Quiet, unassuming Vinik strikes Lightning deal

The proposed new owner of the Tampa Bay Lightning could walk through the Tampa airport and, odds are, no one would recognize him or suspect someone important just walked by.

Quiet, unassuming, not altogether athletic looking, Jeffrey Vinik of Boston is a casual dresser who drives himself to work and vacations with his family at Disney World.

The very opposite profile of a brash sports team owner.

But Vinik, whose agreement to purchase the Lightning was announced Friday, is an avid sports fan, part owner of the Boston Red Sox, major booster of the Duke basketball team and a hockey fan from his youth. He grew up in New Jersey and attends Green Day concerts with his children.

He also happens to be a rock star in a world far from the hockey rink: the rarified strata of wealthy hedge fund managers.

Some say he's possibly one of the world's best investors.

He's a maker of fast and enormous bets in the financial markets and extraordinarily successful. At one time in his career he steered the nation's largest mutual fund before breaking off on his own.

"It's extremely rare to be as good as he is," said Thomas Gimbel, an early investor in a fund Vinik started in 1996 that returned 51 percent a year at times while Gimbel held it, well above the general market.

Reached by phone in New York, Gimbel was direct in his assessment of Vinik's investing skill.

"I'd put him in the top 1 percent I've ever dealt with."

Quiet, fearless and calculated

Vinik's purchase of the Lightning for an undisclosed amount will not be final until the transaction closes and Vinik is approved by the NHL Board of Governors, a process that could take several weeks. Significant changes to the franchise are unlikely, at least in the short term.

"The way I'll approach things with the team is to learn everything you can, understand it as well you can and, therefore, with that information, you are more likely to make better decisions," Vinik said Friday during a rare interview. "Historically, my decisions in life are well thought out."

Vinik, 50, is quiet, to be sure, Gimbel said. But he's also a fearless, fast-footed, calculated investor, and not one to shy away from saying what he thinks.

Vinik is wealthy enough to fund a wing of a Boston art museum as a birthday present for his wife, Penny, and donate millions to his alma mater, Duke, where his son attends.

Reports on his net worth vary. The Boston Herald once estimated it at $800 million. Boston Magazine has estimated $515 million.

That fortune didn't come by accident. Vinik graduated in 1982 from Duke University with a degree in civil engineering. After school, he worked his way up through several investment companies until he caught the eye of top executives at the investment giant Fidelity.

After blistering success running several Fidelity funds, he was tapped by executives in 1992, at the tender age of 33, to lead the legendary Magellan Fund, one of the largest mutual funds in the nation.

For four years, he helped the fund grow immensely, until an unfortunately timed bet on bonds went the wrong way - proving the investment maxim that beating the market often takes large and risky bets, but it only takes one wrong move to fall on your face.

A methodical investor

Still, other investors saw huge talent in Vinik. In 1996, he collected $800 million to start his own fund, which he then closed to new investors and grew to $11.8 billion in 2008 before returning money to investors to focus on his own portfolio.

A 2000 profile in Money magazine lauded his investment approach: reviewing 25 companies a day, poring over stock charts, divining subtle movements in the market and making bets of several hundred million dollars on a stock for just a few months before cashing out.

A buy-and-hold investor, no, but he is methodical.

In a 1998 profile on Duke University's Web site, Vinik made a correlation between investing and a project he worked on as a student, engineering water runoff at Duke's public gardens.

"We broke down the problem, analyzed it piece by piece, and figured out the best approach," Vinik said in the profile. "In that regard, it really wasn't that different from what I do now."

The stock market, he explained, is "not purely rational. ... So it's resistant to purely analytical models. But if you structure your variables properly, you have a high probability of getting a productive answer and making a good decision. Emotions are usually wrong, so I don't try to examine what I'm feeling so much as look at what other people are doing, analyze their actions, and then go in the opposite direction."

In that regard, his methods resemble investment titans such as George Soros, who was an early investor in Vinik's fund.

Along the way, Vinik married Penny, a former librarian at Fidelity and now a major art benefactor in Boston. A son, Danny, is a student at Duke, where he also publishes an extensive sports blog AcrossAllSports.com.

Vinik holds a minority interest in the Boston Red Sox and, almost by accident, helped the Sox win the World Series in 2007.

During Game 2 of the American League Division Series against the Los Angeles Angels, Vinik and Danny sat in the rows behind home plate when the Sox's Manny Ramirez hit a foul ball. Danny and Angel's catcher Jeff Mathis grabbed for the ball, but Danny won out - helping keep Ramirez alive at the plate and the Red Sox in the game.

Boston rallied to win 6-3 and went on to win the World Series.

Photos after the catch show a beaming Vinik with Danny in the stands as media rushed to interview the lucky fan - whose dad just happened to own part of the team.

That was a rare brush with publicity.

Vinik rarely speaks publicly, though he and his wife are listed as "eminent benefactors" of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, giving between $5 million and $10 million over a lifetime. A gallery of American artists in a new wing will be named after the family, "a birthday present from Jeff to his wife," according to the Boston Globe.

In 1999, he donated $5 million to Duke's engineering school and has endowed a professorship there.

But when it comes to personal habits, Vinik has been known to border on the mundane. The Money magazine article from 2000 noted he drove himself to work every day before 6:30 a.m. and stopped at the same low-key cafe for coffee and to chat with the manager about sports. He bought the same lunch there, too, almost every day:

A fried chicken cutlet with tomato sauce on a hot roll. Price: $3.95.

The Lightning cost a bit more.