вторник, 11 сентября 2012 г.

Largest Investor in Atlanta Sports Teams Overcame Obstacles to Fulfill Dream. - Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News

By Tim Tucker, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News

Apr. 6--BOSTON -- Twenty-one years ago, he had a signed agreement to buy the Boston Celtics. Three years ago, he almost had another deal to buy the Celtics. A little more than one year ago, he had champagne on ice, believing the next phone call would inform him he'd been awarded the Charlotte expansion franchise.

But various obstacles, from bizarre to mundane, kept getting in the way of Steve Belkin's dream of owning a National Basketball Association team.

Then, when he least expected it, the path cleared to ownership of a team. Two teams, actually: the Hawks and the Thrashers.

Belkin, 56, a Boston-based entrepreneur who made his fortune in the direct marketing of travel packages, credit cards and other products, is the largest single investor, by far, in the nine-man group that last week completed its $250 million purchase of Atlanta's NBA and National Hockey League teams. A former high school basketball star who turned down a scholarship offer from Georgia Tech, he owns 30 percent of the venture and holds one-third of the voting interest, culminating a painful but ultimately exhilarating odyssey to the helm of an NBA team.

'I've seen a few e-mails he's gotten, people asking, 'Are you having a good time?' ' says Donna Janis, Belkin's assistant for 20 years at Trans National Group, the holding company for his various businesses. 'And he e-mails them back: 'I'm having a BLAST!' All the letters capitalized and an exclamation point. That says it all.

'He loves business. He loves Trans National --- it's his baby. But his heart is really in basketball.'

The lesson of his two-decade wait for a team, Belkin says during an interview in his office in the Trans National building next to Fenway Park, is: 'Have faith and trust the universe.' Which, he acknowledges, 'is hard to do when you're in the moment. But, boy, sometimes things will take longer than you anticipate. Don't give up on your dreams. Just keep looking for the opportunity that is around the corner, and it all seems to work out, even if at the time you don't understand it.'

He didn't understand in 1983, when he stepped unprepared into the limelight with a signed deal to buy the storied Celtics. Reports soon surfaced that a vice president of one of Belkin's businesses had been convicted of bookmaking several years earlier, spawning a bizarre media circus that boggles his mind to this day.

'What happened was they [in the media] said that this vice president was connected to the Mafia and so therefore Steve Belkin must be connected to the Mafia,' Belkin says. 'They actually showed pictures on TV of the head of the Mafia on a split screen with me. You know, being from Michigan, this was, like, so out of my comprehension.

'And then there were these people --- I don't know if they were media people or who --- going around asking questions about my kids [then ages 7 and 4] at their school. It became a very painful experience for my family, and my wife Joan and I said: 'This is supposed to be fun. We don't need this.' '

So he withdrew his offer to buy the Celtics and, even though an NBA review found no wrongdoing on his part, retreated into private life.

'What did I learn from the experience?' he asks, then answers: 'I learned I was naive, learned I didn't understand the media. And it also became real clear to me that having my kids grow up in a normal life was more important than owning a sports team.'

For the next 17 years, as his two daughters grew up, Belkin deferred his dream of owning a team and focused on his business, his civic work and his family. He continued to follow the NBA avidly --- 'a huge fan and a knowledgeable one,' NBA Commissioner David Stern says of Belkin --- and became close friends with Celtics great Larry Bird and others in the league.

When his daughters --- now 28 and 25, both living in New York, where one is a teacher and the other is in advertising --- were grown, Belkin figured the time was right to again chase his dream of a team.

It so happened that Paul Gaston, whose family had bought the Celtics when Belkin's 1983 deal collapsed, was quietly looking to sell three years ago. Belkin and Bird thought they were on the verge of buying the team. It seemed a natural.

'We were close, very close, in our conversations' with Gaston, Belkin says.

But that was a time of peak values for sports franchises, and eventually a group led by venture capitalist Wyc Grousbeck bought the Celtics for an NBA-record $360 million.

It was another disappointment for Belkin. But not as big as the next one.

In 2002, he led a group that tried to acquire the Charlotte expansion franchise. The group included Bruce Levenson and Ed Peskowitz, who are among Belkin's partners as Hawks-Thrashers owners, as well as Bird, former Celtics General Manager Jan Volk and former Celtics player and coach M.L. Carr.

On Dec. 16, 2002, the NBA was to announce whether it was awarding the franchise to Belkin's group or to Black Entertainment Television founder Robert Johnson, who had a compelling net worth of $1.3 billion but had entered the bidding many months after Belkin.

'The league had said, 'We're going to call you at 4 o'clock,' ' Belkin recalls. 'My wife and Jan Volk and M.L. Carr, we all came into the office. We had been given positive indications. We had champagne ready.

'Then we got the call, and I went in the other room to take it, and when I came back into the office and [made a thumbs-down gesture], they thought I was joking.'

That was the lowest point, Belkin concedes, of his team-pursuing odyssey and 'one of the lowest points of my life.'

'It's not like you're able at that moment to say, 'OK, what's the good here? How can I grow from this?' ' he says. 'You have to experience the disappointment and the sadness. It took me a month to experience the loss. Larry was really devastated as well, because we had put so much effort into it, had gone down and helped rally the Charlotte community to build an arena.'

But they had 'miscalculated,' Belkin concedes, Johnson's appeal to the league.

A month later, Belkin was at it again, checking out every NBA team that might be available from Milwaukee eastward. By last summer --- in tandem with Levenson, Peskowitz and New York developer Bruce Ratner --- he was at work on a bid for the NBA's New Jersey Nets. Then came an unexpected opportunity to buy the Hawks and Thrashers, who were on the verge of being sold to Texas auto mogul David McDavid.

'To a certain extent,' Belkin says, 'there is something that's a little ironic about the McDavid deal, that he was so close to getting this done and just didn't get it across the finish line and we stepped in right at the end.'

Sort of like Gaston did in 1983. 'He stepped in at the end,' Belkin says, 'and took my agreement and just changed the signature page and bought the [Celtics].'

Today, Belkin appears to have no regrets about his near-misses. At the Trans National building, a basketball goal stands in a lobby, a Hawks logo on the backboard.

'To be where I am today, with the arena and the basketball team and the hockey team, I would much prefer that to just owning the Celtics, who don't have a very good arena arrangement,' Belkin says. 'And I really feel blessed that I ended up not getting the Charlotte franchise, because I think Atlanta offers so much more of an opportunity to really make something happen.'

It is the business, as well as the game, that attracts him. Says Volk, who has known Belkin for more than 20 years: 'He is combining his two passions --- his passion for the game and his passion for business and marketing.'

Sports had been about the only business difficult for Belkin to break into. A consummate entrepreneur who has started 26 companies, he traces his drive to his childhood in Grand Rapids, Mich., the son of lower-middle-income parents.

'My mother used to say to me, 'If only we had sufficient money, your dad and I wouldn't argue so much,' ' Belkin says. 'So I got very motivated: 'OK, when I grow up, I'm going to make a lot of money and then I'm going to give that to my parents and then they're going to stop arguing.' It was a false assumption, but it got me to where I am now.'

His parents are 90 and 86 now, living in Florida, with plenty of money. 'They love each other dearly,' Belkin says. 'But they still argue.'

Young Steve Belkin turned down a basketball scholarship to Georgia Tech to attend Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., on an academic scholarship and student loans. His older brother had graduated from Tech, and he wanted to go his own way.

At Cornell, Belkin quit the basketball team upon realizing the rigid practice schedule interfered with his studies, but he played on the more flexible tennis, squash and soccer teams. (Still an avid tennis player, he has won his club championship 15 of the past 20 years.) After graduating from Cornell in 1969, he went to Harvard Business School, which 'I never thought I would be able to do.' Today his career is used as a case study at Harvard and other business schools.

After working briefly as a small-business consultant and as an executive with a travel company, Belkin founded Trans National in 1974 as a direct marketing business that focused initially on group travel, selling vacation packages to members of 'affinity' groups such as trade associations or alumni organizations. He got off to a rugged start --- he still remembers the late-night call from American Express telling him he was way past due on a $15,000 bill --- before he lined up $250,000 in funding.

But soon enough, Belkin's 'affinity' model proved so successful that he diversified into marketing loans to members of groups and then into what he calls the 'home run' of his career: the affinity credit card, which is a credit card carrying the name or logo of a sponsoring organization.

'We started the whole affinity credit card business back in 1982,' Belkin says. 'Now, it's over 50 percent of all credit cards.'

Belkin says his company originated more than 12 million credit cards in the United States from 1982 to 1993, earning a fee from a bank for each approved applicant it generated. Then, in 1993, Belkin sold the domestic credit card business to Maryland National Bank and took the same idea overseas. He recently sold the international operation.

So it goes at Trans National. Of the 26 companies Belkin has started in the past three decades, some have been sold, some have closed, some have morphed into others as conditions have changed, and seven remain under the Trans National umbrella, generating about $200 million in 2003 sales, Belkin says. The current businesses run the gamut: travel, telecommunications, selling books and videos to affinity groups, real estate, venture capital.

'Being a successful entrepreneur is like sailing into the wind,' Belkin says. 'Most people think, 'I'm going to get there by working hard and going in the same direction.' It doesn't work that way. You have a vision of where you want to get, but you have to tack to the left, go along for a while, then figure out when to tack to the right, then come up with a creative solution and tack to the left again. That's how entrepreneurs are successful: knowing when and how to tack.'

Around Belkin, entrepreneurship can be contagious. Donna Janis had been his secretary for five years when, in 1989, he encouraged her to follow her passion for horses by starting her own stable --- with his financial backing. Typical of Belkin's businesses, B.E. Stables has shifted its focus over the years, from racing to breeding.

In his large, elegant office, Belkin is talking about what brings him pleasure --- family, business, fitness, tennis, basketball and especially civic work (including fund-raisers at his suburban Weston, Mass., home for Boston Medical Center and an annual trip on which he takes a planeload of people to the Holocaust Museum in Washington).

He interrupts the conversation for a couple of phone calls --- a conference with Bank of America, a Philips Arena sponsor and a chat with Billy Knight, the Hawks' general manager. Later he's off to a meeting with Logan Airport officials about charter flights.

'This is so far beyond my wildest dreams,' Belkin says. 'I have to pinch myself, just the whole life that I'm living. And I have to pinch myself twice with my NBA dream finally being fulfilled.'

A partnership of nine men based in Atlanta, Washington and Boston has bought the Hawks, Thrashers and Philips Arena operating rights from Time Warner. We're profiling the new owners this week.

--Sunday: Michael Gearon Jr., Atlanta. A passionate Hawks fans since age 3, he made millions by building, then selling, a telecommunications company.

--Monday: Bruce Levenson, Ed Peskowitz and Todd Foreman, Washington. Their media company has a lower profile than Time Warner, but it always makes money.

--Today: Steve Belkin, Boston. Twenty-one years after almost buying the Boston Celtics, he's back in the ownership game.

--Wednesday: Rutherford Seydel, Atlanta. Ted Turner's son-in-law wants a championship ring to wrap up some unfinished family business.

Also: Michael Gearon Sr., M.B. 'Bud' Seretean and Beau Turner.

THE STEVE BELKIN FILE

Age: 56

Grew up: East Grand Rapids, Mich.

Lives: Weston, Mass.

Education: Graduated from Grand Rapids (Mich.) High, Cornell University and Harvard (MBA).

Family: Wife Joan, whom he met at Cornell, and two daughters (ages 28 and 25).

To see more of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.ajc.com

(c) 2004, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

VIA,