Team player.

• Author: Mildenberg, David
• Position: Transamerica Reinsurance Co. President and Carolina Panthers co-owner Bill Simms - Includes related article on Panthers owners - Cover Story

Bill Simms got into the Carolina Panthers' huddle the same way he did the inner circle of Charlotte's establishment -- by knowing how to play the game.

On the surface, it would be hard to find a more blatant example of tokenism than Bill Simms' making the Carolina Panthers' ownership team. Everybody else on it falls into one of two groups: Jerry's friends, namely longtime business associates of general partner Jerry Richardson, or Jerry's bankers, such as the Belks and Harrises.

Except for Simms, the 15-member group is lily white and filthy rich, many of them men to whom wealth and power was a birthright. Simms, by contrast, is an employee, an insurance executive who has spent 22 years with Transamerica Corp., a huge San Francisco-based financial-services company. He arrived in Charlotte from California only two years ago.

But most important for the Panthers, Simms is black, someone who once, not too long ago, would have had a hard time getting into a big-time football game in Charlotte, much less owning a piece of the team. In 1963, the year the Queen City desegregated its auditorium and coliseum, schools and library, its buses, parks and swimming pools, he was an 18-year-old helping his father clean ashtrays in downtown Indianapolis offices. That was how his dad moonlighted, supplementing what he earned as a custodian at the VA hospital.

Bill Simms, now 49, has come a long way since then. "I don't think there's any doubt that the Richardsons were looking for a black," developer Mark Erwin says. "They looked around, and they found a guy who's a very sharp businessman and for whom color is really irrelevant."

Many blacks might take offense at someone thinking they consider race an irrelevancy. Not Simms. He was raised in an integrated neighborhood and attended predominantly white schools. He has spent his career moving in business circles and boardrooms dominated by white males. And if there is any racial discrimination in Charlotte, Simms says, he hasn't seen it. "I wouldn't say there are any barriers at all. I've run into none, and I've tested it in a lot of ways. I've tested it by coming in the front doors with all the right folks supporting me and endorsing me, and I've tested it by walking in the door myself. And believe me, it's an open city."

Though he is the black on Jerry Richardson's team and, in many ways, in Charlotte's business community, Simms says he feels no special pressure. "I don't think I'm on a pedestal, and I don't think my existence in this city is anything special."

For the sake of argument, let's assume Simms is naive, having been blinded by powerful whites anxious to show their political correctness at a time when it's good business to do just that. Even so, to credit his stroke of good fortune strictly to tokenism would be pure bigotry, say those who know him.

The president of Transamerica Reinsurance Co. oversees the nation's largest reinsurer of life-insurance policies and annuities. He has displayed extraordinary networking skills, throwing himself into a variety of highly visible projects. A well-connected Charlotte executive recently saw Simms at a party talking with one of the city's best-known CEOs. "They were carrying on like buddies who'd known each other for decades. I was stunned. I'd never seen anything like that in Charlotte before."

Nor has anyone else. In two and a half years, Simms has penetrated Charlotte's power structure farther and faster than any other black businessman in the city's history. How he's done it may be a primer for black executives interested in wielding influence in North Carolina.

Jerry Richardson isn't known for embracing blacks as business partners. Of the 1,487 Denny's restaurants operated as of June 1993 by Flagstar Cos., the Spartanburg, S.C.-based company Richardson heads, minorities owned 54. Only one was owned by an African-American. At the time, Flagstar officials told The Wall Street Journal they used one black-controlled supplier, who received about $100,000 a year. Well-publicized racial incidents at Denny's in Maryland and California were the only major setback to Richardson's drive to win an NFL football franchise.

To placate critics, Richardson Sports signed a "fair-share agreement" last July with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Among other things, it pledged part-ownership of the Panthers to a minority member. On Sept. 17, Richardson announced Simms had joined the ownership group. "The way I view it is that he's an outstanding person who happens to be an African-American," Richardson says. Neither Simms nor the team will say how much he invested. It's estimated to be between $1 million and $5 million. (The cost of the franchise and stadium totals more than $350 million.)

Richardson Sports became only the second NFL ownership group to include a black. And when Simms made the cut, he became the luckiest man of color in North Carolina, having been of the right race in the right place at the right time. "This football franchise was just a gift from heaven," he says. "I mean, how...