The five most eccentric team-owning plutocrats in sports.
My first exposure to the weirdness of rich people happened when I was kid, leafing through the Guinness Book of World Records paperback I’d requested for Christmas. I came upon an entry for “The World’s Greatest Miser,” Hetty Green. The photo showed an elderly woman dressed all in black, with a big black hat and a cape, striding grim-faced along a New York City street in the 1890s.
And then I learned a few wackadoodle details about the woman nicknamed “The Witch of Wall Street.” Though she’d inherited five million dollars when her whaling empire dad died, she was so cheap she hardly ever washed her hands to save money on soap, bought broken cookies at bargain prices, and cooked her oatmeal over a hot radiator during winter when making breakfast at the bank where she spent her days investing.
She nearly lost her mind once when she thought she’d lost a two-cent stamp.
Hetty Green marked the beginning of my education into monied eccentricity. Crazy rich people grow on trees. There was the Eighth Earl of Bridgewater, Francis Egerton, also in the nineteenth century, a dude who only wore a pair of shoes once, and threw dinner parties for himself and dogs dressed up in fashionable human-style clothes.
There was Sarah Winchester, who married into the Winchester gun company fortune and built an insane, seven-story, 161-room California mansion with doors and stairs that went nowhere and other oddities meant to fool the ghosts of people killed by Winchester firearms she believed haunted her.
Howard Hughes comes to mind. The aviation tycoon had severe OCD, and once spent four months holed up in a Hollywood studio screening room watching movies, often naked, not cutting his hair, surrounded by Kleenex boxes, and consuming only chicken, chocolate, and milk. Even the IKEA founder, Ingvar Kamprad, seemed a bit nuts—or at least cheap enough to give Hetty a run for her money. A Swede who drove a 1993 Volvo as recently as 2013, when he was one of the world’s richest men, Kamprad pocketed restaurant salt and pepper packets and reused tea bags. He furnished his house with IKEA furniture he assembled himself.
“The rich are different from you and me,” F. Scott Fitzgerald was reputed to have said to his drinking buddy Ernest Hemingway, who replied, “Yes, they have more money.”
Given the fact that wealthy people own professional sports teams, basic probability would tell you that a number of team owners are or have been…a little different from you and me. And not only because they have access to boatloads of cash.
Different in the head.
Here are my candidates for the five wackiest owners in sports.
CHARLIE FINLEY
During the seventies, when colorful, bombastic George Steinbrenner commenced his lengthy ownership tenure for the New York Yankees, colorful, bombastic Charlie Finley owned the Oakland A’s, a team that won three straight World Series championships—a feat repeated only one other time, when Steinbrenner’s Yankees did it between 1998 and 2000.
And, like Steinbrenner, Finley was always firing people and feuding with players. But whereas “The Boss,” as Steinbrenner was known in Yankee Stadium, banned beards and shoulder-length hair (he once ordered Don Mattingly benched for not cutting his mullet), Finley encouraged facial hair—even zany facial hair—paying players $300 bonuses to grow mustaches during the postseason.
The practice led to pitcher Rollie Fingers growing his signature handlebar ’stache. Charlie Finley was even nuttier than Steinbrenner. Take it from outfielder-turned-broadcaster Jimmy Piersall, afflicted with bipolar disorder, who once said of Finley’s craziness, “Being around him made me feel well.”
An innovator who advocated for the designated hitter, interleague play, and nighttime World Series games, Finley had a P. T. Barnum-level flair for marketing, which is where he let his freak flag fly. He introduced a new team mascot, “Charlie-O,” a mule, which he paraded through the press room, hotel lobbies, and cocktail parties. He jazzed up team uniforms, going with bright green, gold, and white. He insisted players wear white cleats. He tried orange baseballs during spring training. He hired the future rapper MC Hammer as an eleven-year-old to serve as a dancing batboy. He installed a mechanical rabbit behind home plate that popped up to hand the umpire baseballs. He pioneered ball girls (one of them Debbi Fields, who founded Mrs. Fields’ Original Cookies), and oversaw Hot Pants Night (free admission for women in short shorts), along with promotions for bald and bearded fans.
MARK CUBAN
This motormouthed, T-shirt-wearing, non-graduate of anger management classes has been the loosest of cannons since assuming ownership of the Dallas Mavericks in 2000. His propensity to yell at players and refs, and say stuff he shouldn’t in interviews, has led to a whopping $1.6 million in league fines. Small change for a guy Forbes said had a 2018 net worth of $3.9 billion. A onetime disco dancing instructor, Cuban, who made his money in tech and media, has called Donald Trump a “jagoff” and once offered to pay him a million dollars to shave his head. He allegedly said, “Your son is a punk” to Kenyon Martin’s mom after a game. He’s entered a pro-wrestling ring. He says he might run for president some day.
Is he nuts? Well, maybe not certifiably, but he’s a grade-A eccentric. His superstar player Dirk Nowitzki once said, “He needs to learn how to control himself a little better.” Four years earlier, Cuban claimed an NBA supervising ref “couldn’t manage a Dairy Queen.” Before long, Cuban was managing a small-town Texas DQ for a day, on the company’s invitation.
MIKHAIL PROKHOROV
Nicknamed a “Mutant Russian Mark Cuban” by Bill Simmons, six-foot-eight Prokhorov, who made his fortune in precious metals, has owned or co-owned the Nets since 2010. Last year he had a net worth of $9.2 billion, according to Forbes. Owner of two private jets, a 200-foot yacht, an island in the Maldives, a $140,000 watch, and a Kalashnikov rifle designed for Russian special forces, this womanizing bachelor, now 53, enjoys the hell out of life. He works out for two hours a day and likes doing backflips while waterskiing. Freakishly coordinated, he can balance on a volleyball. When the New York Times visited him in Moscow, he showed the reporter how he could snap his leg with a kick. “I come in peace,” he deadpanned at his first Nets press conference, his Russian accent thick.
“Mikhail is right up there with the most flamboyant owners the league has ever had,” said then-NBA commissioner David Stern when Prokhorov took over the Nets.
JIM IRSAY
A Bill Walton-ish child of the sixties, with a love for the Beatles, The Who, Neil Young, and Bob Dylan, Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts, is a billionaire with slicked-back hair who for years wore a silver Van Dyke beard. In 2014, he was arrested for drunk driving and possession of controlled substances (a bunch of tranquilizers). Nothing if not colorful, Irsay owns the original Jack Kerouac manuscript for On the Road (a 120-foot-long scroll of taped-together paper), as well as a Ringo Starr drum set and guitars once owned by John Lennon and Elvis. He runs the best team-owner Twitter account in sports. Here he is in 2012, jabbing at Cowboys owner Jerry Jones after a TV camera caught Jones’s son-in-law cleaning the owner’s glasses: “I hired ‘The Gimp’ from Pulp Fiction 2 clean my reading glasses; he lives in a trap door in my Owners Suite, but also does my grocery shopping.” Long may you run, Mr. Irsay.
SILVIO BERLUSCONI
The longest-serving postwar Italian prime minister, a media mogul worth more than $8 billion, and a kind of Italian Trump when it comes to braggadocio and love of beautiful women, the 82-year-old Berlusconi owned the world-class AC Milan professional soccer club for 31 years, all the way into 2017.
This endlessly corrupt Teflon politician has endured multiple court cases, been arrested for sex with an underage Moroccan belly dancer, participated in orgies, bragged of getting it on with eight women in one night, and once was caught on camera simulating the humping of a policewoman from behind. The number of sexist things Berlusconi has said could fill Jack Kerouac’s “scroll” and more. The man’s a piece of work.
