Blockbuster founder built fortune from trash

H.Wayne Huizenga, a college dropout who built a business empire that included Blockbuster Entertainment, AutoNation and three pro sports franchises, has died. He was 80.

Huizenga died Thursday night at his home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., said Valerie Hinkell, a longtime assistant. The cause was cancer, said Bob Henninger, executive vice president of Huizenga Holdings.

Starting with a single garbage truck in 1968, Huizenga built Waste Management Inc. into a Fortune 500 company. He bought independent sanitation engineering companies, and by the time he took the company public in 1972, he had completed the acquisition of 133 small-time haulers. By 1983, Waste Management was the largest waste disposal company in the U.S.

The business model worked again with Blockbuster Video, which he started in 1985; nine years later, it had become the leading movie rental chain. In 1996, he formed AutoNation and built it into a Fortune 500 company.

Huizenga was also founding owner of baseball’s Florida Marlins and the NHL Florida Panthers — expansion teams that played their first games in 1993. He bought the NFL Miami Dolphins and their stadium for $168 million in 1994 from the children of founder Joe Robbie, but had sold all three teams by 2009.

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

“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 billionaire Stephen Ross.

Huizenga earned an almost cult-like following among business investors who watched him build Blockbuster 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.

Harry Wayne Huizenga was born outside Chicago on Dec. 29, 1937, to a family of garbage haulers. He began his business career in Pompano Beach in 1962, driving a garbage truck from 2 a.m. to noon each day for $500 a month.

Regarding his business acumen, Huizenga said: “You just have to be in the right place at the right time. It can only happen in America.”