The Cal 100: No. 24 -- The Haas Family
We count down the top 100 individuals associated with Cal athletics, based on their impact in sports or in the world at large – a wide-open category. See if you agree.
No. 24: The Haas Family
Cal Sports Connection: Walter A. Haas Jr. was a member of the Cal tennis team, but it is the Haas family’s intergenerational love and support of Golden Bears athletics that is its greatest association with Cal sports
Claim to Fame: The Haas family has made countless contributions to Cal sports over the past century, most notably its influence in the construction of Haas Pavilion. The Haas family owned the Oakland A’s for 15 years, being responsible for keeping the team in the Bay Area,
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You need only attend a Cal basketball game to know the impact the Haas family has had on Golden Bears sports.
The facility is officially named Walter A. Haas Jr. Pavilion, a basketball, volleyball, gymnastics venue that currently seats 11,858 people. It was basically a $57.5 million renovation of 6,578-seat Harmon Gym, with $11 million coming from the Haas Family. When the facility, which was completed in 1999, needed an upgrade in 2014, the Haas family contributed another $10 million.
This is by no means the only financial support that has been provided by the three Haas generations, represented mainly by Walter A. Haas Sr., Walter A. Haas Jr. and Walter J. “Wally” Haas. And the Haas family is merely emblematic of the wide range of individuals and families that have donated exorbitant amounts to Cal athletics and the university in general.
We realized it would be impossible to mention all the major Cal donors, much less to try to rank them in the Cal 100.
So we rank only the Haas family, with a nod to the Witter family, which has been involved with Cal rugby for more than a century, starting with Dean Witter, a 1909 Cal graduate who was a rower at Cal and became a world famous investment banker. Virtually all of his male descendants attended Cal and were members of the Bears rugby team, then became major financial supporters of the rugby program. The venue where Cal plays its home rugby matches is called Witter Field for a reason.
However, it is the Haas family that is the best known of the big-time financial supporters. And the Haas influence is not limited to Cal athletics.
Their philanthropy developed in 1928 when Walter A. Haas Sr. became head of Levi Strauss, which had been in his wife’s family. And it continued through the generations.
Note this excerpt from a San Francisco Chronicle’s Page One 1995 obituary of Walter A. Haas Jr.:
Haas graduated from Galileo High School and went on to Cal, where he won his letter in varsity tennis and developed a lifelong interest in the university's sports teams, especially the Golden Bears football team. When he was a Levi's executive, the word around the company was that the Monday after a Cal football victory was a good time to ask for a raise, but the subject was to be avoided if the Bears lost. The usually affable boss himself was unapproachable if Cal lost to Stanford.
Before the construction of Haas Pavilion, the family’s contributions to Cal’s business program led to it being renamed the Haas Business School in 1989. A Haas contribution of $15 million led to the establishment of Cal’s Student Athlete High Performance Initiative Fund, which provides sports training resources as well as academic resources to Cal athletes. Wally Haas has been closely involved with the Evelyn and Walter A. Haas Jr. Fund, a charitable organization that helped start Coaching Corps, which trains volunteer coaches in underserved communities.
The Haas family’s biggest impact came in 1980 when Walter A. Haas Jr. bought the Oakland A’s from Charlie Finley for $12.7 million. The purchase was made primarily to prevent the A’s from moving out of the Bay Area, which seemed likely before Haas stepped in. And when the Haas family sold the team in 1995, one of the stipulations of the sale was that team would not leave Oakland.
Wally Haas and Walter A. Haas Jr.’s son-in-law, Roy Eisenhardt, were the ranking front office executives for the A’s during that period, when they reached the World Series three years in a row (1988, 1989, 1990) and won it in 1989.
Virtually every Haas of note graduated from Cal.
You could make a case that the Haas family could be No. 1 on the Cal 100 list based on its impact on Cal and the Bay Area, but it sits nicely at No. 24.
The Cal 100: No. 25 -- Cynt Marshall
Cover photo of Walter J. "Wally" Haas is by Stan Szeto, USA TODAY Sports
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