H. Wayne Huizenga dies; billionaire gave millions to Treasure Coast and cancer charities

H. Wayne Huizenga, a college dropout who built a business empire that included Blockbuster Entertainment, AutoNation and three professional sports franchises, has died. He was 80.

Huizenga died Thursday night at his home, Valerie Hinkell, a longtime assistant, said Friday. She gave no details on the cause of death.

Huizenga had strong ties to the Treasure Coast, particularly Palm City, where he developed The Floridian Golf & Yacht Club.

Huizenga, under his company Stuart Property Holdings Ltd., started amassing property connected to the golf course in 1982, including 12 plots in Martin County, which previously sold for $2.6 million collectively, and four in St. Lucie County, which together had a price tag of $5 million.

On 300 acres straddling the Martin-St. Lucie county line, the 6,916-yard, par-72 golf course has two helicopter landing pads, four guest cottages, a deepwater marina, a sprawling four-story clubhouse and lush landscaping. The 18-hole course, designed by Gary Player, opened in 1996.

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Membership to the club was by invitation only, so most Treasure Coast residents knew about it only through frequent fireworks displays and celebrity comings and goings.

The wide array of celebrity visitors to The Floridian included numerous professional golfers, Miami Dolphins quarterbacks Dan Marino and Bob Griese, radio host Rush Limbaugh, former New York City Mayor (and billionaire in his own right) Michael Bloomberg, General Electric CEO Jack Welch, All-Pro football player and TV sports analyst Ahmad Rashad, basketball legend Julius "Dr. J." Erving and singer Michael Bolton.

President Barack Obama visited twice during his administration, in 2013 and 2015, after Huizenga had sold the club April 1, 2010, for $25.6 million to Jim Crane, owner of the Houston Astros.

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Charitable giving

Huizenga and his wife, Marti, spent less time on the Treasure Coast after selling The Floridian but kept membership at Palm City Presbyterian Church, said the Rev. David Mauldin, the pastor. Marti Huizenga died in 2017.

"He was loved and will be remembered by a lot of people here for his humility, his faith and his generosity," Mauldin said.

The Huizengas donated most of the money for what became the church's Wayne and Marti Huizenga Family Life Center, which was built in 2012 and features a gymnasium and large kitchen.

"He asked me what I wanted to do at the church and how he could help," said the Rev. Richard Anderson, former senior pastor. "There was no stipulation on the cost. ... He was incredibly generous financially, one of the kindest individuals I've met in 41 years in the ministry."

Whenever the church had patriotic programs, Huizenga "wouldn't miss one for the world," Anderson said. "He'd always have tears in his eyes. He loved the United States of America and wanted the best for the country."

The Boys & Girls Club in Palm City is named for Huizenga because a donation from his wife paid most of converting a former fire station into a clubhouse.

"It was her birthday gift to him about nine years ago," said Renee Booth, development officer for the Boys & Girls Club of Martin County.

"A lot of people will remember Mr. Huizenga for his business acumen," Booth said, "but we knew him for his generous heart. As a result, hundreds of kids a year benefit from the Huizengas' generosity."

In 1999, the Huizengas pledged $1 million over three years to the United Way chapters in Martin and St. Lucie counties.

"They split the donation because The Floridian is split between Martin and St. Lucie counties," said Lucy Corley, director of community engagement at the Martin County chapter.

Hands-on

Tom Kenny, a former Martin County commissioner who has been involved in the real estate-and-development industry for four decades, said he enjoyed working for Huizenga for 14 years on several projects including The Floridian.

“The Floridian, it was hands-on,” Kenny said. “He’s the kind of guy who would think nothing of calling you at 2 o’clock in the morning and say, ‘Hey, what do you think of this?’”

Huizenga had high standards for everything he did, Kenny said.

“He formed Waste Management, but you never met a guy who was as clean as he was,” Kennny said. “Everything around him was clean. Sometimes it almost got to the extreme. They bought a (beach) house in Nantucket. They’ve got a lot of seaweed. He had a guy whose job was to rake up the seaweed every day.”

Huizenga also enjoyed a good practical joke, Kenny said. During a planning discussion for The Floridian at Huizenga's home near Grandfather Mountain, North Carolina, Huizenga lured Kenny onto a rope bridge between two mountains, even though he knew Kenny was afraid of heights.

“I’m about halfway across this thing, and he’s behind me, and he starts swinging the bridge and just started laughing, laughing and laughing,” Kenny said. “He had laser-blue eyes and they just lit up when he laughed. I’ll always remember saying, ‘You son of a gun; I’m going to get you for this.’ He laughed and laughed longer.”

“He was funny, he was a good guy, but you sure didn’t want to piss him off,” Kenny said. “He was just intimidating. He was Wayne Huizenga. If you were going to argue with him, you better have a strong case. But he wasn’t the kind of guy who it was his way or the highway. If you had a point, he would listen to your point and then do it his way.”

H. Lee Moffitt, former speaker of the Florida House of Representatives who founded the Tampa cancer center that bears his name, said Wayne and Marti Huizenga donated several million dollars for cancer research.

“It was so transformational in many ways," Moffitt said. "We were able to have research done at the cancer center that we would not otherwise be able to do but for Wayne and Marti.”

Moffitt said he and his wife, renowned interior designer Dianne Davant, traveled throughout Europe with the Huizengas.

“I remember one time we flew nonstop from Tennessee to Moscow, Russia, on Wayne’s jet and got a wonderful tour of Russia as well as all of the Scandanavian countries,” Moffitt said.

"He loved golf and we played golf in Ireland a lot,” Moffitt said. “There are several courses over in Ireland, and whenever they knew Wayne was coming into town, they would put up Miami Dolphins flags in his honor.”

“We’ve been thinking and talking about Wayne all day,” Moffitt said, speaking Friday from a golf course at The Floridian. “In fact, the only hole-in-one Wayne got in all the years he played golf was here at The Floridian.”

Humble beginnings

Starting with a single garbage truck in 1968, Huzienga built Waste Management Inc. into a Fortune 500 company. He bought independent sanitation engineering companies, and by the time he took the company public in 1972, he had completed the acquisition of 133 small-time haulers.

By 1983, Waste Management was the largest waste-disposal company in the United States.

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The business model worked again with Blockbuster Video. Buying his first stores in 1987, he built it into the leading movie-rental chain nine years later. In 1996, he formed AutoNation and built it into a Fortune 500 company.

Huizenga was founding owner of baseball’s Florida Marlins and the NHL Florida Panthers — expansion teams that played their first games in 1993. He bought the Dolphins and their stadium for $168 million in 1994 from the children of founder Joe Robbie, but had sold all three teams by 2009.

The Marlins won the 1997 World Series, and the Panthers reached the Stanley Cup Final in 1996, but Huizenga’s beloved Dolphins never reached a Super Bowl while he owned the team.

“If I have one disappointment, the disappointment would be that we did not bring a championship home,” Huizenga said shortly after he sold the Dolphins to New York real estate billionaire Stephen Ross. “It’s something we failed to do.”

Huizenga cracked Forbes’ list of the 100 richest Americans, becoming chairman of Republic Services, one of the nation’s top waste-management companies, and AutoNation, the nation’s largest automotive retailer. In 2013, Forbes estimated his wealth at $2.5 billion.

Huizenga was a five-time recipient of Financial World magazine’s “CEO of the Year” award, and was the Ernst & Young “2005 World Entrepreneur of the Year.”

Regarding his business acumen, Huzienga said: “You just have to be in the right place at the right time. It can only happen in America.”

Huizenga’s first sports love was the Dolphins. He had been a season-ticket holder since their first season in 1966. But he fared better in the NFL as a businessman than as a sports fan.

He turned a nifty profit by selling the Dolphins and their stadium for $1.1 billion, nearly seven times what he paid to become sole owner. But he knew the bottom line in the NFL is championships, and his Dolphins perennially came up short.

Harry Wayne Huizenga was born in the Chicago suburbs on Dec. 29, 1937, to a family of garbage haulers. He began his business career in Pompano Beach in 1962, driving a garbage truck from 2 a.m. to noon each day for $500 a month.

In September 1960, he married Joyce VanderWagon. Together they had two children, Wayne Jr. and Scott. They divorced in 1966. Wayne married his second wife, Marti Goldsby, in April 1972.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.