschutz cut a deal with another wildcatter to assume all his liability for the damage from the fire, in return for the rights to any oil left after the fires were put out, if they could be.

Having cut the deal, Anschutz quickly got on the phone and hired the legendary Red Adair to fly from Houston to the fires in Wyoming and put them out. He had negotiated some cash from the other wildcatters in the deal to assume their liability, so he had something with which to pay Adair.

But that wasn’t the end of his ingenuity. He also knew that Hollywood was making a movie about Adair and his oil-well-capping heroics, so he sold the producers the rights to film his fire for $100,000. Shortly after, Hollywood had some footage, Adair had the fire out, Anschutz had a quick cash flow and the remaining oil made him his first million.

His oil fortune grew and grew, and his sense of timing was always near-perfect. He made himself a billionaire for the first time by hanging onto some oil much longer than others would and getting out just in time, in the early 1980s, selling to Mobil at the high end just before a big fall.

He bought and sold and merged various railroads with great expertise and timing. When he eventually sold Southern Pacific Railroad in 1996 for a profit of $1.4 billion, he retained the rights to lay his own fiber-optic cable along the rights-of-way of the railroad tracks. That system is Qwest, and because of its 16,000 miles of cable across the country and into Mexico, Qwest is playing in the same ballpark with Sprint and AT&T; and other telecommunications giants.

Matter of fact, Qwest is likely to grow even more dramatically if a recent agreement to join up with US West is approved by the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission. That is expected to happen sometime in mid-2000, and it would make the combined market value of Qwest and US West an estimated $65 billion.

Part of Anschutz’s vision for the growth of Qwest is pure genius. Not only has he laid the cable on his railroad rights-of-way, he has also laid miles of open pipe alongside, so that when other communications companies run out of capacity, Qwest will be ready to serve.

At a steep price, of course.

*

Anschutz’s involvement in the world of sports has branched off in two directions: One stems from a passion for soccer, the other from a passion for a good old-fashioned real estate deal.

Broadcaster Al Michaels, a recent acquaintance of Anschutz, says, “One thing I have come away with from the times I have been with Phil is that he is passionate about two areas, his family and soccer. He loves soccer.”

Friends say this affection began with his three children’s love for the game, and it has now resulted in his being America’s patron saint of the sport. He already owns three teams in Major League Soccer--the Colorado Rapids, Chicago Fire and Los Angeles Galaxy--and there has been much speculation that, once the Staples Center is up and running well, Anschutz will build a soccer stadium for the Galaxy in Los Angeles.

Mike Connelly, sports editor of the Denver Post from 1992 to ‘97, says that Anschutz’s fervor for soccer is unmatched by anyone.

“He has been absolutely adamant for years that soccer is going to make it in Denver,” Connelly says.

Anschutz’s arrival on the Los Angeles sports scene can be traced to a real estate conversation he initiated with business associate Roski in the early 1990s. Anschutz’s Southern Pacific Railroad owned a piece of property near Chinatown in downtown Los Angeles. Now known as River Station, it was then called the Cornfield.

One of Anschutz’s vice presidents called Roski, with whom Anschutz and his company had dealt for years, and asked what use might be made of the Cornfield. Roski saw it as a good spot for a sports arena of some sort.

Eventually, in 1993, Roski had plans drawn for an arena there. Hearing of this, city officials asked Roski and his associates to look at what might be done in the heart of downtown, at the L.A. Convention Center or around the Coliseum.

In the middle of all this back-room talk, McNall went into bankruptcy, and the first buyers of a majority interest in the Kings, Joe Cohen and Jeffrey Sudikoff, proved to have less than enough financial stability of their own to keep the team afloat. So Roski and Anschutz, with visions of their own arena still their driving force, stepped in and bought the team. They also knew that the lease McNall had signed with Laker owner Buss at the Great Western Forum was so favorable to Buss that the only way to make their hockey team financially feasible was to build their own place.

Buss then realized that a fancy new arena downtown and no hockey tenant in his building made his Forum obsolete, so he sold a chunk of the Lakers to Anschutz and Roski and signed on to play in Staples, too. Clipper owner Sterling, having no place to go except Orange County and the Arrowhead Pond--but long ago having drawn his line in the sand at the county border--decided that being third fiddle at Staples was better than being No. 1 at the venerable, creaky Sports Arena. So he signed on, too.

That puts most of the pieces in place for a grand old time for years to come at the Staples Center, where the dreams of Phil Anschutz go beyond basketball and hockey and even arena football into a sort of downtown Universal Citywalk of restaurants, theaters and shopping. An entertainment destination, if you will.

Anschutz and Roski have built it. The question remains, will Los Angeles come?

*

While Los Angeles is figuring out the answer to that, it also may want an answer to another question: Just who is Philip Anschutz?

Information derived in pursuit of that answer will not be derived from Anschutz, who, at present, despite all that can be gleaned from research and interviews with those who know him, remains the phantom of the Los Angeles sports opera. Documented business dealings and studies of mergers and profit and loss statements reveal only so much and take us only slightly beyond the image of an enigma with a fat wallet.

The last full-blown interview Anschutz did was in 1974, for the Colorado Historical Society. And that has become an almost ridiculous source of recycled odd information, such as the fact that Anschutz seldom drinks, and when he does, he sips beer poured over cracked ice. Dozens of stories written on Anschutz since that 1974 piece have breathlessly detailed the beer-over-cracked-ice information.

He is not a recluse, nor is he anti-press. He just seems to want to avoid, at all costs, being the show, even though owning three soccer teams, a hockey team and a $400-million building for it to play in would appear to be an inescapable public venture, with inescapable public responsibilities. Nevertheless, Anschutz remains publicly silent.

The Los Angeles Times and its sports editor elicited from Anschutz the following response to a request for an on-the-record interview:

No.

Connelly, the former Denver sports editor, says that he had one conversation with Anschutz at a party, but he didn’t know it was Anschutz until the billionaire walked away.

“It got to be pretty silly, even kind of anal in Denver,” Connelly says. “Every time there was some sort of cocktail party, we’d send a photographer out to search for Anschutz to see if we could get at least a fresh mug shot. It was our own little ‘Hunt for Red October.’ ”

Even Times sportswriter T.J. Simers, who learned his interviewing technique by watching the guy playing bad cop on “NYPD Blue,” failed with Anschutz. Sent to a charity event a few years ago with the assignment to get Anschutz on the record, on anything, Simers managed to glean a few benign sentences about how he hoped that things would turn out well with the downtown arena.

Simers called in those quotes, breathlessly, like a reporter who had just finished a two-hour sit-down with the pope, and then admitted later, with a degree of grudging respect, that Anschutz was firm in his resolve.

“I advised him,” Simers says, “of how important it was for him to be on the record, to talk to the people of Los Angeles through the press. He advised me that that isn’t going to happen.”

Broadcaster Michaels, who is in the media and knows all the arguments for Anschutz’s being more public, has admiration for his friend’s stance, nonetheless.

“Phil is different,” Michaels says. “I’ve seen people as rich as Phil who try very hard to be mysterious for a long time. Donald Trump jumps to mind. Then, all of sudden, they are all over the place. They are on the cover of every magazine on the rack--Fortune, Forbes, People . . . . Soon, you can’t get rid of them. I think I can say unequivocally about Phil that that will never happen.”

*

Those Anschutz does let into his world are almost unanimous. This is a man with vision, integrity, guts and loyalty.

Roski says he is a great partner. And he adds: “He has no hidden agendas, no shades of gray. He makes decisions quickly and is not a committee-study kind of guy.”

Leiweke says that in the eight years he has known Anschutz and the four years he has worked for him, his boss has never raised his voice, in anger or for any other reason. And he adds: “You want so much to please him, so much not to disappoint him, that you just work that much harder.”

Buss says that while his dealings with Anschutz were limited to a few negotiating sessions, he found him to be bright, energetic, polite and tough. “His style was listen-talk, more than talk-listen,” Buss adds. “People I talked to before I met him said he was a straight-shooter, and I found that to be true.”

The only real disclaimer comes in a recent piece in Fortune magazine, in which one of Anschutz’s former business associates, a lawyer named Robert Starzel, now a senior vice president of Union Pacific Railroad, reached back 20 years or so and recalled: “He [Anschutz] didn’t have much of a sense of humor at first. He was juggling a lot.”

Harvey, his president, says Anschutz’s management style is one of interaction, and that he encourages a free flow of ideas. “He is not reclusive, just private, and I admire him for that,” Harvey says.

When asked for anecdotes about his boss and longtime friend, Harvey replies, “Part of my respect for him is that, when I am asked to tell Phil Anschutz stories, I don’t.”

*

Luc Robitaille, the Kings’ veteran scoring star, says he and his teammates are still talking about the November day in 1997 when the team, with a couple of days off after a game in Denver, went as a group to Anschutz’s ranch outside Denver.

“There is a nine-hole golf course there, some skeet shooting, a trout stream, horseback riding and enough room to sleep the entire team,” Robitaille says. “The kitchen seated 50. Can you imagine? I can’t describe what it is like there. There’s just everything and anything to do.

“Mr. Anschutz wasn’t there when we first arrived, but he drove up before dinner and just kind of hauled his bags out of his car and joined us. He walked around, talking to players out on the deck, and was friendly and low-key. He has a way of making everybody else around him feel important.

“You know, I hate to say something like this, ‘cause it sounds like I’m sucking up, but if I had the kind of money he has, he’s the kind of person I’d like to be.

“He’s crazy about his family. His wife, Nancy, is a huge sports fan and knows more sports stuff than most guys. And because of what he does, he can have time with them.

“He’s just a regular guy, but with lots of money.”

*

So, with or without the nfl gods showing up in Los Angeles sometime, the immediate future of our pro sports psyche is dependent, for the most part, on a Denver billionaire who doesn’t live here, probably never will, and asks, not directly but through a cadre of lieutenants, that we give our loyalty, devotion and admission dollars.

Sounds scary, doesn’t it?

Well, let’s give it some perspective:

--If everybody you talk to who knows him uses words such as integrity and loyalty, they can’t all be wrong.

--His name isn’t Al, Georgia or Bruce.

When the Kings open in the Staples Center Oct. 20, don’t look for helicopters or limos or big deals being made over the owners.

It will be a proud night, to be sure.

But if you want to find the man responsible, and you can prove that you are not a newspaper or TV reporter, go stand in one of the hot dog lines and Phil Anschutz will be glad to chat.