Dick Nunis brought Walt Disney’s dream-big mentality to UCF sports | Commentary

Dick Nunis was most well-known for being Walt Disney’s right-hand man in the early days when he was building his theme-park empire, but he also is known for bringing some of ol’ Walt’s famous imagination to UCF athletics.

Nunis, who passed away earlier this week at 91, was a visionary in his own right and one of the handful of big-money UCF donors whose financial contributions and innovative thinking helped keep UCF athletics functioning and moving forward during a four-decade journey from rag-tag Division III outfit to the thriving Big 12 program of today.

I talked to Nunis a few times over the years and most remember the joy in his voice the day UCF was invited into the Big 12 in 2021. “This is a day,” he said giddily that afternoon, “that we’ve all been working for and dreaming of for a long time.”

Nobody dreamed bigger than Dick Nunis did. This quote from UCF’s Board of Trustees Chair Alex Martins in an obit written by the university pretty much encapsulates what Nunis has meant to UCF: “Inspired by his time with the Walt Disney Company, he pushed us to dream big and always believed in UCF’s ability to unleash potential.”

Just as Walt Disney envisioned 43 square miles of Florida swampland as a kaleidoscopic, magical place where dreams could come true, Nunis and others saw UCF’s expansive campus as a virgin landscape where bigtime college athletics could thrive.

Nunis actually played college football at USC, where he was an academic All-American and teammates with Frank Gifford when the Trojans won the Rose Bowl in 1953. As fate would have it, Nunis’ plans for a pro football career changed late in that season when he broke his neck during a rivalry game with UCLA.

With his football career over, he applied for a summer job training employees for a new theme park that was about to open in L.A. The theme park’s name was Disneyland.

The rest is history.

Nunis thrived in the new business, skyrocketed up the ranks and became Walt’s apprentice and confidante and — after Walt passed away in 1966 — continued his mentor’s dream of building theme parks in California, Tokyo, Paris and, yes, Orlando. As the chairman of Disney Attractions, he was one of the masterminds behind the clandestine Project X, which was the codename for Walt Disney World.

There’s a famous story about when the finishing touches were hurriedly being put on Disney World the night before the grand opening in 1971. When Nunis noticed the sod had not been installed on the front lawn of the Contemporary Resort hotel, he gathered a bunch of other Disney executives and they tackled the job themselves. Nunis yelled these simple instructions to the white-collar execs who weren’t used to manual labor such as laying sod:

“Green side up!” he said.

That was Dick Nunis — not afraid to roll up his sleeves, get his hands dirty and do what it took to get the job done. He was the same way when he retired from Disney and became the inaugural chair of UCF’s Board of Trustees. He moved to Orlando when Disney World opened, fell in love with the City Beautiful and adopted UCF as his “second alma mater.”

Because of his love for college football, Nunis was one of the driving influences in convincing late, great UCF President John Hitt to “go for it” and start investing massive resources into transforming the school into a bigtime college football program. Nunis, fellow financial donor Jerry Roth and others pushed and prodded Hitt into investing multimillions in facilities and infrastructure.

“I told him, ‘If you want to be an amazing university, you’ve got to be good in athletics,’” Nunis said last year. “There may have been a few times where we literally just bulldozed ahead — and maybe asked for forgiveness later. There was a lot of work to be done, and we had a lot of fun doing it.”

On the day Hitt died, Nunis chuckled when talking about how meticulous and budget-conscious Hitt was when deciding whether the school should go into debt to build athletic facilities such as the on-campus stadium.

“John Hitt was a hard sell,” Nunis told me that day, “but in the end, he decided to spend the money to make it happen. He knew football would also help the university grow.”

Sometimes, I don’t think people like Nunis and other well-heeled donors get enough credit for ponying up money over the years to keep UCF’s cash-strapped athletic department afloat. Many of these men such as Nunis, Roth, Tony Nicholson, David Albertson, etc. never attended UCF, but moved to Orlando and wanted to help the hometown university thrive.

One of my favorite stories was told to me by ex-UCF coach Eugene McDowell about local Anheuser-Busch distributor Wayne Densch when the school’s board of trustees was prepared to shut down the football program in the mid-1980s if enough money couldn’t be raised to erase the university’s $1.5 million football debt. Densch pretty much eliminated the debt with one stroke of his pen when he wrote a check for $1 million.

“I was introduced to Wayne through some mutual friends,” McDowell told me before he passed away a few years ago. “We went fishing a few times, drank some Scotch and Wayne said he’d like to do something to help his local university. His first donation was for a million dollars and that pretty much saved the program right there. When I went to thank Wayne for the donation, he looked at me and said, ‘Coach, there’s more where that came from.’”

Wayne Densch passed away two decades ago and now Dick Nunis is gone, too.

UCF owes these men and many other donors a huge debt of gratitude.

As Walt Disney himself once said, “It takes a lot of money to make these dreams come true.”

Email me at mbianchi@orlandosentinel.com. Hit me up on X (formerly Twitter) @BianchiWrites and listen to my Open Mike radio show every weekday from 6 to 9:30 a.m. on FM 96.9, AM 740 and 969TheGame.com/listen