Wycliffe “Wyc” Grousbeck grew up in Massachusetts and his parents are Irving “Irv” and Sukey Grousbeck. Grousbeck’s father is also a co-owner of the Boston Celtics alongside his son. Grousbeck has two kids from his first marriage and two step-children from his current marriage to Emilia Fazzalari.
Here’s what you need to know about Wyc Grousbeck’s family:
1. Wyc Grousbeck Was Born & Raised in Weston, Massachusetts & His Father Founded a Successful Cable Company
Grousbeck grew up in Weston, Massachusetts, a small town around 15 miles west of Boston. He has three siblings and his father, Irv Grousbeck, often took them to Fenway Park and Boston Garden, ESPN reported. The family outings instilled in Grousbeck a love for sports.
Grousbeck’s father founded Continental Cablevision with Amos Hostetter Jr. in 1963 and it grew from a small cable company in Ohio to “become the third largest cable systems operator in the United States” over 33 years, its website states. During that time, Irv Grousbeck served as president and then chairman. Grousbeck and Hostetter eventually sold the company for $11.5 billion, ESPN shared.
Irv Grousbeck is an adjunct professor in organizational behavior at Stanford, and his bio states that he has a bachelor of arts degree at Amherst College from 1956 and an MBA from Harvard University, obtained in 1960. He was a lecturer at Harvard Business School in the 1980s and became a consulting professor at Stanford in 1996.
As for Grousbeck, he followed his father’s academic path and attended Noble and Greenough for high school followed by Princeton University, where he obtained a degree in history. The future Celtics owner continued his education with a law degree at the University of Michigan and an MBA from the Standford Business School. According to ESPN, he worked in Silicon Valley for several years as a venture capital lawyer.
2. Wyc Grousbeck’s Father Is Also a Co-Owner of the Celtics & His Mother Is a Huge Fan of the Team
Grousbeck and his father are both co-owners of the Celtics along with Steve Pagliuca ever since buying the storied club back in 2002. They had initially discussed buying the Oakland Athletics and the San Francisco Giants but made a successful bid at the Celtics and were introduced as the new owners back in December 2002, ESPN wrote.
Grousbeck recalled going into the locker room to wash up before the press conference to introduce them and said that’s when the magnitude of his new responsibilities sank in. “I’m trying to find the sink, and the counter comes up to my chest and the faucets are up here, and I’m trying to find the mirror,” he recalled. “I’m saying, ‘I’m in the Land of the Giants. What have I done?'” He said their goal from the onset was to “get this right.”
“This is not just any team,” he added. “This is the Celtics.” While Grousbeck and his father are co-owners, his mother Sukey Grousbeck is very much interested in the team as well. Sukey Grousbeck grew up in Quincy, Illinois, and always loved sports, from the moment she was a young girl. She was a cheerleader for football and basketball games at Quincy High School, she told the Herald-Whig, back when she was known as Suzanne Barber.
She met her husband Irving Grousbeck when she was 19 years old. At the time, she was attending Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts while her future husband was at Harvard Business School and they met at a fraternity party.
They now live in Portola Valley, California, but she still follows the Celtics’ every game despite the distance. “If we lived in Boston, we’d go to every single game, because we’re still huge sports fanatics,” she told the Whig. “As it is, the people out here don’t even know we’re involved with the team, and we like to keep a low profile. Our son enjoys running the team.”
3. Wyc Grousbeck Has 2 Children From His First Marriage, a Daughter & a Son Who Are Both Adults Now
The Final episode of The Last Twenty:
Wyc Grousbeck and Steve Pagliuca discuss the lessons that they’ve learned, including how important off-the-court community work is ☘️
Grousbeck has two children with his ex-wife Corinne, a daughter named Kelsey and a son named Campbell. The parents announced their separation in October 2014 after a 28-year marriage, the Boston Globe reported.
Grousbeck’s eldest child is his daughter Kelsey, who was born around 1990 in Burlingame, California. When she was young, her family moved to Massachusetts and like her father, she attended Noble and Greenough School and graduated in 2008. She also took up rowing, the same sport her dad pursued with great success when he was studying at Princeton. She attended Stanford, where she was on the rowing team, her athletics profile shows.
Kelsey Grousbeck married Matt Cosby in 2018, according to a profile in the Vineyard Gazette. The couple chose Camp Jabberwocky in Martha’s Vineyard for their wedding location as they both volunteered there and the spot holds special memories for Kelsey Grousbeck. She began volunteering there as a teenager, the publication wrote and became the first director of development in 2017 once she obtained her master’s degree in business administration. She is also a professional photographer, as is her husband.
Grousbeck’s son Campbell was born in 1992 when Kelsey was three years old. At the time, the Grousbeck family was living in the Bay Area. Soon after he was born, they learned that he had Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA), a rare genetic eye disease that typically leads to “severe visual impairment beginning in infancy,” according to the National Institutes of Health.
The family decided to move back across the country to Massachusetts so Campbell could attend the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, a global leader in education for kids with visual impairments. Grousbeck’s son developed many interests and passions during his time at Perkins and the Celtics owner told ESPN, “He runs track for Perkins. He wrestles for Perkins. He’s on the swimming team. He’s a three-sport athlete.” He added, “Campbell is a pretty smart guy.”
Grousbeck’s mother shared that her son is now a preschool teacher. “He talks to the kids about his blindness and allows them to ask questions,” she told Seeker. She shared in 2017 that Campbell works in music with the Boys and Girls Club, the Boston Herald reported, and also teaches science to kids at the Museum of Science.
4. Wyc Grousbeck’s Son Campbell Is the Reason the Family Moved to Massachusetts & He Eventually Bought the Celtics
Grousbeck has shared that Campbell is the reason he became the owner of the Celtics. He said if it wasn’t for Campbell getting the LCA diagnosis, they would have never moved to Massachusetts and eventually bought the NBA team. “We would be out in California, probably, and my golf game would be a little bit better, but I wouldn’t be getting ready for a playoff game tonight,” he told ESPN in 2008. “If not for Campbell, we wouldn’t be here.”
Grousbeck didn’t have a job lined up in Massachusetts when the family packed up and moved across the country but it was a leap of faith to get their son the best education possible given his LCA diagnosis. “Wyc didn’t have a job when we came out here, and we had no idea where to live,” Grousbeck’s then-wife Corinne told the publication. “We took a huge risk uprooting the family to come 3,000 miles across the country.”
Campbell attending Perkins was a full-circle moment of sorts for the Grousbeck family as his grandmother Sukey Grousbeck volunteered there more than 10 years before Campbell was born. She told ESPN that she looked after families’ babies while they looked around the school. “I do feel that out of anything bad, goodness arises,” Sukey Grousbeck told the publication. “And I do feel that Campbell is a gift to our family. I think the Celtics and Perkins connection is a beautiful thing, out of happenstance.”
5. Wyc Grousbeck Is Married to Emilia Fazzalari & the 2 Are Also in Business Together
Grousbeck is now married to Emilia Fazzalari, the daughter of Italian immigrants who grew up in Michigan, she shared in an interview with Nasdaq. She went to college at the University of Michigan and graduated with a degree in economics and a concentration in psychology, according to her LinkedIn.
After graduating, Fazzalari moved to New York City and began working in financial services, a career that would see her move up the ranks of Bloomberg L.P. over the next 20 years.
Fazzalari, who has two kids of her own, married Grousbeck in a small ceremony in Las Vegas in January 2017. The couple was set to get married later that year but decided to elope, she shared with Haute Living.
Fazzalari now works as the CEO of Cincoro Tequila, a company she co-founded with her husband and three other NBA owners: Los Angeles Lakers owner Jeanie Buss, Milwaukee Bucks owner Wes Edens and Charlotte Hornets owner and NBA legend Michael Jordan. She said the idea for the company came about in July 2016, when Grousbeck was having several meetings in New York City for an NBA committee with the other owners.
Fazzalari, who loves to entertain, told Nasdaq, “I suggested to him that we all get together as a group over dinner. Everyone agreed – and when the five of us got together that first night, the bond was almost immediate. We began the evening as acquaintances and after sharing a series of stories and discovering a mutual love of tequila, we quickly formed the foundation of a real partnership and friendship.”
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Wyc Grousbeck’s Family: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know