10 GMs or Owners Who Changed Sports Forever

Famous celebrity sports icons, such as Micheal Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, and Babe Ruth, often dominate the conversation when discussing all-time sports legends. However, it is truly the work of the owners and front office personnel of professional sports whom these great players owe their legendary status to.

They often say that the players make the sport. However, without these pioneers, who, in many cases, took on personal risk and used ingenuity to lift up the sports world, the players may never have had the celebrity they have been able to achieve.

Recognizing this, we present to you, the Top 10 owners and general managers whose success should be celebrated right alongside the famous sports figures who make the front pages of Sports Illustrated and the like.

Some of these men may not be as captivating as the players who dunk a basketball, hit a long home run, or throw a touchdown pass, but they are all incredible success stories worthy of our attention.

It may be sexier to advertisers to promote the star player who seemingly walks on water to achieve such heights of immortality, but each of these men.

Granted, a list such as this has some level of subjectivity. It is extremely challenging to limit this to just 10 people. That said, each of these men were chosen for their contributions to the teams and the sports for which they helped alter. 

Meanwhile, I am honored to present to you one man's opinion on the owners and GMs who changed sports forever.

George Halas Thrills the Nation with the T Formation

George "Papa Bear" Halas is better known for being the coach of the Chicago Bears for more than 40 years. But he was also the team's original owner and GM.

Impact on professional football? Well, all you need to know is that the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio is located on George Halas Drive.

While the Super Bowl trophy bears the name of another football legend, Vince Lombardi, I chose Halas for this list because of his contributions to the formation of the league. 

Sure, he was a great coach, with only six losing seasons in 40 years. But it was everything else he did that made him so high on this list.

He was the first to put games on the radio; the first to use film to analyze opponents; the first to share his profits with other teams in the league—63 years as an owner, 40 as a coach, 324 wins, and 8 NFL titles as a coach or owner.

Halas perfected the T-formation attack with the man in motion. It was this offensive attack that propelled the Bears to their 73-0 NFL title win over Washington in the 1940 NFL Championship Game and sent every other league team scurrying to copy the Halas system.

Halas was part of a group which formed the rudimentary structure of the American Professional Football Association, to be renamed the National Football League in 1924.



George Steinbrenner: The Bombastic Owner Revives the New York Yankees

It is no exaggeration to say that the Yankees are the world's best known professional sports franchise. As such, the role that Steinbrenner played is worthy of making this list.

In a day when sports owners primarily stayed out of the limelight, Steinbrenner was a hands-on, public figure whose controversial style and brash personality both irritated as well as amazed baseball throughout the land.

He presided over seven World Series titles, 11 pennants and a franchise valued at approximately $1.6 billion at the time of his death in 2010.

Steinbrenner was a pioneer of modern sports ownership and helped start the wave of spending freely on high-priced free agents. His teams often had a payroll that dwarfed others and he paid out millions in luxury tax and revenue-sharing.

While some in baseball considered this practice to be the result of an "evil empire" and symbolic of all that was wrong in baseball, I say that the alternative would have been for Steinbrenner to pocket all the profits. At least he put the money back into the team and tried to win for his fans.

Steinbrenner successfully got a $1.5 billion stadium built in the Bronx. He was also one of the early pioneers of generating television revenue, eventually forming the YES Network.

He was suspended twice form Major League Baseball. He could be a blowhard, who meddled in the affairs of everyone's job with the Yankees.

But you can't argue with his success and he was also a very charitable person.

Not bad for a man who insisted he would stick to building ships when he bought the team.

Charlie Finley: Baseball's Outrageous Showman

In a small, unintentional way, Finley was responsible for starting free agency in baseball. While its result on baseball is debatable, there is no denying how historically significant that has been.

This happened as a result of the way Finley refused to give in to the demands of his players, not allowing for no-trade clauses and attempting to sell off his high-priced players. This led to players wanting more control and thus, free agency.

Finley was about the only baseball person other than Marvin Miller who realized that the advent of free agency could work to the owners' advantage if they allowed all players to become free agents every year, thus matching supply with demand.

Like Steinbrenner, Finley helped change the role of sports ownership, as his loudmouth tyranny and innovation helped shape the A's and MLB for many years.

He was a master showman who had a 20 year tenure as owner of the Kansas City and Oakland Athletics.

To keep fans interested in an awful team, Finley dressed his players in flamboyant green-and-gold uniforms with white shoes, introduced Charley O the mule, let a herd of sheep graze beyond the outfield fences and installed a mechanical rabbit that popped up from the ground to give balls to the home-plate umpire.

But he was also a success.

Finley's A's won five straight division titles (1971-75) and three consecutive World Series (1972-74). Also part of his legacy are Charley O the mule, orange baseballs, mustachioed players, the designated hitter and designated runners.

Finley also contributed to the adoption of the designated hitter. But he was probably best known for trying to sell Vida Blue to the Yankees and Rollie Fingers and Joe Rudi to the Red Sox for a combined $3.5 million, claiming he needed the money to sign free agents and rebuild.

Commissioner Bowie Kuhn disagreed, voiding the sales by saying they weren't "in the best interests of baseball."

Branch Rickey Breaks the Color Barrier

After a mediocre career as a player and manager, Branch Rickey spent 50 years in the front office as one of MLB's greatest visionary executives.

With the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1920s and '30s, Rickey invented the modern farm system, promoting a new way of training and developing players. Then, with the Brooklyn Dodgers, he was the first to use statistics.

But he was best known for what he did in 1945 that helped change the landscape of baseball forever.

That year, he became the first executive to break baseball's color barrier when he signed future Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson, who became the major leagues' first African-American player. 

Since then, integration in sports has certainly come a long way from having separate water fountains and hotel rooms. Now people of all color play professional baseball.

And they all have this man to thank. .

Billy Beane's MoneyBall

That Billy Beane's baseball career (to date) has been turned into a movie tells you everything you need to know about how revolutionary baseball people felt Beane's contributions to the modern game has been.

Beane is the GM and minority owner of the Oakland A's. He is the subject of Michael Lewis' 2003 book on baseball economics, Moneyball, which was also made into a 2011 film, as we mentioned, starring Brad Pitt as Beane.

Beane has brought several new perspectives to the GM position during his tenure with Oakland.

First, he started as a scout, and that scouting and player development perspective was something not many GMs had as a background.

Instead of going out and signing big money free agents, Beane bought into the concept of building from within that many teams now embrace.

Also, he was one of the early adopters of sabermetrics. The modern baseball statistics have helped bring a fresh perspective to analyzing players and the game itself.

Some long-standing truths were exposed as frauds. Bunting to move runners along is now in question, as is the value of the RBI and pitcher wins as legitimate measures of players abilities.

New stats, such as on-base percentage, OPS, FIP and other metrics bring new light to what is important in baseball. His relative lack of success recently can be traced to the fact that other GMs have begun copying his style.

Pat Riley Brings LeBron James to South Beach

Actually, it might be fair to acknowledge the Boston Celtics as the architects of the "Big 3" philosophy, except that there was relatively little fanfare associated with Kevin Garnett, Ray Allen and Paul Pierce at the time as compared to "The Decision."

Miami Heat GM and longtime coach, Pat Riley, made something happen that will affect the NBA for a long time. That is, taking three superstars who plotted to be together and putting them on the same team.

The difference between what he did vs. other owners and GMs who also had multiple stars playing for them is that this was all a result of the players themselves deciding to get together.

In the past, players wanted to compete against each other. Michael Jordan, for example, would never have wanted Larry Bird or Magic Johnson on his team. The goal was to beat his competitors, not join them.

This decision by Riley to sign LeBron James and Chris Bosh to join existing superstar Dwayne Wade has changed the landscape of the NBA forever.

Now you have talk of Carmelo Anthony teaming up with Chris Paul and other stars recruiting other plays to join them to battle the Heat's trio.

Riley was the first GM to actually set his team's payroll up such that he could afford three superstars. Other teams either had homegrown players or already had two stars and went out and acquired another one.

But this was a conscious effort by the Heat to acquiesce to the desires of three players to join together on one team.

The players have become the GMs, in a sense now. Apart from Derrick Rose, who refuses to recruit other players, most NBA stars are now plotting their moves together.

If the owners were doing this, it would be called collusion.

Al Davis, the Renegade Who Reshaped Pro Football

Al Davis was one of the first owners who broke the mold of boring, shadowy figures who would not be heard from. Instead, he was outspoken and brash.

Davis was a central figure in the merger of the upstart American Football League with the established NFL.

As such, Davis had a hand in inventing the Super Bowl. He also was very successfull, winning championships despite ticking off the rest of pro football.

Davis was a coach, general manager and owner of the Raiders for nearly 50 years. He left briefly, in 1966, to become the commissioner of the AFL. His annual championship with the NFL eventually became known as the Super Bowl.

Davis was the mascot, if you will, for a franchise that delighted in having a reputation for being thugs, and giving a figurative middle finger to what the rest of the league thought of them as outlaws.

But Davis wasn't just about winning and being a thug. He did great things to shape change within football as mentioned previously and also was the first owner to have a Latino head coach (Tom Flores), a black head coach (Art Shell) and a female chief executive (Amy Trask).

Still, he relished the role of intimidator, on and off the field. Consider this quote:

“I don’t want to be the most respected team in the league,” Mr. Davis said in 1981. “I want to be the most feared.”

 From 1963 to 1985, the Raiders compiled an overall record of 229-91-11, the highest winning percentage of any team in professional sports during that time.

As Al would say: Just win, baby!

Lamar Hunt's Influence on Multiple Sports

Mr. Hunt isn't on this list because of just dollars and wins, nor his contributions to any one sport alone. Instead, it's for his collective influence on so many different areas of sport.

Hunt founded the Kansas City Chiefs and was known as one of the most influential and most beloved owners in sports.

He helped found the American Football League in 1960, which later merged into the NFL to create the Super Bowl.

That alone would be more than most owners would accomplish in their lifetimes, but consider the following.

Hunt also helped found the North American Soccer League, a predecessor to MLS.

He also was one of the original founding investors in the Chicago Bulls.

As if that wasn't enough, Hunt helped found the World Championship Tennis circuit in the '60s, which is seen as giving birth to the open era of tennis.

He's a member of the football, soccer and tennis halls of fame.

Red Auerbach, Pioneer of Modern Basketball

"Red" Auerbach was the basketball coach of the Washington Capitols, the Tri-Cities Blackhawks, but is best known as the coach and GM of the Boston Celtics.

After a stellar coaching career, which resulted in a record number of championships only recently broken by Phil Jackson, he became president and front office executive of the Celtics until he died.

As a coach, his teams won 938 games and nine titles, but as GM and team president of the Celtics, Auerbach's teams won an additional seven NBA titles, for a total of 16 in 29 years.

Auerbach redefined the sport, introducing the fast break and high scoring. One of the things he was most proud of was that he helped break down the color barriers in the NBA.

He drafted the first African American NBA player, Chuck Cooper, in 1950 and introduced the first all-black starting five in 1964.

The NBA Coach of the Year award has been renamed the "Red Auerbach Trophy" and he is the most successful man in NBA history as well as all of sports.

In addition to coaching, Auerbach was a highly effective mentor; several players coached by Auerbach would become successful coaches themselves (Bill Russell - two titles; Tom Heinsohn - two titles; K.C. Jones - two titles; Bill Sharman - one title; and Don Nelson, who was voted one of 10 Greatest Coaches in NBA history).

When Auerbach gave up coaching to become the Celtics general manager in 1966, he appointed Bill Russell as his successor. Russell became not only the first black NBA coach, but the very first African-American coach of a professional sports organization.

Richard Petty's STP Sponsorship Changed American Motorsports Forever

"The King," Richard Petty. was owner/racer of the Petty Enterprises, and it was his sponsorship with STP that altered the business model for motorsports forever.

His success is legendary. Seven championships, seven Daytona 500 victories, 200 wins, 27 wins in one season, 10 wins in a row, most poles, top-5s, top-10s, laps led—the records go on and on.

But it was STP that changed the landscape for the sport.

"When Richard did the STP sponsorship deal it forever changed the business model in American motorsports," said Jack Roush, founder and owner of four-car NASCAR powerhouse Roush Fenway Racing. "At a time when a lot of people were panicking about money, not unlike today, he and that company presented a solution that changed the face of racing."

NASCAR has become one of the top moneymaking sports in the world, and before you think it's just a hick sport for southerners and white trash America, think again.

It's very big business, but if not for Petty, it may not have ever been such a success.

"All the factories were pulling out," Petty recalled now. "Ford was gone. Chrysler was leaving us. Chevy was starting to nose around, but nothing big. At the time, factory support from Detroit was what kept the doors open at the race shop. When that went away, so did the money. Suddenly, guys like Junior [Johnson] were barely hanging on. Cale [Yarborough] went Indy car racing. It was a mess. We had more money put back than most, but everyone was worried, including me."

Andy Granatelli, the demonstrative CEO of STP, and Petty formed a combination that forever altered the auto racing business.

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Honorable Mentions: Steve Bornstein (part-owner of Raiders who invented fantasy football); Vince Lombardi; Robert Kraft; John Henry; Jerry Buss; Jerry Jones; Mike Ilitch; Art Rooney.