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 4 of 6)

Whereas Arthur ruled by royal decree, Rocky disarms with an Everyman's affability and openness. One of the first things he did after taking charge of the Blackhawks, for example, was to launch a goodwill tour among the three largest Chicago-area newspapers—the Tribune, the Sun-Times, and the Daily Herald—which had been the target of regular harangues by Bill over coverage he perceived as hostile. Such a conciliatory gesture would have been unthinkable under his father, he admits. "I figured, Let's take a little different approach," Rocky says. "I introduced myself, said, 'Hey, here's my card if you need me.' Just wanting to say, 'It's a new day; we're not carrying grudges; we're moving ahead.' " Guy Chipparoni, a Chicago public-relations executive, chuckles at the reaction of one columnist after Rocky's first press conference: "She said, 'Where did you find this guy?' "

Underlying the question is a mystery that continues to baffle family observers far more accustomed to the combative, some say belligerent, style of Bill and Arthur Wirtz: How does someone who grew up in a family demanding unquestioning loyalty, and whose role models defined themselves by a stubborn refusal to change, grow up to be the peacemaker in a city willing to boo his father's eulogy?

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The irony of Rocky's strikingly different approach to his father's vision is heightened by the numerous similarities he and Bill shared, starting with the fact that both were born on the same day, October 5th. Both spent time working on the family's 400-acre Ivanhoe Farm, in Fremont Township near Mundelein. Though he goes by "Rocky," the son actually shares his father's given name (Rocky's full name is William Rockwell Wirtz; Rockwell was his grandmother's surname. "Rocky" comes from Rocky Marciano, with whom Bill claimed he once got into a bar fight.) Both boxed when they were young. And like his father, Rocky learned at the feet of the family patriarch, Arthur Wirtz, the son of a Chicago cop who built the Wirtz name into a business empire and made the family name synonymous with hard-fisted business practices.

Arthur began building the Wirtz fortune during the Great Depression, buying up real estate at fire sale prices. Eventually the family holdings included insurance and liquor distributorships in Illinois and Nevada, banks in Chicago and Miami, and real-estate interests across the country.

In the 1930s, Arthur's hunger for property led him to join forces with James Norris, a Canadian-born grain speculator whose family had established a grain brokerage in Chicago. Together, Wirtz and Norris acquired interests in arenas and convention centers across the country, including Madison Square Garden and the Chicago Stadium. Among his many achievements, Arthur was considered the "father of the ice shows," having partnered with the three-time Olympic gold medalist Sonja Henie to create the "Hollywood Ice Revue," a widely popular show that made millions for both her and Wirtz.

At the height of his arena holdings, from 1949 to 1955, Arthur put on 47 of the 51 championship prizefights in the United States. The Wall Street Journal once called Arthur "one of the sharpest, best entrenched and most influential men on the sports scene." In 1954, when Rocky was a toddler, Arthur bought the Chicago Blackhawks, which he ran until 1966, when Bill took over as team president.

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Like Arthur, Bill was a man of complexity. To those who knew him well, he was generous and thoughtful, a raconteur with a biting sense of humor. To those with whom he did business, he was a domineering bully.

On one hand, he was an attentive and generous dad. He could also be stern to the point of being martial. "He went to all of my games," Rocky says, recalling Bill's gentler side. "I played basketball and football. He would take me to all of the hockey games. When I was little, we'd stay up all hours of the night—he and Jimmy Norris would hold court at the Pump Room. I'd fall asleep in the booth while they solved the world's problems."

By contrast, "when I was ten, I was misbehaving on my birthday," Rocky recalls. "We were going to go to the Chicago Stadium for the party and he said, 'If you do that again, I'm leaving you behind for your own birthday party.' Naturally I tested him. Sure enough, the family station wagon went right down to Chicago Stadium with all my friends, and I got left home. I deserved it, but it was indicative that whenever he made up his mind you weren't going to change it."

For all the family's riches, Bill was as loath to pamper his children as he was to coddle employees. "There were no limos, no drivers. When I was 16, I drove the yellow family station wagon with wood on the side. If you didn't think that looked good, then you walked."

Rocky, the eldest of Bill's five children (Gail, Peter, Karey, and Alyson are the other four), spent his first two years of college at Boston University, before returning home to finish at Northwestern University, then enter into the family business. Working for his father was both rewarding and intimidating. Freethinking was tolerated if not exactly encouraged. "You could give him a dissenting opinion, but you did so knowing that sometimes you'd pay the price," Rocky says.

Rocky laughed when I asked what that price was. "He wouldn't talk to you," he says. "You just didn't want to get him to the point where he'd have to say yes or no about anything, because once he did that, then he wouldn't change. You told him what you thought, how you'd do it, but you always knew who would take the ball over the goal line and that was him, and that was fine. I had my role to play and was happy to play it."

For a time, the approach seemed to work. After Bill became team president in 1966, the Blackhawks went on a run that included 13 division titles and a Presidents' Trophy, presented to the team that finishes with the best overall record in the league. Nine times, Wirtz was elected chairman of the NHL Board of Governors. He was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1976. "Bill Wirtz was a giant presence in a giant city, his beloved Chicago, and an even greater presence in the National Hockey League," NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said in a statement after Bill's death.

As miserly as he could be in paying players, he could be magnanimous to those in dire need. "Like his old man, he was famous for helping out, picking up checks, if one of the staff members had a family crisis and couldn't afford the health care of a child or something like that," Verdi says. When the former Blackhawks defenseman Keith Magnuson was killed in a car accident nearly five years ago, Bill paid for all the expenses surrounding his death. When the NHL staged a lockout in 1994, he continued to pay his employees and even threw a Christmas party. In 1993, Bill also established Chicago Blackhawk Charities, an organization that has donated millions of dollars to causes such as the Boys & Girls Clubs and the Amateur Hockey Association of Illinois. "He had his ways and he wasn't going to change them," Verdi says. "But to say Bill Wirtz was evil is very unfair."

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