RIP H. Wayne Huizenga

They can't hear you if they don't exist.

 

Made a heck of a hire in Bill Torrey. RIP

 

Same with Dave Dombrowski and Jim Leyland. Did OK with Jimmy Johnson, though not as well as most Dolphins fans hoped.

Unfortunately, he whiffed on Dave Wannstedt (should have fired him after he failed to make the playoffs in '02 with Ricky Williams running for 1,800-plus yards), Nick Saban (whose wife hated South Florida) and especially Cam (1-15) Cameron.

 

Are we sure there won't be a replacement body at the funeral?

 

Somebody here must have called the publisher ...

H. Wayne Huizenga, whose restless entrepreneurial spirit led him to become the only U.S. businessman to found three Fortune 500 companies, has died.

 

Well, I did message a former colleague who still works there and who posted the obit on my Facebook feed.

So I'll take the credit.

 

He and I dropped out of the same college. He would have been considered by many to be the most successful graduate had he, you know, graduated.

 

No, no, no, it was all me. You were just mopping up, shame on you.

 

Three work-related anecdotes tied in with Mr. Huizenga:

An older co-worker, generally known as prudent and conservative with his money, was friendly with Huizenga's right-hand man in the late '80s and got in very early on Blockbuster stock, buying a large block of shares at a low price. He sold a few years later for a sizable profit after the stock took off. I believe that windfall helped put his daughters through college.

In the mid-'90s, Huizenga was angered by the Sun-Sentinel's coverage of his enterprises and the word was he was thinking of making an offer for the paper, which was a cash cow and still growing like crazy. He backed off when he found out (a) the asking price would be roughly equivalent to his net worth, which was around $1.5 billion at the time, and (b) TribCo wasn't interested in selling, anyway.

And a few years after that, the Sun-Sentinel's 60-plus-year-old business columnist became quite aggressive and critical in his coverage of Huizenga, writing a series of hard-hitting columns. According to two sources of mine who were in position to know what happened, Huizenga finally had enough and reacted by making two phone calls -- one to the paper's reader-friendly editor, another to its business community-friendly publisher. Wasn't long before the columnist was demoted and assigned to write business briefs and help edit biz wire copy. He quit, sued for age discrimination -- and lost.

 

The Blockbuster Bowl will never be the same.