LOS ANGELES -- The thought did occur to Steve Ballmer that he might want to play this one against type. Surprise everyone by simply walking out on stage, gently taking the microphone from Los Angeles Clippers president Doc Rivers and calmly introducing himself to his new team. The famously fiery former Microsoft executive could have rebranded himself at the same time he rebranded the Clippers, after three decades under disgraced former owner Donald Sterling.
"My wife said, 'Look, man. You're 58 years old. Stop running. You're going to hurt your shins. You're going to hurt your back. Frankly, I don't even like the whole yelling and running around stuff. Can you get rid of it?'" Ballmer said over an extended late-afternoon interview this summer.
"So I said to myself, 'This is a new shot with the Clippers now. You can just walk on stage calmly."
And for a time, he did consider it. Since stepping down as Microsoft's CEO last fall, Ballmer has been trying a lot of new things. He has begun studying a new language (Hebrew). He's planning to teach a class at Stanford Business School in the fall. He has been researching and studying public policy and government, looking for a way to make a meaningful civic and philanthropic contribution to society. It's all written down in a seven-point plan he has explained so many times he can recite it off the top of his head now.
But then he started going over the plans for the raucous introductory event at Staples Center in August that was attended by some 4,500 fans and the entire Clippers team. And it's not that the Mensa maven, with the laser focus of a mathematician, possesses only one gear. It's that some things really get him amped up.
"You did it to me," Ballmer said, smiling as he looked across the table at Payne Brown, who had been running the Clippers' business operations under interim CEO Dick Parsons. "You said you wanted me to come out from where the fans were. ... And I said I knew if I did that what was going to happen. I'm going to get fired up and ..."
He didn't need to finish the sentence. We all remembered what happened next. Ballmer ran into the arena like a boxer, slapping hands and wildly pumping his fists as Eminem's "Lose Yourself" played on the speaker system.
"It was just like a Microsoft sales meeting," Ballmer said. "I always picked my own music at every sales meeting. That was kind of how I got my mind around what the theme was. That's why I liked Eminem: 'One shot, one opportunity, one moment.'
"That means we're looking forward."
Ballmer doesn't really do wistful, and had little interest in talking about Donald Sterling, or the three-month delay in completing his record-setting $2 billion purchase of the Clippers with Shelly Sterling.
"No, he's never been part of my life," Ballmer said of Sterling. "He's been more part of the life of the Clipper organization, so there doesn't seem to be much reason or importance to look back.
But expunging that history completely would cost the franchise something important: A chance for Clippers fans to pipe up.
The Clippers have always been the lesser alternative to the Lakers in Los Angeles. Maybe you didn't want to root for the coolest kid in town. Maybe you just like the underdog. Maybe you're from another town, where everybody just wanted to "Beat L.A." But that's who the Clippers and their fans have been. They just haven't been able to celebrate it very often. Because on some level, every fan, every player, coach and employee had to reconcile their affection for the team with the implicit support it conveyed for Sterling. Rivers and longtime broadcaster Ralph Lawler both touched on the phenomenon at Ballmer's welcome pep rally. Rivers told stories of Clippers fans "whispering" to him that they rooted for the team. Lawler said fans could finally cheer for the team "without any reservations."
Well now they've got an owner who couldn't whisper something if he tried. So what if people thought his pep rally was dorky or awkward or over the top. So what if the video went viral, like all the other ones. That's who he is, and hasn't been afraid to be. The Clippers probably need a little of that energy. That doesn't mean L.A. will become a Clippers town anytime soon. The Lakers still rule here, despite their recent struggles. They are the town's daily soap opera -- always there, always interesting, even when the plot gets weird. But the Clippers and their fans finally get to be the Clippers without apologizing for it.
"In a way, sure, it reminds me of the beginnings of Microsoft," Ballmer said. "I remember when we added our 100th person in November of 1981. It was a Friday the 13, 1981. We had a company meeting at the Ramada Inn. I remember that.
"The Clippers have about 130 people now. But when we were at 130 [at Microsoft], we didn't have the big footprint, we didn't have the spotlight. We didn't have the brand impact when we were that size. That's a time when my parents wondered why I left school? Why this thing was called software? Or why any person would need a computer?"
These days, people wonder why Ballmer paid $2 billion for the Clippers, when the next highest bid was $1.6 billion. How could he possibly make back his money and turn a profit? "It's not a cheap price," he said. "But when you're used to looking at tech companies with huge risk, no earnings and huge multiples, this doesn't look like the craziest thing I've ever acquired. There are real earnings in this business. There's real upside opportunity. So compared to the things I looked at in tech, this was a reasonable purchase."
He also just really wanted the team and was going to do whatever he had to do to get it. Ballmer was a part of the group that tried to buy the Sacramento Kings and move them to Seattle last fall. He and lead investor Chris Hansen had gone about as far along in the process without getting a team as you can get before the NBA ultimately decided against relocation and threw its support behind Vivek Ranadive, who promised to keep the team in Sacramento.
Ballmer was stung by the experience. He had also made a last-ditch effort to try to keep the SuperSonics in Seattle before Clay Bennett moved them to Oklahoma City in 2008.
"We were obviously disappointed, but it didn't sour me on the idea of wanting to own a basketball team," he said of the effort to buy the Kings. "But I said, 'I'm not giving up, I'm not giving up on a team and I'm not giving up on Seattle.'
"There were two places that were best for me -- get a team back in Seattle or get a team in Los Angeles. Everybody told me as late as February of this year, you're never going to get a team in L.A. and, right now, there's no expansion and the league is promoting teams staying where they are, so you may have to get off of this L.A.-Seattle thing and get a team somewhere else."
Ballmer said he took a quick look at the Milwaukee Bucks when they came up for sale last year, but it was so late in the game nothing serious came of it. He'd done the same thing toward the end of the Sonics' run in Seattle.
"I had a full-time job at the time," he said. "My absolute and total priority was to Microsoft and my family. I didn't have time to be the guy who was getting an arena built. I just didn't have that time. If you would have told me was it possible that the Sonics would leave Seattle, I'd probably guess that wasn't likely to happen.
"But when it looked like that might happen, I went with a guy named Jim Sinegal, who was an early CEO of Costco, and John Stanton, the CEO of VoiceStream, which became T-Mobile, but it was too little too late to throw a Hail Mary."
Ballmer went away quietly that time. Maybe Bennett was always going to move the Sonics to Oklahoma City. Ballmer doesn't seem to dwell in regret, however. The disappointment lingers, sure. But he knows why he didn't get involved earlier, and is comfortable with the decision.
It's how he's wired. A math whiz at Harvard, where he lived down the hall from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Ballmer seems to process the world as a problem set.
He made a seven-point plan to deal with retirement. He keeps a copy of a 14-point plan that his friend Stanton gave him on his tablet, which is of course, a Microsoft Surface. He begins, as if he were presenting a PowerPoint:
• "Get an office. Your wife doesn't want you at home.
• "Your kids will outgrow you. Don't count on them to be your amusement.
• "Golf gets boring.
• "Find out who really wants to talk to you, versus who just wants to talk to you because you used to have a job.
• "You aren't going to save the world, but it doesn't hurt to try a little bit.
• "It's easier to invest in an existing not-for-profit than start a new one because most of them are small businesses that fail.
• "Most sports teams are poorly run small businesses."
Ballmer gets a kick out of that last one and lets loose a laugh that seems to bounce off the glass window behind him. He explains that Stanton owns a few minor league baseball teams. But it's a funny statement to read aloud after dropping $2 billion of his estimated $20 billion fortune on a sports team.
He has no intention of operating them as a small business. He plans to bring in a team of executives to run the business operations. He's entrusting Rivers to run basketball operations. The team's television rights are up in two years, so he'll soon immerse himself in those negotiations.
For now, though, he's just trying to enjoy himself. He may have had a seven-point plan to chart the course of his retirement, but the truth is he really needed something like this to throw himself into.
There was a time when Ballmer wouldn't have dealt with excitement he felt before the fan rally in the same way. He was shy as a child. He'd grow quiet when he got nervous, trying to hide from the stage instead of run onto it. But he had to get over that in college. He managed Harvard's football team and the only way to do his job was to stand in front of the team and yell. So now that's how he does everything. Whenever he gets fired up, whenever he gets nervous, he lets it rip.
How in the world did he ever give serious thought to playing this one safe?
"Yeah, there's a reinvention," Ballmer said. "I don't know the first thing about owning a basketball team. I was joking with some of the players, 'You all know more about what an owner should do than I do because I've neither worked for an owner nor been an owner.'
"My job as an owner is not to run everything. My job is to help give people permission to be more excellent than this organization has ever been."
The moment Ballmer was introduced to Clippers fans was expected to be a tale of muting Sterling's sad history.
But that's not how Steve Ballmer played his NBA entrance. He had the volume cranked all the way up, which is another way -- a louder way -- to announce these Clippers are different.