Gracious Winner
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For Gordon Gund, life is full of trade-offs. Early this year, Gund surprised the sports world when he sold the Cleveland Cavaliers and Gund Arena to Detroit mortgage mogul Dan Gilbert. Who would walk away from a rising team? Twenty-year-old phenom LeBron James was excelling in his second year; All-Star center Zydrunas Ilgauskas was healthy after numerous foot injuries; and fans were flocking to the arena. As the city hoped for a trip to the playoffs, Gund turned his attention to a bigger prize: finding a cure for blindness caused by disease. It's a personal mission for Gund, who lost his vision in 1970 and founded The Foundation Fighting Blindness a year later. Gund, who turns 66 this month, wanted more time to oversee strategic planning and fund raising for the foundation. "If I can spend my energy and abilities doing something that will change the face of the world - that means [disease-inflicted blindness] will never affect anyone else in the world again - that's more important than winning the NBA championship or making a bundle of money," he says. "It's much more lasting." In order to focus more attention on the foundation, Gund had to relinquish some obligations. "The thing I could most readily do was sell the Cavs," he says. "I miss it. I miss the people. But you don't look back. It's right for the city, the people who work for the Cavs, and the ownership. Life is full of trade-offs, and this was one of them." Born in 1939 in Cleveland, Gund is the third of six children of Jessica and George F. Gund II. His family roots run deep in the city. Gund's grandfather ran a successful brewery with the feature brand Gund's Crystal Bottled Beer. Gund's father bought the first American producer of decaffeinated coffee, sold it to Kellogg Co. in 1927 for $10 million, and later made millions in banking as the chairman of the board of The Cleveland Trust Co. Gund attended University School in Shaker Heights through the sixth grade, then went to Groton School in Massachusetts for high school. He majored in physical sciences at Harvard University, where he graduated in 1961. Degree in hand, Gund was unsure what career to pursue. The military draft was in full swing, and rather than be enlisted, he attended the Naval Officers Candidate School in Newport, R.I. "The Navy invested in a lot of technology and offered 22-year-olds responsibilities at sea," Gund says. "I liked that idea." He served in the gunnery department on a destroyer in the Pacific for three-and-a-half years. After Gund's discharge, his father encouraged him to enter banking. It was a familiar industry to Gund, who recalls going with his father to the bank on Saturdays as a boy. "I'd sit and listen to him doing business," he remembers. After attending the Chase Manhattan Bank training program in New York, Gund landed his first job as a regional lending officer with the bank. "As I cold-called, I talked to a number of entrepreneurs who had started and built their own businesses," he says. "I decided that would really interest me." In 1968, Gund started two businesses in New York: Gunwyn Ventures, a venture capital firm, and Gund Investment Corp., a company involved in diversified investment activities. Both later relocated to Princeton, N.J. In the meantime, two life-altering events occurred. In 1965, Gund began dating his future wife Llura (Lulie) and he was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa (RP), a progressive degenerative disease of the retina. Gund had met Lulie briefly while at Harvard. They reconnected several years later when they both lived in New York and were asked to be godparents of a mutual friend's baby. They drove to Massachusetts together for the christening. After returning to New York, they formed a car pool from their east side residences to Wall Street, where they both worked. "She probably only asked me because she had a VW bug and wanted a larger car," he jokes. The two married in 1966 and had two sons, Grant in 1968, and Zachary in 1970. When Gund's night vision started deteriorating in 1965, an ophthalmologist diagnosed him with RP. During the next five years, his peripheral vision gradually narrowed. Gund remembers his final weeks of vision. His son, Zack, had just been born. "I had only a narrow tube of vision, but I could scan his face and see him. That's so important to both of us," says Gund. "My vision closed in, and I lost it just a few weeks later." But Gund did not resign himself to a life of blindness. In November 1970, he traveled to an infirmary in Odessa, Russia, to pursue an experimental treatment. "It was a long way from anywhere for a person who couldn't speak Russian or see," says Gund, who remained abroad for several weeks. The treatment failed, and Gund hit rock bottom emotionally. Yet he doesn't regret the trip. "I was forced to deal with [my blindness]. I couldn't whine about it," he says. "It gave me time to think about what really mattered and focus on what I could do, rather than what I couldn't do." That included starting The Foundation Fighting Blindness. Since 1971, the foundation has raised more than $225 million for multifaceted research ranging from gene therapy programs to retinal cell transplantation and artificial retinal implantation. "It's exciting to advance these therapies from the laboratory to the patient," says Gund. "We've taken an experience that was difficult for both Lulie and I and made something positive out of it." This doesn't surprise John Graham, CEO of NAS Recruitment Communications, a human resources recruitment and services firm in Cleveland that Gund owned from 1983 until 2000. "Gordon has a very strong ‘can-do' attitude," says Graham. "I've told him, ‘When we're down, you carry us along, and when we're up, you tell us to look at the sky and fly higher.'" "Being blind, you are dependent on people in a physical way to get around," says Gund. "But you realize that we're all dependent on each other to accomplish anything that's worthwhile." Gund's unwavering trust in people and focus on teamwork have benefited him immensely in business, especially in the business of sports, which he entered in 1976. Gund has always loved sports. As a boy, he watched the Cleveland Barons play hockey at the Cleveland Arena. Later, he played hockey and rowed at Harvard. In 1976, his brother George, a minority partner in the California Golden Seals, moved the hockey team to Cleveland. George's partner backed out, so Gund and his brother became co-owners of the team, which they renamed the Barons. The brothers merged the team with the Minnesota North Stars in 1978, then sold the North Stars in 1990 for rights to a new team - the San Jose Sharks, which they owned until 2002. Gund bought the Richfield Coliseum and the Cleveland Cavaliers in 1983, after the team had suffered six straight losing seasons, often drawing fewer than 1,000 fans a game. In 1994, the Cavs moved to the newly built Gund Arena. Under Gund's ownership, the team recorded one of the largest increases in home attendance in the NBA during the past 19 seasons. "Sports and entertainment is often more show than glow, and Gordon made a business of it," says Graham, who was part of the founding group of the Cavaliers, which formed in 1970. For now, Gund is content furthering efforts at The Foundation Fighting Blindness and heading Gund Investment Corp. as its chairman and CEO. He and his advisers are adept at spotting up-and-coming companies, such as Santa Clara, Calif.-based Align Technology Inc. Gund learned about the company, which developed Invisalign, an invisible orthodontic product, from his college roommate. He was intrigued and invested in the start-up company in 1998. Today, he's the company's largest stockholder. "Many investors are short-term oriented; Gordon isn't," says Warren Thaler, president of Gund Investment. "He looks at opportunities with a very long timeframe, both before making investments and afterward. Gordon is a builder." And he expects the same passion and thoughtfulness from his business associates. "He encourages all his business leaders to relentlessly consider ways to make our products and services better, to ask questions, test assumptions and ponder possibilities," Thaler says. "Gordon calls this ‘constructive imagining.'" In addition to his keen business sense, Gund values people. "I've seen him with big politicians and the people who clean up Gund Arena after games," says Jim Boland, vice chairman of the Cavaliers. "He treats everyone with respect." A disciplined leader, Gund is ready to slow down a bit. He'd like to relax at his home in Nantucket with his family, read more novels, do some fly fishing, and work on wood and clay sculptures, a hobby he took up 20 years ago. But he can't imagine retiring. "I'm going to take the edges off, I think," he says. "But I'm still in business." Issue Date: October 2005 Issue, Posted On: 9/30/2005 |
