If support for hockey in St. Louis were a river, it would be a foot wide and a mile deep.
Stepping over it, ignoring it, isn’t hard. Fall into it, and you’ll drown. Fervent Blues fans will expound on the team’s brushes with greatness and tirelessly retell dramatic tales that approach the status of Nordic myths. Red Berenson scored six goals in one game in ’68. Doug Wickenheiser scored an overtime goal to complete the Monday Night Miracle rally in a 6-5 playoff victory over Calgary. For the Blues fan, there’s a Valhalla of personalities: Brett Hull, Bernie Federko, Jacques Plante, Scotty Bowman, Glenn Hall, Brendan Shanahan, Mike Liut, the Plagers and a cameo appearance by Wayne Gretzky. Best and worst of all, there is the team’s Red Sox–like run: consecutive years in the playoffs, 25; Stanley Cups, 0.
But there can be life without the Blues, at least for most of us. Even Blues junkies, who wear the replica jerseys and rub the Blue note on the chest when the team is behind, have experienced life without a local NHL fix. A lockout canceled last season. With the announcement in June that Bill and Nancy Laurie were putting the Blues up for sale, civic and business leaders had to consider the idea that the NHL might be gone for good. Jeff Rainford, Mayor Francis Slay’s chief of staff, is one of many locals who don’t want to lose the Blues.
“They are an important part of downtown. It’s the jobs and tax revenue they generate, the positive impact on the surrounding businesses, including Union Station, and that they’re an anchor tenant to the Savvis Center,” says Rainford. “Maybe the most important aspect is that the Blues bring a lot of people to downtown. A lot of hockey fans live in the suburbs, and when they come downtown they spend money. In the winter, when there is not a lot going on, the Blues can generate some excitement if they’re playing well.”
The economic impact of sports teams often is exaggerated, but make no mistake: The Blues do pay taxes. Last year, the 5 percent amusement tax generated by Blues games put $1.2 million in the city’s coffers. The earnings tax, a levy of 1 percent on the players and 0.5 percent on the club and visiting clubs, kicked $637,000 to the city. The sales tax in the city is 7.6 percent, though more than half of that—4.2 percent of each dollar—goes to the state. And the club is paying off the debt on what started out as the Kiel Center, which is a city-owned building.
Don Breckenridge, who owns the nearby Sheraton Suites and is in the midst of renovating the Kiel Opera House, wants the Blues downtown, though he admits that the canceled season did not do him much financial harm, save for a small drop in liquor sales at the hotel bar.
“There are some dedicated hockey fans here—maybe that base is 7,000 to 10,000 people, but they need 16,000 a game,” says Breckenridge. “I think they have a lot of rebuilding to do.”
Breckenridge is optimistic about the area around Kiel and says plans are steaming ahead for his spring 2007 reopening of the Kiel Opera House, which abuts Savvis Center. That will take place no matter what happens with hockey, he says. Breckenridge also predicts that a National Basketball Association team will come to St. Louis—not the first time such a prediction has been made.
The Lauries twice tried to bring an NBA team to town, but they acquired the Blues almost as an afterthought. They took over the debt payments on the Kiel Center, and the team was virtually thrown in as a deal-sweetener: They got the lease and the team for $100 million. Forbes values the team alone at $140 million; being able to book the Kiel Center for other events was likely a major source of revenue for the Lauries.
Financial advisers had told the previous owners of the Blues about the advantage of owning the lease and being able to book hockey and basketball teams. If Laurie had pulled that off, chances are he would not have tried to sell the Blues. But chafing under an uncertain NHL future, a bloated payroll, a combined sales and amusement tax of 12 percent and an inability to lure an NBA team, the Lauries ran up the white flag.
Give Blues president Mark Sauer points for pulling off a deft media maneuver when the sale was announced. Sauer made sure that Post-Dispatch columnist and KMOX-AM radio host Bernie Miklasz broke the news of the Blues’ being for sale. Because it had an “exclusive,” the daily paper slapped a copyright on the story, making the electronic media salivate on cue. The humongous headline on page one blared “For Sale” in a type size that won’t be used again until Osama bin Laden is captured by an airport security guard.
Miklasz, who is not known for his hockey fanaticism, wrote a column in the sports section about the need to keep the team in town, and he pointed out tax breaks that the Rams and Cardinals received and the Blues were denied. The column’s headline was one that Sauer couldn’t have written better himself: “Wise Up, Politicians and Help Keep the Blues.”
When St. Louis hockey fans heard that the team had been put up for sale again, and the current owners complained about how other, more popular teams in town get tax breaks denied the Blue Note, well, it was just one more reason to have the blues. The fans have heard this dirge played before, and somehow they’ve weathered the sorrow.
Through it all, Blues fans have endured. Smaller in number than Rams’ or Cardinals’ fans, the Blues have a core constituency of people who don’t care that hockey is the national pastime for a different country, that its TV ratings are abysmal and that it is the redheaded, missing-a-few-teeth stepchild of local professional sports. Locally and nationally, the Westminster Kennel Club Show drew more viewers than the NHL finals aired at the same time last year. Who cares? Game on.
It’s been said before that Blues fans are the Cubs fans of hockey, though the comparison only pertains to superficial misery. Cubs fans have paid good money to watch crappy teams for decades. When Cubs fans do have a contender, it’s an almost awkward experience for them. To be a Blues fan is harder than being a Cubs fan. The Blues fan often knows, or believes, that the team is good. Because the Blues fan has a realistic hope that the team will make a run deep into the playoffs, the annual letdown is worse than growing comfortable with the idea, as Cubs fans have, that their team routinely sucks.
For the Blues, the franchise’s troubles haven’t been just on the ice or in the stands. Ownership has been tricky. When the National Hockey League expanded in 1967, it had the marketing sense to put all of the new teams in one division. Somebody had to finish in first place. The Blues did. With Scotty Bowman as coach, the team got to the Stanley Cup finals as a result of the new divisional setup,
Salomon’s run at the Arena, on Oakland, started to fade within 10 years and led to the first instance of the Blues’ being rescued from real or imagined financial ruin by a corporate sugar daddy. Ralston-Purina’s R. Hal Dean agreed to invest in the team for the 1978–79 season, getting Salomon off the hook. In a move that gave new meaning to the word “tacky,” Dean had the Arena’s roof painted with red and white squares and renamed the Checkerdome. This arrangement only lasted until ’83, when rumors of a sale and move surfaced.
The team was considering running past the border to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan—a place not the Cardinals, nor even the Rams, would consider as a possible home. Well, if the good citizens of that burg in the Great White North would build a totally public-financed, domed stadium and then dedicate amusement-tax dollars to pay off the debt on a training facility, maybe the Rams would bolt. Oh, wait—they already have that deal. Never mind.
Enter Harry Ornest, the California entrepreneur who bought the team, thereby saving the Blues from Saskatoon (and vice versa). Ornest kept the team until a local ownership group headed by Michael Shanahan took over in ’86.
Then someone had the bright idea that it wasn’t the team, the sport and the payroll that were the obstacles to making a profit, it was the building. So to replace the Arena as home ice, a “private-public partnership” was formed. The city put up $35 million to tear down Kiel Auditorium and build a new parking garage next door. St. Louis also paid $15 million to get rid of the Arena. The city issued $62.5 million in bonds, guaranteed by Kiel Center Partners, a consortium of 20 of the 26 Civic Progress companies. The partners kicked in $30 million and borrowed another $37 million. All told, the new venue cost about $170 million.
Alas, it wasn’t long before the partnership began to unravel. This ownership group held the fort until 1999, when Bill and Nancy Laurie emerged as too-good-to-be- true buyers. The billionaire couple with Wal-Mart behind them looked as if they would not only bail out the Kiel Center and the Blues but would also have the resources to win a Stanley Cup and bring back pro basketball. But “too good to be true” rang true again. Even the Lauries, who got the team and a lease for a song, say they’re losing money.
In the one-page June press release from the team about the proposed sale, Sauer is quoted as saying that the team “lost more than $60 million in the past two years.” Not mentioned in the press release is the fact that the Blues had a reported payroll of about $31 million in 1999, when the Lauries bought the team. By 2004, either admirably or insanely, depending on whether you are a Blues fan, the Lauries had doubled the payroll to about $60 million.
So the payroll jumps $30 million a year and you claim you have lost $60 million in the last two years. With those dynamics, waiving the city’s 5 percent amusement tax doesn’t seem like a lifesaver.
Don Phares, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, looked into the original Kiel Center deal when he co-wrote a chapter on St. Louis for the book Major League Losers: The Real Cost of Sports and Who Pays for It by Mark Rosentraub. Phares says it’s best not to swallow whole what Laurie says he’s lost on the Blues.
“What’s included in what he defines as being a loss? I don’t know the answer to that,” Phares says. “Tax law can be convoluted enough so you can define all sorts of things, for tax purposes, as being a loss when other people would not consider them to be a real pecuniary loss.”
Hockey in general has economic challenges. Football and baseball make most of their money from television revenues. Those sports play well on television. Hockey does not. The noise, speed and skill of a hockey game make it the one sport that is vastly improved when seen live. Almost the reverse is true of football and baseball; hence the revenues that can be had from selling commercials during broadcasts.
Even with that popularity, fewer than half of local televisions were tuned into the Cardinals games during last year’s World Series. Those people not watching the Cardinals apparently preferred to do something else, be it watching the History Channel, going for a walk or reading a book.
Ratings relate to revenue, not the quality of the game or the experience of the fans devoted to the game. If you love hockey and have followed it since Glenn Hall was in the nets back at the Arena, you don’t care that more people watch American Idol than a Channel 11 game between the Blues and the Black Hawks. The game’s the thing. If you see a really good movie, do you care that The Dukes of Hazzard won the box-office sweepstakes that weekend?
The fans just want the game. And eventually, for the Blues fans’ close to 40 years of devotion and pain, they want a Stanley Cup.
Maybe it was prophetic to name the team after the genre of music that is all about being down, sad and melancholy—and feelin’ good about it. The St. Louis Blues? We got ’em.
