Billionaire Donates $165 Million To Oklahoma State
STILLWATER, Okla. (AP) -- Oil magnate Boone Pickens likes to win. And with the largest donation to an athletic program in NCAA history, Pickens hopes his alma mater will be able to compete with any school in the country.
Pickens announced Tuesday he has donated $165 million to Oklahoma State to help create an athletic village north of the football stadium that already bears the name of the 77-year-old Texas oil tycoon. The money will go toward completing the upgrade of Boone Pickens Stadium and fund changes in a 20-year master plan yet to be approved by university regents.
Pickens, a 1951 geology graduate, noted Oklahoma State has won 46 national championships to rank among the best in the nation but the school has dominated some sports -- including winning 33 championships in wrestling -- while falling behind in others.
"We've been competitive in some areas consistently," Pickens said. "Other areas we have been competitive kind of on a hit-and-miss basis."
The amount of Pickens' donation surpasses the $100 million Las Vegas casino owner Ralph Engelstad gave the University of North Dakota in 1998. Only half that sum was initially intended to build a hockey arena, but the project eventually consumed the entire gift.
Pickens' money will go toward creating a bowl in the football stadium's west end zone -- a project that will cost $120 million -- and $300 million in new facilities included in the athletic village.
Pickens hatched the plan for the record-setting donation over a series of quail hunting trips with Mike Holder, who led Oklahoma State to eight national titles in golf before becoming the school's athletic director in September.
He committed to the donation at a Dec. 29 meeting in his Dallas office with Holder, university President David Schmidly and Burns Hargis, chairman of the OSU Board of Regents.
"We've talked about things that we'd like to do, but what we come down to is that we want all our sports to be competitive," Pickens said. "We believe if we have a strong athletic program, it'll also help our academic side, too."
Pickens gained fame in the 1980s by attempting takeovers of several major oil companies and is now the chairman of BP Capital, an investment group. He was listed in a tie for 207th on Forbes' list of the 400 richest Americans last year with a net worth of $1.5 billion.
The Holdenville native also made the largest previous donation in Oklahoma State history. In 2003, he pledged $70 million to the school, including $20 million for an array of improvements to the football stadium.
He donated more than $30 million to the athletic village project in December. Before that, he split the $3 million cost of new synthetic turf with a business partner, Sherman Smith.
"It doesn't surprise me because of the kind of man that I know in Boone Pickens. He's very generous, not only to Oklahoma State University but a lot of other worthwhile causes," Holder said.
Pickens also has made donations to the American Red Cross' hurricane relief effort, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and several Texas hospitals.
Holder said he originally asked Pickens for even more, but came up with the final figure after crunching some numbers -- including some spreadsheet work in his office on Christmas.
"I think this is the number we needed to get to to make things happen," Holder said.
"We had to figure out some way to get the money out front to accomplish what we want to accomplish," Pickens said. "And then you've got to keep focusing on here's a guy that's 77 years old and who wants things to happen."
As proposed, all of the construction in the athletic village would be completed by 2011. Still, Pickens -- as he did during his 2003 announcement -- said this wouldn't be his last gift to the university.
He hopes other alumni will follow in his footsteps with donations to Oklahoma State.
"He's set the table for other people to come to the table and give both academically and athletically. He's raised the whole benchmark for the entire institution," Schmidly said.
"I just think it's an absolutely huge, unbelievably generous thing for a person to do."
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