No one tops inmate Lemieux. With his former team in bankruptcy, Lemieux concluded that the only way to get the $27.5 million in back salary he was owed was to take control of the Penguins. The former star’s whopping pay made him one of the team’s biggest creditors. In late June a judge approved his plan to bail out the Penguins by converting the debt into an ownership stake. Lemieux is expected to complete his lineup of additional investors and more than 1,000 pages of legal agreements this week, putting the final pieces in place for him to become the first star in modern times to own a major-league club. “Dealmaking is a lot tougher than playing hockey,” he said.
When superstars become owners, intriguing questions arise. Lemieux pledges to hike the Penguin payroll by 25 percent next year, but overall thinks salaries take up too much of the league gate. Will players react poorly to that argument when it comes from someone whose last contract totaled $42 million over seven years? Maybe not in Mario’s case. He led his team to two Stanley Cups, and bankruptcy concentrates the mind. “I don’t think there is anybody who doesn’t want to play for him,” says seasoned Penguin Rob Brown, now skating for $550,000 a year.
Even so, skeptics might well ask what links world-class athletic skill to the acumen needed to manage a complex business. Not much, says Stephen A. Greyser, a professor of sports management at Harvard University. Orchestrating the talent side of the equation–hiring coaches, approving trades–is one thing. Operating the business, from marketing to number crunching, is another. Greyser fears superstars may not know the limits of their expertise. “My sense is that hubris might be a problem,” he says.
Thomas, once a dominating backcourt player, knows something about the limits of the new game. In 1997 he sold his 10 percent stake in the NBA’s Toronto Raptors when his bid to buy the entire club failed. As general manager, he’d felt frozen out of key decision making by the primary owner. He won’t have that problem now. Last week Thomas plunked down $10 million to buy all nine teams in the Continental Basketball Asso-ciation, a free-standing league in smaller markets from Sioux Falls, S.D., to Yakima, Wash. The NBA has used the CBA as a talent pool for the last 19 years. Thomas’s goal: to enhance his new property into a full-fledged minor-league system that would make CBA teams affiliates of NBA teams, with players moving back and forth as skills improve or decline. He also sees the junior league as a laboratory to cultivate more African-American front-office talent. Will NBA owners ever be rescued from their antique status as a white man’s club atop a black man’s game? “I think it’s just a matter of time,” says Thomas.
Time ran out in Charlotte, N.C. There, current owner George Shinn began talking last March to Jordan–the ex-player with the deepest pockets of all–about sharing the NBA Hornets on a 50-50 basis. Talks broke down in May. Two weeks ago Shinn did a deal with an Atlanta manufacturing executive with $80 million to spend but little of Jordan’s charisma, an outcome that leaves many locals questioning just how much public money Charlotte should contribute to an expensive new arena for the team.
Elway’s looming appeal as an owner also rests partly on the idea that a sports legend can help attract funding for slick new digs. In Los Angeles two rival groups–one led by Hollywood’s Mike Ovitz, the other by billionaire home builder Eli Broad–began wooing him two months ago to join them in their efforts to win the rights to the NFL’s 32d franchise. Both groups hoped Elway’s football credibility would bring in other investors to help renovate L.A.’s Memorial Coliseum and garner the votes of NFL owners when they select a winner next month. Houston, offering $200 million in public money, could still beat out L.A. for the franchise. While there is no signed deal, Elway has been offered a 10 percent stake in the L.A. team and, more important to him, the ability to call his own plays as a hands-on team president. Last week Elway completed a $2 million deal with a Florida investment firm to produce a new finance-and-fitness Internet site, MVP.com, to market health products along with mutual funds. But the Net still pales next to the NFL. Even before the cyberink dried, he reiterated his hope to own an NFL team. “That’s really my passion,” he said.
When ex-athletes become hands-on owners, tension between labor and management might well ease. It’s natural to wonder whether baseball’s and basketball’s destructive impasses of the 1990s could have been avoided, or at least ended quickly, if a few ex-player owners had been there to calm the waters. And imagine what will happen, says the University of Oregon’s Burton, when “some brash young celebrity who probably couldn’t carry their jock says to an Elway or a Jordan, ‘Give me $100 million or I’m walking.’ And they’ll say, ‘Hey, you can’t even go to your left’. "
No one raced down the left side of the rink like Lemieux–a fact no one in Pittsburgh has forgotten. Many think he’ll make the perfect galvanizing, ticket-selling leader for the Penguins in a difficult hour. So far Lemieux appears just as adept at business as at slap shots. He’s hammered out a new TV deal that will give the Penguins $9 million a year in revenue–triple the old rate. And with help from a grateful city, he’s renegotiated his arena lease to cut overhead there by 80 percent.
Even so, all those meetings can be wearying. Doesn’t Lemieux ever want to put on the skates and just duke it out on the ice? The six-time NHL scoring leader laughed heartily. “The odds would be in my favor,” he said. And you thought George Steinbrenner had macho.
