Crystal Wise
More than 40 years ago, John Goff departed Houston for a trip up Interstate 45 carrying all that he owned in a U-Haul rental truck.
His most valuable possessions were his hopes and dreams.
He had brought all of it to Fort Worth.
Today, decades later, Goff is recognized as having achieved unique stature in American business, a bold, visionary real estate developer and billionaire investor.
He did it by being a keen, far-sighted observer of markets and market forces.
With Richard Rainwater, whom Goff calls “a brother, father, partner all wrapped into one,” he built and sold Crescent Real Estate Equities to Morgan Stanley for $6.5 billion. He bought it back in distress two years later for a fraction of what he sold it for.
The highly anticipated opening of the Crescent Fort Worth, a hotel and office development emerging in the Cultural District, is slated for later this year. The development will house Crescent Real Estate, Crescent Energy, Goff Capital, and Canyon Ranch, the luxury resort and wellness brand founded by Mel Zuckerman 40 years ago.
Along with 168,000 square feet of office space, the project will include a 200-room luxury hotel, an upscale restaurant, and 175 high-end residences.
The restaurant will also include a bar called Ralph’s, a request of investor Mary Ralph Lowe.
He likes to say that “I would love to think he thought I was really smart” when Rainwater charged him with investing $50 million in 1987, “but the reality is he knew the stock market was so oversold that any dummy could put money to work and it’d work out.”
Goff found out Rainwater’s plans for him as an investor while he was telling someone over the phone.
“And then I didn’t sleep for three weeks.”
Yet, to be sure, he is shrewd, astute, and sharp-witted, and, even then, 35 years ago he could, “rip apart a financial statement and quickly assess a company’s prospects.
Goff made Roger Staubach, a personal hero while growing up, a winner in real estate, and he and Rainwater with Rusty Rose and George W. Bush cut an ownership deal for the Texas Rangers, buying a distressed asset from Eddie Chiles. Rick Scott, today a senator from Florida, started Columbia/HCA with an investment from the team of Rainwater and Goff. Eddie Lampert, brought in from Goldman Sachs, started his highly successful investment fund in those same downtown offices.
Goff, 67, is also impeccably kind and thoughtful. And he has a pleasant nature that manifests in good humor, obviously.
He enjoys recalling the moment he decided to switch majors at the University of Texas. He had more than two years in as an electrical engineering student and was interning at Dow Chemical. He was on a design team for a new plant in Brazil. During a meeting on the project, he recalls, the engineering team was on one side of the table, and the business guys and lawyers financing the project were on the other.
“It was like a light switch,” Goff says. “I realized during that meeting that I needed to be on the other side of the table. What they were doing was a lot more interesting than what I was doing.
“And I felt I was more in line with their personality. [The engineers] were really nice people, but I just don’t know if I wanted to hang out with them all the time.”
He went back to Austin and became an accounting student. UT, then and now, has one of the best accounting programs in the country. In his class, he recalls, was Gary Kelly, the former CEO of Southwest Airlines, and Phillip Green, CEO of Frost Bank.
Whether the hand of destiny or simply Lady Luck interceding, that metaphoric fork in the road and Goff’s choice made all the difference.
Sitting across from him in a conference room, there is an aura of greatness that remains in one place in the air. I am sitting in the presence of greatness, a leader who has gotten results with a Midas touch, and a great communicator who operates at the highest levels of sincerity.
In that setting, a quick thought comes to mind: If there is a leadership void in our national politics – ahem, there is – this is the guy to bridge it.
This is the guy.
Socrates identified the ideal leaders for the body politic as the philosophers. Their natural abilities and virtues are what is necessary to rule well, he argued. They despise falsehood, are quick learners, have a good memory, they’re moderate, courageous, and are pleasant. They have a pleasant nature.
“I have been asked to,” Goff says of running for public office, “and thought about it -- for seconds -- but I don’t think I have the temperament, and besides … I love what I do.”
That he is civic-minded is indisputable, however.
Goff stepped out into the public realm at the outset of the pandemic at the request of Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price, who asked him to co-chair, with Elaine Agather, the committee to assist local business.
City staff and leaders “brainstormed on what we should do,” says Price of what became Fort Worth Now, “to help us get through the pandemic and how we could be more robust when we got out. I said, ‘I’ve got the right person.’”
Goff won’t say yes, she was told. He just doesn’t get out front like that.
“I said, ‘he might.’”
Says Goff: “I didn’t know exactly what I was buying into, but it was a lot of work, and still is,” he says. “I’m hopeful this is part of my legacy that I can give back to the city.”
He and Agather, of J.P. Morgan Chase, assembled a group of leaders from all walks of life to be part of the committee. That committee took charge of doing all the “obvious things,” like distributing masks, facilitating vaccination dispersal, and generally breaking through logjams wherever they were. It also assisted in getting money to businesses that were suffering under the strain of the pandemic and its associated shutdowns.
Goff personally gave $100,000 to Fort Worth Now. Jon Brumley, his good friend and business partner, heard that Goff had made the donation and matched it. Other benefactors, including J.P. Morgan, came forward.
“Pretty soon we had a budget to work from,” he says.
It wasn’t long before Goff was thinking about the committee’s charge to make the city more robust coming out of the pandemic.
“The single-most important thing I realized we could do is bring in a Tier 1 research university to the city. Long term that would have more impact than anything.”
Fort Worth was the largest city in the nation without one.
Of all the deals Goff has manufactured over the decades, the concordat with Texas A&M to bring a Tier 1 research campus to Fort Worth – let’s face it, when you strike a deal with an Aggie, it’s more like a covenant – might be his pièce de resistance.
It’s that big a deal for the city, likely ultimately ranking right up there with the U.S. Army’s arrival, the county election, the coming of the railroad, and TCU driving stakes in the ground.
Its leader is John Goff.
“This is really a legacy for me. I want to see it through.”
Texas A&M-Fort Worth
An artist's rendering of Texas A&M's campus in Fort Worth.
* * * * * *
In 1941, Dow Chemical embarked on building new plants in the Houston metro area. One problem came with expansion plans: How to provide accommodations for the thousands of current employees and the thousands who would follow.
The company found a solution. It would build a new town on the old Lake Jackson Plantation, south of Houston. The location was ideal for offering protection from Gulf storms.
It would be the “City of Enchantment,” and for one guy raised there it was indeed enchanting.
“It was a great place to grow up,” says Goff of his childhood hometown. “My parents never knew where I was. There was nothing fancy there at all. One drug store. One little grocery story and a more legitimate grocery store. One place to buy school clothes.
“We had a blast. Oyster Creek runs through town. I lived on the creek, fishing and hunting. There was a lot of goofing around and getting into trouble, though there wasn’t much trouble to get into.”
Each of the streets in town, the “ways,” led to the downtown area. “Center Way” is in the center of town. “Circle Way” loops around the business district. And, the town’s designers were clever, too. There was a “This Way” and a “That Way.” A church was, appropriately, located on “His Way.”
Goff’s parents met at Austin College in Sherman. Janice Blackburn was the daughter of a hardware store owner in town, Blackburn Hardware. In addition to hardware, Goff recalls, that his maternal grandfather sold coal and ice cream, too. Janice and Charlie Goff eloped to Dallas before she finished her degree.
Charlie Goff was at Austin College on an athletics scholarship, back when the school offered scholarships for sports. Charlie had a hall-of-fame career there, playing baseball, basketball, and football. That was a path the father had in mind for his youngest son, too.
Charlie graduated in 1940 just as the war was heating up on both shores. His father, with a new wife and soon with children, found a good paying job in Lake Jackson at the Dow plant, where he worked his way from entry level in the utility department to manager of material handling for the company’s Texas division.
Goff jokes that he was an unplanned addition to the family. He has an older brother, Charles Jr., now in his early 80s, and two older sisters, Jan and Jill, who both went to TCU.
At his home sits one of Goff’s most prized possessions, an autobiography his paternal grandfather authored.
“I don’t think he ever went to school, but somehow he learned to read and write,” Goff says. “I have it. I’ve given it to all my kids. He had no formal training, but it’s written in incredible penmanship.”
It’s all in one sentence, he says. “There are no periods or commas.”
“I want to do something with it. It could be a movie. It’s fascinating.”
It is indeed a compelling story.
It tells of the journey of his grandfather and great uncle traversing the Deep South by horseback from Tennessee and into Texas in search of Col. Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, ultimately the last conquerors of the Spanish empire in America. The demise of the USS Maine on the shores of Spanish Cuba had put the U.S. on a war footing in the late 1800s.
The Goff brothers wanted in.
“He [Goff’s grandfather] had this dream to ride with Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders,” Goff says. “I’m not sure he ever met with Teddy Roosevelt, but they met the leadership of the group and told them they wanted to fight with them. Somehow, they found out his age.”
The brothers were turned away, informed that they were too young to join the American war effort against Spain. Dejected, they rode off, finding the banks of the San Antonio River, where they camped for several days or weeks.
“They met some guys who told them, ‘If you really want to make some money, go to Mexico. There are free range cattle you can gather and bring up [to Texas] and sell for a lot of money.’”
So, off they went, south of the border, in search of money and glory, not the glory they sought in Cuba, but glory nonetheless. The brothers eventually traded in their horses for guns and hopped on a train. They jumped off somewhere near Vera Cruz.
“They never left,” Goff says.
Goff’s father was one of 10 children born to his grandparents, many of them in Mexico. Spanish was their first language. Goff isn’t sure exactly what kind of intermingling there was in Mexico. He believes, though he isn’t certain, that his grandmother, like his grandfather, was an American living in Mexico.
However, he says he still has many relatives living in Mexico.
The grandfather worked on a coffee plantation as a laborer and eventually bought 10 acres for a banana plantation. “That’s what they lived on,” Goff says. Any sense of enchantment in Mexico came to a screeching halt as the Mexican Revolution heated up, Villa and Zapata leading freedom fighters against the dictator, Porfirio Diaz.
“Pancho Villa comes in and raids the farm and takes animals,” Goff says, recalling the details of Pancho raiding his grandfather’s farm, as told in the book. “It’s the craziest story.”
Ultimately, it all became too much. The grandfather sent Goff’s father, then a young boy, and his other siblings back to the states, all transported by a military boat to Galveston.
His father was raised by two older sisters in the Fifth Ward of Houston, though at some point he moved back to Mexico.
“He was tough as nails,” Goff says of his father. “He grew up in a very bad part of town, but he was a good athlete and went to school at Austin College.”
All of the family eventually back to Texas, settling in Angleton in Brazoria County when Charlie was 12, according to his 2007 obituary.
Athletics was the same route to university the father wanted Goff to take. Goff says, while he enjoyed sports — and still does — going to school to play sports wasn’t an option. He had bigger concerns than a batting average.
“I was serious about my studies. At the time, I was scared and ambitious. My dad was at an age that he was talking about retiring. He never made much money. I knew I was going to be on my own. I was hungry, ambitious, and scared all wrapped up into one. I wanted to go study, get out of school, and make money.”
Goff had always been ambitious and industrious. He hustled. Not in the sense that one is dishonest or cunning. Like Charlie Hustle. He busted his ass.
He remembers as a young boy he would pick pecans in Lake Jackson and sell them to the local grocer. “He would cull through my sack of pecans on the basket of my bicycle because he would worry that I had put rocks or a brick at the bottom to weigh them,” he says laughing at the memory.
He also mowed grass for neighbors. At 10 or 11 years old, he did odd jobs, like painting and cleaning the pool at the apartment complex owned by the father of his older sister’s boyfriend. He earned the trust of the older man, who delegated other tasks, like collecting rent payments.
It was a long list of stuff. It was very lucrative for a pre-teen and teen.
“Whatever anybody needed, I did it,” Goff says. “I worked at a lumber yard, then [the same man] started building houses and I did that.
“Whenever my friends needed money, they would come to me,” he jokes.
Engineering seemed like a natural for a young man who grew up with a company, Dow, that desperately needed them. Goff certainly had an aptitude for it. He says building things and taking them apart, like a stereo or TV, was a favorite pastime.
“You name it, I built all kinds of stuff,” Goff says.
He had been accepted into a program at Dow in which the company would pay for an engineering degree, while the student would come back to work internships and, if everything went to plan, come to work full time at Dow.
All was going according to plan until that summer when he sat across from the financiers.
And then the light switch went off.
* * * * * *
Among his and wife Cami’s philanthropic pursuits, the Medal of Honor Museum, which has broken ground in Arlington, is a high priority.
The Goffs, Jerry Jones and his family are leading the fundraising movement to get it built, as well as a monument in Washington, D.C. So far, $185 million has been raised, including significant gifts from the Goffs and Joneses.
The Goffs have met with many of the 66 living Medal of Honor recipients.
“Incredible stories,” Goff says. “I find it unreal that nowhere in the U.S. is there a monument to honor them.”
It’s a passion project, he says. Cami Goff is executive vice president of the National Medal of Honor Museum board.
Texas A&M in Fort Worth is passion, too.
“I may be a tea-sip,” Goff said in public remarks earlier this year of his education at the University of Texas, “but I can tell you that when it comes to Fort Worth and Tarrant County, I am totally agnostic. I am 100% onboard.
“This was the No. 1 focus of mine personally, as well as Fort Worth Now, to get this deal done. It is a game changer. This will have so much impact. I can’t tell you how many companies have embraced this and are chomping at the bit to be a partner.”
The $350 million Texas A&M-Fort Worth campus will break ground soon. The money figure is a conservative estimate. The investment to be made, whether from the university or other sources, such as companies, will be “far greater than that,” Goff says.
“It’s going to be a big number.”
Fort Worth Now has been renamed the Fort Worth Tarrant County Innovation Partnership. Goff will be the chairman.
The high-rise complex will include classrooms, labs, and flexible research and maker spaces that can be used by the public and private sectors for academic programs, workforce training and collaborative research in the fields of engineering, emergency management communications, agriculture, health sciences and visualization, among others.
The Texas A&M System will construct the Law & Education Building. It will be financed with bonds backed by the Permanent University Fund and other sources.
The other two facilities, the Research and Innovation building and the Gateway conference center and offices, will be financed with city-issued bonds secured by leases to the A&M System and private sector development firms.
The Fort Worth City Council in January approved an interlocal agreement that spells out the general terms and conditions the city and Texas A&M will follow in developing the downtown campus.
The Research & Innovation Local Government Corp., also approved by City Council, will oversee a large portion of the campus, including construction of the Research and Innovation Building, Gateway Conference Center and a campus plaza.
A developer, who is yet to be chosen, will be responsible for developing and leasing the space for the private firms. Start dates for the two buildings have not been announced.
“Today, we are here to celebrate A&M’s continued nature of being both big and bold and their dreams of a Fort Worth campus,” said Councilwoman Elizabeth Beck, who represented the city in Mayor Mattie Parker’s stead. Parker was in Washington, D.C., for the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
“A&M could have updated their law school and called it a day. Instead, they decided to dream big and invest physically with three buildings, culturally, educationally, and economically in our community.”
“There’s a real appetite here to be connected to this kind of university,” Goff said at the Greater Fort Worth Real Estate Council’s 2023 Forecast in January. “Alcon has been incredible at talking and being in those meetings with me and with A&M to get them to bring aspects of the university that can benefit Alcon here.”
Lockheed, Bell Helicopter, AT&T, Elbit Systems, among others have joined in the meetings, too, he said.
Goff says he is personally working on one corporate relocation from the Northwest. The company employs software engineers that Texas A&M-Fort Worth will train and gradute.
“They want to move the entire company and locate right adjacent to the university,” he said.
Bobby Ahdieh, dean of the Texas A&M Law School had been among those to first see the potential of a win-win with an expanded A&M presence in Fort Worth.
“There had been talk about building a new law school building for a while,” Ahdieh says. “Frankly, as I got to know Fort Worth and A&M [when he took the job 4 1/2 years ago], it was so clear to me that there was opportunity that was bigger than that.
“If there was an opportunity for A&M to use this location as a platform for a broader engagement with industry, with Fort Worth and all of North Texas that was a huge win for A&M. And on the Fort Worth side, there was this hole, this lack of strong Tier 1 research, academic programs, and workforce trends.”
Ahdieh, whom Goff had put on the board of Fort Worth Now, had spoken briefly about it .
Goff asked for another meeting at his office — in the same conference room we now sat — to talk further about it.
“We had lunch in this room,” Goff says. “He’s a fireball; lots of energy. He does wonderful things for that university.”
Goff put his developer’s hat on and asked to go to the site, to step out on the roof, and look over the property.
“We went onto the roof,” Adhieh recalls. “Here I am taking this billionaire crawling through this crawl space. But he was excited to get up there. He said, ‘This is a no-brainer. This is exactly what we need.’
“He brought vision to the table, and he’s ready to do the legwork.”
Goff set up a meeting with Texas A&M Chancellor John Sharp in College Station. Goff said he was bringing Price, then the mayor, with him.
“I didn’t tell him what it was about,” Goff says. “I had never met John. I sat right next to him. This was in the height of Covid. He had 20-30 people in the room. I go through this presentation. Afterward, he leans over and says, ‘I love this. I’m going to do it. We’re going to figure this out.’ We shook hands and away we went.”
As part of his end of the deal, Goff offered Texas A&M free reign and use of his offices downtown for any kind of meetings or business they needed.
Goff hasn’t made a dime for any of his work with Fort Worth Now or the new organization. Some have suggested that his company should develop the campus. It’s not as if they’re not capable. The company’s portfolio includes the new American Airlines state-of-the-art campus.
“I don’t want the world to look back on this and say, ‘the only reason John did this was to make a nickel on the development,” Goff says. “There are plenty of good developers. I’ll help select them. Let’s go pick the best one."
It is said that history has a knack for putting the exact right people in place at the exact right time. As Fort Worth grapples to grow into its status as world-class city, a visionary has stepped forward with a prescription and know-how to get it done.
When all is said and done, Goff’s brief tenure as a public figure will be associated with a single achievement.
Remarkably, in a career full of capstone achievements, what will have been accomplished here will be as big as anything he has done before because of its potential for revolutionary impact in Fort Worth and on so many lives.
And the impact will be as great as any of those other visionary civic leaders who came before him.
“I really feel blessed to be part of Fort Worth,” Goff says. “I didn’t grow up here, but the city has been good to me. I’ve raised family here. This is a way I can give back, perhaps something meaningful.”