Wayne Huizenga, who went from trash to billions, dies

MIAMI — College dropout Wayne Huizenga started with a trash hauling company, struck gold during the U.S.’s brief love affair with VHS tapes and eventually owned three professional sports teams.

Huizenga owned Blockbuster Entertainment, AutoNation and the world’s largest trash hauler, and was founding owner of baseball’s Florida Marlins and the NHL Florida Panthers. He bought the NFL Miami Dolphins for $138 million US in 1994.

The one thing he never got was a Super Bowl win.

Huizenga died late Thursday, according to Valerie Hinkell, his longtime assistant. He was 80.

The Marlins won the 1997 World Series, and the Panthers reached the Stanley Cup Final in 1996, but Huizenga’s beloved Dolphins never reached a Super Bowl while he owned the team.

“If I have one disappointment, the disappointment would be that we did not bring a championship home,” Huizenga said shortly after he sold the Dolphins to New York real estate billionaire Stephen Ross, who still owns the team. “It’s something we failed to do.”

Huizenga earned an almost cultlike following among business investors who watched him build Blockbuster Entertainment into the leading video rental chain by snapping up competitors. He cracked Forbes’s list of the 100 richest Americans, becoming chair of Republic Services, one of the nation’s top waste management companies, and AutoNation, the nation’s largest automotive retailer.

“You just have to be in the right place at the right time,” he said. “It can only happen in America.”

Harry Wayne Huizenga was born in the Chicago suburbs on Dec. 29, 1937, to a family of garbage haulers. He attended Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., but dropped out and began his own garbage hauling business in Pompano Beach, Fla., in 1962. He would drive a garbage truck from 2 a.m. to noon each day, then shower and go out and solicit new customers in the afternoon.

He eventually bought out several competitors, expanding throughout South Florida.