Memphis Grizzlies ownership

About half of the National Basketball Association's lead owners are billionaires. One is a United States senator. Twenty-nine of 30 are white. None is under 40.

With his long leather jacket, shaved head and goatee, Brian Davis does not look like them. He's 36 years old and played the game at a level they couldn't. Now he hopes to join their club with a bold -- some would say quixotic -- bid to buy an NBA franchise, the Memphis Grizzlies.

Mr. Davis describes rising from a childhood of “welfare, powdered milk and powdered cheese” to accomplish things that others believed he couldn't. He is a former co-captain on the Duke University basketball team and was crucial to its winning two national championships. After failing to stick in the pros, he joined with his more successful teammate Christian Laettner to develop real estate in Durham, N.C., Duke's hometown. Their local celebrity opened doors, and the project is helping revive a once-deserted downtown.

Mr. Davis wants to apply his model on a broader scale, buying into the Grizzlies with an eye, he says, toward redeveloping the neighborhoods around their downtown arena. “That's the black belt,” he says of Memphis. “If I can't touch black people in that area to support us and to support what we're doing, then we've done something wrong. That's what's so exciting. We don't think it's a small town. We think it's a huge town. But we think it just needs a downtown.”

The hurdles are high. Unlike most owners, Mr. Davis brings more moxie than money. Though his property wealth, when totaled, entitles him to be called a millionaire, Mr. Davis by no means shares the same level of wealth as many of the NBA's other team owners.

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His first break came when he was recruited to play basketball at Duke, where, despite not being as talented as some of his teammates, he was a leader of teams that won consecutive NCAA championships in 1991 and 1992.

“Brian always has had big dreams and a cockiness or a confidence of achieving that. It's like Miracle-Gro with him,” says Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski. “When he got here, he was thrown into an environment on a day-to-day basis with some of the most successful young men and women at the country at Duke. And then you threw him in to a basketball environment where you have Grant Hill, Christian Laettner and Bobby Hurley on the team, he has the ego and the confidence level to feel like he's as good or better than them.”

After fizzling as a pro player, he spent a year working in the NBA's offices before turning to real estate. Mr. Davis and Mr. Laettner had talked since college about combining their entrepreneurial interests with socially beneficial projects. Through Durham contacts, Mr. Davis and Mr. Laettner hooked up with Tom Niemann, a Duke business-school graduate. It took some cajoling, but they eventually convinced Durham's city council that they could bring upscale residents to a downtown so blighted that its population numbered in the low hundreds in the mid-1990s. Those close to the talks describe Mr. Davis as the group's charismatic sweet-talker, Mr. Niemann as the one who worked the deal's nuts and bolts, and Mr. Laettner a more distant partner, providing a sizable stake from his NBA earnings.

The results are handsome -- once abandoned tobacco buildings are now apartments with the exposed brick and high ceilings that make yuppies swoon. The West Village project appears to have been a clear winner. According to data provided by Reis Inc., a real-estate research firm, the 240-unit complex had a vacancy rate of a low 2.5% during the third quarter of this year.

“Downtown Durham was not where I would have suspected that kind of success,” says Gary Hock, president of Durham-based Hock Development Corp. Mayor Bill Bell calls the project a “catalyst” for others that have created a nucleus of new residential, office and commercial spaces. A second, larger phase of the project recently broke ground.

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Should their group receive the team, Mr. Laettner predicted a cut in payroll while trying to remain competitive: “We're not going to be cheap owners, but we're not going to be stupid owners, either.”

None of the other investors in the first phase of the downtown Durham redevelopment is involved in the Memphis deal. “It's a big piece of meat,” Mr. Niemann, who has since broken with his two tall partners, says of the Grizzlies.

In the end, boil away all of the side questions, and Mark Cuban, owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks and a role model for Mr. Davis, has a simple answer for what Mr. Davis will need in order to continue on his unlikely but so far lucrative trajectory. “It takes a lot of money, nothing more or less,” he says.

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