Ueberroth Sees Himself as a Problem-Solver

The boyish good looks that graced the cover of Time magazine in 1985 have settled into late middle age, the dark blond hair gone silvery gray and the skin a little loose around the neck. But Peter V. Ueberroth’s eyes remain sharp and confident and his appetite for troubleshooting is still keen.

“I’m not throwing stones at the Democrats. I’m not throwing stones at the Republicans. I’m throwing stones at the process, which has gotten out of hand and it’s got to be fixed,” said Ueberroth, 65.

“If there’s somebody at this given moment in history who has the skills to do that, it’s me.”

This Laguna Beach Republican and former sports czar said in an interview that what sets him apart from the other 134 candidates on the Oct. 7 recall ballot is that he has done it before: brought together squabbling factions and made them sort out their problems. And he’s not running to stake out a political future, he says: Should Gov. Gray Davis lose the recall vote and Ueberroth succeed him, he plans only to finish out the term, and without pay.

Ueberroth’s supporters agree that the man who rose to prominence in the 1980s by shepherding the Los Angeles Summer Olympics and Major League Baseball into profitability is just the kind of head-knocker Californians need to solve the state’s fiscal and political problems -- even if his brash management style is hard for some to take.

“As a leader, he’s the kind of guy who carries the wounded and shoots the stragglers, and he shoots them very publicly,” said John Rutledge, an economist and investor who has known Ueberroth for more than 20 years.

“California right now doesn’t need someone to coddle interest groups,” Rutledge added. “We need someone to say this is broken and we need hard decisions. I can’t think of anybody better at forcing people to come together in a room and fix something.”

Ueberroth spent the 1990s resuscitating troubled companies, and vastly expanding his personal fortune, through his Newport Beach-based Contrarian Group Inc. He has sat on the boards of such major corporations as Coca-Cola, Hilton Hotels and Bank of America. He is part-owner of the fabled Pebble Beach golf course and holds stakes -- six worth more than $1 million each -- in a range of corporations.

“The ‘90s basically was trying to return to what I’m good at -- a finance and business man -- to accumulate some net worth for our family and for our charitable foundation,” said Ueberroth, who with his wife, Ginny, has four adult children and seven grandchildren.

Ueberroth, who has not begun campaigning, has been largely out of public view for nearly 15 years.

“He’s going to have to spend a lot of money and hope for some breaks,” said Kevin Spillane, who was a strategist for former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan. “His moment in the spotlight was in the ‘80s. He has to make his successes and achievements relevant to what’s happening in California today.”

Though Ueberroth declined to say how much money he hopes to raise or plans to spend, a filing with the secretary of state’s office Friday showed that he had given his campaign $1 million. He had raised another $290,700 from donors.

Ueberroth has hired as his strategist William Lord-Butcher, who directed the 1978 Proposition 13 campaign; Dan Schnur, press aide to former Gov. Pete Wilson and GOP presidential candidate Sen. John McCain; and staffers from the aborted gubernatorial campaign of U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista), whose millions underwrote the petition drive that will culminate in the recall election.

Billionaire Warren Buffett, a friend of Ueberroth’s, has signed on with Arnold Schwarzenegger, as has Orange County’s centrist New Majority collection of wealthy Republican business leaders.

Those donors rushed to judgment, Ueberroth said. “An awful lot of those members have, unsolicited, made contributions to our campaign,” he said. “We’re not even out of the box yet.”

Ueberroth was one of the last of the top contenders to enter the truncated campaign that’s more of a sprint than the traditional marathon.

Fellow Republicans Schwarzenegger, Bill Simon Jr. and Tom McClintock already have a week’s worth of campaigning behind them, as does Democrat Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante and columnist and author Arianna Huffington, running as an independent.

Ueberroth says he will make up for lost time with substance. Next week, he says, he will offer details on how he would repair the state’s finances.

“We will be specific with a plan of what needs to be done,” Ueberroth said. “I want to offer very direct changes -- cost cuts, revenue building -- that will balance this state’s financial future. That’s essential.”

Ueberroth said he would discuss his proposals in a series of town hall-style meetings across the state. Analysts said getting his message heard above the din of 135 candidates would be difficult.

“If Ueberroth has any chance, it would be that he could promise to be the grown-up who would settle things down,” said John Zaller, a political science professor at UCLA. “But I don’t think either the media or the public wants a grown-up at this point. Everyone is having too much fun.”

Zaller said Ueberroth’s success could depend on whether Schwarzenegger and Bustamante stumble.

For many, Ueberroth’s decision to enter the race was a surprise. He flirted with runs for statewide office in the 1980s and early ‘90s but decided to forgo the grueling primary and general elections.

This week, he described the typical political campaign season as “a waste of time,” saying, “I like the length” of the recall campaign.

Ueberroth said he decided to run after it was clear that Democratic U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein would not. Ueberroth has been a longtime backer of Feinstein and has supported other Democrats on the state and national level.

But Ueberroth also donated $2,000 to the Bush-Cheney reelection committee in June and has supported California Republicans such as Matt Fong, who lost a 1998 effort to unseat Democratic U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer.

Ueberroth said his varied political alliances prove his bipartisan approach to politics and presage how he would staff the governor’s office.

“I really look for talent” over party affiliation, he said -- an approach he said could help him deal with a fractious Legislature.

“For the Republicans and Democrats to continue to fistfight is not going to be productive for anybody,” Ueberroth said.

“I’m going to make the problems that Californians face economically very visible, and then not be afraid to offer some fairly unpopular solutions,” he said. If legislators “won’t work together, I’m going to have to expose them. We have to get something done, and right now.”

Ueberroth was born in Illinois in 1937, the son of an aluminum salesman. His mother died when he was 4 and his father remarried the next year.

The family moved often, every time his father took a new job. Wisconsin, Iowa, Pennsylvania, California -- he had attended six elementary schools and three high schools by the time he entered San Jose State in 1955.

After college, Ueberroth moved to Hawaii and soon was working for Kirk Kerkorian’s commercial air business, first in Honolulu, then in Los Angeles. He left in 1961 to open his own travel service, First Travel Corp., which he sold in 1980 for $10.8 million, retaining $4.4 million as his share.

At the time, Ueberroth was little known outside the travel industry.

But his profile rose quickly as he directed the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles. Previous Olympics had left local governments with hefty tabs, and many in Los Angeles feared the same fate. But Ueberroth turned a $222-million profit and attracted a record 140 countries to the Games despite a Soviet-led boycott that kept many Eastern European athletes home.

Time magazine named him its Man of the Year. A spate of media profiles lauded his success, concurring that he excelled precisely because the Olympics was a short-lived, goal-specific enterprise. The consensus was that his admittedly gruff management style -- publicly berating subordinates for perceived failings and sometimes demanding the impossible just to see how underlings responded -- would probably have failed in a more bureaucratic setting.

After the Olympics, Ueberroth skipped to the pros as commissioner of Major League Baseball, a five-year reign marked by both a financial turnaround for the league and what one baseball player’s union official described as “one of the most immoral things in baseball” -- collusion by team owners to circumvent free agency, an idea hatched by Ueberroth for which team owners paid more than $100 million in civil penalties.

“That was a terrible mistake, a terrible error,” said Marvin Miller, former head of the Major League Baseball Players Assn. and a union advisor during those years.

Other high-profile appointments followed, including a stint as co-chairman of the post-riot Rebuild L.A. coalition, which Ueberroth quit in frustration after a year amid criticism that the effort was more show than success. Among the issues: criticism by activists that Ueberroth, as a wealthy Republican suburbanite, couldn’t relate to the daunting issues facing South Los Angeles and that Rebuild L.A. was moving too slowly, even though Southern California was in the depths of a recession.

Ueberroth resigned as chairman but remained on the Rebuild L.A. board.

Then-Gov. Wilson tapped him to anchor his California Council on Competitiveness, which issued a blueprint for government reforms aimed at ending the recession of the early 1990s. The council made 161 recommendations on tax breaks, regulatory relief and changes to the state workers’ compensation system to make California more attractive to business.

“I think the California citizens know that the state that they love and live in is in deep trouble,” Ueberroth said.

“They also know that it has seen bright days and has great resources -- mostly its citizens -- and that it can be returned to its proper position.

“Anybody who’s honest with them knows that it’s not going to be an easy path.”