Harry Wayne Huizenga (, born December 29, 1937) is an American businessman and entrepreneur. He has also been an owner of three top tier professional sports franchises.
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Background
Harry Wayne Huizenga is of Dutch descent. His parents, Gerrit Harry and Jean Huizenga, both originated from the Chicago Dutch community.
He was born at Little Company of Mary Hospital, in Evergreen Park, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, on 29 December 1937. He has one sister, Bonnie, who is five years younger. He attended Timothy Christian School until his mid-teens. In early 1953, the Huizenga family moved to Florida and settled in the Fort Lauderdale area.
The remainder of his high school years were spent at Pine Crest School, where he was a member of the football team and class treasurer. After high school graduation in 1956, he moved back to Chicago where most of his friends, grandparents and other relatives still lived, and enrolled at Calvin College, a liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan, but he dropped out before the end of his sophomore year. For approximately five years after graduation, he was taking on low-wage jobs and enrolled in the army reserves.
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Career
In Fort Lauderdale, he started a garbage hauling business, as his grandfather had done in Chicago in 1894. Beginning with a single garbage truck in 1968, and pursuing customers in an aggressive manner, he created Waste Management, Inc., an entity that would eventually become a Fortune 500 company. Huizenga went on to purchase many independent garbage hauling companies; by the time he took the company public in 1972, he had completed the acquisition of 133 small-time haulers. In the early 1980s, he had grown Waste Management into one of the largest waste-disposal companies in the United States.
Huizenga repeated the process with Blockbuster Video, acquiring a handful of stores in 1987, with the company becoming the country's leading movie-rental chain by 1994. After a process of building and acquiring auto dealerships, in 1996, he formed AutoNation, which went on to become the nation's largest automotive dealer.
In 2004, he sold Boca Resorts, a group of hotels that included The Hyatt Pier 66 Hotel and the Radisson Bahia Mar Hotel & Marina in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, The Boca Raton Resort & Club in Boca Raton, Florida, and several others in Naples, Florida and Arizona, to private equity firm Blackstone as part of a $1.25 billion deal.
In 2010, Huizenga along with Steve Berrard, former CEO of Blockbuster Video and AutoNation, took on a majority stake in Swisher Hygiene, after paying $8.1 million to founder Patrick Swisher and his wife, Laura. Swisher Hygiene went on to be traded on the Nasdaq and the Toronto Stock Exchange via a 2010 reverse takeover deal in which the company acquired the publicly traded CoolBrands International, a former Markham, Ontario, Canada-based frozen food and dessert manufacturer. CoolBrands had divested its core businesses in 2007, leaving little more than a corporate shell.
Sports team ownership
Huizenga is notable for introducing both baseball and hockey to the South Florida area as the creator and initial owner of the Florida Marlins and Florida Panthers. Also he bought the cable television channel SportsChannel Florida in 1996 to air his teams' games in the region.
He was criticized for naming the two teams for the state of Florida rather than the city of Miami. As an advocate for the city of Fort Lauderdale, he explained that his goal was to include Broward County and Palm Beach County in his teams' fan base.
In 1994, Huizenga's brother-in-law attempted to purchase the NBA's Miami Heat, but was unsuccessful.
Football
In 1990, during a period of financial hardship for the franchise, Huizenga purchased 15 percent of the National Football League club Miami Dolphins and their sports venue in Miami Gardens, Florida. Long-time owner Joe Robbie had recently died and his family found it difficult to keep the team afloat. In turn, Huizenga bought out the remaining shares of the team to obtain total ownership in 1993. He removed the Joe Robbie name off the building and sold that space to Fruit of the Loom associates Pro Player, a corporate sponsor who later went under. It has since been renamed many times - as Dolphins Stadium, Dolphin Stadium, Land Shark Stadium, Sun Life Stadium, as well as a few other corporate names, such as Fruit of the Loom, and Hard Rock Stadium.
In 2008, Huizenga sold 50 percent of the team and 50 percent of the stadium to Stephen M. Ross, Chairman of Related Companies. Huizenga remained the managing general partner of the franchise until January 2009, when he sold another 45 percent of the team and as much of the stadium to Ross. Thus, Ross became managing general partner with 95 percent ownership of the Dolphins and the stadium, while Huizenga retained a 5 percent share of both club and stadium.
Huizenga remains the proprietor of 50 percent of the land.
In the early 1990s, Huizenga served a 2-year probationary period with the National Football League as an owner, with the stipulation that he not buy another team.
Baseball
In the 1996 off-season period, and only four years after the Marlins' first expansion appearance in the Major League, Huizenga and General Manager Dave Dombrowski spent more than $89 million in transfers, the amount surprising the rest of the league. The Marlins strengthened their pitching staff by luring Alex Fernandez to Miami and brought over third baseman Bobby Bonilla, outfielder Moisés Alou, reliever Dennis Cook and outfielders John Cangelosi and Jim Eisenreich. In the 1997 season, they made the play-offs for the first time in their history and went on to win the World Series, defeating the Cleveland Indians in seven games.
In the next off season, Huizenga, claiming a financial loss of approx. $34 million running the team that year, a claim subsequently disputed by Smith College economist Andrew Zimbalist in an essay, ordered the $54 million players-payroll to be cut, which led to an exodus of most championship players. In November of 1998, the year after they'd won the World series, the Marlins were sold for a reported amount of approx. $150 million to commodities trader John Henry, who would go on to sell the franchise in order to finance his 2002 acquisition of the Boston Red Sox. In 2017, the Marlins would be sold by owner Jeffrey Loria to a group of investors for a reported sum of approx. $1.2 billion.
While his sale of the Marlins was characterized as "one of the worst moves in the franchise's history" and Huizenga himself subsequently expressed regret over the final years in the club and wished he had instead chosen to "go one more year", the analysts of the Baseball Prospectus, through statistical work, claimed that by both winning the sport's ultimate trophy and selling the club immediately after that win for a substantial profit, Wayne Huizenga proved to be a "genius."
When he sold the Marlins, Huizenga, who still owned the Pro Player Stadium, retained the rights to skybox tickets and club seat customers, as well as 62.5% percent of parking revenue, and 30% of concessions. Economist Andrew Zimbalist commented that "Huizenga made a killing when he sold the team for $150 million [in 1998] and had the lease for this stadium that enabled him to keep just about all the stadium revenue."
Hockey
Huizenga operated the Panthers as a public holding company, buying numerous real estate properties in the name of his Panthers Holding Group. Capitalizing on the team's 1996 drive to the Stanley Cup finals, he sold shares to the public, whose enthusiasm for the club drove civic leaders in Broward County to use public money to build a new stadium for the team. Huizenga used the hockey team's stock as currency to begin building yet another diversified enterprise, buying two resort hotels owned partly by Huizenga and other Panthers officials. His original investment in the Panthers had nearly tripled in total value to $150 million.
In 2001, he sold the Panthers to pharmaceutical businessman and friend Alan Cohen and Cohen's partner, former NFL quarterback Bernie Kosar, for approximately $100 million. In December 2017, twenty five years after he created the club, the Panthers retired the No. 37 shirt in honor of Huizenga.
Philanthropy
Huizenga funds the H. Wayne Huizenga School of Business and Entrepreneurship at the Nova Southeastern University, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He has donated to Pine Crest School, a private preparatory school, which named their science building "Huizenga Science Building." He is a board member of the Laureus Foundation, a charity that, according to its mission statement, "us[es] the power of sport to end violence, discrimination and disadvantage."
Honors
In 1992, Huizenga was named a "Distinguished American" by the Horatio Alger Association in 1992 for his funding of scholarships throughout Florida. He was named their 2008 Norman Vincent Peale Award recipient. His donations help fund the association's annual National Scholar awards.
In 2012, the City of Fort Lauderdale, Florida renamed Southeast 9th Street in the Rio Vista neighborhood "Wayne Huizenga Blvd".
On January 19, 2018 the Florida Panthers honored Huizenga by retiring the number 37 his birth year and lucky number. This is represented by a banner hanging above the BB&T Center rink.
Personal life
On September 10, 1960, he married Joyce VanderWagon, a woman with a Dutch background, whom he met while in high school. He had known Joyce since his early school years in Evergreen Park. Wayne and Joyce had two children, Wayne Jr. and Scott. The marriage ended in divorce in 1966. Huizenga married his second wife, Martha Jean "Marti" (née Pike) Goldsby, a native of San Antonio, Florida, in April 1972. She was a secretary in one of his businesses. He later adopted her two children, Peter and Robert Ray. The couple remained married until her death on 3 January 2017, following a fourteen-year battle with cancer
In 2003, Huizenga's son, Robert Ray Huizenga, while driving a Range Rover under the influence of alcohol, hit 71-years old Irwin Louis Feigenbaum as he crossed Las Olas Boulevard, leaving him with a concussion, a gashed head and a broken elbow. Since this was young Huizenga's third DUI conviction in a decade, it was automatically rated a felony and, in 2007, he was sentenced to serve 120 days in prison, the judge declining probation.
In 2004, Wayne Huizenga purchased the private luxury yacht Aussie Rules from the Australian professional golfer Greg Norman. The yacht cost $77 million and was further modified by Huizenga and now features a helipad for a 12-seat helicopter.
In the 1980s, he began acquiring some 2,000 acres about 30 miles north of West Palm Beach. In 1996, he based there the Floridian Golf & Yacht Club, an exclusive golf club "with enough estate homes on the property to cover his costs," whose course was designed by Gary Player, where he extends free privileges to some two hundred "friends, relatives, and business associates," including actors Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones and retired General Electric Corp. Chairman Jack Welch. He renamed his yacht Floridian, before selling, in 2010, the Floridian club and estate to Texas entrepreneur Jim Crane.
References
Source of article : Wikipedia
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