Shaq among those saluting DeVos. Mike Bianchi,
Shaq, others salute co-founder DeVos after his death at age 92
Fittingly and fatefully, it was Shaq who was one of the first ones to call Orlando Magic CEO Alex Martins on Thursday morning after the sad news broke that franchise owner Rich DeVos had passed away.
That’s right, Shaq — the one player who literally and figuratively represents DeVos’ most colossal failure as the owner of the Magic — wanted to call to pay his respects. All these years after DeVos mistakenly opened the door and allowed Shaq to walk through it and leave for Los Angeles, isn’t it telling that the Big Diesel still adores the late Magic owner and has even said DeVos is the main reason he still regrets leaving Orlando?
“Knowing what I know now, I would have stayed in Orlando,” Shaq said upon his retirement from the NBA. “I regret it [leaving Orlando]. Orlando is where I started and where I should’ve stayed. I regret it because of the DeVos family. They deserve a couple of NBA titles.”
To me, this will be DeVos’s lasting legacy as an owner. No, he never won a single championship, but he touched thousands of lives. Coaches he fired (Brian Hill, Matt Guokas, Richie Adubato) have come back into the fold to work for the Magic. And players he has traded (Nick Anderson and Tracy McGrady) have
been welcomed back into the organization.
And why is it that the two greatest players in Magic history — Shaq and Dwight Howard — both forced their way out of Orlando only to regret it years later?
Martins told the story Thursday of the countless times he’s stood courtside during pre-game warm-ups and been approached by former Magic players playing for opposing teams. Invariably, those players would ask about DeVos and talk about the fun, fond memories of playing in Orlando.
“I can’t tell you how many times players who were traded or released or signed contracts elsewhere … they would come up to me and tell me the biggest thing they regretted about their careers is that they left the Orlando Magic,” Martins said. “That’s all because of Rich DeVos and the way he treated them while they were here.” It wasn’t just the players; DeVos treated
everybody that way. “Whether you were a ticket-taker, an usher, a member of the team, a coach or the CEO, he always made you feel like you were the most important person in the world,” Martins said.
It’s true. DeVos once asked me how my wife (now ex-wife) and two daughters were doing, and, to this day, I still don’t even know how he knew I was married and had two kids. Brian Schmitz, my former colleague at the Sentinel who covered DeVos from the moment he bought the team in 1991, remembers watching DeVos approach an arena custodian one day to ask him about his family and to tell him he appreciated the job he was doing.
“Rich was genuine; I never felt I was in the company of a billionaire,” Schmitz said. “He would tease me about the color of a suit I wore. His values were true and simple, like out of an episode of ‘The Waltons.’ But his legacy as an owner was also complicated.”
In the minds of many Magic fans, DeVos is the owner who lost great players such as Shaq, T-Mac and Dwight, fired a great coach in Stan Van Gundy and hired hamhanded and inexperienced GMs such as John Weisbrod and Rob Hennigan. It’s hard to call him a great owner when the Magic are in the midst of a miserable six-year losing streak, but, in all honesty, DeVos ceded control of the team to his children years ago. I would argue that the Magic’s downfall has coincided with an aging DeVos not being nearly as involved or visible as he was during the Magic’s heyday.
We can debate his politics and his controversial, conservative stance on gay marriage, but you can’t deny his positive impact on our community. Without DeVos, there might not even be an Orlando Magic. No, he didn’t bring the team to Central Florida, but he kept it here. The man who started with $49 in his basement and became a selfmade billionaire as the co-founder of Amway originally wanted to bring Major League Baseball to Orlando.
As fate would have it, the baseball effort fizzled at almost exactly the same time that the bottom fell out of the Magic’s financing during the franchise’s infancy. Majority owner Bill duPont’s financial empire collapsed and he needed to sell the team. Without DeVos there to bail out the ownership group and buy the team for $85 million, there’s no telling what would have happened to the franchise.
“Rich rescued the Magic as an owner when they needed rescuing,” Schmitz said. “He gave them instant credibility and stability, not just with his money but his motives. … He wanted to make Orlando a better place and his track record proved it wasn’t lip service. The organization, to this day, doesn’t take community service lightly.”
DeVos donated hundreds of millions of dollars throughout his life and gave countless millions to charities, causes, hurricane victims and Pulse survivors in Central Florida. There was $10 million for UCF, another $10 million for the Performing Arts Center and a combined $23 million over the years for children’s charities. Throughout the nation, there are college buildings, children’s hospitals and symphony orchestras that have been created by his generosity.
“My biggest regret today is that we didn’t bring him an NBA championship,” Martins says sadly and somberly. “We said for years we’ve got to get this done before he left us and, unfortunately, that is our unfinished business.”
Hopefully, someday, the Magic will finish that business.
But on this day — the day that franchise patriarch Rich DeVos has died — let’s not talk about the championship banners he never raised; let’s reflect on the spirits he lifted, the people he touched, the causes he funded and the lives he elevated.