Washington Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke, who built the NFL franchise into a three-time Super Bowl champion and was nearing completion of a new stadium in suburban Maryland, died Sunday after suffering a heart attack at his home in Washington. He was 84.
Cooke, who had a long history of heart and respiratory problems, was pronounced dead at George Washington University Hospital at 12:09 p.m. after collapsing in his library Sunday morning, said Dr. Robert Shesser, the chief of GWU’s emergency room.
With Cooke at the hospital were his wife, Marlena Ramallo Cooke, his son John, his daughter-in-law and his grandson. Funeral arrangements were incomplete Sunday.
Redskins officials and Cooke aides said they expected little disruption in overall management of the team or the final phases of the $175 million, 78,600-seat stadium in suburban Landover, Md.
Team President John Kent Cooke, the owner’s son, has told associates he intends to keep the Redskins in the family and assume control of day-to-day operations. The younger Cooke has held wide-ranging authority over the team for the past several years; he declined comment Sunday and instructed his staff and all coaches to refrain from publicly discussing his father’s death.
Born Oct. 25, 1912, in Hamilton, Ontario, Cooke sold encyclopedias during the Depression before making his fortune in radio and television companies, real estate and newspaper publishing.
His net worth when he died was estimated at $825 million, earning him the 170th spot on the most recent Forbes Magazine’s 400 Richest Americans List.
The flamboyant Cooke suffered fools and uncooperative politicos unkindly. He was a contradictory figure, a big ego in a diminutive body, a deal-maker who got his way by bullying, cajoling and caressing – sometimes all at once.
Maryland Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr., who negotiated with Cooke, recalled his sizable ego. Miller said he once declined an invitation to sit in Cooke’s exclusive box in Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium, but promised to look up at Cooke from his own end-zone seats.
“There’s probably 40,000 people who look up at you,” Miller recalled telling Cooke.
Cooke replied: “No, all 58,000 look up: I’m part of the show.”
Joe Gibbs, who coached all three of Cooke’s Super Bowl champion teams, Sunday credited Cooke with making Gibbs a professional head coach for the first time 16 years ago.
“I was 40 years old and no one took a chance on me,” Gibbs said Sunday from Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth, where the racing team he owns was competing in the Interstate Batteries 500. “That showed the kind of guts he had. He gambled and went with me, a nobody.”
Before his health began to fail, Cooke was a regular at Redskin Park, the team’s practice facility, visiting at least twice a week. He frequently drove his own black BMW into his reserved parking spot, and then, accompanied by his spaniel Coco, would drive a golf cart down to the field area to watch the team practice.
He would sit through bitterly cold days and sweltering heat, commenting on virtually every play and every player. He would chide General Manager Charley Casserly for draft choices that displeased him and compliment him for high-performance players.
Once, when a coach asked, “What are your dreams, Mr. Cooke?” the owner snapped: “I don’t dream. I do.”
In an era when more and more teams are owned by corporations and managed by faceless bureaucrats, Cooke was a prone-to-temper, effusive-in-his-praise patriarch of a family-run team. And said so himself.
“If there is anything more exciting, more invigorating, more tantalizing, more worrisome, more ebullient in the world than owning a franchise like the Washington Redskins, I wish someone would tell me what it is,” Cooke said recently. “It is the best fun there is.”
During a 1992 interview, after announcing plans to build a new stadium, Cooke touched briefly on his own mortality, a subject he customarily avoided.
“I want to be buried in a burgundy-and-gold coffin,” he said. “And when I’m going, someone named Cooke is going to own the team. And when he’s gone, someone else named Cooke is going to run the team.”
