Master of the Games

By Robert Ajemian

Control. Ever since he was a boy, he has needed to be in control. Long before he appeared out of nowhere five years ago to organize and eventually dominate the 23rd Olympic Games, Peter Ueberroth was always in charge of his life. At 16, he left home voluntarily (even though his parents never really understood why) to live and work in a nearby orphanage. He liked the independence and affection he got there.

Such great control. His bland face and laid-back manner rarely reveal his inner feelings. Those who know him well say Ueberroth is a fascinating paradox, an idealist with a salting of cleverness, a man of high principle who is willing to go right to the edge of scruple to reach his goals. He once described himself as both shy and ruthless. Over the years he has perfected a calculating public modesty, down-playing himself about, say, his mediocre college grades. But behind the self-deprecation is a huge ego and a steely inner toughness. Everything Ueberroth does has a purpose. He is a creative energizer of people, a man unafraid to make unpopular decisions, a natural teacher and leader.

To millions of Americans the blue-eyed, sandy-haired Ueberroth is still a virtual unknown. Even his recent anointment to the apple-pie job of baseball commissioner left most of the country in the dark about him. How did he achieve such a spectacular success? What combination of strength and guile lay behind that almost inscrutable exterior? All his life Ueberroth has been in the thrall of challenges. The Olympics were clearly his greatest. He made speech after speech to his thousands of workers about how together they had to climb a majestic mountain. "I've always hunted for challenges," says Ueberroth dismissively. He is a man who has little patience for self-analysis. Was there anything in his beginnings that would explain clearly why this man, of all the accomplished people around, turned out to be so exactly right for this Olympian task?

The son of a roaming salesman of aluminum siding, Pete Ueberroth was born Sept. 2, 1937, in Evanston, Ill. His father, Victor, half German and half Viennese, with his hearty manner and curious mind, was the biggest influence in his life, says Ueberroth. Perhaps because Victor's education ended in the eighth grade, he always had an encyclopedia near by and engaged his family in mind puzzles, a drill Peter used years later to brace his Olympic employees. His mother, Laura Larson, half Swedish and half Irish, had been ill almost from the time he was born. A Christian Scientist, like her husband, she died when Peter was four.

Within a year Peter's father had remarried. His new bride, Nancy, was an accountant, and she helped clear up some of her husband's heavy debts. Six years later she had a son of her own, whom she seemed to favor. Some friends now believe this was the seed of Ueberroth's drive to achieve, the deep need to gain approval from his new mother. The family moved often, and young Pete had to adjust to a variety of schools and neighborhoods, from Iowa to Pennsylvania to Wisconsin and finally to Northern California, in the town of Burlingame. By then his father was home most of the time, ill from a heart attack.

At 15, Ueberroth was constantly out of the house, a pretty fair athlete consumed by sports, usually hanging around with older kids, holding a series of jobs at gas stations, shopping centers, Christmas tree lots. By the time he was in high school, he was paying all his own bills. He was in charge, and he liked that. A buddy, John Matthews, remembers that Ueberroth always knew where the parties were, where to get a car. And he would usually set up the dates. If the gang was unable to pick a movie, says another friend, Pete would quickly make the choice. Mostly, Matthews recalls, Ueberroth seemed to have a new job.

There was a little glamour once in a while. His father's younger brother, Alan Curtis, was a movie actor married to Actress Ilona Massey, and young Pete spent one summer with them. He had a broken romance too and got over it in 48 hours, Ueberroth recalls. Two years before finishing high school, Ueberroth moved out of the house and into Twelveacres, an orphanage for children from broken homes. He was the recreation director and was paid $125 a month. When he was handed his diploma, in 1955, all 28 of the boys from Twelveacres stood up in the bleachers and shouted: "Daddy Pete!"

Ueberroth paid his own way through four years of San Jose State, although he received a small sports grant for playing water polo. He tried out for the Olympic squad in 1956 but did not make it. (He did break his nose five times over the years playing water polo, and today it is still badly bent.) At San Jose, Ueberroth spent 15 hours a week in the classroom and 40 hours at odd jobs; selling women's shoes, working on a chicken farm.

The summer after his junior year, Ueberroth and three friends went to Hawaii. While they surfed, Ueberroth loaded baggage and emptied buckets for a nonscheduled airline. Even his recreation did not mean relaxation. On the weekends he frequented a famous body-surfing beach called Makapuu, a stern challenge with 6-ft. swells crashing one on top of the other. Makapuu at the time was jealously guarded by the locals. Resentful of the intrusion, they crowded Ueberroth while he was riding the waves, sometimes driving him into the coral. Bruised and tired, Ueberroth kept going back. But once he mastered the challenge, he lost interest in Makapuu.

After graduating with a degree in business, Ueberroth was turned down for jobs by several large companies, and the rejections deflated him. He decided to drift back to Hawaii, confident he could get work. That September he married the daughter of a Long Beach baker, Ginny Nicolaus, whom he had known for a couple of years at San Jose. Together they lived in a one-room Oahu apartment, so small, remembers Ginny, that they could almost reach out and touch all four walls from the center of the room. Ueberroth, now 22, became operations manager for a small nonscheduled airline owned by Kirk Kerkorian, the adventurous entrepreneur who later took over MGM. The service, Trans International Airlines, had been set up to bring passengers from California to Hawaii and back. Ueberroth created a market, overlooked by the big jet lines: luring new customers out of the scattered islands and sending them to the mainland. A year later when Kerkorian offered to bring him to Los Angeles to run the whole airline at double his $1,000-a-month salary, the young man showed he could drive a hard bargain. He held out for part ownership and got 3%.

Shortly thereafter, Ueberroth left and started his own air service between L.A. and Seattle. Hotel rates suddenly shot up, travel dropped, and he found himself $100,000 in debt. It was one of the few times he was truly scared. But he had another idea. It had seemed to him that small airlines, small hotels, steamships and others that could not afford representatives in several cities could use a reservation service. He set up a phone bank in Los Angeles for a few dozen customers, each dutifully listed in local directories. If someone telephoned Alaska Airlines, or Aloha Airlines, or Ethiopian Air Lines, Ueberroth would answer just as though a local office existed. Soon he had a dozen such operations around the country. By 1965 the company, Transportation Consultants, was rolling up big revenues. Ueberroth was invited to join the Young Presidents' Organization, one of its youngest members ever. He was 28.

Next he took his company public and with the cash began buying up small travel agencies, then expanded into hotel management and eventually purchased several 50-room hotels. Soon the company had ten, generating lots of revenue, and in 1972 when a large old travel agency called Ask Mr. Foster came up for sale, Ueberroth grabbed it, putting up nearly $1 million in cash. By 1978, carried along by the boom in the travel and leisure market, his parent company, now called First Travel, had 1,500 employees in 200 offices worldwide and gross revenues in excess of $300 million, making it the largest U.S. travel company after American Express.

Along the way Ueberroth developed a disciplined, fastidious style.

His sense of propriety was strong, and he did not hesitate to impose it on others. Employees were required to bring spouses along whenever they did any business entertaining in their home towns. Peter the counselor wanted to promote family unity. His instructional techniques also became personal. If an employee tended to speak with his hand over his mouth, Ueberroth would reach out and brush it away. If Ueberroth was concerned about shabby dress, that employee's bonus would carry specific instructions to buy a couple of new suits. His bluntness was his way of peddling improvement. At the same time, Ueberroth was intensely opposed to workplace discrimination, frequently hiring older employees, giving younger ones serious responsibilities and using women managers years before they routinely had such roles in the travel business. The principle was important to him, but it also made good business sense, since he could pick from a larger pool of talent.

Throughout his career, Ueberroth has poured considerable energy into his family: his wife, three daughters, Vicki, 22, Heidi, 19, Keri, 17, and a son, Joe, 15. Back in 1963, even when he was struggling to get out from under that $100,000 debt, he made a decision not to work on weekends. Even today, Ueberroth will interrupt meetings to take a phone call from his wife. Last month he surprised his two youngest children by taking them to a Michael Jackson concert, though he dislikes the music. The whole family recently walked out during the third act of the Broadway hit Hurlyburly. The language was too vulgar for them. During Christmas time they all took a boat cruise to Mexico. Ueberroth rarely goes to the movies and watches little television. While not intellectual, he is tirelessly inquisitive and reads about 30 books a year, preferring historical nonfiction. At 5 ft. 11 in. and 185 lbs., he is a good golfer (handicap: 8), and likes to skin dive and spear fish around his waterfront house in Laguna Beach. But until 1978 he had never really considered sport as anything more than a free-time enthusiasm.

In that year a head-hunting firm suggested Ueberroth's name to a Los Angeles committee searching for a person to run the Games. His first reaction was to decline. Who needed the 70% cut in pay (the Olympic salary: $104,000) and all the problems? Pressed a second time, he decided to take it after all. Nine months after accepting the job, he sold First Travel for $10.4 million and later forswore his Olympic salary to become a volunteer. At the start there was no staff and no money. Moreover, the city of Los Angeles had passed a resolution saying that not one cent of municipal funds could be spent on the Games. The first week Ueberroth and his tiny staff were locked out of their small new office. They could hear the phones ringing inside. But the landlord, like most of the rest of the town, was sure the Olympics would lose money and not pay its bills.

Ueberroth, then 42, knew his best chance to get big money was from TV, and he staged a white-knuckle showdown among the networks. The absolute ceiling to shoot for, his own staff counseled, was $150 million. Ueberroth wanted more. He and others hatched what was, in effect, a one-shot blind bidding contest, and ABC, pulled along by the bold auctioneering, shut out the competition with a shocker of a bid: $225 million. Buoyed by the TV deal, he turned toward his other big source of revenue, America's largest corporations. To create an aura of coveted elitism, he drastically reduced the number of sponsors to 30 (there had been 381 in the 1980 Winter Games at Lake Placid) and hiked the price to an unprecedented $4 million minimum per corporation.

Ueberroth negotiated each contract and colleagues say his familiar reverse salesmanship--earnestly seeming to take the other person's side--was awesome to watch. He put soft-drink companies, for example, through the same kind of high-stakes contest as the TV networks. Coca-Cola, after hearing a flag-waving sell from Ueberroth, jumped its bid all the way to $12.6 million. When IBM decided not to participate, Ueberroth, who badly wanted to use their technology at the Games, called Chairman Frank Cary. The firm that sponsored the Games, Ueberroth said solicitously, would gain a global identity with the next generation of youth. Of course, he warned, another mammoth company with only three letters was interested; that was NEC, the Nippon Electric Company. IBM eventually signed on. Ueberroth had wanted the American company, partly out of patriotic loyalty. But threatening to play the foreign card was no bluff. When Eastman Kodak complained bitterly that no photo company would pay $4 million for a sponsorship, Ueberroth unhesitatingly switched to Japan's Fuji Photo.

As the money began to pour in, building international good will became a new priority. Ueberroth spent much of the time before the Games cultivating the various national ministers of sport, and was constantly startled to discover the power and importance of athletics and athletic officials around the world. "Sports is an immense force in other countries," says Ueberroth. "Our Government still doesn't understand the consequences of the two Olympic boycotts in 1980 and 1984." Foreign officials sometimes took Ueberroth aside to inquire if he might help change some aspect of White House foreign policy. Ueberroth would explain that in the United States sports of- ficials do not carry that kind of weight.

Back at the office, which by the summer of 1983 was a huge converted helicopter factory, the staff was growing. Virtual- ly all of the top men and wo- men Ueberroth had known for years. His style throughout was to turn responsibility over to tested deputies. The man who actually ran the Games, Harry Usher, formerly Ueberroth's travel business attorney, says leadership and inspiration, not operations, are Ueberroth's managerial gifts. Whenever his lieutenants bucked decisions upward, Ueberroth flung them back down. "Authority is 20% given," he would say, "and 80% taken. Take it." If someone faltered, Ueberroth did not hesitate to make a change. He once had to okay the firing of a friend of 25 years. Later the friend wrote and told Ueberroth he was cold and inhuman, especially since their families had been so close. The letter stung Ueberroth, but associates say his decision was right.

As the early months of 1984 rushed past, Ueberroth's team was approaching 1,000. But despite the size, his no-nonsense stamp was everywhere. He pronounced that men must wear jackets and ties at all times. Women could wear stone- washed jeans, but not regular ones. To build unity, and save time, staff members were encouraged to lunch at the hangar's cafeteria. Ueberroth was a regular. With his thin mouth and athlete's stride (he looks strikingly like the 1940s actor William Lundigan), he had become a revered, somewhat intimidating presence.

The teacher inside Ueberroth was always working. If he detected that a colleague was not using all of his skills, he flashed annoyance. And he was exhilarated when he saw someone shine. He constantly tested and challenged those around him, often sounding preachy, sometimes downright rude when he interrupted in mid-sentence, pushing them to be better. "By now," remembers Ueberroth, "we felt the reputation of the country was at stake. It was frightening." Often he would stroll through the hangar, sure to prod with questions, and more questions: the exact location of Rwanda or the spelling of the names of International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch and Director Monique Berlioux. "Peter is demanding and self- demanding," says Agnes Mura, a top staffer. "That makes you try as hard as you can."

Ueberroth could be imperious with those whose dedication did not seem adequate to him. One day in the cafeteria, he stopped to talk to some women having lunch. The chat was pleasantly routine until one of the ladies asked about possible salary increases. Ueberroth, the unsalaried volunteer, turned cold and snapped: "You shouldn't be working here if you don't understand what we're trying to do." Later when the enormous Olympic surplus of $215 million was announced, Ueberroth and his committee were accused of poor mouthing about a possible shortage of funds. Of course, just weeks before the Games, Ueberroth's insistence that there would be at least a $15 million profit despite the Soviet boycott was greeted with great skepticism. For months Ueberroth had suspected that a large profit was possible. But the threat of catastrophe always hovered over the Olympics, and he was always planning for the unexpected.

Such pre-emptive worrying paid off when the Soviet boycott came on May 8, just two months before the Games. Disaster threatened. The immediate objective was to hold down the number of countries dropping out, head off any impact on ticket sales and avoid the possibly ruinous prospect of having to return as much as $70 million to ABC if the actual viewing audience did not reach a pre-established total. Ready for the emergency, Ueberroth's men sprang. Experienced envoys quickly flew to assigned countries: Attorney Charles Lee to China, Savings & Loan Executive Anthony Frank to East Germany, Ueberroth to Cuba (Fidel Castro said he had to follow the Soviet lead, but agreed not to pressure other Latin countries to stay away). Later, chartered planes were dispatched to bring athletes from 40 African states.

Ueberroth always believed the boycott decision had been a very close call by the Soviet Politburo. He blamed himself for not dealing more directly with Soviet Party Leader Konstantin Chernenko, knowing, as he did, that Chernenko had suffered through the 1980 U.S. boycott with his mentor, Leonid Brezhnev. Ueberroth has the confidence to be this openly self-critical. It is partly a management technique, but associates say he will flatly reverse himself in the face of a reasoned argument.

A key target in the antiboycott battle was Rumania, with its outstanding athletes. But the Soviets had summoned President Nicolae Ceausescu to Moscow. The U.S.S.R. had already declared its own athletes would not be safe in Los Angeles; hence the boycott. The Rumanians had confided to Ueberroth that they wanted to use their presence at the Olympics as a nonpolitical way to stand up to the Soviets. But, they also told him warily, they dared not push too far. Before Ceausescu left for Moscow, Ueberroth met secretly with Rumanian Olympic officials at a Swiss hotel. He briefed them on exact details of how good the security arrangements really were. They listened intently. It was a moving experience, Ueberroth recalls, watching them prepare to challenge the U.S.S.R. The Rumanians had no idea what lay ahead. A few days later, after Ceausescu's journey to Moscow, Rumania announced it would come to Los Angeles. Ueberroth glowed at the news. The Rumanians went on to an excellent Olympic performance, winning 53 medals.

As the opening ceremonies drew nearer, all of Ueberroth's top managers were laboring seven days a week. The strain was palpable, but not paralyzing. On one occasion, the pressure did get to the boss. When he believed ABC was reneging on full payment because of the boycott, Ueberroth went into a rare fury. Disgusted after one conversation, he threw the telephone to the floor and throughout the Games treated network executives icily. (ABC ultimately paid in full, and for good reason: 180 million Americans watched, more than any other TV event in history.)

When the three Olympic villages opened for the athletes two weeks before the Games, Ueberroth waited for the predicted nightmares to happen. By now the tension had reached its peak. "I always had the feeling," he recalls, "that at any second something would erupt." Foremost in his mind was the realization that at Munich in 1972 the Israeli athletes had not been seized until the tenth day. "I carried a calendar around in the center of my skull," he says. Crises, small and large, occurred by the hour. The man Ueberroth had picked to climb the towering steps of the Coliseum to light the Olympic flame, former Decathlon Champion Rafer Johnson, developed shin splints. Three times Ueberroth was told Johnson could not make the climb, and each time Ueberroth declared he must. Johnson finally did. The day before the opening, a fire broke out in one of the stadium towers, shooting flames into the sky. "We thought terrorism every time," remembers Ueberroth.

An hour and a half before the opening ceremony, word suddenly came that the Olympic flame must not be lit. Two unfamiliar electrical wires were discovered leading to the gas jet. General Manager Usher remembers thinking: "Jesus Christ, this is it, it's happening." Security rushed in, and found that TV technicians had laid the new wires without informing anyone. Rumors and suspicions of sabotage were legion. Eighty investigations of bomb scares took place. The dormitory in which the Israelis and Turks lived was evacuated several times.

Ueberroth himself was constantly on the move, racing to the scene when the stands collapsed under a large crowd watching team handball (injuring six spectators), riding a helicopter over the freeways checking traffic (the gridlock that the press had predicted for a year did not materialize). To boost spirits, Ueberroth wore a different uniform each day: a bus driver's suit, a kitchen staffer's whites, a blue and gold usher's shirt. He strapped an electronic gadget on his hip that delivered printed, urgent messages to him.

Wherever Ueberroth spotted security forces, he sought them out to shake hands. There were 29 different police forces involved in the Los Angeles Games, and some believe the security there will rank for years as a model. The key, to Ueberroth, was attitude more than equipment. "The law-enforcement people were so upbeat," he explains, "and that affected everyone." Ueberroth himself had a few scares. One night four men carrying sawed-off | shotguns leaped over the security fence around his house but were caught; their objective was never clear. On another occasion two of Ueberroth's dogs died from poisoned meat thrown onto his lawn. But basically, for the man of control, everything worked. Called to the platform at the close of the Games, Ueberroth received a prolonged, roaring ovation from the crowd of 93,000--and felt his eyes fill up and his head take a most unaccustomed spin.

All of his spectacular success has not been lost on Ueberroth. There is a lot of the prince in him. Now he is introduced routinely to audiences as a man who brought honor to America. Three weeks ago President Reagan invited him to the White House and asked him to serve on a committee to energize the private sector in causes all the way from world hunger to urban blight. Lee Iacocca, a man Ueberroth much admires, picked him to share responsibility for the restoration of the Statue of Liberty. The hero of the Olympics receives hundreds of letters urging him to run for President. Some of his associates have pushed him to get into national politics, arguing that he is apolitical and therefore broadly acceptable, a tough-minded leader who is properly frugal. Although he was disillusioned at the indifferent way Reagan handled the Soviet boycott, he voted twice for his fellow Californian.

But Ueberroth remains skeptical about any change in his career direction. Besides, he has already found a new crusade. Baseball, the national pastime, he discovered, is in far more distress than anyone really knows. Of the 26 franchises, 22 are losing money. The use of drugs is an accelerating problem. All of this seems to him a worthy chal- lenge. Now Ueberroth talks excitedly about baseball cards that will carry personal messages from the players about drugs. But the incredible fever of the Olympics is never very far from his mind. An Olympic torch hangs on the office wall of baseball's new commissioner. One recent afternoon, waiting for a team owner to arrive, Ueberroth was asked to take a minute to look at a short film of the Olympic torch relay. He had never seen pictures of the event. He stood in a small office waiting for the film to be shown on a TV screen.

Suddenly there they were, those familiar thrilling images, families holding up small children, waiting eagerly for a runner to come into view. There was a grandmother running proudly, a red-haired boy barely able to carry the two- pound torch, a smiling young woman limping along with an artificial limb. / Ueberroth stood silent, staring. A runner whose eyes seemed to be gazing at the sky appeared. Ueberroth recognized him instantly. "He's the one who is blind," he said softly.

When the film ended, Ueberroth looked pleased. "I hoped the run would unify the country," he said. He spoke of how much pride the Olympics had rekindled. "People weren't afraid to stand up and cheer for the country," he said, "and the rest of the world saw how caring America can be." And there was something more. In the U.S., he observed, "there's a spirit of can-do, can-work, can-accomplish--you can do things without being on the Government dole. People want to know that something can work, that somebody can step up and turn a situation around."

Ueberroth has a way of trying to turn whatever he touches into a cause. To be involved in difficult problems with difficult goals lifts him up. He is a promoter with a global mission, a throwback to the kind of American entrepreneurial zealot who believes unblushingly that his product is a force for good in the world. And maybe, if he just gets everyone pulling together and persuades them that the impossible can be done, then maybe everything will be under perfect control.