He was an owner of multiple pro sports teams in the Charlotte region who liked to straddle the two Carolinas, sometimes playing one state off against the other when he wanted something new built.
He decided his Charlotte-based pro team needed an S.C.-based training facility and moved heaven and a lot of earth to make it happen — then ended up wishing he’d just put it in Charlotte in the first place.
He was at first popular in Charlotte because of his gregarious nature and humble background, then became unpopular due in large part to his own mistakes.
I’m speaking, of course, of George Shinn.
Did you think we were talking about someone else?
Long before anyone in Charlotte had ever heard of a billionaire sports team owner named David Tepper, George Shinn was the original owner of the Hornets — the man who literally brought the NBA to Charlotte. Shinn also owned minor-league baseball’s Charlotte Knights from 1987-98, even though that team didn’t actually play in Charlotte for most of that time.
The problems Shinn had managing those two franchises and providing updated facilities for them is being echoed 25 years later, with Tepper and his Carolina Panthers terminating their agreement Tuesday to build a fancy headquarters and training facility in Rock Hill.
What’s past is prologue, as Shakespeare wrote in “The Tempest. ” And we’ve certainly got a tempest of our own swirling right now with this Rock Hill/Panthers mess.
I called Shinn, 80, this week to discuss his own forays and flirtations with South Carolina during his 15-year run as a pro sports owner in Charlotte.
Shinn was glad to talk, but wanted to make sure of one thing first: He doesn’t want what you read next to be perceived as him telling Tepper what he should do.
“When it comes to ownership, we all have to accept the fact that the owner has the right to do what he thinks is best for his franchise,” Shinn said. “I don’t want to get into a fight with anybody.”
What Shinn was happy to speak about was his own experiences on the NC/SC border, which looks well-paved and tidy at the Carowinds amusement park but turns out to be a lot thornier in real life. The point Shinn made several times during our 40-minute conversation was this:
He wishes he had never moved anything to South Carolina (or to New Orleans, for that matter).
“There’s no question I would have rather had everything in Charlotte,” Shinn said, “and kept everything in Charlotte. That would have been ideal.”
Shinn said he wished that he would have been able to cut a deal with the city of Charlotte to either put a baseball stadium in uptown Charlotte (it happened, of course, but many years later under different ownership) or else build one by the old and now-demolished Charlotte Coliseum.
Shinn likes to think about how it would have looked. There would have been a true all-year sports and entertainment district off Tyvola Road, with Hornets’ games all winter and spring and then the Knights taking over the area in the summer.
“Since baseball was primarily a summer sport, we could have put the new stadium in a spot close to the old Coliseum and have all that parking available right there to share,” Shinn said.
If he had gotten that, Shinn said, he would have simply built the Charlotte Hornets’ training facility nearby, too.
Moving baseball to South Carolina
Instead, Shinn started hopscotching back and forth across the Carolina border.
The Hornets were an immediate success, leading the league in attendance at the Charlotte Coliseum for the first eight years of their existence and routinely drawing 24,000 fans per game.
But Shinn wasn’t able to parlay that into a new stadium for the baseball team he had bought from the Crockett family in 1987 (then named the Charlotte O’s, but quickly rebranded under Shinn as the Charlotte Knights). His baseball-related conversations with Charlotte political leaders at the time, as Shinn remembers it, weren’t fruitful.
“I wanted the city of Charlotte to build the baseball stadium and then I would rent it from them,” Shinn said. “But obviously, that didn’t work. So I had to have a place for the baseball team to play. And so we went to South Carolina right across the line. I bought some property there and then I put up my own money to build the stadium.”
That 10,000-seat stadium was called Knights Castle, in Fort Mill, S.C, 15 miles from uptown Charlotte. And it wasn’t all Shinn’s money. It was similar to the Panthers’ deal with Rock Hill — although the numbers in the early 1990s didn’t have nearly as many zeroes attached to them. York County gave Shinn tax breaks — about $5 million worth, The (Rock Hill) Herald reported in 1997.
At the time, Shinn called it “a marriage — a public-private partnership.” With the county paying for infrastructure, he promised to develop the 320 acres of surrounding land into a thriving business park.
Shinn did build the Charlotte Hornets a new training facility in 1993 behind the right-field wall of Knights Castle. That building included a 4,000-seat venue that could be used for concerts and graduations when the Hornets weren’t practicing.
But none of it worked out well, Shinn admits now. Driving down to South Carolina became a symbolic difficulty that both baseball fans in the Queen City and Charlotte Hornets players didn’t much want to do.
“I would get complaints from the players like, ‘I live in North Carolina but I’ve got to drive to South Carolina to train?’ ” Shinn remembered.
Baseball fans would say much the same thing. After some early success, the Knights’ attendance dropped like a stone. Shinn lost millions on the Knights before selling the team in 1998 to Don Beaver.
“We decided the Hornets had to be our main focus,” Shinn said, “and we couldn’t keep busting our chops making this minor-league team go.”
‘I did not want to leave Charlotte’
It turned out the Charlotte Hornets’ original coliseum was outdated shortly after it opened due to a lack of skyboxes and premium seats. So by the mid-1990s, Shinn wanted a new arena. There was even some reports at that time he might move the Hornets to South Carolina, although today Shinn scoffs at that.
“If someone said it, that was just a bargaining chip,” he said.
But the Hornets did want a new building in uptown Charlotte under Shinn’s ownership, and they might have gotten one, too, had Shinn not messed it up.
“I did not want to leave Charlotte,” Shinn said. “But I had my own problems.”
Specifically, Shinn got sued for sexual assault. His trial was nationally televised in 1999. A jury acquitted Shinn, but on the witness stand he had to admit to all sorts of questionable behavior — including two sexual relationships with women other than his then-wife.
It tarnished his relationship with the city and Hornets fans. In 2001, voters in Charlotte overwhelmingly rejected a referendum that would have built the Hornets a new arena. In large part, that vote was considered a personal rejection of Shinn.
“Of course, I wanted to stay in Charlotte,” Shinn said in our interview. “But it just got to the point that it was a situation that I just didn’t feel could work, because of bad-judgment decisions on my part. People had lost confidence in me.”
Shinn moved the Hornets to New Orleans in 2002. But the NBA returned to Charlotte in 2004, and eventually the Hornets’ nickname did, too. The Charlotte Knights have played in uptown Charlotte since 2014 and routinely draw sellout crowds. The Hornets ended up getting their new arena, too, which includes a training facility. And Shinn is retired and living primarily in Franklin, Tenn., with his third wife Megan, cycling every day and concentrating much of his work on his numerous charitable endeavors.
As for the lessons learned, Shinn said if he had to do it all over again he would “put everything as close to the main venue as possible.”
“I loved Charlotte,” Shinn said. “Still do. And I should have kept everything there.”
