L.A. Owes Debt to Him

The magnitude of the loss of John C. Argue to the business and sports community of Los Angeles may be best represented by his role in the events leading to this city’s bid for the 1984 Olympic Games. Even more so, by what he did after those Games had been awarded.

Argue, who died Saturday at 70 after an eight-month battle with leukemia, was a lawyer, businessman and educator.

One of his closest sports and business associates, Pat Haden, the former USC and Ram quarterback, called Argue “a doer, somebody who got the ball advancing. You’d meet with him, and then, at the next meeting, two, three, sometimes five steps had been taken.”

For Los Angeles to get the Olympic Games, it needed a doer. And Argue, as longtime chairman of the Southern California Committee for the Olympic Games (SCCOG), was that doer. His SCCOG raised the money and did the legwork for the bid effort. Then Argue worked the politics of the International Olympic Committee. The result was a successful bid, in 1978, for the Games to come here in 1984.

But what few knew, and what nobody addressed publicly until Sunday, was the vital and selfless role that Argue played in the aftermath of that successful bid.

When L.A. was awarded the ’84 Games, They came with a provision. The IOC demanded that there be a public component to the proposed private operation of the Games. That public component was to be a commitment from city officials, and then-Mayor Tom Bradley, that taxpayer money would cover any operating shortfalls.

Bradley and Argue knew that that wouldn’t work in L.A. When the IOC proposed a contract that had taxpayer liability in it, Argue responded by saying, “We’re not going to sign that.... It is absolutely not acceptable in its present form.”

Shortly after, Bradley made it clear that, with this additional provision, Los Angeles would pull back on its bid. The negotiations continued, and to lead the way for the Los Angeles cause, Bradley appointed a committee of seven, composed of lawyer Paul Ziffren, industrialist Justin Dart, utilities official Howard Allen, labor leader Bill Robertson, TV producer David Wolper, oilman Rodney Rood and Argue. Argue was the chairman of the committee.

It immediately became clear that, were the Games to go forward in Los Angeles, somebody from this group would be in charge. And it seemed likely it would be Argue. The history of Olympic bids in the United States, then and now, most often put the person behind the successful bid directly into the top chair of the organizing committee. That’s what happened when William May Garland brought the first Games to L.A. in 1932, and it is what happened in ’96 in Atlanta with Billy Payne, and in 2002 in Salt Lake when Tom Welch led the bid charge and became the organizing committee president until scandal touched him and the Games.

But once Bradley and Argue got the IOC to blink and agree to a privately funded L.A. Olympics, Bradley had to pick a leader. The politics of that, and how Argue handled it, were not only critical to the success of the L.A. Olympics, and the Olympic movement in general, but also spoke volumes about John Argue.

Bradley decided that Ziffren, a widely respected liberal lawyer, would become chairman of the L.A. Olympic Committee, not Argue, a widely respected conservative lawyer. That decision was described Sunday by Anton Calleia, then a key aide to Bradley.

“John Argue was part of the old line, exclusive Olympic establishment,” Calleia said, “and Bradley wanted a more inclusive Olympics for Los Angeles that would include all parts of the community in the effort.”

That meant that Argue was a member of the exclusive downtown California Club, in which the predominantly white membership routinely excluded other races and females. Bradley had made it a policy never to go to the club.

Argue, who later served as president of the California Club and accepted a movement that has changed that policy of exclusion, would have had grounds for loud and public protest. Nobody could dispute that he, more than anybody else, had brought the Games back to L.A.

Instead, the man who made a career out of fairness, consensus-building and behind-the-scenes work, went along with the decision.

Ziffren’s widow, Mickey, said Sunday: “John and Paul became friends. They had huge political differences, but Paul had a high regard for him.”

Robertson, the labor leader, said: “With every move John made and every suggestion he put out there, he proved his leadership. There was no showboating on his part.”

Shortly, it became time to select an operational chief, the L.A. Organizing Committee president, who would be the hands-on person, the one who would truly get the credit or blame for the success of the ’84 Games. Argue’s choice was a little-known travel business executive named Peter Ueberroth.

“He fit. He was young, healthy, vigorous,” Argue said later. “He knew accounting. He knew management. He’d been down and dirty in every aspect of business. It also had to be somebody who loved sports, knew something about them. Had a feel for them.”

Also in the picture was Edwin Steidle of the May Company. A vote needed to be taken on whether to allow Steidle more time to negotiate a severance with May; were the vote to be against allowing that additional time, Ueberroth would effectively be elected.

According to Calleia, the vote of the existing L.A. Olympic Organizing Committee was preceded by a conversation between Bradley and committee member Rafer Johnson, the former Olympic decathlon champion. So impressed had Bradley been by the way Argue handled the Ziffren situation, the mayor felt he owed Argue. So Bradley asked Johnson to vote for Ueberroth, which he did.

The final vote was 9-8 for Ueberroth, who went on not only to run the most financially successful Olympic Games and become Time magazine’s Man of the Year, but also to choose, as the final torchbearer and lighter of the Olympic caldron at the opening ceremony, Rafer Johnson.

Richard Perelman, a vice president of media relations for the LAOOC and an Olympic historian, remembers running into Argue near the end of the L.A. Games.

“I ran into him in the street between the Coliseum and the Sports Arena, and by then it had become obvious what a huge success our Olympics would be,” Perelman said. “During the Games, John had been chief of protocol for the Coliseum, which was nice but not exactly president of the organizing committee. So I asked him if he felt bad that he hadn’t demanded a higher position because I believe to this day he could have gotten anything he wanted.

“But he just seemed happier than I’ve ever seen him and he said, no, that he was just delighted the way things had turned out. He said, ‘Why would I have wanted to get in the way of what I knew would turn out to be such a great success even without me.’ ”

Perelman said that it was Argue who figured out the basic problem with Olympic cost overruns before 1984 and was able to address that in getting the attention of the IOC, and eventually the bid for L.A.

“Every Olympics since World War II, he found, had made money on operations, but lost overall because of construction costs,” Perelman said. “He quickly showed the IOC how little construction was needed in Los Angeles, how much we already had here.”

Perelman also noted Argue’s ability to sense the direction of the prevailing winds and play to that.

“He made sure that the first sentence on one of the bid proposal documents read: ‘Arrangements are to be spartan.’ Remember, this was happening right after the Montreal Olympics, where cost overruns had been huge.”

Perelman said he hopes that Olympic history will eventually find a special spot for Argue.

“I don’t know that the Olympic movement will ever fully understand how important John Argue was to it,” Perelman said.

For Haden, who has served on various boards with Argue and has worked with Argue in Argue’s capacity as chairman of USC’s board of trustees, the loss is much more than an Olympic matter.

“I looked for an obit in the New York Times, because I thought he was that big,” Haden said. “I don’t know if people who haven’t been around here for a while fully understand how big a loss this is. I’ll tell you one thing. Every business person in downtown L.A. understands.

“Last week, so much attention was on Chick Hearn and his loss. And rightfully so. But we’ve lost another of that stature with John, He was as big behind the scenes in L.A. as Chick was in front of it.”

David Simon, president of the L.A. Sports Council, of which Argue was the founding chairman, said that almost all business decisions he made, either involving the Sports Council or other matters, would prompt some sort of blessing from Argue.

“Sometimes, there would be six or seven of us at a table,” Simon said, “and we would brainstorm for hours and reach a decision and feel very good about it. Then everybody would say, ‘Better bounce that off John.’ And sure enough, in the first 10 seconds of our talk with him, he would see something obvious and important that we had missed.”

Simon also said: “I don’t think anybody has accomplished more for Los Angeles and gotten less credit for it than John Argue.”

Anita DeFrantz, influential IOC member and president of L.A.’s Amateur Athletic Foundation, was an active Olympic rower in 1977 when she first saw Argue.

“L.A. and New York were fighting for the USOC approval to try for the ’84 Games,” DeFrantz recalled, “and there was a meeting about that. I was there as a member of the athletes’ advisory council, and John Argue stood up to speak. I remember how much energy he had, and how much passion he had for making sure the Olympics would be great for the athletes.”

Since 1995, Argue had been chairman of DeFrantz’s AAF, and she said that brought both friendship and friendly disagreements. Politically, DeFrantz was on the other side of the world from Argue.

“One time, he asked me why we had so much news about women athletes in the Sports Letters we put out,” DeFrantz said. “I told him that we did that because the general makeup of the world was about 50% men and 50% women. He paused for a while and then said, ‘OK, but just don’t make it any more than that.’

“I couldn’t stop laughing.”

Among Argue’s idiosyncrasies was his tendency to send off short, handwritten notes to friends and associates, not to mention sports editors of newspapers, about anything and everything.

The problem was, his handwriting was indecipherable. So his longtime administrative assistant, Connie Gray, would send along a typed translation with the original note.

His Argue-grams were so much a part of his existence that Randy Harvey, veteran Olympic writer for The Times and now a senior assistant sports editor, used them as a measure of Argue’s health. When one arrived in February at The Times’ Olympic office in Salt Lake, shortly after word had gotten out of Argue’s illness, Harvey surveyed the scribble and its translation, encouraging The Times to give better placement to USC basketball over UCLA. Then Harvey said, “I feel better now. This means he’s fine.”

Haden thought the same thing when he received an Argue-gram Thursday.

“The Times ran a picture with me and George Allen in it,” Haden said. “John wrote one of his notes, chiding me about being shorter than George Allen.”

Haden said he had written back, but obviously too late.

As in most things with Argue, he had quietly, effectively, without much of a ripple, gotten the last word.