Blue Jays Owner And Media Pioneer Ted Rogers Passes Away At 75

Ted Rogers Passes Away At The Age Of 75

BUILDING AN EMPIRE: The NATIONAL POST's Theresa Tedesco writes Rogers "built a huge conglomerate of telephones, cable television, magazines and sports [franchises] by borrowing dizzying amounts of money." Few Canadian "corporate titans have bet their businesses as often -- and in diversified sectors -- and succeeded as the incorrigible" Rogers. RCI, worth just over C$18B, operates Canada's "largest wireless carrier, its largest cable provider, 52 AM and FM radio stations, 70 consumer and trade magazines, including Chatelaine and Maclean's, the OMNI multicultural television stations, Rogers Sportsnet and Citytv networks, The Shopping Channel," the Blue Jays and Rogers Centre. Rogers, whose estimated personal wealth of C$7.6B makes him the "second richest Canadian," has a business school named after him at Toronto's Ryerson Univ. and was "trying to lure" an NFL team to the city. Univ. of Toronto's Rotman School of Management business historian JOSEPH MARTIN said of Rogers, "He is one of the great entrepreneurs of this country. What he has done is truly remarkable. He certainly has left a huge footprint" (NATIONALPOST.com, 12/2). In Toronto, Moira Welsh writes Rogers' "hunger for success, combined with an ability to envision technological change years before his competitors (and a tolerance for debt) lifted his business from one fledgling radio station into a [C$25B] Canadian institution." Turning RCI into a "blue chip empire was his greatest ambition." Rogers said that RCI's acquisition of the Blue Jays and the SkyDome, now known as the Rogers Centre, in '00, "branded the company in Toronto as a 'good corporate citizen.'" In the past few years, Rogers "spent more time working on a company succession plan, recognizing that his biggest challenge has been his heart," as he had been "in and out of hospitals for his heart condition, as well as aneurysms, melanoma and glaucoma" (THESTAR.com, 12/2).

AN UNMATCHED LEGACY: The GLOBE & MAIL's Gordon Pitts writes Rogers' "greatest expectation-smashing act was escaping bankruptcy," as RCI "survived a parade of near-death experiences, buried under the debt amassed by its risk-embracing owner." Rogers was the "master of the communications universe in Canada, the owner of the dominant cable TV system, of radio and television stations, of magazine publishing, residential telephone services and the largest wireless network." He was the "rare communications titan to solve the convergence conundrum, combining media content and transmission in a single corporate entity." Rogers was Canada's version of Apple Computer co-Founder & CEO STEVE JOBS, a "technology entrepreneur who was down but never out" (GLOBEANDMAIL.com, 12/2). The GLOBE & MAIL's Robert Brehl notes Rogers once said that "it was 'an emotional drive' -- to prove to his long-deceased father that he could get the Rogers name back atop the communications world and keep it there." Though we have "seen many of these successful people rise in Canada through their emotional drive, there will likely never be another Ted Rogers" (GLOBEANDMAIL.com, 12/2).

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