John Wulfers thought teamwork was the key to success, both in his international law practice and for the sports organizations he followed throughout his life.
“A team player and a great partner,” said Nick DiGiovanni, head of the insurance and reinsurance group at Locke Lord, where Mr. Wulfers was a partner specializing in insurance and reinsurance law until he retired in 2010.
Mr. Wulfers, 64, died of metastatic colon cancer Friday, Dec. 2, in his home. He lived in northwest suburban Chicago for more than 30 years.
Mr. Wulfers was born and grew up in New Jersey, with a father who took him to all sorts of sporting events.
“He was just so passionate about all sports,” said his wife, Nancy. “He liked everything and followed sports all his life.”
That included baseball, basketball, soccer, hockey and football — he and his father held season tickets to the New York Giants football team for 50 years.
His love of sports also went beyond team sports to include horse racing and golf, which he played all over the world, thanks in part to his business travels.
Mr. Wulfers didn’t just follow the sports from a distance. He went to the games. Super Bowls, World Series, NCAA Final Fours, World Cup soccer games and Triple Crown thoroughbred races were all on his agenda, as were baseball spring training and college football games, especially those of his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin.
“He knew more about sports than the announcers did,” said his son, Ted, a musician. “He was a walking sports encyclopedia.”
Mr. Wulfers graduated in 1972 from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and received his law degree from SMU Dedman School of Law in Dallas in 1974.
He worked briefly as a prosecutor in Monroe County, N.Y., before coming to Chicago with his wife, Nancy, in 1978. The two met at Wisconsin and married in 1971.
In 1980, Mr. Wulfers started his 30-year career with the law firm that was then Lord, Bissell & Brook and is now Locke Lord. He specialized in working with international clients in the insurance and reinsurance industries.
“Reinsurance is the insurance of insurance companies,” DiGiovanni said. When insurers take on large risks, they sometimes look to others — reinsurers — to share some of that risk.
“John spent his time working with high-level reinsurers throughout the world,” DiGiovanni said.
The nature of the business can lead to coverage disputes, such as those that have arisen over coverage for damages resulting from asbestos exposure.
“Those are major, major issues,” DiGiovanni said of asbestos, “and John dealt with those as much or more than anybody in the industry, mostly from the reinsurance end.”
Though Mr. Wulfers traveled the world on business, he also traveled for pleasure. That included nearly annual trips to Hawaii. One such trip in 2002 turned into the sporting event of his life.
He and his son were fishing in the ocean off Hawaii when his son hooked a huge Pacific blue marlin. The fish was 14 feet long and weighed more than 660 pounds, said Ted Wulfers. Last year, the family donated a fiberglass model of the specimen to Chicago’s Field Museum.
“We very much caught that fish together,” Ted Wulfers said.
Asked to explain his father’s lifelong fascination with sports, Ted Wulfers said: “There’s no guaranteed ending. You have to play to know the outcome.”
Mr. Wulfers also is survived by his mother, Dorothy, and a sister, Melinda Russell.
A funeral Mass will be said at 11:30 a.m. Saturday in St. Simon’s Episcopal Church, 717 W. Kirchoff Road, Arlington Heights.
