October 19, 2008 Sunday
By Brad Schrade
One is a businessman who wanted to be an owner in the world of big-time pro sports. The other is an ice hockey legend with relatively little business experience.
Boots Del Biaggio and Pittsburgh Penguins hockey great Mario Lemieux made an unlikely pair, but the two have been friends, golfing buddies and business associates for years. They invested in a junior league hockey team together, and California records indicate they co-owned a home in Santa Monica.
Del Biaggio's friendship with Lemieux and other hockey stars, and how those relationships gave him credibility, is an important aspect to his extraordinary rise and fall with the National Hockey League and the Nashville Predators.
But it's one that has received little attention since his financial and legal problems became public in May.
But that backdrop of how Del Biaggio hooked in with the hockey world is falling into place. Recently, one of those hockey greats, Luc Robitaille, now an executive with the Los Angeles Kings, filed a lawsuit against Del Biaggio claiming he defrauded him of $2 million in a business deal they had together.
"He was a hockey groupie," said Chuck Peterson, a California car dealer and creditor in Del Biaggio's bankruptcy case, who also gambled, partied and played golf with Del Biaggio. "He liked being around hockey players."
Peterson said he saw Del Biaggio together with Lemieux and other players. And he said Del Biaggio was a regular at charity golf tournaments where hockey players and other athletes gathered. Based on information that came out in lawsuits, bankruptcy filings and interviews, the 41-year-old scion of a well-off San Jose, Calif., family was borrowing and risking everything to try to buy the Predators last year, all the while posing as a deep-pocketed Silicon Valley entrepreneur who could play in the big leagues.
"My gut feeling is he wanted it so bad that he'd do anything to get it," said Olympic hockey great Mike Eruzione, who was in the circle of hockey players Del Biaggio befriended. "I just think he liked the action of being a professional owner. He liked the limelight. He liked people knowing who he was and he liked the sport of hockey. I think that's what it was."
{}Banker becomes partner
When he bought a 2 percent stake in the San Jose Sharks hockey team in 2002, William J. "Boots" Del Biaggio was little known outside his hometown. The local San Jose Mercury News, writing about the new investor group buying into the NHL team, described Del Biaggio and the others as "not so much household names as they were solid Silicon Valley citizens."
Del Biaggio's family had deep ties in the community and he was known to contribute to local charities and political candidates. In 1994, he co-founded a local bank and, two years later, co-founded a venture capital firm that was trying to ride the dot-com boom of the 1990s.
Del Biaggio and Lemieux met around 2000 at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, through a mutual friend and hockey fan Ben Robert, according to a 2005 story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The two became "fairly close" after the introduction, in part, because of their mutual love of golf and interest in hockey.
In 2004, Del Biaggio, Lemieux, Robitaille and Robert, along with San Diego business executive John Donovan, bought the Omaha (Neb.) Lancers hockey team, a United States Hockey League junior club.
The group promoted the legendary hockey status of Lemieux and Robitaille at the press conference announcing the sale. According to an account in the Omaha World-Herald, Lemieux and Del Biaggio owned a 40 percent stake in the team. In marketing shares of the Predators last year and earlier this year, Del Biaggio mentioned his hockey ties with Lemieux, Robitaille and Eruzione in a PowerPoint presentation he gave to potential investors.
{}Penguins bid unravels
Del Biaggio's name didn't make major hockey headlines until June 2005, when his name was linked to Lemieux and the Penguins. In early June, reports surfaced that Del Biaggio was heading a West Coast group of investors that intended to buy the Penguins.
During that well-publicized process, Del Biaggio became known in Pittsburgh and around the hockey world as a friend of Mario Lemieux. Underscoring the differences between the two, Del Biaggio at the time told a local newspaper, "I can't even skate."
Lemieux is one of the best-known hockey names in the world. The handsome superstar led the Penguins to NHL titles in 1991 and 1992 and is in the Hockey Hall of Fame. He had owned a stake in the team since it emerged from bankruptcy in the late 1990s with the club owing him millions in back salary. He added to his legend both in Pittsburgh and the hockey world when he became a player-owner for the team as it emerged from bankruptcy.
In an article in the Post-Gazette describing the friendship of the two men, Del Biaggio explained how they became close acquaintances.
"We hit it off because he has a very similar philosophy about where (pro hockey) needs to go," the newspaper quoted Del Biaggio as saying. "That's the primary reason I'm (spearheading the effort to buy the Penguins)."
That same day Del Biaggio outlined in the San Jose paper why he was interested in the Penguins. He emphasized his friendship with Lemieux.
"In this particular situation, it's just kind of a timing issue," he said. "This is our window of time to be able to get into this, and I wouldn't be doing it unless Mario was 100 percent on board."
Lemieux and Del Biaggio were golfing, lunching and working out the details of the deal the day the Crosby rights fell to the Penguins.
Lemieux "isn't believed to be the sticking point in the negotiations for Del Biaggio and his group to purchase the majority interest," the Post-Gazette story said. "In fact the day after the CBA/Crosby windfall, Lemieux said he expected the purchase agreement to be reached within days."
Del Biaggio was quoted in the story saying: "This is a long process. It takes a long time to buy a team. Too much has already gotten out in the press."
Eruzione said that his understanding of why Del Biaggio didn't buy the club was he didn't have the money.
"If Boots had the money he'd have gotten the team, which, looking back, would have been a nightmare," Eruzione said.
{}Partners surprised
Del Biaggio has declined repeated requests for interviews since his financial and legal troubles surfaced in May. Efforts to reach Lemieux through the Penguins media office the past two weeks were unsuccessful.
The NHL declined to comment Friday about the relationship between Del Biaggio and Lemieux, or any other players Del Biaggio may or may not have had relationships with.
A Kings spokesman said Robitaille, who is a president with the club, did not care to discuss his relationship with Del Biaggio because of his pending litigation. Robert, who has known Robitaille for years and is a vice president with the Kings, also declined an interview request.
Eruzione said Lemieux probably would not want to talk about Del Biaggio. Eruzione, who was captain of the "Miracle on Ice" 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team, said they were all surprised by what has happened with Del Biaggio.
"I can't speak for Mario," Eruzione said. "We have talked about it. I think Mario feels similar to the way I do. We feel bad about the situation because we trusted Boots and got along very, very well with him. Mario is a very bright man. He was as shocked as I was when this whole thing happened."
Eruzione owns a small stake in the Lancers, and he said Del Biaggio is no longer a part of that ownership group.
He had become a trusted member of their circle and there was never anything to hint that Del Biaggio was not on the up-and-up, otherwise he wouldn't have been a part of the group.
In fact, many in the group gathered in Tahoe within the past few years for a surprise birthday party for Del Biaggio. Eruzione said Del Biaggio was a generous guy who always sent him a check for $1,000 to help with his charitable foundation, and he was a regular at Lemieux's charity golf tournament in Pennsylvania.
"When you see things like that," Eruzione said. "You see somebody who's not a drunk. He's not a druggie. He's not a ridiculous gambler. To me, he's a guy that had a very successful business," Eruzione said of Del Biaggio. "He had a lot of money and he was willing to share it and spend it."
Brad Schrade can be reached at 615-259-8086 or bschrade@tennessean.com
