Slim and None

by Howard Baldwin

  The 1985–86 group of Whaler players was extraordinary. Joel Quenneville has won two Stanley Cups as a coach and is one of the all-time winningest coaches in the NHL. Kevin Dineen has coached in the AHL and the NHL, and most recently coached the gold-medal-winning Canadian women’s hockey team in Sochi. Dave Tippett is a top NHL coach and is moving up on the all-time wins list as well. Ron Francis is a key executive with the Carolina Hurricanes. Other players, such as Ulf Samuelsson, Paul Fenton, Ray Ferraro, Steve Weeks, Dean Evason — seriously too many to reference quickly here — have gone on to play an important role in the world of professional hockey.

  But those same storm clouds that were hovering over the skies in the early 1970s were about to re-gather in the 1990s. Little did I know at the time that I would have a very active NHL decade ahead of me.

  PART FOUR

  THE NHL:

  THE TURBULENT ’90S

  Back in the Game

  Nineteen eighty-nine was a transition year for me and Karen. After I finished with the Whalers, we moved to L.A. in September and concentrated on the movie production business. By that point, we had made From the Hip, Billy Galvin, Spellbinder and a few others. When we left Hartford, we left with some money — our share of the sale of the Whalers was $2.7 million — and we were living off that money and also investing in films. Karen was finding success with the acting and writing, and we were expanding our film company, as we both liked living in California.

  Although I was not active with my own team in the NHL, I’d stayed close to people in the league and had many friends and connections within it.

  Jay Snider was running the Flyers at the time and, thoughtfully, had put me on their board, which to this day I still appreciate. As well, Karen and I developed a friendship with Bruce McNall, who owned the L.A. Kings. We had season tickets for the Kings at the Forum, and Karen even sang the national anthem prior to the Kings-Whalers game. There were 16,000 people there and she did a great job. I was so nervous that I was in the bathroom, sick to my stomach.

  We were happy in Los Angeles, but I did miss what I had grown used to doing for over 20 years — running a hockey team. I missed the competition and camaraderie of it. For me, hockey was a safe haven; it was all I had done since I started my working life. I had been very fortunate because with the Whalers, from day one, I always had great partners, starting with Bob Schmertz and evolving into the corporate partnership. There was stability for me in hockey, whereas with the film business we didn’t generate any income unless we made a film.

  So I was at a place where I was eager to find a way to have a little more stability. And just as I will never forget that small WHA article in the Boston Globe, I will never forget the phone call from NHL president John Ziegler and Calgary Flames partner Norm Green.

  It was the summer of 1989, and Karen and I were driving along the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu when our car phone rang.

  “Howard,” John said, “the league would like to expand by at least two more teams, and we want to push westward. You’re on the West Coast, see what you can find out.”

  John added that they wanted to establish a new benchmark price of $50 million for a new NHL franchise. Although I was a bit taken aback by the size of that number, I said I would see what I could do.

  The call came a little less than a year after Peter Pocklington traded Wayne Gretzky to Los Angeles. I remember having a bet with Ed Snider after that trade. Ed was saying, “Oh my God, with that deal, L.A. will win the Stanley Cup this year.” And I said, “I bet you Edmonton wins another Cup before L.A. does,” because I felt Mark Messier was such a competitor that he was going to prove a point. And the Oilers did win, in 1990.

  The Gretzky deal was sad for Canada, but for L.A. and the rest of the U.S. it was great. It triggered the growth of hockey on the West Coast. You take the greatest player in the history of the sport, in terms of persona — you could argue that Bobby Orr, or even Gordie, was a better player, but Wayne was an absolute giant at the time — and put him in a star-studded city like L.A., and it electrified people.

  Suddenly people started going to the hockey games in L.A. in record numbers. That trade single-handedly did more to generate interest in the NHL in the United States than anything that had been previously done. Wayne was the one star of the game who transcended it. Mario Lemieux, the other superstar of the time, was very reserved — a reluctant star. Mario was a great, great player, but he did not enjoy being an ambassador for the sport. Wayne was an ambassador for the sport and Bruce was a smart promoter.

  Bruce immediately tripled Wayne’s salary to $3 million per year. Bruce knew he had to get the front page, from a marketing point of view, and one of the ways he did this was to encourage celebrities to come to the games by placing them in prominent seats along the ice where the media could capture photos of them and where the TV cameras could pan to them during the game. On any given night you would see such luminaries as Ronald Reagan, Tom Hanks, John Candy, Sly Stallone, Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn. Bruce made the games a place to go and be seen.

  In the Hockey Hall of Fame, they have a Builders section that rewards key executives and owners who have made an extraordinary impact on the sport. Bruce should be in the Hall in that category, as he was a true builder. Granted, he had legal difficulties and he was punished for them, but that doesn’t change the incredibly positive impact he had on the sport itself. When he did that Gretzky deal, it turned the whole hockey world upside down and put all the attention on the West Coast market. It made the NHL a coast-to-coast sport in the U.S. and opened up new markets to hockey. It brought Anaheim into the league in a couple of years, and it was not very long afterward that the league started to move into warmer, non-traditional markets like Miami, Tampa Bay, Dallas, Phoenix and San Jose.

  There is no question that Wayne’s trade prompted that call along the Pacific Coast Highway. In a follow-up call shortly after the first one, Norm and John suggested I go to the desert, to Palm Springs, to meet Morris Belzberg, a friend of Norm’s from Canada who was interested in owning a hockey team. Morris had risen from being the first individual licensee of Budget Rent a Car in Canada to being chairman of the board and CEO. Morris and I liked each other from the start and agreed we would join forces to pursue a team. Morris would provide the principal financing for an expansion team on the West Coast, and I would spend the time to explore various markets.

  During the late ’80s, right when we were leaving the Whalers, I started working much more closely with Tom Ruta. Tom had always worked with us on our personal financial matters, but in the late ’80s we formed a partnership that remains strong to this day. There is not a thing I am involved with where I don’t reach out to Tom for his input and expertise. Tom and my older brother Michael are two business partners I value greatly. As well, Tom’s brother Nick Ruta has worked with us on all business matters, film and personal. Tom is a brilliant financial mind and our alliance was fortuitous. I love to work with him because he has the ability to take some of my “creative ideas” and ground them in good business practices. It made us an effective team.

  Morris, Tom and I began by looking at the San Diego and San Francisco markets, the two most obvious targets. To me, San Francisco was very attractive. I really liked it as a city. It has an East Coast feel to it. The city itself is absolutely beautiful and it had a history of hockey in the old Pacific Coast League, with the San Francisco Shamrocks. However, the politics of the city were such that it was quickly clear to my group that it would take years to get the support needed to build a new arena.

  We also looked long and hard at San Diego. They did have a 13,000-seat arena that we could have used temporarily, but we didn’t like the marketing radius of San Diego: it has the Pacific Ocean to the west, Orange County to the north, the desert to the east and Mexico to the immediate south. That location gave us great concern for its long-term viability as a hockey city.

  Then I received
a call from Jim Hager, a young lawyer in San Jose, who said he had read in the paper that I was spearheading the drive for an NHL team on the West Coast. He asked if I would visit him and the mayor in San Jose.

  Jim, a terrific young fellow, met me at the airport, showed me around and took me in to meet the mayor, Tom McEnery. Tom comes from an old-line California political family and to this day is a very good friend of mine.

  I knew instantly that San Jose was it. The team would be the only show in town, like in Hartford. It was an exciting up-and-coming city. They had all the financing in place to build a new arena. They were in the Silicon Valley area just as internet technology was exploding. It was a technology center for the world, just as Hartford was the insurance capital.

  We engineered a very exciting and powerful deal for the NHL. The team was to be financed based on all the revenue streams we would generate from the arena. Part of the deal with the mayor was that the city turned the arena over to us. So we had the arena and the management rights to the arena to help finance bringing a hockey team there. I then went to Tony Tavares, who was running Spectacor Management Group, an arena management company owned by Ed Snider, and we put together a deal that set the bar for a new NHL team at $50 million, which became the expansion fee for the 1990s. We were able to generate additional financing by bringing Spectacor in as the arena manager — Spectacor advanced dollars to our partnership (Morris, Tom and me) against future arena revenues that it would earn. San Jose was pleased because they would get a top-of-the-line arena management company and an NHL team — a huge boon to the local economy. We were all very proud of this deal.

  Karen and I had actually picked out a home and were prepared to move to the area. We were committed to the relocation and to running the team as we had in Hartford. It was close enough to Los Angeles that we could keep an eye on the film business, and if Karen had the right opportunity, we could easily commute for her to take advantage of it.

  Then I got another phone call from John Ziegler and Norm Green. Norm invited me to Palm Springs to discuss an “exciting idea.”

  You know when you can sense it’s not an exciting idea? So I said to myself, “Whoa-oh.”

  If anything, I tend to overly communicate, so I had been keeping John Ziegler and Bill Wirtz, who was chairman of the NHL, closely apprised of the progress I was making. The possibility of the NHL coming into San Jose was now known to the public. Of course, it was also known to the member teams of the NHL.

  At the same time that our San Jose deal was coming together, Gordon and George Gund, the owners of the Minnesota North Stars, were making noises about wanting to move their team. When the Gunds became aware of the dynamic opportunity in San Jose, they started to put in a claim on what was essentially my deal. This created some serious debate within the league. On the one hand, there was an existing NHL ownership group which had lost a great deal of money in Minnesota. And on the other hand there was my group (Baldwin/Belzberg/Ruta) which had done exactly as asked by the NHL — create a new, exciting West Coast venue at a premium price to the league.

  “We love the idea of San Jose,” John Ziegler told me. “But we have a problem here. The Gunds want to relocate from Minnesota to San Jose and they are a member team.”

  The battle lines were drawn. There needed to be a compromise and there was: the Baldwin/Belzberg/Ruta group wound up owning Minnesota and the Gunds got San Jose.

  I fought it initially, pointing out that I put the whole deal together, that I had sweat equity in the franchise and that Karen and I were prepared to move up there. Bill Wirtz and some of the other guys on the board were very loyal to me and said, “Howard found this,” but there were other guys who said, “Yeah, but Gordon’s in the league and he’s lost a lot of money.”

  It wasn’t going to go our way, so the solution was a swap.

  The compromise deal was announced on May 5th, 1990. The Gunds would take their Minnesota team to San Jose as an expansion franchise, and the league would put an “expansion” team in Minnesota for us. We had a draft of the Minnesota players to split them up, and both teams would take part in the expansion draft.

  San Jose paid $50 million to the league, and we paid $33 million to the Gunds. So an interesting way to look at it is that the Gunds got San Jose for only 17 million bucks.

  That’s the only deal that I was really disappointed not to get done. I thought we had San Jose, and it kind of pissed me off, but that’s the way it went. It was sad for me because we loved the market and we loved the people.

  So we created San Jose for the league, we created the $50 million benchmark and we saved their asses in Minnesota.

  We paid less money for our franchise but to be candid with you, neither Karen nor I wanted to be in Minnesota. However, it was a good hockey opportunity, so we said we’d adjust our personal plans and go to Minneapolis and try to make it work.

  The deal wasn’t as good as the one in San Jose. We thought we had a deal for a new arena, but it didn’t work out. They were building a new arena in Minneapolis for the Timberwolves basketball team, but at the last minute the owners of the NBA team decided they didn’t want to share it with another prime tenant.

  To further complicate the situation, Morris decided he didn’t want to finance the team in Minnesota without an additional money partner. So, lo and behold, who does he bring in but his friend Norm Green?

  I knew from the moment Norm set foot in Minneapolis that he wanted to run the team, and there was going to be conflict. The only opinion that mattered to Norm was his own. I had no issues working for somebody, but I wasn’t about to start working for somebody who knew little to nothing about the business.

  I don’t think Norm behaved the way you’re meant to behave. He thought he knew more than anybody, and he was a bully to people who couldn’t fight him back. I remember he called the office once and couldn’t get right through to me, and he had the receptionist in tears. It was at that point that Karen and I looked at each other and realized that our relocation to Minnesota was going to be a short one.

  Another time, Karen and I were in our apartment early on a Sunday morning. Those were the days of the old fax machines that spun paper out like toilet paper, and I hear this thing going “Mmmmzzzz.” I thought it was stuck or something, but when I went in the other room to check, there was a fax from Norm that stretched all the way to the bathroom, telling me, “Do this, do that.” And I thought, “Mmmm, this isn’t going to work.” And of course it didn’t.

  Karen and I were in Minneapolis for only two or three months. We hired Bob Gainey as coach and Bob Clarke as general manager, but it was only six weeks later that I sold out to Norm and Karen and I went back to L.A. And Norm actually got lucky that season, as Minnesota made it all the way to the Stanley Cup final before losing to Pittsburgh.

  One of my favorite Norm Green stories has to do with my cousin, Taylor Baldwin. Taylor came to work for me in the mid-’80s. His story is a fascinating one. Taylor’s father, my father’s older brother, was Peter Baldwin. After World War II, Uncle Peter settled in Bombay, India, rather than returning to Harvard. He was a physically imposing man, one of the last runners-up to Johnny Weissmuller for the part of Tarzan. Uncle Peter started his own airline in Bombay in the late ’40s and it was a great success, so much so that eventually it was taken over by the Indian government. Uncle Peter was married to his fourth wife, Taylor’s mother, an Indian woman named Myrtle, and he decided to leave India and move to Kabul, Afghanistan. In Kabul he was a highly successful businessman and did a tremendous amount of wonderful work in the country for the local people. Peter and Myrtle had three boys — Taylor was the middle child. Very sadly, Uncle Peter died playing tennis with the man who was then king of Afghanistan. My father flew over there to get Myrtle and the boys and bring them to the United States. Taylor was 11 when he was relocated to this country.

  As he grew to manhood, Taylor reached the impressive heig
ht of seven feet and was a standout college basketball player at Maryland. When he left Maryland, I immediately hired him as a salesman for the Whalers. I remember with delight the first time Karen saw Taylor — she thought he was standing up behind his desk when in fact he was seated, and then he rose up in all his seven-foot glory! Everyone adored Taylor — he was a gentle giant.

  When we left Hartford, Taylor came with us to Los Angeles, and then on to Minnesota with a few other Hartford employees. The one agreement I had with Norm Green when we left the North Stars was that he would give every Hartford employee that we had taken with us at least three to four months to prove themselves. Needless to say, in classic Norm style, the minute the jet wheels were up and we were on our way to L.A., he called Taylor into his office and told him his “services were no longer needed.” Norm was behind his desk. Somehow he hadn’t twigged to the long reach of Taylor Baldwin’s arm.

  Taylor stood up as if he was going to reach for Norm behind the desk, pick him up, and give him a good shaking — which, believe me, Taylor could have done — but he was only trying to scare Norm. Norm flipped over backwards in his desk chair in fright, and Taylor proceeded to laugh hysterically as he exited the office and the city and came back out to L.A. to rejoin us in film.

  Taylor went on to work for us in Pittsburgh, but tragically he passed away of brain cancer in 2000. It was a devastating personal loss to Karen, to me, to my children and everyone in our family, and to anyone else whose life Taylor touched.

  The Penguins, Part II

  Karen and I had kept our place in Beverly Hills, so when we returned to L.A. from Minnesota we went straight back to doing film work with our production company.