Much to the shock of everyone, a low-key developer out in Brooklyn suddenly wanted in.

Owning a sports team is usually a job for blow-dried nouveau-ultra-riche narcissists. Think Jerry Jones. Think Mark Cuban. Not only does Ratner show zero interest in earning face time on ESPN’s SportsCenter, but he practically never speaks to the press about anything, although he did come out of his shell a bit with a showy press conference at Junior’s last week. In this interview with New York, Ratner declined—in accordance with a confidentiality clause issued by the investment banks handling the sale, Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers—to talk about any specifics relating to his bid, his strategies to build support within City Hall, or his potential ownership group (Ratner, according to one report, is looking to put up $75 million of his own money into a team that could go for $250 million).

Yes, Ratner, now 58, did serve for a time as Consumer Affairs commissioner under Ed Koch. He has served as chairman of the board of bam. But for a guy who’s already transformed the landscape of downtown Brooklyn with massive projects, he’s almost invisible. At some point soon, “New Brooklyn” may indeed need a cheerleader, a Trump all its own. But it won’t be Bruce Ratner. “That’s the last thing I’d want to do,” he says a bit awkwardly. “It’s not my nature, and at the end of the day, I’m a real-estate developer.”

But then he proceeds to cheerlead. “There are still people who say, ‘What, Brooklyn?’ They don’t get it,” Ratner says. He envisions the triumphant arrival of the Nets—and maybe even the NHL-champion Devils—at a gleaming pleasure dome on the very site where the O’Malleys once dreamed of building a new Ebbets Field. It would be the crowning achievement of his real ambition, he says, which is to help bring about one of the country’s great urban renaissances.

In fact, the biggest thing Ratner might have going for him is that his plan turns the build-it-and-they-will-come model, which is always a bit of a gamble, on its head. Ratner’s idea is more they’ve-already-come-so-let’s-build-it. The they in this case is the invigorated new population that has simply transformed the borough in the past five years.

“Five years,” he marvels. “I can’t believe my eyes, the changes.” Absurd Manhattan real-estate prices pushed an entire generation of creative, educated, and solidly middle-class New Yorkers across the East River. It’s a historic shift of intellectual and financial capital, and a striking reversal of the hemorrhage that sapped Brooklyn during the decades of suburbanization. If you’re looking for evidence that Brooklyn is once again a major-league town, perhaps you need look no further than the price of brownstones in Park Slope, some of which have tripled in value in the past ten years.

“You talk to old Brooklynites, a lot of them almost never went to Manhattan their whole lives,” Ratner says. “For them, the world started and ended in Brooklyn. They talk about the ‘good old days,’ when Brooklyn had everything, because it did have everything. Downtown Brooklyn once had fifteen theaters!”

“It’s not an accident it’s all coming back,” Ratner enthuses. “Just like the Russian immigrants would move here and bring their families over, now it’s the intellectuals who move here and bring their friends over. Brooklyn has become a brain drain on the rest of the city. In fifteen years, this place will be everything it was and more. You can just see it.”

Ratner, of course, is not everyone’s idea of a philanthropist visionary. In business, he can play hardball as fiercely as Ty Cobb. Five years ago, a rival developer, Millennium Partners, had already started on a gleaming entertainment complex with a 22-screen multiplex and a 50-lane bowling alley down near the Gowanus. Ratner, however, filed suit, claiming rights to the land. In the end, Ratner won out, though the same might not be said for Brooklyn, which will end up with another big-box chain store—Lowe’s Home Improvement Warehouse.

Nevertheless, Ratner sees his mission as more than mercenary. “I was never interested in traditional real estate—you know, luxury high-rises in Manhattan,” he says. “I mean, there are lots of ways to make money. I found my niche, creating buildings that keep jobs in this city.”

“Everything he’s doing is just homogenizing,” says an activist. “This is just one more step in the Manhattanization of Brooklyn.”

Ratner grew up in a progressive family in Cleveland. His boyhood idol was Indians outfielder Larry Doby, the first black player to cross the color barrier in the American League, Ohio’s own Jackie Robinson. “Bruce is an old lefty, he’s an old hippie,” says one friend. A nephew of powerful Cleveland developer Max Ratner, Bruce Ratner enrolled in Columbia Law School after graduating with honors from Harvard, and planned a career in public-interest law.

“I was a storefront lawyer for the Model Cities program in Queens, which deals with consumer-fraud issues,” explains Ratner, who later taught law at NYU for five years. “I had no interest in business.” In 1982, Ratner, concerned with “family finances and so forth,” decided to try real estate. “My intention was to go into this for a short time.” With backing from the Ohio Ratners, the neophyte developer almost instantly turned his sights on the least-promising terrain around.

“I remember walking downtown one time with my cousin Albert,” recalls Ratner. Albert Ratner is chairman of Forest City Enterprises, the family’s original Ohio company. “I was new to the business and hadn’t built anything yet. We came upon the MetroTech site. If you could only see pictures of it back then. It was the worst precinct in the city. I suddenly got really nervous that MetroTech just couldn’t be done. I turned to Albert and said, ‘Am I crazy?’ Albert just said, ‘Bruce, stay the course.’ ”

Over the next fifteen years, Ratner found plenty of opportunities to test his sanity. “I used to get guffaws,” he recalls. “I would be giving a presentation to a company and I would say, ‘Downtown Brooklyn is the best downtown in America. You’re going to laugh, but I’m going to take the next twenty minutes to prove it to you. We have 32,000 college students, more than Cambridge, Massachusetts. We’ve got the cultural institutions, the transportation. I’ve been all over the country, and this downtown is going to be the very, very best.’ ”

But how could New Jersey let its first native pro franchise go, just at the cusp of greatness? “I for one always assumed that Jon Corzine and Jim McGreevey would never let them leave,” says Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce president Kenneth Adams. “But when are they going to start playing defense? So far, anyway, Ratner is playing offense quite successfully.”

For the record, everyone in New Jersey insists he’s working hard to keep the Nets in Springsteen Country. The question is, at what cost? Both Nets ownership and elected officials in Jersey insist the Newark arena is not dead. The problem is, team owners have asked for more than the $210 million in public funds originally agreed to, and neither the city of Newark nor the state says it can spare the money.

Meanwhile, current Nets ownership remains deeply divided. Ray Chambers appears ready to sell. Katz is rumored to have thrown in his lot with Ratner, though neither will comment. Jersey’s best hope appears to rest with developer Charles Kushner, now backed by Corzine. That duo brings tremendous clout, both political and financial, but even they appear to be pinning their hopes on securing up to $100 million to renovate Continental Arena, and no one yet has figured out where that will come from. Wang, for his part, is thought to be interested only to the extent that he can get public money to spruce up the unloved Nassau “Mausoleum”—unloved by Kidd and Mourning themselves, who have already spoken out against any fast-breaks out to Long Island, though not necessarily to the 718 area code.

And then there’s Brooklyn, a sports town waiting to happen if ever there was one. “Brooklyn long ago established itself as a good borough for professional team sports,” says Zimbalist, a sharp critic of some other cities’ stadium plans, “and hasn’t been given much of a chance since 1958.

“With arenas,” he explains, “as opposed to outdoor football stadiums, you ought to be able to get much more private financing. The basketball team alone gives you 41 dates, and that’s even if the Devils don’t come. A football stadium gives you ten dates, and there’s not much else you can do there to create revenue except maybe have Billy Graham come and speak, or Bruce Springsteen give a concert.”

The question of how much money the city gets from a new team depends on how much it puts in. That’s where the idea of “incremental” tax revenue comes in. The Bloomberg administration has a policy for any team wishing to build in the city: It’s only willing to kick in money for construction that wouldn’t otherwise be available to the city if the stadium didn’t exist.

An arena, in other words, will inevitably generate new tax revenues—from tickets to basketball games, concerts, even the circus, as well as income taxes from employees who work there. That projected future income is what the city is willing to lend. “What we’re going to use is those extra taxes that would not have existed otherwise to pay for our contribution,” explains Daniel Doctoroff, deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding. “And hopefully, we’re going to have some left over, too.”

It’s the same deal the city is working out with the Jets, who are making good progress toward a West Side stadium with a retractable roof that would double as an arena and convention center. The problem with Steinbrenner’s now-defunct dreams for a West Side stadium were twofold, Doctoroff says. First off, the Yankees draw 40,000 to 50,000 fans a game, and there are 81 home games a year. That’s a lot of extra activity for midtown Manhattan. Also, moving the Yankees from the Bronx to Manhattan doesn’t bring a net gain for the city. It only robs Peter to pay, well, George.

Bringing the Nets to Brooklyn makes more sense, Doctoroff says. Basketball games attract at most 20,000 fans, and to a far less congested area served by nine subway lines. New Jersey would be the loser here, not a rival borough. Yes, the Knicks might not want a champ in their own backyard, but they don’t have much of a voice in the matter. The NBA decides on such moves by a three-quarters vote of its teams. “The Knicks,” says league spokesman Tim Frank, “would have the same vote as the Phoenix Suns.”