The NBA Sixth Man Who Built a $1.4 Billion Fortune

How an NBA sixth man learned business from behind the counter and ended up owning a piece of his old team

BASKETBALL

9/13/20264 min read

In September 2024 the Milwaukee Bucks introduced a new minority owner. He was buying 10% of a franchise valued at $4 billion. The club didn’t need to explain who he was: he had played 711 games in its jersey, a franchise record that stood until Giannis Antetokounmpo passed it in 2023. He started almost none of those games.

Junior Bridgeman’s story is usually told as the tale of a backup who got rich. Look closer and it’s the story of a man who learned a new trade at 33 and made the decisions that trade demanded, even when they weren’t the comfortable ones.

A sixth man with a summer job

Bridgeman entered the NBA in 1975 as the eighth pick in the draft, chosen by the Lakers. He never played for them: within weeks he was traded to Milwaukee as part of the package that sent Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to Los Angeles. He played twelve seasons, ten with the Bucks and two with the Clippers, averaging 13.6 points. He was a reliable sixth man, the kind who decides games without making headlines.

He never earned more than $350,000 in a season. It was a good living, but not the kind that lets you retire and stop thinking about money. In the summers he worked: he sold insurance and staffed the front desk at a Howard Johnson.

What he learned on the other side of the table

His real business school was the union. He served as an officer of the players’ association and was its president from 1985 to 1988, in the middle of the fight over free agency. The antitrust lawsuit the players filed against the league in 1987 bears his name: Bridgeman v. NBA.

In those meetings he noticed something few players paid attention to: how the owners thought. “Just watching the owners’ thought processes… they were two or three questions ahead,” he told Fortune in 2014. During breaks in the negotiations he heard them talk about real estate and movie deals. Years earlier, Bucks owner Jim Fitzgerald had told him, half joking, that business has only two problems: people and money. Bridgeman admitted he didn’t fully understand it at the time.

It’s what happens to a union rep at any company. You spend years negotiating against the bosses, and one day you realize you’ve learned to think like them.

Five Wendy’s that weren’t making money

He retired in 1987, at 33. According to Forbes, his first attempt went badly: a Wendy’s in Brooklyn with his former teammate Paul Silas, which struggled and ended with a fire. In 1988 he bought five Wendy’s franchises around Milwaukee, the city that knew him best.

The restaurants were not doing well. The best one brought in about $800,000 a year and the worst about $400,000, when the local average was around $850,000. His original plan was the one almost anyone would have. He said so himself in a 2014 interview: he didn’t really want to run it, he just hoped it would work and a check would arrive every month. He admitted he had followed the same path many players who now ask him for advice follow.

With the numbers in front of him, he changed his mind. He went through the chain’s training and worked every station: the grill, the counter, the drive-thru window, the mop. So much so that a customer, seeing him behind the counter, sneered that if this was the best ex-athletes could do… The bank didn’t take him seriously either: a banker he had worked with for years kept directing her questions to his partner instead of him.

It’s the decision anyone makes after buying a bar they don’t know how to run. Either you get behind the bar or you end up losing it.

Growing by managing

What came next was growth built on management. He focused on hiring better people and giving employees the power to make decisions. He talked about his team like a locker room: you win together and you lose together. Over the years he kept adding restaurants and partnered with other players who wanted to follow the same path, such as Chauncey Billups, with whom he bought 30 Wendy’s in St. Louis.

By 2014 he owned around 195 Wendy’s and 125 Chili’s, with 9,000 employees, and was the second-largest Wendy’s franchisee in the country. At his peak he had more than 450 restaurants.

From the counter to the bottling plant

In 2016 he made the move that most defined him as a businessman: he sold 120 Chili’s and 100 Wendy’s and went into Coca-Cola bottling. He bought Coca-Cola Heartland, the bottler that serves parts of Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Iowa and Illinois. Forbes estimates he paid about $290 million and that the company’s revenue nearly tripled in eight years, to almost $1 billion in 2023. In 2018 he also took a minority stake in Coca-Cola’s Canadian bottling business.

He never explained the reasoning publicly, but from the outside the shift is easy to read. He went from selling to customers one at a time to distributing across an entire region, with far more scale and a product that already sold itself.

In December 2020 he made a different kind of purchase: Ebony and Jet, two landmark magazines of the Black press, which had gone bankrupt earlier that year. He paid $14 million.

Owner of the team that paid him like a backup

The purchase of 10% of the Bucks closed in September 2024. Forbes estimates Bridgeman paid about $300 million, with a discount for being a minority partner. In February 2025 the magazine named him a billionaire, with an estimated net worth of $1.4 billion. He died just a month later, on March 11, 2025, at 71, after suffering a heart attack at an event in Louisville.

The club that paid him at most $350,000 a season ended up counting him among its owners. Thirty-seven years after his last game, he walked back into the same locker room through the owners’ door.