Go Wild

Dear Bob: 

With the pending sale of the Minnesota Wild to Craig Leipold, I thought this was an appropriate time for a hockey dad and minority investor to write to you. As you may remember, I wrote you 10 years ago to say that you would never be successful in building a new hockey arena to secure a new professional hockey team in Minnesota.

You invited many of us to a meeting in Doug Leatherdale’s office at the St. Paul Companies to meet with you and Gary Bettman, commissioner of the National Hockey League (NHL). We then went on a tour of what was then called the Civic Center.

Barnum & Bailey Circus had just finished a three-day run at the arena. Maintenance workers with shovels were cleaning up the straw and elephant dung. The NHL commissioner was not impressed.

As we walked through the old arena with the commissioner, it was not the World Hockey Association or its fallen heroes we could sense; rather, it was some other more disturbing odor. The odor of—how can I say this politely?—dung. Barnum & Bailey Circus had just finished a three-day run at the arena. Maintenance workers with shovels were cleaning up the straw and elephant dung. The NHL commissioner was not impressed.

Back in Leatherdale’s office, Bettman informed this group that the only way we would ever get an NHL franchise would be to build an arena (later estimated to cost in excess of $120 million). No one at that meeting believed we had any chance at that—no one except for you and possibly Mayor Norm Coleman.

Building a first-class arena was only the first step. You also put together a first-class business operation. You assembled a remarkable group of people and persuaded them to come to Minnesota, including the incomparable Jac Sperling. (TCB’s December cover story discusses his new venture, Grit Rock Rodeo.)