Douchiest Owners in Sports Lore

Threedee said:
I'm watching the feature on the Baltimore Colts. I think we should generate a list of the biggest douchebags in the history of sports owners. This can be any team, even English football. Also, I don't want to hear guys like Steinbrenner: they only qualify if they hurt their own fanbase - not generate Yankee envy. Al Davis could qualify because he was a douche, and he did temporarily leave Oakland. I personally hold Charles Comisky in contempt, but he should still be down on the list

Robert Irsay
Art Liddell
Clay Bennett

I think Irsay has no close comparison. He ran the Colts into the ground for a solid decade before moving them. They contained to suck in Indy until he finally died. At least Bennett didn't sabotage the Sonics while they were still in Seattle.
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I think you can make no argument that Charles Comiskey was the biggest douche in the entire history of American pro sports.

My list would be...with a certain amount of bias of course.

Mike Brown. A pales shadow of his father who was the greatest head coach in the entire history of football and was a darned good owner too. During his reign of ownership his teams were consistently top 5 or 6 teams. Mike Brown is stuck in a by gone era, the NFL started making dramatic changes in terms of how the game was played, how it was marketed and how talent was evaluated. Mike Brown rejected all of those modernizations and sat back while others grew the NFL into the billion dollar annually business that it is now and then exploited the work of others in the league and exploited the town of Cincinnati and Bengals fans while providing 20 years of utter ineptitude. It wasn't until the league stepped in and threatened the sanction the franchise that Brown, reluctantly began to modernize. Today the Bengals are still largely ran like a 1950's family business instead of as a modern elite sports franchise.

But my personal pick as worst owner in my life time in terms of an owner betraying his fans is Charles Finley. At least when Isray betrayed Colts fans the Baltimore Colts had sucked for over a decade after the Great Johnny U retired. Charles Finley dismantled one of the best, if not the best Major League Baseball team of the last 50 years. This was a team that contained Vida Blue, Blue Moon Odem, Jim "Catfish" Hunter, Raleigh Fingers, Ken Holtzman, Gene Tenace, Sal Bando, Bert Campaneris, Reggie Jackson, Mike Epstein and Joe Rudi and won three consecutive world series...and was the last MLB team to do so....only to have Finley sell off the core of his teams talent after the 1975 season. Finley tried to gut the A's to pay personal debts by selling off all his best players in 1976 only to have all the trades vetoed by commissioner Bowie Kuhn. Finley then refused to offer market value contracts to his top players that he was forced to keep on an utterly demoralized team who pretty much all left via free agency anyways. He was widely regarded as the biggest douchebag in sports at the time and though most A's fans remember the early 70's fondly.....Finley is not exactly loved in Oakland.
 
Ah, yes, the man who gave us the Oakland Pathetics. Irsay had been the cause of the Colts decline, though. It looks like the current owner of the Marlins is on course to go down as a complete douche. I will give you that Finley was probably a bigger douche than Irsay, because of his blatant attempts to sell off all of the talent.
 
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