Sympathy for the Rich Man

What can you buy with a few hundred million and a dream? Marketing magnate Daniel Snyder bought the Washington Redskins and reserved parking on annual Worst Sports Owners lists. Peter Magowan, a grocery-store mogul, bought the San Francisco Giants and the right to be vilified for both protecting and disrespecting a famed steroids junkie.

Here in Cleveland, Larry Dolan dropped $320 million, only to discover with every flip of the sports page what a cheap son of a bitch he is. Randy Lerner earned the same right by simply inheriting the Browns from Dad.

Call it the fate of sports owners, the relatively anonymous billionaires who spend all that money for fame, fun, and the chance to be lionized on city streets, only to find that -- unless you win that rare championship -- you've simply purchased loathing rights for an entire region.

Of the 120 or so owners in the four major sports, perhaps only a dozen earn the affection of fans. The best earn titles, providing them with automatic glory until the winning years run out, when they're once again cast into the fiery pits of radio call-in shows. The smart stay anonymous, preferring the low profile of luxury boxes, allowing their general managers to take the heat. But most can't resist that fame, that temptation to touch the flame, where the odds are roughly 30-1 that they'll get burned, badly.

Gordon Gund did it right. In 1983, he paid $20 million for the Cavaliers, rescuing them from Ted Stepien, who gave away top draft picks as if they were Brook Jacoby trading cards. "You don't have to know a lot about NBA basketball to know that if your team is on the bottom of the league and has four years with no first-round picks, you're in deep trouble," Gund says today.

So he saved the team -- ushered it into a new downtown arena, built it to the verge of a championship, then quietly guided it through the lean years. He loved it, but showed his devotion from afar, taking a page from the book of Philip Wrigley, who preferred working in the yard to witnessing his beloved Cubbies lose. Gund couldn't watch his team anyway. He's been blind since age 30 and had built a life in New Jersey.

They called him an absentee owner. That was how he liked it. He may have missed out on glory rightfully his during the Nance-Price-Daugherty years, but he also insulated himself from the wretched era when he was forced to ask Clevelanders to pay to see Ricky Davis, Michael Doleac, and Bimbo Coles.

In 2004, he finally found a convenient departure. The Cavs had misfired their way to the bottom of the NBA, winning the right to draft hometown star LeBron James. He alone would generate wins and revenue, begin to fill an arena where the crowds had become smaller than at St. Ed's football games. But it would take some aggressive fathering to rebuild once again. At 65, Gund wasn't interested. "It was time to put the franchise in stronger, perhaps younger hands," says his close friend, NBA commissioner David Stern.

There was also a strong incentive: By the time Gund put the team up for sale, it was worth $375 million -- almost 20 times what he'd paid for it. So he went looking for someone with a few hundred million dollars and a dream. Dan Gilbert had both.

Gilbert, 44, is a hybrid sports owner model. He has Art Rooney's working-class pedigree, Dan Snyder's love of spending, Mark Cuban's love for e-mail and disdain for suits. But when Gund put his team up for sale, none of that mattered as much as one attribute, the quality shared by all modern-day owners: He was obscenely rich.

"It's kind of the typical thing," Gilbert says. "You realize in high school, 'Most likely I'm not going to be a professional athlete. So one day, I'll buy a team.'"

Of course, such thoughts aren't remotely typical. Long gone are the days when Art Modell could put up $250,000 for a controlling share of the Browns, or Bud Selig could buy the Milwaukee Brewers with the savings from his car dealership. Today, you need the net worth of a Baltic state to qualify. Not even Tiger Woods, the world's richest athlete, makes Forbes' list of the richest Americans. Compared to that of their owners, the wealth of most professional sportsmen is downright average.

Gilbert, however, is the founder and chairman of Quicken Loans, the nation's largest online mortgage company. He has amassed enough wealth -- just over $1 billion -- to qualify for entry into one of America's most exclusive and quirkiest clubs: the pro-sports owners society. So on March 1, 2005, alongside his newest employee, LeBron James, Gilbert was introduced as the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers.

What did his $375 million buy him? Gilbert is convinced it will eventually yield what most owners crave: a championship. And he might be right. But even for the obscenely rich, there is a learning curve. And before long, Gilbert was opening the papers to read things he never heard in the mortgage business.