Robert K. Kraft, former football student-athlete at Columbia University and current owner of the defending NFL

Super Bowl champion New England

Patriots, will be recognized as the 39th recipient of the NCAA Theodore Roosevelt Award during the Honors Celebration January 7.

A native of Brookline, Massachusetts, Kraft grew up in an observant Jewish family. He won an academic scholarship to Columbia, where he earned letters in 1959 and 1960 as

a member of the freshman and varsity lightweight football squads. After sustaining an injury early in the 1961 season, he did not play again. He graduated from Columbia in 1963 with degrees in history and economics, and then went on to earn a master’s degree in business administration at Harvard Business School.

Kraft’s career as a business executive began in the late 1960s when he took a position with the Rand-Whitney Group. He later acquired that organization and went on to establish the Kraft Group of Companies, whose holdings in paper and packaging include Rand-Whitney Group, International Forest Products and Carmel Container System, Ltd., which is one of the largest packaging companies in the Middle East.

In 1994, Kraft purchased the New England Patriots for $172 million, then the highest amount ever paid for a sports franchise. Under his leadership, the Patriots have collected three Super Bowl titles and entered the 2005 football season with a 20-game winning streak and 115 straight consecutive home-game sellouts to their credit. According to Forbes Magazine, the Patriots rank third in NFL team value at $1 billion, and the franchise is estimated to generate $256 million annually and pocket $50 million in earnings.

Kraft also owns the New England Revolution, the 2002 Major League Soccer Cup champion. The Revolution advanced to the final last year.

In the community, Kraft is a trustee emeritus at Columbia and serves as a trustee at Boston College. He is a member of the executive committees for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, where he established the Robert K. Kraft Blood Donor Center.

In addition to donating to local charities, Kraft was the principal benefactor for the Robert K. Kraft Family Center for Student Life at Columbia and has donated funds to construct stadiums for recreation and amateur sports in Rhode Island and Jerusalem, Israel.