Cooke A Triple Crown Winner

When billionaire businessmen buy into major league sports, few succeed. It’s harder for pro teams to win than they - or their fans - suspect. It takes a lot of time to learn football or baseball or basketball. And a business genius who is busy piling millions on top of millions, year after year, can’t find the days or hours he needs to master competitive sports.

Jack Kent Cooke was different.

Cooke, who died Sunday at 84, made time to understand the cable television industry, the financial markets and the major leagues.

He won in all three.

Because he worked at it, Cooke was a winner on two sports stages:

Nationally, his definitive accomplishment was restoring the greatness of the Washington Redskins. An ancient NFL team, once a champion with quarterback Sammy Baugh, the Redskins had been in a decades-long slump when Cooke, moving in as their majority owner, restored order, taking them to five Super Bowls, three of which they won.

On the California stage, Cooke was the entrepreneur most responsible for turning Los Angeles into a basketball town from whatever it was when the Rams and Raiders were here and the Dodgers were winning. As owner of the Lakers, Cooke brought Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to the team in a trade and then drafted Magic Johnson.

Other Lakers executives opposed him both times.

The most knowledgeable Laker all these years, their voice, Chick Hearn, once told me: “I wouldn’t have made that trade, and I might not have gone that way in the draft.”

Of the capitalists Cooke beat in business or sports, few realized that his main weapon was the research he made into the lives, values and potential of the persons he needed to win.

That led him to take Hearn’s advice most of the time. And it led him to hire Abdul-Jabbar, Johnson, Joe Gibbs, George Allen and Bobby Beathard.

In Washington, which had been a famous loser since the 1930s, hiring Allen to coach the Redskins was their turning point. As the NFL’s first billionaire owner, Cooke brought in Allen for seven years that turned both houses of Congress into Redskins rooting sections.

Then, when Allen defected to the Rams, Cooke hired Gibbs, who in four Super Bowls coached three Redskins winners.

As a football man, Cooke was never a power or even much of a leader in the NFL, where except for Al Davis - he was the league’s most conspicuous loner.

Simultaneously, Cooke was ever a pleasant companion.

One time, at football practice, Cooke, seated with a sportswriter on the sideline, whispered that it looked like the Redskins were practicing a tricky new formation with three tight ends instead of the usual one or two.

“Isn’t that a third tight end?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” the reporter said.

So Cooke asked Gibbs, who confirmed it.

And that, possibly, is what it takes to get to the Super Bowl five times: a billionaire owner who can recognize three tight ends.