Rich DeVos - co-founder, Amway Corporation, one of the world's largest direct selling companies; renowned speaker; author, BELIEVE! and Compassionate Capitalism; owner, Orlando Magic, NBA basketball team; recipient, Horatio Alger Award, 1996, Horatio Alger Foundation; past member, Presidential Commission on AIDS.

 It's nice to be back with all of you. After all the many good years, I left abruptly with a couple of heart attacks and a couple of strokes and a few things that made me disappear for the last few years from here. While I was not physically here, I was always thinking of you and cheering you on, and saluting and remembering the things I learned here.

A lot of things have happened in my life, but I would like to tell you what I really am.

I'm a sinner. Saved by the grace of God.

Through my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, I can stand here. He's permitted me to do a lot of wonderful things. He's entrusted to my wife and me a great amount of money. Which we have to carefully dispense. Now, that means we have to say no to some of you.

And yes to some of you. So we're partners with many of you in many ways.

Now that I've got that out of the way, we can chat a little bit about my concerns about our country and about where we're going.

You're all experts in these fields. You are the ones who wage the war. The others, like Helen and I, come along to learn and then, I hope, write checks.

Conservatives thrill me and disturb me at the same time. I was always thrilled by the dedication and the fierceness with which you would fight for your causes. And yet, always concerned that you sometimes fought for your cause so long that you never joined the group to win the bigger war. You would go right down to the wire, standing and fighting for something, and you weren't willing to take 80 percent to move us in the right direction. Sometimes conservatives continue to find fault with others because they don't think a hundred percent as you or I think. And I think we lost some wars when we didn't decide we ought to come all together, even though we couldn't get all of what we wanted now.

This is a great time for rejoicing. Not just because Dole is doing well -- and some of you don't like that too well. I happen to like that well. I think he can beat Clinton if all of you and us get together with him. He will never be all the things that I would have him be, or support every issue that I would have him stand on. But I'll tell you, he'll be a lot better than the other guy.

So it's very important that, while we fight for those things we can get, there is a time to come together, to unify our forces and go with what ammunition we have to see if we can't get the rest of it. I don't know whether we're three-quarters there; we're certainly two-thirds of the way there, aren't we? Boy, that's quite a victory. When I came, and I was with this group all the time, we didn't have no-thirds.

And we complained and we talked and we found fault with all of them and today, we're two-thirds of the way home. Boy, if you were running a long-distance race, you'd say, "Are we ever making progress," and what a time to rejoice and celebrate how far we've come. Now, if we can just pull all of our troops together to go the final bit, we may have it all. Then we'll have another problem. Because when you have it all, you're going to be responsible for it all. And you won't have anybody to blame. And that may be a bigger challenge than when we always had somebody else to shoot at.

So your work will not be done, but it'll be done, I hope, in a different way as we move onward into these new things.

I do have an old basketball team here in town. People asked me oftentimes why we bought this team. Being of a good old Dutch tradition, the problem was should we own a sporting team that plays on Sunday? For Helen and me, that was a serious question. In fact, I went to a minister friend of mine and asked, "What do you think about that?"

He said, "Go buy the team. You've got your Amway army moving around the world and expanding on the philosophies that you believe in and sharing your faith, doing great things, but," he said, "this will give you a whole new audience. And especially an audience of young people who admire and stand up and hold your players as heroes. You can have an influence on them as to how they conduct themselves. It'll be a new outreach for you. And I would encourage you to do that even though you may have some of the other questions."

We didn't know all the answers. I had never been to an NBA game until I owned an NBA team.

But the opportunity was there to do something. And so a lot like CNP, a divergent group of men come together to play basketball. Unless they finally form a team, you don't get the job done. Last year, we had a pretty good year. We were a hit in the East, and we were about to enter the playoffs. Everybody said, "Oh, yeah, but you can't win on the road." And I was telling this to our players. And others were saying, "Well, they're too young and inexperienced, and they won't do well in the playoffs. They never won a playoff game." And others said, "Well, Shaq can't shoot free throws, so you're not going to get there." And they had a lot of other things to say.

And so I talked to the players and I said, "Well, I don't guess we can really do it. I've been reading the papers; it sounds like we're kind of done. But I'm going to tell you something. One of these days some young team is going to do it. And we have the ability to do it. So the question is, if not us, who? And if not now, when?" 

 Of course that got picked up. The television guys picked up on it, and it became a slogan that still hangs in our locker room here, and it's still referred to. I found out later on where that came from. It came from a couple of missionaries in Brazil who went in to see the Indians way up in the upper ends of the Amazon River.

They flew into there to spread the gospel. One of the missionaries wrote in his book before he crawled in his sleeping bag, after having visited with these people, "If not me, who? And if not now, when?"

That night they killed him and all the missionaries who were there. Interesting, isn't it? How things come into your mind and you don't even remember where they originated. So we made it a theme. And I'd like to have you make it a theme. If not us, who? If not now, when?

We don't have the luxury of nitpicking each other. In basketball, words that would be better learned, pass the ball around a bit. You better learn to get to the open man so he can shoot, and you better work together as a team. We didn't get to the championship. We got to the finals. Sort of like us conservatives in 1994. We didn't quite get the presidency, but we got almost there. What a time of celebration. What a year we had. What we achieved. And yet, sometimes you go home so depressed you scare me. Because you don't recount your victories so you can be strengthened by what you've achieved.

I stand here tonight to salute you for what you've achieved. The victories you have won. The obstacles you have overcome are fantastic. And you are on the edge of victory, if you don't keep shooting each other. It is time. And you know the Lord's hand is upon this country right now, in an unusual way. He has been present in my life in an unusual way, in our life, and I just stand in awe and marvel at the miraculous things that we see happen. They are not explainable because I'm smart or we worked harder or I went to the right school -- mainly, I guess, because I didn't go to school very long.

But we have a mission statement over at the Magic that hangs on our wall. They said Bob Dole doesn't have a vision. I think Bob Dole has a vision. It may be too simple for some reporter to understand it. This organization, CNP, had a vision all the time, and that was the strong national defense of this country. We stood up for free enterprise and three or four other fundamental things this organization has always stood for.

But tonight I grabbed the Magic vision statement; it could just about substitute our vision for America in it. Not quite, you'd have to change a few words, but let me give you the Amway vision once, or the Magic vision once.

The vision of the Orlando Magic is to be recognized, and this was done under the leadership of our oldest son, Dick, because when we bought the team he took over, and he said, "Dad, we need a vision statement for our team." Even as he has a vision statement for Amway. "We got to know where we're going."

It goes like this. The vision of the Orlando Magic is to be recognized as the professional sports model of the 21st century, by exemplifying the principles and practices of a championship organization, both in the sport and business of basketball. We intend to achieve world-class status as a franchise, through unwavering commitment to integrity, service, quality, and consumer value. While emphasizing the partnership among our community, our fans, our coaches, our players, our staff and our owners.

I would emphasize, as we end, on that word of partnership. I have been in business with one person for fifty years. A reporter one day in Taiwan said to me, he said, "I know about Amway and I know how big you are and I know how fast you're growing." He said, "I want to know something. How did you two guys stay in business together for fifty years?"

I hadn't ever been asked the question, and I thought only a moment. And I said, "It's because we never have used the words, 'I told you so.'" And we never have.

If it didn't go quite right or we didn't get all the way, we didn't spend our time blaming or pointing fingers. We moved on to how to make it better and fix it the next time.

I know I did a lot of dumb things and I can't remember any dumb things Jay did. But Jay never said to me, "That was really dumb. I told you so. I knew that would happen." He never did any of that. We moved on to greater things.

The city of Grand Rapids is just one little Midwestern city in America. In the few years we've been around, we've added a lot to it, because of our involvement in our communities. We have more wonderful schools than you could imagine. I hear about all the schools and how bad many schools are. And that may be. I don't know about all those scoring things. All I know is I seem to get employees who come to work every day, get the job done, and run computers I can't even fathom. Somehow they tell me all the schools have failed, but I don't know. Something confuses me, then, about how everything works. Why all the lights come on every day. And why I can get my phone hooked up if I want to. I mean, there are miraculous things happening every day by these kids I know, because their schools are better, yeah, but, hey, it's not all bad.

I listen to the arts in our country and the music and the sports and the health levels and the improvements of health; they're happening right under our noses and we don't comprehend.

I would be dead if all we knew was what we knew ten years ago. But the things they learned in that last ten years have allowed me, or the Lord has allowed me, to be here. All these miracles are taking place around us. And our country is going to be better. It's going to be great. And what we have seen in our lifetime is nothing compared to what we're going to see. God's hand is upon it. Does that mean we don't have work to do? There's a lot of work for you.

But my plea today is, let's accept as partners people who don't always agree with us on everything. Your wife doesn't. And your husband doesn't agree with everything you do, but you make it work. It's important right now that we as CNP and those of us involved in this side of the war keep going. But we don't have any time to put down each other. We must now build each other up for the big race. I'm proud of you. I salute you. I thank you. And I hope we win tonight. Thank you, everybody.