George Shinn makes the team.

• Author: Bailey, David
• Position: Mover and Shaker of the Year owner of Hornets basketball team; includes related article on Spencer Stolpen

GEORGE SHINN MAKES THE TEAM

Dan Hamrick remembers George Shinn - all 130 pounds of him. "He was a tiny fellow and had no business being out for football," recalls Hamrick, who coached at A.L. Brown High School during the '50s.

Every day, Hamrick would go to backfield coach Ed Edmiston to borrow players he wasn't going to use. Hamrick needed them to hold up the dummies for linemen practicing blocking.

And every day, Shinn and his dummy got pounded into the turf by brawny Kannapolis mill boys. "I used to kid about I was one of the best tackling dummies that Brown High School ever had," Shinn says.

"He was tickled to death just to be there and be part of it, even though he didn't get to play," Hamrick says. "He was there every day and was there all four years of high school."

Why?

"He wanted to belong, and he took a lot of physical punishment just to stay there."

Nearly 30 years later, Shinn suffered similar punishment as he pounded the pavement looking for wealthy, well-connected Charlotteans willing to invest a few million in a professional basketball team.

"George had a lot of doors slam in his face when he was trying to get professional sports in Charlotte," says Felix Sabates, who became one of his partners. "He went around and he knocked on every door he could knock on. Levines and Belks and the Harrises, and they all turned him down."

Says Shinn: "I think the general reaction of everybody was that this was more of an ego thing than a realistic thing and it will never happen and I just don't want to get my name involved with it.

"I hadn't been part of the blue blood in the city."

Hardly. Though George Shinn, now 47, never wore rags, his rise to riches has been the story of a man who spent his early years as an outsider looking in at what others had and he didn't - a father, a good address, social status, a university education, wealth, a name people recognized, acceptance.

Nowadays, the boy who watched his family's property auctioned to pay off debts has a house so large and imposing that he's kidded about people pulling into his circular driveway to ask where the first tee is.

By now, most everybody knows the George Shinn story, from his speeches or his books or accounts in the press: the poor boy and poorer student who grows up into an insecure man. Then, when he finds he has a knack for business, he becomes an instant overachiever.

Yet, he's an overachiever who says his primary aim in life is to help others. "God is going to reward me in direct proportion to how I give him credit for what I've achieved," he says, "and how I share what I receive with his children."

But as Shinn and the Hornets got down to business during their 1988-89 season, people began to see another side - George Shinn, the two-fisted deal maker who:

* Doesn't mind stepping on NCNB Chairman Hugh McColl's toes or firing sports-marketing whiz Max Muhleman, both instrumental in putting the Hornets deal together, because they were working on a rival bid for a pro football team.

* Was able, after only one year of play, to enforce a sellout agreement he had induced his three Hornets partners to sign and sued the one who balked, likening him in the press to a "spoiled child."

* Says he would move the Hornets to South Carolina, Greensboro or the Raleigh-Durham area if Charlotte fans stop supporting the team.

* Parlayed the credibility gained during his bid for the team into multimillion-dollar real-estate deals revolving around a baseball stadium he's building near Fort Mill, S.C. - and got sued in the process.

* Continues to build a network of businesses: seven auto dealerships, a printing house, an antique-car-investment company, two minor-league baseball teams and five properties leased to the chain of proprietary schools he sold for $28 million.

* Is being talked about as a Democratic candidate for governor in 1992.

It's been a busy time for BUSINESS NORTH CAROLINA's Mover and Shaker of the Year. Now people are wondering what's next. What does George Shinn really want?

"He's gotten money," says John Belk, head of the giant department-store chain and a former Charlotte mayor. "Now he wants prestige. I think that helps drive him."

"I'm sure that initially he was probably driven by sheer economic necessity to not be insecure all his life," says Ed Crutchfield, CEO and chairman of First Union Corp., where Shinn now banks.

But that's changed, Crutchfield adds. "A man who's driven like George is likes to win the game ... and you can't run businesses as complicated as his are and be Santa Claus every day."

It's difficult to paint an accurate picture of George Shinn's climb to fame and fortune. That's because Shinn - a motivational speaker, author of an inspirational autobiography and a relentless optimist - has used the story of his life as a parable. Over the years, it has become a legend.

That's especially true in his hometown of Kannapolis. Although Shinn had attained celebrity status, Dan Boone, who retired from Brown High in 1982, couldn't remember whether he had taught him. "We looked it up," he says, "and I found that I had taught him a semester of economics."

Boone had fun with that until another teacher told him: "I taught Dale Earnhardt driver education."

What Shinn stresses in his autobiography, Good Morning, Lord! (revised and reprinted as The American Dream Still Works), is what happened after a stroke killed his father at the age of 51. George Jr. was 8.

Up to then, the Shinns had been doing fine. Both Irene and George Sr. had children from previous marriages, though George Jr. was their only child together. The family lived in a modest, five-room frame house. George Sr. ran a Gulf station on U.S. 29, then the major road to Charlotte. He had even gotten a loan to build several spec houses on Irene Avenue, named for his wife. Then, Shinn saw his family's status fall almost overnight with his father's sudden death.

Paul Cline, Irene Shinn's brother, still lives in one of three houses her husband built. "After George Sr. died, my sister did have a hard time," Cline says. At first, she tried running the service station, which also was a general store. When that didn't work, she took a job as a cashier in a grocery store, then tried being a telephone operator before she became a motel manager.

Says Shinn of his father: "He was heading in a direction to do all right, and when he died ... he owed quite a bit of money, and that's the reason the foreclosure had to come."

The auction (Irene Shinn managed to hang onto their house) is not what stands out in Shinn's mind. He still dwells on a black, hand-me-down coat that other children made fun of - that and the day his fifth-grade classmates found out he was getting free lunches. Shinn even remembers the name of the girl - he thought of her as his girlfriend - who took up lunch money and who capriciously announced to the class that everybody had paid but George Shinn and one other girl, whose name he also remembers.

"The fact that my peers saw me brought down, that was a real embarrassing situation," he says, "and that obviously had something to do with my motivation to get to the point that I just never wanted that to happen again."

Shinn describes himself as a "cutup in school" and likes to tell how he graduated last in his class. (Actually, a Brown High School spokesman says Shinn, who attended summer school to graduate, was never assigned a class rank.)

He went to work on first shift at Cannon Mills, packaging towels and washcloths. The money bought him the ultimate American equalizer - a hot car, a red '57 Chevy. "That was the thing to do," Shinn says. "The faster the car, the more popular you were. ... About every dime I had I put...