WASHINGTON, April 6 -- Redskins football team owner Jack Kent Cooke died Sunday from a sudden heart attack. He was 84. Dr. Robert Shesser, chief of emergency medical services at George Washington University Hospital, said Cooke arrived at the hospital in 'full cardiac arrest.' Shesser said paramedics performed 'prehospital maneuvers' before taking him to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead 35 minutes later. Shesser said when paramedics arrived at Cooke's home, 'his heart was not beating.' Shesser said Cooke 'received state of the art prehospital care and we went through every possible scenario to try to resuscitate him.' President Clinton expressed his sadness over Cooke's death. In a statement, Clinton praised Cooke's 'straight-shooting style' that helped move the team to three Super Bowl championships. Cooke, born Oct. 25, 1912, was a former encyclopedia salesman in his native Canada. He built a multimillion dollar sports empire that included the NBA's Los Angeles Lakers and the NHL's Los Angeles Kings. Cooke sold the Lakers and Kings, along with the Forum in Inglewood, Calif., to real estate dealer Jerry Buss in June 1979 for $67.5 million. He bought the Toronto Maple Leaf baseball club of the International League in 1952 and was named 'minor league executive' of the year in 1953 when the Maple Leafs set an attendance record. Also in 1952, he bought Consolidated Press, one of Canada's largest magazine publishers, and then expanded to manufacturing in 1954. With Branch Rickey and others, Cooke tried to form the Continental Baseball League in 1958.
The league never came into being but the effort led to the expansion of the National and American leagues. In 1960, Cooke purchased a 25 percent interest in the Washington Redskins for an estimated $250,000 and then increased his holdings to 40 percent in 1972. Cooke, who became a citizen of the United States in 1960 by a special act of Congress, moved to California in 1961 and went into semi- retirement, disposing of nearly all of his Canadian business interests. He formed American Cablevision Co. in 1964 and by the following year it was one of the biggest community antenna television companies in the nation with 78,000 subscribers in California, Idaho, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, New Hampshire, West Virginia and Texas. ---
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