Happiness for Richard J. Heckmann on Thursday was climbing a ladder to reach the basketball hoop of an NBA goal at Indian Wells Tennis Garden days before the historic Phoenix Suns game against the Denver Nuggets.

The goal: Fake a slam dunk in a photo shoot.

As he grabbed the rim, the Rancho Mirage resident flashed a grin.

“Now I know what scoring's like for Shaquille O'Neal,'' said Heckmann, the co-owner of the Phoenix Suns. “I can't imagine what it would be like to be this high 15 times a game.”

In the corporate world, Heckmann has mastered high-flying shots.

Heckmann has chalked up corporate successes as easily as the 7-foot-1 Shaq and Suns' guard Steve Nash can rack up points.

Take the idea to have the 16,077-seat Indian Wells Tennis Garden set the stage for the first National Basketball Association game ever to be played outdoors on United States soil, for instance.

Everyone he called to float the idea — from longtime friend Charlie Pasarell and Suns president Rick Welts to NBA commissioner David Stern — said it was a great idea. It would be fun.

“At every step, I thought someone might say it was a dumb idea,'' Heckmann said. “No one did.”

Slam dunk.

Now, Heckmann's having fun teasing Nash about the elements: “I told him, for the first time in his pro career, he'd have to worry about shooting in the wind.”

In the business world, Heckmann thrives on being nimble — making investments in a head-wind.

He is a proven veteran in the field of acquisitions and mergers.

Heckmann holds the distinction for creating the Coachella Valley's first and only Fortune 500 company, USFilter Corp.

Today, he is at the helm of Palm Desert-based Heckmann Corp., a blank-check company on the New York Stock Exchange that plans to bottle up China Water & Drinks Inc. at the end of October for $505 million in a cash-and-stock deal.

“We've got Triple-A investors'' for the China-based corporation that is selling two billion bottles of water in China at 11 cents a bottle to people who can't drink their own tap water, he said.

“We are poised to build one heck of a great company in a market with no competition,'' Heckmann added, claiming this as his favorite investor road show statistic: Total bottled water sales in China in 2008 is expected to reach $4.6 billion.

The population living in a 3,757-mile stretch from Hong Kong to Dubai is 3 billion, and there's virtually no place you can drink the tap water.

What is it about the China Water product that intrigues him?

“It's high volume,'' he said, and it's a low-cost product based with this key element. “It's a necessity.”

For Heckmann, acquiring China Water is a new global adventure — in fast forward.

College in Hawaii

Happiness to Heckmann as a teen was Des Moines, Iowa, in his rearview mirror.

The son of a General Electric warehouse supervisor who left the Hawkeye State for Honolulu — the farthest dot he could find on the map of universities in the United States — hasn't looked back since.

He's been a ski buff, Vietnam air rescue worker and presidential appointee in President Carter's Administration. He's brokered stocks, made investors rich and gone broke himself.

Heckmann has climbed Mount Rainier. He ran for mayor in Sun Valley, and won.

And Ernst & Young named Heckmann San Diego's 2005 “master entrepreneur” for his prowess with Carlsbad-based K2 Inc., the sporting equipment company Heckmann pulled up by its ski boot bindings to post fiscal year 2004 sales of $1.2 billion. It was sold to Jarden Corp. in 2007 for $1.2 billion.

Heckmann has a Midas touch, said Richard Oliphant, a longtime valley developer.

“He's a visionary with guts.”

“I've never known him to have a failure,'' Oliphant said, noting that his successes read like a “Who's Who of Business,'' starting with his Smith Goggles, Callaway Golf, USFilter and his stock brokerage life.

To that, Heckmann humbly replies, “It's about being in the right place at the right time.”

“It's the old story: You sell at the top and buy at the bottom,'' he said.

Heckmann said his businesses are run by the JP Morgan adage: “Buy your straw hats in the wintertime.”

As the inspiration behind the Richard J. Heckmann International Center for Entrepreneurial Management at UC Riverside's Palm Desert Campus, he also recognizes that the desert is a gold mine of opportunity.

Water is king

When he moved to the valley 30 years ago, starting out as a stockbroker for Prudential-Bache Securities, he looked beyond the blowing sand.

He dug deeper.

Heckmann found a rich aquifer in USFilter Corp., the venture he and six others — it included doughnut store mogul Vern Winchell — opened July 16, 1990, on the second floor of a baseball card trading shop called “Field of Dreams,'' upon the discovery that there was no way to invest in water.

“Here we had a product necessary for life itself. Five days without it and you're a dead duck.

“Everything is water based. It's bigger than oil, but no one was investing in it.”

The USFilter investment team's $1.6 million gamble to provide pure, filtered water to companies as varied as Intel and Coca-Cola — Heckmann's portion was $350,000 — tapped a vein of gold.

The company posted $17 million in annualized revenues in 1990, began gobbling up 260 smaller outfits and evolved into the largest publicly-traded water treatment company with 28,000 employees worldwide. When USFilter went on the New York Stock Exchange in 1993, it was called the fastest-growing company in America, Heckmann said.

Sales topped $6.5 billion in 1999 when USFilter accepted an $8.2 billion cash buyout with debt assumption from courtier Vivendi S.A., of Paris, France.

“I knew I was riding a bubble. The (stock) values were ridiculous,'' Heckmann said. “Vivendi had come at it (the water business) before in the U.S., and failed. When they offered us a full value, we took them up on their offer.”

Heckmann has called the sale one of his finest entrepreneurial moments.

“Entrepreneurs don't know the true sound of money until they hear the cash register ring,'' he said. “It rang royally with the sale of USFilter.”

Heckmann pocketed more than $100 million. The sale made millionaires out of 240 employees, providing a 5,760 percent return on their stock, if they were in it from the beginning.

“It went out at $31.50 per share, and if you adjust it back for all the splits, it started at about 75 cents.”

The region profited, as well.

Helped education

Heckmann peeled $6 million from his profits in March 2001 to help build two California university systems' campuses on a wind-blown, 200-acre chunk of land along Interstate 10 in Palm Desert.

He told then-California Gov. Gray Davis the $6 million gift had a caveat: The state of California needed to contribute $10 million to the effort and the University of California had to locate on a 20-acre tract of the 200-acre parcel the city of Palm Desert donated to Cal State San Bernardino.

“It was a bit of a battle, but it worked.”

Today, Heckmann is glad he was adamant that the universities locate to Palm Desert.

The Richard J. Heckmann International Center for Entrepreneurial Management lays claim to several MBA graduates.

Oliphant said Heckmann has often theorized that the desert was not likely to import successful entrepreneurs. “He felt they had to be homegrown,'' Oliphant said, and business leaders today are grateful for the political tap dance he did to help develop the campus.

The center remains a driving force for Heckmann.

He rents an office there to run Heckmann Corp., the blank-check company that is poised to buy China Water. Here is where he draws on his experience as his guide.

“Success comes from experience, being in the game day after day,'' Heckmann said. “When you are in corporate America, you can learn nuances in buying and selling of companies that — in some way — are no different than what happens to rookies in the NBA who match wits against longtime pros.”

Rookie days

Heckmann won't forget his days as a rookie.

Amid the trappings in his office sit the relics of his successes and one goalpost miss: A clunky radio device that Heckmann's first firm produced.

The aircraft electronic manufacturing plant was a success, Heckmann said, but at age 22, “We thought that meant having Porsches.”

“I keep the device on my desk to remind me of what not to do,'' he said.

“We had the revenue side down cold, but didn't get the cash flow side,'' Heckmann said, calling the venture a three-year rocket ship.

Before it crashed and burned, he switched gears.

His first significant venture, Tower Scientific Corp., was founded in 1972 when he learned Stuart Anderson, of Black Angus restaurants, had inherited a business that made prosthetic devices after the death of his father, a famous orthopedic surgeon in the United States, but wasn't interested in pursuing this line of work.

“I scraped together $2,000 and borrowed $398,000” to buy the company, Heckmann said. “When we sold it in 1977, it was the largest manufacturer of custom prosthetic devices in the United States.”

Heckmann profited $3.5 million to $5 million from the sale, noting, “Back then, that was real money.”

No fancy sports car purchase that time.

Heckmann said he waited until success at USFilter to buy his sports car, a Ferrari. Then, with offices in 147 countries, he also bought a jet.

He used the plane to get him to and from his Rancho Mirage ranch on Clancy Lane, to the Suns' home games in Phoenix, New York City and to Carlsbad, where he held the reins as chief executive of K2 Inc., a company he helped rescue from a slippery slope in 2002.

Heckmann was having dinner in Los Angeles one night when the ski-making company's then-CEO, Richard Rodstein, called to say the company was going to declare bankruptcy.

“He told me the plug was going to be pulled on a loan,” Heckmann recalled. “I said, ‘If you agree not to do this, I will make a commitment in 60 days to invest $25 million, and we will fix it.'”

They held off. Heckmann came up with $25 million and, in October 2002, became K2's chairman and chief executive.

Before its sale, K2's holdings read like an All-Star playbook: It bought Rawlings, a baseball glove manufacturer for $98 million; Worth, a softball equipment maker, for $37 million; and, then in 2004, Marmot, Völkl and Marker.

Its products include skateboard shoes, fishing reels, outdoor marine accessories, paintball products, softball bats and hunting gear, baseballs, gloves, skis and snow boards.

Fun with the Suns

Brilliant is how he describes his adventures with the Phoenix Suns.

“Of all the things I've done in my life, this has been the most fun,'' he said.

As the father of five sons and a daughter, and stepfather to twin daughters, it poses an opportunity to get in one more game with the kids.

Heckmann, who remembers watching from the sidelines as his children participated in sports, gets to sit with family members at the games.

It has been a way to inspire youth, as well.

He has sponsored bus trips to Phoenix Suns' games in Arizona, where wide-eyed Palm Desert Aztec basketball team players met pro players, sat front and center for their game and came home with autographs and mementos they've framed and hung on their bedroom walls.

Last week, the scene was repeated with Suns' celebrity visits to local high schools. Heckmann said he bought and gave away more than 100 tickets to Saturday's game.

Heckmann also viewed the preseason game as a mini-retreat for the players.

“For the rest of their lives they'll be able to say they played in the first outdoor NBA game on U.S. soil,” he said.

For Heckmann, he said it will be a true homecoming.

“This is where I started,'' he said, and recalled the days he coached a Little League baseball team that the son of Indian Wells Tennis Garden's Tournament CEO Charlie Pasarell played on.

Heckmann, then a stockbroker, and Pasarell became fast friends, years before the stadium was built.

“The Tennis Garden is their pride and joy,'' he said. “The team is my pride and joy.

“Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that Saturday night I would have an NBA team play in his stadium,'' Heckmann said.

“That's how things happen with Dick,'' said Pasarell, president of PM Sports Management. “You bump into him at the airport, and he suggests an idea. And you say, ‘Are you kidding? Let's do it.' It doesn't take long to get the ball rolling.”

What is it that Heckmann loves about the sport?

There's no rearview mirror in the world of basketball, Heckmann said.

In business, decisions can drag on for months and money isn't always made in a year.

“With basketball, you win or you lose.

“Within two hours you know the score.”