Red McCombs
The 78-year-old San Antonio salesman—is there any better way to describe him?—on football, cars, radio, cattle, and giving away his millions.
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You don’t think so?
No. Randy Moss unfortunately made a few gaffes that were so publicized that we lost fans who didn’t know the difference and didn’t go to games, who just saw what he said and thought, “This guy is a jerk.” Well, he’s not a jerk. He’s a down-to-earth, solid, caring person. I loved having Randy Moss every season. And I didn’t have any sense that in trading Randy Moss I would be able to get equal value for him, because there is no other player who has the ability that he has. He’s truly one of the few players at any level who can win a game by himself.
Come back to San Antonio for a second. Do you think your hometown will ever get an NFL team?
San Antonio could very well support an NFL team. But the league has pretty much said that it wants to go to L.A. next, for obvious reasons, and it doesn’t really want to expand beyond the 32 teams it has—that probably favors some other team moving into L.A. So I think it’s going to be difficult for San Antonio to get one. I think an ideal spot for an NFL team in San Antonio, by the way, is between New Braunfels and San Marcos, which would tie the Austin and San Antonio markets together.
Football has been only a part of your business interests. What about your car dealerships? You had the number one dealership group in San Antonio in 2004, and you’ve been at this a long time.
Cars and car dealerships are the basis of my business. That was the foundation of everything I do. But it has not been, in the scope of the things that I do now, a significant factor in my business world for the past fifteen years and certainly hasn’t been in the past five or six.
So as the percentage of all the money that comes in the door from the various interests you have, cars would represent how much these days?
Less than 10 percent. But outside of sports, it’s still my favorite business, and I never get far away from it. We have eight franchises in San Antonio. Three years ago, on my seventy-fifth birthday, we turned the responsibility for them over to my daughter Marsha Shields. She’s doing very well, I might say. She likes that business a lot. Of course, she’s been raised in it all her life.
What about the radio business? You still have a significant stake in Clear Channel, which I just heard was down 12 or 13 percent in revenue in the second quarter of this year.
It puts us a little off for the year, but we have a lot of free cash flowing. And yet the stock market has not recognized the value that we feel has been there the last couple of years, so we’re in the process of breaking the company into three companies: Radio would be one; outdoor [billboard advertising] would be one; and entertainment [concert venues and concert promotions and booking] would be one.
You’re aware, of course, of what’s been written over the years about Clear Channel. Somebody coming from another planet who read those stories would think, “Oh, my God, this has to be one of the worst companies in the world!” Why has Clear Channel been such a magnet for criticism?
Because we’re so much better than everybody else in that business. And most of the criticism comes from our competitors, not our customers. Hey, let’s face it. It’s a huge entity. We wake up every day and turn on a microphone that talks to about half the people in the United States.
Okay, on to cattle. Are your holdings a serious part of your business or are they a hobby?
It is not a hobby with me. This is going to make me sound like a money-grubbing kind of guy, but if it didn’t work financially, I might have 5 or 6 [head] instead of 250. But it is a good business. I’ve been in it since 1978, and I enjoy it very much.
What percentage of your interests does cattle represent?
About 7 to 8 percent.
So 7 or 8 percent on cattle, 10 percent on cars—
I’ve got a lot of time left over.
Where is the bulk of it going?
I’ve spent the bulk of my time the last two years looking for new ventures, and I’ve put private equity into four start-up companies, all different types of businesses. There’s also my real estate development business. I’ve always been in that business, but I’ve paid more attention to it in the last few years because we’re in such a red-hot market in Texas. And then I’ve been in the oil business for 35 years. Our energy company is headquartered in Houston. We have fourteen employees, so we’re not a big outfit. But we drill about sixty wells a year. We’re pretty active.
I’m guessing that the past eighteen months have been pretty good for you in the energy biz.
Well, prices doubling in the last two years—that would make any business very good.
Has anyone ever said to you, “You have, from a professional standpoint, ADD”? Because you have so many different interests, and not all of them are necessarily compatible.
It’s a big challenge, but it’s not about any attention deficit. I’ve always known people to be able to totally focus on anything at any given moment, and it doesn’t take that much time, really, to make decisions, to decide what you’re going to do. That doesn’t mean there aren’t problems and issues and all. In a given day, with all these various entities, I probably spend about a third of my time on problems at one place or another. I spend about a third of my time looking for new opportunities, and I spend about a third of my time on community activities.
You’re one of the richest men in the world. You’ve built a long, wonderful life from humble beginnings. You have the blessings of health and family. You don’t have to do any of this. Why not sit on your duff?
About the time I was ten years old, I recognized that I had such great curiosity for the way business worked, and I was so fascinated with all aspects of it that it was like, “I have to try some of that, I have to try some of this, and it doesn’t mean I’ll be successful at everything.” I’ve been pretty fortunate, because enough of it has worked that it gives me a pretty full day. I’ve had my failures and my mistakes. I don’t dwell on them. If I have something that’s not going well, and I feel like I’ve done as good with it as I expected to do and I still didn’t get the desired results, I get out of it. So I don’t have anything dragging me down at any given time. I think that attitude is everything, and I want to feel positive about all the things that I do and about all the people that I see and meet. I don’t like negative vibes.
What kind of hours do you put in?
I’m not a workaholic, and I never have been. I work about 60 hours a week.
To a lot of people, 60 hours a week is workaholic territory.
That’s 10 hours a day. God gives us 24 hours a day, and he created all of us equal. All of us get exactly the same time. To take 10 hours out of that and try to make a contribution in some way or another still gives you a lot of time left.
But why contribute to the University of Texas or Southwestern University or other beneficiaries of your generosity? Why give away your millions?
I was raised by parents who were very loving and caring and sharing. Growing up, I watched my dad make 25 bucks a week. He was an auto mechanic in Spur. He would come home every Saturday night with his pay envelope, and my mother would open it up to find $24.75 cash in there. She would take out $2.50 immediately and put it in an envelope for the First Baptist Church. In addition to that, if anyone in our little town had problems or issues or setbacks or whatever, my mom and my dad always, in whatever way they could, offered to help and did help. So I was raised in that atmosphere. And Charline [his wife] and I have always shared our resources. Of course, in the last ten or fifteen years, when those resources have a lot of zeros behind them, it gets more attention.
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