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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Whole New Ballgame With Allen As Owner

Hunter T. George Associated Press

Paul Allen, the new owner of the Seattle Seahawks and one of the richest people on the planet, is first and foremost a basketball fan.

The billionaire Microsoft co-founder is such a hoops fanatic that he’s spending at least $600,000 to build a two-bedroom, three-bath skybox at Portland’s Rose Garden arena, the grand facility he built for his beloved Trail Blazers.

But now the Blazers will have to compete for his attention with the Seahawks, the hapless football team that has cost Allen at least $270 million so far, all in the name of civic duty.

His purchase of the team this summer, after voters approved a mix of public and private funding for a new stadium, was widely viewed as the best way to keep the team from leaving Seattle.

Now Allen is trying to build a winner out of what had been one of the NFL’s worst teams in recent years. He certainly has the means.

Despite his preference for privacy, the 44-year-old Allen is sure to draw attention in the NFL with his staggering wealth. He immediately becomes the league’s richest owner: He’s the sixth-richest person in the world with a net worth of $14 billion, Forbes magazine reported.

Players are impressed.

“When the ownership is committed to doing things first-class, that makes the rest of the team follow that lead. I think that’s where you’re going to see the big difference in this organization,” says Warren Moon, signed as a backup quarterback to John Friesz.

Linebacker Chad Brown signed a $24 million contract with Seattle after being whisked away from the Pittsburgh Steelers in Allen’s jet.

“This team’s not afraid to go out and spend some money to get the guys it takes to help them win,” Brown says. “I think that’s a great attitude.”

It’s an attitude that hasn’t been there since the late 1980s. Had Allen not bought the team, “I think we would have seen the franchise driven into the ground,” Seattle Mayor Norm Rice says.

A serious sports fan - he was in England watching Wimbledon when he signed papers to buy the Seahawks from developer Ken Behring - Allen rarely grants interviews and would rather divert attention to the athletes.

“To the extent you can be egoless in a positive way, he has that ability,” says Bob Whitsitt, the man Allen has entrusted to run the Blazers and Seahawks. “He doesn’t need to see his name in the paper or his picture on TV. Fans aren’t buying tickets to see the owner… . He doesn’t want to be in the spotlight.”

But it’s becoming more difficult for Allen to avoid the spotlight as he builds a sports empire in the Pacific Northwest, though Whitsitt says the empire-building is not by design.

Allen, who has owned the Trail Blazers since 1988, is thinking about bringing an NHL team to Portland to share his Rose Garden with the Blazers, but the timing isn’t right.

“If and when it makes sense, we will go down that road,” Whitsitt says.

The if-it-makes-sense approach is what drives Allen’s business strategies. He has investments in an eclectic collection of three dozen businesses that all play into his vision of the future’s “Wired World.”

The Blazers and Seahawks aren’t part of that strategy; they’re not even part of the same strategy. Allen bought the Blazers because he loves basketball, Whitsitt says, and he bought the Seahawks out of civic duty.

When Seattle and state officials asked him last year to buy the Seahawks from Behring, who had become disenchanted with the Northwest and tried to move the team to Southern California, Allen studied the options. In the end, he said he’d buy the team only if taxpayers helped by investing in a $425 million stadium complex to replace the dreary 20-year-old Kingdome.

Taxpayers went for it, though there was grumbling that Allen could pay for the stadium himself with profits he makes in a single day on his 100 million shares of Microsoft stock.

Rice feared voter rejection of the stadium plan might have prompted Allen, who has given millions to charitable causes, to make Portland the recipient of all his largess.

“To lose somebody of the stature of Paul Allen and the philanthropy he brings would have been devastating,” Rice says.

NFL owners soon will learn that Allen is a bit of an enigma. He rarely makes public appearances, surrounding himself with a small, discreet group of close friends, family and advisers. Bert Kolde, his roommate from an early 1970s stint at Washington State, heads up some of Allen’s ventures. His sister, Jody Patton, runs several of his charitable foundations.

He’s passionate about music and his toys, especially his 757 Boeing jet.

And he apparently loves to party. On election night in June, when early returns showed voters would narrowly approve the stadium plan, Allen strapped on his electric guitar and rocked the night away at a campaign party.

Allen, a bachelor, even has his own band - The Grown Men - that gathers for jam sessions at his Lake Washington estate near Seattle. “They’re pretty doggone good,” Whitsitt says.

A Seattle native, Allen traces his success to 1968, when he met Bill Gates at Lakeside School, a local prep school. In 1975 they formed a company that eventually would make them super rich: a venture to produce software for microcomputers called Micro Soft.

In the late 1970s and early ‘80s, Allen would help Microsoft, as it became known, develop products now used by millions of people every day, including MS-DOS, Word, Windows and the Microsoft Mouse.

Allen left Microsoft in 1983 after being diagnosed with cancer, but he began forming and acquiring new companies a few years later when chemotherapy cured him.

Whitsitt acknowledges that Allen and his advisers aren’t “football people.” Soon he expects to ask the Seahawks’ front office to develop long-term plans for the team - on the field and in the community.