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Robert Rowling is the billionaire Dallas doesn't know(Dallas Morning News, The (KRT) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Aug. 24--Most Dallas billionaires love the limelight. Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, last year fox-trotted, mamboed and jive danced his way through Dancing With the Stars. T. Boone Pickens, former corporate raider and present-day champion of natural gas and wind power, is starring in his own campaign to wean the United States off foreign oil, testifying before Congress and appearing in television ads. Talkative tycoon Ross Perot ran for president in 1992. Even local developer and oilman Ray Hunt, who likes his privacy, occasionally speaks out on issues, such as his company's controversial oil deal in Iraq. Then there's Robert Rowling, whose estimated $6.2 billion makes him richer than them all. A 54-year-old Corpus Christi native who got his start in his father's oil and gas business, Mr. Rowling is embarking on a buying spree that may add to his fortune -- or show that even billionaires make mistakes. But don't expect to see him reveling in the spotlight. Robert Rowling is a name unfamiliar to most Texans. And he seems to like it that way. "In general, he keeps a pretty low profile," said his assistant, Laura Ruiz, in the process of telling a reporter that Mr. Rowling would not be commenting for this article. Who is he? The married father of two, living quietly in Highland Park and going to church on Sunday, has amassed a grab bag of hotels, fitness centers, oil and gas assets, financial and energy stocks, a fifth of downtown Corpus Christi real estate, even a chain of Mexican dollar stores. It adds up to a fortune that makes him the 51st-richest American, according to Forbes magazine. He's a major Republican donor, with recent donations to GOP presidential candidate John McCain. Mr. Rowling (rhymes with bowling) is vice chairman of the University of Texas' Board of Regents and chairman of the University of Texas Investment Management Co., the company that oversees more than $23 billion for the UT and Texas A&M systems. And at the helm of his holding company, TRT Holdings Inc., he continues to expand his business empire from a Las Colinas office building. He's placed recent bets on everything from hotels to a Texas bank caught up in the U.S. housing bust. He's done this all without ever getting his picture on the front page of his adopted hometown's daily newspaper. This story was pieced together using Securities and Exchange Commission filings, news accounts and Mr. Rowling's biography in the Texas Business Hall of Fame. Robert Brian Rowling, the son of a self-made oilman, was born in 1953 and grew up in Corpus Christi. He earned a degree in business administration from the University of Texas at Austin, then went off to law school at Southern Methodist University. After graduation, the newly minted lawyer embarked on a career in tax law. He lasted a year before jumping to his father's Corpus Christi company, Tana Oil and Gas Corp., in 1981. The elder Mr. Rowling, Reese, was a talented geologist, and he had built Tana into a large South Texas energy producer. Even before joining the company, Robert Rowling had spent years learning the business by looking over his father's shoulder. Oil plays Oil prices were setting new highs when Robert Rowling joined the company. The Rowlings decided it was a good time to sell the company's oil and gas reserves. Oil prices plummeted in the following years, devastating the Texas energy industry -- and the Rowlings used the opportunity to build their reserves back up. By the end of the '80s, they'd built the foundations of a fortune. In 1989, the family sold Tana's assets to Texaco Inc. for $476.5 million. Bargain hunters The Rowlings then tried their hand at other businesses, often jumping in during economic troubles to snare a bargain: --Out of the wreckage of the 1980s Texas banking crash, they bought a majority stake in Dallas-based MCorp's Corpus Christi operation in 1990. After recapitalizing it with $20 million and renaming it Corpus Christi National Bank, they sold it four years later to a precursor of Bank of America Corp. for $131 million in stock. --The Rowlings bought Omni Hotels in 1996 for about $500 million from Hong Kong-based Wharf (Holdings) Ltd. Later that year, Mr. Rowling, a devout Christian, ordered the hotels to eliminate their pornographic pay-per-view channels. He moved Omni's headquarters from New Hampshire to Corpus Christi, then to North Texas to be closer to a major airport. He soon moved here himself and now lives in a home on Beverly Drive valued by tax appraisers at $8.5 million. It's a stone's throw from the Dallas Country Club. (Mr. Rowling is an avid golfer, friends say.) --The Rowlings rebuilt Tana in the 1990s and sold it once more, this time to Unocal Corp. in 1999 for a payday north of $100 million (the exact figure was not disclosed). They also sold a pipeline company they'd built to PG&E Corp., turning a 1982 investment of $61 million into a 1996 sale for $380 million. --In 2002, Mr. Rowling formed yet another oil and gas company called Tana, which now operates in the Gulf of Mexico. He also bought Gold's Gym International Inc. in 2004 for $158 million, according to the Web site of the private equity firm that sold it to him. The unifying thread among such disparate holdings? Only Mr. Rowling knows for sure. Associates describe him as an incisive thinker, with a good sense of industry trends and market dynamics -- and a quick mind for numbers. "Bob is a strategic thinker," said James Huffines, a commercial banker in Austin with Dallas-based PlainsCapital Bank, who serves with Mr. Rowling on the UT Board of Regents. "He understands numbers backward and forward, and it's my impression that he gets involved in all of the numbers when he makes a decision." Now, amid a stock market swoon and a grinding downturn, Mr. Rowling is on the prowl again. Earlier this year, he shelled out about $139 million for a 14 percent stake in Gaylord Entertainment Co., according to a regulatory filing last month. The company's stock had fallen by more than half in the 12 months before he announced his purchase. It's risen nearly 30 percent since then. The transaction had some analysts atwitter that the tycoon might want to forge a deal between Gaylord and Omni. Others played down the possibility. "It has nothing to do with any synergy between Omni and Gaylord," said Bruce Walker, president of Source Strategies Inc., a hotel consulting firm in San Antonio. "You have a savvy hotel investor in Rowling, and he saw an opportunity." Risky purchase Mr. Rowling's purchase of a stake in Austin-based Guaranty Financial Group Inc., a bank and insurance company battered by the recent housing bust, may be riskier. Mr. Rowling is pouring about $150 million into Guaranty, which has seen its stock price drop about 70 percent this year. The transaction, which was arranged in a private placement that also involved New York billionaire Carl Icahn, is expected to give Mr. Rowling a nearly 20 percent stake in Guaranty. "We feel this investment has significant upside," Mr. Rowling said in a Guaranty news release at the time. The deal amounts to a bet that Guaranty has a profitable future despite its exposure to the devastated housing markets in California and other states. The company has posted net losses this year as executives have set aside more money to pay for bad loans. The capital infusion gained with the private placement strengthened Guaranty's balance sheet, but it remains far from clear when the company will throw off the kind of profit its backers are hoping for. "The whole [housing and economic] downturn has caught most investors and financial analysts by surprise. Can anyone really say what the bottom is?" asked Stephen Skaggs, president of the Bank Advisory Group LLC, a consulting firm in Austin. "I think more investors than not who are bottom-fishing will probably make a whole lot of money, but there are going to be some who guessed wrong." Mr. Rowling has built one of the largest fortunes in Texas by guessing right. In the worst financial crisis in decades, he's betting a recovery is close enough to once again put his money down. To see more of The Dallas Morning News, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.dallasnews.com. 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