Katz knows something about basketball, although the last team he played on was the Camden High School junior varsity. "He's still got a good eye," says Arthur Goldberg, the Atlantic City casino mogul who two years ago unsuccessfully bid $95 million for the Nets himself. The two once bet $10,000 on a game of one-on-one. "He beat me ten-nothing, and he would kill to have my upper body," says Goldberg. (They donated the money to charity.) Katz even once beat President Clinton in a game of Pig at the Nerf hoop in the office of Philadelphia mayor Ed Rendell.

"Lewis is a little wild," says voluble power forward Jayson Williams, whom the Nets just signed to a $100 million contract. "He's like me -- he doesn't take anything too seriously."

Raymond Chambers, the other driving force behind the new Nets, couldn't be more different. "If you want snappy quotes or long speeches, you got to talk to Lewis," says Jayson Williams. "Ray Chambers is the main man, the big cheese, but he's the kind of guy who pays people a lot of money to keep his name out of the press. He'll probably come to one game all year."

Chambers has fought tenaciously to protect his privacy. He declined to be interviewed for this story, and his friends try to avoid even using his name with reporters. In 1992, he agreed to speak on background for a Wall Street Journal profile only after, at his suggestion, the reporter volunteered for five months at a weekend tutoring program for underprivileged kids. Friends say Chambers believes that recognition for his charitable acts would diminish their merit.

A tall, strikingly handsome man with gray streaks in his dark hair and a strong resemblance to Ted Turner, Chambers was born in Newark 56 years ago, the son of a steel-warehouse office manager. He worked his way through Rutgers University by playing keyboards in a rock-and-roll band called the Ray-tones, then worked for a few years as an accountant. After investing on his own for a time, he formed a partnership called Wesray Capital Corporation with Richard Nixon's former Treasury secretary William Simon. Wesray became one of the most successful leveraged-buyout firms of the eighties. At the end of the decade, he retired from active management of the firm and dedicated himself full-time to becoming a kind of philanthropic godfather to the devastated city of Newark. The plan for the Nets -- buying the team, building the arena, redeveloping the district -- was originally his. "I had never seen people as down-and-out as the people of Newark," he said in a statement issued to the Journal. "It had gotten so bad I didn't think I had any alternative."

Forbes magazine estimated his wealth at more than $200 million in 1988. Since then, he has given away far more than $50 million, according to estimates in the New York Times. He has given even more generously of his time, often leveraging his contributions to elicit support from others and maximize their impact. His Amelior Foundation has been a mainstay of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Newark. He helped bring the city a movie theater when it had none, and helped found mentoring and scholarship programs there that served thousands of kids. With characteristic ingenuity, he once established a nonprofit commodities-trading fund, managed by top-notch trading firms that agreed to waive their fees. He was the driving force behind the development of Newark's $190 million New Jersey Performing Arts Center, not far from the Nets' proposed arena. "He was the first Newark boy who really put his money on the line and made it happen," says Barton Myers, the center's architect. "No one would have thought you could raise $190 million in Newark and build an arts center."

Last summer, Chambers even made a rare public appearance to perform with the middle-aged members of his old band in a beachfront benefit concert to save a giant wooden elephant that is a landmark of the Jersey shore. With a guitar-shaped keyboard slung across his shoulder, he sang a tribute to the concert's organizer, Lewis Katz: "He's mighty thin and he's also tall, he thinks he should play basketball, Lewie, Lewie . . ." (Katz, dancing without much rhythm, pantomimed a hook shot.)