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Photo courtesy of the Cincinnati Reds
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Bill DeWitt Sr. talks strategy in the early 1960s with
manager Fred Hutchinson (right) and pitching coach
Jim Turner.
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A new challenge: the Stingers
The elder DeWitt made a fortune when he sold the Reds in 1966. Controversy over a new stadium helped prod the sale: He didn't agree with the city's preferred downtown location and didn't want to saddle his heirs with a long-term lease at what became Riverfront Stadium.
The senior DeWitt invested a sizable portion of his windfall in oil and gas concerns, retaining 15 percent of the club and giving it to his son, who kept a front-office job but stayed on just one year and sold his interest in 1968.
"I didn't see a real role for me there," he says. "I mean, they accommodated me. As much as I love the Reds and I love baseball, it wasn't a very good fit."
It was time to make a more ordinary living.
DeWitt joined a Cincinnati investment firm. The future looked bright. He was in his mid-20s, married and just starting a family. But picking investments and managing money wasn't enough. Pro sports still had a strong hold.
He invested in the Kentucky Colonels of the old American Basketball Association. He also had an interest in the Cincinnati Bengals. Still, he dreamed of something bigger. That something ended up being hockey.
Figuring they had a shot at landing a National Hockey League franchise, DeWitt teamed with lawyer Brian Heekin and Heekin's brother Albert. They had at least one major problem: The city didn't have an arena. A new building was as important to profits as the team itself.
"What we wanted to do was get a coliseum built here that would be multipurpose, and we needed a hockey franchise to make it work," DeWitt recalls.
City officials agreed to subsidize a new arena for an NHL franchise. The best the league could offer was a promise to expand to Cincinnati, but there was no certain date, so DeWitt and Heekin decided to join the World Hockey Association, a brand-new league. They figured the leagues would eventually merge.
But city fathers weren't enamored with a startup league barely two years old. If Heekin and DeWitt wanted an arena for a WHA team, they'd have to raise the money themselves. And they did. After 18 months, local banks, initially skittish, finally agreed to buy $20 million in construction bonds, and the Cincinnati Stingers were in business at Riverfront Coliseum.
Heekin was in charge of the building. DeWitt ran the team and was the exclusive negotiator of player contracts, even though he was no hockey expert.
"I just knew it was an up-and-coming sport," he says.
The WHA was a far cry from major-league baseball. Several franchises started on shaky financial ground and folded within a few years. The Zamboni broke through the ice at the league's first game. League officials forgot to buy a trophy for the first championship and ended up scrambling for the best available one the night before the deciding game.
The league was known for a rough-and-tumble brand of hockey. John Hewig, the Stingers' public-relations director, ordered team members not to shave for a few days, then took publicity photos immediately after practice so they looked like wild men.
"It was a tough man's league," recalls Jim McVay, a promotions and ticket-sales manager for the Stingers who is now president and CEO of the Outback Bowl. "I remember seeing those gloves come off in warmups. People would come early, because you didn't know when the action would start."
There were cheerleaders in the stands, but crowds of fewer than 5,000 fans in a 16,000-seat arena were routine, a fact the team disguised from television audiences by installing randomly colored seats. The inaugural game was particularly depressing.
"It was the day after the Reds had won the seventh game of the World Series (in 1975)," recalls Hewig, who went on to work for the New York Knicks, the Hartford Whalers and the New Jersey Devils before retiring. "Ten thousand people who had tickets to our opening night were drunk in the middle of town somewhere."
The Stingers didn't do well in the standings, but following a league-wide strategy of raiding Canadian junior leagues and locking up young players before the NHL did, they landed players who went on to Hall of Fame careers. Mark Messier began his big-league hockey career in Cincinnati as an 18-year-old, as did Mike Gartner, who went on to score 708 goals in the NHL. The handful of fans who were present that night can tell their grandchildren about seeing Wayne Gretzky score his first pro hat trick against the Stingers at Riverfront. But all the talent in the world didn't help.
For four years, DeWitt concentrated almost exclusively on the team, spending each day in his office at the coliseum and, according to Heekin, devoting 90 percent or more of his time to the Stingers as opposed to outside business ventures. Former Enquirer sportswriter Terry Flynn says DeWitt remained upbeat despite the obvious.
"He pretty much always kept, publicly, a very positive outlook -- 'We hope to be able to do this, da, da, da, da, da' -- right up to the end, when the team folded up and didn't move to the NHL," Flynn recalls. "I wrote stuff and other people did. All you had to do was look at the numbers and you knew they were having problems, because you knew how much they had to make. You take a look at the payroll, you know what the tickets are, you know what their break-even point is, and they're not even close. Most nights, they're getting killed."
In the end, the team's investors got their money back, but just barely, DeWitt says. The NHL paid the owners a $3.6 million indemnity, ostensibly for players and other assets but also to prevent any lawsuits from blocking entry into the more established league, a prospect DeWitt and Heekin now say they couldn't have afforded, given NHL franchise fees, player salaries and Cincinnati's proven reluctance to support big-league hockey.
Heekin and DeWitt say investors just about broke even on the team itself. Profits came from the coliseum, which was sold for $21 million in 1997.
"I would say, in total, the combined investment of the building and the hockey team was not a good one," DeWitt says. "But it was OK. Everybody got their money out. I mean, at the end of the day, the building was sold a year or two ago, but that was years and years and years after we built it."
Former employees and friends say DeWitt was philosophical about the Stingers' failure. Today, he says he was "relieved" when it all came to an end. "Everybody was kind of tired," he says. "It was a lot of fun, but it's no fun to lose money, and that's what we were doing."
Embracing politics and buying baseball teams
When the franchise folded in 1979, DeWitt took a break from sports to form the investment firm of Reynolds, DeWitt & Co. with Mercer Reynolds III, a former executive at the investment house where DeWitt worked before launching the hockey team. It has proved a lucrative partnership.
Among other things, DeWitt and Reynolds -- who also has a minority stake in the Cardinals -- have invested in restaurants, soft drink bottling companies and radio stations. Although the firm focuses on deals in the $1 million to $10 million range, DeWitt and his partners don't balk if something bigger comes along. In 1989, for example, DeWitt and company, then owners of 64 Arby's restaurants, made an unsuccessful bid to purchase the entire chain, a deal that would have been worth $200 million.
DeWitt typically invests with the same group of a half-dozen or so longtime friends and business associates, several of whom share his Ivy League pedigree and place in the upper echelon of Cincinnati society. They make it a point to keep their business as private as possible, rarely commenting to the press about details of their deals.
"We've been in a lot of different businesses over a long period of time," DeWitt says. "We've had some success in a number of them, and we've had a number of them that haven't been successful. It's just kind of the nature of what we do."
But even things that look like losers can end up smelling good when DeWitt is involved.
One example is the oil business. Following the example of his father, who invested baseball profits in oil and gas companies after selling the Reds, DeWitt and Reynolds formed an oil-and-gas-exploration company called Spectrum 7 in 1979, the same year the Stingers went out of business. With fuel prices skyrocketing in the late '70s, prospects looked good.
During the early 1980s, DeWitt and Reynolds searched for someone to run Spectrum 7 operations in Texas. In 1982, geologist Paul Rea, Spectrum's only Texas employee, introduced DeWitt and Reynolds to George W. Bush, whom Rea had befriended a few years earlier, when the future president was starting in the oil business and looking for advice.
When he met DeWitt and Reynolds, Bush, son of the Vice President of the United States, was head of his own oil exploration company, which he kept afloat by tapping family friends for money. With typical caution, DeWitt and Reynolds lunched with Bush, then waited two years before buying out Bush Exploration in 1984, shortly before Ronald Reagan and the elder Bush were re-elected in a landslide. Under terms of the deal, Bush received Spectrum 7 stock and was named president of the company at an annual salary of $75,000.
The deal was a godsend for Bush, given that his struggling company had never made money for its investors. Though Spectrum 7 acquired oil-drilling rights held by Bush's firm, DeWitt and Reynolds weren't interested in Bush Exploration so much as they were in Bush himself. In several published interviews, both men have said they went into business with Bush because he had experience in drilling wells and they admired his leadership style.
Others, including Rea, say that Bush's celebrity was a key factor. The name "was definitely a drawing card," Rea told The Washington Post in a 1999 interview. In the same story, DeWitt says the fact that Bush was the son of a sitting vice president with Oval Office ambitions didn't improve the company's ability to raise capital. His statements underscore his extraordinary network of business contacts and reputation as a man who makes money for his partners.
"There was obviously some notoriety because of who (Bush) was, but it didn't open any doors for us," DeWitt told the paper. "I mean, our doors were already opened."
The Bush name did help DeWitt and Reynolds make a graceful exit from the oil business. Thanks to dropping oil prices, Spectrum 7 reported net losses of $1.6 million in 1985 and was on the brink of bankruptcy. Harken Oil and Gas came to the rescue in the fall of 1986, acquiring Spectrum for $2.2 million in Harken stock and assuming more than $3 million in debt. Harken officials have acknowledged they were investing in political capital as much as in Spectrum's oil reserves, which had an estimated value of $4 million at the time of the sale.
"We didn't have a fair price for oil, we just had George," former Harken director E. Stuart Watson told The Dallas Morning News. "It seemed like George, he knew everybody in the U.S. who was worth knowing."
So far, DeWitt has done more for Bush than the other way around, although the president was said to be considering him for an ambassadorship. DeWitt ended such speculation in March when he flatly denied interest. Bush appointed Reynolds as ambassador to Switzerland and Stephen Brauer, another Cardinals owner, as ambassador to Belgium.
During the 2000 presidential campaign, DeWitt was one of Bush's biggest fundraisers in one of the closest elections in U.S. history. On a single night last August, he and Reynolds hosted parties that netted $2 million for the Bush campaign. The night before Bush accepted the Republican nomination, he practiced his acceptance speech in DeWitt's living room in Indian Hill.
DeWitt, in fact, has been active in political fundraising on all levels. Mother Jones magazine recently included both him and Reynolds in its annual list of the nation's top 400 political contributors, at Nos. 247 and 318, respectively (see Porkopolis, issue of March 8-14). Carl Lindner -- Cincinnati's better-known rich, politically connected, mysterious baseball team owner -- ranked No. 6 on the contributor list.
When Bush was finally declared the winner by the narrowest of margins, he called on DeWitt and Reynolds to co-chair his inauguration committee. The partners were instrumental in raising more than $20 million in private donations to pay for the parties.
DeWitt and Bush have much in common. Both graduated from Yale and Harvard Business School. Both men's fathers invested in the oil business. Both men love baseball and often chatted about the game during flights between business meetings in the Spectrum 7 days.
In 1988, DeWitt set in motion the deal that made Bush a millionaire and eventually helped put him in the White House. Through his baseball contacts, DeWitt heard that Texas Rangers owner Eddie Chiles, who'd known the Bush family for years, was looking for a buyer. Here was a chance to get back into the major leagues. DeWitt called Bush, who was helping his dad campaign for president: Would he be interested in putting a deal together once the campaign was over? Bush jumped at the chance.
While DeWitt raised money from Cincinnati investors, Bush worked the Texas end -- major-league officials wanted substantial local investment to ensure the team wouldn't move. With help from then-commissioner Peter Ueberroth, who twisted the arm of a well-heeled Dallas-area financier, Bush landed sufficient commitments from Texas investors to gain league approval of the sale and crafted an ownership framework that would install Texans, including himself, as managing general partners.
Bush was the front man, even though his investment of $600,000 in borrowed money was relatively small, giving him a stake of less than 2 percent of the team. That investment mushroomed into a $15 million windfall within 10 years, thanks to a stadium deal that has taxpayers paying $135 million of the $195 million cost of the Ballpark at Arlington, which is owned by the public. The team pays $5 million a year in rent and maintenance and has the right to eventually buy the stadium, with the annual payments counting toward the purchase.
The team's value soared thanks to the stadium deal. Under the partnership agreement, Bush was entitled to 10 percent of the team once other investors got their money back, plus 2 percent interest, and, with a $250 million sale price in 1998, there was plenty of money to go around. By then, Bush was governor of Texas, having won election in 1994 with a campaign that focused on his record as the man who turned around the Rangers on the field and made the team a successful business venture.
But DeWitt wasn't around to share in profits from the Rangers sale. As an out-of-town investor with a minority stake, his role in the team was limited once he lined up investors. He wanted a chance to be the main man on a daily basis, and so he made a $140 million bid for the Baltimore Orioles in 1993, with a substantial portion coming from the same group of Cincinnati investors with whom he'd brought into the Rangers. The attempt failed, but DeWitt didn't give up.
Confronted by rival bidders with deeper pockets, DeWitt joined forces with Baltimore lawyer Peter Angelos and bought the Orioles for $173 million, a then-record price for a major-league franchise. Under league rules, DeWitt couldn't have interests in more than one team, and so he sold his share of the Rangers.
DeWitt had planned to run the Orioles, but once the sale closed, Angelos installed his own management team, keeping DeWitt from having any real say over team operations.
In the spring of 1995, less than two years after buying his share, DeWitt sold his $4 million interest to Angelos for what he had paid. He wasn't out of baseball very long. Within six months, a better deal came along in St. Louis.
Meet me in St. Louis
The deal for the Cardinals started when DeWitt asked a neighbor in Cincinnati who was on the Anheuser-Busch board whether the brewery was interested in selling. DeWitt and Hanser had been politely rebuffed a few years earlier when Hanser wrote a letter of inquiry to the brewery, but this time was different. One factor was the recently concluded baseball strike, which promised to depress attendance and cut revenues.
DeWitt proved a savvy negotiator during the purchase talks with Anheuser-Busch.
"One time we were in a key conference involving the purchase of the Cardinals with a very important person from the Cardinals side," Hanser recalls. "There was going to be a consulting agreement. They wanted me and Bill and Drew (Baur) to guarantee the money. They were very serious. Bill looked at them and said, 'I'm not a guarantee type of guy.' "
Almost immediately, Hanser says, DeWitt proposed an alternative solution acceptable to both sides.
DeWitt chuckles when asked about that meeting.
"I don't view myself as a huge risk-taker," he says. "I don't take lightly guaranteeing notes and obligations and things like that. I do it as necessary for business reasons. I don't make it a habit, or try not, to have a lot of open-ended exposure."
On paper, at least, the Cardinals deal was a steal for DeWitt and his 16 partners, several of whom had also put money into the Orioles and Rangers with him. For $150 million, they got the team, Busch Stadium, parking garages and land beneath two nearby hotels. Within a year, they recouped $91 million by selling the garages and another $9 million by selling the hotel land.
Besides helping the owners pay off loans they used to buy the team, the sale of the garages and land increased the portability of the Cardinals. If the owners can't get the deal they want for a new downtown stadium, it will be much easier for them to move now that they've reduced their downtown financial interests.
How hard might DeWitt squeeze taxpayers? Heekin, the former Stingers owner, isn't sure whether DeWitt would abuse his catbird seat position to extract an overly lopsided deal from the city and Missouri legislators.
"I don't know," he says. "I doubt if he would. You never know."
Even some of DeWitt's biggest fans say they wouldn't want to be on the other side of the negotiating table from him.
"I don't think I would," says Hewig, who calls DeWitt the most honest boss he's ever had. In trade talks and player negotiations during the Stinger days, Hewig recalls, DeWitt was a man who wouldn't be pushed around. "When I would be in his office and he would be talking to another general manager or somebody on the phone and the general manager would be trying to get a little more out of Bill, he'd just say, 'No, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to hang up now.' Not rude, but 'No, I can't do that.' "
DeWitt answers "probably" when asked whether he'd want to face himself in negotiations.
"I think I'm fairly pragmatic," he says. "I don't like to negotiate deals that don't get done. I feel like I'm flexible enough to have the other side, whoever's negotiating with me, feel like they've gotten a fair deal. I think it's being able to adapt to what the situation is, in terms of doing a deal -- whether it's signing a player or selling a business or working out something with one of the senior executives.
"What I try to do is put myself in their shoes and see what would be acceptable and what wouldn't be acceptable. It doesn't make any sense to steamroll somebody or to try to get the last dollar or try to get the best of a transaction. If it's not good for both sides, generally it's not going to work."
In baseball deals, sentiment can be as important as dollars and cents for DeWitt. Consider his bid for the Orioles in 1993: At the time, he stood to gain a healthy profit from his investment in the Rangers, who'd closed a deal for a new stadium that would increase revenue and the value of the franchise. But long before the team was sold and other investors cashed in, DeWitt sold his interest to buy into the team that was once the St. Louis Browns.
Besides emotional ties and what he thought would be a chance to run the franchise, DeWitt says he jumped to the Orioles because the team was drawing well and played in Camden Yards -- "I think it's about the best place in the world to watch a baseball game," he says.
"When it comes to baseball, I think he's particularly enamored of the old franchises," says DeWitt's son. "It sounds like he's owned a ton of teams. In reality, he's actually turned a bunch down. He might get a call here, a call there, saying, 'Hey, the so-and-so franchise is available for sale. What do you think about putting a group together?' I know he got calls like that when people knew he was interested (in getting back into baseball). I think he was looking for the right opportunity."
In many people's minds, the right opportunity has always been the Reds, a team for which DeWitt made an unsuccessful bid in 1984. Rumors flew when Marge Schott sold the franchise in 1998 -- surely DeWitt wouldn't be able to resist the chance to buy the league's oldest franchise, his father's old team, a club in his adopted hometown.
While keeping close tabs on negotiations, talking with Schott and potential buyers, DeWitt at the time refused any public comment, which fueled speculation.
"Obviously I've got friends who were interested in that and asked me to help and take a look and maybe give them advice on it," he says now. "Beyond that, that was about it."
DeWitt III paints a picture of a man inexorably drawn to the 1998 negotiations for the Reds, which ended with Carl Lindner and some minority partners buying Schott's shares.
"He tried to stay out of it," the son says. "He just knew everybody who was interested in selling or interested in buying. It was just more out of, I think, curiosity that he just kind of stayed on top of the situation there. I think with Marge calling him and talking to him, I think he kind of felt like it was nice to at least be consulted on who was the right guy."
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Photo courtesy of the Cincinnati Reds
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A young Bill DeWitt met Babe Ruth shortly before the
slugger’s death in 1948. DeWitt’s St. Louis Browns’
batboy uniform now hangs in the Baseball Hall of
Fame.
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Given the chance to swap the Cardinals for the Reds, the son and Hanser say DeWitt would stay put. John Williams, the former Greater Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce president, thinks otherwise.
"Knowing Bill, and with his father having owned the team, I can't imagine if he had the opportunity and it was a reasonable business deal that he wouldn't do it or wouldn't be a part of it," Williams says.
DeWitt himself stops just short of guaranteeing he'll own the Cardinals forever. "I'm totally committed to the Cardinals and can't ever foresee doing anything other than what I'm doing today with the Cardinals," he says.
The family maintains roots in St. Louis, where his sister Donna "DeDe" DeWitt Lambert, a minority team owner, lives. DeWitt stays with her or his son when he's in St. Louis. The ties are strong enough that the family held a memorial service in St. Louis for the senior DeWitt when he died in 1982.
Laying low
Those who know Bill DeWitt Jr. describe a classic Midwestern gentleman: honest, smart, polite, wealthy but not ostentatious. Funny, not flamboyant. Generous. Relentlessly positive. Completely committed to his four children and wife, Kathy, a high-school sweetheart he dated through college.
And, ultimately, an enigma to all but his close circle. He's clearly amused that no one seems to know what really makes him tick.
"Maybe you'll never find out," he chuckles.
What kind of music does he like?
"He's not much of a music guy," answers DeWitt III. "We as kids would always pretty much have full reign over the radio. He never had a big opinion, one way or another."
Well, not quite. "Generally Rock," DeWitt says. Silence.
Any groups stand out? "Well, I mean, I was in the '60s era in college. In the progression of all, that is what I like. I like a lot of music. I like music in general."
What's the last book he read? He can't recall a title. "I'm not a huge book reader. I read a lot of current stuff like magazines and newspapers and sports stuff and sports sections. To the extent I read a book, it's a historical book."
He doesn't ruffle at difficult questions and, if he's offended, he doesn't say so. Check out what Pete Rose thinks about my dad, he says, and you'll get a different perspective than Frank Robinson's. Informed that Rose last year told Playboy that his father once ordered Rose not to associate with black players, DeWitt, hardly the Playboy-reading sort, professes shock.
"I can't imagine that," he says. "I know Pete. At least, he always told me that he thought a lot of my father and my mother."
As a second interview wraps up, DeWitt starts asking questions. "Do you get to many ballgames yourself?" he wants to know. "Are you married? What do you think of St. Louis as a place to live?"
It's as if this man with so much power, wealth and responsibility has all the time in the world to talk, and it doesn't come off as contrived. Never interrupting, he seems genuinely interested in what the other person has to say, every bit the "Call me Bill" guy his family and friends say he is.
Almost humble, in fact. DeWitt III recalls attending a concert at the MCI Center in Washington during George W. Bush's inauguration. He was eager to speak with the new president, and with just 20 or so people in the private box, now was his chance.
"I was talking to my dad, and Bush was up there with Laura," the younger DeWitt says. "He said, 'You know, kind of lay low, if you would. He's kind of getting sick of the hounding.' And I said, 'That's fine.' "
And so the son of the president's key fundraiser, the man who made the party possible, bided his time.
"It turns out Bush came up to my wife and said, 'Hey, I remember you from last summer' -- he'd come to the house and done a fundraiser," DeWitt III continues. "By being tactful about some of these things, I think, people sense that and are more likely to engage you in ways you might not otherwise have gotten if you were right out there saying, 'Hey, let's do the picture. Let's get the autograph kind of thing.' "
Kind of like the African proverb: It's the most patient lion that gets the wildebeest. The son laughs at the comparison.
"That's a good one," he says. "I'm not sure it's on his desk as a slogan, but it certainly would be appropriate."
A version of this story originally appeared in The Riverfront Times, St. Louis' alternative newsweekly.
