Remembering Greg Van Dusen: ‘Dutch’ played important role in bringing Kings to Sacramento
Greg Van Dusen was the cheerful fellow booming with optimism. He was everybody’s friend, and no person was too small to help and no task was too tall to tackle.
Well before his death Tuesday at 72, Van Dusen did the grunt work and heavy lifting. In his 20s, he pushed a broom, sold tickets and wrapped hot dogs early in his Sacramento sporting career with the Sacramento Solons Triple-A baseball team, though his primary task was that of public relations. In his 30s, he brainstormed with Sacramento developer Gregg Lukenbill on ways to make Sacramento a sports city to be proud of, and he helped move mountains. Some 40 years ago, with a hard hat on top of his flowing hair at a construction site in Natomas, Van Dusen was in his element, gleefully handing out bumper stickers that read, “The Kings are coming!”
Van Dusen was a paramount figure in Sacramento sports for decades, be it with professional baseball and soccer teams that squeezed into Hughes Stadium, or helping Lukenbill negotiate the deal that secured the purchase of the Kansas City Kings and the relocation to Sacramento in 1985. He was Lukenbill’s public relations voice and was for 12 years the executive vice president of Arco Arena. Van Dusen helped the Kings become the first sports team in the country to secure paid naming rights for arenas, which is now common.
Van Dusen’s mind was sharp and witty to the end, but his liver and kidneys failed him, his family said. His three sons, Adam, Brett and Kyle, announced his passing on Facebook. Brett Van Dusen spoke to The Bee about the contributions of the man known as “Dutch” as a father and Sacramento sporting figure.
“Just a great guy who helped hundreds if not thousands of people make connections over the years, advancing careers, giving advice, helping out,” said Brett Van Dusen, a project manager for Syblin-Red, a construction firm in Folsom. “The amount of people he knew and shook hands with was amazing. He always had a great spirit and sense of humor. We’ll miss that.”
Humor helped Greg Van Dusen navigate through exhausting 100-hour work weeks. The Sacramento High School and Sacramento State graduate grew up a sports nut. He worked his way into the front office of the Solons, who in the mid 1970s played home games at Hughes, a horseshoe stadium designed for football. But he made it work, offering up all sorts of gimmicks and fun that led to the highest attendance in minor league baseball. Van Dusen was the general manager of Hughes Stadium on the campus of Sacramento City College, which was home to memorable boxing matches and the Sacramento Gold professional soccer team that led the league in attendance and won a championship in 1979.
Then he was out of a job. The soccer league folded. Before long, he met Lukenbill. They had common interests and the gift of gab.
“Dutch was a guy I connected with in the context of loving Sacramento and history,” said Lukenbill, still building and developing projects big and small in Sacramento. “I wasn’t so much a sports guy as I was a builder and historian. He was a perfect match for me then.”
Lukenbill recalled his quest to lead a Sacramento group to purchase the floundering Kings.
“I knew I had to go to Kansas City to meet the guy there running the team,” Lukenbill said. “I called Dutch early in the morning — ‘Get two tickets to Kansas City. We’re going!’ We get there and made the deal that afternoon.”
Van Dusen beamed when the Kings played their first NBA game in Sacramento in 1985, then he beamed some more in the new Arco Arena when it opened in 1988. Though he was no longer working with the Kings, he was an advocate for the Kings getting a new arena — Golden 1 Center.
“Sports can work here, and we’ve shown that, and our best days are ahead,” Van Dusen told The Bee in 2021. “You always try to shoot for the moon.”
In the Kings, Sacramento landed Jupiter, a taste of the big time in a city that had only known minor league sports, most of them that came and went or flopped. Though Van Dusen and Lukenbill were not able to lure the Oakland A’s or Raiders to Sacramento in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it wasn’t for a lack of effort or creativity.
G-Man’s start with Kings
Gary Gerould said he is forever indebted to Van Dusen. Gerould is the only radio voice the Kings have had since their arrival, and it is tied directly to Van Dusen.
“Dutch was instrumental in me getting the radio job,” Gerould said Wednesday. “One day, I get one of these out-of-the-blue calls — ‘G-Man! It’s Dutch! I want to play what-if with you. What if the Kansas City Kings come to Sacramento? Would you be interested in being the play-by-play voice?’ Well, yeah. I was stunned but excited, and it took off from there.”
Without any NBA broadcasting experience, but backed by Van Dusen’s enthusiasm, Gerould landed the gig and became an institution. So, too, was Van Dusen.
“It’s a tremendous loss,” Gerould said. “He was huge here. His fingerprints were all over so many projects. He was even a star in the local media softball league, Sunday morning, a lot of personality and always fun.”
Van Dusen also helped jump start the career of Don Yee, a Sacramento native who became a sports agent and whose clients include Tom Brady and Jimmy Garoppolo.
As a young teenager in 1973, Yee answered an ad in The Bee posted by the Solons. The club was in need of batboys and clubhouse attendants. Yee wrote a letter to the Solons. Van Dusen answered, interviewed Yee, hired him, and Yee was hooked on sports. That Yee fibbed on his age — the job required applicants to at least be in high school — amused Van Dusen decades later.
“Wait. He was in the eighth grade when I hired him?” Van Dusen told The Bee for a Yee story in 2019. “He lied about that! Smart kid. He could be one of the great feel-good stories to come out of here.”
Kings’ darkest day
In his years working at Hughes Stadium in baseball, boxing or soccer, Van Dusen experienced it all. He’d been shoved, poked and cursed by spectators who were unruly. He was splashed by beer and other assorted debris.
While in the Kings front office, Van Dusen was once clutched by the shirt collar and hoisted by a crestfallen Bill Russell, the Hall of Fame great who in the late 1980s coached the Kings and worked in the club’s front office. The darkest day in Kings history was one that remained with Van Dusen. On Aug. 14, 1988, it was Van Dusen who was alerted by Sacramento law enforcement of a tragedy, and it was Van Dusen who broke the news to Russell: promising forward Ricky Berry had taken his life by suicide by shooting himself.
Russell was meeting with Berry’s parents at Arco Arena about a scouting job for Bill Berry when Van Dusen fielded that call.
“I had to go tell Russ,” Van Dusen told The Bee for a story on Russell’s passing in August. “He was just down the hall. I motioned for him. First, he waved me off. I finally got him out and told him what happened. Bill grabbed me by my sports coat and lifted me, face to face, and said, ‘You’d’ better not be f---ing with me!’ I started crying. ‘I’m not.’ Russ was never the same.”
Van Dusen said it was “the most difficult, saddest, most painful experience I’ve had in sports. I’ll mostly remember the good times, but that sticks.”
Van Dusen kept his good cheer to the end, his son Brett said. Brett held his father’s hand for his final breath, not too long after Van Dusen bid a tearful goodbye via cell phone video.
“Hey, this is Greg,” he said in the clip. “I hope everybody is doing well. It’s been a wonderful life, and I just wanted to send all of you my love and thanks and blessings.”
Van Dusen’s memorial service is March 2 at Heritage Oaks Memorial Chapel in Rocklin with a reception to follow at Bennett’s Kitchen Bar Market in Roseville.
This story was originally published February 22, 2023 at 2:27 PM.