Talk to Ted Leonsis and it quickly becomes clear that the titan of Washington, D.C., sports thinks big. The Potomac resident has always been at the forefront of change. As an undergraduate in the 1970s at Georgetown University, he says, he used the only computer on campus to build an algorithm to determine when Ernest Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea. In his 20s, he founded LIST, a personal computing magazine that he sold two years later for millions. After he started and sold another company, this one to America Online, he joined AOL and helped turn it into a behemoth. He sent AOL’s first Instant Message, in 1993, to his wife, Lynn: “Don’t be scared … it is me. Love you and miss you.”
“He really anticipates where things are going, not just next year, but five years and 10 years from now. So he is always trying to push the envelope,” says his son, Zach, president of media and new enterprises at Monumental Sports & Entertainment, his father’s umbrella company that owns the NBA’s Wizards, WNBA’s Mystics and NHL’s Capitals, among other properties. “He lives by a motto of, ‘If you are not growing and advancing, you’re dying.’ ”
ABOUT
From: Brooklyn, New York
Lives in: Potomac
Age: 68
College: Bachelor’s degree in American studies from Georgetown University
Occupation: Founder, chairman, managing partner and chief executive officer of Monumental Sports & Entertainment. Previously president and vice chairman of AOL.
Family: Wife, Lynn; son, Zach, 35; daughter, Elle, 31
Ted Leonsis, who chairs both the NBA and NHL media committees, thought he was again ahead of the curve when he announced at a splashy press conference last December that he was moving his Wizards and Caps across the Potomac River to a soon-to-be-built entertainment district. It would, he envisioned, enrich the community and the teams—and, presumably, himself. Leonsis, who doesn’t so much answer questions as use them as launching pads to explore much larger ideas, has long championed the idea that the DMV—the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia—are not three distinct entities, but rather one massive “super community” that runs from Delaware south to Richmond.
“Worldwide, there are going to be 10 super-cities,” he says. “There’ll be four in North America. We have the ingredients: the airports, the industry, the sports teams, the universities. But you need to pull it all together. We need to be one of those four.”
Evidently it’s a concept that some have yet to embrace, which makes it easy to see why he was at least partially blindsided by heavy opposition to the move to Virginia. Longtime Washington Times sports columnist Thom Loverro wrote that Leonsis’ performance at the press conference “came off like Transparent Ted was dancing on the District’s grave.”
Ouch.
When politics and public opinion quashed the plan 15 weeks later, it was a rare loss for a man not used to coming up short, at least not off the court. The day after the Virginia deal died, Monumental announced that it had reached an agreement with the District in which the city will spend more than $500 million to keep the Wizards and Capitals at an eventually renovated Capital One Arena in Chinatown. (The company says it plans to spend at least $300 million on the project as well.)
“If we hadn’t decided to try to go to Virginia, I don’t think that the city would have reacted positively the way they [did] to create a next-generation kind of partnership,” Leonsis says. “Because it’s not just about the money to rehab the building. There’s a new crime bill that was passed. There’s a new organizational structure put in place around what should we do in downtown D.C. The Metro has been reinvigorated, and we’re all working together to try and restart, reimagine, reinvigorate downtown D.C. So I think we will look back at this and see it was very catalytic to big change in D.C.”
Bethesda Magazine interviewed Leonsis at his office in Capital One Arena in November, emailed him follow-up questions in January, and spoke with him via Zoom in May. The interviews have been combined and lightly edited for clarity and length.
What went wrong with the Virginia deal?
I remember when I had my last meeting with [Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser]. I said, ‘This is going to this committee in Virginia, and I’ve been told that when they approve something—it’s all in private, it’s not open to the public—that 100% of the time the deal has gone through. And that’s why this is being announced this week. The governor has confidence in this. But we should stay close because you never know what’s going to happen.’ I also told the mayor, ‘I’m not going anywhere. My investment company Revolution is focused on D.C., [as is] my philanthropy at Georgetown and my work with D.C. [College Access Program].’ I said to the mayor, ‘Let’s be nice, let’s take the high road.’
I was very surprised by the politics in Virginia. I had always thought of Virginia as a well-managed, business-focused state. Now I can say that it was easier and more rational to do business with the mayor and the council in D.C. than it was to deal with people in Virginia. I had one meeting with [Virginia state Sen. L. Louise Lucas] and was told, ‘Don’t tell anybody about the meeting. No tweeting. No grandstanding.’ And I got home that night and she put up a tweet of a graveyard with [the arena deal] being buried in it. [Laughs]
That was not a typical way of recruiting a $6 billion company that would drive a lot of revenues for the state. It was surprising. My belief is that policy and partnership will lead to prosperity, and we were not getting that in Virginia. The mayor did a great job, and I’m proud of her for saying, ‘You shouldn’t leave. Here’s what we can do for you. Here’s how we can work together.’ And so they won the deal fair and square, and Virginia lost the deal.
Did you anticipate the level of criticism you were going to take when you announced the move?
No. I think I underestimated, ‘You’re abandoning D.C.,’ because I really didn’t believe that. This 70-acre plot of land of which we were taking the first 12 acres is positioned as being right across from Washington National Airport. And the publication that was covering this the most was the Washington Business Journal, and they’re headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. And so I misjudged, ‘You’re abandoning Washington by moving 3½ miles away.’ And I was wrong in that. So, you know, lesson learned.
When you read or heard some of those criticisms, did it hurt personally?
I’m a grown-up. I understand the game. I think I’ll look back at this year and say, ‘Let’s see. You had three teams make the playoffs. You got a deal with the city for $500-plus million and a partnership and services agreement to move forward. Your Cava investment in a D.C.-based company was the No. 1 IPO for the year. … Your family’s healthy. You have another grandchild on the way.’ I had a hell of a great year.
But I understand that some people in the media felt this was a juicy subject to go after. I have to live with it, and I have to live with these people and communicate with these people. And everyone has their problems. I’ll use, as an example, Bradley Beal. He was one of our [Wizards] players. He had a no-trade contract, and he wanted to be traded. He went to Phoenix. When we announced we were moving, he found it necessary to get online and say, ‘You’re making a big mistake. You shouldn’t be moving.’ I thought that was gratuitous, but I didn’t say anything. They made the playoffs and got swept in the first round. And there’s a lot of criticism of Bradley Beal. That’s how life is, right? You can criticize. Can you take the criticism back? It’s the world we live in.
There are many different ways to make money—you know a lot of them. Why sports?
It’s not about money. I think the social responsibility and the higher calling of sports are to bring a community closer together.
The making of these memories between fathers and sons, that was ingrained in me really early. I was a very poor kid growing up in Brooklyn, New York. My dad was a waiter. On occasion, I’d get to go to a Mets game. Occasionally, I’d get to go to a Jets game. When the Mets won the World Series [in 1969], we lived in an apartment house and people poured out and were beeping their horns and hugging. It’s indelible. If you don’t understand that part of the equation, you won’t be a good owner.
We bring 3 million people a year into [Capital One Arena]. A third are from D.C., a third are from Maryland, a third are from Virginia. When we won the Stanley Cup [in 2018], we’d go on the road and open up the arena. Twenty thousand people would come in and watch the game on television. Fifty thousand people were outside watching the game. There was no crime. Love was in the air.
When we had our parade when we won the Stanley Cup, there were [hundreds of thousands of] people wearing red along the National Mall. It was the most politically, socially divided our community had ever been. We were the only thing anyone agreed on. I won’t define my ownership of teams on what’s the valuation of the team. It’ll be, what impact did we have on the community and how many rings did you win?
Are you interested in buying the Nationals?
I have high interest in consolidating sports teams in our region. It can include the Nationals. It can include D.C. United. The media landscape has changed dramatically over the last five years. And media is a major revenue driver for teams and leagues. I bought our network from Comcast. It’s now called the Monumental Sports Network. It’s available on cable, but we’ve gone direct to consumer, where people can subscribe to watch the game who don’t have cable, which is an imperative because cable subscriptions are almost down 50% because young people don’t want to be tethered to a cable. They’re wireless and consume media differently. So if you want to go direct to consumer, you’re going to be in a subscription business.
Owning a baseball team would double the amount of games and be year-round. You can see from a business standpoint, that’s important. But why it’s important for the team is, how can you define yourself as a big market team? How can you attract free agents? How can you keep really good young players from going somewhere else? Which we have proven we do with my teams. Alex Ovechkin didn’t leave to go to a hockey market. He stayed and made it a hockey market. John Wall, Bradley Beal, the first-generation players that we drafted very high in our rebuild, they didn’t go and leave us in free agency. We were able to pay them.
“I think I underestimated ‘You’re abandoning D.C.,’ because I really didn’t believe that.”
Ted Leonsis
So I look at the business side as a way to generate the resources and dollars to position us as a big, important market, where I think we should be. We want to be a destination where players want to come, and you need to have the resources to do it.
We don’t want to buy a baseball team so I can get programming on the network. We want to buy a team to get programming on the network to build a big business to invest into each of the teams so that we can win and compete for championships. Fans really reject the notion of, we can’t compete with the New York Yankees, we can’t compete with the Montreal Canadiens. If you get tainted with that as an ownership group, it’s very hard to bounce back from.
How’d you find your way to Georgetown University as an undergraduate?
We moved from Brooklyn to Lowell, Massachusetts, my junior year in high school. My neighborhood in Brooklyn was getting very drug-ridden and violent. I didn’t have a car, so I had someone drop me off at the library to try and find books on how to make money. I found a book on landscaping, and it had a section on how to mow lawns. There was an area in walking distance from us with big houses and lawns. And I literally knocked on people’s doors. Can you imagine doing something like that today?
People would answer. This one man answered on a Saturday, and I introduced myself and said, ‘I’m looking to work for the summer. I thought maybe you’d consider me mowing your lawn.’ He was kind of taken aback and said, ‘Have you ever mowed a lawn?’ I said, ‘No, but I’ve read the book.’ He laughed and said, ‘I’m proud of you for knocking on the door. You got a job.’ Every week I would mow his lawn. At the end of the summer he said, ‘Are you thinking of going to college?’ I said, ‘Well, yes and no. No one in my family’s gone to college. Maybe I’ll go to a community college.’ He said, ‘Well, I’m involved with Georgetown.’ I had no idea where it was. He said, ‘I’ll get you some info.’ And I’ll never forget—it was a card that had a pen-and-ink drawing on the front. On the back you filled out your name and address, and they would send you the application. Nothing online, obviously. A couple of weeks later I got this packet of information. I filled out the application.
“I came from humble beginnings, and being the first in my family to attend college changed my life’s trajectory. I want to help to do that for others.”
Ted Leonsis
He did a letter of recommendation, and I was accepted at Georgetown. The first time I ever came to Washington, D.C., was the first time I ever saw the university. I got off a Greyhound bus on New York Avenue, got in a taxi with my two duffel bags, drove up M Street and went, ‘Wow.’ I mean, it was awesome.
I went to my first Caps game as a student at Georgetown in 1974. I started my company in Florida, but I moved back here full time in 1992, when AOL bought my company. This is home.
Let’s talk about the Wizards. Do you use the word ‘rebuilding’ to describe what they’re going through?
Yeah. I’m not afraid of saying rebuild.
How tough has it been to watch the losing?
Well, we were losing a lot the last two seasons. Winning in sports is the hardest achievement in business. The reason it’s so hard to win a championship, if that’s what you define your success as, is the alchemy of having the right infrastructure: minor league system, development system, assistant coaches, trainers, head coach, general manager. Just bringing all those parts of an organization together. And then health. You can have the best load management systems, nutritionists, and then a player gets hurt. If it’s a star player, it’s very hard to replace that talent.
I have [12] championship rings. We’ve won five [American Hockey League] championships with Hershey. We won the Stanley Cup in ’18. In the WNBA, the Mystics won a championship. [The video game] NBA 2K—[esports are] relatively new, but it’s on ESPN, professional players—we won back-to-back championships. We brought arena football back to the community. We had a team in Baltimore and a team here where we won the championship.
When we don’t make the playoffs, I feel great social responsibility. I let the fans down, right? Because they’re investing so much time, so much passion, so much money. And you’re totally aligned in what you want as your outcome. But there can only be one winner, and everyone else is a loser. So my goal is to make playoff-caliber teams. Sometimes when I say we want to make the playoffs, I get criticized. ‘He only wants to make the playoffs.’ I go, ‘Well, last time I looked, the only way you can win a Stanley Cup or an NBA championship is to qualify for the playoffs.’
The last few years with the Wizards we thought we had playoff-caliber teams with highly compensated players, highly compensated coaches, great infrastructure, but the team wasn’t getting there. So you say, ‘We got to try something different.’
It’s interesting when people want rebuilds. I’ve been through rebuilds with the Caps and the first time with the Wizards. They’re really hard and painful, and they force you to sit through interviews like this. [Laughs]
There’s been a lot of publicity around the Qatar Investment Authority’s reported $200 million investment in Monumental Sports, which was the first of its kind in the major American professional leagues. How do you respond to critics who say that you are enabling Qatar to bolster its international reputation through sportswashing?
There’s misinformation on what this deal is, so I appreciate the chance to clear it up. Institutional investors, like QIA, are highly regulated by the leagues and have zero visibility into our day-to-day operations. They are passive investors, not partners.
They view our business as a great long-term asset which will accrue value over long periods of time. So that’s not an applicable concept to how our relationship with QIA is structured.
What is your philosophy on and the current focus of your philanthropy?
We must leave things better than we found them and give more than we take. I try to lead this company as a business committed to a double bottom line—fiscally responsible and socially responsible.
Through my Leonsis Family Foundation, the Monumental Sports & Entertainment Foundation, and direct personal giving, I’m actively involved with dozens of nonprofits. Many, like D.C. Central Kitchen and the Capital Area Food Bank, are focused on stopping the cycle of hunger and poverty.
But where I really want to make an impact is in helping students gain admission [to] and then graduate from college. I came from humble beginnings, and being the first in my family to attend college changed my life’s trajectory. I want to help to do that for others. I serve as board chair of the D.C. College Access Program [DC-CAP], which has fostered 14,000 graduates and awarded $55 million in scholarships to D.C. students. We are trying to break the cycle of poverty by getting first-generation, underserved children to graduate from high school and then go to and graduate from college. We have a very dynamic program where we help our students prepare for college. … Our goal is to remove all angst related to the cost of college for these students and their families.
We began a partnership with UMass Lowell, the college [in the] town where I lived with my parents before I came to D.C. to attend Georgetown. Last year we saw the first group of DC-CAP students at UMass Lowell make it to graduation. Nineteen of the 20 original students graduated, which was breathtakingly successful. They are taking demanding classes, so we really celebrate that.
Why did you move your personal residence from Great Falls, Virginia, to Montgomery County?
We bought the Marwood estate [in Potomac in 2011], and my wife brought it back to its grandeur, if you will. I was very touched and moved by the history of it. A member of the Pulitzer family built it, and then Joseph Kennedy lived there. Then the home became FDR’s Summer White House. It’s part of the historic register.
We have the greatest place in that the Potomac River comes right down to our house, and then it turns and goes directly to Great Falls, Virginia. You sit outside and you can hear the water. It’s beautiful. It’s spectacular. My grandchildren were here with my daughter and her husband from London. We took the grandkids and we went to [Great Falls Park]. Because I’m [over] 65, they sold me a national park card for $20. I can now visit every national park. I thought that was funny.
It’s like you’re way out in the country; there’s peace, there’s solitude, there’s natural beauty. And then you can go to your little town. I’m extroverted. I know all my neighbors. I get my beard trim at George’s barbershop [in Potomac Village]. It hasn’t changed since the ’70s. I have found Maryland to be a fantastic place. We’ve been there now 10 years.
Do you think about legacy? And if so, what would you want yours to be?
I won’t be around to read my obituary. But I hope the obituary in 25 years is, he won multiple Stanley Cups and championships, but he’s best known for helping 10,000 kids graduate from college debt-free. I guarantee you in my obituary that I was going to move [the teams] to Virginia will never be mentioned.
In 1983, after a scary incident in a plane, you wrote a list of 101 things to do in your lifetime. How many are you up to?
Ninety-two.
Have you gotten a hole-in-one yet?
No, and I swear I was just thinking of that. Going to outer space? That’s doable. Working on the list has been fun. I don’t want to define myself on it.
Are you looking into going to space?
This is funny. Richard Branson read an article that had the list. I had met him at a couple of things. My assistant says, ‘Richard Branson wants to talk to you tomorrow.’ This was like [a year and a half] ago. He goes, ‘I hear you want to go in outer space.’ I go, ‘Oh yeah, you saw that?’ He goes, ‘You can come with me because I’m going.’ And I go, ‘Wow, that’s fantastic, thanks.’ He goes, ‘It’s $60 million.’ Just threw that out. ‘And you have to send me 30 right away to reserve your space. And if you fail the physical it’s nonrefundable.’
I think I’m going to wait.
Mike Unger is a writer and editor who grew up in Montgomery County and lives in Baltimore.
This story appears in the September/October 2024 issue of Bethesda Magazine.
