When a tiger is king of the jungle.

• Author: Donsky, Martin
• Position: Tiger Management's Julian Robertson - Company profile

The view from the 47th floor of 101 Park Ave. is spectacular, a panorama of midtown and lower Manhattan and beyond.

To the west, the Empire State Building. Farther west, the office towers going up on the Jersey side of the Hudson River. To the east, the apartment flats and smokestacks of Brooklyn and Queens. To the south, the twin towers of the World Trade Center, Wall Street and, farther out, the VerrazanoNarrows Bridge.

This morning, the sun is bright and the sky blue - the midday smog is still a few hours away. It's a beautiful day in Mr. Robertson's neighborhood.

A Salisbury native, Julian Robertson has in the last decade emerged as a grand-slam hitter in the major leagues of professional money management. Last year, for example, partners in his funds saw their money grow 49.9 percent - nearly double the increase in the Dow Jones industrial average. That's after Robertson's management firm took its 20 percent cut.

Since he formed his first partnership in 1980 with $8.8 million - he now manages about $750 million divided among four partnerships - Robertson has produced returns that have averaged 32.4 percent annually over 10 years. Except for 1987, when the stock market crashed, Robertson's Tiger Management (a name suggested by his oldest son, then 5 years old) has far outpaced every major bench mark used to measure investment performance.

Robertson's record has put him in the top I percent of the nation's money managers, and Wall Street observers scratch their heads when asked to name an investment manager who outperformed him in the 1980s.

The 58-year-old Robertson - born just two weeks before the Dow Jones average dropped to its all-time low of 41.22 in 1932- is modest about his success. If he has any special skill, he says, it's accounting. "It's the most vital thing in the business," he says.

But there's more at work here than an appreciation of a balance sheet. Friends and associates say he has made the most of a restless competitiveness, a deeply embedded contrarian streak and an insatiable curiosity.

"Money doesn't motivate him," says one acquaintance. "He loves to win, and he's doing so well that he's having the time of his life."

"Julian is terrifically competitive," says his father, Julian H. Robertson Sr., a retired Salisbury textile executive.

"I think competition is something you are born with," the younger Robertson says.

The two men are close. They talk three or four times a week, and the elder Robertson is an investor in Tiger. They share many traits. The father, now 90, was an amateur tennis champion and avid golfer who still exercises daily. The son says he's terrible at golf but adds, I love skiing, and I'm getting better at it all the time." The same goes for tennis.

"They are a lot alike," says Robertson's sister, Blanche Bacon of Raleigh. "Although I think julian has a better sense of humor. Daddy was very serious." His other sister, Wyndham, a former assistant managing editor of Fortune magazine, is vice president for communications of the University of North Carolina system.

Each day, Robertson senior heads for a small office in downtown Salisbury where he manages what he describes as a "right good portfolio of stocks." Like his son, the father is a contrarian who continued to invest in the market after the 1929 crash and eventually did quite well when it began to rebound in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Julian Jr., the oldest of the Robertson children, started high school in Salisbury, then transferred to Episcopal High, a prep school in Alexandria, Va. "I had a lot of breaks growing up that a lot of other people wouldn't have," he says.

"When he and his sisters...