Top 7 Sports Owners

If one were to compose a list of the most famous owners in any field, many probably pop into your head immediately.  Bill Gates.  P.T. Barnum.  Donald Trump.  Steve Jobs.  P. Diddy.  Thomas Jefferson.  In sports, you can probably think of even more, and that’s where this week’s Top 7 comes in.  There is probably one of the following that would actually make BOTH lists, the general one and the sports one.  That’s quite an accomplishment.  A couple of notes: fictional owners were not allowed to be part of the list, so Mr. Burns cannot get credit for his ownership and managership of the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant Softball team, and Rachel Phelps cannot make the list for owning the Major League Cleveland Indians, though they would probably be 1-2 on a fictional owners list, though that little kid from Little Big League wouldn’t be far behind.

7. Jerry Jones

I rarely watch any of the ESPN shows, but I happened to catch Skip Bayless wailing away on Jones on Wednesday morning, talking about that he worried too much about marketing recently and not on winning football games again until last year.  Um…what is he talking about?  They made the playoffs in 2003, 2006, and 2007, and missed the playoffs last year.  Then whatever guy was on this show with him started complaining about how the preseason doesn’t matter and that it’s boring and shouldn’t even be played.  Do a lot of people who write and talk about sports for a living even like sports?  If it’s that bad, I can recommend a great job I used to have: admissions counselor for a career college.  They’ll love it!  Jerry Jones also has one of the most famous plastic surgery faces in history, along with Michael Jackson (the benchmark), Nancy Pelosi, and Skeletor.

6. Mark Cuban

Here’s a question: what if Cuban hadn’t cashed out when he did for broadcast.com?  He would have merely been a millionaire instead of a billionaire and with the dot-com stuff about to tank, he cashed out when he absolutely maxed out as much as he possibly could.  Would he have found something else to make himself a billionaire?  Would sports fans not have ever met Mark Cuban?  The guy obviously knows what he is doing…broadcast.com was sold for $5.7 billion, and it no longer exists!  That’s absolutely insane!  Something bought with almost six billion in stock just ten years ago no longer even exists in any kind of form that it originally started with.  People can talk all they want about the “housing bubble,” but comparing the housing bubble to the dot com bubble is like comparing taking a bath with Hurricane Katrina. ###MORE###

5. George W Bush

Back when W was the owner, he would always be shown during TV broadcasts with the announcers saying something like “There is George W Bush, co-owner of the Rangers and son of President Bush.”  If you’re being shown regularly during coverage of the game, you are a famous owner.  Of course, if this list were on overall famousness even after their term as owner was over, Bush would have to be #1.  He made an insane amount of money on the Rangers—he bought in for $800,000 in 1989, and sold his stake in 1998 for $15 million.  He now has a suite named after him at the Rangers stadium too.  I always thought it was entertaining that Juan Gonzalez once came and met him at the White House to hang out during one of his terms.  What would a conversation between George Bush and Juan Gonzalez be like?

4. Al Davis

There is no such thing as a sure thing for someone you don’t know or something that you haven’t seen for yourself, but there is absolutely a 99.9% chance that Al Davis has screamed at a kid to get off of his lawn.  Amongst many other things.  Throwing him on the list also reminds me of a great sports figure mention in a rap song that I missed last week, courtesy Ice Cube: “Stop givin’ juice to the Raiders, cuz Al Davis, never paid us, I hope he wear a vest…”  Fantastic!  Ice Cube threatened to kill Al Davis.  It sure didn’t happen though, the man is 177 years old.  That particular song by Ice Cube is also #2 all-time on “angriest raps ever,” right behind 2 Pac’s “Hit Em Up.”

3. Vince McMahon

Jack Tunney may have been the figurehead of the WWF in the 80s, but Vince was always the owner, even when he was an announcer.  For those who grew up on WWF, that was a shocking thing to find out, and most probably did in that one Sports Illustrated article that hit in the early 90s.  Vince has also owned the World Bodybuilding Federation and also the XFL.  The best thing about the XFL, and there are many, was that the “X” stood for nothing.  On a completely unrelated note, have you seen Lauren Thompson on The Golf Channel?  Good God.  I haven’t been this excited for an up-and-coming hot female TV person since Stephanie Abrams of The Weather Channel.

2. Ted Turner

Here is the guy who could probably make the general list as well.  Starting TBS (don’t you miss those starting times at five after the hour) and CNN will do that for you, as well as joining up with Time/Warner and later AOL.  How far has AOL fallen by the way?  They were rich enough to freaking BUY Time/Warner on their own, and now are just the 35th most popular website according to Alexa (though even that seems high for them…who still uses AOL?)  They are the Internet provider service equivalent of Napster.  As for Turner himself, he of course owned the Atlanta Braves and WCW.  He is batcrap crazy.  He doesn’t think Americans should be allowed to have more than two kids and thinks that we’re all going to become cannibals because of global warming.   He also allowed Eric Bischoff to spend millions and millions of dollars of his money to sign wrestlers who never came close to making that money back.

1. George Steinbrenner

He was the original rock star CEO of sports, paving the way for McMahon, Jones, Cuban, and pretty much any other famous owner.  He’s also probably the most love/hate owner in sports history.  Back in the early 90s, USA Today had to re-name its annual readers’ list of “most hated person in sports” the “Steinbrenner Most Hated Person” because of how easily he won the yearly poll.  Kramer summed it up best that time in Jerry’s apartment when he said he bothered him that he kept giving away the Yankees’ top prospects, like Buhner, McGee, and Drabek.  But just a few years later, Steinbrenner served as owner when the Yanks won four World Series in five years, by far the most successful run of any baseball team in the last 25 years and hard to imagine being repeated any time soon because of the amazing randomness that seems to occur in the baseball playoffs every year.

Side Note: You can listen to Jason Major and Patrick Imig discuss this Top 7 list, and other, every week on the JoeSportsFan Radio Network.  Give it a listen, you filthy animals.

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