Junior Bridgeman, who followed a strong NBA career with a remarkable run as an entrepreneur, hundreds of fast food restaurants, a Coca-Cola-Bottel company and a minority stake and a minority stake in the Milwaukee Bucks, his team, died in Louisville, Ky. He was 71.
The cause was a cardiac event, said a spokesperson for the family. During a charity event in the Galt House Hotel, Mr. Bridgeman had spoken with a reporter for a local television station when he said he had the feeling that he had a heart attack, the spokesperson said, and he was taken to a hospital where he died.
The business success of Mr Bridgeman brought him a net value of $ 1.4 billion this year, Forbes Magazine said, making him “rare air next to Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and LeBron James as the only NBA players with 10 figures.”
Mr. Johnson, who wrote on X after death, recalled that Mr. Bridgeman, a former little attacker, “had one of the sweetest Jumpshots in the NBA”, Mr. Bridgeman, he added, had helped to create a blueprint for “as much current and former sport that success finishes.”
Mr. Bridgeman was not a big star during his 12 seasons in the NBA, 10 with the bucks and two with the Los Angeles Clippers. But he stood out like a sixth man who has a Milwaukee team a score boost from the bank, which largely exceeded coach Don Nelson. From 1975 to 1987, Mr. Bridgeman had an average of 13.6 points per match.
“Junior gives us so much of the bank that I hesitate to start him,” Mr. Nelson told the Los Angeles Times in 1979. “A player who can come in and pick up a team as he can, is important. Whoever starts does not really matter, because Junior will still get his minutes.”
The first big taste of Mr Bridgeman's company came in 1978, when he invested $ 150,000 in a new cable television company run by Jim Fitzgerald, the majority of Bucks. A few years later Mr. Fitzgerald him a check of $ 700,000.
Around that time, Mr. Bridgeman became fascinated that Wayne Embry, the general manager of Bucks and himself, had a former NBA player, McDonald's franchises in Milwaukee. Mr. Bridgeman started to believe that ownership would appeal to him more than work for others when he retired.
In 1984 he invested in a fast food restaurant of Wendy in Chicago. Three years later he and another former NBA player, Paul Silas, went together in another outlet from Wendy, in Brooklyn, but it turned out to be a loser of money. After he had withdrawn from the bucks, Mr. Bridgeman went to a Wendy training school to learn everything he could run about running a franchise.
In 1988 he invested an estimated $ 750,000 to buy five Wendy's restaurants in Milwaukee.
“He would work in the restaurant as if he were an employee per hour,” Sidney Moncrief, a former teammate of Bucks, told ESP in 2024 and he was wearing those work trousers. '
From that start, Mr. Bridgeman built a realm of approximately 450 fast food restaurants in the United States. In 2016 he announced that he sold some of them (120 chilis and 100 wendies) to a private buyer, and that he had agreed to buy territories from the Coca-Cola company in Kansas, Missouri and Illinois and to start a bottling company to produce and distribute the drinking ties of the company.
In 2018 he added to his drinking by investing in a joint venture that acquired the Canadian Bottel and distribution company from Coca-Cola. His partner, Larry Tanenbaum, is the chairman of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, who owns various professional teams, including the Toronto Raptors and Maple Leafs, and is also chairman of the NBA Board of Governors.
“We were introduced through mutual friends in the NBA,” wrote Ken Tanenbaum, the executive chairman of Coca-Cola Bottling Canada and Larry's son, in an e-mail. “My father and I cherished him as a partner and a friend.” Mr. Bridgeman was a minority partner, but, Mr Tanenbaum, said: “We have always operated it as a real partnership.”
Ulysses Lee Bridgeman Jr. was born on September 17, 1953 in East Chicago, Ind., On Ulysses Lee Bridgeman Sr., who worked in a steel factory, and Delores (Meaders) Bridgeman.
He helped the University of Louisville Cardinals to the last four of the NCAA basketball tournament for men in 1975, where they lost, 75-74, to the final champion, UCLA, his 36 points against Rutgers in a Midwest Regional Quarterfinal game in 1975. That same year he had an average of 16.2 points and 7.4 rebounds a game. He obtained a Bachelor's degree in psychology in 1975.
In the NBA design of 1975 he was selected in eighth place by the Los Angeles Lakers. But less than a month later he was sent to the bucks in the Blockbuster trade that brought the future Hall of Fame Center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to the Lakers.
Mr. Bridgeman played in front of the bucks next to, including, Sidney Moncrief, Marques Johnson and Bob Lanier. The bucks won six division titles with Mr. Bridgeman in Milwaukee and 60 games in the 1980-81-but season never passed a final of the conference.
After nine seasons at the Bucks, Mr. Bridgeman was traded to the clippers in 1984. He returned to the bucks for the 1986-87 season.
He considered going in basketball, he told the New York Times in 2004. But “there was a part of me that wanted to go out and see what else I could do.”
And, he said, the food company interested him.
“I felt that one thing that people would always do was eat,” he said. “So because I wanted to invest in something, I thought food would be the safest investment.”
To his portfolio of restaurants and bottling, he added ebony and jet magazines, which he bought from the bankruptcy court in 2020 for $ 14 million. Both magazines had moved to platforms with digital only after they stopped print publication.
“If you look at Ebony, you not only look at the history for black people, but at the United States,” Mr. Bridgeman told the Chicago grandstand at the time of the purchase. “I think it's something that a generation is missing, and we want to reduce that as much as possible.”
Mr. Bridgeman is survived by his wife, Doris (Payne) Bridgeman; his daughter, Eden Bridgeman Sklenar, who is the Chief Executive of Ebony and Jet; His sons, Ryan, the president of Manna, who owns the remaining 240 Wendy's outlets, Fazolis and Golden Corral Restaurants, and Justin, the executive director of Heartland Coca-Cola, a bottling company; his sister, April Bridgeman; His brothers, Darryl and Samuel; And six grandchildren.
Last September Mr. Bridgeman back to his basketball roots in Milwaukee when he acquired a 10 percent interest in the bucks.
“When this opportunity introduced itself,” he said at a press conference, “it just seemed the natural for me to get the chance to participate – not only in the heart, but physically – of the organization in the future.”
