Kohl’s was a life of service, and service to the people of Wisconsin in particular. Born in Milwaukee, he would study at the University of Wisconsin—Madison before earning an MBA from Harvard. After a six year stint in the Army Reserve, Kohl would return to his home state and eventually rose to become CEO of his family’s eponymous grocery/department store chain. He would win election to the US Senate in 1988 and would go on to win three more — thanks to the gradual increase in sports franchise values, he was widely acknowledged as the most independently wealthy legislator in the nation.
In part thanks to the wealth accumulated through the company and its sale to British American Tobacco, Kohl was able to purchase the Milwaukee Bucks from Jim Fitzgerald for $18 million. The team would post a 60-22 record in 1985-86 under the aegis of coach Don Nelson before being swept by the Boston Celtics in the Eastern Conference Finals. Nelson would leave after the following season, Del Harris would take over, and the long interregnum of Bucks irrelevancy had more or less arrived starting in 1990.
The Bucks story from 1990 until the ownership changeover in 2014 was one of low cashflow, mediocre (or worse) front office stewardship, ownership meddling, a hockey arena-turned-NBA home, and a glimpse or two of something worthwhile beneath the habitual irrelevancy. All of this combined into the two overarching pillars of Kohl’s ownership tenure: Saving the team’s existence while watching it slowly fall to pieces on the court.
We must acknowledge how poorly the team was run for much of Kohl’s tenure: Kohl was never particularly cash-rich in comparison to new generations of owners who bought into the league after him, and the Bucks were run more like a local family operation than an organization on the cutting edge of the burgeoning sports landscape. With a tiny local TV market and bad rosters, the 90s were a lost decade and the 2000s not much better besides the brief renaissance of the 2000-2001 team led by Glenn Robinson, Ray Allen, Sam Cassell, and coached by George Karl. That team would lose in seven games to the Sixers in the Eastern Conference Finals before promptly detonating in trades that saw Robinson and Allen leave town. Milwaukee would not make it past the first round of the playoffs for 17 years.
