Stan Kroenke's full-court press: six years after swooping in to rescue the Nuggets and Avalanche, the unassuming Missouri billionaire has transformed Colorado's sports scene, established a business model for the industry's future, and become the most powerful sports figure in the state. He just won't tell you about it.

• Author: Schley, Stewart
• Position: Enos Stanley Kroenke - Biography

In real estate, three things matter, and talking isn't one of them.

Enos Stanley Kroenke of Columbia, Mo., is many things, but foremost among them he is a real estate developer, and a very successful one, which may help explain why the most influential team owner in one of the best sports markets in the country is about as visible as the 15th player on a 15-man National Basketball Association roster. In a city where previous Denver Nuggets owners like Red McCombs and Sidney Schlenker were drawn to the spotlight, Kroenke is dry-toast, black-coffee, in-bed-by-10-p.m. dull by comparison. People who know Kroenke go blank trying to come up with colorful anecdotes or lively descriptions. "A perfectly pleasant person," says Don Elliman, a former Kroenke lieutenant. "Quiet," says Wendy Aiello, a Denver public relations consultant who has worked for Kroenke and his wife, Ann. "Very cordial," offers Jeff Gordon, a columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper.

What does matter in the business of real estate is money, location and timing.

Those attributes Stan Kroenke has without question.

The money part is well-catalogued by nearly every article ever written about the 58-year-old Kroenke, whose wife is a member of the Wal-Mart Walton family. Forbes estimates Kroenke's personal wealth, gained separately from the Wal-Mart fortune, at $1.8 billion in 2005, most of it reflecting the "location" part of the real-estate equation.

Kroenke has investments in shopping centers, buildings and in realty-management agreements in highly trafficked retail corridors stretching from Pennsylvania to Steamboat Springs to Malibu, Calif. THF Realty, the privately held company Kroenke founded with a partner in 1991 (the name stands for "To Have Fun"), manages 100 or so properties encompassing 20 million square feet of space. When he's not dispatching subordinates to hash out rights-of-way agreements and zoning deals with city councils for new Wal-Mart locations and roadside malls, Kroenke has shown a fondness for adding personal holdings like a large stake in the St. Louis Rams football team, a fly-fishing ranch in British Columbia, and most recently, an interest in Screaming Eagle Winery in California's Napa Valley, which produces an acclaimed Cabernet Sauvignon that goes for as much as $1,000 per bottle.

On the timing side, the soft-spoken Midwesterner has exhibited an instinct for knowing when to strike, and a willingness to pounce quickly. On the July morning in 2000 when Kroenke was introduced to Denver as the new owner of the Denver Nuggets, the Colorado Avalanche and the Pepsi Center arena that both teams called home, few employees of the teams even knew who Kroenke was. "I was told to call a press conference in one hour," recalls Brian Kitts, who managed media relations for the teams' owner, Ascent Entertainment Group Inc. "I asked Don Elliman who the buyer was. I had no idea."

Kroenke came out of nowhere to complete a deal that had soured twice, leaving the teams twisting in a sort of corporate no-man's land where dysfunction prevailed. The company that cashed Kroenke's $420 million check for the teams and the Pepsi Center was Liberty Media Corp., the cable TV investment firm based in Douglas County and run by cable impresario John Malone.

But Liberty was only a temporary resting place for the sports teams and their lower-downtown sports palace. Liberty had inherited the Nuggets and the Avalanche as part of Liberty's acquisition of Ascent Entertainment, a badly conceived amalgamation of television pay-per-view operations and supposedly synergistic sports teams that had hemorrhaged money since being spun off by a Maryland satellite communications provider, Comsat Corp. Under pressure from shareholders, Ascent put the Denver teams and the arena on the market in 1999, attracting the first of two doomed offers. At that time, the name "Kroenke" was hardly recognized in Denver or anywhere outside of Columbia, Mo.

TWISTED TRAIL TO OWNERSHIP

In Columbia, Stan Kroenke was busy building a real estate empire, cheering on quarterback Kurt Warner from box seats at St. Louis Rams games, and helping his son, a promising basketball player at Columbia's Rock Bridge High School, sort through college offers.

Even so, Kroenke probably would never have maintained a part-time residence at the Pepsi Center today if it weren't for the first of Ascent's two failed attempts to sell the team. The would-be buyers in the summer of 1999 were Missouri billionaires Bill and Nancy Laurie, who offered Ascent's CEO Charlie Lyons roughly $400 million in cash for a chance to own two professional sports franchises in a city that displayed unusual fervor for its teams. Lyons, feeling pressure to make a deal, accepted. Within days, shareholders were in full revolt, claiming the $400 million price deeply undervalued the teams and Ascent's $170 million Pepsi Center. Ascent's board of directors took the unusual step of unraveling an agreement that had been blessed by the company's top executive. It fired Lyons, the Lauries refused to increase their bid, and Ascent was left with two professional sports franchises it badly wanted to sell.

There was no way for outsiders to know...