Peter Ueberroth

Peter Victor Ueberroth (born September 2, 1937 in Evanston, Illinois) is an American sports official and California politician. From 1982 to 1984 he organized the Olympic Games in Los Angeles. From 1984 to 1989 he was commissioner of Major League Baseball. From 2004 to 2007, he served as President of the United States National Olympic Committee.

Ueberroth, whose father was of German and Austrian descent, grew up in Northern California. He attended Union High School in Fremont. After graduating from high school, he began studying economics at San José State University on an athletic scholarship as a water polo player (he was a swimmer and had a good throwing arm as a baseball and football player), graduating in 1959. He built a national travel agency business, for which he was named Junior Manager of the Year in 1977. After both the state of California and the city and county of Los Angeles refused in referendums to invest state money in the 1984 Olympics, the successful young entrepreneur was chosen as the new general secretary for the games (his predecessor had been a union official to avert feared strikes). Ueberroth organized the Los Angeles Olympics, for which he was named "Man of the Year" by Time magazine in 1984. He succeeded in limiting the Eastern Bloc's boycott of the Olympics to the Soviet satellites in the narrower sense, since as early as 1982, in a personal conversation with Fidel Castro in Cuba (brokered through baseball friends), he was able to get Castro to agree not to use his influence in Africa against Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Olympics were the first purely privately financed games. In the end, there was a profit of close to $250 million, which went to youth sports development in the counties that provided free sports facilities. The money is administered by the Amateur Sports Foundation (renamed the LA84 Foundation in 2008), whose president is IOC member Anita DeFrantz.

In 2003, Ueberroth ran unsuccessfully for California governor. Although he was a registered member of the Republican Party, he ran as an independent. He finished in sixth place with 25,134 votes, which was 0.29 percent, placing him between Arianna Huffington in fifth and Larry Flynt in seventh. He was elected president of the United States Olympic Committee for the 2004-2007 term.

In 2004, he was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. When he was awarded the NCAA's Theodore Roosevelt Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015, his first reaction was, "I haven't done it yet."