Winning causes.

• Author: BRADY, SHARON

LED BY RON SALLY, NUGGETS & AVS SET A NATIONAL STANDARD FOR GIVING

THE POSITIVE POWER of sports can reveal the character of an individual. It can transform the motivations and mindset of a team. It can galvanize and lift a community And although it has been said there is no "I" in "team," it is also true that one person's positive actions can directly improve the lives of others: on the playing fields of sports, in the backyards and back streets of neighborhoods and even in the halls of commerce.

Take Ron Sally, senior vice president of Kroenke Sports Enterprises, owner of the Denver Nuggets and Colorado Avalanche. Over the past four years, Sally, even through the change of ownership of the two teams, has guided their combined front office to a lead position among Colorado's professional sports franchises for community giving.

According to the Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation, which matches community grants of four of Denver's professional sports franchises, the Nuggets and Avalanche, joined by the foundation, gave $4.08 million to community groups last year, compared with nearly $3.2 million given by the foundation and the Denver Broncos, and $1.5 million by McCormick and the Colorado Rockies.

Sally knows first hand how sports can help change a life, and by extension, a community. "I would not have had the opportunities that I have experienced without sports," he said, and he means primarily, educational opportunity. From there, Sally, 38, has carried the ball himself. He grew up poor on the mean streets of inner-city St. Louis. But he won a football scholarship to Duke University where he played quarterback, and graduated in 1984.

He then accepted several fellowships and graduated from the UCLA School of Law in 1988. While working at Crosby, Heafey, Roach & May in Los Angeles, he attempted to persuade the firm to represent professional athletes, and bill them hourly instead of under the standard percentage-of-contract system used by sports agents. That way, he said, the firm could build a clientele among an increasingly wealthy segment of society, and also provide its new clients with the quality services of a top-tier law firm.

"I knew that we could do a better job for a better price for the client," he said. But Sally's firm rejected the idea, and Sally accepted a position with the Denver Nuggets as assistant general counsel and director of business affairs in 1995.

Six months later, after supervising the relocation of the Quebec...