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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Malcolm Glazer, the seventy-seven-year-old owner of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers football team, is short and stout, with a craggy face, a bald crown, and a straggly red beard. Some Bucs fans refer to Glazer as "the leprechaun," but he isn't Irish. His father, Abraham, was an Orthodox Jew from Lithuania, who arrived in America as a young man and later ran a watch-repair business in Utica, New York. In 1943, Abraham died, of cancer, and Malcolm, who was fifteen, took over the family company. Apart from six weeks at a college upstate, he has been working for it ever since. "He never had time for sports or hobbies or friends because after school he ran to work in the business," one of Glazer's four sisters told a reporter for the Daily Mail of London last year. "From eight years old, he was earning money. . . . He is like a machine."
When Glazer was twenty-one, he opened a jewelry and watch-repair concession at Sampson Air Force Base, near Rochester. "It was hard, but I thoroughly enjoyed it," he said to the St. Petersburg Times years later. "I was making more profit than ever before." His earnings enabled him to buy and sell some small buildings in the Rochester area. As his real-estate holdings grew, Glazer acquired several trailer parks, and started building shopping malls. In 1984, he founded First Allied Corporation, which is now one of the country's biggest shopping-mall developers. He invested in television, commercial fishing, and weapons manufacturing; he bought Houlihan's, the restaurant chain, and the Zapata Corporation, a Texas oil company co-founded by former President George H. W. Bush.
Glazer also took up "corporate raiding," a practice common in the eighties in which wealthy investors purchased stakes in companies with undervalued stock and threatened to take them over. Glazer was never a raider on the scale of Carl Icahn or T. Boone Pickens, but his targets included well-known corporations, such as, in 1989, the motorcycle manufacturer Harley-Davidson. As often happened in these cases, the company sued, accusing Glazer of chicanery. During one court hearing, a judge called him "a snake in sheep's clothing"; ten months later, Glazer sold his stake in HarleyDavidson at a handsome profit.
In January, 1995, Glazer bought the Bucs for a hundred and ninety-two million dollars--then a record price for a sports franchise--despite the fact that the team, which was founded in 1976, had lost seventy per cent of its games. That summer, Glazer invited Dick Greco, who was Tampa's mayor at the time, to join him in the owner's box for a pre-season game. A player on the visiting team intercepted a pass and raced fifty yards up the field, for a spectacular touchdown, but the referees called a penalty. "Isn't that a shame," Glazer said to Greco. "It was such a nice play." An astonished Greco gently reminded his host that he was supposed to be cheering for the Bucs. "You expect sports owners to be outgoing, loud, and boisterous in support of their team," Greco told me recently. "Malcolm is the exact opposite."
Before long, Glazer threatened to move the Bucs to another city unless Tampa agreed to build a new stadium for the team. Accordingly, local residents voted to spend nearly a hundred and seventy million dollars of city money on a state-of-the-art facility that would be leased to the Bucs. Glazer's sons Joel and Bryan, whom he had appointed to supervise the team's business operations, hired expensive new players, including Keyshawn Johnson. In January, 2003, Tampa Bay won Super Bowl XXXVII, defeating the Oakland Raiders, 48–21. The Bucs finished this season with eleven wins and five losses, and reached the playoffs--an accomplishment for which many fans believe Glazer deserves at least some credit. "I don't think, even to this day, he has any idea what is going on down on the football field, but he leaves the football to the football people, and he has completely changed the way people look at the team," Roy Cummings, a sports reporter for the Tampa Tribune, told me.
Glazer, except for attending Bucs games, seldom appears in public. He lives in Palm Beach, in an oceanfront mansion, near Jim Clark, the founder of Netscape, and Rod Stewart, the rock star. Thom Smith, the society columnist of the Palm Beach Post, is one of the few journalists who have visited Glazer's house. The occasion was a fund-raiser for an Israeli technical college; the guest of honor was Jehan Sadat, the widow of Anwar Sadat, the late Egyptian President. "Malcolm stayed in the background," Smith recalled. "He seemed downright shy."
In the rare instances when Glazer does speak to the press, he can sound kooky. "If you have a father who dies when you are young, you don't trust the future anymore," he told the St. Petersburg Times shortly after he bought the Bucs. "You were cheated once, you'll probably get cheated again. . . . Death is right around the corner, waiting to grab anyone in this room. Watch out. Walk fast when you go out of the house here, so he doesn't grab you."
Last year, Glazer celebrated his tenth anniversary as the Bucs' owner; he now refers to his family as "long-term sports investors." In May, he purchased Manchester United, the English soccer club, in a hostile takeover that cost him one and a half billion dollars--the most money ever paid for a sports franchise. He is the first American to own a major English soccer team, and the investment, which has generated great contention among United's fans, could conceivably ruin him.
Unlike the Bucs, United didn't need a savior. Between 1992 and 2003, the club, which is known in Britain as the Red...
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