Rough Trade (2 page)

There are few businesses as public and as personal as an NFL franchise. Most people have no idea who runs Ford or General Motors, but a surprising number can tick off the ' names of the men who own the nation’s football teams. When Chrissy married Jeff Rendell, she knew that she was not only marrying the Monarchs’ heir apparent, but stepping into the public eye, as well. In Milwaukee the Rendells have always been treated as a kind of minor royalty. And if she occasionally missed the urban electricity of Chicago or felt suffocated by people’s rigid expectations for her in her new hometown, she had nonetheless always been careful about holding up her end of the bargain.

No one knows where their life will lead them, but surely the Monarchs’ current problems were more than Chrissy or anyone else had signed on for. Through a combination of hubris and circumstance, risk and miscalculation, Beau Rendell had brought his family to the cusp of disaster. While I’m sure that Chrissy was prepared to remain at her husband’s side come what may, I was equally determined to steer them from the precipice—if I could only figure out away.

A hundred years ago they would have hidden away their daughters when Jack McWhorter rode into town. Now, when he shows up in his private jet they practically offer their daughters up to him, debutantes and brewery princesses, all hoping to snag Milwaukee’s most eligible bachelor. Even though I am inherently suspicious of blatantly handsome men, I must confess that when he walked into the room, I had to suppress the fleeting impulse to if not exactly hurl myself at his feet, then at least to bat my eyelashes.

Stray raindrops glistened among the strands of his jet-black hair, which he wore slicked back, no doubt something he’d picked up in L.A. along with his tan. His shirt was custom made and in a carefully chosen shade of blue that matched his eyes, which were hooded, hard, and glittered with self-assurance.

Like so much of the money in Milwaukee, Jack McWhorter’s came from beer. His family owned a food service and concession company that supplied the stadiums and arenas in a half a dozen cities with not just popcorn and hot dogs, but the small river of brew the fans washed them down with. Jack was in charge of the company’s West Coast operations and as such divided his time between Milwaukee and Los Angeles. However, it was his California connections that brought him to Beau Rendell’s dining room today.

Jack had come on behalf of the Greater Los Angeles Stadium Commission, a quasi-government agency whose mission was to bring professional football back to the City of Angels. He was an interesting choice of emissary. Not only had his family’s company long held the concession contract at Monarchs Stadium, but he was a contemporary of Jeff’s. As I sat there about to watch him make his pitch,

I couldn’t help but wonder whether his masters in Los Angeles assumed that with Beau beaten and near ruin, the reins of the Monarchs organization had already been passed to Jeff. If so, I figured they still had a thing or two to learn about Beau Rendell.

McWhorter began by telling us what we already knew. With the ignominious departure of both the Rams and the Raiders, Los Angeles had become a National Football League city without an NFL team—a situation that the municipal movers and shakers were prepared to pay handsomely to correct.

“Believe me, no one wants to see the Monarchs leave Milwaukee,” Jack confided. “This is a great town, a football town. I should know. I grew up here. But things change. There are the realities to consider. It used to be that all that you needed for a successful franchise was fan support. Market size. Then it was television revenues. Now it’s stadium economics. Before free agency all you had to do was fill the seats, but nowadays less than thirty percent of a team’s revenue comes from ticket sales. Today you need revenue from parking, concessions, season ticket licenses, and skyboxes just to make ends meet.”

One look at Beau Russell was all it took to see that Jack was already pedaling uphill. The Monarchs’ owner did not look like he was enjoying being lectured to by a man whose knowledge of football was limited to how many hot dogs he could expect to sell at the game. Harald Feiss wasn’t listening at all—a fact I found particularly annoying. As Beau Rendell’s closest business adviser he, more than anyone else, knew that the Monarchs were in no position to close the door on any viable offer. But of course, if Harald Feiss knew anything at all about business, the Monarchs wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place.

Perhaps sensing that he was losing his audience, McWhorter produced copies of a term sheet outlining the specifics of what L. A. was prepared to offer to bring the NFL back to Southern California. There was a copy for each of us, individually numbered in the top right-hand comer. It was a familiar lawyer’s trick, useful for keeping track of sensitive documents and making sure that stray copies didn’t find their way into the wrong hands. The front page was also stamped “confidential” in big red letters. Given the subject matter, they could just as easily have been labeled “dynamite.”

It took me only about ten seconds of adding up the numbers to realize that what I was holding wasn’t just a proposal but the team’s salvation. Los Angeles wasn’t offering a deal, they were offering a bribe—a football palace, a new stadium whose every square foot was designed to make Beau Rendell money. To sweeten the deal they were even offering a one-time $100 million “moving fee” to help the team defray the costs of the transition, which Beau would be free to spend any way that he saw fit. All he had to do was sign the agreement with L.A. and his troubles would be over.

From beside me I could sense the relief move through Jeff’s body and hoped that he wasn’t wearing it on his face as well. Any way you looked at it, this was going to be a complicated transaction. Even though the terms L.A. was offering seemed extremely favorable, there was still much that needed to be negotiated and the longer we were able to keep the Monarchs’ financial situation under wraps the better. Desperation is never an advantageous position from which to strike a bargain.

Beau, no stranger to playing his cards close to his chest, maintained a cypher-like demeanor. He let Jack finish and then dismissed him with the neutral promise that he would confer with Jeff and Harald Feiss before coming to any decision. It wasn’t until the door had closed behind McWhorter that the owner of the Milwaukee Monarchs let us know what he really thought of L.A.’s offer. Beau Rendell fixed his eyes upon his son directly across the table, picked up the copy of the term sheet, held it up, and tore it into little pieces.

“Just so that you and I understand each other,” he proclaimed coldly. “I’ll die before I move this team.”

CHAPTER 2

In the aftermath of his father’s performance with the Los Angeles term sheet Jeff maintained an incendiary silence—one that I, half friend, half lawyer, felt uncomfortable trying to breach. Instead, I suggested we save our discussion for the relative privacy of his office at the stadium, a suggestion he seemed eager to embrace. Following behind him in my own car as we headed downtown I hoped that the drive would give him a chance to calm down and collect himself. Beau’s refusal to even consider L.A.’s proposal moved things one step closer to catastrophe, which meant that Jeff and I had much to discuss.

As we passed through one pristine suburb after another I was struck, not for the first time, by how much Milwaukee seems like a cleaner, kinder version of Chicago, a sort of metropolis in miniature perched on the edge of Lake Michigan. It was almost as if God, foreseeing what a sprawling mess Chicago was destined to become, decided to let the Germans try their hand at doing better. The result was a small big city, beertown to Boston’s beantown, true to its blue-collar roots and, in deference to its Teutonic heritage, almost fanatically clean.

Kickoff was still almost an hour away, but the parking lots surrounding Monarchs Stadium were already crowded with fans. Despite the dismal weather, the team’s depressing record, and their even gloomier prospects against Minnesota, a carnival atmosphere reigned. A lot of it had to do with the fact that over the years Monarchs fans had developed their own variation of the tailgate party, with die-hard supporters gathering before every game in their own version of a Monarch’s court. Dressed in approximations of medieval garb, they ate turkey legs and called each other thou, as in “Will thou pass me another beer?”—which they dra
nk
from tankards the size of turrets.

There was even an actual monarch, a three-hundred-pound welder who ruled the bleachers from beneath a crown of beer cans and moth-eaten ermine robes. Home games found him attended by his court: his Rubenesque queen, an assortment of swaggering knights who demonstrated their fealty (and foolhardiness) by baring their chests in all weather, and a leering, gap-toothed jester in purple tights and a cockscomb cap.

As I waited in the shadow of Monarchs Stadium for the guard to wave me into the players’ lot, it occurred to me that if the team was looking for a physical symbol of their problems, this was it. Built as part of the city’s unsuccessful bid for the 1932 Olympics, it was a structure that was simultaneously imposing and decayed. Big enough for the opening and closing ceremonies of an Olympiad and designed as an oval to accommodate the track-and-field events, it was a spectacularly flawed venue for football. Not only were the sight lines terrible, but over the years moisture seeping through the concrete had caused the structure to crumble, leaving gaping holes and rusted, exposed girders. The Monarchs had played there for thirty-one consecutive seasons, during which time, Beau never tired of pointing out, the johns had never worked right.

I eased my battered Volvo in between a Ferrari and a Porsche, both red, and trailed Jeff into the dark bowels of the stadium. He led the way through a series of narrow corridors, up a service elevator loaded with pallets of hot dog buns, and along a series of dimly lit concourses that smelled of spilled beer. The team offices were in the uppermost reaches of the stadium and consisted of three adjoining double-wide trailers suspended from the roof and accessible from the concourse below via a series of poorly lit metal staircases barely wide enough for one person to pass.

Jeff’s office adjoined his father’s, and both were jammed with Monarchs memorabilia and done up in the team’s colors. The walls were painted a mustardy yellow, no doubt meant to invoke gold, and the indoor/outdoor carpeting was the color of grape jelly. Taken together the effect was of an old bruise. On the wall opposite Jeff’s desk was an enormous board on which was written the name of every player in the NFL, along with his team, the length of his contract, and his reported salary. A quick look at the totals told me that the Monarchs were carrying the third highest salary load in the league. It was, I reflected, a high price to pay for last place.

Jeff sat down behind his desk, and I settled into the visitor’s chair. Up to this point our relationship had been one that could best be described as once removed in that it had always been dictated by or conducted through Chrissy. That was only natural seeing as he was my best friend’s husband. However, now that I was being thrust into the middle of the Monarchs’ financial crisis, I found myself taking stock of him afresh.

In his early thirties, Jeff Rendell still had the kind of lantern-jawed, Clark Kent good looks that made you want to whip off his glasses and run your fingers through his hair—just to see what developed. However, compared to the men who Chrissy’d been involved with in the past—pro athletes and soap opera stars—Jeff was stunningly ordinary.

Everything else I knew about him I knew second-hand. From Chrissy I’d heard about his disjointed childhood marked by a succession of opportunistic stepmothers and his own adolescent transgressions. From the sports pages I’d followed the course of his near epic disagreements with Coach Bennato, Monday morning volleys of accusation and blame acrimonious enough to have been picked up and reported in the national press.

One thing was clear from all this: football had always been the one constant in Jeff Rendell’s life. He’d grown up in the sport the same way that acrobats are raised to the circus. He’d spent his childhood on the sidelines and in the locker room and gone to work in the team’s front office straight out of college. He’d literally known no other world.

I understood, perhaps too well, about the burdens carried by the children of prominent parents, but at least I’d had the chance to put some distance between myself and the world in which I’d been raised. While no one could ever blame Jeff for not striking out on his own—there aren’t many people who’d turn their back on the chance to be a part of an NFL team—I worried whether a lifetime spent in his father’s shadow had adequately prepared him to stand up to him now.

“Do you want to know what I’ve been thinking about the whole way down here?” asked Jeff, morosely rocking back and forth in his desk chair. “I’ve been thinking my father must have a death wish.”

“Why is that?”

“It’s the only explanation. What he’s doing makes just about as much sense as dousing himself with gasoline and striking a match. I mean, what does he think is going to happen in ten days?”

“Do you think there’s a chance he’s already figured a way out and he’s just not telling anybody?” I asked, being well acquainted with Beau’s reputation for secretiveness.

“I have absolutely no doubt
he
thinks he has,” replied Jeff. “He’s been running around town for weeks holding hush-hush meetings and dropping hints to the press, but believe me, he’s just deluding himself.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I’ve been talking to people, too. Dad’s living in the past, when a handful of guys with cigars got things done with a handshake. Everything’s
bigger
now, things have moved past him. Baseball, basketball, even fucking soccer is cutting into football’s appeal. Football isn’t even just a game you sell tickets to anymore, it’s a gigantic entertainment industry encompassing everything from television to athletic shoes. Player salaries are stratospheric, and stadiums cost more to build than skyscrapers. Dad thinks that just because he’s the owner of the Milwaukee Monarchs he’s not going to get hammered, but he’s wrong.”