Larry Probst -- USOC's New Leader Takes Charge

(ATR) From consumer products to a successful gaming company, Larry Probst, the U.S. Olympic Committee's new chairman says he'll use his experience in the business world to bring the Olympic Movement to a new generation of Americans.

Probst was a virtual stranger to the Olympic Movement when Peter Ueberroth tapped him earlier this year to become his successor as chairman of the U.S. Olympic Committee. But Probst is used to charging full speed ahead into unfamiliar territory. He's done it before, with tremendous success.

After spending nine years selling consumer products at Johnson & Johnson and Clorox, Probst leaped to the video games company Activision in 1982.

"Everybody that I knew, including my father, told me I was nuts to switch gears that way with my career," Probst tells Around the Rings.

His father tried to talk him out of it. "He said, 'Have you lost your mind?'" Probst says. "I said, 'Look, I'm at the stage in my career, and I'm young enough where I can take a chance, roll the dice, and if it works out, great. If it doesn't, I can always go back to consumer products."

He never went back.

Two years later, Probst took a job with Electronic Arts as vice president of sales, eventually moving up to CEO and chairman of the board. When he arrived at the Redwood City, Calif., company, EA had about 40 or 50 employees and $8 million in revenue. During Probst's 16-year tenure as CEO, from 1991-2007, revenue grew from $175 million to $3 billion and EA became widely known as the world's largest publisher and distributor of video games. Probst, 58, retired as CEO last year but remains chairman.

Inspiration from the 1960 Olympics

Probst's jump from video games to the Olympic Games was a more logical move. Unlike video games, which didn't exist when he was a kid, Probst had grown up watching the Olympic Games, starting with Cassius Clay and Wilma Rudolph in 1960.

Still, Ueberroth's initial phone call came as a complete surprise. Probst was hitting golf balls on a driving range in Mexico when his cell phone rang and he saw Ueberroth's name. "I went, what does he want?" Probst says.

The two men had met eight to 10 years ago at the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference for movers and shakers in business, politics and media. Probst also knew Ueberroth's daughter Heidi from the NBA, which has a licensing agreement with EA Sports.

"His pitch was primarily, 'Look you've been very fortunate in your career and your lifetime, it's time for you to give back. And this is a way to do a lot of good for a lot of people in the country,'" Probst says.

Probst had no idea that Ueberroth was grooming him for the chairman's position.

"He's a cagey old guy," Probst says. "This past year at the Allen & Company Conference, I babysat his dog. Since I returned his dog in good shape, he figured I was a worthy successor."

Ueberroth, 71, also recognized that Probst had the business savvy to land new corporate sponsorships and experience in an industry that appeals to the younger demographic the USOC hopes to attract.

"People will concentrate on the facet of Larry's business background, which is the gaming and the ability to market to young people, but he really is a consummate business professional," Jim Scherr, chief executive officer of the USOC, tells ATR.

"He's run an exceptionally large company, taking it through a large growth cycle and come up the ranks in that business.

"So what he brings is his business acumen, his leadership and management skills and his business contacts in addition to the specifics that everybody sees on the surface."

Probst the Quick Study

Probst isn't wasting any time getting to know his new world. He has traveled to Orlando, where he attended his first board meeting in October; Chicago, to learn more about the 2016 Olympic bid; Colorado Springs, Colo., and several cities on the East Coast representing the USOC. He presided over his first board meeting earlier this month in Costa Mesa, Calif.

"I've been able to meet with a lot of people..., learn a lot of things and I think I'm getting up to speed pretty quickly," Probst says. "The people that I've encountered are smart and passionate and committed and I feel pretty honored to be part of this. And I think I can help."

But Probst admits that his new role, which is strictly a volunteer position, is more time-consuming than he anticipated. It's cutting into his golf game "big-time," where he has a handicap of 10 or 11.

"I will tell you that at some point in the future I'm going to get even with Peter Ueberroth for misrepresenting how much time this takes," Probst says with a smile.

Probst estimates he spends about 25 hours a week on his Olympic duties, or about 60 to 70 percent of his time. His Electronic Arts chairmanship, by comparison, only takes "five hours a week, tops."

Probst has already worked on the proposed new U.S. Olympic network, the IOC/USOC revenue-sharing negotiations, the Chicago 2016 bid and organizational and development projects with Scherr. He has ideas about giving the USOC an enhanced online presence and building community and social networks around the Olympic brand and athletes. And maybe, in the future, he could help the USOC expand into video games.

Results-Driven Performance Expected

"He's very much results-driven, and I think that's great," Scherr says. "It's really refreshing and good for us. He likes to set a timeline and wants that timeline to be short. It keeps us driving forward."

Probst has said he'd like to see the IOC and USOC resolve the revenue-sharing agreement "the sooner the better," and he is personally interviewing candidates for the important job of USOC Chief Marketing

Officer.

"I'm very demanding but fair," Probst says of his management style. "I don't have a lot of patience. I like to get things done quickly and well. I expect people to work hard and give their very best effort because that's what I try to do myself. I like to win. I don't like to come in second."

N'Gai Croal, a Newsweek magazine general editor who has written about technology since 1995, said Probst helped make Electronic Arts the No. 1 video games company in the world by putting in place an excellent team.

"I have never gotten the impression that Larry is himself a gamer, but he was the CEO and ran the company and did well," Croal tells ATR. "Most companies that try to get to the scale Electronic Arts has gotten to haven't succeeded, and I think what that says about his ability will be relevant when managing the U.S. Olympic Committee."

Probst agrees that he's not a gamer, although he does shoot about 2-under-par on Tiger Woods PGA and played against Woods in a video where "it was kind of him taunting me, just for fun."

"I was on the business side, not the development side," Probst says. "We had very skillful people, but I have pretty good instincts about what's good and what's not good."

Support for Probst

Members of the U.S. Olympic community have applauded Probst's arrival.

Paul George, a former USOC vice chair who is involved with the U.S. figure skating and hockey foundations, says he's heard Probst is very approachable and easy to talk to.

"He's clearly got some innovative ideas," George says. "I think the new media direction is certainly something that could be exciting and perhaps useful to the USOC."

Mark Henderson, chair of the USOC Athletes' Advisory Council, was grateful for the invitation to address the USOC board at its December meeting. "I trust Larry Probst is taking us in the right direction," Henderson tells ATR. "I think he's doing an amazing job."

Probst expects to get to know more international leaders next year. "In the Olympic Movement, he's very much still an unknown quantity," Scherr says.

Probst has not met IOC President Jacques Rogge yet, but has written him a letter. Probst had to miss the IOC executive board meeting in Lausanne because he had a prior commitment with the V Foundation, one of two cancer research boards he serves on.

While Rogge has publicly blamed video games for contributing to childhood obesity and believes kids should play on sports fields instead of computers, Probst says, "I don't think those two things fight with one another. If kids are sitting in front of the TV playing video games eight or 10 hours a day, that's just bad parenting."

Told that that his views put him in disagreement with Rogge on this issue, Probst growls, "It probably won't be the last thing."

"He's straightforward," says Newsweek's Croal. "For a lot of his tenure, I would have described him as polite, but curmudgeonly. Towards the end of his tenure, he loosened up a fair bit. I don't think you would call him wild and crazy. You're not going to mistake him for Steve Martin any time soon.

So has he loosened up? Probst laughs. "Maybe a little... but not a lot."

He doesn't smile for press photographs and admits, "I hate to talk about me."

Pennsylvania Native, Oenophile

Growing up in Meadowbrook, Pa., a suburb of Philadelphia, Probst played high school sports. "I was kind of a little guy, so I played on the front line of the soccer team and was a guard in basketball," he says.

Probst enrolled at the University of Delaware in chemical engineering, his father's profession, but says "it was not my idea of a good time in college" and switched to a business major about a year and a half later.

"In those days, you got your degree, you went to work, you got married, had a family, that was about it," he says.

Probst and his wife Nancy have two adult sons, Scott and Chip, who used to test-drive video games for Probst when he was at Electronic Arts.

A wine connoisseur, Probst has a couple of thousand bottles in the wine cellar of his California home. Colleagues at EA recently had a surprise party for him and gave him a large format bottle of Stag's Leap cabernet. "I was completely shocked and surprised," Probst says. "That's a pretty special bottle. It will go in a special place in my wine cellar and probably never be opened."

He also has a small vineyard of about 8 acres. He used to sell the fruit to other winemakers but started making his own cabernet this year, although he doesn't yet have a name or a label. "We put the first batch into the oak barrels about a month ago," he says, "and it will probably be ready in about 3 years."

That will be just in time to toast athletes at the 2012 London Olympics.

Probst went to Beijing, where he says "the most amazing thing I saw when I was there was Usain Bolt. That guy is unbelievable."

If he could live his life over again, Probst says he'd want to be "the fastest man in the world. That's a pretty cool thing to be, the 100-meter champion."

He also says it's pretty cool to be the chairman of the USOC. "I think there are a whole lot of people," he says, "that would line up behind me and do this in a heartbeat."

Drawing on his experience with consumer products, does he think a little Clorox could clean up the doping problem in sports?

"That's a pretty remarkable chemical," Probst says. "It's certainly a problem that needs to be addressed. Doping is something that we need to make go away, the sooner the better."

And it's something he never expected would be on his plate.

"There are a lot of things on my plate, that I didn't expect," Probst says. "It's all part of growing up."

Written by Karen Rosen.