Thomas O. Hicks, the private-equity investor whose skill with leveraged buyouts made him a titan among Texas businessmen but undercut his success in owning professional hockey and baseball teams in Dallas and the storied English soccer club Liverpool, died on Dec. 6 at his home in Dallas. He was 79.
The cause was complications of throat cancer, his daughter, Catherine Hicks Cosgrove, said.
Mr. Hicks specialized in using large amounts of borrowed money to acquire companies. His investing firm, Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst, raised more than $12 billion of private equity and completed more than $50 billion in leveraged acquisitions from 1989 to 2004, according to the Texas Business Hall of Fame, which inducted him in 2022.
He used this strategy to fund his other passion, sports. And for a time it worked gloriously. “He loved the intellectual challenge of business and the emotion of sport,” Ms. Hicks Cosgrove said.
From 1995 to 2011, Mr. Hicks was the owner and chairman of the Dallas Stars, of the National Hockey League. Under his stewardship, the Stars reached the league championship series twice and won the Stanley Cup in 1999.
For the victory parade, Mr. Hicks, who regularly wore cowboy boots, had a special pair made featuring the silver Stanley Cup trophy. The family kept the cup at home for about a week, recalled Ms. Hicks Cosgrove, who was in elementary school at the time. (She set up a lemonade stand, she said, charging 50 cents for a cup of lemonade and a dollar for a photo with the Stanley Cup.)
Mr. Hicks owned the Texas Rangers baseball team from 1998 to 2010. It won the American League West division three times during that period. But when the Rangers reached the World Series for the first time in 2010 (they went on to lose the series to the San Francisco Giants), Mr. Hicks lost control of his sports empire.
He had to sell the Rangers in bankruptcy court that year. He also lost his Liverpool soccer club. The Stars were put up for public auction and sold in 2011.
Mr. Hicks had partly been a victim of the 2008 global financial crisis, which sent the United States into the deepest recession since the Depression. But he had created his own problems, too. In trying to replicate his leveraged buyout success in the business world, he went heavily into debt and defaulted on $525 million in loans for the Rangers and Stars in 2009. A year later, according to Forbes, the Rangers’ debt equaled 105 percent of the club’s value.
“Tom ran into the perfect storm for a leveraged sports asset: The economy falling apart, fans go away and corporate sponsors go away,” Mike Cramer, a former president of the Stars and Rangers, told The New York Times in 2010.
Mr. Hicks also spent lavishly on player contracts with the Rangers that constrained the team. Most ostentatiously, he signed Alex Rodriguez to a record 10-year, $252 million deal, but the Rangers never escaped last place in the three seasons that Rodriguez was on the roster (2001-03), even though he won the American League’s Most Valuable Player Award.
“The mistake I made with the Rangers was I tried to catch up with the Yankees,” Mr. Hicks told The Times in 2010.
American ownership of soccer teams in the English Premier League has for years raised fears among fans that clubs would be loaded with debt that could hinder investment in players and stadiums.
When Mr. Hicks and his partner, George Gillett Jr., bought Liverpool in 2007, fans protested vehemently. In 2010, the partners were unable to refinance about $445 million in debt owed to the Royal Bank of Scotland. A proposed new stadium did not materialize.
The club was sold that year for about $480 million to the owners of the Boston Red Sox in a deal that Mr. Hicks called a “betrayal.”
Thomas Ollis Hicks was born on Feb. 7, 1946, in Houston. His father, John Hardin Hicks, a onetime theology professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and an advertising representative, owned local radio stations in Texas and Louisiana. His mother, Madelyn Harde (Ollis) Hicks, ran the household.
As a teenager in Port Arthur, Texas, Tom played high school football and worked at his father’s station there as a disc jockey under the name Steve King the Weekend Wonder Boy. He followed his father into the business world after getting a bachelor’s degree in finance from the University of Texas at Austin in 1960 and a master’s degree in business from the University of Southern California in 1970.
Mr. Hicks adhered to the “buy and build” strategy of investing, which involves purchasing a core business and adding one or more businesses to it to create a larger, more valuable company.
He most famously employed this tactic in the soft-drinks industry in the mid-1980s. Mr. Hicks and his investing partner, Robert Haas, and their financial backers bought the Dr Pepper Company, the 7Up Company and A & W Root Beer, eventually converting an equity investment — variously reported to be from $55 million to $88 million — into roughly a $1.2 billion payout for the original investors.
“I do believe that deal helped establish the city of Dallas as a powerful player in the investment world,” Mr. Hicks wrote in the Dallas publication D Magazine in 2010.
For a time, he and his partners had the third-largest market share in the soft-drinks field, behind Coca-Cola and Pepsi, while avoiding the cola wars between those two beverage giants. (When the Stars won the N.H.L. championship 1999, the Hicks family drank Dr Pepper from the Stanley Cup.)
“His thesis at the time was that everyone was in New York doing finance, and all the deals were happening in the rest of the country, so there should be someone outside of New York making those deals happen,” Ms. Hicks Cosgrove, who owns a fine tea company, said of her father in an interview.
She continued, “It seemed to make people trust him because he wasn’t one of the New York suits.”
In the 1990s, his firm Hicks Muse orchestrated a $23.5-billion merger of Clear Channel Communications and AMFM Inc., which created the nation’s largest radio broadcaster. But there were failures, too, as the firm lost more than $1 billion on internet and telecommunications businesses that faltered.
Mr. Hicks’s marriage to Luann Harrell ended in divorce. He married Cinda Cree in 1990. In addition to Ms. Hicks Cosgrove, from his second marriage, he is survived by his wife and a son from that marriage, William; four sons from his first marriage, Thomas, Mack, Alex and Bradley; two brothers, Steve and Bill; and 14 grandchildren.
While Mr. Hicks faced enmity in English soccer circles, he is more fondly remembered in Dallas for his philanthropy, his maverick business instincts and his can-do spirit in bringing the first Stanley Cup to a Sun Belt city and helping to raise expectations for the Rangers, who won the World Series in 2023.
“Tom had vision few do,” Jon Daniels, a former general manager of the Rangers, told The Dallas Morning News after Mr. Hicks’s death. “He wasn’t afraid and was an eternal optimist. He encouraged us all to think big.”
Jeré Longman is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk who writes the occasional sports-related story.
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