Of course he was reading. That’s how his brother found him in his Denver apartment: lying in bed, on top of the covers, shoes on his feet, glasses on his nose, an iPad by his side. At the moment his heart gave out, he had been reading Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life. And Maybe the World by Admiral William H. McRaven. We know this because earlier that morning he posted a picture on Facebook of the day’s selection, right beside two enormous cups of Dunkin Donuts coffee.
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Bret Bearup was a large man with large appetites. He read, ate and drank until he had his fill. Then he devoured some more. Late nights were followed by early mornings, red wine chased by coffee, all of it seasoned by fattening foods and hilarious conversations. More than anything, he had an insatiable curiosity. For people who knew him well and loved him deeply – and there are lot of them – it was no surprise he would die reading. Nor, sadly, was it a shock that he had suffered such an untimely demise. It’s too bad it had to be this way, but there are worse things than dying too young because you loved life too much.
When word spread of Bearup’s sudden death by coronary on May 16 at the age of 56, he was identified in news reports by the top line in his résumé: former Kentucky basketball player. That barely begins to describe the road he traveled. He truly was larger than life, with an outsized personality that matched his massive physique, and an infinite web of relationships that were as diverse as his reading interests. “A lot of times we as athletes get stereotyped,” says 7-foot-1 center Sam Bowie, Bearup’s teammate at Kentucky. “But Bret Bearup wasn’t just the smartest, most intellectual athlete I’ve ever been around. He was one of the smartest, most intellectual humans.”
Todd Bearup describes his brother as “an academic at heart who happened to be really good at playing basketball.” He also had enough street smarts to know his limitations. Though he arrived in Lexington in 1980 as a heralded, 6-foot-9 McDonald’s All-American out of Harborfields High School in Greenlawn, N.Y., Bearup realized early on he was not a prime candidate for the NBA. So he told his teammates that when they were playing in the pros, he would advise them on their investments. He talked about owning a string of condominiums. Having been a voracious reader even as a youngster, he had a vocabulary that was off the charts. His UK teammates used to joke that even if they didn’t win an NCAA championship, they were sure to claim a national spelling bee title as long as The Bear was on the roster.
Bearup was also an unapologetic smartass. That put him at loggerheads with Wildcats coach Joe B. Hall. Bearup often joked that when he was in college he thought his first name was “Goddamn,” because Hall was constantly shouting, “Goddamn Bearup!” When Bearup’s father pressed Hall as to why his son wasn’t getting more minutes, Hall produced a video that showed Bret pulling up his sock instead of diving for a loose ball.
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Bearup got more playing time as a fifth-year senior during the 1984-85 season, mostly because the incumbent starter abruptly left the team at the start of the season. He averaged 6.3 points and 26.4 minutes that year and finished with 410 career points. A few months later, Bearup was one of 33 former players to be quoted by the Lexington Herald-Leader saying he had accepted illicit cash from UK boosters. That only worsened his relationship with Hall, which was never that good in the first place. “We were told to stay away from Bear when I was in college,” says Rex Chapman, who played for Kentucky from 1986-88 and later became one of Bearup’s best friends. “That just made us want to hang with him more.”
During the summer before he started law school, Bearup was invited to be a celebrity judge for the Miss Kentucky pageant. When it was his turn to pose a question to a contestant named Beth Ann Clark, a junior at UK, he said, “Do you cook?” After Clark won the pageant, Bearup asked if he could give her a call. A few months later invited her to his apartment so he could make an elaborate spaghetti dinner, which he later confessed had actually been prepared by a former teammate. They were married on Dec. 2, 1989.
In 1990, Bearup was working at a firm in Louisville that specialized in investment law when he was asked to represent pro bono Lawrence Funderburke, a 6-9 freshman who was seeking a release from Indiana. Funderburke won his appeal and finished his career at Ohio State. The experience showed Bearup how valuable his connections in the sports world could be. In 1993, he formed an investment advisory company called ProTrust Capital in hopes of building a client base that included pro athletes. Three years later, he and Beth Ann moved to Atlanta in order to make it easier for him to conduct his business travel.
Over the years, Bearup used his connections and charm to attract high-profile NBA clients such as Elton Brand, Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett and Nick Van Exel. To that point, many players were using their agents, or someone who worked for their agents, for financial advice, which presented conflicts of interest. Bearup’s keen intellect and gregarious personality worked to his advantage. He had a knack for being in the right place at the right time, all the time. “I would see Bret throughout my [NBA] career at different arenas, different functions,” Bowie says. “I didn’t know exactly what his job description was, but everywhere you looked, there he was.”
Bearup wasn’t in the money business so much as the relationship business. His next idea was to scavenge for young, up-and-coming players and groom them as future clients. He arranged trips to Europe for small groups of elite high school players, and he worked the grassroots circuit, particularly the Adidas ABCD Camp in New Jersey run by Sonny Vaccaro. Bearup would spend the week watching games from the bleachers, pressing flesh in the hallways and holding court at the hotel bar. He liked to say he was first-team all-lobby.
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It wasn’t long until Bearup became a lightning rod for controversy. Though he was friends with a lot of coaches, he had some particularly close relationships, namely with Missouri’s Quin Snyder, West Virginia’s Bob Huggins and Florida’s Billy Donovan. It wasn’t hard for conspiracy theorists to connect the dots. When Mike Miller, a forward from South Dakota who had accompanied Bearup on one of his trips, signed with Florida, Bearup was put on blast by South Carolina coach Eddie Fogler at the SEC’s preseason media day in the fall of 1998. “I’ll tell you what the new gig is,” Fogler said. “It’s the financial planner taking 10 players to Europe. He’s from one SEC school, and he’s steering them to another SEC school. It’s not illegal, but I wonder if it’s ethical.”
Bearup responded by insisting he never unduly influenced anyone, but the perception was hard to shed. The truth is, he was smart enough to monetize a giant, unclaimed space. He wasn’t an agent and he wasn’t a coach, so he wasn’t restricted by NCAA or NBA rules. He could talk to whomever he liked, whenever he liked. He made no bones about the purpose behind the overseas excursions. “The benefit, I suppose, is down the road,” he said in 2000. “By the time they’ve spent 10 days to two weeks with me in Europe, they know what kind of person I am. If they like me, fine. If not, at least they’ll have formed their own decision.”
Bearup quickly became a go-to source for reporters on the college basketball beat. He knew everyone, loved to dish and told the truth. Throw in his Runyanesque personality, and it made for irresistible copy. “Stogie in one hand and a tumbler in another, Bret Bearup can work a lobby with the best of them – buying drinks into the wee hours, soaking up information, making connections,” Pat Forde wrote for ESPN.com in April 2000. “His cell phone and pager go off 24/7. A veritable gossip clearinghouse, he is the guy to call when you need to know the story behind the story.”
When Dan Wetzel was writing for CBSSportsline.com in the late 1990s, he would take a two-week driving tour of colleges in the preseason. Bearup called Wetzel and said he wanted to go on the trip with him the following season – and offered to drive. “He was the best wheel man you could possibly have,” Wetzel says. “We’d drive for six hours and he could talk about any subject on Earth, and it was always really interesting.”
They took those trips together for five straight years, closing a lot of bars and sharing a lot of laughs. Once, when then Indiana coach Mike Davis invited Bearup and Wetzel to his house, he introduced them to his wife. “Just make yourselves at home,” she said.
Bearup cracked, “When I’m at home, I take off my pants.”
Eventually, Bearup left the college game, not because he was chased by controversy but because he was chasing opportunity. He had been spending time around the Missouri program when he befriended Stan Kroenke, a Mizzou grad and multibillionaire who had married into the family that owns Wal-Mart and is the chairman/CEO of Kroenke Sports and Entertainment, which today owns the Denver Nuggets, the Colorado Avalanche and the Los Angeles Rams. Kroenke’s son, Josh, played for Snyder at Missouri and had gone on two of Bearup’s overseas trips when he was in high school. Stan Kroenke hired Bearup to help manage his affairs and serve as an adviser with the Nuggets.
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On the face of it, they seemed like the Odd Couple; Kroenke was 14 years older and much more introverted. Yet, it was an enduring and prosperous partnership. “My dad is very smart and incredibly well-read,” says Josh Kroenke, who is now the vice chairman of KSE and president of the Nuggets and the Avalanche. “That was the core of their friendship. They were able to stimulate each other intellectually in a lot of different ways.”
In his usual stealth manner (his bio did not appear in the team’s media guide), Bearup worked behind the scenes to engineer trades and help manage the team. To hear him tell it, every smart move the Nuggets made was suggested by him, and every dumb move was made over his objection. Mostly, he was a source of unending good cheer. On game nights, he would sit courtside long before tipoff and greet the countless friends and acquaintances who came over to share a bro-hug and a funny story. Having been immersed at all levels of the game, Bearup became the ultimate basketball Zelig. He never met a stranger he couldn’t befriend, and he never walked into a bar he couldn’t close.
Working for Kroenke meant spending extended time away from Beth Ann and their three children in Atlanta. That was especially difficult when the couple’s daughter, Mackenzie, endured several chronic illnesses, including complex regional pain syndrome, beginning when she was 10. Bret helped Mackenzie deal with her pain by instilling in her a love of reading. He sent her so many books that she started a charity called Sheltering Books, which has been responsible for donating nearly 500,000 books to homeless shelters in the U.S. and around the world.
Indeed, it was no secret that the Bear was a big ol’ softie at heart. Every year when the NCAA Tournament concluded, Beth Ann would hand him a box of Kleenex because she knew he would get misty when One Shining Moment came on. Alas, he was less generous when it came to his own well-being. He struggled with his weight, which often ballooned to north of 350 pounds, thanks to his gluttonous lifestyle. “We all tried to shame him into eating better, but he wouldn’t,” Chapman says. “For a guy who was so smart, it was perplexing.” Adds Todd Bearup, “My brother had a lot of amazing attributes, but self-discipline was not among them.”
In 2010, Bearup left his job with the Nuggets when the organization underwent a restructuring. He remained in Denver to work with Kroenke, and in recent years he developed an analytics department that touches every corner of Kroenke’s sports properties. There are not many trained lawyers who can manage high-level investments and develop major-league analytics departments. Then again, there are not many Bret Bearups.
Bearup tried to moderate his lifestyle in recent months, at one point losing about 80 pounds. Wetzel noticed a change when he visited him in Denver last winter. “He had matured,” Wetzel says. “I mean, let’s not overstate it, but at least we weren’t out all night. He was looking good.”
Alas, the Bear was never long for this world, and everyone around him knew it. On Friday, his remains will be cremated. Sometime in mid-June, per his wishes, his ashes will be scattered in the Snake River that flows through the mountains along the Idaho-Wyoming-Montana borders. It’s hard to imagine a more fitting farewell for a true force of nature, a man who feasted too much and finished too soon, leaving the rest of us hungry for more.
The family asks that donations in Bearup’s honor be made at Shelteringbooks.org.
(Top photo courtesy of Beth Ann Bearup)