1984
Peter Ueberroth
BY ROBERT AJEMIAN
Jan. 7, 1985
Peter Ueberroth has described himself as both shy and ruthless. His
associates say he is demanding and self-demanding. behind his laid-back style
is the toughness that made him so right for an Olympian task. But when the
world cheered, his head spun and his eyes welled up.
Control. Ever since he was a boy, he has needed to be in control. Long
before he appeared out of nowhere five years ago to organize and eventually
dominate the 23rd Olympic Games, Peter Ueberroth was always in charge of his
life. At 16, he left home voluntarily (even though his parents never really
understood why) to live and work in a nearby orphanage. He liked the
independence and affection he got there.
Such great control. His bland face and laid-back manner rarely reveal his
inner feelings. Those who know him well say Ueberroth is a fascinating paradox,
an idealist with a salting of cleverness, a man of high principle who is
willing to go right to the edge of scruple to reach his goals. He once
described himself as both shy and ruthless. Over the years he has perfected a
calculating public modesty, down-playing himself about, say, his mediocre
college grades. But behind the self-deprecation is a huge ego and a steely
inner toughness. Everything Ueberroth does has a purpose. He is a creative
energizer of people, a man unafraid to make unpopular decisions, a natural
teacher and leader.
To millions of Americans the blue-eyed, sandy-haired Ueberroth is still a
virtual unknown. Even his recent anointment to the apple-pie job of baseball
commissioner left most of the country in the dark about him. How did he achieve
such a spectacular success? What combination of strength and guile lay behind
that almost inscrutable exterior? All his life Ueberroth has been in the thrall
of challenges. The Olympics were clearly his greatest. He made speech after
speech to his thousands of workers about how together they had to climb a
majestic mountain. "I've always hunted for challenges," says Ueberroth
dismissively. He is a man who has little patience for self-analysis. Was there
anything in his beginnings that would explain clearly why this man, of all the
accomplished people around, turned out to be so exactly right for this Olympian
task?
The son of a roaming salesman of aluminum siding, Pete Ueberroth was born
Sept. 2, 1937, in Evanston, Ill. His father, Victor, half German and half
Viennese, with his hearty manner and curious mind, was the biggest influence in
his life, says Ueberroth. Perhaps because Victor's education ended in the
eighth grade, he always had an encyclopedia near by and engaged his family in
mind puzzles, a drill Peter used years later to brace his Olympic employees.
His mother, Laura Larson, half Swedish and half Irish, had been ill almost from
the time he was born. A Christian Scientist, like her husband, she died when
Peter was four.
Within a year Peter's father had remarried. His new bride, Nancy, was an
accountant, and she helped clear up some of her husband's heavy debts. Six
years later she had a son of her own, whom she seemed to favor. Some friends
now believe this was the seed of Ueberroth's drive to achieve, the deep need to
gain approval from his new mother. The family moved often, and young Pete had
to adjust to a variety of schools and neighborhoods, from Iowa to Pennsylvania
top Wisconsin and finally to Northern California, in the town of Burlingame. By
then his father was home most of the time, ill from a heart attack.
At 15, Ueberroth was constantly out of the house, a pretty fair athlete
consumed by sports, usually hanging around with older kids, holding a series of
jobs at gas stations, shopping centers, Christmas tree lots. By the time he was
in high school, he was paying all his own bills. He was in charge, and he liked
that. A buddy, John Matthews, remembers that Ueberroth always knew where the
parties were, where to get a car. And he would usually set up the dates. If the
gang was unable to pick a movie, says another friend, Pete would quickly make
the choice. Mostly, Matthews recalls, Ueberroth seemed to have a new job.
There was a little glamour once in a while. His father's younger brother,
Alan Curtis, was a movie actor married to Actress Ilona Massey, and young Pete
spent one summer with them. He had a broken romance too and got over it in 48
hours, Ueberroth recalls. Two years before finishing high school Ueberroth
moved out of the house and into Twelveacres, an orphanage for children from
broken homes. He was the recreation director and was paid $125 a month. When he
was handed his diploma in 1955, all 28 of the boys from Twelveacres stood up in
the bleachers and shouted: "Daddy Pete!"
Ueberroth paid his own way through four years of San Jose State, although
he received a small sports grant for playing water polo. He tried out for the
Olympic squad in 1956 but did not make it. (He did break his nose five times
over the years playing water polo and today it is still badly bent.) At San
Jose, Ueberroth spent 15 hours a week in the classroom and 40 hours at odd
jobs; selling women's shoes, working on a chicken farm.
The summer after his junior year, Ueberroth and three friends went to
Hawaii. While they surfed, Ueberroth loaded baggage and emptied buckets for a
nonscheduled airline. Even his recreation did not mean relaxation. On the
weekends he frequented a famous body surfing beach called Makapuu, a stern
challenge with 6 ft. swells crashing one on top of the other. Makapuu at the
time was jealously guarded by the locals. Resentful of the intrusion, they
crowded Ueberroth while he was riding the waves, sometimes driving him into the
coral. Bruised and tired, Ueberroth kept going back. But once he mastered the
challenge, he lost interest in Makapuu.
After graduating with a degree in business, Ueberroth was turned down for
jobs by several large companies, and the rejections deflated him. He decided to
drift back to Hawaii, confident he could get work. That September he married
the daughter of a Long Beach baker, Ginny Nicolaus, whom he had known for a
couple of years at San Jose. Together they lived in a one-room Oahu apartment,
so small, remembers Ginny, that they could almost reach out and touch all four
walls from the center of the room. Ueberroth, now 22, became operations manager
for a small nonscheduled airline owned by Kirk Kerkorian, the adventurous
entrepreneur who later took over MGM. The service, Trans International
Airlines, had been set up to bring passengers from California to Hawaii and
back. Ueberroth created a market, overlooked by the big jet lines: luring new
customers out of the scattered islands and sending them to the mainland. A year
later when Kerkorian offered to bring him to Los Angeles to run the whole
airline at double his $1,000-a-month salary, the young man showed he could
drive a hard bargain. He held out for part ownership and got 3%.
Shortly thereafter, Ueberroth left and started his own air service between
L.A. and Seattle. Hotel rates suddenly shot up, travel dropped, and he found
himself $100,000 in debt. It was one of the few times he was truly scared. But
he had another idea. It had seemed to him that small airlines, small hotels,
steamships and others that could not afford representatives in several cities
could use a reservation service. He set up a phone bank in Los Angeles for a
few dozen customers, each dutifully listed in local directories. If someone
telephoned Alaska Airlines, or Aloha Airlines, or Ethiopian Air Lines,
Ueberroth would answer just as though a local office existed. Soon he had a
dozen such operations around the country. By 1965 the company, Transportation
Consultants, was rolling up big revenues. Ueberroth was invited to join the
Young Presidents' Organization, one of its youngest members ever. He was 28.
Next he took his company public and with the cash began buying up small
travel agencies, then expanded into hotel management and eventually purchased
several 50-room hotels. Soon the company had ten, generating lots of revenue,
and in 1972 when a large old travel agency called Ask Mr. Foster came up for
sale, Ueberroth grabbed it, putting up nearly $1 million in cash. By 1978,
carried along by the boom in the travel and leisure market, his parent company,
now called First Travel, had 1,500 employees in 200 offices worldwide and gross
revenues in excess of $300 million, making it the largest U.S. travel company
after American Express.
Along the way Ueberroth developed a disciplined, fastidious style. His
sense of propriety was strong, and he did not hesitate to impose it on others.
Employees were required to bring spouses along whenever they did any business
entertaining in their home towns. Peter the counselor wanted to promote family
unity. His instructional techniques also became personal. If an employee tended
to speak with his hand over his mouth, Ueberroth would reach out and brush it
away. If Ueberroth was concerned about shabby dress, that employee's bonus
would carry specific instructions to buy a couple of new suits. His bluntness
was his way of peddling improvement. At the same time, Ueberroth was intensely
opposed to workplace discrimination, frequently hiring older employees, giving
younger ones serious responsibilities and using women managers years before
they routinely had such roles in the travel business. The principle was
important to him, but it also made good business sense, since he could pick
from a larger pool of talent.
Throughout his career, Ueberroth has poured considerable energy into his
family: his wife, three daughters, Vicki, 22, Heidi, 19, Keri, 17, and a son,
Joe, 15. Back in 1963, even when he was struggling to get out from under that
$100,000 debt, he made a decision not to work on weekends. Even today,
Ueberroth will interrupt meetings to take a phone call from his wife. Last
month he surprised his two youngest children by taking them to a Michael
Jackson concert, though he dislikes the music. The whole family recently walked
out during the third act of the Broadway hit Hurlyburly. The language was too
vulgar for them. During Christmas time they all took a boat cruise to Mexico.
Ueberroth rarely goes to the movies and watches little television. While not
intellectual, he is tirelessly inquisitive and reads about 30 books a year,
preferring historical nonfiction. At 5 ft. 11 in. and 185 lbs., he is a good
golfer (handicap: 8), and likes to skin dive and spear fish around his
waterfront house in Laguna Beach. But until 1978 he had never really considered
sport as anything more than a free-time enthusiasm.
In that year a head-hunting firm suggested Ueberroth's name to a Los
Angeles committee searching for a person to run the Games. His first reaction
was to decline. Who needed the 70% cut in pay (the Olympic salary: $104,000)
and all the problems? Pressed a second time, he decided to take it after all.
Nine months after accepting the job, he sold First Travel for $10.4 million and
later forswore his Olympic salary to become a volunteer. At the start there was
no staff and no money. Moreover, the city of Los Angeles had passed a
resolution saying that not one cent of municipal funds could be spent on the
Games. The first week Ueberroth and his tiny staff were locked out of their
small new office. They could hear the phones ringing inside. But the landlord,
like most of the rest of the town, was sure the Olympics would lose money and
not pay its bills.
Ueberroth, then 42, knew his best chance to get big money was from TV, and
he staged a white-knuckle showdown among the networks. The absolute ceiling to
shoot for, his own staff counseled, was $150 million. Ueberroth wanted more. He
and others hatched what was, in effect, a one-shot blind bidding contest, and
ABC, pulled along by the bold auctioneering, shut out the competition with a
shocker of a bid: $225 million. Buoyed by the TV deal, he turned toward his
other big source of revenue, America's largest corporations. To create an aura
of coveted elitism, he drastically reduced the number of sponsors to 30 (there
had been 381 in the 1980 Winter Games at Lake Placid) and hiked the price to an
unprecedented $4 million minimum per corporation.
Ueberroth negotiated each contract and colleagues say his familiar reverse
salesmanship—earnestly seeming to take the other person's side—was awesome to
watch. He put soft-drink companies, for example, through the same kind of
high-stakes contest as the TV networks. Coca-Cola, after hearing a flag-waving
sell from Ueberroth, jumped its bid all the way to $12.6 million. When IBM
decided not to participate, Ueberroth, who badly wanted to use their technology
at the Games, called Chairman Frank Cary. The firm that sponsored the Games,
Ueberroth said solicitously, would gain a global identity with the next
generation of youth. Of course, he warned, another mammoth company with only
three letters was interested; that was NEC, the Nippon Electric Company. IBM
eventually signed on. Ueberroth had wanted the American company, partly out of
patriotic loyalty. But threatening to play the foreign card was no bluff. When
Eastman Kodak complained bitterly that no photo company would pay $4 million
for a sponsorship, Ueberroth unhesitatingly switched to Japan's Fuji Photo.
As the money began to pour in, building international good will became a
new priority. Ueberroth spent much of the time before the Games cultivating the
various national ministers of sport, and was constantly startled to discover
the power and importance of athletics and athletic officials around the world.
"Sports is an immense force in other countries," says Ueberroth. "Our
Government still doesn't understand the consequences of the two Olympic
boycotts in 1980 and 1984." Foreign officials sometimes took Ueberroth aside to
inquire if he might help change some aspect of White House foreign policy.
Ueberroth would explain that in the United States sports officials do not carry
that kind of weight.
Back at the office, which by the summer of 1983 was a huge converted
helicopter factory, the staff was growing. Virtually all of the top men and
women Ueberroth had known for years. His style throughout was to turn
responsibility over to tested deputies. The man who actually ran the Games,
Harry Usher, formerly Ueberroth's travel business attorney, says leadership and
inspiration, not operations, are Ueberroth's managerial gifts. Whenever his
lieutenants bucked decisions upward, Ueberroth flung them back down. "Authority
is 20% given," he would say, "and 80% taken. Take it." If someone faltered,
Ueberroth did not hesitate to make a change. He once had to okay the firing of
a friend of 25 years. Later the friend wrote and told Ueberroth he was cold and
inhuman, especially since their families had been so close. The letter stung
Ueberroth, but associates say his decision was right.
As the early months of 1984 rushed past, Ueberroth's team was approaching
1,000. But despite the size, his no-nonsense stamp was everywhere. He
pronounced that men must wear jackets and ties at all times. Women could wear
stone-washed jeans, but not regular ones. To build unity, and save time, staff
members were encouraged to lunch at the hangar's cafeteria. Ueberroth was a
regular. With his thin mouth and athlete's stride (he looks strikingly like the
1940s actor William Lundigan), he had become a revered, somewhat intimidating
presence.
The teacher inside Ueberroth was always working. If he detected that a
colleague was not using all of his skills, he flashed annoyance. And he was
exhilarated when he saw someone shine. He constantly tested and challenged
those around him, often sounding preachy, sometimes downright rude when he
interrupted in mid-sentence, pushing them to be better. "By now," remembers
Ueberroth, "we felt the reputation of the country was at stake. It was
frightening." Often he would stroll through the hangar, sure to prod with
questions, and more questions: the exact location of Rwanda or the spelling of
the names of International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch
and Director Monique Berlioux. "Peter is demanding and self-demanding," says
Agnes Mura, a top staffer. "That makes you try as hard as you can."
Ueberroth could be imperious with those whose dedication did not seem
adequate to him. One day in the cafeteria, he stopped to talk to some women
having lunch. The chat was pleasantly routine until one of the ladies asked
about possible salary increases. Ueberroth, the unsalaried volunteer, turned
cold and snapped: "You shouldn't be working here if you don't understand what
we're trying to do." Later when the enormous Olympic surplus of $215 million
was announced, Ueberroth and his committee were accused of poor mouthing about
a possible shortage of funds. Of course, just weeks before the Games,
Ueberroth's insistence that there would be at least a $15 million profit
despite the soviet boycott was greeted with great skepticism. For months
Ueberroth had suspected that a large profit was possible. But the threat of
catastrophe always hovered over the Olympics, and he was always planning for
the unexpected.
Such pre-emptive worrying paid off when the Soviet boycott came on May 8,
just two months before the Games. Disaster threatened. The immediate objective
was to hold down the number of countries dropping out, head off any impact on
ticket sales and avoid the possibly ruinous prospect of having to return as
much as $70 million to ABC if the actual viewing audience did not reach a
pre-established total. Ready for the emergency, Ueberroth's men sprang.
Experienced envoys quickly flew to assigned countries: Attorney Charles Lee to
China, Savings & Loan Executive Anthony Frank to East Germany, Ueberroth to
Cuba (Fidel Castro said he had to follow the Soviet lead, but agreed not to
pressure other Latin countries to stay away). Later, chartered planes were
dispatched to bring athletes from 40 African states.
Ueberroth always believed the boycott decision had been a very close call
by the Soviet Politburo. He blamed himself for not dealing more directly with
Soviet Party Leader Konstantin Chernenko, knowing, as he did, that Chernenko
had suffered through the 1980 U.S. boycott with his mentor, Leonid Brezhnev.
Ueberroth has the confidence to be this openly self-critical. It is partly a
management technique, but associates say he will flatly reverse himself in the
face of a reasoned argument.
A key target in the antiboycott battle was Rumania, with its outstanding
athletes. But the Soviets had summoned President Nicolae Ceausescu to Moscow.
The U.S.S.R. had already declared its own athletes would not be safe in Los
Angeles; hence the boycott. The Rumanians had confided to Ueberroth that they
wanted to use their presence at the Olympics as a nonpolitical way to stand up
to the Soviets. But they also told him warily, they dared not push too far.
Before Ceausescu left for Moscow, Ueberroth met secretly with Rumanian Olympic
officials at a Swiss hotel. He briefed them on exact details of how good the
security arrangements really were. They listened intently. It was a moving
experience, Ueberroth recalls, watching them prepare to challenge the U.S.S.R.
The Rumanians had no idea what lay ahead. A few days later, after Ceausescu's
journey to Moscow, Rumania announced it would come to Los Angeles. Ueberroth
glowed at the news. The Rumanians went on to an excellent Olympic performance,
winning 53 medals.
As the opening ceremonies drew nearer, all of Ueberroth's top managers
were laboring seven days a week. The strain was palpable, but not paralyzing.
On one occasion, the pressure did get to the boss. When he believed ABC was
reneging on full payment because of the boycott, Ueberroth went into a rare
fury. Disgusted after one conversation, he threw the telephone to the floor and
throughout the Games treated network executives icily. (ABC ultimately paid in
full, and for good reason: 180 million Americans watched, more than any other
TV event in history.)
When the three Olympic villages opened for the athletes two weeks before
the Games, Ueberroth waited for the predicted nightmares to happen. By now the
tension had reached its peak. "I always had the feeling," he recalls, "that at
any second something would erupt." Foremost in his mind was the realization
that at Munich in 1972 the Israeli athletes had not been seized until the tenth
day. "I carried a calendar around in the center of my skull," he says. Crises,
small and large, occurred by the hour. The man Ueberroth had picked to climb
the towering steps of the Coliseum to light the Olympic flame, former Decathlon
Champion Rafer Johnson, developed shin splints. Three times Ueberroth was told
Johnson could not make the climb, and each time Ueberroth declared he must.
Johnson finally did. The day before the opening, a fire broke out in one of the
stadium towers, shooting flames into the sky. "We thought terrorism every
time," remembers Ueberroth.
An hour and a half before the opening ceremony, word suddenly came that
the Olympic flame must not be lit. Two unfamiliar electrical wires were
discovered leading to the gas jet. General Manager Usher remembers thinking:
"Jesus Christ, this is it, it's happening." Security rushed in, and found that
TV technicians had laid the new wires without informing anyone. Rumors and
suspicions of sabotage were legion. Eighty investigations of bomb scares took
place. The dormitory in which the Israelis and Turks lived was evacuated
several times.
Ueberroth himself was constantly on the move, racing to the scene when the
stands collapsed under a large crowd watching team handball (injuring six
spectators), riding a helicopter over the freeways checking traffic (the
gridlock that the press had predicted for a year did not materialize). To boost
spirits, Ueberroth wore a different uniform each day: a bus driver's suit, a
kitchen staffer's whites, a blue and gold usher's shirt. He strapped an
electronic gadget on his hip that delivered printed, urgent messages to him.
Wherever Ueberroth spotted security forces, he sought them out to shake
hands. There were 29 different police forces involved in the Los Angeles Games,
and some believe the security there will rank for years as a model. The key, to
Ueberroth, was attitude more than equipment. "The law-enforcement people were
so upbeat," he explains, "and that affected everyone." Ueberroth himself had a
few scares. One night four men carrying sawed-off shotguns leaped over the
security fence around his house but were caught; their objective was never
clear. On another occasion two of Ueberroth's dogs died from poisoned meat
thrown onto his lawn. But basically, for the man of control, everything worked.
Called to the platform at the close of the Games, Ueberroth received a
prolonged, roaring ovation from the crowd of 93,000—and felt his eyes fill up
and his head take a most unaccustomed spin.
All of his spectacular success has not been lost on Ueberroth. There is a
lot of the prince in him. Now he is introduced routinely to audiences as a man
who brought honor to America. Three weeks ago President Reagan invited him to
the White House and asked him to serve on a committee to energize the private
sector in causes all the way from world hunger to urban blight. Lee Iacocca, a
man Ueberroth much admires, picked him to share responsibility for the
restoration of the Statue of Liberty. The hero of the Olympics receives
hundreds of letters urging him to run for President. Some of his associates
have pushed him to get into national politics, arguing that he is apolitical
and therefore broadly acceptable, a tough-minded leader who is properly frugal.
Although he was disillusioned at the indifferent way Reagan handled the Soviet
boycott, he voted twice for his fellow Californian.
But Ueberroth remains skeptical about any change in his career direction.
Besides, he has already found a new crusade. Baseball, the national pastime, he
discovered, is in far more distress than anyone really knows. Of the 26
franchises, 22 are losing money. The use of drugs is an accelerating problem.
All of this seems to him a worthy challenge. Now Ueberroth talks excitedly
about baseball cards that will carry personal messages from the players about
drugs.
But the incredible fever of the Olympics is never very far from his mind.
An Olympic torch hangs on the office wall of baseball's new commissioner. One
recent afternoon, waiting for a team owner to arrive, Ueberroth was asked to
take a minute to look at a short film of the Olympic torch relay. He had never
seen pictures of the event. He stood in a small office waiting for the film top
be shown on a TV screen.
Suddenly there they were, those familiar thrilling images, families
holding up small children, waiting eagerly for a runner to come into view.
There was a grandmother running proudly, a red-haired boy barely able to carry
the two-pound torch, a smiling young woman limping along with an artificial
limb. Ueberroth stood silent, staring. A runner whose eyes seemed to be gazing
at the sky appeared. Ueberroth recognized him instantly. "He's the one who is
blind," he said softly.
When the film ended, Ueberroth looked pleased. "I hoped the run would
unify the country," he said. He spoke of how much pride the Olympics had
rekindled. "People weren't afraid to stand up and cheer for the country," he
said, "and the rest of the world saw how caring America can be." And there was
something more. In the U.S., he observed, "there's a spirit of can-do,
can-work, can-accomplish—you can do things without being on the Government
dole. People want to know that something can work, that somebody can step up
and turn a situation around."
Ueberroth has a way of trying to turn whatever he touches into a cause. To
be involved in difficult problems with difficult goals lifts him up. He is a
promoter with a global mission, a throwback to the kind of American
entrepreneurial zealot who believes unblushingly that his product is a force
for good in the world. And maybe, if he just gets everyone pulling together and
persuades them that the impossible can be done, then maybe everything will be
under perfect control.
COVERS GALLERY: Click here to see the cover image from 1984
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