Stan Kroenke's full-court press: six years after swooping in to rescue the Nuggets and Avalanche, the unassuming Missouri billionaire has transformed Colorado's sports scene, established a business model for the industry's future, and become the most powerful sports figure in the state. He just won't tell you about it.

In real estate, three things matter, and talking isn't one of them.

Enos Stanley Kroenke of Columbia, Mo., is many things, but foremost among them he is a real estate developer, and a very successful one, which may help explain why the most influential team owner in one of the best

sports markets in the country is about as visible as the 15th player on a 15-man National Basketball Association roster. In a city where previous Denver Nuggets owners like Red McCombs and Sidney Schlenker were drawn to the spotlight, Kroenke is dry-toast, black-coffee, in-bed-by-10-p.m. dull by comparison. People who know Kroenke go blank trying to come up with colorful anecdotes or lively descriptions. "A perfectly pleasant person," says Don Elliman, a former Kroenke lieutenant. "Quiet," says Wendy Aiello, a Denver public relations consultant who has worked for Kroenke and his wife, Ann. "Very cordial," offers Jeff Gordon, a columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper.

What does matter in the business of real estate is money, location and timing.

Those attributes Stan Kroenke has without question.

The money part is well-catalogued by nearly every article ever written about the 58-year-old Kroenke, whose wife is a member of the Wal-Mart Walton family. Forbes estimates Kroenke's personal wealth, gained separately from the Wal-Mart fortune, at $1.8 billion in 2005, most of it reflecting the "location" part of the real-estate equation.

Kroenke has investments in shopping centers, buildings and in realty-management agreements in highly trafficked retail corridors stretching from Pennsylvania to Steamboat Springs to Malibu, Calif. THF Realty, the privately held company Kroenke founded with a partner in 1991 (the name stands for "To Have Fun"), manages 100 or so properties encompassing 20 million square feet of space. When he's not dispatching subordinates to hash out rights-of-way agreements and zoning deals with city councils for new Wal-Mart locations and roadside malls, Kroenke has shown a fondness for adding personal holdings like a large stake in the St. Louis Rams football team, a fly-fishing ranch in British Columbia, and most recently, an interest in Screaming Eagle Winery in California's Napa Valley, which produces an acclaimed Cabernet Sauvignon that goes for as much as $1,000 per bottle.