Clippers’ owner is speaking loudly and carrying a big wallet
LOS ANGELES — Speaking last month to a few hundred MBA students at the University of Southern California, Steve Ballmer, the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, broke into verse. He recited a snippet of a song from the Broadway musical “Pippin”: “Rivers belong where they can ramble. Eagles belong where they can fly. I’ve got to be where my spirit can run free. Got to find my corner of the sky.”
Ballmer sensed his audience was more attuned to cloud computing, which he seeded while running Microsoft, than to Stephen Schwartz’s “Corner of the Sky.” And so he supplied some context, explaining how Pippin, the son of King Charlemagne, engaged in a lifelong quest for fulfillment.
Ballmer might have been talking about himself. Retired from Microsoft, where he was employed for 34 years, the last 14 as its chief executive, Ballmerhas spent the first several months of his retirement pondering how to build a personal legacy through philanthropy.
“What is it like to be rich beyond belief?” a student asked him.
Ballmer, a billionaire, answered: “It’s sort of a privilege, sort of a duty, sort of a burden. How do I make a difference?”
Eleven months ago, Ballmer won a bidding war for the Clippers. He bought the franchise for $2 billion in what was considered part business transaction, part act of beneficence, after the Clippers’ longtime owner, Donald Sterling, incurred a lifetime ban from the NBA for making racist comments that were recorded and made public.
The official transfer in August of the team to Ballmer, whose Swiss-born father worked for the U.S. Army as an interpreter in the Nuremberg war crimes trials, was seen as a clean break from the Clippers’ desultory past. In Ballmer, 59, the team acquired a loud and proud leader. He was more inclined to show his enthusiasm than his navel, unlike Sterling, who at Ballmer’s age was still wearing shirts unbuttoned to his waist.
Phoenix Suns forward Reggie Bullock said Ballmer drew attention in his own way on game nights.
“He has a very distinctive voice,” said Bullock, who was a Clipper until a trade in January. “It sounds like he’s howling at the moon.”
With his manic enthusiasm and deep pockets, Ballmer was going to swoop in and pry Los Angeles from its decades-long love affair with the Lakers. That was the plan, anyway. But even though the Clippers finished with 35 more victories than the Lakers, they trailed their fellow Staples Center tenants in the local regular-season ratings.
The Clippers are a reflection of their new owner, all right. But it is not the goofy, giddy guy seen gyrating like a giant inflatable tube man near his baseline seat — most memorably during a January halftime performance by Fergie that prompted real estate mogul Donald Trump to describe Ballmer as “an embarrassment to rich people.”
Ballmer emphasized to the USC students the need to be “tenacious and hard core” in the pursuit of their goals. It is a message his team seems to have absorbed. Matt Barnes and Blake Griffin were fourth and fifth in the NBA in technical fouls in the regular season with a combined 25. Nine Clippers had more technical fouls than any single player on the San Antonio Spurs, their first-round playoff opponent.
Ballmer commutes to games from his home in Seattle. He travels by private jet, explaining, “Time is our most precious commodity, and there are conveniences that wealth brings to essentially get you more time.”
It is one of Ballmer’s few outward displays of wealth. His wardrobe is more J.C. Penney than J.Crew. The security guard standing outside the Clippers’ locker room during one homestand marveled at how effortlessly Ballmer blended into the crowd on game nights.
For the mathematically gifted Ballmer, sports have always served as his main medium of communication. In high school, he said, the first varsity letter he earned was in track.
“The coach gave me one in 10th grade,” he said, “because a guy had made a scoring error and deprived us of a point. I was helping out as the manager and I discovered the error and the coach said, ‘I guess you scored a point for us in a meet,’ and gave me a letter.”