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College dropout Wayne Huizenga started with a trash hauling company Thomas Rawls Color Rush Jersey , struck gold during America's brief love affair with VHS tapes and eventually owned three professional sports teams.

Huizenga owned Blockbuster Entertainment, AutoNation and the world's largest trash hauler, and was founding owner of baseball's Florida Marlins and the NHL Florida Panthers. He bought the NFL Miami Dolphins for $138 million in 1994.

The one thing he never got was a Super Bowl win.

Huizenga died late Thursday, according to Valerie Hinkell, his longtime assistant. He was 80.

"No one was a bigger Dolphin fan," Pro Football Hall of Fame coach Don Shula said in a statement Friday. "And no one wanted to see the team win more than he did. He supported the team in every way possible, and no one could have asked to work for a better owner."

The Marlins won the 1997 World Series, and the Panthers reached the Stanley Cup Final in 1996, but Huizenga's beloved Dolphins never reached a Super Bowl while he owned the team.

"If I have one disappointment, the disappointment would be that we did not bring a championship home," Huizenga said shortly after he sold the Dolphins to New York real estate billionaire Stephen Ross, who still owns the team. "It's something we failed to do."

Huizenga earned an almost cult-like following among business investors who watched him build Blockbuster Entertainment into the leading video rental chain by snapping up competitors. He cracked Forbes' list of the 100 richest Americans, becoming chairman of Republic Services, one of the nation's top waste management companies, and AutoNation, the nation's largest automotive retailer.

"You just have to be in the right place at the right time," he said. "It can only happen in America."

For a time, Huizenga was also a favorite with South Florida sports fans, drawing cheers and autograph seekers in public. The crowd roared when he danced the hokey pokey on the field during an early Marlins game. He went on a spending spree to build a veteran team that won the World Series in only the franchise's fifth year.

But his popularity plummeted when he ordered the roster dismantled after that season. He was frustrated by poor attendance and his failure to swing a deal for a new ballpark built with taxpayer money.

Many South Florida fans never forgave him for breaking up the championship team. Huizenga drew boos when introduced at Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino's retirement celebration in 2000, and kept a lower public profile after that.

In 2009 Isaiah Oliver Jersey , Huizenga said he regretted ordering the Marlins' payroll purge.

"We lost $34 million the year we won the World Series, and I just said, 'You know what, I'm not going to do that,'" Huizenga recalled. "If I had it to do over again, I'd say, 'OK, we'll go one more year.'"

He sold the Marlins in 1999 to John Henry, and sold the Panthers in 2001, unhappy with rising NHL player salaries and the stock price for the team's public company.

Huizenga's first sports love was the Dolphins 鈥?he had been a season-ticket holder since their inaugural season in 1966. But he fared better in the NFL as a businessman than as a sports fan.

He turned a nifty profit by selling the Dolphins and their stadium for $1.1 billion, nearly seven times what he paid to become sole owner. But he knew the bottom line in the NFL is championships, and his Dolphins perennially came up short.

Huizenga earned a reputation as a hands-off owner and won raves from many loyal employees, even though he made six coaching changes. He eased Shula into retirement in early 1996, and Jimmy Johnson, Dave Wannstedt, interim coach Jim Bates, Nick Saban, Cam Cameron and Tony Sparano followed as coach.

In 2008, Huizenga's final season as owner, the Dolphins had a turnaround year and won the AFC East on the final day of the regular season.

"It was a magical feeling Authentic Korey Toomer Jersey ," Huizenga said. "I had tears in my eyes. I kept looking away so I wouldn't have to wipe my eyes in front of everybody."

Miami lost in the first round of the playoffs and didn't return to the postseason until 2016. But Huizenga won praise from such disparate personalities as Shula, Johnson, Saban and Marlins manager Jim Leyland even when they no longer worked for him.

"The classiest man I ever met," Saban said in a statement Friday.

Harry Wayne Huizenga was born in the Chicago suburbs on Dec. 29, 1937, to a family of garbage haulers. He attended Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, but dropped out and began his own garbage hauling business in Pompano Beach, Florida, in 1962. He would drive a garbage truck from 2 a.m. to noon each day, then shower and go out and solicit new customers in the afternoon.

One customer successfully sued Huizenga, saying that in an argument over a delinquent account, Huizenga injured him by grabbing his testicles 鈥?an allegation Huizenga always denied.

"I never did that. The guy was a deputy cop. It was his word against mine, a young kid," he told Fortune magazine in 1996.

He eventually bought out several competitors, expanding throughout South Florida. In 1968, he merged with the Chicago sanitation company his uncles owned, creating Waste Management Inc., which eventually became the world's largest trash company. That became his method of operation 鈥?becoming the first national player in industries that had been dominated by small and local operations. He resigned from the company in 1984, taking $100 million in stock.

But retirement bored him and he soon began buying dozens of small businesses like hotels and pest control companies. In 1987 Titans Harold Landry Jersey , a business partner persuaded him to check out Blockbuster, a small chain of video stores. At the time, video stores were mostly locally owned mom-and-pop operations. Huizenga didn't even own a VCR.

"I had an image of them being dark and dingy and dirty types of adult bookstores," h When Barry Trotz left the Washington Capitals fresh off winning the Stanley Cup, the New York Islanders couldn’t move fast enough to talk to him.

Minutes after word circulated that Trotz resigned from the Capitals, Islanders president of hockey operations Lou Lamoriello got in touch. On Thursday, the Islanders hired Trotz and hope to benefit from the first Stanley Cup-winning coach leaving his team in a contract dispute in 24 years.

”It’s certainly not something that you see every day,” Lamoriello said Thursday after the NHL general managers meeting. ”But I think we’re the fortunate recipient of it that we were able to have him come in our organization.”

The Capitals weren’t willing to pay top dollar to keep Trotz in the fold, so the Islanders pounced and have a fresh selling point to try to retain face of the franchise John Tavares. Trotz, who brings his resume with the fifth-most wins in NHL history, two Presidents’ Trophy seasons and now a Stanley Cup, has already been in touch with Tavares, a 27-year-old point-a-game center who can begin speaking with other teams next week and become a free agent July 1.

”That’s something that really is John’s mind,” Lamoriello said. ”We don’t know what he’s thinking, but certainly he’s a very important part of this franchise.”

Trotz considers himself one piece of the puzzle of re-signing Tavares and believes the process is in good hands with Lamoriello, who won the Cup three times as New Jersey’s GM and also helped turn Toronto back into a playoff team.

”If you know anything about those two parties, they are of the highest integrity, both of those gentlemen,” Trotz said of Lamoriello and Tavares. ”I think that they’ll have great dialogue and we’re hoping to have John be a part of it.”

Trotz is now a part of it after the Islanders gave him the kind of long-term, big-money contract the Capitals weren’t willing to commit to the 55-year-old who coached them the past four seasons. The deal is reportedly for five years at $4 million or more annually Authentic Martavis Bryant Jersey , more than double what he would have made in Washington.

After hoping the Capitals would renegotiate the automatic two-year extension that kicked in for winning a Cup and offered only a $300,000 raise to about $2 million, Trotz took the chance on leaving and found an immediate home three days after resigning.

”It’s good to be wanted,” Trotz said. ”It happened really quickly because you’re going from one emotion of winning the Cup to the next emotion of leaving the team you just won a Cup with and you have to make some quick decisions.”

The Capitals were barely done celebrating their first championship in franchise history when GM Brian MacLellan and Trotz sat down to talk contract. Trotz thought the deal he had with the Capitals was ”a little unfair based on value around the league,” thanks in large part to the $50 million, eight-year contract Toronto’s Mike Babcock signed in 2015 that helped raise coaching salaries.

When it was clear to each side right away there wasn’t a fit, Trotz asked for and was granted his release. MacLellan wasn’t surprised Trotz immediately went to the Islanders.

”Could’ve guaranteed it,” MacLellan said. ”I’m happy for him. I think he got what he wanted, and that’s a good opportunity for him. It’s a good payday for him, too. So it worked out good.”

It worked out great for the Islanders, who go from GM Garth Snow and previously inexperienced coach Doug Weight to Lamoriello and Trotz. They already have rookie of the year Mathew Barzal as a building block of the future, and now they have a coach who brings with him a shiny new Cup ring.

”What we need is we need an individual who can walk in that locker room with the players who are there who have not really had a lot of success and he walks in there with instant success,” Lamoriello said. ”People follow that, and I think that that’s a very important thing for these young men.”

In the past 40 years, Trotz is just the fifth coach not to return to a Stanley Cup winner and the first since Scotty Bowman retired after winning with Detroit in 2002. Mike Keenan in 1994 was the last coach to leave a Cup champion in a contract dispute when he did not return to the New York Rangers.

MacLellan will move on to interviewing associate coach Todd Reirden to replace Trotz, but the strangeness of this situation isn’t lost on the veteran hockey executive.

”It’s so weird,” MacLellan said. ”It’s awkward. It’s weird. I don’t know what to make of it. I don’t know what we could do with it.”

MacLellan said Trotz wanted to be compensated among the top four or five coaches in the NHL. His deal with the Islanders puts him behind Babcock, Chicago’s Joel Quenneville and Montreal’s Claude Julien – all fellow Cup winners – but ahead of most of the rest of the league.

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