A Phoenix Rises

Oil and gas man Dick Lowe, “never a doubt” in his mind, enjoying life after financial bust and comeback.

by

There’s a framed piece of art – a gift from the city’s exclusive Exchange Club – that hangs in Dick Lowe’s home office on the west side of Fort Worth. “How a Phoenix Rises from the Ashes,” its title says, but Phoenix was crossed out by the artist and replaced with “Horned Frog.” It shows a caricature of a triumphant Lowe, the oil and gas wildcatter and TCU booster who finally struck it rich and stayed rich, dropping cash on the university and another favorite charity amid the ashes of two plane wrecks symbolizing a pair of ventures that busted wildly in the late 1980s.

That’s fortunately the last time Lowe, now 87, was busted – he was in his 60s then, if you’re doing the math - and the last time he had to deploy what he says has been a simple strategy for those times he’s been dead broke. “Quit drinking, quit eating bad food, exercise rigorously, walk every day, think about nothing but making money.”

“The only stress I had was I was broke; I didn’t have other forces working against me,” says Lowe, a direct, fearless and persistent negotiator who cashed in twice with partner Hunter Enis and others on the Barnett Shale for a total $1 billion in sales in the last decade. Lowe had a minority interest in a third $225 million sale of Barnett Shale assets that were assembled by his son, Brad Cunningham. “People who go broke and start feeling sorry for themselves are screwed,” Lowe says.

It turns out nothing keeps Dick Lowe down. Not even the rogue golf cart that tipped over at the Shady Oaks Country Club in mid-January while Lowe was driving it and trying to catch up to his group, sending him airborne and falling on top of him. (Cue the artist again.) Lowe, with just a cut lip and bruised thigh, was back at things and headed out of the country several days later for a week-long vacation in Costa Rica. “Dick’s doing an interview on how to drive a golf cart,” his wife of 30 years, Mary, joked a day before they left for Costa Rica. “Did you hear about Dick’s accident?” Enis, shaking with laughter, said at the start of an interview with FW Inc. about his partner.

The last time Lowe was broke, it was just a few years after he had taken the fall for a band of unnamed TCU boosters who got caught making payments to football recruits. Lowe says he took a 20-year break from being intimately involved in the program “to just be a fan.” In 2011, he and Enis cut a $15 million check for the renovation of TCU’s Amon Carter Stadium.

The last time Lowe was broke, he and his wife completed the last of a series of moves into smaller homes, this time into a little rent house off of White Settlement Road. Mary had sold her engagement ring, and Dick Lowe arrived home one day to find a friend testing the StairMaster in the couple’s garage. “Mary was keeping us in money by selling furniture and everything,” Lowe says.

These days, there are fewer stresses. Four Sevens Oil Co., the Fort Worth firm founded in 1990 by Lowe and Enis, both former Frog football players, is on the sidelines, with energy prices depressed and potentially headed lower. The firm is buying mineral rights and royalty interests, but not drilling any wells. And the company has no debt. The market will “start going up again, maybe this summer,” Lowe says. “All you’ve got to have is the demand curve. The supply curve has gotten a lot better.”

Larry Brogdon, chairman of the TCU Energy Institute and the geologist who steered Lowe and Enis toward the Barnett Shale and became their partner at Four Sevens, tells his students Dick Lowe is “like a rubber ducky. You turn him over and put him under, and he pops back up. He’s the most persistent guy I’ve ever seen. And optimistic. Ultra-optimistic.”

Lowe’s Start: Age 11 Ask Lowe how he got his start in the industry, and he remembers it like it was yesterday. He grew up in Wichita Falls, and his father was a landman and the family had very little money, mostly, Lowe says, because his dad would deal only with honest oilmen. “My career started when I was 11,” Lowe says. “The way it started was I just couldn’t believe the South lost the Civil War.”

So he rode his bike to the library and read up on the war. The librarian took an interest in him, he says, and showed him how to use criss-cross directories, which matched addresses of homes to the occupations of people living in them. “We lived around a lot of really expensive houses, and I was just determined to figure out who owned the most expensive homes,” Lowe says. Using the directories, he found “the vast majority were in the oil and gas business.”

Lowe asked his father how to get into oil and gas. “He told me to go to college and get a geology degree, get a job with a big company, then go out on your own,” Lowe says. “He said ‘I want you to go to college, but I want you to know right now I can’t afford to send you.’ ”

Lowe then turned to football, because he heard there were college scholarship opportunities for kids who played football. But he was undersized, and he didn’t get much opportunity to play early on in high school, he says. “The first three years I played football, I didn’t get in the game,” he says. “I had a coach who tried to get me to quit – for three years.” Then, Lowe says he learned how to hit with his elbows. “I broke my friend’s nose,” he says. “Then they started paying attention to me.”

Lowe got a scholarship offer from the legendary TCU coach Dutch Meyer, whose Horned Frogs won the national championship in 1938. Lowe had paid an official visit to Texas A&M and had several more visits to go, he says, when he arrived for a visit to TCU. Meyer told Lowe he needed to decide immediately. “Well, how long do I have before I have to make up my mind?” Lowe says he asked Meyer. “He says, ‘you’ve got 30 seconds.’ ” Lowe said yes.

At TCU, Lowe played guard for the football team and majored in geology, where he got impatient and interrupted a lecture. “I said, ‘I want to know if we’re ever going to learn anything about how to find oil and gas,’ ” he says. The professor made Lowe stay after class for the last six weeks of school under threat of not passing him and allowing him to receive a degree, Lowe says. “Then when I went to look for a job, he gave me a negative recommendation.”

With a friend’s help, Lowe got his first job in oil and gas, as a mud logger in Sweetwater, analyzing samples of rock for oil. Nine months later, Lowe heard about another job in Graham, and he hitchhiked there, getting a job as a wellsite geologist. Impatient with periods of inactivity, Lowe told his boss he wanted to develop prospects, and lease them and drill the sites. His boss approved, and Lowe, still in his mid-20s, hit the courthouse, where the staff showed him how to search records for property ownership. One of the employees even recognized two of the owners he was researching and called and introduced him.

GOING INDEPENDENT At 29, Lowe went independent, moving to Fort Worth about the same time. “I quit a good job,” he says. “But if you’re an employee, you make a salary. I wanted to make equity.”

One thing he hadn’t considered before he resigned: “I didn’t realize you needed a capital source. I didn’t have one. So I just started cold-calling people. Doctors, dentists, bricklayers, just anybody I knew who had money.”

One of Lowe’s hallmarks: “I was totally sincere and determined,” he says. “If they don’t buy it, at least they like your attitude.”

But success didn’t come immediately. “I drilled 16 dry holes,” over four to five years, Lowe says. “I starved to death for years and years and years.”

Then, opportunity struck in a big play discovered in New Mexico and West Texas. The acreage was all leased, but Mobil was farming a site out, and Lowe had a friend in oil and gas who did a report on the prospects for the field. Lowe traded him the engineering and tried unsuccessfully to raise money in Fort Worth and Midland.

Lowe flew to New York, where a friend who worked for a chemical company connected him to his boss, who took an interest and turned Lowe onto several other prospects, whom Lowe cold-called. It took six weeks, but he raised the money. Lowe offered one well at a time and ended up owning a large chunk of the deals as three quarters of the investors opted out down the line.

This time, Lowe says he drilled 32 straight good wells. A company offered to buy them, and Lowe accepted. His share, at age 35: about $1 million. “I was a millionaire for the first time,” Lowe says.

One of Lowe’s next ventures was the purchase, with borrowed money, of Tenneco acreage on the W.T. Waggoner Ranch in Wichita County. The deal started to go sour, and a friend suggested Lowe go public. Lowe had started a company in Canada, and he contacted his manager there, who connected him to a group of Canadian investors. The group bought the deal, then backed out, forcing Lowe to have to fly to Canada and have to re-seal the deal over dinner and drinks, he says.

American Quasar went public, its stock eventually rising to $33 per share from 50 cents as the company drilled wells in the United States and Canada, including in a big Utah discovery. Lowe’s stake in the company was worth $77 million at its peak, and he borrowed to buy a home and a ranch.

Then American Quasar drilled a well into a giant gas discovery in British Columbia, 90 miles from a pipeline in the mountains. American Quasar struck a deal with British Columbia Petroleum Corp. to build a line connecting American Quasar to the pipeline, but only if American Quasar built six wells, a landing strip and roads, Lowe says.

With an agreement to sell the gas in California, Lowe assembled $60 million in debt from a consortium of banks. “We are ready to go,” he says. Then Canada slapped a punitive tariff on gas exiting the country. “We were stuck,” and American Quasar’s value and Lowe’s holdings took a beating, he says. “We were broke,” he says. “But we had a bunch of acreage. If we wildcatted that and were successful, we were set.”

A subsequent financial deal to save American Quasar fell apart, and then a friend referred him to the financier Richard Rainwater, who was interested, but didn’t want Lowe involved in the entity because of the potential stigma, Lowe says. “I told him, ‘I don’t care if you make me janitor; I want equity,’ ” Lowe says.

The company was restructured as Wolverine in 1988, but it went bad, too, Lowe says. “I owed $11 million, and I was broke,” Lowe says.

Besides the move to a rent home and the sale of various other assets, Lowe’s car was repossessed. “I called the bank and said, ‘Listen, you’ve repossessed this car; how do you want to come get it?’ ” he says. The bank asked Lowe to drive the car to the bank. He did, but had no way to get home. “I had to call a friend for a ride,” he says. Lowe says he’d whittled his debt to $1.25 million. But in a dispute with his bank, he ended up filing for bankruptcy.

“Mary and I had $3,000, in a shoebox,” Lowe says. “No car, no credit cards, no home, no income. We had nothing. That’s when Hunter called.”

BARNETT SHALE CALLS Enis, who played quarterback at TCU for Coach Abe Martin and then went pro, had gone into oil and gas in 1978 when he was in his early 40s and was looking for a partner. Lowe told Enis he was broke. “I said, ‘No, you’re like getting the No. 1 draft choice with no bonus,’ ” Enis says.

Lowe, Enis knew, was a good oilman with experience and connections. The pairing matched up Lowe’s skills as a dealmaker with Enis’s business sense, Brogdon, the geologist, says. “I’ve seen Dick get so mad” during a negotiation, Brogdon says. “And it was all for show. He’d be giving the attorneys a mouthful, and then he’d walk by and wink at me.”

Lowe and Enis formed Four Sevens and started drilling in Jack County with nothing but a handshake deal, an arrangement they say remains today, to the consternation of the legal team. “This is our contract,” Enis says, showing a color photograph of him and Lowe shaking hands. “If you’re worth a damn, that’s all you need,” says Lowe, who, Enis notes, also eschews computers and smartphones in favor of a yellow legal pad.

The 1990s were productive, even with outmoded technology in vertical wells. Lowe had borrowed $1 million from Enis to get into Four Sevens, and he repaid that after winning a lawsuit against his bank that came out of the bankruptcy.

Then in the early 2000s, the Barnett Shale – the huge natural gas formation - happened to Four Sevens. Enis and Lowe got interested as gas prices and technology improved, assembling acreage and leases and drilling its first wells beginning in 2002.

Four Sevens got in on the Barnett Shale early. “We were really early,” Brogdon says. “Leases were $150 an acre,” later rising to $27,000 an acre during the peak. “It was crazy.”

Enis and Lowe tracked the progress of Mitchell Energy and its billionaire leader George Mitchell, who figured out how to use “slick water” to fracture the shale and get to the gas, and then modeled Four Sevens’ approach after that. Mitchell also pioneered the drilling of horizontal wells in the Barnett Shale, and Four Sevens followed. “All of the information is public, so we just got the public information and did what they did,” Enis says. Higher gas prices and cheaper costs of extracting the gas meant “all of sudden, it made it economic,” and allowed independents like Four Sevens to get in, Brogdon says.

Brad Cunningham, Mary Lowe’s son from a previous marriage, ran the Four Sevens land department, which went from Cunningham and three landmen to 150 landmen at the peak. Many were ex-TCU athletes. “We wanted people who had a real strong work ethic, and we wanted people who were competitive,” Brogdon says.

XTO Energy called at one point and asked to visit and examine Four Sevens’ production, Lowe says. XTO offered $140 million, which Lowe declined. “How much money do you need?” Enis, using an expletive, asked Lowe, Lowe recalls.

XTO called back and offered $145 million for 26,000 acres, which Lowe declined, Lowe says. XTO then offered $155 million. In a meeting, “Hunter said, ‘we’ll take it!’ before I could say $165 million,” Lowe says. That deal closed in 2004.

Four Sevens continued to assemble assets in the Barnett Shale, and then took the package to market again. This time, Chesapeake Energy was the lone interested buyer and offered $825 million. “I said, ‘That’s nice, but that won’t buy it,’ ” Lowe says. Chesapeake returned and offered $845 million, which Four Sevens accepted. That 39,000-acre deal closed in 2006, and Four Sevens shared the proceeds with its 50-percent partner Sinclair Oil.

There was very little basis for the $845 million number from Four Sevens’ side, Enis says. “$845 million plus $155 million is a billion,” Enis says. “That’s very scientific, isn’t it?”

Four Sevens did its last big sale in 2008, when it sold a package to Chesapeake for $225 million, with Cunningham having the biggest interest.

Cunningham, 50 today, had flown corporate jets for Justin Industries when he got interested in oil and gas and joining Four Sevens. When he asked Lowe for a job, “Dick said, ‘You got any money? You’re going to have work for free for one year,’ ” Cunningham recalls. Cunningham, then 30, worked the one year in the field in Jack County, logging wells, running pipe, and starting wells. “After a year, I was out of money,” says Cunningham, who asked for a job again. Lowe, as he had promised a year earlier, let Enis make the decision. Enis hired Cunningham, who later became partner.

After the 2006 sale, Cunningham went to Lowe and Enis and asked them to stay in the game. Lowe recommended securing a pipeline right-of-way and signing up drill sites in Fort Worth. Do that, and “you’ve captured all the gas,” Lowe told Cunningham, who subsequently led the leasing of 7,000 acres. In 2008, Cunningham, tired of the messy politics that came with leasing in the city, decided he wanted to take the package to market. Lowe recommended calling Chesapeake. Natural gas prices peaked in the spring of 2008. “Brad never drilled a well,” Lowe says, with pride. “He’s a lot smarter than Hunter and I.”

Four Sevens can still blow a wad of money. Early on, it sold a package of Parker County leases for $500,000, keeping a 12.5 percent back-end interest. That company sold, and Lowe negotiated a $54 million price for its interest in the Parker County assets. The money didn’t last. “We drilled a bunch of wells in Lubbock County,” Lowe says. “No good.”

ON THE SIDELINES Today, the pace is decidedly more relaxed at Four Sevens. The principals meet daily to discuss trends, examine logs, and decide whether to pursue any acquisitions, they say. The group doesn’t get too wrapped up in when oil prices might come back.

“I think we’ll start to see prices start to come back by the end of ’16, beginning of ’17,” Cunningham says. “But that’s just my opinion, and it’s guaranteed to be wrong.”

The market presents strong opportunities for lean companies with no debt and “a little bit of cash,” Enis says. “There’s billions of dollars on the sidelines waiting to get into oil and gas. If we were young, we’d be back in the middle of this right now.”

Today, Dick and Mary Lowe live just a few miles away from, but decidedly more comfortably than, the rent home they once occupied. Their impressive home has a pool and a massive man cave that includes bar, shuffleboard and pool tables, juke box, collection of artwork and TCU memorabilia, and a bathroom with urinal. More than enough room to entertain friends and the Lowes’ family: three sons including Chad Cunningham and Burk Lowe, five grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.

Lowe routinely lifts weights and likes to play golf in the afternoons twice a week with a regular group at Shady Oaks, near his home. During a two-month vacation this summer at Ruidoso in New Mexico, he played golf nearly every day, hurting himself in the process. He jokes about how most of his longtime friends have died. Still, even if he needs a golf partner, there are some people Lowe won’t play with. “He won’t play with me unless he’s wearing a helmet,” says Brogdon, who admits to having once hit a ball backwards and being very susceptible to a dramatic fade.

And Lowe freely indulges in his TCU passion, attending all football games at home and on the road, often sitting with the athletic director Chris Del Conte in the visitor’s AD box  during road games. Lowe and Enis were one of six founding $15 million donors toward the Amon Carter Stadium renovations. Both recall a visit Del Conte paid to pitch them on becoming founding contributors.

Lowe and Enis both say they had agreed to give a total $5 million, and told that to Del Conte when he showed up. “I was expecting a big hug,” Lowe recalls. “He says, ‘Nooooo, I can’t take $5 million from you boys; I need 15.’ ” Enis recalls the conversation the same way. “He wound up getting $15 million,” Enis says. Del Conte, through a spokesman, said he doesn’t recall that specific exchange.

Lowe says he wasn't forced to disassociate himself from the football program after the recruiting fiasco, but he took a long break anyway.

“What I did was stupid, it was wrong, it was ridiculous, and it was goofy, and it wasn’t really me,” says Lowe, who never identified any of the other boosters involved in the infractions, even though he says the chancellor Bill Tucker pressed him for the information.

Through all of his ups and downs, Lowe says his wife Mary, a longtime benefactor of Fort Worth’s Presbyterian Night Shelter, the other charity depicted in the Lowe caricature, stuck it out, remembering people of significantly less fortune. Even though Dick Lowe was busted at an age when most people are contemplating when to start their Social Security checks, Lowe says he knew he’d be able to mount a comeback. “Never a doubt in my mind,” he says.

There was no retrieving his wife’s engagement ring. “But she got one as similar to it as I could find,” he says.