Few people will be following the action at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am this week as closely as Heidi Ueberroth. In addition to being an avid golfer and a keen fan of the sport, she is co-chairman of the Pebble Beach Company, which owns the resort at which most tournament rounds are played. Ueberroth also has an interest in the event as a director of the Monterey Peninsula Foundation, the nonprofit organization that hosts the AT&T each year.
Those are high-level posts in a high-level competition, and just the sorts of things the 57-year-old Ueberroth has been doing for much of her business life. And doing them very well.
In some ways, her successes in that realm are not surprising, for she is the daughter of Peter Ueberroth, best known for organizing the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and then serving for five years as commissioner of Major League Baseball. Being involved in the sports business was clearly in her blood.
So was working at Pebble Beach, for her father was part of a group, with Clint Eastwood and Arnold Palmer, that bought the resort and all its assets in 1999 for $820 million – and then sold minority stakes in the company to select investors at $2 million each. Upon completion of that transaction, Ueberroth the Elder assumed the role of co-chairman of the Pebble Beach Company with another lead investor, Dick Ferris, the former CEO of United Airlines. And when they stepped down from those jobs in January 2020, it was Ueberroth’s daughter Heidi and Ferris’s son Brian who took over, along with longtime Pebble Beach CEO Bill Perocchi.
To the uninitiated, Ueberroth’s ascension to that position might reek of rank nepotism. But she had spent a decade on that board by the time she succeeded her father. And she had established herself as one of the brightest minds and biggest talents in sports, having held a variety of top executive positions at the National Basketball Association over a nearly 20-year stretch. That included serving as president of its international operations, during which time she greatly expanded the NBA brand and business around the world. In addition to being praised for her management skills, Ueberroth came to be regarded as a deft deal maker. Which is one reason why members of the Chinese media took to calling her the “NBA Goddess of Wealth.”
After leaving the league in 2013, Ueberroth, who describes herself as “bicoastal” with residences in northern California and Long Island, founded Globicon, a private investment and advisory firm focused on media, sports, entertainment and hospitality. She also joined the boards of Four Seasons Hotels and Electronic Arts and became a director for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, the First Tee and the Monterey Peninsula Foundation. The fact that she received an invitation in 2019 to become a member of Augusta National also speaks volumes about her stature in the business world as well as her love of golf. Currently, she carries an handicap index of 11.6.
A few weeks before the start of this year’s AT&T, Ueberroth spoke to John Steinbreder about her work at Pebble Beach, her excitement at the U.S. Women’s Open being staged at the resort this summer (and three more times in later years), her passion for travel, the ways that her father and mother mentored her, the things she learned from the late NBA commissioner David Stern and how golf helped her break down language and culture barriers all over the world. What follows is another installment of the 19th Hole:
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