Clara Wu Tsai

David Rubenstein (0:03)

Traditionally, sports teams in the professional world have been owned by men, but now increasingly women are owning these teams as well. One of the most influential of these owners is Clara Wu Tsai, who is a co-owner of the Brooklyn Nets and a co-owner of the New York Liberty. And she helped the New York Liberty get to a championship, the WNBA, not long ago.

I had a chance to sit down with Clara recently to talk about her journey from Kansas to the professional sports world. We are in Brooklyn doing this and we're at a Brooklyn Basketball Center. What is this center?

Clara Wu Tsai (0:32)

I think it's so important what sports can teach you, teamwork, discipline, for kids, for their own physical and mental well-being, and also for learning leadership skills to be able to have a place. And it should be equitable. So we have this here and we make it available to everybody in the community.

And it's also a way to develop a pipeline of fans, of course.

David Rubenstein (0:58)

Did you ever expect growing up in Kansas, as the daughter of academics at the University of Kansas, that one day you would be a major sports owner?

Clara Wu Tsai (1:07)

Absolutely not. I could never have dreamed it. Well, first of all, whoever thinks that they're going to have enough money to buy an NBA team, but especially me, because I was the daughter of immigrants professors from Taiwan. So it never crossed my mind.

David Rubenstein (1:26)

What is the life of a sports owner like? I mean, is it more fun than you thought it would be, or is it more aggravation than you thought it would be?

Clara Wu Tsai (1:32)

I can't think of anything more fun than owning a sports team when your team is winning. People come up to you, they thank you, they tell you how much the team means to them and their family, and they're really grateful, and you realize when they do that that you're bringing people together and you're helping people create memories that are going to last a long time. There's nothing more gratifying than that.

David Rubenstein (1:54)

How did you compare the challenges of being in the business world with the challenges of being a sports owner?

Clara Wu Tsai (1:59)

You know, in a traditional business, you're focused on quarterly earnings, and I think for sports team owners, you're thinking about decades and you're thinking about generations. Instead of thinking about earnings, you're really thinking about increasing the value of this institution.

David Rubenstein (2:18)

The Brooklyn Nets were owned at the time, your husband and you bought it by a Russian businessman, and he, I guess, decided to maybe sell a piece of it. Ultimately, you have a chance to maybe buy a sports team, and one that came available was a partial interest in the Brooklyn Nets basketball team in the NBA. And why did he want to sell a partial interest, the owner?

Clara Wu Tsai (2:42)

I don't know how much of it was, you know, his own decisions or decisions that, you know, that he felt were inevitable. But the fact that there was a path to majority control and a path to be able to own an arena made the Brooklyn Nets particularly attractive to us. Let me tell you why it was so important to us to have majority control. It goes back to being a decision maker.

And I think that, you know, for us, when you have majority control, you can make decisions and you can set the direction and set a vision for the company. And for us, that meant, you know, like how it played out was we were able to get into women's sports and buy a WNBA team.

David Rubenstein (3:28)

Now, at some point, the NBA came to you and your husband and said, we have a WNBA team called the New York Liberty and languishing a bit. Why don't you buy that? And did you consider that from the start as a good idea or not?

Clara Wu Tsai (3:44)

I think we were a little wary because we knew that it had somewhat, you know, been orphaned in a way. It had been moved to Westchester County. We knew that the numbers had been, all the business metrics were declining naturally since it moved out to Westchester and lost a lot of the fan base. You know, as I started to get to know the players and I also produced a movie, a documentary called Unfinished Business, which looked back at that time, the 25 year history of the WNBA and then it followed the young players of 2021 in their first year at Barclay Center. And through that experience of making the documentary, I learned a lot about these women and found them really impressive. And I really, I realized that the talent was there and the heart was there, the competitive fire was there, there really wasn't enough visibility.