TIBCO founder first Indian American major sports franchise owner.
By Global India Newswire
WASHINGTON: The Indian American community may not have a star in any of the major U.S. sports, but it finally has a legitimate big league presence. On Tuesday, the NBA Board of Governors approved the purchase of the Sacramento Kings by a group led by software mogul Vivek Ranadive.
Ranadive’s group, which includes 24 Hour Fitness founder Mark Mastrov and former Facebook executive Chris Kelly, will buy a 65 percent stake in the team for roughly $348 million.
Ranadive, who was born in Mumbai, is founder and chairman of TIBCO Software, Inc., a Palo Alto-based company that provides infrastructure software to businesses.
The 55-year-old is already a minority stakeholder in the NBA team Golden State Warriors, whose stakes now he will have to sell in order to be the majority owner of Kings.
Ranadive is the second person of South Asian origin to own a major U.S. sports franchise. Last year, Pakistani American businessman Shahid Khan purchased the NFL team Jacksonville Jaguars.
Ranadive, who, according to his bio on the TIBCO site, arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of 16, with just $50, has a bachelor’s and master’s degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard.
Ranadive is an avid basketball fan and an amateur basketball coach. His accomplishment as the coach of his daughter’s middle school basketball team was detailed by Malcolm Gladwell in a 2009 New Yorker piece.
“Thanks to entire NBA for approving sale of Kings to our organization,” Ranadive tweeted on Tuesday, the day the league approved the sale of Kings. “It is an honor & a privilege to be part of such an amazing community.”
The “amazing community” he referred to includes NBA icon and global sports legend Michael Jordan, who owns Charlotte Bobcats, and fellow IT entrepreneur Mark Cuban, owner of Dallas Mavericks.
Ranadive has said one of his dreams is to popularize basketball in India.
According to Forbes, the Kings are the 11th most valuable franchise in NBA. The current owners, the Maloof family, purchased it for $156 million in 1998.
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