by Paul Allen
As my attorney, Allen Israel, noted shortly after the IPO: “This wealth should enable you to do whatever you want to do whenever you want to do it. …” I made up my mind to exploit my new freedom. Life is short, and there was so much out there to do. I called Bert Kolde, my old Phi Kappa Theta roommate and by then my right-hand man, and said, “I want to buy an NBA team.”
I WAS A thin, gangly child with no conspicuous athletic talent. When my peewee church basketball team won the city title, I sat at the end of the bench and played the last few minutes of our blowouts. I have a vague memory of trying to dribble and shoot; the basket seemed way, way up there. I fared better on the playground at four square, where you hand-serve a large rubber ball into quadrants of a court. I liked to compete, but my modest athletic talents didn’t flower until high school soccer.
I had little exposure to the NBA before Microsoft moved to Bellevue in 1979, coinciding with the Seattle SuperSonics’ stretch run to its first and last championship season. I got caught up in the excitement and became a big fan. In June, after the Sonics finished off the Washington Bullets for the title, I was out among the people thronging the streets and honking their horns.
The next fall I bought my first season tickets. The SuperSonics began trading away their talent, and each year the team got a little worse and my seats got a little better, until I was stationed courtside across from the home bench. Sitting so close deepened my passion for the game. I thought the NBA was the greatest spectacle in sports—equal parts athleticism, ballet, teamwork, and individual grit. The action was almost nonstop, full of vivid moments. Unlike baseball or football, few games were decided with more than five minutes left. And what could match the beauty of a pure jump shot swishing through the net or a tough offensive rebound in traffic?
The Sonics of the early eighties weren’t a great team, but they were competitive and entertaining. When I got sick, they became my escape; I went to every game I could and caught the rest on television. I studied box scores in the newspaper while waiting for my radiation treatments, and devoured the Official NBA Register. If you asked about Sidney Moncrief’s foul-shooting percentage, I could rattle it off within a few percentage points.
The Sonics were a godsend in getting me through that difficult time. No matter how rotten I felt, there was always the next game to look forward to.
IN THE FALL of 1987, I heard that the Portland Trail Blazers might be available. Winners of a championship a decade earlier with Bill Walton, the team was owned by a Los Angeles developer named Larry Weinberg, a gentleman from the old school. I made an overture through Bob Barnett, my old TRW contact. Weinberg’s attorney told him that the Blazers were “not for sale, but we might entertain an offer.” They insisted that our meeting be private. If word leaked out, our discussions would be over.
That October we met with Harley Frankel, Weinberg’s most trusted associate. Going in, I told Bob I had one precondition: a price. I didn’t want to bid against myself. Frankel went on about the glories of the NBA, and how the Blazers were a rising franchise with top local TV ratings and sellouts for ten consecutive years. On our way out, I looked at Bob and said, “They didn’t give us a price.”
I thought the deal was dead, but then in March they called. I still had the itch to own a team, and this time I met with Larry face-to-face. For two hours, he told us his story—how the Blazers won the title the year after he’d become majority owner, but then Walton broke his foot and they’d never recovered. He’d get up in the middle of the night on some overseas business trip and listen over a radio feed for two and a half hours, and the next day was ruined if his team hadn’t won. “The losing starts to tear your guts out,” he said.
As we wrapped up, Weinberg said he would take $65 million. Ten minutes later, we had a handshake deal. I was thirty-five years old and the youngest owner in major-league sports.
In May 1988, I attended a media conference at the Trail Blazers’ office, my first time on the bright red, team-color carpeting. Weinberg said, “I would like to introduce you to the new owner of the team, Paul Allen.” Everyone was surprised; we’d been discreet, as promised. This level of public exposure was new to me, and I felt nervous about meeting the press, but Weinberg was extremely gracious. He made it clear that he wouldn’t have sold unless he’d found the right person for the team’s future success. I was “first of all a fan,” Weinberg told the reporters. “Unless you’re a fan, nothing else counts in this ownership.”
Early on, I met Clyde Drexler, the team’s superstar, and we hit it off. Clyde was sharp and candid, a free spirit on the surface but with a calculating edge underneath; I’d heard that he and Kiki Vandeweghe clashed with coach Mike Schuler, a brittle disciplinarian. Before the season started that fall, the two players asked to see me. I had them to my house on Mercer Island, just outside Seattle, and I should have known better. We’d barely sat down when the coach-bashing began: Schuler was a control freak who killed the players’ creativity, and so on.
Toward six o’clock, Clyde said, “Hey, Paul, we saw your basketball court on the way down. Do you ever use it?” In fact, I’d been spending a fair amount of time polishing my jump shot—I even had three-point range in those days. We shot around and then Kiki said, “Let’s play H-O-R-S-E.” I agreed, assuming I’d get creamed. But the players were polite enough to stick mostly to three-pointers, and I hung in there. It began to drizzle, and we turned on the lights. Whenever a stray shot bounced off the court, Clyde and Kiki raced across the slick mesh surface to grab the ball. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, I thought. What if somebody got hurt?
After I made the game-clinching three-pointer (they’d gone easy on me), Clyde said, “Hey, I want to dunk.” Kiki tossed the ball in the air, and Clyde took a flat-footed leap from under the basket. He was twenty-six years old, in his prime, and he met the ball maybe three feet over the ten-foot rim—caught it, dunked it. I’ve sat courtside at more than a thousand NBA games, but I’ve never seen anything quite like that soaring slam in the dark, in the rain, on my own outdoor court.
On his way out, Clyde said casually, “Can I call you sometime to talk about the team?”
“Of course,” I said. That was my second rookie mistake. It’s fine to be friendly with your players and to care about them, but you have to be careful about crossing the line. Get too close, and it may come back to bite you when it’s time to renew a contract or weigh a trade. In Clyde’s case, I got too close. For years afterward, I’d be awakened by the phone in the middle of the night.
“Paul, it’s Clyde.”
I’d say, “Who else would be calling me at three A.M.? How’s it going, Clyde?”
And he’d say, “We lost again.” He’d complain about a teammate who kept forgetting the plays—like most of us, Clyde was better at seeing others’ flaws than his own. We’d chat about the game until he got to the point: “Paul, it’s just not fair what I’m being paid.”
Shortly before I bought the team, Larry Weinberg had signed Drexler to a six-year contract averaging $1.3 million a year. The deal made him one of the best-paid players in the game, but then salaries escalated sharply and Clyde’s had lagged behind. “Paul,” he’d say, “I’m only the sixth-best-paid player on the team. You know that isn’t right.”
And I’d say, “But Clyde, you signed a contract. Nobody forced you to sign the contract.” We’d go back and forth, beating each other up until I’d plead exhaustion and hang up the phone. There was no simple resolution. On the one hand, Clyde did deserve more money. He had that special extra gear—the turbo, he called it—that you see only in the greatest players, and he’d won a lot of big games for us. On the other hand, I thought a deal was a deal. It seemed both illogical and a terrible precedent to tear up a contract just because a player had my home number.
A year or so after I became owner, my ties to Clyde affected my judgment and changed the course of two franchises. Bucky Buckwalter, an executive under general manager Geoff Petrie, brought me a blockbus
ter trade. “I think we can get Olajuwon for Clyde,” he said. Akeem (later Hakeem) Olajuwon was one of the top two or three centers in the game. I subscribed to the axiom that you always trade a smaller player for a bigger one of like talent, but this time I told Bucky to pass. I had concerns about Olajuwon’s long-term health after doctors had found a blood clot in his leg. (The condition turned out to be treatable.) But the other reason I held back was that Clyde was special—to the team and its tradition, but also to me personally. I didn’t want to see him go.
* * *
THE TRAIL BLAZERS struggled that first year. After word filtered out that the team’s black players felt alienated from the coaching staff, we hired Maurice Lucas, a respected star from the Walton years, as an assistant coach. But issues still festered, to the point where Sports Illustrated depicted the Blazers as a team rife with turmoil. I sent Bert on a midseason road trip, and he came back with a sobering report. The team was split into “ten and two,” with Clyde and Kiki the two. Everyone hated the coach, whom Clyde was doing his level best to undermine. Schuler responded with a bunker mentality. He’d schedule meetings with his staff and “forget” to tell Maurice Lucas. He was freezing Lucas out.
I wasn’t keen about disrupting the team with a midseason coaching change, but the divisions seemed irreparable. In February 1989, we fired Schuler and replaced him with Rick Adelman, then a little-known assistant. Kiki asked to be traded, and we packed him off to the Knicks, ending a controversy over playing time with the younger, more dynamic Jerome Kersey. After getting swept out of the first round of the playoffs by the Los Angeles Lakers, the team’s needs were obvious. The Blazers were strong on the perimeter with Clyde, Kersey, and point guard Terry Porter, but thin up front. With the oft-injured Sam Bowie missing most of the season, we had a short-armed center in Kevin Duckworth and a hole at power forward. Teams scored on us inside at will.
I’ve tried to strike a balance as team owner, to be involved and accountable while preserving my executives’ freedom to shape the roster. My job is oversight, not execution. While I sign off on trades or free agents, I’ve rarely overruled my basketball people’s decisions. But I’m not shy about steering the discussion or pushing deeper if something doesn’t make sense to me.
Shortly before the 1989 NBA draft, my first as a real participant, I attended an all-star game for top college players. My eyes were drawn to Cliff Robinson, a wiry six-ten center from the University of Connecticut with a constant scowl on his face. On tape he looked like a smooth and explosive athlete who could really shoot, my favorite combination. But Cliff had a reputation as a surly kid who didn’t play hard. On draft day, I sat in our war room and scanned the board that ranked our top prospects. As the second round began, Cliff was the only one left in the greenroom, where projected lottery picks waited to take the stage as their names were called. He was so hurt that he left and went back to his hotel.
By then I was lobbying hard to choose him. Second-round picks are low-risk propositions. Their contracts aren’t always guaranteed, and they can be easily cut if they don’t pan out. Bucky Buckwalter, who leaned toward long, athletic players, gave his assent. With little to lose, Geoff Petrie agreed to take a flier on Cliff.
That draft taught me how quickly a team’s fortunes can change with one or two good decisions. Buck Williams, newly acquired in a trade for Bowie, was the ideal addition to our starting lineup: tough, focused, a pillar of strength against larger players like Utah’s Karl Malone. Cliff was rangy, fast, and defense-minded, capable of playing three positions—another perfect fit. (He’d be named the league’s top sixth man in 1993 and an all-star the following year.) Together they helped vault the Trail Blazers from a losing record to 59–23, second best in the league. That squad was unselfish and relentless, and it was a privilege to watch them. After we beat the Celtics by thirteen points in Boston Garden, Red Auerbach said, “They just ran us right out of our gym.”
There’s a special bond in cities with a single major-league franchise. I’d heard about Blazermania coming in, but I didn’t know just how rabid the Portland fans could be. Our run that season unleashed a wave of pent-up fervor. We swept Dallas in the first round of the playoffs, and then Cliff set the tone against San Antonio by subbing for the injured Duckworth and holding the great David Robinson to nine points. Then came the Western Conference Finals against the high-scoring Phoenix Suns. Though I’m not demonstrative by nature, I got caught up in the collective emotion of that series, to the point where I was signaling three-point shots and waving the crowd to stand and cheer down the stretch. I’d punctuate a win by pointing to the fans and clapping, to thank them for their support. After we pulled out the clincher on the road, by three points, I got so carried away that I ran out to join the scrum of players on the court. When Buck Williams embraced me, it felt like getting hugged by a brick wall. Our magical ride finally ended in the NBA Finals, when the “Bad Boy” Pistons used their experience and toughness (and the timely shooting of Vinnie “Microwave” Johnson) to defeat us in five games.
We returned to the Finals in 1992, the coming-out party for Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls. Heading into the showdown, a Sports Illustrated cover story featured the players who’d finish one-two in the balloting for Most Valuable Player that year: Jordan and Drexler, who was billed as Jordan’s “No. 1 Rival.” That only stoked Jordan’s competitive fires, which never needed stoking in the first place. Worse yet, Clyde had to guard the league’s top scorer without his normal lateral movement. After arthroscopic surgery the previous September, he’d had his right knee drained half a dozen times.
Jordan was a streaky jump shooter at that stage of his career, making only 27 percent of his three-point shots during the season. But in game one in Chicago, he hit six of them in the first half on his way to 39 points. (After the last deep shot, he turned toward the broadcast table and shrugged, as if he’d surprised even himself.) We tried Cliff and Jerome on him, along with Clyde—all solid defenders, but it made no difference. Jordan had his “turbo” on. I’ve seen just one other person up close who compared to him, who wanted not only to beat you but to crush you if he could. Those two stood apart for raw competitiveness: Michael Jordan and Bill Gates.
We had our moments against the Bulls. Midway through the fourth quarter of a tight game four in Portland, Clyde tapped the ball away from Jordan and converted it into a dunk, setting off a surge that evened the series at two games apiece. Nearly giddy, I went into the locker room afterward and found Clyde slumped in front of his locker, completely exhausted, an ice bag on every joint. And I said, “Clyde that was a brilliant steal. You read Jordan perfectly.”
He looked up at me, shook his head, and said, “Stop, stop, you don’t understand. Most guys have two or three go-to moves; Jordan has nine. I guessed right, that’s all. I got lucky. Sometimes you get the bear, but usually the bear gets you.” Clyde knew the score. The Bulls, on the cusp of a dynasty, beat us in six games. Just around that time, to compensate for those years when Clyde was paid below the market, I gave him a $9.8 million, one-season extension, then the biggest yearly paycheck in the history of team sports. I thought he’d earned it.
Though we never won a title in the Drexler era, those were glorious years. I watched up to three hundred games a season, live and on TV; in remote locales like Hawaii, I had a special live satellite feed when the Blazers came on. When I was home in Seattle, I’d invite six or eight people to fly to Portland for each home game. My mother became one of our biggest fans, and she’d bring a friend and drink her tea and eat her cookies en route. Then she’d sit with me on the baseline and scold the referees in her dignified fashion. “You’ve got to call it the same way on both sides,” she’d say, as the nearest official rolled his eyes. For my mom, bad whistles were injustices, and she wasn’t going to sit by and not say anything.
One night we were playing the Sonics, and Sam Perkins—six nine and 235 pounds—barreled after a ball that was sailing out of bounds straight over my mother
’s head. She threw up her hands as Perkins crashed into her, and then I noticed her holding her wrist. “It’s broken,” she said calmly. At halftime the team doctor iced and taped it, and I asked if she wanted to head home. “No,” she said firmly, “we’re going to watch the rest of the game.”
Over ensuing seasons, Adelman tied our younger players to the bench and stuck with the tight rotation of veterans who had gotten us to the Finals. But you can’t freeze time, and those guys were now on the downside. In 1994, we hired a new coach, P. J. Carlesimo, plus a new team president and general manager who would define the team’s next decade.
ARTICULATE, COOL, and deceptively bland, Bob Whitsitt had joined the Seattle SuperSonics in 1986. At age thirty, he was the youngest top executive in the league, known as Trader Bob for his nonstop personnel moves. He built a powerhouse team around Gary Payton, a pugnacious point guard, and Shawn Kemp, a wildly talented big man who’d never played in college. Those Sonics teams were bold, volatile, swaggering, and athletically gifted. In 1993–1994 they posted a record of 63–19, best in the league. Whitsitt was named NBA Executive of the Year, but his owner, Barry Ackerley, became disenchanted after the team got upset in the playoffs. Ackerley disconnected Whitsitt’s office phone to encourage him to resign. I jumped to hire him.
Clyde was promptly traded to the Houston Rockets, as he’d requested. I gave my favorite player the news and thanked him for his contribution, and it was an emotional moment for us both. That spring I rooted for him from afar as he helped Olajuwon win a title. I’d always considered Clyde a champion, and now it was official.