BET Founder Gets NBA Team

The billionaire founder of Black Entertainment Television will be awarded the NBA’s expansion franchise in Charlotte, N.C., making him the first African American to hold a majority ownership in a major professional sports franchise.

Robert Johnson was selected by the league’s expansion committee over a group led by Boston entrepreneur Steve Belkin and former Boston Celtic star Larry Bird.

A news conference to announce Johnson’s winning franchise bid will be held today. Before it becomes official, it must be approved by the league’s board of governors next month. The fee for the franchise, which will begin play in the 2004-05 season, is expected to be $300 million.

Johnson had tried to buy Charlotte’s previous NBA team, the Hornets, but owner George Shinn wouldn’t sell.

Declining attendance and the city’s refusal to build a new arena -- both attributed, in part, to the public’s dissatisfaction with Shinn -- caused the Hornets to move to New Orleans this summer. But the NBA quickly decided to seek a new team for Charlotte, a city in a basketball-crazy state. The Hornets led the league in attendance eight times after beginning play in 1988.

The team ownership only adds distinction to Johnson’s remarkable success story, and represents another step forward for a league that likes to consider itself progressive in its commitment to racial and gender diversity.

The NBA and its offspring, the WNBA, were the only leagues to receive ‘A’ grades from the Northeastern Center for the Study of Sport and Society’s 2001 racial report card on the diversity of coaches and front-office personnel in professional, Olympic and college sports organizations.

The NBA trumpeted the purchase of the Denver Nuggets by Bertram Lee and Peter Bynoe in 1989 as the league’s first black ownership, but it was later learned that Comsat Video actually owns 62.5% of the team.

Other high-profile African Americans who have since held minority interests include Magic Johnson, who bought a 5% share in the Lakers in 1994, and Isiah Thomas, who was a member of the group that was awarded the Toronto expansion franchise in 1993.

Robert Johnson’s distinction as the first African American with controlling interest in a franchise may have been inevitable given his dogged pursuit of teams. He attempted to buy the NBA’s Washington franchise from Abe Pollin in the mid-1990s. Pollin had expressed a desire to move his team -- then called the Bullets -- to downtown Washington from the Maryland suburbs if the city built an arena. Johnson said he would build an arena if Pollin sold him the team. Pollin said the team wasn’t for sale, and later paid for the arena’s construction himself.

Johnson also leads a group that includes Washington Redskin owner Daniel Snyder that is attempting to bring a baseball team back to the nation’s capital.

“I think the leagues have to have a commitment to diversity of opportunity,” he told the Washington Post recently in regard to his baseball bid. “I don’t think they have to guarantee an outcome. I wouldn’t want to go into a league saying I got my franchise because I’m a minority, or because I got a discount to what the next guy paid.

“National sports is too much of a tight club. It’s too much of an organization made up of people who are very accomplished in many ways, have strong egos. The last thing you want to do is be in the room because you got a set-aside. There’s no way that I am looking for a guaranteed outcome just because of my minority status.”

Johnson could not be reached for comment Tuesday night.

The only one in a family of 10 children to graduate from college, Johnson is the first African American billionaire, with a net worth estimated at $1.3 billion by Forbes magazine earlier this year. He founded BET with a $15,000 investment in 1979. Last year he sold the controlling interest to Viacom for $3 billion.

Despite his success, Johnson is not universally revered among African Americans because some believe that BET plays to the lowest common denominator with programming dominated by music videos. Popular talk-show host and political commentator Tavis Smiley was let go by the station last year and a public affairs show hosted by Ed Gordon that featured embattled Republican leader Trent Lott this week is slated for cancellation in January.

The NBA’s 30th team will be its first new club since the Toronto Raptors and Vancouver Grizzlies were added in the 1995-96 season.

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The Associated Press contributed to this report.