Owner of NFL, NBA teams dies
Business acumen helped turn Saints into Super Bowl champions
Tom Benson, a successful auto dealer who brought the New Orleans Saints their only winning seasons and the “Benson Boogie,” has died. Benson, who has also owned the NBA’s New Orleans Pelicans since 2012, was 90.
The NFL and NBA teams announced Benson’s death on Thursday. He had been hospitalized since Feb. 16 with flu symptoms.
Benson made his mark in pro sports with the Saints, which he bought in 1985 when it appeared the club would be sold to out-of-state interests and perhaps moved out of Louisiana. He paid $70 million for the team, which is now worth close to $2 billion.
Benson’s business acumen helped turn the Saints from a perennial also-ran into a contender — and the 2009 NFL champion. Yet his ownership also was less flatteringly marked by the 2012 bounty scandal and by rumours Benson did not want to bring the team back to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city in 2005.
Benson’s death comes on the heels of an acrimonious family split that has caused some uncertainty about the future of his clubs. Benson made it known in January 2015 that he wants his third wife, Gayle, to inherit complete control of the Saints and Pelicans, but Benson’s disowned daughter, Renee, and her two children, Rita and Ryan LeBlanc — who had long been in line to take over his businesses — have vowed to prove their patriarch was manipulated against them while in a mentally enfeebled state. The estranged heirs, who still inherited hundreds of millions of dollars from irrevocable trusts set up before the family split, sued after their ouster from family business to have Benson declared mentally incompetent to run his own affairs and have a receiver other than Gayle Benson appointed to oversee them. The heirs lost that case, but still could contest the will.
In the meantime, the clubs will be run by Gayle Benson — who married Tom Benson in 2004 — and a trusted circle of executives installed by her husband, including Dennis Lauscha, the president of business operations for both clubs, and Mickey Loomis, an executive vice-president overseeing football and basketball operations, and also serving as general manager for the Saints.
With his heavy New Orleans accent and parasol dances along the sideline after victories, Benson cut quite the figure among NFL owners when he first joined the league.
His jovial game-day persona turned hardheaded, however, when it came to business matters. In 2001, he negotiated an unprecedented $187 million in concessions and state subsidies to keep his team playing in the Louisiana Superdome through 2010 — a deal Benson said was necessary to succeed in small-market New Orleans. That lease was followed by another unusual arrangement in which the state stopped paying direct subsidies to Benson, but committed to relocate numerous state offices in a Katrinadamaged office high-rise next to the Superdome — at abovemarket rents — if Benson rehabilitated the building, which is now called Benson Tower.
Until recent years, fans often questioned whether Benson’s desire for profit outweighed his loyalty to his native city.
With the Superdome and much of the city wrecked by Katrina, the Saints temporarily relocated to San Antonio, where Benson had many business holdings.
When officials there said they were talking to Benson about what it would take to keep the team, Katrina-weary residents in New Orleans reacted angrily. Graffiti reading, “Warning, Tom Benson inside,” was scrawled on numerous foul-smelling, discarded refrigerators that lined sidewalks around the city.
But when he brought the Saints back to a still-reeling New Orleans in early 2006 — or was forced to by the league, which would not allow Benson to abandon the Big Easy — the region’s fans rewarded him with more than a decade of consecutive sellouts.