SAN ANTONIO — At a leasing office in Austin 25 summers ago, a couple of college kids tried at first to make a good impression. One worked at the student newspaper, the other was about to start a job with a contractor, and they hoped to beat out a slew of applicants for a vacant off-campus apartment.
As the agent explained all the forms they needed to sign and documents they needed to provide, the newfangled, just-acquired contraption in one of the kids’ pockets started ringing. In an act of blatant discourtesy, the 20-year-old reporter-in-training pulled out the mobile phone and answered it.
“This is Suzy in Red McCombs’ office,” the voice on the other end of the line said. “Do you have a moment for Mr. McCombs?”
Of course he did. And over the quarter-century that followed that first call, which came in response to an inquiry about the University of Texas megadonor’s ideas for student seating in a renovated Royal-Memorial Stadium, the kid would be reminded over and over again how widely McCombs’ voice resonated every time he used it.
Oh, how that voice carried. It wasn’t just that he boomed when he spoke, with an expert car-salesman’s cadence that was somehow drawling and abrupt and intimidating and comfortably familiar all at once. It was that people cared what he had to say. And not just people in a single niche.
If you live in San Antonio, or if you root for the Spurs, or if you went to business school at UT, or if you played softball for the Longhorns, or if you received cancer treatment at MD Anderson, there’s a good chance McCombs changed things for you. Sometimes in a major way.
The billionaire businessman, who founded the Spurs and later owned the Denver Nuggets and Minnesota Vikings, died Sunday at the age of 95. McCombs was responsible for more than $100 million in donations to civic causes across Texas, according to his company. And if he sometimes came across as brash?
He was OK with that, because he knew he’d eventually win his listeners over.
“Obviously, I want people to have a good feeling about me rather than not have a good feeling about me,” McCombs once told that college kid-turned-columnist, during a time when the auto magnate and philanthropist who’d done so much good for so many was trying to explain one of the few comments he admitted regretting. “But I want to earn that.”
He earned plenty. The Spurs wouldn’t exist without McCombs, who helped lead the effort to bring an NBA team to San Antonio in 1973 and later said he considered that his most important business accomplishment. But that doesn’t go nearly far enough.
An argument could be made that San Antonio wouldn’t even be San Antonio if McCombs hadn’t been one of the driving forces behind HemisFair ’68, the transformative event that turned a sleepy town into a nationally renowned city.
Historical through-lines can be drawn from McCombs to HemisFair to the tourism industry and the major businesses that have kept San Antonio growing, not to mention major events like the NCAA Final Fours that now make regular stops in South Texas.
Even aside from all of that, though, there are those who benefited from McCombs’ contributions without ever stepping foot in Bexar County. He and his foundation gave $50 million to the UT business school, and $30 million to Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, and donated enough to women’s sports at UT to cover the cost of the state-of-the-art softball stadium that bears his name and that of his wife, Charline.
Having spread so much goodness around, McCombs figured his voice should carry some weight, and he was right. He was a dedicated reader of the newspaper, and if he noticed a story in which he figured he had some insight, he wasn’t shy about having Suzy Thomas, his trusted longtime administrative assistant, set up a phone call with the reporter.
Sometimes, his observations were hilarious, like when he noted “There is a sense of optimism (around UT sports, but) I just don’t know if it’s based on much reality.” Sometimes, his candor caused problems, like when he opined on local radio in 2014 about how Charlie Strong — who’d already been successful as a head coach at Louisville — was qualified to be “maybe a coordinator,” but not the Longhorns’ head coach.
McCombs apologized for that remark, which stemmed in part from his frustration about not being consulted in the search for a coach at the university he fell in love with after a stint in the Army in the 1940s. But he never backed down from his belief in his own gut.
Twenty-five summers ago, that’s the reason McCombs returned a phone call from a student reporter he didn’t know from Adam. He had something to say, and he figured somebody could benefit from hearing it.
“Do you have a moment for Mr. McCombs?”
That kid made sure he always did.
And even if he didn’t get that apartment, he never once regretted it.
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Red McCombs: The lasting impact on sports and beyond - Houston Chronicle
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