Red McCombs, a former Texas used car dealer who became a multi-millionaire entrepreneur by venturing into a string of successful businesses, including media giant Clear Channel Communications and several professional sports teams, died Sunday at his home in San Antonio. He was 95 years old.
His family announced his death but did not state the cause.
Mr. McCombs was a flamboyant wheeler-dealer who created more than 400 companies in a wide variety of industries, including oil, real estate, livestock, insurance, movies and racehorses, often selling them at a substantial profit. At various times he owned a professional football team, the Minnesota Vikings, and two professional basketball teams, the San Antonio Spurs and the Denver Nuggets.
But his heart was in the automobile business, where he began as a prominent automobile salesman in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1950. He started his own dealership and later expanded it into a network that their peak in 1998 included more. more than 100 retail locations, making it the largest auto dealership in Texas and the sixth largest in the United States.
“I was an entrepreneur before I knew what the word was and certainly before I could write it,” Mr. McCombs in a radio interview in 2006. “New deals, new opportunities, new ventures are always part of my life.”
In the 1950s, Mr. McCombs, a University of Texas alumnus and Longhorns football fan, turned his love of sports into ownership of a minor league baseball team in Corpus Christi.
He then purchased the Dallas Chaparrals from the former American Basketball Association in 1973, moved the team to San Antonio for the 1973-74 season and changed its name to the Spurs.
When the ABA and NBA merged in 1976, he played a key role in getting the Spurs included in the merger. He sold the team in 1982 and acquired the Nuggets, only to sell that franchise in 1985 for $19 million, nearly double what he had paid for it. He then bought the Spurs back for $47 million before selling them in 1993 for $75 million (about $157 million in today’s money).
In a statement Monday, NBA commissioner Adam Silver called Mr. McCombs of “a driving force in creating the modern NBA.”
In 1998, Mr. McCombs bought the NFL’s Minnesota Vikings for $246 million, but grew impatient with futile attempts to build a new stadium for the team in the Minneapolis area. He sold the Vikings for $600 million in 2005.
He also played a key role in bringing Formula 1 racing to Austin by investing in the Circuit of the Americas, the Austin track that has hosted the annual United States Grand Prix since 2012.
In a statement Monday, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones called Mr. McCombs “a true Texas titan in sports, media, business and philanthropy” who had “followed his dreams.”
The most profitable company of Mr. McCombs was Clear Channel, which he co-founded with Lowry Mays in 1972, when they bought a local radio station in San Antonio, KEEZ-FM, for $125,000. (Mr. Mays died in September at age 87.)
The two men went on to acquire radio stations, then television stations and billboards across the country. With the help of the Federal Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allowed media conglomerates to own an unlimited number of stations, they made the company the largest owner of radio stations in the world; by 2000, Clear Channel had more than 1,200.
The company eventually expanded into event promotion, live music and sports management. Mr. Lowry oversaw the business, but Mr. McCombs was instrumental in seizing expansion opportunities, according to John Hogan, the company’s former president and CEO.
“He strongly supported the idea that when telecommunications regulations changed in 1996, we had to move quickly and aggressively, and that those who were slow and hesitant would be left behind,” Mr. Hogan in an interview for this obituary. .
Although the company was often criticized for homogenizing radio programming in a way that removed much of the local flavor of independent radio stations, the formula was extremely profitable. When Mr. Lowry began to see signs that the Internet would disrupt his well-oiled strategy, he and Mr. McCombs sold the company in 2006 for $17.9 billion to a private equity group led by Bain Capital Partners and Thomas H. Lee Partners. As part of the deal, the group agreed to assume more than $8 billion in the company’s debt.
The timing was perfect to sell. Clear Channel’s fortunes plummeted almost immediately. In 2014, the company split into Clear Channel Outdoor, for the billboard business, and iHeartMedia, for radio stations and other media properties.
Billy Joe McCombs was born in the small West Texas town of Spur on October 19, 1927. His father, Willie Nathan McCombs, was a valet driver and later an auto mechanic. His mother, Gladys McCombs, came from a farming family.
Billy, whose red hair earned him the lifelong nickname “Red,” showed an entrepreneurial bent at the age of 9, when he began selling bags of peanuts to migrant cotton pickers. He was 15 when his family moved to Corpus Christi, where he became a standout high school football player, eventually earning a scholarship to Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. He left college to serve in the Army for two years before returning and enrolling at the University of Texas in 1948 on the GI Bill.
But he dropped out to start a business career. He got a job at the local Ford dealership in Corpus Christi and realized he had found his calling. At just 22 years old, he set himself the goal of selling one car a day and, by his own account, accomplished the feat three years in a row.
In 1950, he married Charline Hamblin, who died in 2019 at age 91. He is survived by his three daughters, Lynda McCombs, Marsha Shields and Connie McNab; eight grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren.
After selling new cars for several years, Mr. McCombs realized he could make more money selling used cars, he wrote in his autobiography, “Big Red: Memoirs of a Texas Entrepreneur and Philanthropist” (2010). New cars, he thought, were all the same, but “every used car is unique” and had a story to tell.
“People like stories about things they might be interested in buying,” he wrote.
In 1957, at the age of 29, he opened his first new car dealership in Corpus Christi. But he sold Edsels, a Ford brand that would become synonymous with automotive failure. Although he sold many cars, he said, he knew the brand would not survive. (The Edsel was discontinued in 1959.)
“I was selling it myself and I could see the resistance,” he said. “We had to hook everyone up, and after I sold all my friends, I had nowhere to go. It was time to move on.”
He moved to San Antonio in 1958 and there befriended Mr. Mays. The two soon began buying up radio stations, eventually turning Clear Channel Communications into a behemoth. Mr. McCombs knew the power of radio and outdoor advertising from his experience with car dealerships.
He did his own radio and television commercials for 25 years, becoming a Texas celebrity along the way. He struggled for years with alcoholism and almost died at age 48 after a severe case of hepatitis. He then gave up alcohol and often spoke candidly about his addiction.
In the year 2000, Mr. McCombs and his wife gave a $50 million gift to the University of Texas business school, the largest donation in the school’s history at the time. It was renamed the McCombs School of Business. He and his wife also gave $30 million to the university’s MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
Mr. McCombs was a major donor to Republican politicians, including Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and President Donald J. Trump.
Of all his business achievements, Clear Channel was his most significant, Mr. McCombs in his autobiography. “I never thought I could ever have the opportunity to do something like Clear Channel,” he wrote. “That’s why I don’t really believe in long-term plans. There was no way I could have planned for Clear Channel.”
