The Breakaway

By the time Bill Wirtz died last fall, his once-proud Chicago Blackhawks had turned into perennial losers playing before dwindling crowds. His son Rocky took over and quickly opened a new era for the team—by repudiating almost everything his old man held dear

By Bryan Smith

(page 3 of 6)

Of all the changes Rocky has wrought in the past year—the greenlighting of Blackhawks home games on television, the luring of the team president, John McDonough, away from the Cubs, the reaching out to the old legends, Bobby Hull, Stan Mikita, Tony Esposito—one of the most symbolic is one of the least well known.

For 25 years, the office of Rocky's late grandfather, Arthur, sat unoccupied, Bill having chosen upon his father's death to stay in far more modest digs down the hallway at 680 North Lake Shore Drive, the estimable address that has been home to the Wirtz Corporation for more than four decades.

With its polished parquet floors and oak and glass display cases, its floor-to-ceiling windows with their 19th-floor view, the office evokes an old-fashioned, captains-of-industry masculinity, fitting for a man of Arthur Wirtz's imperious temperament. The place, Rocky says, had been left untouched after his grandfather's death, a frozen-in-time tribute to the founder of the empire. "Everything is exactly as it was—his pen-and-pencil set, the telephone on the desk, the display cases," Rocky tells me.

Each day when Rocky passed the office, he wondered why it wasn't used. "As I got older, about ten years after Grandpa had passed away, I talked to Dad about [his] moving in here," Rocky says, sitting on a long black leather couch in the office one late-summer morning. Rocky paused, then shot me a sidelong glance. "He was not receptive to it." When I asked why, Rocky shook his head. "I don't know, but it wasn't one of those things you pushed with my dad. That's one of those you leave alone."

Shortly after his father died, Rocky showed no such reluctance. He moved into the old patriarch's office without hesitation. "I just thought it was symbolic," he says. "I wanted everyone in the office to know that we're progressing as a business. That we're moving along. We're not fearful." Rocky adds, "I think he'd be honored, that he'd say, 'By all means, I want you to sit there,' because that means the business is still aggressive."

On a recent afternoon, Rocky gave me a tour of the headquarters. He is a square-built man with a wide-open, expressive face; like his father and grandfather, he dresses expensively but soberly in finely tailored suits. He bears a fleeting resemblance to his father in Bill's younger days, with pale eyes, a high forehead, and a thick head of hair neatly parted left to right. But he looks nothing like the caricaturist's dream that Bill—with his enormous head, fierce expression, and bulbous nose—became in later life. Along with familiar facial features, Rocky inherited the burdens of carrying his father's famous name. Being a Wirtz often hasn't been easy. Among other things, Rocky, 56, endured having his divorce in 2003 from his first wife, Kathleen, dragged into the public spotlight. (He is now remarried and lives with his wife, Marilyn, on the North Shore.)

In the couple of days that we spent together, Rocky seemed eager to avoid any suggestion of the kind of bullying swagger associated with his father. After a tour of one of the family's Judge & Dolph warehouses, he insisted we eat lunch at Ringside Sports Bar, a cheeseburger and potato-skin joint in Elk Grove Village. Earlier that morning, when he allowed me to sit in on a board meeting, he insisted that I sit at the head of the table while he sat in the middle. He cracked jokes and often shot me a conspiratorial glance when discussing something he found foolish or questionable, even something his father did, as if to say, "I know—I can't believe it either."

On the other hand, during the tour of Arthur's office, he delighted in the majesty of his grandfather's intimidation. "Grandpa was a six-four, 300-pound man, and he'd sit behind that desk with absolutely nothing on it but the telephone. He had a buzzer underneath for his secretary, Gertude Knowles, the same secretary he had for 50 years. He'd have the air conditioner on so high that when people smoked, they could watch their cigarette burn down in the ashtray. The vent blew down on his arm, and doctors couldn't figure out why his blood pressure was different in one arm than in the other, until they realized the air conditioning was coming down on one side.

"What happened was, it made you feel uncomfortable. It was a whole ritual. First, he'd make you wait awhile outside. When you finally got into the office, he'd start making phone calls. By the time he finally talked to you, you were so ready to get out of there that he had you."

Rocky recalls the time his grandfather summoned him to the inner sanctum one day, apparently to express his displeasure over a less-than-stellar financial statement from a family holding under Rocky's purview. "He called me in around two," Rocky recalls. "He had all the financial statements in a pile on his desk with the worst on the top, but he didn't say anything about them. Instead, he said, 'Mind if I make a few phone calls?' Well, he made 50 or 60 calls. Occasionally he would get up to go to the bathroom. He'd always come back—until the last time. I waited 40 minutes or so, then went to Gertrude, and she said he'd gone home. That was his way of telling me he wasn't happy."

Other than adding a framed family portrait of himself with his three children, Rocky has left the office largely intact. The display cabinets still hold a special bottle of whiskey emblazoned with the Blackhawks logo and bearing the legend "For Chief Blackhawk and his associates." Trophies from the family's harness horses gleam next to Arthur's original nameplate. "These tan chairs were his," Rocky says. "The desk, of course." Rocky has also added some memorabilia to the office, including the original bid book for Chicago Stadium, the "Madhouse on Madison" where the Blackhawks first played. He has added another book, one that would almost certainly have had no place on his father's bookshelf—The Elusive Fan: Reinventing Sports in a Crowded Marketplace.

Rocky finished the tour by showing me the boardroom where his grandfather and father got down to their most serious business. Filled with English antiques, the room is dominated by an enormous round oak table. "Arthur designed it himself," Rocky told me, shooting me one of those sidelong glances. "It was inspired after King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Guess who was King Arthur."

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