Rough Trade (3 page)

“So why not just sell the team?” I asked. “Isn’t the going rate for an NFL franchise something like $300 million?”

“We could probably get a little more. Unfortunately, by the time we retired our debt and paid capital gains taxes, there’d still be nothing left.”

“I had no idea your level of debt was that high.”

“We’ve borrowed against everything but our socks, and that’s only because nobody will give us anything for them.”

“Then what about selling part of it, taking on a minority partner?”

“We already have two.”

“You’re kidding. Who?”

Harald Feiss and Coach Bennato each have a minority interest in the team.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Nobody does. Dad got them to agree to take the shares in lieu of salary. That’s how tight things are.”

“What if you sold a thirty or forty percent ownership in the team? There’ve got to be plenty of sports-crazed tycoons out there who’d be willing to spend $100 million to own a piece of a franchise like the Monarchs.”

“Sure. Provided my dad didn’t own the other sixty percent. The guys you’re talking about didn’t get where they are by being stupid. Nobody’s going to pony up that much dough without being absolutely certain that Dad isn’t going to just piss it away again. They’re going to want to make damn sure that they have a say in how the team is going to be run.”

“Surely there are worse things.”

“Not to my Dad. I guarantee you he’d lose the team before he agreed to that.”

“Well, then what’s he thinking? He can’t just be waiting for the bank to take the team away from him.”

“Oh, I guarantee he and Feiss have been trying to cook something up.”

“With whom?”

“I know they’ve been meeting with a group of suburban developers who want to build a new stadium out in Wauwatosa. They want to use it as an anchor for a big shopping and entertainment complex....”

“And?”

“And it’s a terrible idea. Nobody wants to drive out into the cornfields to see a football game. Monarchs fans don’t want to shop for shoes and catch a movie after the game. Besides, everywhere they’ve already tried the suburban stadium idea it’s failed miserably. They’re shutting down the Pontiac Silverdome, and last I heard, they’re turning the Richfield Coliseum into a prison. People want downtown stadiums.”

“So what are the chances of the team cutting a deal with the city?”

“And having a check for $18 million to take to the bank in ten days? After Dad publicly backed the mayor’s opponent in the last election? I’d say they’re the same as our winning the Super Bowl this season—somewhere between zero and none.”

“Even if the city realizes that the alternative is losing their football team?”

“You heard what my father said. He’s not moving the team.”

“I’m not saying that he necessarily should. But you and I both know that’s how the game is played. Teams squeeze their home cities in order to get them to ante up a new stadium, or else they threaten to move to a place that will. Grant you, most of the time it’s just blackmail— millionaire team owners squeezing the taxpayers for subsidies that will allow them to make even more money— but the irony of it is that in the Monarchs’ case it wouldn’t be. You really may have no choice but to move the team.”

“Unfortunately, Dad doesn’t see it that way. Harald Feiss has got him convinced that just because Dad plays golf with Gus Wallenberg and invites him to watch the games from the owner’s box that the bank won’t make good on its threats.”

“Who’s Gus Wallenberg?”

“The president of First Milwaukee Bank.”

“The bank that holds the team’s note?”

“Yeah. It’s one of the few private, family-owned banks left in the city. But just because they haven’t let themselves be bought up by one of the big national chains doesn’t mean they don’t have to compete with them every day. Believe me, Dad’s deluding himself if he thinks that Gus cares about anything but the money. He isn’t going to cut us any slack.”

“Why don’t you let me talk to Wallenberg?” I suggested. “Maybe I can find some way to restructure the loan or at least convince them to give you some more time.”

Jeff shook his head.

“Come on,” I pressed. “I do this kind of thing all the time. Ba
nk
ers love me.”

“Believe me. It’s no use.”

“At least let me give it a shot. You never know. Maybe they’ll be more willing to listen to an outsider, someone who hasn’t been part of the problem up until now.”

“You don’t understand. If I thought there was even a one-in-a-million chance, I’d take you to talk to them right now. But I guarantee you there’s no way they will give us anything—not one more day, not one more dollar. Nothing. Not even the benefit of the doubt.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because on October 3 my father paid $ll million to buy Tamecus Johnson’s contract from the New York Jets.”

“Tamecus Johnson? Isn’t he the wide receiver who was arrested for possession of cocaine while he was with Dallas?”

“Cocaine in Dallas, cocaine and a concealed weapon in New York, and DUI and resisting arrest three weeks after he signed with us. At last count he’s been in rehab seven times.”

“Let me get this straight. Your father paid to sign this guy
after
he was already in default with the bank?” I was beginning to see Jeff’s point about his father having some kind of death wish.

“Yep. Dad went out and spent $ll million that he should have paid to the bank to acquire the biggest drug addict in the league. So now do you believe me when I say that when it comes to the bank, we are well and truly fucked?”

* * *

While Jeff made arrangements to have copies of the team documents I needed packed into boxes and brought down to my car, I went off in search of Chrissy. Even if Jeff and I both agreed that moving the team to L.A.—or at least threatening to do so—was the only way for the Rendells to get out of this mess, the first thing I needed to do was review the various agreements and covenants that governed the team. It made no sense to push the issue with Beau until we knew for certain that such a move was even possible. Of course, I was also secretly hoping that I might find something else, a loophole or some other point from which to maneuver, that had heretofore been overlooked by Feiss.

Not that I had any idea when I was going to actually find the time to do any of this. My plate at the office was already hideously full, and my life, well, let’s just say that I was going through one of those periods where I preferred not to think about the catastrophe that passed as my personal life. That said, there was still no way that I was going to leave Milwaukee without stopping to at least say hello to Chrissy—especially not today. It wasn’t just that the whole mess with the Monarchs had me worried and feeling protective of her. On some level I felt responsible for the situation in which Chrissy now found herself.

The truth is, before she met Jeff Rendell, Chrissy had been engaged to someone else. Malcolm Partiger was wealthy, successful, and devastatingly handsome. He was also thirty years her senior. Their whirlwind romance was emblematic of Chrissy’s place in the fast lane and when
People
ran a full-page photo of her showing off her four-carat engagement ring her only regret was that her parents, especially her mother, hadn’t lived long enough to see it.

Malcolm’s attorney waited until the day before the wedding to present Chrissy with a prenuptial agreement. With no one else to turn to, she came to me for advice. I was a second-year law student at the time, every bit as idealistic about love (I’m sure some would say naive) as I was about the law. But that didn’t prevent me from speaking my mind.

Stepping back from the sense of injury and outrage that had been my first reaction, I told Chrissy that I found not just the document but its timing troubling. Oddly enough, money wasn’t really the issue; Malcolm was actually being more than generous. The issue was control. If Chrissy I signed the prenup, she was not just agreeing to a less than I equal partnership, but ceding to her husband the power to make all the important decisions in their life.

Throughout the entire drama Malcolm was cordial and curiously silent. No doubt he assumed that a girl like Chrissy, if just left alone with her wedding dress for long enough, would eventually come to her senses and sign. Perhaps if she’d picked another maid of honor, she would have. As it turned out, half an hour after she was supposed to descend the curved staircase of the Four Seasons Hotel, dressed in a confection of taffeta and tulle, Chrissy marched down the stairs in her going-away suit and announced to the three hundred assembled guests that there would be no wedding.

It was an act of bravery, a victory for what was right as opposed to what was expected, but in light of the Rendells’ current predicament I couldn’t help but wonder whether it hadn’t also turned out to be a quixotic act of folly. Malcolm had gone on to marry a starlet, a leggy blonde, and together they had become a staple of the magazines that chronicle the doings of the rich and beautiful. Despite her protests to the contrary, I knew that Chrissy had to wonder how her life would have turned out if she’d chosen differently that day.

I made my way through the team offices to the owner’s skybox that hung, suspended from the top level of the stadium, directly over the fifty-yard line. There I found my friend doing what she’d done every game day since her marriage—acting as hostess for the dozen or so invited guests in her father-in-law’s box. Waiters were cleaning up the remains of a catered lunch, and several of the VIPs had already taken their drinks out onto the balcony overlooking the field.

Sensing a new arrival, Chrissy turned toward the door with an automatic smile of welcome on her face, a smile that was instantly transformed into something much more genuine when she saw that it was me. As always, I was immediately struck by how beautiful she was. Dressed simply in black pants and a cashmere sweater of Monarchs purple she easily eclipsed every other woman in the room. It wasn’t just that she was tall, thin, and blond. Chrissy carried herself like a duchess and her features possessed a sly asymmetry that drew you in and held your interest.

She would have been beautiful no matter what: dressed in rags, soaking wet, after an entire day of weeping... though no one would ever see her that way, not even me. Chrissy had long ago discovered that her face could serve not only as a magnet but a shield. No doubt some people saw her devotion to the mirror as vanity, but I knew better—her wardrobe was her armor and her flawlessly applied make-up often the only buffer between herself and an increasingly intrusive world.

As she crossed the room to meet me I caught Jack McWhorter following her progress from beneath veiled lids. I immediately thought of Jeff and found myself wondering what it must be like to be married to a woman so beautiful that men couldn’t help but watch her greedily with their eyes. But then again, perhaps the inevitable envy was part of the appeal.

We hugged like sisters. Her body felt thinner to me than last time I saw her and I found myself worrying about how all the team’s troubles must be affecting her.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” she whispered under her breath as she took me by the elbow and steered me toward the door. “That way you can keep me from killing him.”

“Killing whom?” I demanded, craning my neck to look back over my shoulder at the other people in the box.

“Gus Wallenberg, of course.”

“He’s here?” I demanded, surprised.

“That’s him over there with Beau, the one with the mustache who sort of looks like Hitler. I wish he would just choke.”

“What’s he doing here?”

“Beau invited him if you can believe it,” she continued as she drew me out the door, down the corridor, and into an adjacent box, which was vacant—another symbol of the Rendells’ distress. Since the completion of the city’s new I baseball stadium, there were no municipal funds left to renovate the football venue, and the corporate boxholders had defected in droves, lured by plush luxury boxes that actually afforded a decent view of the game. This one was now apparently being used to store dozens of stacking chairs. Chrissy boosted herself up and perched on top of them.

“So how did the meeting go this morning?” she asked. “Are we moving to La-La Land?”

“Have you talked to Jack? How does he think it went?”

I countered.

“We didn’t really have a chance to talk about it. Why? What happened?”

“Let’s just say that your father-in-law didn’t exactly embrace the idea.”

“Do you mind explaining what that means in plain English?”

“He tore up the proposal and told Jeff he’d die before he moved the team.”

“Then I wish he would,” she announced, fiercely.

“Would what?”

“Die,” replied Chrissy. “I wish he would die.”

“You know you don’t mean that,” I replied, genuinely shocked. Chrissy was fun-loving and nonjudgmental by nature. This wasn’t like her at all.

“You don’t understand,” she blurted. “We’re going to lose everything.” The last statement was delivered in something very close to a sob.

“What?”

“You heard me. If the team goes bankrupt, so do we. Jeff, me, the baby... personally we lose everything.”

“How is that possible?”

“Easy. The team hasn’t paid Jeff a salary in eleven months. We’ve borrowed every penny we can against our house just to cover our living expenses. The rest we’ve lent to the team so that they could make payroll. Can you believe it? Jeff and I are in hock up to our eyes so that his father could keep paying players whose weekly paychecks are more than most people make in a year. We haven’t paid our own bills in months.”

“My god, Chrissy, why didn’t you tell me?” I said, reaching for my purse. “I’ll write you a check right now.”

“For $18 million?” she countered, bitterly. “Unfortunately that’s what it’s going to cost to get us out of this mess.”

“What about for your bills?”

“What would be the point? Either we move the team, in which case everything’s going to be all right, or...”

“Or what?”

“Or it’ll be like pissing into a forest fire—a complete waste.”