Ueberroth, Peter

Ueberroth, Peter (Victor)

(1937– ) businessman, baseball commissioner, Olympics chairman; born in Evanston, Ill. He was both athletic and entrepreneurial from an early age, and after graduation from college he went on to become the operations manager and vice-president of the Trans International Airline (1959–62). He then formed his own company, Transportation Consultants International (1963–79). Invited in 1979 to head the Los Angeles Olympics Organizing Committee, he used his marketing and business talents to turn the 1984 games into a self-supporting event and was named "Man of the Year" by Time for 1984. That same year he became commissioner of baseball, but he soon became disenchanted by his inability to have a decisive impact on affairs and in 1989, after one term, he stepped aside and went back to the private business world. In the wake of the Los Angeles riots (1992), he headed a task force of public and private institutions determined to remove the economic and social causes of such episodes, an assignment even more frustrating than dealing with the owners of major league baseball teams.