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 5 of 6)

By the time Rocky inherited the team, however, the Blackhawks were in freefall. They had made the playoffs only once in the preceding ten years—no mean feat in a sport in which half of the teams qualify for the playoffs each year. Having last won a Stanley Cup under Arthur in 1961, the team was also suffering through the longest championship drought in the NHL. To fans, Bill's transgressions are well known: allowing Bobby Hull, perhaps the most popular player in franchise history, to leave for the fledgling World Hockey Association in a bitter—and many say deeply petty—dispute over money; the loss of high-caliber players like Jeremy Roenick, Tony Amonte, Ed Belfour, and Chris Chelios; the firing of the longtime play-by-play man Pat Foley; the stubborn loyalty to his right-hand man Bob Pulford, whose judgment as coach and then general manager was called into question almost as often as Bill's. (Pulford was also blamed for Mikita's refusal to return to the team. "I never felt welcome," Mikita told me.) And of course, Bill's reasoning behind not televising home games: that doing so would be disloyal to season ticket holders.

Fans' discontent grew personal. "Some of the stuff was really cutting," Rocky says. The Web bristled with anti-Bill Wirtz blogs, including wirtzsucks.com and killbillwirtz.blogspot.com. In 2004, ESPN named the Blackhawks the worst franchise in pro sports. The network had named Wirtz one of the top ten greediest team owners. The Blackhawks—whose tickets were once "like jewels," as Verdi puts it—suddenly had the second-lowest home attendance in the NHL. Many saw an ad campaign by Chicago's other hockey team, the minor-league Chicago Wolves, as a veiled slap at the Blackhawks. "We Play Hockey the Old-Fashioned Way," the Wolves' slogan said. "We Actually Win."

* * *

Far from assuming a defensive crouch, Bill seemed to adopt almost a bring-it-on defiance to the scorn. A sly, subtle smile played on his lips when he was booed. When Verdi tagged him with the "Dollar Bill" nickname, he embraced it. "I joke about it," Bill told Mark Suppelsa in a 2005 interview. "I sign my letters 'Dollar Bill.' . . . You have to be a masochist to be a team president today. You have to love to take punishment. But I'll tell you one thing, I have fun every day."

There was nothing fun, however, about that night at the United Center last October, as Dale Tallon struggled through his remarks amid showers of boos. "I told Dale that he should get hazardous duty pay," Rocky says. "What was hardest was how everyone reacted to it, my sisters and my brother. They were really taken aback. You just take it and let's get on with it."

* * *

The changes were swift, sweeping, and dramatic. One of the first, and Rocky says most crucial, moves he made was hiring McDonough, who had made a name for himself selling the once woeful Cubs to fans. "John was a year younger than I, and at the time I didn't know if he'd be comfortable to leave [the Cubs], or if he had fire in his belly. That's one of the first things I asked him, because I knew we had a lot of stuff to do."

The two met at Champps, a restaurant in Schaumburg. "I didn't really know Rocky," McDonough says. "I'd only met Peter once. Over the noise, we talked about lives and people and families and hockey for four and a half hours. About two hours in is when Rocky said, 'I think you're the right person to bring the Blackhawks back.'

"There was a full week of tears and gnashing of teeth as to whether I was going to take this job," McDonough recalls. "I needed to know that if I did this, nobody was sacred. I had a job to do, and it wasn't going to be for the faint of heart. When you haven't made the playoffs for seven or eight years, your games are not televised, you're not in good stead with your former great players and some of your recent great players left acrimoniously, you fire the most popular broadcaster in franchise history—somewhat inexplicably—it's a lot of ground to make up. Changes were going to have to be made, and it couldn't be personal."

* * *