remember when he used to pull money out of his pocket and say "SAVE YOU MONEY" after the flood last year i went over there and he was giving away free basketballs... and he wrote: Lisa, SAVE YOU $$$! - mack i feel special. my name isnt even lisa
I thought it was funny when ESPN pimped Mac and called his bowl the "Houston Bowl" instead of "The GalleryFurniture.Com" bowl. os
He went to my elementary school 15 years ago and talked about his drug and alcohol problem too. You could call it community service, but I think he was genuine on his message. Mac's done a lot for Houston, and while I don't know if he buys into the stuff or is using it as a marketing ploy, it puts a positive image for the community for all he's done. I moved out Houston 7 years ago but I still remember that damn jingle with their phone number. 6-5-4-5-5-7-0! Marketing at it's best...
When I lived in Houston, I thought Mattress Mac was a great example of what hard work can get you. And despite his wealth, it also seems he's pretty much an "everyday guy" from the looks of it. His dorky commercials helped him make that million, but it also made him a lot more "human" than many others in their commercials. Mattress Mac r00lz, d00dz!!
Mac should help bring the Olympics here. I bet he could do it and stamp gallery furniture as the official furniture store of the 2012 Olympics.
I realize that Paul Bosch loved the guy, but Mattress Mac makes me sick. A friend of mine was part of a group that Mac spoke to and after the talk he stuck around, but let's just say he wasn't really approachable. I have been to his store and he seems to be a real jackass. A hard working jackass, but a jackass nonetheless. Also his sales staff has been seen at seminars on how to sell at higher prices than your competition. What Mac does is clear. He seems like the average Joe, making everybody who doesn't know any better come and buy his overinflated crap at an obscene interest rate. I would gladly hit him in the face with a sock full of manure, my compensation to be negotiated.
McIngvales have come a long way, baby By DALE ROBERTSON Copyright 2002 Houston Chronicle WIMBLEDON, England -- Seven springs ago, Jim and Linda McIngvale were in Orlando, Fla., for the Rockets-Magic NBA Finals. As it happened, they were carrying documents related to the possible purchase of the Westside Tennis Club, which had recently hosted a Virginia Slims tournament won by Steffi Graf and sponsored by Gallery Furniture. The McIngvales were tennis neophytes of the first degree. When a friend asked them if they would like to have Pete Sampras, living in Orlando at the time, join them for one of the games -- Pete, it seems, had scored lousy seats -- Linda admits she had no idea who or what a Pete Sampras was. Never mind a Grand Slam tennis tournament. At least the word "Wimbledon" did ring a faint bell with her. They, nonetheless, invited Sampras to join them, and not long thereafter closed on the club, naively thinking the Slims event came with it and that Graf -- who never had visited Houston before that spring -- would be traipsing through town every spring with her famous friends in tow. Wrong. Big-time tour tennis was gone from Houston for the time being and Westside, not in the best of shape in those days, proved to be an infinitely deeper money pit than Mr. and Mrs. Mattress Mac could have envisioned. His decision (inspired by the Tour 18 golf course near Humble) to lay down courts with the four Slam surfaces have, of course, accounted for most of the cost. Asked Friday if they would do it all over again, knowing what they now know about tennis clubs, tennis players, tennis courts and tennis tournaments, it took both of them about half a nanosecond for their simultaneous replies. "Absolutely!" Mac said. "No!" Linda said. Linda was just kidding, of course. Look, she was sitting in the chichi media cafeteria at Wimbledon with a certain Chronicle columnist, bundled up in an overcoat watching it drizzle after having just signed off with her hubby on a $7 million letter of credit to bring the 2003 and 2004 Tennis Masters Cups to Houston. What's not to be giddy with excitement about? The deal isn't done. But the lingering details involve a squabble between the ATP, the International Tennis Federation and the Grand Slams partnership and, no matter how that gets resolved, it will have no impact on the McIngvales' intention of going through with their most outrageously ambitious tennis adventure yet. By about fourfold. The USTA's Men's Clay Court Championships cost them roughly $2.5 million to pull off. The prize money pool for the Masters is currently $4 million alone. Because he'll also be reuniting the doubles finals with the singles for the first time since 1985, the total outlay probably will exceed $10 million. It will be tons of fun. It will not save him money. "Events like this are the only way we'll ever get any money back out of the club," Mac said. "We'll never get any money back out of the club," Mrs. Mac chimed in, correcting him. Nobody ever accused the McIngvales, arguably the least likely tennis impresarios in the history of the sport, of not thinking big, or of not having confidence in their ability to keep moving recliners out the Gallery doors by the hundreds. Mac donned a tie and made his passionate presentation to the ATP on Friday morning with no serious competition. Representatives from St. Petersburg, Russia, wanted to get in the game, but the put-up-or-shut-up $7 million derailed their efforts before they were ever on track. So the Masters will return to Houston after a 27-year hiatus. When Compaq Center was less than a year old in 1976, the event paid its last visit to an American metropolis other than Boston (1973) or New York. There it settled in 1977 and stayed through 1989 before moving to the German cities of Frankfurt, then Hanover in the 1990s. Lisbon and Sydney have hosted the last two Masters. The racket party moves on to Shanghai's International Expo Center in November. McIngvale briefly considered Houston's under-construction downtown arena, to open in the fall of 2003, as a possible venue but quickly dismissed it as being too vast, too expensive to rent from his old chum Leslie Alexander and, worst of all, far too removed from the Westside environs. He knows he can't hope to break even with 8,200 seats in the club's erector-set stadium -- ironically, they'll have to lay down temporary hardcourts over two of those $500,000-plus copycat Roland Garros clay courts -- but at least he can use the event to promote his club. And he guarantees the place will be jumping from the get-go. Mac sold out the U.S.-Spain Davis Cup quarterfinal in about 10 minutes, and that rousing success plus Sampras' late entry helped him go SRO at the Clay Courts. More important than merely collecting money for the seats, Mac filled them with cheering, clapping fans. Pete and Andre Agassi left town raving about Houston's high energy level and, when those two speak, tennis people listen. It has reached the point where we must say the same of Mac. Money talks ...
