The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (32 page)

Bobby Stillwell knew that Pickens wanted to make a big gift. But the number had to make sense, and $365 million didn’t make sense. “That was a shockingly large sum,” Stillwater explained. “Nobody went around giving that kind of money, certainly not to athletic programs.”

Over the following three months, Stillwell talked regularly with Holder. Then, in December, Pickens gave OSU athletics $6 million. He also told Stillwell he was leaning toward tacking on another $100 million. But he was planning to give the money through his will.

Privately, Holder and Stillwell agreed that Pickens should make his $100 million gift right away, not after he had died. But getting Pickens to see it that way required understanding how he thinks.

“Boone is an all-in competitor,” Stillwell said. “He goes all in on every hand. He never plays it safe. He likes high risk.”

Stillwater had a heart-to-heart with his friend.

“Boone, you’ve got a lot of money now,” he told him. “You like to play big. Why wait another twenty years when you have the money now? Why wouldn’t you want to see the results of what you give?”

“I never thought of that,” Pickens said.

The idea of being around to watch the impact that big money could have on an institution appealed to Pickens. On a broader scale, the chance to shake up the status quo in college football had a certain surface appeal. But the idea of parting with $100 million or more all at once still gave him pause.

“It’s such a large amount of money,” he told Stillwell. “It is hard to give it. Maybe the prudent thing is—”

“Screw prudent,” Stillwell said. “You don’t have to be prudent. Think of how much fun this will be and what this will mean to the students and the alumni at Oklahoma State.”

Pickens did some quick figuring. “You know, we can have a lot of fun with this,” he said. “I’m seventy-eight. I’m going to live to be ninety at least. If it takes us three to five years to get this going, I’ll still have almost ten years to have a lot of fun.”

Stillwell smiled.

“I want to kick OU’s ass,” Pickens said.

That’s what Stillwell was talking about.

“And by the way, Bobby,” Pickens said. “UT, too.”

Stillwell had deep ties to Texas and had been invited to join its board of regents. “Texas probably won’t be happy if I help arm OSU,” he said. “But I don’t give a damn.”

They both laughed.

Stillwell told Holder to rework his request from $365 million down to something more reasonable, something in the $100 million to $200 million range. Unable to think about anything else, Holder spent Christmas Day putting together a new spreadsheet.

“I tried to get down to a number that was more reasonable,” he said. “I pared it down to $165 million. And I did a spreadsheet that showed we could build this stuff and put football where it needed to be.”

He e-mailed the spreadsheet to Stillwell that evening. Days later Holder got invited back to Dallas to meet with Pickens and Stillwell. This time Holder brought along OSU’s president at the time, David Schmidly, as well as V. Burns Hargis, chairman of the board of regents. They knew Pickens had just given $6 million and was contemplating another, more sizable gift.
Neither had any sense of what was being contemplated. And Holder didn’t tell them how much he was seeking.

With Pickens and the others looking on, Holder put his spreadsheet numbers on a whiteboard in Pickens’s conference room at BP Capital’s headquarters. Then he broke down each item—building out the west end of the football stadium and adding more luxury suites, a new practice facility, new locker rooms, new training facilities and on and on.

“Now, what is it that you need to get this done?” Pickens asked after the presentation.

“One hundred sixty-five million dollars,” Holder said.

Schmidly and Hargis braced themselves.

“Okay,” Pickens said. “I’ll give $165 million.”

Schmidly and Hargis were speechless.

“They were flabbergasted,” Holder said. “This was fantasy stuff. OSU is out in the middle of nowhere. OSU was the stepchild of the conference. Our alumni can’t give large amounts of money to build beautiful stadiums. To think that someone would give our institution $165 million was shocking.”

Holder looked at Stillwell. Both men were fully aware that the balance of power in the Big 12 and across college football had just shifted. It would take a couple years to complete all the construction. And it would take a couple more years for new crops of recruits to get into the OSU system. But the Cowboys were about to become players.

SEVEN YEARS LATER

Friday, September 28, 2012, began like any other business day for Boone Pickens. The eighty-four-year-old started with a 6:15 call with his two traders. They briefed him on how the world markets had performed overnight. At 6:30 the personal trainer arrived, putting Pickens through an in-home workout. After a shower, Pickens drove himself to his Dallas office. He was at his desk by 8:00. Thirty minutes later he met face-to-face with the chief operating officer of a major transportation company. Then it was a battery of phone interviews—
Parade
magazine, a radio station in the Midwest, another magazine—and meetings: one with a political strategist to discuss House and Senate races, another with his staff to look at investment opportunities. He hustled off to the Dallas Country Club for a lunch in his honor, hosted by the chairman of the Texas Railroad Commission, then returned to his office for another round of business meetings.

But at 3:15 sharp, everything came to a screeching halt. No more calls. No more meetings. No more talk of equities, natural gas and alternative energy solutions. It was the weekend of the Oklahoma State–Texas game in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Pickens had a plane to catch.

His assistants handed him last-minute messages while following him past framed pictures and autographed footballs decorating his office walls. Each one symbolized the great returns on his investment in OSU football. In 2010 the team set a school record for wins, going 11-2, including a particularly satisfying 36–16 shellacking of Texas. In 2011, OSU went 12-1, thumping both Texas and Oklahoma and winning the conference and the Fiesta Bowl. Only Alabama and LSU finished ahead of OSU in the national rankings. Pickens had been there for every moment, having a lot more fun than even he had anticipated.

He said good-bye to his staff, hopped behind the wheel of his car and sped off. Fifteen minutes later he pulled up to the gate at a private runway entrance. He pushed a button and announced his password into an intercom. The gate opened and Pickens eased his car to a stop alongside his Gulfstream G550. His pilot and co-pilot were waiting. So were a dozen passengers, all personal friends Pickens had invited to the game—the former mayor of Dallas and his wife, a retired CEO and his wife, an old grammar school mate and his wife. Most of the couples were Boone’s age. Some were big OSU fans. A few had strong ties to the University of Texas. But guests of Boone’s knew to root for OSU.

It’s the least they could do. Boone treated game-day guests to Four Seasons hospitality. His Gulfstream—replete with leather seats, gold-plated fixtures and polished wood paneling—delivered them to Mesa Vista Ranch, a sixty-eight-thousand-acre pristine oasis that Pickens owned in the far northeastern corner of the Texas Panhandle. It’s where he went before every home game, secluded by rolling hills, bluffs and twenty-eight miles of waterways with all sorts of wildlife, including lots of quail. Guests stayed in his twenty-three-thousand-square-foot lodge. The exterior was grand and muscular—stone façade with thick wooden doors bookended by nickel-plated longhorns mounted to the exterior. But the inside was perfectly appointed—leather furniture, western artwork, cathedral ceilings.

Cocktails were at 6:30 in the great room. At 7:30 guests filed into a dimly lit dining room with screened windows and doors that bordered an outdoor patio. The tables were candlelit and covered in white tablecloths. Pickens took his place at a corner table and tapped his wineglass with a spoon.

“Welcome to Mesa Vista,” he said. “I have brought together people that are friends.”

Guests nodded, expressing thanks.

He went over the menu: largemouth bass caught earlier in the day on the ranch, risotto, ham loaf, green beans and Napa Valley wine. It was all arranged buffet-style on a nearby table.

All of this was part of the buildup to the big game. It was a weekend excursion filled with exquisite food, fine wine, great companionship and resort-like accommodations.

Saturday was game day. Pickens followed his routine. The morning was spent tooling around the ranch. While his guests shot skeet, played tennis and took a helicopter tour of the ranch, Pickens inspected the oil exploration project under way on the far corners of his property. By noon the televisions around the lodge were tuned to college football games on ESPN, ABC and CBS. Ohio State faced Michigan State in one room. West Virginia versus Baylor in another. By 4:00, Pickens had reappeared in the library wearing orange leather boots and an orange sweater vest. Everyone knew what that meant—time to head to the main event.

The Gulfstream engine purred on the ranch runway as passengers filed on board. Pickens sank into his seat and fastened his seat belt. Georgia and Tennessee were knotted up 30–30 on the flat-screen monitor at the front of the plane. Disinterested, Pickens glanced out the window at a herd of black cows grazing on prairie grass beneath a wooden windmill off the runway. The pilot invited everyone to relax. It was 178 miles to Stillwater: flight time, thirty-six minutes. At 4:30 sharp, it was wheels up.

In the nineteenth century, the American author Washington Irving visited Stillwater and described it as “a vast and glorious prairie, spreading out beneath the golden beams of an autumnal sun.” In many respects, that’s how Stillwater looked as Pickens’s jet approached Stillwater Flight Center, touching down shortly after five. Normally, the tiny regional airport was dead on weekends. But not on OSU game nights. The runway was stacked up with more than twenty private planes from Dallas, Houston, Austin, Tulsa and Wichita, all carrying well-heeled alumni from Texas and Oklahoma State. It was all part of the new economics of college football.

Pickens’s jet was the biggest plane. And the ground crew knew him by name. “Mr. Pickens, welcome back to Stillwater,” shouted a man in a green
shirt, khaki pants and earplugs, wind whipping his hair as he clutched a handheld radio. “Your van is here for you and your guests.”

Other similarly dressed workers served as ground escorts. Each smiled. The new stadium had brought more air traffic, which translated into overtime. Grateful for the work, they handed Pickens and his guests off to Jesse Martin, a stout associate athletic director standing in front of an OSU shuttle van parked on the runway.

On game day, Martin’s job revolved around Pickens and getting him where he needed to be. The drive toward campus was scenic and quiet until the stadium came into focus. At that moment the impact of Pickens’s money became obvious. Stillwater’s total population is forty-six thousand. Yet close to sixty thousand people decked out in orange and black were trudging toward the stadium entrances. And those were just the ones with tickets. Thousands more had put down blankets and set up lawn chairs in the surrounding lots. They were in overalls and cowboy hats, Wrangler jeans and OSU sweatshirts. Smoke rose from the burgers and hot dogs on their barbecues and hibachis. Mini satellite dishes and televisions plugged into portable generators enabled them to see the game as their grass-stained kids tossed footballs. They had come to campus to be part of the experience.

Martin snaked the shuttle around pedestrians, easing to a stop at the only parking space right next to the stadium’s main entrance. The sign above the space read
GAME DAY PARKING. T. BOONE PICKENS
. Moments later, Pickens was inside the stadium on a private elevator that delivered him and his guests to the skybox level. It was bustling with the luxury-suites crowd—prestigious alumni, big donors, corporate executives, real estate developers, construction contractors, bankers and lawyers. There were ice cream and popcorn vendors, bartenders, waiters, waitresses and cheerleaders. Everything was pristine—the Italian tile, the recessed lights, the mahogany trim around the individual suite entrances.