From Ground Beans to Grounded: Meet the Man Who Tried to Run the SuperSonics Like Starbucks
Around the turn of the century, the team had 58 owners. But one towered over the rest. Episode 2 of ‘Sonic Boom’ tells the story of how coffee impresario Howard Schultz and a recession contributed to the franchise’s exodus.From Ground Beans to Grounded: Meet the Man Who Tried to Run the SuperSonics Like Starbucks
Around the turn of the century, the team had 58 owners. But one towered over the rest. Episode 2 of ‘Sonic Boom’ tells the story of how coffee impresario Howard Schultz and a recession contributed to the franchise’s exodus.
In 2019, I spent much of the year obsessing over a question: How did Seattle—once home to Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp, to the Seattle SuperSonics, one of the iconic franchises that defined the NBA of my youth—end up as a basketball orphan? How did one of America’s most vibrant basketball markets become a market without an actual team?
I knew some version of an answer. The same one known by so many who follow the NBA. Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz sold the team away to a man from Oklahoma, Clay Bennett. Bennett skipped town. The end.
But I wanted to know more. More about what happened in Seattle, and in Oklahoma, and in other cities from New York to New Orleans that all led to one of the great heists in the history of pro sports.
So I went searching for answers. And the deeper into the search I went, the messier and more complicated, and sometimes more confusing, the whole thing got. And as I allowed myself to fall deeper into this obsession, I found myself fixated on so many people beyond just Schultz and Bennett. So many things had to go wrong—or right, if you’re from Oklahoma—for this to happen. So many people had a stake in this struggle.
So I talked to them. There were the players, from Lenny Wilkens to Gary Payton, who now find themselves retired, legends of a franchise that no longer exists. There were the local activists who fought to keep the team in town, and the ones who almost seemed to be pushing the Sonics out the door. And I obsessed over the people behind the scenes in Seattle and Oklahoma. People who made deals on late-night conference calls and on private jets, people whose own ambitions were bound up with the fate of the franchise.
All of it brought me here. To a story about a heist. And about a loss.
Below is an excerpt from the second episode of Sonic Boom. This podcast debuted on another platform in 2019, and this year we’re rereleasing it on Spotify. Subscribe here and check back in each Thursday for new episodes through April 10.
Howard Schultz was born in Brooklyn. He grew up in a neighborhood called Canarsie, which he’s talked about a lot over the years, telling his story of life in the housing projects, of growing up poor. It’s a big part of the version of himself that he sells to the world. He’s a self-made billionaire, not your everyday rich guy. He figured it out for himself. He made it.
At least that’s how Schultz likes to tell it.
“Schultz is a prolific and able self-mythologizer,” says Bryant Simon, author of Everything But the Coffee, a book about Starbucks. He says that self-mythology is key.
So much of Schultz’s success is about the force of his personality, of his vision, and of his story. The way Simon tells it, Schultz didn’t grow up destitute, but his beginnings were humble. Humble enough to motivate him.
“It made him tremendously ambitious,” Simon says. “It made him not want to live the economic uncertainties of his parents. And it made him want to be successful.”
When Zev Siegl, Gordon Bowker, and Jerry Baldwin were first starting out, they meant for Starbucks to be nothing more than a store—a place for people to buy coffee beans.
They never thought of Starbucks the way we all do today: as a place to drink coffee, bring your laptop, and hang out. They didn’t think of it as a brand. An empire.
But then—in the early ’80s—they meet an energetic up-and-comer: Howard Schultz.
“He goes to visit and he’s just blown away by the company,” Simon says. “And he basically sells himself to the owners of Starbucks.”
After he joins, Schultz doesn’t take long to put his own imprint on the company. He takes a trip to Italy for a trade show, and there he sees, for the first time, Italian cafés.
These tidy shops where people sit and talk, where they sip espresso and smoke cigarettes, where they read a newspaper or a book or just sit outside, on a street corner, watching the world around them. Schultz is transfixed. This is what Starbucks should be. Forget selling beans. Let’s sell that Italian café experience, right here in Seattle.
A few years go by. Schultz’s vision differs a little bit from the founders’. He leaves to start his own company, built on that Italian cafe experience, and soon enough he learns that the Starbucks founders have other dreams, other desires. They’re ready to move on to other things. But Schultz is still all in on coffee.
“So the deal was made and Howard became CEO of Starbucks and the majority owner,” Siegl says.
Pretty quickly, Simon says, Schultz put Starbucks on a trajectory of incredible growth. By 2001, Starbucks is already massive, with nearly 3,000 stores in North America and many more worldwide. It’s one of the brands that defines Seattle’s image.
The SuperSonics, meanwhile, have reached the end of an era.
George Karl is gone. So are Shawn Kemp and Detlef Schrempf. They’re still competitive, making the playoffs, but no longer a title contender. And Barry Ackerley, the longtime owner who bought the team back in 1983 for $21 million, is looking to sell. He had pushed for the renovation to Key Arena, but now he wanted out. His goal was to find someone rooted in Seattle.
And as it happened, Howard Schultz was looking to buy.
And he’s not the only one. Wally Walker is interested too. Wally has deep ties to the Sonics. He played on the 1979 championship team. Then after retiring from basketball and getting an MBA at Stanford, he ends up working for them in the ’90s, as the general manager. And as part of his contract, he got an ownership stake in the team. And now, in late 2000, he wants to put together a group to buy the whole thing.
“I was still working as general manager but then the Ackerleys—when they decided to sell—came to me,” Walker says. “And separately Howard Schultz has said, ‘We’re gonna buy a team if you want to put together a group.’ Howard, I really didn’t know him very well—I knew him some. He and I had breakfast. Said, “Well, if we’re going to put together a group, we can compete against each other or we can do it together.”
So it starts with a breakfast meeting—Walker and Schultz. And then, both guys start calling around, getting in touch with their rich-guy friends, trying to put together enough money to buy the team. Which, safe to say, was going to go for a lot more than the $21 million Ackerley paid for it back in 1983.
“And Howard’s like, ‘Well, I’ll call these five guys. I think they’re good for 20,’” Walker recalls.
Twenty million, that is.
“And I say, ‘Well, I know some guys too. You know I don’t know. But we’ll be able to raise it. No problem. This is easy.’ Well, it wasn’t easy because the world had changed again.”
They announce the deal on January 11, 2001. By two months later, the dot com bubble bursts, and the United States economy falls into a recession.
Suddenly, Howard and Wally’s rich-guy friends are a lot less rich.
“We saw some of ’em have a net worth cut in half from the time we started the conversation to the time we’re talking about closing the deal,” Walker says. “And that’s how you end up with 57 owners.”
Yeah. Fifty-seven. Minority owners. Plus Schultz, making a total of 58.
Without that many people, they wouldn’t have had the money. The economy was crashing, but NBA franchises had soared in value. Schultz’s group buys the team for $200 million. And when he does, people around Seattle are excited.
“I was indifferent to Schultz and Starbucks,” says Jason Reid, director of the documentary SonicsGate. “That was fine, I loved coffee, it made it more available, the breakfast sandwiches were good, like that was cool. But then he bought the team and I was like, ‘Oh, I’ll just go to Starbucks all the time, I’m going to, like, do everything I can to support this guy and to support this business. He came in, he saved our team, he’s the guy who will keep this team here forever.’”
Things start off pretty well. The Sonics make the playoffs in Schultz’s first year. They start working toward profitability. They’re no longer the thrilling team of the ’90s, but they’re solid. They’re stable. They also go through some rebranding. That’s always been Schultz’s genius, and he puts it to work here.
It seems like, in Schultz’s eyes, the most important thing he was bringing to the Sonics wasn’t an ownership group, a management philosophy, or a bunch of money—it was simply himself. His own genius and charm. To be fair, Schultz is an incredible salesman, a guy whose true gift is connecting with people. And one thing he really wanted to do was to hang out with the players. To be their friend.
“He wanted the organization and the players and the coaches to like him,” says Nate McMillian, who played with the Sonics until 1998 before retiring and joining the team’s coaching staff.
With some guys, it worked. But Schultz didn’t click with everyone.
“We let a knucklehead get the team and that’s what he was,” says Gary Payton, a star point guard with the team from 1989 to 2003. “You know the knucklehead didn’t know what to do with it. He tried to run a basketball team like a coffee company. You can’t run it like a coffee company. There’s no comparison.”
