‘84 L.A. Official Usher Dies

Harry L. Usher, the no-nonsense general manager of the 1984 Olympics and right-hand man to Peter Ueberroth in those highly successful Los Angeles Games, died Thursday, apparently of a heart attack, while exercising at a hotel gym in Secaucus, N.J. He was 61.

Usher was often given credit, along with Ueberroth, for producing an Olympics with a surplus of $232 million, the most in the movement’s history. In a classic example of fiscal control, it was Usher’s policy to personally approve every expenditure of $1,000 or more.

The surplus put the Olympic movement on a new, more successful course eight years after the debacle of a $1-billion deficit in the 1976 Montreal Games.

Pursuing fiscal success, Usher was so secretive in his direction of the Olympic staff that he once told employees to turn over all sensitive papers on their desks when the board of directors of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, his own nominal supervisors, came through for a visit.

The act reflected Usher and Ueberroth’s belief that even the board would not prove steadfast enough in pursuing a profitable Games.

Usher, who had had two open-heart surgeries, one when he was only 36, was in New Jersey on a consulting mission for General Electric Financial Services Corp. at the time of his death.

Besides the Olympics, Usher also served as commissioner of the short-lived United States Football League after the Games, was a trustee for six years of his alma mater, Brown University, and, before the Games, headed the Beverly Hills Bar Assn.

His death was greeted emotionally Thursday by Olympic leaders.

“Harry had the unusual skill to be a leader and a friend to everyone with whom he came into contact,” Ueberroth said. “He had boundless energy. . . . Harry was a comrade and a partner of mine in a historic endeavor of the city of Los Angeles. For me personally, he will be a most sorely missed pal.”

The vice president of the International Olympic Committee, Anita de Frantz of Los Angeles, said Usher had made “an extraordinary contribution to the Olympic movement through his skilled management of the 1984 Games.”

By coincidence Thursday, the Amateur Athletic Foundation, the Los Angeles group that has disseminated more than $100 million of the Olympic surplus to Southern California youth sports, was meeting to deliberate on more grants.

At the meeting, David Wolper, who directed the opening and closing ceremonies of the L.A. Games, recalled the time he sought $4,000 from Usher to buy Olympic pins for the ceremonies staff.

Usher turned him down, but Wolper said he had spent his own money to produce the pins, and later they became so popular that he was able to sell 40 of them to the public for $100 each, recouping his gift.

Ueberroth believed in fiscal control, but most often it was Usher who exercised it. He personally signed off on every contract and, for a while, even asked to see every letter that was sent out in the organizing committee’s name.

On one occasion, he got into an elevator at the committee’s offices and noticed boxes of computers stacked there. Deciding that the committee had too many computers if they could be left like that in an elevator, he ordered an immediate suspension of computer purchases.

Many people were fired or demoted at the committee, yet in the end staff spirit was high.

Somehow, Usher had the capacity to be tough and yet have people like it. Arnold Schwartzman, fired by Usher as the committee’s design director, later observed, “I did like Harry, actually, and I still do. I don’t know why. I could murder the guy, but I really liked him.”

Dealing With the Soviet Boycott

Perhaps Usher’s supreme moment came on May 8, 1984, when, with Ueberroth in New York for a meeting, Usher got word that the Soviet Union had announced it would boycott the Los Angeles Games.

Within an hour, Usher issued a stiffly worded memo instructing the Olympic staff “not to make any comment regarding this matter to anyone.”

He ordered reporters barred from entering the committee’s parking lot. Later in the day, he spoke to the staff at what amounted to two pep rallies.

Never mind what the Soviets had done, he told them. “These are still going to be terrific Olympic Games.”

It was often Usher’s first instinct to say little or nothing publicly about an issue.

But within the committee, he was pointed in his comments.

“You could tell him, ‘This is what we want to do and this is what we think will happen,’ and Harry shone in being able to say, ‘Well, that’s fine, but right here, that won’t work,’ ” said former ticket aide Debra Henry. “ ‘This country will say that,’ or ‘It doesn’t fit with what 40 other departments are doing.’ He had this incredible ability to remember a lot of things.”

The way John Argue, a key founder of the organizing committee and present chairman of the Amateur Athletic Foundation, put it Thursday was, “He carried most of the details of the Olympic effort around in his head.”

Often, Usher and Ueberroth played “hard guy-soft guy” roles in negotiating for the organizing committee, with Ueberroth coming across as infinitely reasonable and Usher cracking the whip. Confronted one day with tough Los Angeles police negotiators over security costs, Usher suggested that they wanted to use the committee’s money for “caviar lunches.”

But it was this tough spirit that kept the Games’ costs down.

Usher also was a lifelong liberal. At the Olympic Committee, he was an important factor in resisting an excessive police presence, warning that the spirit of the Games could be compromised. His opposition to national chauvinism was possibly decisive in the rejection of red, white and blue as the color scheme for the Games and the adoption of the bright California colors that turned out to be a success.

Usher was born March 6, 1939, in Jersey City, N.J. His father died shortly after he was born, and his mother died soon after he entered Brown on a scholarship.

Graduating from Brown as a Phi Beta Kappa, he went on to Stanford Law School, where he was an editor of the Law Review. Later, he went to the prestigious Los Angeles law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, and then became part of a three-man Beverly Hills firm.

For a while, he was Ueberroth’s attorney when the future Olympic head was in the travel business. Ueberroth recalled Thursday that, although Usher had little administrative experience, he instinctively felt he was the man he wanted to manage the Olympic effort.

Usher’s jobs after the Olympics were anticlimactic. At the USFL, he was confronted with an impossible mission: competing with the NFL. When he brought an antitrust suit against the NFL, he won, but the jury awarded his organization only $3. Soon, the USFL folded.

Later, he worked for or headed executive search firms, or served as a consultant for troubled corporate organizations.

At the same time, he became a leading West Coast representative of Brown, helping many California students who were seeking admission to the Ivy League school.

As a director of the Amateur Athletic Foundation, it was Usher who proposed making the nonprofit organization permanent rather than phasing it out after a period of time. He was active in its search for likely grant recipients, and bears some responsibility for the fact that investments have brought the foundation’s assets from $93 million at its beginning in 1985 to $210 million today.

And he had the time to coach his two youngest sons in various sports.

Usher is survived by his wife, Jane Ellison-Usher, assistant dean at the Annenberg School of Communication at USC. He is also survived by his first wife, Jo Usher, now alumni director at Kenyon College in Ohio, as well as four children from his first marriage and two children by his second.

The family requested that contributions remembering him be sent to the Amateur Athletic Foundation, 2141 W. Adams Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90018.

Public services will be held at 10:30 a.m. Sunday at the foundation, with interment private.