Huizenga made imprint on South Florida sports
MIAMI — College dropout Wayne Huizenga started with a trash hauling company, struck gold during America’s brief love affair with VHS tapes and eventually owned three professional sports teams.
Despite those achievements, he wasn’t without regrets.
Huizenga died late Thursday, according to Valerie Hinkell, his longtime assistant. He was 80.
Huizenga owned Blockbuster Entertainment, AutoNation and the world’s largest trash hauler, and he was the founding owner of MLB’s Florida Marlins and the NHL’s Florida Panthers. He bought the NFL’s Miami Dolphins for $138 million in 1994, though that team didn’t match the success of his others.
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 before he sold the team after the 2008 season.
“If I have one disappointment, the disappointment would be that we did not bring a championship home,” Huizenga said shortly after he sold the franchise 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’ list of the 100 richest Americans, becoming chairman 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.”
For a time, Huizenga was also a favorite with South Florida sports fans, drawing cheers and autograph seekers in public. The crowd roared when he danced the hokey pokey on the field during an early Marlins game. He went on a spending spree to build a veteran team that won the World Series in only the franchise’s fifth year.
But his popularity plummeted when he ordered the roster dismantled after that season. He was frustrated by poor attendance and his failure to swing a deal for a new ballpark built with taxpayer money.
Many South Florida fans never forgave him for breaking up the championship team. Huizenga drew boos when introduced at Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino’s retirement celebration in 2000, and he kept a lower public profile after that.
In 2009, Huizenga said he regretted ordering the Marlins’ payroll purge.
“We lost $34 million the year we won the World Series, and I just said, ‘You know what, I’m not going to do that,’” Huizenga recalled. “If I had it to do over again, I’d say, ‘OK, we’ll go one more year.’”
He sold the Marlins in 1999 to John Henry, then sold the Panthers in 2001, unhappy with rising NHL player salaries and the stock price for the team’s public company.
Huizenga’s first sports love was the Dolphins — he had been a season-ticket holder since their inaugural season in 1966. But he fared better in the NFL as a businessman than as a sports fan.
He turned a nifty profit by selling the Dolphins and their stadium for $1.1 billion, nearly seven times what he paid to become sole owner. But he knew the bottom line in the NFL is championships, and his Dolphins perennially came up short.