Brian Davis sees the world through rose-colored glasses-literally.
On a warm Thursday in early October, the former Duke basketball captain sits at a white tablecloth-covered table at Tosca, the Italian restaurant located in the middle of West Village. The 36-year-old Davis owns West Village, along with his old co-captain Christian Laettner and Tom Niemnann, a Fuqua graduate. The partners also own downtown properties in four other cities which they plan to develop into West Village-style communities.
And on October 2nd, they reached an agreement to buy 70 percent of the NBA's Memphis Grizzlies for more than $250 million.
From the exterior, the complex is urban, gritty-looking. It is reminiscent, in a way, of the Atlantic City, N.J., and Southeast Washington, D.C., neighborhoods where Davis grew up on welfare.
But the inside of Davis' apartment at West Village, with its leather couches and hardwood floors, is a far cry from the powdered cheese and milk that Davis used to eat as a kid.
And in becoming the Grizzlies majority owner (he'll be the league's youngest) Davis officially moved from the powdered cheese set to the wine and cheese set.
To find out how he did it, just start with those rose-colored glasses.
"The goal is to push the envelope to where people will say, 'You're crazy,'" Davis says. "I want to inspire people to do incredible things.... I'm like Coach K. My expectations are very high."
When he was nine years old, Davis printed business cards. "Brian Keith Davis," the cards read. "And I can do anything."
Growing up, he did do anything and everything-he was washing cars, cutting grass and selling blueberries by age six.
"I didn't really have the fortune of having a normal kind of upbringing," Davis says. "What I did think about was never being ignorant and going to jail and doing something negative. My thing was I was going to do something very positive, I was going to think positive."
Once he got to Duke, Davis started learning how to make that positive impact. He told his basketball teammates that he'd develop real estate, own a sports team and change the world. "They'd laugh at me," he says now. "I didn't listen to that."
During his undergrad summers, Davis worked for Durham real estate developer Terry Sanford, Jr., and at the financial firm Morgan Stanley. He started building relationships and learning the real estate skills that would help him after college. He graduated in 1993, and after playing professional basketball for two years, Davis returned to Durham and, with Niemann's help, developed his business plan.
Using his magnetic personality and the national recognition he gained from back-to-back national titles at Duke, Davis recruited rich men to invest with him. His company, Blue Devil Ventures, bought the Ligget-Myers Tobacco Warehouse and turned it into West Village, which opened in 2001.
"When we were 26 years old they thought it was really interesting that we would make an attempt to become successful," Davis says of his big-money investors. "Now they believe we can go to that next level."
And by buying the Grizzlies (and on November 10th, the MLS' D.C. United), Davis has taken his entire life to another level. But he's not ready to stop. He plans to bring as much as $1 billion in private money to re-vitalize Memphis' downtown. He has even picked the spot in town where he'd like to start developing. "I view Memphis as an incredible opportunity to change people's lives," he says.
Those are pretty big dreams, of course. But Brian Davis sees the world through rose-colored glasses, and so far, he has always come out on top.
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