A Miller's tale: the storied life of a Utah empire builder.

What would it be like to be Larry H. Miller? To walk into the Delta Center and know you own it all? To hear the pulsing crowd cheering in the house you built for the team you bought? To know this vibrant carnival scene is all your doing--from the beautiful dancers to the millionaire athletes, from the famous coach working the referees to the media you seated and fed for free? [paragraph] What would that feel like? Not content. Not Larry. Too driven. He lives his life according to the Japanese principle of kaizen, striving for continuous improvement, and the Lexus motto "relentless pursuit of perfection." [paragraph] Standing at the microphone, the Utah Jazz owner looks pretty tough, in a short, bald, wise guy sort of way. With broad shoulders and widely spaced, heavy-lidded eyes, Miller looks like he could definitely persuade someone to see things his way, one way or another. [paragraph] Then he starts to sniffle, and the big blue eyes drop to the floor. He wipes his nose, and soon you realize Miller is crying on camera again, and you just want to give the guy a hug. [paragraph] Where is the cold, calculating businessman, the ruthless corporate leader, the long sharp teeth of the capitalist? Poker faces are not supposed to have tears on them. He used to hate that renowned sniffle but no longer fights it. He remembers the day he came to terms with his emotional volatility.

Doing It His Own Way

Miller was parts manager at a Toyota dealership in Colorado in the mid-seventies, when a boisterous 300-plus-pound, 6-foot-6-inch-tall football player named Gary became a top car seller. Huge and loud, Gary intimidated customers and compensated by hamming it up.

Gary called everyone "Moe" and developed a bizarre closing strategy. Stuck on a price near the end of a deal, with the atmosphere growing tense, Gary would suddenly bang his head on his desk hard, yelling, "You gotta help me, Moe!"

Tensions evaporated, everyone laughed and deals closed.

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One day, a different salesman was stuck on a final price for a Toyota Corolla, wrangling with a tight-fisted schoolteacher for hours. Desperate, he decided to try big Gary's head-banging technique. "You gotta help me, Moe!" he yelled and banged his head. And lay there. And didn't move ... and started sliding back off the desk. The staff, watching, realized he had knocked himself out. Mortified, the school-teacher leapt up and rabbited out the door.

"I learned right there you gotta do it your own way," Miller says, sitting at a chair atop the 10th floor of the Jordan Commons Office Tower, where the mountains look painted on the window against a too-blue-to-be-true sky. "Your own style, own technique. You try to learn from others but take what suits your style and personality."

Over the long term, the sincerity of Miller's sniffle builds trust, because he is consistent. People seem to like what he's doing. Like donating thousands for scholarships, when he didn't attend college. Or borrowing money just as any homebuyer would to build the Delta Center at a time when pro franchises nationwide clamor for taxes to subsidize venues.

Mostly, they relate to an NBA team owner so passionate he can only do things his way, even when that means occasional tears or tantrums, but never lack of passion.

"His emotions are right there on his sleeve," says Brad Rock, long-time sports columnist at the Deseret News and Larry-watcher since 1990. "It's what he's made of. Everyone gets close to him, which is why (Karl) Malone and he fought like kids."

Most team owners are stuffed shirts with silk ties sitting up in the luxury suites surveying their kingdom, Rock says. Not Miller. He would dress up in sweats and warm up with the team, and reportedly tore cabinets off the wall in the locker room in a frenzy, where for years he kept a locker with his name on it.

"Larry is over there on the floor wearing jeans, giving flack to the refs," Rock says. "The true common man's owner."

Miller impressed Rock during a locker room interview. Rock was grilling Miller about Stockton, when Miller stopped mid-sentence, turned around, and spoke to one of the players for ten minutes. Then, without batting an eye, turned back around, finished the second half of that sentence and kept right on talking with Rock.

Rock is a professional acquaintance, not in Miller's circle of close friends. To be in that group--long before Miller's net worth was more than a used car--you had to be a boy running around City Creek Canyon, part of a group of 31 friends who fished, hiked and played sports together for 17 years.

Friends like that played a big part in Larry becoming who he is, he says. Twenty-five of them still get together. That was long before he bought that first dealership at 5680 S. State in Murray in 1979, long before the five-state empire that includes more than 120 car dealerships and an NBA team. Now, he is one of the best-known faces in Utah, seen on car commercials by day and on sports news at night. Miller had more than 50 mentions in the Deseret News from early May to mid-June.

You don't know this guy, but you've probably done business with him. Miller figures that in one form or another, 99 percent of Utahns have interacted with his businesses, whether it's buying a car, going to the Delta Center, or watching a Megaplex movie or Jazz game.

Passion, Talent and Regrets

During the last Jazz game of the past season (against the Phoenix Suns, the sixth worst team in the NBA) the Jazz were losing--which happens. At home--which happens, too. But they were playing without passion. Miller can stand anything but that. He sat on his courtside seat wearing jeans, rolling his eyes as Ostertag clanged yet another free throw, glimpsing at his watch again as if he did not know there were only 17 seconds left. If only he were 7 feet tall, he'd show these guys intensity.

Coach Jerry Sloan lamented the loss, quoting John Stockton: "I'd rather have my wrists slit than lose. I don't accept it well." That could be Miller's mantra, too. Sloan calls Miller "a bulldog, and you don't want to mess with a bulldog."

"I wake up every morning with one goal in mind ... to kick your butt," Miller said in May at a 25th anniversary celebration of his first car dealership purchase. In his Delta Center, chocolate fountains flowed for invitation-only guests at a gala honoring Miller's empire. Stockton flew from Spokane to attend and said of Miller's leadership, "If your best player works harder than everyone else, that's a great formula for success." Not a problem for Miller. At one of his early jobs selling parts with six people, Miller wrote 62 percent of the tickets. He held 15 jobs by age 21 before taking a job at a parts store for $1.65 an hour.

Racing his wife Gail's 1963 Ford Falcon convertible propelled him into the car business. There, he found a home, a place where his interest in cars, his genius for numbers, and his innate drive made an impact.

Car parts and sales exploit his gift for numbers, but the passion runs deeper than that. He is personally excited to see "performance, fuel economy and style back--that America is getting back in the car business, after focusing mostly on SUVs and trucks," he says. Miller is obsessed with the old blistering-fast Ford Cobras and races them competitively.

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Miller has the classic traits of all great leaders: hustle, drive, impatience with naysayers ... and phenomenal instincts. "I've been good at recognizing opportunities when they come and getting on them before they evaporate," he says.

His brazen confidence goes way back. He met Gail in 1956 while in the 7th grade at Horace Mann Jr. High School. They dated through high school and married in 1965. His line? He called her up and said, "Hey, I hear you're cute, can I meet you?"

Stupendous instincts drive Miller's success. Now his empire adds a major acquisition every 60 days, running on Larry's shoot-from-the-hip style. "Lots of people can't believe I work with no master plan," he says.

He is an optimist, but a realist. "Luck is much more likely to be there if you've worked to get into position," he says.

The magic of sports is that it is condensed life, adds Miller, and he was hooked long before being a big-shot team owner. He played 90-100 games a year over 23 years of adult fast-pitch (88 mph) softball. Of course, he was a pitcher.

Perhaps Miller's most defining characteristic is that competitiveness always bubbling just under the surface, but he has other gifts, too. Rarer ones, such as a brilliance with numbers that borders on autistic, enabling him to regurgitate digits: labeling a mid-70's carburetor like it's his own birthday. And he has a boundless hard-drive, reiterating last-second Jazz game highlights in vivid detail like a prattling historian. One of his most extraordinary gifts is a freakish inability to second-guess himself, eliminating that great Achilles heel of many of the brightest minds.

His friend Tom Mabey of Sahara Construction says Miller has a tough time going back to reconsider or even to look at decisions he has already made.

Miller thinks doing that is living in the past. "When we make a decision we've got all the best information and resources at that time. It's hard for me to spend energy on it two times," Miller says. But all gifts have their downside. His focus is so fierce it's trance-like, and he often fails to notice when people walk in and out of his open-door office.

"I get so focused I have to work to remember to properly recognize people as individuals with feelings," he says.

He regrets not being a better dad, not realizing sooner it means more than being a breadwinner. He has five children aged 26 to 37, and has worked successfully to build bridges back to them over recent years. Other regrets are more situational. Fierce intensity comes with ... well ... fierce intensity. He came back to his church on his own terms, in his own style, after years of truancy. When an LDS church member asked him why he had trouble not cursing, Miller replied honestly: "It's better than killing people."

He once wrestled with a heckling fan, and recently, a woman accused him of yelling at her so badly in a restaurant she believes it will be worth $2.2 million in a lawsuit.

Quiet Philanthropy

That $2.2 million isn't even a tenth of what he has given away over recent years through charities he resists naming for fear of putting a self-serving tint on philanthropy. The only thing that makes Miller more uncomfortable than criticism from Karl Malone is the idea that he might actually get credit for giving.

"Over the years I've seen people donate quietly and others donate with camera crews chasing," he says. "I like to make sure it's for the right reasons." Donations range from ball fields to a $28-million-plus high-tech complex for Salt Lake Community College.

Not bad for a car salesman. Over 90 percent of his cash flow still comes from the car business; he sells about 65,000 annually. Owning the Jazz, the Mayan restaurant and the huge movie theatres is more positive exposure than anything.

Miller's goal now is to build a legacy, and building bridges back to his kids is just the start. That is the theme of all his giving now, building bridges, reaching out to make it easier for others to pass the chasms he's crossed. But you can bank on one thing. He'll do it his way, with his own style: with passion, intensity, sincerity ... and sometimes, tears.

Skip Knowles is a Salt Lake-based freelance writer.

ILLUSTRATION BY STEVE KROPP