Red McCombs, car salesman turned media magnate, dies at age 95

Red McCombs, a former Texas car dealer who became a billionaire entrepreneur by venturing into a string of successful companies, including media giant Clear Channel Communications and several professional sports teams, died Sunday at his home in San Antonio. He turned 95.

His family announced his death, but did not specify a cause.

Mr. McCombs was a flamboyant cycling dealer who founded more than 400 companies in a slew of industries, including oil, real estate, livestock, insurance, movies, and racehorses, often selling them for a substantial profit. At various times, he owned a professional football team, the Minnesota Vikings, and two professional basketball teams, the San Antonio Spurs and Denver Nuggets.

But his heart was in the auto business, where he started in 1950 as a high profile car salesman in Corpus Christi, Texas. than 100 outlets, making it the largest car dealership in Texas and the sixth largest in the United States.

“I was an entrepreneur before I knew what the word was and certainly before I could spell it,” said Mr. McCombs in a 2006 radio interview. “New deals, new opportunities, new ventures are always a part of my life.”

An alumnus of the University of Texas and a passionate Longhorns football fan, Mr. McCombs used his love of sports to become the owner of a minor league baseball team in Corpus Christi in the 1950s.

He then purchased the Dallas Chaparrals from the old American Basketball Association in 1973, moved the team to San Antonio for the 1973-74 season, and changed its name to the Spurs.

When the ABA and NBA merged in 1976, he played a key role in getting the Spurs involved in the merger. He sold the team in 1982 and acquired the Nuggets, but sold that franchise in 1985 for $19 million, nearly double what he paid for it. He then bought back the Spurs for $47 million before selling it in 1993 for $75 million (about $157 million in today’s money).

In a statement Monday, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver called Mr McCombs “a driving force in creating the modern NBA.”

In 1998, Mr. McCombs purchased the Minnesota Vikings from the NFL for $246 million, but was growing impatient with futile efforts to build a new stadium for the team in the Minneapolis area. He sold the Vikings in 2005 for $600 million.

He also played a key role in bringing Formula 1 racing to Austin by investing in the Circuit of the Americas, the Austin circuit that has hosted the annual US Grand Prix race since 2012.

In a statement Monday, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones called Mr. McCombs “a true Texas titan in sports, media, business and philanthropy” who had “followed his dreams”.

Mr. McCombs’ most lucrative venture was Clear Channel, which he co-founded with Lowry Mays in 1972, when they bought a local radio station in San Antonio, KEEZ-FM, for $125,000. (Mr. Mays died in September at age 87.)

The two men went on to acquire radio stations, then television stations and billboards across the country. Aided by the Federal Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allowed media conglomerates to own an unlimited number of stations, they built the company into the world’s largest owner of radio stations; in 2000, Clear Channel owned more than 1,200.

The company eventually expanded into event promotion, live music and sports management. Mr. Lowry oversaw the company, but Mr. McCombs was instrumental in seizing opportunities to expand, according to John Hogan, the company’s former chairman and CEO.

“He steadfastly supported the idea that when telecommunications rules changed in 1996, we had to act quickly and aggressively, and those who were slow and hesitant would be left behind,” said Mr. Hogan in an interview for this obituary. .

While the company was often criticized for homogenizing radio programming in a way that eliminated much of the local flavor of independent radio stations, the formula was extremely profitable. When Mr. Lowry began to see signs that the Internet would interfere with his well-oiled strategy, he and Mr. McCombs sold the company in 2006 for $17.9 billion to a private equity group led by Bain Capital Partners and Thomas H. Lee Partners. As part of the deal, the group agreed to assume more than $8 billion in debt from the company.

The timing was perfect to sell. Clear Channel’s fortunes collapsed almost immediately. In 2014, the company split into Clear Channel Outdoor, for the billboard business, and iHeartMedia, for the radio stations and other media properties.

Billy Joe McCombs was born in the small town of Spur in West Texas on October 19, 1927. His father, Willie Nathan McCombs, was a sharecropper and later an auto mechanic. His mother, Gladys McCombs, came from a family of farmers.

Billy, whose shock of red hair earned him the lifelong nickname “Red,” showed an entrepreneurial bent as early as age 9, when he began selling sacks of peanuts to migrant cotton pickers. He was 15 when his family moved to Corpus Christi where he became a high school standout football player and eventually won a scholarship to Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. He left college to serve in the military for two years before returning and enrolling at the University of Texas in 1948 under the GI Bill.

But he dropped out to start a business career. He got a job at the local Ford dealership in Corpus Christi and realized he had found his calling. He was only 22 and set a goal to sell a car every day, and according to him, he managed to accomplish that feat three years in a row.

In 1950 he married Charline Hamblin, who passed away in 2019 at 91. He is survived by their three daughters, Lynda McCombs, Marsha Shields, and Connie McNab; eight grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren.

After several years of selling new cars, Mr. McCombs realized he could make more money selling used cars, he wrote in his autobiography, “Big Red: Memoirs of a Texas Entrepreneur and Philanthropist” (2010). New cars, he thought, were all the same, but “every used car is unique” and had a story to tell.

“People like stories about the things they might want to buy,” he wrote.

In 1957, at the age of 29, he opened his first new car dealership, in Corpus Christi. But it sold Edsels, a Ford brand that would become synonymous with car failure. Although he sold many cars, he said, he knew the brand would not survive. (The Edsel was discontinued in 1959.)

“I sold it myself and I saw the resistance,” he said. “We had to cram everyone in, and after I sold them to all my friends, I had nowhere to go. It was time to move on.”

He moved to San Antonio in 1958 and befriended Mr. Mays there. The two soon began buying up radio stations, eventually turning Clear Channel Communications into a behemoth. Mr. McCombs knew the power of radio and outdoor advertising from his experience with car dealerships.

He did his own radio and television commercials for 25 years, gradually becoming a celebrity in Texas. He struggled with alcoholism for years and nearly died at age 48 after a severe case of hepatitis. He then gave up alcohol and often spoke candidly about his addiction.

In 2000, Mr. McCombs and his wife made a $50 million gift to the University of Texas business school—the largest donation in the school’s history at the time. It was renamed the McCombs School of Business. He and his wife also donated $30 million to the university’s MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

Mr. McCombs was a major donor to Republican politicians, including Texas Senator Ted Cruz and President Donald J. Trump.

Of all his business achievements, Clear Channel was his most important, said Mr. McCombs in his autobiography. “I never thought I would ever get the chance to do something like Clear Channel,” he wrote. “That’s why I don’t really believe in long-term plans. There was no way I could ever have planned Clear Channel.”