The Real Franchise Player: Hawk Owner Ken Behring

IN CALIFORNIA, Ken Behring is known as "the quintessential businessman with a conscience." In Seattle, he is the man who in six years has guided a once-proud Seahawk franchise to a 2-14 record. His only regret is not replacing Chuck Knox sooner. -------------------------------------------------------------------

DANVILLE, Calif. - From his desk inside the antiseptic, dimly lit corporate headquarters where he created the community of Blackhawk out of parched hillside, Ken Behring can look out a thick glass window and see wind-blown trees, and sometimes China.

"It's a different world now," he said. "Other countries are going to become the new capitalists, including China, which nobody would believe. Young people are really capitalistic there. New homes in Shanghai are going for over $1 million. If I was younger, China would be my focus."

At a well-tenured 65, though, Behring rarely chooses to look far beyond Seattle, where his professional football team plays. And of course, if he can glimpse China he certainly believes he can see the Pacific Northwest from his perch 800 miles away.

This kind of vision has gotten him into trouble before. Since buying the Seahawks in 1988, the Bay Area land developer has directed a franchise that went from AFC West Division champion to the very basement of the NFL, a club that announced this year that its entire five-digit waiting list for season tickets had evaporated.

The past five seasons have been a hurricane of bad trades, front-office turnover, long contract holdouts, curious injuries and simple rotten luck, leaving at the bottom of the rubble only one subject - Ken Behring. You would think he's lost confidence.

He hasn't. On the eve of the season opener Sunday against San Diego, Behring strides ahead briskly, resolute that he can see the future of the club as clearly as anyone, even from the hills outside Mount Diablo where the Seahawks are no more than a couple of paragraphs in the Monday newspaper.

He said he expects the team to make the NFL playoffs next year, and this year, who knows. Then again, from here, the Seahawk crew that went 2-14 last season looks enough like the Dallas Cowboys to Behring that he actually feels he can compare them to the Super Bowl champions.

"If the Cowboys had the injuries we had last year they might not have been quite as bad as us, but they would have been right down there," Behring said. "If we don't have injuries this year, we should be quite a bit better."

Behring installed his son, David, 37, as president of the team this year and someday David will take over the whole enterprise. Ken said he has written in his will that David gets first dibs on inheriting his majority interest in the team.

But make no mistake, Ken Behring, as much as Cortez Kennedy, is the Seahawks' franchise player.

Take the rookie quarterback. The scouts and coaches weighed him, watched him, ranked him and chatted up the media about him after the draft. But the original Rick Mirer admirer was Behring, who met the Goshen, Ind., native four years ago when he presented him an American Academy of Achievement award as the top high-school football player in the nation.

"I told him then, `A few years from now we'll be looking at you,' " Behring said. "I don't know if I was serious or not because at that time we wouldn't have had a good enough pick to get him."

Behring got his chance when the Seahawks were dreary enough to warrant the second pick in the draft this year. "I liked him from the beginning and all the way through," he said. "A couple of fellows up there (Seahawk staff) thought the other fellow (Drew Bledsoe) had a better arm. But I like the heart and toughness of Mirer."

On the sideline at the first exhibition game against the Indianapolis Colts, Behring reminded Mirer of his promise made four years ago. Mirer was surprised Behring remembered the conversation, much less followed through.

Mirer shrugged uncomfortably. "It's good to feel wanted."

Behring two years ago urged the selection of another quarterback, Dan McGwire, brother of Oakland A's star Mark McGwire. But truth be known, and Behring admits this freely, his influence goes well beyond setting budgets and making the occasional recommendation on player acquisitions. He used to talk to Tom Flores once or twice a week when Flores was team president, but now is on the phone once a day with his son, asking questions, getting injury updates, proposing moves. Asked which players other than the quarterbacks he had a direct role in bringing to Seattle, he said, "All of them."

He is by no measure an absentee owner in the mold of the Seahawks' last proprietors, the Nordstroms, nor would he be described as the strong, hands-on owner along the lines of Al Davis of the Los Angeles Raiders. His other business interests require his attention, so he plays with his toy in episodes, and from a distance. The lack of continuity is one reason why David joined the Seahawk front office this year.

"One of the problems is that I'm involved in so many things, I can't devote all my time to it," Behring said. "Most owners, probably 80 percent of them, that is all they have. They inherited it from their fathers."

Clearly in charge

Spend more than a few minutes with Behring, and what becomes obvious is that the club is captive to his expertise, imagination and budget and will achieve only to the level of those abilities. Ken Hofmann, another Bay Area developer, owns 25 percent of the team, but Behring, who owns 63 percent of the team (and holds 75 percent of the voting stock), insists that all decisions are his and his only.

The upside is that Behring, whose only experience as a football player was as a high-school fullback in Wisconsin, is getting the hang of things. He said that this year, for the first time, he feels as though he understands what it takes to win in the NFL. The man who upon buying the team called the Kingdome the "Seadome," can now talk salary caps and incentive clauses and spread offenses.

He even has a plan, as desperate as the club seems right now. He wants to control costs until the full effect of the new collective bargaining agreement kicks in next year, when he expects a number of intriguing free agents to be cut loose by teams that are above the projected salary cap of $32 million. With one of the lowest NFL payrolls, Behring figures he's better positioned to take advantage of the new economics.

"Next year's going to be very interesting," he said. "A team like San Francisco is probably going to have to shed close to $15 million in payroll. That's not easy. When you have to get rid of one-third of your payroll, that doesn't make people very happy."

Behring hopes that by then the Seahawks will already have a nucleus of young players who are comfortable playing with each other. In this regard, Behring does not at all regret chasing off many of the veterans left over from the Nordstrom era. If anything, he said, his biggest error as an owner so far was waiting four years to get rid of head coach Chuck Knox and the methodical football that never got the Seahawks to the Super Bowl.

"But we hesitated to change in the beginning because we were reading the newspapers and (figured) how hard it would be on us if we changed," he said. He promises to never again be such a wimp.

Finally with a team that truly belongs to him, Behring began to show some spunk this past offseason. He spent more than $11 million to sign four unrestricted free agents and center Ray Donaldson, who was waived by the Colts but will start with the Seahawks. He lavished $15.6 million on Mirer, and $12 million on Kennedy, to get them into training camp and prepared for the season.

Still, the club's sagging reputation cost them other players. The Seahawks made offers to running back Marcus Allen, wide receiver Mark Ingram, tight end Rod Bernstine and offensive lineman Will Woolford, but were spurned in each case. The inability to get Woolford could be especially damaging, since Mirer, slated to start in the season opener, will be operating behind one of the NFL's leakiest lines.

Behring, who started with nothing as a used-car salesman in Wisconsin and now is one of the richest owners in the NFL, flinches at the notion that he should have made bigger offers to lure the top free agents to Seattle. Forbes magazine last year estimated his personal worth at $330 million, the same as in 1991 despite a general recession in the California real-estate market.

As much as any NFL owner, Behring views the franchise as a business. To blow budget because you want to chase some valuable free agent like Reggie White does not compute with him.

"Coming from the background I come from, I just don't like to lose (money)," Behring said. "I'm not trying to make big money, but I think you're entitled to make at least a percentage on your investment. And that's what the new cap allows you to do."

Behring said he has made $8 million in the five years he has owned the team, about half of that last year. He would make more if payments on the loan he used to buy the team are not subtracted. His group of investors bought the team for $80 million plus assumed debts from the Nordstroms that raised the eventual price to above $90 million, he said.

Of course, Behring is pulling in profits even as the value of NFL franchises continues to escalate. He takes a more conservative approach than other owners, who realize that even if they overspend now they are likely to recover the losses when they sell the team.

"When you're owning a sports franchise, you should be able to make money and get a return," said Herman Sarkowsky, former managing general partner of the Seahawks under the Nordstroms. "But on Monday morning when you roll into the office, you also want people to tell you how well you did yesterday."

`The quintessential businessman'

Ambling into the offices at the Blackhawk Corp. on the day after games, Behring may come across some Seahawk fans. Seahawk mugs and banners started appearing on employees' desks after Behring purchased the team. Some people continue to get together to watch the games via satellite, at a bar or a friend's house.

But none of the Puget Sound papers show up at the local newsstand the next day. The Fabulous Sports Babe's radio signal dies well before the California border. And almost no one seems to believe the talk filtering south from Seattle that Ken Behring is cheap or incompetent or aloof.

Down here, Behring is "the quintessential businessman with a conscience," said Leigh Steinberg, a prominent NFL agent who lives in nearby Lafayette.

Behring gives lots of money to the local hospital, offers the use of his gleaming automobile museum to a variety of charitable causes, even plans to give his $100 million antique car collection to the University of California-Berkeley at the turn of the century. He is recognized as smart, as the creator of this 2,800-unit nouveau-riche community, and willing to spend, as the owner of a 29,000-foot mansion patterned after Frank Lloyd Wright's "Fallingwater." Steinberg calls him "funny."

In Seattle, Behring is about as funny as a carburetor.

To Seahawk fans, he is the man who engineered the precipitous decline of one of the NFL's best-run frachises. To Seattle civic leaders, he is recognized for contributing little to the community, a "non-entity," according to Sarkowsky, a longtime figure on the Seattle business scene. To environmentalists, he is the man who tried to force-feed a large Eastside development down the county's throat.

"It's like it's not even him," said Michael DeBene, a minority owner of the Seahawks and Bay Area associate of Behring, about Behring's image. "Same man, but different person."

Behring, who gets Seattle-area newspaper clippings sent to him two to three times a week, tends to think only journalists are mean to him. "No matter who I see up there, nobody (other than sportswriters) ever has anything negative to say," he said.

Behring flies to Seattle every couple of weeks for games and stays in a hotel. He used to own a home in Hunt's Point, but sold it because it wasn't "spectacular" enough and couldn't be molded into what he's used to in a home. He then bought a condo, but got rid of that, too. He said he plans to build a home in Seattle.

Behring's lack of involvement in the community concerns Hofmann, who would prefer to be majority owner, said George Vukasin, president of the Oakland/Alameda Coliseum. Vukasin worked with Hofmann last year when Hofmann, an Oakland native, tried to help the city get an NFL expansion franchise. (Vukasin said the Seahawk owners have never talked to him about moving the team from Seattle).

"He still has great pride in owning a minority share of the team, but if he were the majority owner I think he would do things differently in terms of how they interact with the community," said Vukasin. Hofmann declined to be interviewed.

Behring said he gets involved in communities that allow him to make money. Since the Grand Ridge project was shot down, and the Seahawks register modest profits, his contribution to the Puget Sound is modest. To that, Sarkowsky said, "That's the worst reason in the world."

Standoff hurting Behring's image

Seattle to Behring: You take the first step. Behring to Seattle: You take the first step. It's a standoff, and in the meantime Behring's image more and more takes on the patina of his friend George Argyros, the former Mariner owner and fellow California real-estate developer.

But Behring believes he knows at least one thing about being a sports-team owner, and that is that people will love him if and when he wins.

"And he's right," Sarkowsky said.

Of course, were Behring obsessed with public opinion he might never have pushed to get a tax break in 1989 on his donation of the antique cars collection to UC-Berkeley. The request led to the creation of a bill in the California legislature that saved him $1.4 million in belated taxes that would have been due because he originally bought the cars with a dealer's license.

The bill was criticized as a prime example of special-interest legislation. Behring believed it right that he should avoid penalty when providing a gift to the state. He stuck with his conviction, and won.

With the Seahawks, Behring is so thoroughly convinced that his is the right way that he has not sought advice from the Nordstroms, "nor have they offered any." He said he stays in contact with owners such as Tampa Bay's Hugh Culverhouse, Detroit's Bill Ford and Dallas' Jerry Jones, but that he considers no one a league mentor. John Madden, the CBS analyst and Blackhawk resident, can talk endlessly but has yet to do so about the Seahawks at Behring's pleasure.

He professes no interest in learning the rest of the NFL, where an active network of team executives, agents and others work the phones, trade information and cut deals. "I don't care how the league works," he said.

David Behring, who played two years of football at Princeton, said his presence in the office should help the club get up to speed with the changing NFL, where the trick will be outsmarting rather than outspending rivals.

His father's management style is to find a trusted, high-quality leader and give him or her wide authority to do the job. That role at the Seahawks goes to Coach and General Manager Tom Flores, although Behring is in on many decisions, and eventually his son will assume more responsibility. Princeton-educated and a lawyer, David now splits his duties between the Seahawks and his Blackhawk-area construction company but plans to become full-time with the club in two years.

"Ken seems to really feel comfortable with Tommy there," said Frank Straface, a former manager for Behring who retired to run the country club at Blackhawk. But "if there's going to be a fall guy in this thing, it'll be Tom."

Behring said he's happy with Flores. Moreover, he seems to have developed a genuine compassion for the coaches and players in general, from listening to the crack of helmet on helmet and observing the intricate game strategy from his sideline perch. He said his biggest revelation since buying the team is that football is not just a game to these guys, but their whole life.

So he proceeds with eyes wide open yet always focused on the prize. The closest Seattle has come to the Super Bowl under Behring was in bidding to host the 1991 event, but the city lost out partly because Behring was so new to NFL ownership circles. But Behring believes he can visualize a championship nonetheless, somewhere out the back window of his Blackhawk office.

It's just more elusive than building a home.

"Maybe it took a real bad year to change you around to where you decided you have to put in more effort, and really get in there and do something," he said. "Because there's no question every team wants to win."