In 1988, Paul Allen, who founded Microsoft alongside Bill Gates, bought the Trail Blazers for $70 million. Seated behind the baseline during games and wearing a boyish grin verging on rapturous, he took great joy in the franchise. So much so that he evangelized sports ownership to his friend and coworker. Steve Ballmer recalls that, again and again, Allen gushed to him,
Says Ballmer: “I saw what that meant to him.” Ballmer was too busy to heed Allen’s suggestion, serving, as he was, as CEO of Microsoft. But in 2014, Ballmer retired. Just a few months later, the Clippers came on the block when the franchise’s noxious owner, Donald Sterling, was essentially forced to part with the team.
This was no fire sale. Ballmer paid $2 billion. For the perennially cursed Clippers. Three years after the 76ers had sold for $280 million. And the same year the Bucks sold for $550 million. If this purchase reset the market for NBA teams, so be it. Ballmer had his team.
Over the past decade, odds are good you have seen Ballmer during a game. From his perch—not courtside nor cocooned in a suite but behind the basket, à la Allen, who died in 2018—Ballmer fixes his eyes on the court, overtaxes his larynx and takes it all in… as his phone rests in his pocket. “I try,” Ballmer says, “to be present.”