DURHAM, N.C. -- About half of the National Basketball Association's lead owners are billionaires. One is a United States senator. Twenty-nine of 30 are white. None is under 40.

With his long leather jacket, shaved head and goatee, Brian Davis does not look like them. He's 36 years old and played the game at a level they couldn't. Now he hopes to join their club with a bold -- some would say quixotic -- bid to buy an NBA franchise, the Memphis Grizzlies.

Mr. Davis describes rising from a childhood of "welfare, powdered milk and powdered cheese" to accomplish things that others believed he couldn't. He is a former co-captain on the Duke University basketball team and was crucial to its winning two national championships. After failing to stick in the pros, he joined with his more successful teammate Christian Laettner to develop real estate in Durham, N.C., Duke's hometown. Their local celebrity opened doors, and the project is helping revive a once-deserted downtown.

Mr. Davis wants to apply his model on a broader scale, buying into the Grizzlies with an eye, he says, toward redeveloping the neighborhoods around their downtown arena. "That's the black belt," he says of Memphis. "If I can't touch black people in that area to support us and to support what we're doing, then we've done something wrong. That's what's so exciting. We don't think it's a small town. We think it's a huge town. But we think it just needs a downtown."

The hurdles are high. Unlike most owners, Mr. Davis brings more moxie than money. Though his property wealth, when totaled, entitles him to be called a millionaire, Mr. Davis by no means shares the same level of wealth as many of the NBA's other team owners.

Mr. Davis and his group have agreed to pay $252 million for 70 percent of the team and say they have nearly $150 million more to cover other costs and potential team losses. They expect to get financing in part from CIT Group Inc. (A spokesman for the commercial and consumer lender declined to comment.) Real-estate investor Steve Sallion is among the investors, though Mr. Davis and Mr. Laettner have resisted naming many of their partners. Mr. Sallion said a group he's part of is investing about $30 million. In order to become managing partner under NBA rules, Mr. Davis would have to kick in $54 million personally; he says he will.

But league insiders wonder whether Mr. Davis's bid is too high and overleveraged for a team that lost a reported $40 million last year and has averaged a woeful 15,002 fans early this season. Mr. Davis calls the finances behind the deal a "trade secret." The current team owner believes Mr. Davis will have the money.

The Memphis-based group that owns the other 30 percent has until Friday to exercise its contractual right to match the offer, which would freeze Mr. Davis's group out. The local group, whose public face is J.R. "Pitt" Hyde, the founder of the AutoZone car-parts chain, hasn't suggested publicly whether it will take full control of the team or allow Mr. Davis's group to purchase the 70 percent of current majority partner Michael Heisley, a Chicago businessman.

Mr. Heisley has accepted a deposit from Mr. Davis's group entitling it to buy the team and says of the quieter partners in the group: "These are people with substantial money." The NBA would also have to approve the purchase.

In an unrelated deal, Mr. Davis could also learn this week whether he will hold a minority stake in Major League Soccer's D.C. United, which is being sold by billionaire Phil Anschutz, and says he hopes to enact a similar plan to redevelop the neighborhood around United's planned stadium in Washington's struggling southeastern quarter, where he spent part of his childhood.

Mr. Davis -- who now lives with his wife and two young sons in the former Irish embassy in Washington's ritzy Georgetown -- has long exceeded expectations. As a child, he bounced between homes in Atlantic City, N.J., and in and around Washington. Mr. Davis says he has never met his biological father. He likes to tell a story about how at age 9 he printed a business card that read, "I can do anything," which actually referred to his willingness to take on odd jobs such as mowing lawns, raking leaves and shoveling snow. Yet in some ways Mr. Davis has spent his life trying to back that up.

His first break came when he was recruited to play basketball at Duke, where, despite not being as talented as some of his teammates, he was a leader of teams that won consecutive NCAA championships in 1991 and 1992.

"Brian always has had big dreams and a cockiness or a confidence of achieving that. It's like Miracle-Gro with him," says Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski. "When he got here, he was thrown into an environment on a day-to-day basis with some of the most successful young men and women at the country at Duke. And then you threw him in to a basketball environment where you have Grant Hill, Christian Laettner and Bobby Hurley on the team, he has the ego and the confidence level to feel like he's as good or better than them."

After fizzling as a pro player, he spent a year working in the NBA's offices before turning to real estate. Mr. Davis and Mr. Laettner had talked since college about combining their entrepreneurial interests with socially beneficial projects. Through Durham contacts, Mr. Davis and Mr. Laettner hooked up with Tom Niemann, a Duke business-school graduate. It took some cajoling, but they eventually convinced Durham's city council that they could bring upscale residents to a downtown so blighted that its population numbered in the low hundreds in the mid-1990s. Those close to the talks describe Mr. Davis as the group's charismatic sweet-talker, Mr. Niemann as the one who worked the deal's nuts and bolts, and Mr. Laettner a more distant partner, providing a sizable stake from his NBA earnings.

The results are handsome -- once abandoned tobacco buildings are now apartments with the exposed brick and high ceilings that make yuppies swoon. The West Village project appears to have been a clear winner. According to data provided by Reis Inc., a real-estate research firm, the 240-unit complex had a vacancy rate of a low 2.5 percent during the third quarter of this year.

"Downtown Durham was not where I would have suspected that kind of success," says Gary Hock, president of Durham-based Hock Development Corp. Mayor Bill Bell calls the project a "catalyst" for others that have created a nucleus of new residential, office and commercial spaces. A second, larger phase of the project recently broke ground.

Still, real-estate experts say Mr. Davis's main real-estate deal most likely hasn't spun off the millions he would need in Memphis by itself, and his other projects are just getting started. And the Durham properties themselves may not be worth enough to get Mr. Davis the kind of money he needs. Tax rolls in Durham County place the value at about $27.7 million, but Mr. Davis doesn't have 100 percent ownership of those properties. "I couldn't imagine that a few hundred apartment units are going to generate enough value for him to buy the Memphis Grizzlies," says Jim Jarrell, an associate broker who specializes in the North Carolina commercial market for Cushman & Wakefield.

Mr. Davis says a Baltimore property he owns would help considerably in the Grizzlies financing. He placed its value at about $20 million. Yet, Baltimore city tax rolls value that property at only about $4.4 million. Of course, all the properties' market value could have increased significantly since they were assessed.

"I have all the money I need to close the transaction," Mr. Davis assures, adding that he would be able to reach the $54 million required for his share.

Should their group receive the team, Mr. Laettner predicted a cut in payroll while trying to remain competitive: "We're not going to be cheap owners, but we're not going to be stupid owners, either."

None of the other investors in the first phase of the downtown Durham redevelopment is involved in the Memphis deal. "It's a big piece of meat," Mr. Niemann, who has since broken with his two tall partners, says of the Grizzlies.

In the end, boil away all of the side questions, and Mark Cuban, owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks and a role model for Mr. Davis, has a simple answer for what Mr. Davis will need in order to continue on his unlikely but so far lucrative trajectory. "It takes a lot of money, nothing more or less," he says.