In 1959, before becoming a U.S. citizen, Jack Kent Cooke purchased an AM radio station in Pasadena, California, for $900,000 in his brother’s name.  In 1960, a contest the station ran caused an FCC investigation that uncovered Jack’s majority ownership. In 1962, the FCC ordered the station shut down, and Jack lost the license. It was a major financial blow. While he was licking his wounds, Jack stayed in a remote California hotel. He was surprised to get clear television reception. He learned the hotel was wired for CATV—cable TV—and that people were paying $5 a month for the service. Jack immediately recognized the potential of cable TV and jumped into action.

Cable was simple then, just a way to bring six or so channels to a community from broadcast networks that didn’t have strong enough signals. In the fall of 1964, Jack made his first cable TV antenna system investment for $4.6 million. The profit potential of a protected cable franchise was obvious and reminded him of the early days in northern Ontario when Roy Thomson had a license to print money in broadcast radio. The formula was simple to Jack. Current customers plus projected growth of a cable system’s coverage combined with current and future subscriber rates told you how much each system could generate in revenue. Having calculated these figures, Jack paid $300 per cable subscriber when he purchased a cable system. With customers paying $5 monthly, one deal was netting Jack $80,000 in monthly cash flow. Jack named his company American Cablevision.

Jack’s broadcasting and publishing background gave him an advantage in understanding the potential of the cable market. He moved fast and, in 1965, added tons of communities to his coverage area by buying existing franchises in rural areas. He created two subsidiaries, too—one that “engineered other CATV systems” and one that sold cable equipment. Jack built American Cablevision to 85,000 subscribers and, in 1968, merged it with H&B Communications in a stock deal valued at $30.8 million. In 1970, H&B was bought by TelePrompTer Corporation, then the largest cable system in America, in a stock deal. After the acquisition, Jack owned almost 12% of TelePrompTer’s publicly traded stock, meaning Jack’s shares were worth roughly $40 million. In about five years, Jack had created a $40 million cable fortune.

Cable wasn’t enough for Jack, and in 1965, he purchased the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers basketball team for $5,175,000, a record price. Jack viewed a team in Los Angeles as one of the three most valuable NBA properties, teams in Boston and New York being the other two. Jack was also gunning for the rights to start an NHL expansion team and thought owning the Lakers and having partial ownership of an NFL team legitimized him as a sports mogul. He was right. Less than a year after purchasing the Lakers, he was granted rights to Los Angeles’ expansion NHL team for a $2 million fee and a promise to play in an arena that seated at least 12,500 people. Jack also paid $250,000 for the right to have a team in the United Soccer Association.

Jack kept pushing and, in 1966, added real estate to the mix. He started building the Forum, a modern, roughly $17 million sports arena in Los Angeles that his basketball and hockey teams could play in. The arena opened in 1967 and was unlike anything anyone had ever seen. It was a huge success.

While Jack was thriving as a sports entrepreneur and also running other enterprises, his health and home life were suffering. In 1965, his wife Jean was unhappy and attempted suicide for the first time. And Jack’s brutal work schedule led to him having a heart attack in 1973. This slowed Jack down, but it didn’t stop him. He was just getting started and was focused on his teams becoming champions.