Utah Grizzlies: Risk built an empire for Elmore

About a dozen years ago, some friends asked David Elmore — whose many holdings include the Utah Grizzlies hockey team — if he would allow Leonardo DiCaprio to stay at his Malibu home while the young actor was filming "Titanic" and Elmore spent a month in Europe.

"I thought about it and said, 'That might be kind of a kick,"' said Elmore, who insisted that DeCaprio's mother stay at the house with him.

"The house was in perfect shape when I came back," said Elmore. "Not a bit of damage, and (he) left a lot of videos. I don't think I've gone through all of them yet.

"We got to be friends, and they bought the house next door."

Even with DiCaprio's mother staying with him, it was still a bit of a risk for Elmore to lend out his home to a rich young heartthrob.

But that's kind of the theme of Elmore's life, now 74 years long.

He's taken risks and mostly been rewarded, though he'll also easily talk about some of his failures like the Utah Freezz indoor soccer team that lasted three years in the E Center.

Elmore, with a schoolteacher for a mom in Anderson, Ind., grew up without having much money.

"It's probably the best thing that could have been my background because you just say, 'Well, I made it, and I'll make it again if something happens. I'll just get back and work real hard,'" says Elmore, who owns or co-owns so many companies he's not sure of the number.

After practicing law in Chicago for 10 years following graduation from Indiana University law school, Elmore also got into life insurance and in on the ground floor of real estate development in Vail, Colo., in the late 1960s.

"That led me to the fact that I decided I wanted to be more of an entrepreneur than be working law full-time, so I struck out on my own," said Elmore, who ventured into development in Aspen, bought a small hotel in Hawaii and started in the travel business.

"The thing about the law I didn't like," said Elmore, "I kind of felt I was a cog in the wheel, and even when you knew you were helping, other times, you just said, 'Is this all there is?' That's when I decided I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I just thought, 'I need to be an entrepreneur. I'll have my failures, but I've got to go out and take my chance."'

In the late 1970s, his companies were involved in travel to Moscow and, "It was sort of a natural to apply to the USOC to help them with the (Olympic) Games in Moscow."

Even though the boycott cut American travel to the Moscow Games by about 80 percent, Elmore's companies were the official U.S. travel agents for the 1,500 or so who went, a relationship that continued for Olympics outside the U.S. until they were finally outbid in 2004.

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