Business deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars can often require cold and calculated maneuvers, but as the Milwaukee Bucks looked for a new minority owner, they found themselves in the enviable position of reintroducing a familiar face to the franchise in Junior Bridgeman.
“If you said, ‘All right, let’s find somebody to add as a partner,’ he’s No. 1. And I can’t think who would be No. 2,” Bucks co-owner Jimmy Haslam said of the man whose No. 2 jersey hangs in the Fiserv Forum rafters. “Former star player, face of the franchise, successful businessperson, great character. That’s what you’re looking for.
“The fact he understands this community really better than (co-owners) Wes (Edens), Jamie (Dinan), Mike (Fascitelli) and I do because he’s been here, played here, lived here, as you’ve heard, started his business career here, his kids were here. … You can’t understand or underestimate how big a moment this is for the franchise.”
On Thursday, the Bucks announced that Bridgeman has become a “significant” minority owner of the team. Several members of the organization, including general manager Jon Horst and head coach Doc Rivers, as well as many of the players in town before training camp, such as Damian Lillard, Khris Middleton and Brook Lopez, attended the announcement news conference at the Froedtert and Medical College of Wisconsin Sports Science Center.
In a small group session with reporters, Bridgeman confirmed reports that the deal gave him 10 percent of the franchise’s ownership stake. Per a league source, Bridgeman’s ownership stake does not affect the current arrangement between Wes Edens and Haslam, who serve as the team’s principal co-owners of the franchise and alternate as controlling governor on five-year terms. Edens will continue his five-year term as governor through the end of the 2027-28 NBA season. In February 2023, The Athletic reported that Marc Lasry had agreed to sell his stake in the Bucks to Haslam and the Haslam Sports Group for a $3.5 billion valuation. That sale became official shortly before the 2023 NBA playoffs.
Bridgeman played 10 of his 12 NBA seasons for the Bucks, and he sits near the top of many of the franchise’s leaderboards, including games played (third with 711), minutes played (10th with 18,054) and points (ninth with 9,892). The franchise retired his jersey in 1988.
After his playing career, Bridgeman became one of the most successful businessmen to ever have played professional basketball in the NBA and that started with his investment in a conglomerate of Wendy’s franchises, a journey detailed by The Athletic in 2022. The 70-year-old businessman is reportedly worth $600 million. He has acquired the bottling rights for Coca-Cola in multiple territories in both the United States and Canada and also owns both Ebony and Jet magazines.
Getting to become a minority owner of the team where he played much of his NBA career felt like an organic next step for Bridgeman.
“When you played here and you became a part of the Bucks organization, even when you left, you never felt like you were not a part of the organization, even when you came to games and things like that. And we did,” Bridgeman said. “I’m just thinking back over the years, coming back with some of the guys that would be here — Bobby Dandridge and Oscar Robertson and some of the guys — you always felt like you were a part of the organization and a part of the community.
“So, when this opportunity presented itself, it just seemed like a natural thing for me to get a chance to be part — not just in heart, but physically — of the organization going forward. So it was natural. And I thank Jim and Wes for coming with the opportunity, and I’m just very blessed to be in a position to take advantage of it, and I just look forward to watching those guys over there win basketball games.”
While Haslam told reporters he might not have known the full history of Bridgeman’s playing career in Milwaukee years ago, he did get to know Bridgeman well in the business world as owner of truck-stop chain Pilot Flying J.
“In our former life with Pilot Flying J, we were also a big Wendy’s franchisee,” Haslam said. “We had like 100, which is a pretty good number, and he had like five or six times. I was always pushing our people, ‘How do we catch Junior Bridgeman? How do we catch Junior Bridgeman.’ I knew him reputationally. And then a good friend of ours from Louisville helped put us together.”
Haslam revealed Thursday that some of the team’s minority owners, who owned “a half-percent or 1 percent” of the team, wanted to tender their stocks last year, and the organization bought those stakes and sold them to Bridgeman to make him a significant minority owner.
For Bridgeman, a major motivation in joining the ownership group was the potential for him to get to talk to players and help them with planning a future after their playing careers, something Bridgeman did better than many of his contemporaries in the 1980s.
“There are a lot of smart basketball people, but I’d like to, if I could at some point in time, to be able to help the guys in life and in the business world because I had that same help when I was a player and it came from Jim Fitzgerald, who owned the team,” Bridgeman said. “And I have given him credit a number of times for helping me understand business and really get to where I am with a lot of comments and breakfast conversations and things over the years.”
Nearly 49 years after first making his way to Milwaukee from the University of Louisville and 37 years after playing his last game for the Bucks, Bridgeman once again gets a chance to officially be part of the organization, even if it felt like he had never left.
“I had opportunities (in team ownership) in not just basketball, but football and baseball, and it just felt right,” Bridgeman told The Athletic. “In those other situations, it was like, ‘Am I going to enjoy being at a game? I don’t know.’ With this, it just felt like the right thing to do.”
(Photo of Junior Bridgeman: Paras Griffin / Getty Images)
