Pat Bowlen, 75, the influential hands-on owner of the Denver Broncos, who won all three of its Super Bowl titles under his long stewardship, died Thursday night at his home in Englewood, Colo.
Bowlen received a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease in 2006 and had had no role in running the team since 2014.
But in the decades after he bought the Broncos, in 1984, for $70 million, a record at the time, Bowlen had one of the most successful runs of any team owner in U.S. professional sports. In the first 15 of his 35 years at the helm, the Broncos, who had done far more losing than winning in their first 24 seasons, won seven division titles and five conference titles, and consecutive Super Bowls in 1998 and 1999. The team won its third NFL title in 2016.
Under his ownership, the Broncos continued to sell out every home game — a streak that began in 1970 — even as the team increased the seating capacity in Mile High Stadium by 50%. Bowlen lobbied the local government to pay about 70% of the cost of a new stadium, which opened in 2001, and the sellouts have continued.
Just 40 when he purchased the Broncos, Bowlen walked the sideline before games in a cowboy hat and fur coats, signatures that made him a quasi-celebrity.
His avid athleticism brought him just as much attention. Bowlen ran the New York City Marathon in just over 3 hours and competed in the Ironman triathlon in Hawaii.
He claimed to be publicity-shy, but that did not stop him from being active in nearly every aspect of the club, including the riskiest and most visible one — the signing of players. Although he did not have the title of general manager, like Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, Bowlen kept close tabs on team personnel decisions, which opened him up to criticism when players did not do well.
"I didn't enjoy it," Bowlen said of his public profile. "I think I had to put it into perspective, that if you're going to own a football team, you've got to accept this public-image stuff as part of the job."
He was often seen with players, most notably quarterback John Elway, who played all but one of his 16 seasons under Bowlen.
During his long tenure as chairman of the owners' broadcast committee, the league expanded its TV footprint to include the wildly successful "Sunday Night Football" in 2006. He also encouraged Fox to enter the bidding for a package of games on Sundays. The price paid for the league's TV rights rose rapidly, starting in 1994, the year Fox outbid CBS.
Bowlen also led NFL Enterprises, which includes NFL Films, and sat on the powerful financial, international and compensation committees. The compensation panel determines the pay for the commissioner and other top league executives.
Patrick Dennis Bowlen was born Feb. 18, 1944, in Prairie du Chien, Wis. Pat was sent to boarding school in Wisconsin, where he was a hockey star in high school and played some football.
Sylvia Miles, 94, a character actress whose appearances in "Midnight Cowboy" and "Farewell, My Lovely" lasted less than 15 minutes altogether but earned her two Academy Award nominations, died Wednesday in Manhattan, where she had been a flamboyant fixture of the city's social circuit for five decades.
Miles, who had been in poor health after suffering a fall late last year, appeared in more than 30 films, as well as about a dozen productions on and off-Broadway.
With thick blond hair and bawdy charisma, she was known for playing cantankerous, sexually exuberant characters, including what she once described as "a mad dead crazed German zombie lesbian ballet dancer" in the 1977 film "The Sentinel," and a spinster who sprinkles her ice cream with lithium in an episode of "Sex and the City."
In her breakout role, she portrayed a poodle-walking hooker in "Midnight Cowboy," the 1969 classic about a young Texan (Jon Voight) who moves to New York to become a prostitute, befriends a part-time pimp (Dustin Hoffman) and picks up Miles, mistaking her for a wealthy client.
Miles received an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress, following by a nod for "Farewell, My Lovely" (1975), starring Robert Mitchum as detective Philip Marlowe. "As a drunken widow," wrote New York Times reviewer Richard Eder, "Sylvia Miles plays a role that seems an overdone cliché until you realize that she is doing it with such subtlety that her lost beauty keeps flickering back."
She also starred in "Heat" (1972), an R-rated riff on "Sunset Boulevard" directed by Paul Morrissey and produced by Andy Warhol. Miles — who played an older actress in a relationship with a floundering, onetime child star (Joe Dallesandro) — drew rave reviews.
Off-screen, Miles was a ubiquitous presence at Manhattan cocktail parties, theater premieres, film receptions, museum openings, book launches, charity luncheons and most every other occasion that offered A-list company and the chance of finding work.
Miles began her acting career in the theater and appeared in Broadway productions of "The Riot Act" (1963), a comedy about three siblings in the New York Police Department, and a revival of Williams' "The Night of the Iguana" (1976-77), starring Richard Chamberlain and Dorothy McGuire.
She made her film debut in 1960, with the gangster movie "Murder, Inc.," and was later featured as a theatrical producer in "Evil Under the Sun" (1982), an aggressive real estate agent in "Wall Street" (1987), a bagel-munching matchmaker in "Crossing Delancey" (1988) and Meryl Streep's bombastic mother in "She-Devil" (1989).
Miles also appeared in TV series such as "Naked City" and "Miami Vice" and performed in a short-lived 1981 solo show.
She was born in Manhattan on Sept. 9, 1924.
Martin Feldstein, 79, a Harvard professor and influential conservative economist who called for reduced spending on Social Security and limits on federal budget deficits and served an embattled two-year tenure as the Reagan administration's chief economic adviser, died June 11. The Wall Street Journal reported that the cause was cancer.
He had considered becoming a physician before becoming fascinated by economics while attending graduate school in England in the 1960s. His analysis of the efficiency of the British health care system helped influence national policy and helped define his future.
Feldstein became known for his macroeconomic studies measuring long-term trends in public finance, health care, pension systems and Social Security. He argued in a 1974 paper that retirees counting on Social Security benefits were less likely to save money — by as much as 50 percent — thus producing a drag on the availability of capital in the wider economy.
He wrote that unemployment insurance and minimum-wage laws were "adverse incentives and artificial barriers" that restricted economic activity and free enterprise — from the standpoint of business owners. He favored reduced tax rates for corporations and high-income earners. To keep the deficit under control, he maintained that some federal programs would have to be sacrificed.
Other economists found fault with Feldstein's studies, but his ideas helped shape conservative economic trends that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. He is considered a founder of supply-side economics, which holds that reduced taxes will lead to greater investment and economic growth.
After serving as president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, an influential organization based in Cambridge, Mass., Feldstein joined the Reagan administration in 1982 as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.
"He is tuned in to supply-side economics, but he is not a supply-side kook," said Herbert Stein, who served as chairman of the council under previous GOP administrations. Feldstein assembled a staff that included Lawrence Summers, who served as treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton and later as president of Harvard, and Paul Krugman, who won the Nobel Prize in economics and is now a New York Times columnist.
At first, Feldstein's support of tax cuts and deficit reduction matched the White House's goals, but campaign rhetoric soon collided with reality. When the Reagan administration called for the dual aims of cutting taxes and increasing military spending, Feldstein looked at the numbers and they simply didn't add up.
President Ronald Reagan largely ignored Feldstein's advice and turned instead to Treasury Secretary Donald Regan and Secretary of State George Shultz.
Martin Stuart Feldstein was born Nov. 25, 1939, in New York City.
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