7/10/2012 By William Bowman
Written by By William Bowman
Peter King: In reading about your life story, it truly is a story of a guy who grew up in America after moving from Pakistan, and it’s the story of a guy chasing the American dream and sort of getting it. Can you start off by telling our listeners about your first few days in America, which I find kind of fascinating?
Shahid Khan: Yes, only in America. I was 16. I got admission to the University of Illinois, and I had no idea what it was. Interestingly enough, whether it’s a Pakistani dream or an American dream, you want to start off with the best education. My parents, who were really middle class, it was their dream that I get the best education and it be something that can get you a real job.
Peter King: Were you finished with high school?
Shahid Khan: Yes, I had finished high school. My mother being a math professor, I had good math skills, and I just applied to a number of universities and the first one that came was the University of Illinois. And you talk about fate, destiny, kismet. So I ended up in Champaign at 16 and I think the worst snow storm they’d had. At night you get dropped off at a bus station, and you look for the best bargain, so I walked to the YMCA. They had so much snow that my shoes literally melted; the Pakistani shoes aren’t used to snow and water, and you learn about quality control very quickly. But the next morning I was up, and they were hiring dish washers, and I started working there, and it was like, “What a country. Here I am making $1.20 an hour—more than may 99.9% of the people in Pakistan. What a great country, and do I really want to go through all the trouble of going to engineering school? I would have a great job here.” But I kind of stuck with it. My approach was: I’m here, and I want to really get the American experience; I don’t want to assimilate. They were having fraternity rush and I signed up and really the first fraternity house I went to, they wouldn’t let me leave until I signed up as a pledge. It was one of the greatest things that happened to me. I signed up, and that’s really where the American experience began, in the basement of the fraternity house just watching football on the weekends.
Peter King: So you were also probably a little bit younger than the average college freshman, right? At age 16?
Shahid Khan: Yeah, much younger. Typically they were 18, so they were a couple of years older.
Peter King: Was that a difficult transition also? You were a Pakistani kid and you were also quite a bit younger going through the rush process—what was that like?
Shahid Khan: Well, it was a lot to learn, so it really puts you in a mindset where…frankly, it’s a great mindset because you’re more flexible, you had people who had more life experiences than certainly I’d had, I can learn more from them, and immediately here’s a world I’ve never experienced. You had a bunch of guys who were accomplished or great athletes or driving convertibles, dating these beautiful girls, and oh my god, it cannot get better than this. How do I get a piece of this? They’re reading Wall Street Journal and New York Times. So that was another experience certainly I would have never gotten.
Peter King: What was it about football at an early age that appealed to you?
Shahid Khan: Well, a number of different ways. Being in engineering school, being in math, it was like a three-dimensional chess: infinite number of possibilities. In math and engineering, you’re always looking for a formula or algorithm to somehow be able to predict, and it almost wasn’t possible. There were so many outcomes, so many things that could go right, go wrong, that it was very, very hard to predict. But after I watched it a few times—I had played tennis and cricket in high school—I was drawn to it almost like a moth to a flame. And after that, it’s just all-consuming. And the other thing is how it really brings people together. When you look at whoever the players on the team were, some were heavy, some were fast, some were slow, some were thin, but once they kind of strapped on the helmet, it was all once force that was hopefully immoveable.