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 drank 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.�
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“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. Bankers 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 iss
ue; 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.
Rough Trade Page 2
