Late in the 1997–98 season, Roger and I made up our minds that the only way that we could survive and get our debt paid off was to do a sell-trade with Jagr, the way Quebec did with Lindros and Edmonton did with Gretzky. In a sell-trade you get cash, you get draft choices and you get whatever else you can.
So Craig Patrick and I divided up the teams we thought could afford Jagr. One of the teams I took was the Rangers. On my very first call, Rangers president Dave Checketts said, “Okay, $12 million, a couple of number one draft choices, and a couple of young players.”
It took only one call. But Gary got wind of it and said that wasn’t going to happen under his watch.
I said, “Gary where do you think Jagr is better off playing? In New York City, where he’d be a marquee star? Or in Pittsburgh, where we’re dying? We can’t afford to keep these kinds of payrolls here.”
But Gary put a cap of $4.5 million on the cash we could get back for Jagr, so we were screwed. In order to hang on to the franchise, we had to have more money than that. The only issue I ever really had with Gary was that we were unable to do what Marcel Aubut did in Quebec with Lindros, and what Peter Pocklington did in Edmonton with Gretzky, which was to take an asset that they owned and turn it into a bigger asset — cash and players.
Then we had a number of meetings in Gary’s offices about bankruptcy. I’ll never forget the one meeting when Mario, his lawyer Chuck Greenberg, Tom, my lawyer Steve Lynch and I were in one of the offices and Roger came into the room. When he saw us he took a Coke can and just threw it. It was childish.
Roger and I fought each other right up to the first payroll of the 1998–99 season, when Gary called and said that the only way the payroll could be met was if we filed for bankruptcy. Then, under debtor-in-possession rules, fresh money could be borrowed, because it would be in the first position.
Gary said, “Howard, Roger is the money. You’re going to have to give in to him — as bad as it is, you’re going to have let him file.” I know that Gary didn’t like it any more than I did.
In early October, 1998, Roger filed to put the Pittsburgh Penguins into bankruptcy.
Once he did that, I knew I was done in Pittsburgh. I knew I would get crucified by the Pittsburgh media for the bankruptcy, and I just wanted to be finished with the whole situation. I knew there was nothing that I could say to the media that they would accept and that wouldn’t sound defensive.
The bankruptcy settlement took until the end of that season, and it was after that that I got mad, because the media all forgot that I’d fought for Mario. Part of the commitment I was looking for was for someone to say the right things — that I was an ally of Mario, and that I was an ally of the franchise, because I had tried to do the right thing by both. And when we were going through it all, the Lemieux people, led by Tom Reich, had been very appreciative.
I said to Mario, “Mario, I don’t expect you ever to give me a dime. But when people criticize me, don’t lump me in with Roger Marino, because that isn’t fair.”
At the time I was really pissed, but history will judge whether what I did was good, bad or indifferent.
Tom Reich was a hero of that bankruptcy. He’s the one who brought Ron Burkle in with new money for the team, and he’s the one who fought every second for Mario.
In Mario I was dealing with a man that I truly had genuine affection for. And who could not admire the skill level of this extraordinarily gifted athlete? I only hope that Mario and a few others realize how hard we did try on his behalf and on behalf of the franchise. People were quick to forget that at the time we acquired the franchise there was considerable speculation that it would be purchased and relocated.
The bankruptcy was conditionally settled in June, with Mario, the largest creditor, proposing to turn $20 million of his $28 million in deferred payments into equity, which would give him controlling interest. And in September, the NHL approved his application for ownership. In the end, as part of the bankruptcy settlement, I was able to keep the dormant AHL franchise (which eventually became the Manchester Monarchs) and a small residual interest in the team.
Postscript to Pittsburgh
On reflection, the 1990s was a very rough decade for me and for hockey.
Personally, I had the thrill and excitement of being part of a team that had Hall of Famers and some of the greatest players in the world at the time: Mario Lemieux, Ron Francis, Paul Coffey, Tom Barrasso, Joey Mullen, Kevin Stevens and, of course, Jaromir Jagr, who is still playing today and who will be an instant first-ballot Hall of Famer. We won the Stanley Cup, a Presidents’ Trophy, and many other wonderful awards.
Financially, however, it was an incredibly difficult period to operate an NHL franchise. We were forced to suffer the indignities of a bankruptcy that I never wanted. That was heartbreaking for me.
There was new leadership in the NHL with Gary Bettman, who I think was the perfect man for those difficult times. Bob Goodenow was head of the players’ union and he represented the players well. There was no longer the “overly chummy” relationship that the league had enjoyed for so long between the players’ rep, Alan Eagleson, and the old-line owners. The players were very cognizant of the agreements the other three major leagues had between their unions and management. No longer were the hockey players going to just roll over.
On a personal level, I felt that I did some really good things. We held the Penguins together as a team. If they are put into their proper perspective, some of the contracts that I have been criticized for don’t deserve the criticism. I took a lot of heat for the Lemieux contract from other owners and GMs. Yet those very same critical owners and GMs were guilty of contracts that were just as onerous as any contract I ever agreed to — if not more so. All one has to do is look at history to see that is a fact. And lastly on this issue, how could we not have paid the greatest player in the game at the time, and one of the very few drawing cards that the league then had, especially after we won back-to-back Stanley Cups?
The problem with some of the critics was, and still is, not understanding that there’s more to it than just selling tickets. As we got into the 21st century, it was television and the worldwide appeal of the sport that would make the revenues grow dramatically. And that world is driven by stars.
I do feel, however, that I could have done a better job of managing other expenses and of building up the cash reserves of our company in the beginning, when we were doing well financially. We would have been better prepared for the “rainy day.”
I also felt that we made too many changes at the top of the Penguins organization. That falls on me. There is no other way to say it — I was just unwilling to relocate to Pittsburgh full time. I feel strongly enough about my own abilities to operate a business to think that if I had been there day to day we would never have had to file for bankruptcy. Subsequently, when the ownership profile changed and Morris left and Roger came in, I was dealing with somebody who had his own point of view and was totally unwilling to listen to anyone else’s — mine included.
I think another problem we had as owners was that we were always perceived as outsiders — which we were. However, the people in Pittsburgh were incredibly supportive of us as well as the team, and were so nice to us. Pittsburgh is a great city, and having Mario Lemieux as a local owner as well as the financial savvy Ron Burkle brings to the table as the lead money partner is huge for the franchise. Mario gives the franchise a great face not only locally but in the sports world at large. Ron Burkle gives the franchise immense financial credibility. It makes us very happy to see how well the team is doing now.
PART FIVE
HOLLYWOOD —
THE GLITTERING ’00S
A Taste for the Movies
I was introduced to the film business through my involvement in developing Flight of the Navigator with my great friend Bill Minot. Then I got a further taste of the business through my very dear friend from hockey,
Johnny Bassett. The first two film projects Johnny and I worked on together were both scripts — The Bill Tilden Story, the proposed biopic of tennis legend Bill Tilden based on the book written by Frank Deford; and the story of Rommie Loudd, the African-American football executive who ended up going to prison for selling drugs in order to meet his team payroll.
Around that time, in 1974, I became intrigued enough with the business that, through a casting director friend of my brother Michael’s, I got a bit part in a movie called The Happy Hooker. It may not sound like it, but it was a legitimate film, starring Lynn Redgrave and Jean-Pierre Aumont. I figured, what the heck, it was only a day, and I could have a little fun doing the part. I knew nothing about the filmmaking process and I was curious. The day I had to film my scene drove me nuts because it was so monotonous. We were mostly just hanging around and waiting for the scene to be set up. It was 10 hours after I arrived when they actually filmed me. My role was to play a “john” waiting in a lobby with other johns for a night of supposed entertainment. Once the filming was done, back to Hartford I went, and I never gave it another thought. To this day I have not seen the actual movie!
Cut to three years later, when the Whalers were playing badly and a critical column was written about me in one of the local papers. Unbeknownst to me, The Happy Hooker had come out in theaters, and this particular sportswriter had seen it. He wrote in his column that the problem with the Whalers was that the managing general partner of the team was off moonlighting as a movie extra. Caught!
The Kelley Connection
I’ve known David E. Kelley since he was a young boy. We even have pictures in the family photo album of him when he was eight or nine years old. David is the son of Jack Kelley, who coached Boston University during my brief stay with the varsity team, was our first Whalers head coach and GM and, starting in 1993, was president of the Penguins. David was our stick boy in Hartford and later played hockey at Princeton before studying law at BU and joining Phil David Fine’s firm, where my close friend Bob Caporale also practiced.
One day in the mid-1980s, when I was still running the Hartford Whalers but also just starting to get some connections to the film business, I was watching a game with Jack in Hartford and he mentioned that David had written a movie script in his spare time and would love for me to look at it.
From the Hip was about a young lawyer who uses unethical practices during a civil case so he can rise quickly in his firm. He’s faced with a moral dilemma during a criminal trial and, ultimately, makes the right decision. I thought it would make a good movie and sent it to my lawyer friend Stuart Benjamin and to Bill Minot in L.A. They both thought it was really good, although at 75 pages it was too short (a script should be about 110 pages long).
We optioned the script for $10,000, which meant that we had the exclusive right to try to make the script into a film. Bill Minot suggested that we talk to our old neighbor from Westport, Massachusetts, Bob Clark, who had directed the Porky’s films and A Christmas Story. Bob loved it and agreed to direct, and then collaborated with David to make the script longer.
Within six months we were shooting at Dino De Laurentiis’s studios in North Carolina with Judd Nelson as the lead and Elizabeth Perkins, John Hurt and Darren McGavin also in the cast.
From the Hip became the first movie that we did from soup to nuts, and that script eventually got David the job on L.A. Law. He took a leave of absence from the law firm, but I told Cap he might as well get another litigator because David was never coming back.
L.A.: The Early Days
The 1985–86 season in Hartford was a turning point for the Whalers on the ice and financially. We were up to 12,000 full-season tickets, had just made the NHL playoffs for the first time, and the team was clearly stabilized with Dave Andrews on the business side, Bill Barnes on the marketing and sales side and Emile Francis on the hockey side all doing a terrific job.
This all enabled me to finally catch my breath and reflect on what my future would be in the business world. Karen and I were to be married in October of 1987, and the film business was becoming more and more prevalent in our lives. My Whaler partners were ready to sell the team now that it was profitable. I didn’t have much choice to stay with the team once the partners decided to sell. I had to represent the partners and get them as much as I could for the team, and I didn’t have the financial capabilities of buying the team myself. At the same time, Karen was finding success in acting in Los Angeles and I was enjoying the film business and was ready for a new challenge. So in 1988 we relocated to L.A. It was hard for both Karen and for me, as we both adored our families and I had three children, but we felt we could make it work.
We started a film company called Indian Neck Productions. Initially, there were three partners in the company — Bill Minot, ourselves, and Brian Russell, who was married to Cheryl Ladd of Charlie’s Angels fame, and who had a solid production background — but then Bill Minot left the company and Richard Cohen came on board. We met Richard through Brian and Cheryl, and Karen and I took an instant liking to him. Richard became one of our closest friends and was a wonderful partner.
Indian Neck Productions made two films — Spellbinder, starring Kelly Preston and Tim Daly, and a lower-budget horror film called The Cellar. We invested heavily in these two films and pretty quickly learned our first lesson in Hollywood: it can be a money pit. We lost money on both films, and Brian left the company as a result.
Richard, Karen and I licked our wounds and regrouped under the banner of Baldwin/Cohen Productions. We then went on to produce several successful films together, including Sudden Death; The Patriot, starring Steven Seagal; Resurrection, starring Christopher Lambert; and Gideon, starring many Oscar- and Golden Globe–winning actors, including Charlton Heston and Shelley Winters.
And while we were going through all the Penguins turmoil with Roger Marino, Richard, Karen and I made our fourth film together: Mystery, Alaska.
Mystery, Alaska
If you’re in the hockey business and you’re also in the film business, it only makes sense that occasionally you would combine the two.
The first time we did that was with Sudden Death, in our first year with the Pittsburgh Penguins, and the second time was with Mystery, Alaska, which is my favorite among the hockey movies we’ve produced.
Mystery, Alaska was released in October of 1999. But the seeds for the movie were planted when Karen and I had lunch with David E. Kelley at Delmonico’s in 1996, when I was still immersed in running the Penguins.
By then, David had become an extremely successful producer and writer, first with Steven Bochco on L.A. Law and Doogie Howser, M.D., and then with his own shows, Picket Fences and Chicago Hope. And he was about to debut both Ally McBeal and The Practice.
David is one of the most wonderful people on this planet, and one of the most creative. When I suggested at Delmonico’s that day that we should try to come up with the ultimate hockey movie, he told me a story about the town of Shelby, Montana. It was an oil boomtown for a while, but its fortunes began to sag, and in 1923, trying to get publicity and revive the economy, the townspeople decided to raise the money to put up a purse for a title fight between Tommy Gibbons and the legendary Jack Dempsey. David suggested we do a hockey version of that theme.
David was very busy, so we agreed that he would get his friend from Princeton, Sean O’Byrne, to write the script, and then David would do the final rewrite. Our idea was to set a hockey game in natural elements to show people the roots of hockey, because in the 1990s everything in the game was perfectly packaged and temperature-controlled. That’s how we came up with the idea of Alaska as the site for a televised exhibition game between the New York Rangers and local players.
Remember, at that time the NHL hadn’t yet started their outdoor Heritage Classics, and I believe Mystery absolutely had an influence on the league staging those games.
In the fictitious town of Mys
tery, the Saturday hockey game on the outdoor rink is the major weekly social event, and it is considered high praise just to be invited to play. The story was built around the sheriff, who is asked to give up his spot in the Saturday game to a younger player. A former resident of the town is working for a major sports publication in New York City, and he takes it upon himself to issue a challenge to the New York Rangers to come to Mystery, Alaska, to beat the Mystery Boys on “the pond.” This comes as a surprise to the town, as they have no idea he’s doing this — and they are even more shocked when the Rangers agree to the challenge. The story revolves round the town getting ready for the big game.
Only a week after we got the final script, we signed what’s called a pay or play deal for $30 million with Disney. The definition of “pay or play” in this case meant that Disney committed to make the movie, subject to cast and director and the budget coming in at $30 million or less.
The director we all wanted was Jay Roach, who had directed the first Austin Powers movie. It was a bold decision, because Jay didn’t know hockey at all. He turned out to be a great choice because he had to really study and explore the game to understand it.
The Disney people said they thought Russell Crowe, who was coming off L.A. Confidential, should play the sheriff. They really wanted us to meet Russell, so Karen and I had dinner with him at Mr. Chow.
Russell turned out to be a wonderful guy. He brought a date to dinner and we all had a nice time, and then we figured it was time for us to turn in. When we told Russell we were leaving, he said, “Not when you’re with me, mate. I’ve got a bunch of mates over at the Peninsula Hotel and we’re all going over to meet them there.” We were there until three or four in the morning, and it took me about a month to recover. He’s a great guy.
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