Robert K. Kraft, also known as Bob Kraft (born 1942) is the owner of National Football League's New England Patriots and Major League Soccer's New England Revolution, as well as the stadium where they play, Gillette Stadium.
Kraft, a native of Brookline, Massachusetts, is a 1963 graduate of Columbia University and the Harvard Business School. He is married to Myra Kraft, a 1964 graduate of Brandeis University and the daughter of Boston philanthropist Jacob Hiatt.
He began his career with the Rand-Whitney Group, a packaging company he later acquired; he still serves as chairman. In 1972, he founded International Forest Products, a paper commodity trader. The two combined companies make up the largest privately-held paper and packaging companies in the United States.
A Patriots fan since their American Football League days, he first bought season tickets for the team in 1971. In 1988, he outbid several competitors to buy Sullivan Stadium, then the home of the Patriots, out of bankruptcy court for $25 million. It was renamed Foxboro Stadium in 1990.
In 1992, the Patriots themselves were bought by James Orthwein, a St. Louis native. For the next two years, constant rumors swirled that the Patriots were due to move to St. Louis because Orthwein wanted to return the NFL to a city that had lost the Cardinals in 1988. Finally, in 1994, Orthwein offered Kraft $75 million to buy out the remainder of the team's lease at the stadium. Kraft turned him down, instead making a $175 million bid to buy the team that Orthwein had little choice but to accept. It was the highest price ever paid at the time for a professional team, especially remarkable since the Patriots were one of the least-valued teams in the NFL. He consolidated his business interests into the Kraft Group in 1998.
The day after the NFL approved the sale, Patriots fans bought almost 6,000 season tickets en route to selling out every game for the first time in the team's 34-year history. Every home game has been sold out since then. The Patriots responded by putting together a 7-game winning streak to end the season, making the playoffs for the first time since 1986. Under Kraft's ownership, the Patriots have won more playoff games (16) than in the team's first 33 seasons combined (10). The team won AFC East titles in 1996, 1997, 2001, 2003 and 2004 and represented the AFC in the Super Bowl in 1996 (lost), 2001 (won) 2003 (won) and 2004 (won). The team has dominated the last two seasons with identical 14-2 regular-season records--a franchise record for a team that hadn't won more than 11 games in a season before Kraft bought the team.
The Patriots almost moved to Hartford, Connecticut in 1999, but at the last minute the hurdles were cleared for what became Gillette Stadium, which opened in 2002.
He recently addressed the 2005 class of Columbia College upon their graduation regarding the driving forces in his life: "Family, Faith, Philanthropy, and FOOTBALL". In a break with commonly accepted spelling, Mr. Kraft termed this heady combination the "Four 'F's."
Later in 2005, a minor international incident was caused when it was reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin had inadvertantly taken one of Kraft's three Super Bowl rings. Kraft quickly cleared up the misunderstanding, stating that he had given Putin the ring out of "respect and admiration" he had for the President and the Russian people