Owning up to greatness
Bay Area’s best bosses, ranked and annotated
As the Warriors prepare for their third NBA championship parade in four years, we offer a spirited debate:
Where does Joe Lacob rank in the pantheon of Bay Area sports team owners of recent history?
This question presupposes that sports team owners belong in a pantheon — a temple of the gods. Rich guys who are good (or lucky) at their hobbies don’t belong in a pantheon, unless they build their own manpantheons.
But I digress. Lacob has owned the Warriors for eight seasons, and the past four went well. Four Finals, three rings.
Does that make him the greatest ever? I’m about to give you my top seven owners, with
this caveat: This list was put together quickly in the wake of the Warriors’ win, and is intended as more of a friendly barroom-brawl starter than as a scholarly evaluation.
7. Wally Haas
At least I think it was Haas who ran the A’s for his father during their three-peat World Series-appearance seasons of 1988-89-90.
Credit the Haas family with keeping the A’s in Oakland, treating fans well and putting an entertaining team on the field. Progressive folks. In the ’50s, the Haas family integrated its Levi’s plants. And Wally hired GM Sandy Alderson, who pioneered Moneyball.
6. Charlie Finley
A stingy, egomaniacal bully, but nobody’s perfect.
He brought the A’s to Oakland, and gave ’em flair — crazy uniforms, mustaches, an elephant, a teenage vice president (Stanley Burrell, who became MC Hammer after Finley fired him). One of the great showman owners of sports history.
Finley was his own chief scout and general manager. I grade owners on what they do beyond sitting on their thrones and smiling down on the rabble. They have to bring something besides the checkbook.
Charlie O’s greed cost him with my selection committee (me). He presided over the breakup of a dynasty. If he had had his way, major-leaguers would still be driving beer trucks on the side for rent money.
5. Franklin Mieuli
Lovable guy, or so I hear, but that’s just a footnote.
Mieuli moved the Warriors from Philadelphia to San Francisco, then to Oakland. He owned the team from 1962 to 1986: 10 playoff appearances, three trips to the NBA Finals and one championship.
Extra credit: Mieuli helped break down the NBA’s unwritten racial quotas. Ten of the 12 players on the 1975 championship Warriors were African American, as was head coach Al Attles and assistant coach Joe Roberts.
4. Charles Johnson
Or whomever owns/runs the Giants. Maybe it’s Larry Baer, who basically functions as owner.
Huge credit for preventing the Giants from escaping to parts unknown. And for building that ballpark, breaking with the grand old American tradition of extorting a stadium from your city. Come on, put your hands together for that yard.
Three World Series championships in five years, that’s huge.
3. Eddie DeBartolo
Save your angry emails. I know I’m an idiot outsider (only 26 years in the Bay Area). You don’t understand! Yes, I do.
Young Eddie D took the 49ers from perennial ho-hummers to NFL dynasty and pride of the Bay Area.
“Every player loved him!” scolded Ann Killion when I told her DeBartolo would not be my No. 1.
Irrelevant, your honor. No owner was as generous to his players, for sure, and his generous spending shamed the other owners. But mainly, DeBartolo got ’er done, once he hired Bill Walsh. High-level talent recognition, or luck, or both?
Five Super Bowls, five titles. Damn. But he cost San Francisco (and himself ) a new stadium.
2. Joe Lacob
His No. 1 move, hiring Steve Kerr, was, like DeBartolo/ Walsh, part luck. But once the opportunity was there, Lacob went after Kerr with ruthless effectiveness, as he did with Kevin Durant.
Major props for bringing in Bob Myers, Rick Welts and (now-departed) Jerry West. Lacob really knows who to put where.
Also big: Trading Monta Ellis for Andrew Bogut.
The historic booing, though, Lacob earned that. Not so much for trading away fan-fave Ellis, but for his (and co-owner Peter Guber’s) naked intent to move the Dubs straight outta Oakland. Jury’s still out on the wisdom (and humanity) of that impending move.
1. Al Davis
I admired his taste in enemies. He once told me he wished he was younger so he could kick my ass.
Davis coached the Raiders, bullied his way to ownership, gave the team the coolest identity in sports, hand-picked his players year after year, dictated team-playing style and coached his coaches.
He was the most racially progressive sports owner ever. Had Davis owned the Brooklyn Dodgers in ’47, he would have put six or seven black players on the field and sneered at a dumbstruck nation.
Davis gets graded down for treating Oakland and its fans like dirt, and for saddling the team with a decade of wretched losing as his energy and skills faded. But from 1967 to ’85, wow.