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Ueberroth, then 42, knew his best chance to get big money was from TV, and he staged a white-knuckle showdown among the networks. The absolute ceiling to shoot for, his own staff counseled, was $150 million. Ueberroth wanted more. He and others hatched what was, in effect, a one-shot blind bidding contest, and ABC, pulled along by the bold auctioneering, shut out the competition with a shocker of a bid: $225 million. Buoyed by the TV deal, he turned toward his other big source of revenue, America's largest corporations. To create an aura of coveted elitism, he drastically reduced the number of sponsors to 30 (there had been 381 in the 1980 Winter Games at Lake Placid) and hiked the price to an unprecedented $4 million minimum per corporation.
Ueberroth negotiated each contract and colleagues say his familiar reverse salesmanship--earnestly seeming to take the other person's side--was awesome to watch. He put soft-drink companies, for example, through the same kind of high-stakes contest as the TV networks. Coca-Cola, after hearing a flag-waving sell from Ueberroth, jumped its bid all the way to $12.6 million. When IBM decided not to participate, Ueberroth, who badly wanted to use their technology at the Games, called Chairman Frank Cary. The firm that sponsored the Games, Ueberroth said solicitously, would gain a global identity with the next generation of youth. Of course, he warned, another mammoth company with only three letters was interested; that was NEC, the Nippon Electric Company. IBM eventually signed on. Ueberroth had wanted the American company, partly out of patriotic loyalty. But threatening to play the foreign card was no bluff. When Eastman Kodak complained bitterly that no photo company would pay $4 million for a sponsorship, Ueberroth unhesitatingly switched to Japan's Fuji Photo.
As the money began to pour in, building international good will became a new priority. Ueberroth spent much of the time before the Games cultivating the various national ministers of sport, and was constantly startled to discover the power and importance of athletics and athletic officials around the world. "Sports is an immense force in other countries," says Ueberroth. "Our Government still doesn't understand the consequences of the two Olympic boycotts in 1980 and 1984." Foreign officials sometimes took Ueberroth aside to inquire if he might help change some aspect of White House foreign policy. Ueberroth would explain that in the United States sports of- ficials do not carry that kind of weight.