in time: mary wilson
In sports, time is everything. The fractions of a second elapsed between first and second place in a sprint. A swing of the tennis racket timed to meet the ball at just the right instant. The nail-biting final moments of the fourth quarter in a tied football game. Without the constraint of time, most sports would lose momentum and meaning.
As a woman who has lived her life in sports, Mary Wilson knows all too well what it means to be up against the clock. From the hours spent on the courts of Wimbledon at the pinnacle of her competitive tennis career to her years of sideline access to the Buffalo Bills as the wife of team owner Ralph Wilson, Mary is a seasoned expert in the way time can be a curse or a gift to a competitor, depending on fate and fortune. But her most challenging race against time may be ahead of her.
As a Life Trustee of the Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation, Mary is an integral part of the organization’s work to meet the 20-year spend-down deadline mandated by her late husband when he conceptualized his namesake foundation. The clock is already ticking down to 2035, the year the Foundation’s balance sheet is required to zero out.
Making the spend-down deadline even more challenging is the sheer volume of the spend–$1.2 billion plus additional investment earnings that accrue over time.
“It is unusual. But there are examples of foundations that have, over time, gone off in directions that they were never meant to–off-mission and away from the founder’s vision,” Mary explains. “The idea for the spend-down really was to make sure the impact of this foundation would be aligned to Ralph’s values and the way he lived his life.”
Born in Columbus, Ohio, and raised in Detroit, Michigan, Ralph Wilson graduated from the University of Virginia and attended law school at the University of Michigan before enlisting and serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II. After the war, he returned home to Michigan and joined his father’s insurance business. Over time, he invested in a diverse range of businesses and established Ralph Wilson Industries.
He was a successful businessman by 1959, when he purchased an AFL football team for $25,000 and founded the Buffalo Bills. He went on to be the team’s only owner for over five decades, making him one of the longest-tenured owners in football history. Six months after his death in 2014, the Buffalo Bills were sold for $1.4 billion, the majority of which will be invested by the Ralph C. Wilson Foundation.
The Foundation makes investments in Western New York and Southeast Michigan, the two places Ralph called home, and focuses on four priority areas aligned with Ralph’s animating values: promoting active lifestyles, preparing youth for workforce success, supporting caregivers, and nurturing entrepreneurship and economic development.
A core operating principle of the foundation is collaboration, and they continually seek strong education partners already active in the foundation’s focus areas and target regions.
“We’re not reinventing the wheel,” Mary explains. “We can really make a difference by helping people who are already making a difference, and who will continue their work long after the foundation is gone. So we’re finding other organizations that are doing great things and investing in them. I think that is going to be one of our great legacies.”
The foundation’s biggest investments to date are in large-scale parks and trails projects in both Detroit and Buffalo, announced on Ralph’s 100th birthday and funded by $200 million to be split evenly between the two cities. The signature parks will both be renamed Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Centennial Park and will revitalize West Riverfront Park in Detroit and LaSalle Park in Buffalo.
Since they were announced in 2018, the projects have become a strong illustration of the foundation’s approach to collaboration, with dozens of government and private sector partners working in concert toward a shared vision, investing time and money to make the parks a reality.
The commitment to collaboration and inclusion extends to the communities and people the foundation seeks to serve as well.
“We asked the community what they wanted,” Mary says. “We brought together people from different walks of life and took them to different parks on learning trips. We had meetings with the community who came together to give us their ideas. It’s the way we do things–with a lot of input, together with our communities.”
One person the Foundation never received direct input from, though, was Ralph Wilson himself. When asked if Ralph shared a detailed vision or hopes for his legacy as he entered the later years of his life, Mary laughs.
“Are you kidding? Ralph was gonna live forever,” she says.
Instead, to ensure his vision would be realized, Ralph handpicked a slate of lifetime trustees to drive the direction of the foundation after his death–his wife Mary Wilson and niece Mary Owen; Jeffrey C. Littleman, who served under Ralph as director and CFO of the Buffalo Bills for 25 years; and the late Eugene Driker, a prominent Detroit lawyer who was a close advisor and friend.
“He chose four people who really knew him,” Mary said. “We all knew him in different ways, but we knew his passions and how he lived his life. He said that he trusted that we would know what to do.”
And with a watchful eye on the countdown to 2035, they are carrying Ralph’s legacy on well. At publication of the foundation’s last biennial progress report, it had committed 1,118 grants with a grand total of nearly $1 billion. The size of the task is not lost on Mary.
“I’m often overwhelmed at meetings by the magnitude of the work, by the honor of just being in the room with so many great people,” Mary says. “And I’ve grown to understand the tremendous responsibility I have to the community Ralph–and I–love so much in Buffalo and Western New York.”
A native Texan, Mary graduated with a physical education degree from Trinity University in San Antonio. Her competitive tennis career spanned many years and included playing Wimbledon in 1976 and a successful high school coaching career in Corpus Christi.
“As a girl in Texas, what I was looking for was the perfect forehand. I really loved the game of tennis. But I had no idea about Buffalo or the Buffalo Bills,” Mary says, laughing. “I had no plan of getting married–I enjoyed my life and my freedoms. But Ralph was pretty amazing.”
It was on the tennis court that Ralph, also an avid player, first saw Mary in 1990. They dated for several years before marrying in 1999. Early in their relationship, Mary was by Ralph’s side to see the Buffalo Bills’ unprecedented run of four Super Bowl appearances. It taught Mary a lot about the kind of person Ralph was.
“It was devastating, losing the Super Bowl, but Ralph was always a person who could move on,” Mary explains. “The next day he was thinking about how to move forward, talking to his coach. He was resilient and he didn’t get stuck on anything in life. And he had so much integrity, always treating people right. The people who worked with him at the Bills always felt they were part of a family. He just had an amazing attitude about life.”
Mary spent 25 years with Ralph, splitting time between Detroit and Buffalo and attending countless Bills games by his side, until time ran short in 2014 when he died at the age of 95. While Mary’s time with Ralph was over, the impact of his life was just beginning to take shape in the Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation and the people he had chosen to steer it.
“It’s amazing, the whole circle of Ralph,” Mary explains. “It started with his love of football, and Buffalo, and the fans. But his foundation really is touching more people on a broader scope. It’s sometimes hard to get my mind around it.”
In many ways, this is a story about time well spent. Ralph Wilson understood better than most how to focus on the things that truly mattered to him within the timeline he was granted. And he created his namesake foundation to operate with the same principles by which he lived his life–to do things that matter, urgently, because, as in the game of football, there is always a clock.
When asked if she has anything else to add, Mary pauses for a moment and smiles: “Just that I am so lucky to be part of his legacy. And that I miss him every day.”