Del Webb

March 1942. Del Webb's construction crews raised roughly 500 buildings on a stretch of Arizona desert in under three weeks, working double shifts to finish a camp built to hold more than 17,000 Japanese Americans behind barbed wire. Three years later, the same builder sat down with a tin-plate heir and a hard-drinking baseball lifer and bought the New York Yankees. Webb spent his career building things fast, for whoever was paying -- army contracts, a wartime relocation camp, a mob-financed casino in the Nevada desert -- and somewhere in the middle of all that concrete, he ended up owning the most successful franchise in American sports for two decades. He almost never made the papers doing it. That was the point.

The Ballplayer Who Became a Builder

Delbert Eugene Webb was born May 17, 1899, in Fresno, California, to Ernest Webb, a fruit farmer, and his wife Henrietta. He dropped out of high school to apprentice as a carpenter and spent his late teens and early twenties chasing a semi-pro baseball career on the side, good enough to think it might go somewhere. It didn't. Sometime in the mid-1920s he came down with typhoid fever severe enough to end his playing days for good, and on a friend's advice he moved to Phoenix, Arizona, to recover. He never really left.

Webb worked as a carpenter around Phoenix before starting his own outfit, the Del E. Webb Construction Company, in 1928 -- a bad year to open a business, as it turned out, with the Depression arriving right behind him. He survived it by chasing government work, and by the time World War II hit, his company was landing some of the largest federal contracts in the country. Some of that work built the tools of a war worth fighting. Some of it built something else entirely: in the spring of 1942, Webb's crews put up the Poston War Relocation Center near Parker, Arizona, the largest of the ten camps where the U.S. government imprisoned Japanese Americans during the war. Ground broke March 27. Roughly 5,000 workers finished the job in under three weeks, and the camp opened that June holding more than 17,000 people. It's not a footnote you get to leave out of a Del Webb biography. It's just true, and it happened fast, the same way everything Webb built happened fast.

Three Men and a Ballclub

Jacob Ruppert's estate had run the Yankees on autopilot since his death in 1939, and by late 1944 it wanted out. Webb, Topping, and Larry MacPhail closed on 96.88 percent of the club on January 25, 1945, for $2.8 million, picking up the final 3.12 percent that March. MacPhail got the title -- club president, full authority over baseball operations -- while Webb and Topping settled for vice president and largely let him run it. That arrangement lasted less than three years. MacPhail's championship-night meltdown at the Biltmore Hotel after the 1947 World Series ended with him resigning on the spot, and Webb and Topping bought out his stake for a reported $2 million the next morning. Two men who'd spent two and a half years watching a third partner run the show suddenly owned the whole operation outright.

MacPhail had been the loud one, the innovator, the man who put lights in Yankee Stadium and picked fights with sportswriters. Webb was never any of that. He was a construction executive who happened to also own a ballclub, and he ran his half of it the way he ran a job site -- from a distance, through people he trusted, without much interest in getting his name in the paper over it.

The Quiet Half

The partnership with Dan Topping worked precisely because the two men rarely wanted the same job. Topping planted himself in New York, signed off on the baseball decisions, and stood in front of the microphones when something needed announcing. Webb stayed mostly in Phoenix, ran his construction empire, and handled the Yankees' business and league-level affairs -- the unglamorous machinery of American League politics that never made a headline but decided who played where. It was Webb, more than Topping, who became the sport's power broker on that side of the business. During the franchise-relocation fights of the 1950s, when several owners started eyeing untapped cities for a payday, Webb argued for realignment over expansion, wary of adding teams to a league that still had struggling two-team markets.

That instinct for business over headlines produced one of the era's more quietly controversial arrangements. Arnold Johnson, a Chicago businessman with financial ties to Webb, Topping, and MacPhail, bought Yankee Stadium itself in 1953 before league owners forced him to sell it. A year later Johnson bought the Philadelphia Athletics and moved them to Kansas City for the 1955 season -- and Webb's construction company won the contract to enlarge the team's new home, Municipal Stadium, the same ballpark that had housed the Yankees' own Triple-A farm club. The Yankees and the Kansas City A's traded with each other constantly through the rest of the decade, a volume of business heavy enough that historians still describe Kansas City as having functioned like a de facto Yankees farm system. None of it was illegal. All of it ran straight through Webb's business relationships, and it's exactly the kind of arrangement a construction magnate with a stake in half the league's plumbing was positioned to make happen.

George Weiss ran the baseball side day to day, building the roster and making the trades, but he still needed both owners' sign-off on the moves that mattered -- from hiring Casey Stengel in 1948 through the five straight championships that followed. Webb rarely got credit for those calls in the New York papers. He also rarely seemed to want it.

Flamingo, Sun City, and Life Outside the Bronx

Webb's construction business kept running the whole time he owned a piece of the Yankees, and some of what it built is stranger than anything that happened in the Bronx. In 1946, his company finished the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas as general contractor for Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, the mobster fronting the project. Costs ballooned well past budget, Siegel fell behind on payments, and Webb arranged a bank loan just to keep the job moving.

Fourteen years later, in a much quieter corner of the same career, Webb's company opened Sun City, Arizona, on January 1, 1960 -- the first large-scale retirement community of its kind in the country. More than 100,000 people showed up over the three-day opening weekend, and 237 houses sold before the weekend was out. Webb built a mob boss's casino and a retiree's paradise within a decade and a half of each other. Both jobs got finished.

Selling the Concrete Empire's Side Project

By 1964, Webb and Topping were ready to cash out. CBS agreed to terms that August and closed on 80 percent of the Yankees for $11.2 million that November 2 -- four times what the original three-man group had paid for the whole franchise nineteen years earlier. Topping stayed on as CEO under a handshake deal to keep running the club. Webb didn't stick around for any of it. He took his money and went back to the business he'd never really left.

Webb died July 4, 1974, in Rochester, Minnesota, at age 75, following surgery for lung cancer. He'd outlived his own ownership tenure by a decade, long enough to watch CBS run the club into the ground and sell it off in January 1973 -- to George Steinbrenner's group, for $10 million, a discount off what Webb and Topping had gotten for 80 percent of the team nine years before. The construction magnate who'd built an internment camp in three weeks and a casino for a gangster spent the best years of his career signing off on a baseball dynasty from a desk in Phoenix, and he never seemed to need anyone to notice.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Del Webb?

Del Webb was a Phoenix, Arizona construction magnate who co-owned the New York Yankees from 1945 to 1964, alongside Dan Topping and, for the first two and a half years, Larry MacPhail. His construction company built everything from World War II internment camps to the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas to Sun City, Arizona -- the country's first large-scale retirement community.

When did Del Webb own the Yankees?

Webb, Dan Topping, and Larry MacPhail bought the Yankees for $2.8 million on January 25, 1945. After buying out MacPhail's stake for a reported $2 million in October 1947, Webb and Topping ran the club as equal partners until selling 80% to CBS for $11.2 million on November 2, 1964.

What did Del Webb's construction company build?

Beyond the Yankees, Webb's company built military installations during World War II, the Poston War Relocation Center (one of the largest Japanese American internment camps), the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas as general contractor for Bugsy Siegel, and Sun City, Arizona, which opened in 1960 as the first large-scale age-restricted retirement community in the country.

How did Del Webb and Dan Topping split ownership duties?

Topping ran the Yankees' day-to-day baseball operations from New York and served as the public face of the ownership group. Webb, based mostly in Phoenix running his construction business, handled the club's business affairs and American League politics, becoming one of the most influential owners in the league during the 1950s franchise-relocation debates.

The internment camp came down eventually, dismantled after the war like the other nine. The casino outlived the man who financed it by decades. Sun City is still there, a whole industry of retirement communities built off the model Webb's company got right the first time. And the Yankees he quietly helped run for twenty years won more championships in that stretch than any franchise in the sport has won in any stretch since. Webb built all of it and stood in front of almost none of it. That's about as close to a signature as the man ever left.