Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/moyfiles/1984moy.001

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                                                                                January 7, 1985

Man of the Year:Peter Ueberroth

Master of The Games



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 hugh 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.

--By Robert Ajemian