A large table sat in the middle of a conference room at the law offices of Gray, Plant, Mooty and Mooty and Bennett. On one side, a financially stressed owner of the Minnesota Timberwolves with roots in Minneapolis’s hardscrabble North side sat with a cadre of lawyers and accountants, holding a No. 10 envelope in his hand with a number written on it.
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On the other side of the table, a former state senator from rural Minnesota who had built an empire thanks to business success in printing and agriculture stared right back at him after handing over an 8 1/2-x-11 sheet of paper with his offer to buy the team. After listening to his accountants and attorneys tell him there was no way they could consider an offer presented in such simplistic form, the beleaguered Marv Wolfenson stood up, walked around the table and approached an opportunistic Glen Taylor. Wolfenson extended his hand to accept the offer. Taylor stood up and accepted. Having just spent $88 million to rescue the Timberwolves from extinction, Taylor just had one more question.
“Does somebody have the phone number for the NBA?”
A few weeks before it became known that he is seriously exploring selling the Timberwolves, Taylor reflected on the chaotic process that thrust him into the owner’s chair back in 1994. It is a wild tale filled with visions of runaway horses, vampire sightings and white-knuckle negotiations that prevented the team from hopping a riverboat down to New Orleans just five years after the league made a celebrated return to the Twin Cities. And it all came together for the famously frugal Taylor during a meeting in his hotel room with the 32-year-old chief of staff for Commissioner David Stern, a lawyer by the name of Adam Silver.
“It was one of those rooms where when you open the door, it just barely makes it past the bed,” Silver said with a chuckle. “It was a very small room.”
The twists and turns are befitting a franchise that has spent the vast majority of its 32 years of existence trying to find its way. That lifespan — at least in Minnesota — would have been a lot shorter had Taylor not emerged out of nowhere to hammer out a deal during a breakneck week of negotiation, and without speaking to a single soul at the league office. After shaking hands with Wolfenson in that law office, Taylor returned to his hotel room, dialed a general number for the NBA and a receptionist picked up.
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“I said, ‘I just bought the Minnesota Timberwolves and I would like to speak to somebody about that,'” Taylor said. “She laughed just like you just did. Like, what are you talking about?”
Fifteen minutes later, Taylor received a phone call from Silver.
Twenty-six years later, Silver and more than a dozen others still have a clear picture of those harrowing days during the summer of ’94 when the future of the Timberwolves was hanging in the balance. Every person interviewed includes their job title at the time of the transaction.
“It was a difficult situation, there’s no question, until Glen emerged and put the deal together,” Silver said in a phone call from Orlando, where the NBA is finishing out the 2020 season. “It was very unclear we would’ve been able to keep the team there. Glen saved the team in Minneapolis.”
I. ‘Screw ’em. We’ll build our own arena.’
Bob Stein had a front-row seat for the genesis of the financial troubles that would eventually put the Timberwolves in peril. Before Wolfenson and his partner, Harvey Ratner, were awarded the franchise in 1987, the rags-to-riches scrappers from North Minneapolis brought Stein with them to a meeting with Gordon Gund, at the time the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, the Minnesota North Stars and the Met Center in Bloomington.
Bob Stein: We sat down and the first thing out of Gordon’s mouth was, “Ya know Marv, we would love to see you bring the NBA back to Minnesota. And if you agree and we work out a deal to play at Met Center, I’ll do everything I can to help you in the NBA to get a franchise here. But if you don’t, I’ll call in all my chips and keep you out.”
Marv Wolfenson (according to Stein): Gordon, I’ve lived about 60 years without an NBA team. I’ll bet I can make it the rest of the way.
Stein: I’ll never forget this. We’re walking in the parking lot and Marv looks at me and says, “Screw ’em, we’ll build our own arena. It’s nothing more than a warehouse with seats in it.” Honest to God. At that moment I had the first and only vision I’ve ever had in my life. I closed my eyes and what I saw was a white horse, no saddle, no nothing. Just a white horse running by sideways, me holding onto the tail and dragging me like a piece of cloth in the wind. I had a premonition where a lot of this was gonna fall. It was like that for a lot of years.
Stein and Wolfenson eventually paid $32.5 million to the NBA to start the Timberwolves, and another $100 million to build Target Center in downtown Minneapolis without any public funding. The building opened for the 1990-91 season. It didn’t take long for the troubles to surface.
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Stein: The essence of the crunch that led to our really having very few options was the decision to build the building ourselves. Nobody had done that for years and years. Economics had gone far beyond that.
Chris Wright, vice president of sales and marketing: One of the big things, we were sort of self-managing the stadium back in the day when we launched. We were taking risks on concerts, on a lot of the other events that were coming into the city.
Stein: They were guys who loved sports, loved their community and had a very traditional, honorable view that if you want to do something, you just do it. You don’t have to go begging. That was a big part of how they saw it.
Jeff Munneke, director of ticket sales: Harv and Marv didn’t ask for a dime from the government and built it on their own nickel. We quickly realized, holy smokes, owning your own building is quite a task and owning a franchise is quite a big endeavor. Suddenly, several years into it, you’re starting to hear some rumblings that perhaps they may look to bring on a minority partner or they may look to sell the team.
Stein: Over time, the team did fine financially and we were in the top three or four in our corporate sponsorships nationally. Ticket sales, we were 100 percent, 100 percent on suite sales. We really had a well-run business organization. But we had this problem. Take 8 percent (in taxes) and toss that anchor onto any business and see how it does, especially in a market where it has immediate competitors that don’t have that anchor.
To make matters worse, the savings and loan crisis shuttered Wolfenson’s and Ratner’s primary financier as the arena was being built. They were paying for concrete to be poured out of their own pockets to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars a week and went through an epic scramble to secure new funding. A loan officer named Joe Pettirossi helped the team get new financing through some Japanese banks and was hired by Stein as the team’s chief financial officer.
Stein: Maybe if somebody a lot smarter, with a 30,000-foot view of the whole thing, might have said at the very beginning, “This ain’t gonna fly.” That would have been on target probably.
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Wright: We were under all sorts of financial pressure. Bob’s job was to manage all of that and our job was to continue to move an NBA franchise forward, move a building forward, convince partners to be part of what was this incredible growing brand in the market at that time.
Silver: We felt the early lack of success certainly was not due to a shortage of support in the community. Marv Wolfenson and Harvey Ratner had some independent financial struggles with their sports clubs and the arena.
II. ‘Are we going to be OK?’
Target Center played host to the 1994 All-Star game, highlighted by J.R. Rider’s win in the slam dunk contest. It was supposed to be a celebration of the NBA’s return to Minnesota after the Minneapolis Lakers left in 1960. But it quickly turned into a rumor mill on the health of the franchise. Stern announced during the weekend that the NBA would serve as mediators to try to help Wolfenson and Ratner resolve their issues with the arena, an ominous sign one year after Minnesota had watched the NHL North Stars leave for Dallas.
Tom Hanneman, Timberwolves television reporter: It was unsettling, and to have that conversation with everyone from out of town, all the announcers that I work with, they all wanted to talk about (was) what’s going on and what’s wrong. People were thinking how can owners have financial issues? Not everyone was a billionaire at that time. It took a little away from the excitement of that weekend.
Munneke: There was this undercurrent of what’s happening with the franchise. Are we viable? Are we going to be OK? There was certainly a lot of chatter about that.
Stein: Internally, not many people knew about it. Publicly, you have to try to manage to some degree.
Scott Coleman, account manager: It was just chaos. Living day to day. Very uncertain what was going to happen. There were constant rumors about new ownership, who was interested in buying the team, who was not.
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Silver: David and I probably had made a dozen trips out to Minneapolis over the course of several months, meeting with various people, government officials. I testified before the city council.
By the end of the season, a feeling rippled through the organization that the Wolves could be moving. It was so strong that Hanneman gave a reflective sign-off from the team’s final game of the season in Dallas, a 116-102 loss on April 24. It was Hanneman’s way of saying goodbye without saying goodbye.
Charley Frank, director of broadcasting: Tom kind of quietly put together this really neat, really thoughtful two- or three-minute piece as we were rolling credits. We didn’t know anything for sure. We couldn’t act like this was our last broadcast. But there was so much uncertainty at that time.
Hanneman: There was an overriding concern with those of us working for the team, and for many of the fans, that if we lose this franchise after losing the North Stars, we’re not going to see another NBA opportunity. Probably similar to what the fans in Seattle have been going through for many years.
Frank: That could have been our last time together. It was ’94. We had only been together since ’89. The team had never been that compelling, really. And yet there was a feeling we’d lived a long lifetime there in five years. To go without some sort of acknowledgment of it would’ve been a mistake. Tom handled it perfectly.
Wolfenson and Ratner received local interest, namely from business partners Bill Sexton and Willis Heim, who offered $87 million for the team.
Bill Sexton, prospective owner: I was getting kind of bored in my business. I saw in the Wall Street Journal that the (CBA’s) Albany Patroons were for sale. I got about half interested in that and then I found out Marv and Harv were selling the Timberwolves. We met with them.
After much negotiation, Wolfenson and Ratner had doubts about the veracity of Sexton’s offer. Sexton pulled out of the negotiations several times.
Sexton (via the Star Tribune on May 3, 1994): We’re not going to chase it. I’m not going to negotiate anymore. If someone comes back to me, I’ll listen.
III. ‘Got ’em’
After months of speculation, the dam finally broke on May 23. Wolfenson and Ratner could not come to agreement with the City of Minneapolis on a deal for Target Center, so they reached agreement with a group headed by boxing promoter Bob Arum and Houston attorney Fred Hofheinz on a $152.5 million sale that dwarfed Sexton’s offer and would result in the team moving to New Orleans.
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Stein: It was an absolutely fabulous deal. At this point, owners were looking at major economic threats for their family security.
Munneke: I had an office that looked right out my window, and you could see into Conference Room 1, which was our big conference room in Target Center. I remember as this thing was starting to heat up a little bit, I remember looking up one morning and seeing Bob Stein and Harv and Marv high five each other in the conference room. I’m thinking, “Whoa.” So I’m kind of looking out my office window and saying, “Oh my God, something must be happening. I think we’ve been sold.”
Stein: Had it gone underwater, both owners’ families would have also probably gone under. So there was a little stress and not the kind of thing you can talk about in your senior staff meeting.
Munneke: We got pulled into a meeting and we were packed into this room. Then the 2-by-4 came across the forehead. We’ve been sold to boxing promoter Bob Arum down in New Orleans.
Weeks earlier, government leaders approved a $42 million acquisition of Target Center. But Wolfenson and Ratner owed $76 million on the building and were having other difficulties with their primary businesses. The acceptance of the New Orleans offer came as a shock.
Stein: They grew up in North Minneapolis poor as church mice. They were a real old-fashioned success story and had a lot of love and pride for the market and really wanted to do it here if it was at all possible. But they got very frustrated when we kept having these political doors slammed in our face, maybe because they weren’t as adept as some of the people who make a career of feeding at the public trough.
Munneke: Immediately you’re thinking boxing promoter, New Orleans. That will be interesting to have a boxing promoter from New Orleans as the owner up here in Minnesota. Then you quickly realize that, oh no, it’s not happening in Minnesota. We’re going to New Orleans. In that span of 45 seconds to a minute, you realize, oh boy. You take the big gulp to realizing, oh no, we’re going south.
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Hanneman: This was only a year after the North Stars were swept away to Dallas. That was on the minds of some of us and the feeling that, man, we just got ’em. And no, they’re not great, but they’re our Wolves, let’s build a future.
Arne Carlson, governor of Minnesota, 1990-98: It was roughly at that point when the alarm bells went off. We knew enough about two things to cause us to be deeply concerned. The first, obviously, was they were going to take the team out of Minnesota and bring it to New Orleans. But the second part was also that their source of funding was rather dubious. Our desire was to try to find somebody with financial strength in Minnesota to purchase it.
Frank: You had no choice but to treat it as a serious thing. That’s what we were hearing. There was a part of it too that in the back of your mind still all felt like a house of cards.
Stein: In retrospect, part of the thinking was, “Hey, Al Davis did it in football, why can’t we do it? The law’s on our side.” Well, there’s a lot of nuances and politics. That’s another part of the context that’s important to understand. They felt because of the Raiders move, they had a little bit of a legal authority behind them. If we can’t do it, and we’ve done everything we can to try to do it here, why should we go under?
IV. ‘I said hello. One of the vampires said hello back.’
After Wolfenson and Ratner accepted the bid, they dispatched Wright, senior vice president of sales Len Komoroski and several other staffers to New Orleans to start the process of moving the team. Even if there were questions about the Arum/Hofheinz group’s financing, the Wolves were preparing to go. New Orleans city leaders were discussing name changes, including the Rhythm, proposed by Mayor Marc Morial.
Arum (via an Associated Press story): I’m confident it will be approved. And as soon as it is, we’ll be in New Orleans.
Jason LaFrenz, game operations coordinator: At the time I had agreed to buy a house and got a call from my mortgage company saying they read in the paper that the Timberwolves were moving to New Orleans so they could no longer finance my house.
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Hanneman: Really in a very short order, it went from this has gotten serious to it happened. The New Orleans “Got ‘Em” paper came out. The Wolves had been sold down the river and it was over. It was sad. It was shocking. Even though it wasn’t 1,000-percent official, it seemed close enough that most of us believed that this is over.
Wright: I was down there on the day that (the jersey of) Christian Laettner, 32, in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. The headline on the front of the newspapers with a photograph of his jersey was “Got ’em.”
Munneke: Chris and I went down to New Orleans twice in the middle of the summer to start meeting with people. This is July. I will never forget. We were wearing suits and dresses coming off the plane. Realizing what the New Orleans heat and humidity is like, I looked like Robert Hays in “Airplane.” I was sweating so bad.
It wasn’t all work in New Orleans. There were all kinds of … adventures.
Wright: It’s a very unique marketplace, where everybody knows everybody and everybody has a story to tell about everybody. We were told one of the higher-ups in the city, his wife was going to manage all of the merchandise sales for the franchise. This young lady, when we met her, really knew nothing about merchandising and sales whatsoever.
Munneke: I forgot to tell you about the vampires.
Vampires?
Munneke: We were kind of getting a flavor of where to go, where to stay away from, here’s where you want to live, here’s where you want to eat. One of the guys just says, “Obviously there’s a lot of voodoo stuff down here and a spot where the vampires are at.”
Come on.
Munneke: We went and got a beignet for our dessert. And I’m like, “C’mon, we gotta do this.” So we hopped in a cab. We probably traveled a mile and were dropped off. The guy knew exactly what we were talking about.
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Sure enough, all of a sudden walking down the street, there was somebody with white face paint. We were just like, “What in the world?” You could see when they kind of open their mouth, some of them had shaved their teeth like fangs. There literally was three or four vampires walking around these blocks. … It was kinda freaky, kinda thrilling.
Wright: We would get on the plane and go to New Orleans on Monday morning and go to the Marriott and come home on a Friday night. You should talk to my wife. I can remember coming home and she’d say, “OK, what are the stories this week?”
Hanneman: I remember Chris Wright, who assured some of us that we would continue on (with the franchise after the move). He came back from New Orleans scoping things out and trying to figure it all out. He said, “Great news, Hanny. I found a beautiful bedroom community that we could all live in.”
And I’m thinking, well, I’m not sure I want to live with everyone that I’m working with. I said, “What, where is it?” He said, “Picayune, Mississippi,” which is 50 miles each way. I’ve got kids and am thinking, “This isn’t good.”
Wright did his best to put on a brave face to those back home, but it was starting to become clear that there were some serious concerns surrounding the viability of the New Orleans bid.
Wright: It didn’t take us too long to figure out that we knew that they were completely underfunded. I’m going to try to be as careful as I can in terms of what I say. They were sort of somewhat avoiding the approval processes of the league in so many different ways, or not paying attention to what the approval processes needed to be to be really, truly awarded the franchise.
Munneke: It was just a different way of life down there. … We would meet with people about licensing and merchandising and they would tell us, “You know what, things are done a little bit differently down here than you’re used to.” We’re just going, “Well, actually, this is how licensing works.”
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Wright: Lenny and myself would scratch our heads every night when we got back to our hotel rooms and sit down and have dinner and say, “What did you get today?” The answer was how the heck is this going to work down here at this particular time?
John Hainkel, Louisiana Republican state senator (via AP): They ought to come here. They are a total disaster like everything else around here.
V. ‘This is the last hurrah.’
The Wolves had planned to have a staff-wide retreat to a resort at the end of the season as a reward for all of their hard work. With the news of the New Orleans deal, it took on the feel of a final goodbye for a tight-knit workforce. It’s a party that lives in Timberwolves lore.
Coleman: You heard about that, huh? There’s a lot of things I’m not going to divulge from that trip for print.
LaFrenz: People, I would say, let loose. It was basically the goodbye to your friends. Some people were moving to New Orleans. Some had different jobs in different cities. A couple people had offers from other teams already. It was a blowout for two days.
Wright: We were all on our way out of a job. So we went up there and had two days of golf, jet skiing, campfires by the lake to say goodbye to probably about a 120-member staff. It was an incredible time.
Munneke: It was almost like your last rites together. It’s been real.
Frank (who stayed back to produce radio coverage of the NBA playoffs): Everything I heard was it was, you know, in a good way, debaucherous. Wasn’t out of control, but the spirit of the whole thing was, “This is it. This is the last hurrah.”
As the funeral music played, there were signs behind the scenes that the move was anything but certain. Stern and Silver had spent months going back and forth from New York to Minneapolis to try to facilitate a deal to keep the team in Minnesota. If Harv and Marv thought they were going to get a rubber stamp from the league, they were mistaken.
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David Stern (statement issued from the league after the New Orleans deal was announced): Marv Wolfenson and Harvey Ratner have received substantial offers to purchase the team and keep it in Minnesota. Regrettably, they decided against accepting these offers.
Stein: (Wolfenson and Ratner) were bright guys. They knew that hurdle was yet to be surmounted. But what are you going to do? You have one port in the storm and, of course, you need the league approval. I think in Marv’s head, he had some comfort from the whole Al Davis thing. He was a scrapper, Marv was. He wasn’t going to be intimidated from asserting his rights and he thought his rights included the right to move his team if he couldn’t survive, just like in the NFL. And that’s what it was.
Hanneman: I remember David Stern around the office a lot. This was his thing. He was determined that Bob Arum and Top Rank were not going to be part of his NBA.
Silver: There had been lots of parties that I had talked to. We had been chasing every lead.
Stein: It wasn’t the preference, it wasn’t an ego grab or a money grab. It was survival. It was economic survival in a situation where they put their fortunes on the line to try to create an entertainment venue and bring a major league product back to Minnesota, where they had grown up, and they really did feel it was a giving back as much as anything. They were nice guys who didn’t put their own personalities up front like you see some owners in some sports do. There’s something about a couple of poor guys from the North side who made enough business success that they could actually bring a team back.
Silver: People have to remember that this was an expansion franchise, too. Certainly David would’ve seen a huge failure for the league if the team, so relatively soon after its launch, had not been successful in Minneapolis.
Carlson: We had gone through this with hockey as well and it’s frankly a tough business because you’re trying to find local people, or people that are prone to Minnesota, to not only buy a team but to also pledge to keep it here.
The day after Wolfenson and Ratner had agreed to the deal with New Orleans, Stern offered Carlson the chance to assemble a group to make a presentation to the NBA relocation committee in New York in an effort to keep the team from moving. Carlson met with his delegation, including Sexton, at the governor’s residence before they left for New York, and after a vigorous debate about the content of the presentation. Some local leaders wanted an emphasis on Minnesota’s virtues. Carlson, a native New Yorker, wanted something more straight forward. The meeting was June 15.
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Carlson: We get down there and the hotel was just packed with television cameras. They wanted all sorts of quotes. I personally felt that we were in good shape. But I don’t want to suggest anybody was terribly confident because they weren’t.
Hofheinz (to reporters in the lobby of the St. Regis Hotel): We’re a little curious why they continue to show up at the NBA. Basically, it’s a nuisance rather than something that imperils our deal.
Carlson, chuckling: We start the presentation with Mayor (Sharon Sayles) Belton. I don’t know how far into it she got. She may have gotten into how wonderful our lakes are when Stern quickly interrupts. He yells to me, “Governor Carlson, do you or do you not have the money?” I quickly elbowed (Metropolitan Sports Facilities chairman) Henry Savelkoul and said, “Henry, you’re on.” That was the end of our presentation on how fabulous Minnesota was. Henry got up and, just in a wonderful fashion, pointed out how the finances would work, the commitments that were made and bingo, that was it.
Sexton: We had flown on the governor’s plane to La Guardia. Before we boarded to go home, they told us the Timberwolves were going to stay in Minnesota.
Hofheinz (to reporters at the St. Regis): We just took a blind bullet.
Silver: For David and the league, it was very important that we return to the community the support they had shown for the team and in essence not cut and run just because this particular ownership group was having financial issues unrelated to the team. But there were issues with the arena that needed to be worked out. That’s part of why I was out there a lot, too.
In a shrewd move, the NBA also filed a lawsuit against Wolfenson, Ratner and the Arum/Hofheinz group to get a judge to issue an injunction that blocked the team from moving. New Orleans, in turn, counter-sued Sexton and Heim for “tampering” with the deal. It was textbook Stern, who had a reputation for ruling with an iron fist.
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Stein, laughing: When his commissionership would become offended, it was not a pretty scene. To his credit, there was never any conversations that I recall that weren’t diplomatic. But he diplomatically laid a lawsuit on us with a restraining order the same day that we came and presented all the reasons why it was necessary for us to relocate the franchise.
Munneke: I am literally on an airplane on the way to Vancouver when David Stern and the NBA come in and block the sale. I don’t know the sale’s blocked until I land in Vancouver and the Grizzlies staff is there to meet me. I said, “Hey, how ya doing?” They’re like, “Hey, Jeff, you might want to call back to the office.”
Back then there was no cell phones. It was all done on landlines. They said, “There’s some pretty important information. The sale’s been blocked. We certainly hope you follow through and would love to have you stay here. But we totally understand if you need to think about this now.”
Frank (who was back at Target Center running the radio broadcast of the NBA Finals): We were thinking, among other things, “Thank goodness we’re not up at Izaty’s resort,” because these people are going to be awfully embarrassed when they have to look at each other at their desks the next work day.
LaFrenz: I remember this distinctly. We were sitting in the lobby of Izaty’s, at the bar waiting for the shuttle buses to pick us up to bring us back to Minneapolis. We’re watching the local news at 12 noon and it comes across the screen: Timberwolves not moving to New Orleans. Everybody’s sitting there like, “You gotta be kidding me. Now what?”
Coleman: I definitely remember that piece of it as being, “Wow.” We were all very excited about that, but there was still a lot of uncertainty. That’s great they turned it down, but we still need someone to buy the team.
LaFrenz: I just can remember the looks on people’s faces after this blowout party at Izaty’s. Suddenly the whole thing shifted 180 degrees. It was pretty crazy.
VI. ‘Who would want to own a professional team?’
Some Wolves staffers had already accepted jobs elsewhere. Some were planning to go with to New Orleans. Still others had spent some of the severance money they thought they had coming in. And just like that, they were back in business. Well … almost. Sexton’s group had a lawsuit hanging over its head and there was still some question about what would happen with Target Center.
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Sexton: When we got back we continued our negotiations, but the city hadn’t decided on the Target Center and we were being sued by the New Orleans group. Our legal people contacted people in Louisiana. They said, “You’re (in the) right, but you’re probably going to lose. It’s French law.”
Stein: Of the very small group of potential owners, you just don’t know from the buyer’s side, if at one point they’re going to say, “Well, it maybe doesn’t make as much sense and it’s maybe not as attractive as it seemed when I was just beginning to kick the tires.”
Silver: There were others who had understandings with Marv and Harv where deals had fallen through.
Sexton hired a power broker named John Drossos to help complete the negotiations. They wanted indemnification from the Louisiana lawsuit as part of any deal. As talks stalled, Carlson turned to an old friend from the state senate to try to push things across the goal line.
Glen Taylor: (Carlson) said that there was a group of people that would probably leave it in Minnesota that were interested in purchasing the team, but he didn’t know how that was progressing. He was wondering if I would serve as a mediator between the two parties to get the deal done so we could keep the Timberwolves here in Minnesota.
Carlson: One of the people that I was very close to in the House was our director of PR, Bob Anderson. Bob is a very meticulous thinker. I do recall him singing praises that Glen was a very capable businessman. So when years later and this opportunity arose, why not?
Taylor: They had been negotiating for quite some time, I found out. It wasn’t new. The governor was aware there was some difficulty and there was a good chance it was gonna fall apart.
Carlson: It’s a very, very serious thing, particularly in the 1990s, for any major city to lose a sports team. It’s one thing not being able to attract a team, but it’s quite another when you lose one. It was also very vital to the physical development of Minneapolis.
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Sexton: Probably the biggest business disappointment I’ve ever had in my life. But life goes on.
Taylor: I would say two or three weeks later that I read in the Tribune (on Friday, Aug. 3) that the deal had fallen apart. That didn’t surprise me. But it was public. That was, I’m pretty sure, that was on the weekend that I read that. On Monday, I got a call from Marv.
Stein: The interesting thing to me was he certainly seemed to have a lot of the same views and motivations as Marv and Harv had. Self-made guy from a small town and now he’s in a position to do something like this and hopefully it will be a lot of fun and financially rewarding.
Taylor: When I went up there the first time, initially, I went up there driving in my car with the idea, who would want to own a professional team? You lose $5 million. Why would you want to lose $5 million just to own a team? It never occurred to me. But being up there and having access to all this information, I became aware that you could go up there and own this team and you don’t have to lose money. I never had that idea before. But I did have it when he called me.
Hanneman: I didn’t know Glen. None of us really did.
Wright: Taylor Corp. had a suite with us and a three-year deal. At the end of the three-year deal, which was one year before any of this happened, Glen pulled the plug on the suite agreement at Target Center.
Taylor: I called (Wolfenson) back late Monday and said, “Yes, let me come up there and take a look at it and see if we can put a deal together. I will come up on Tuesday to do my due diligence on the Timberwolves.”
VII. ‘I just made a deal to buy the Timberwolves. … Just don’t hang up on me.’
Taylor made a second trip up to Minneapolis, this time bringing sons-in-law Rob Moor, who had marketing experience with the Los Angeles Kings, and Roger Griffith, an accountant, with him to do a more thorough review of the books. He also brought his CFO and an attorney from Taylor Corp. to go over the financials and legal odds and ends. After two days of research and review, the group met in the Marriott City Center just before midnight on Thursday, Aug. 7, to go over the findings.
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Taylor: There was nothing there I didn’t see when I was helping with the negotiations. There was nothing new that stood out. The thought was that we would buy the team and we would buy the building. That was the conclusion that I came to.
Stein: The fact is you try to qualify buyers before you get into it with them. That’s something that leagues typically do as a part of the process too. They want to manage that process. They want to manage who their partners are coming in. They always do and keep a veto on that. At the end of the day, you never know where “yes” ends and “no” begins financially for any one of them.
Frank: No one knew a whole lot about him at the time with everything else being in the printing industry and Mankato-based. It happened pretty quickly.
Taylor: Friday morning, I got up early and I wrote out on just a yellow tablet what our proposal was going to be, what we would pay for it, the buying of the building, everything. I just wrote it out longhand and got it all on an 8 1/2-x-11 sheet of paper. It wasn’t that complicated. Just kind of said, “OK, how am I going to present this?” I called Marv and said we were willing to make an offer.
Coleman: Mr. Sexton announced he was no longer interested in purchasing the team. Shortly after that, out of nowhere, Glen Taylor emerged and it was done.
On Friday morning, Taylor’s group met the Wolfenson/Ratner delegation in a law office to present their “formal” offer.
Taylor: I said, “OK, I’ve got my presentation.” I pulled out my 8 1/2-x-11 sheet of paper. Didn’t have anything to pass out to the rest. You could just see it. They were all looking for a 20-page legal draft and I had this one piece of paper. I said, “OK, here’s our deal.” It was really simple. The deal was that we would buy it, and I named a price at $88 million, we’re going to buy the team.
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Stein: The meaningful part of it was doing something for the community that needed to be done. I think there’s a lot of people who buy sports franchises who want to dress up in that outfit who don’t deserve it. That’s their public relations presentation. But I know for Marv and Harv, and I believe for Glen, it was sincere.
Taylor: I said, “Well, that’s it.” And everybody’s just kind of sitting there. “What do you mean, that’s it?” Nobody had any paper in their hand. I looked across the table and I was looking at Marv, and Marv was writing it down as I was explaining it, not that there was that much to write down. But I looked at what he was writing it down on. He was writing it down on a No. 10 envelope, just a regular envelope. He was writing his notes on that.
Sexton: I’ll be very honest. I believe Glen had a lot more pull having been in the senate and spent so much quality business time in Minnesota to get that done. He didn’t have to fight a lawsuit.
Taylor: One of the lawyers got up and said, “Well, this is not something we could consider or do. We don’t know exactly what your proposal is. You just kind of walked through it.”
We sat there for a little bit. Marv stood up. He was on the other side of a large table. He got up, he walked all the way around the table and he came over to me, he put his hand out. I stood up and he says, “Done. You own ’em.”
A phone call needed to be made. Taylor rang the NBA and got the receptionist.
Taylor: I said, “I just made a deal to buy the Minnesota Timberwolves. I know you don’t know me. I know you don’t know if I’m kind of a crank caller. Just don’t hang up on me. Here’s what I’m going to ask you to do. I’m going to say take this message to whomever you think you want to take the message to. But somebody important at the NBA. You can pick the person. I’m not going to pick the person because I don’t know their names. You pick the person and say, ‘I just received a phone call from a Mr. Glen Taylor, who said he just bought the team. He said I was supposed to bring it to somebody here, that it has some importance and he then said you could pick anybody you want in Minnesota and you could call that person up and ask that person, ‘Who is Glen Taylor?'”
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Silver: The league office doesn’t generally get involved until there is in essence a handshake between a buyer and a seller. That’s all true. Glen must’ve called a general number because he certainly wouldn’t have had my number. … There wasn’t even an NBA.com yet where you could just look up people in the league office and Google and all that. So Glen got to me, explained who he was and his background.
VIII. ‘If you’ve got a live one, call me.’
It had been a six-month process for the NBA to try and find a qualified local buyer who could save it from the ignominy of losing an expansion franchise just five years after its birth and avoid getting into business with the Arum-backed group that brought its own concerns. After talking to Taylor, Silver took the next flight to Minneapolis and planned to meet Taylor at his hotel that night.
Taylor: I think he was there in about four hours. It wasn’t a terribly long time.
Silver: May the record reflect it was a commercial flight.
Taylor (in a playfully gruff voice): He came to my hotel room. I just had a little hotel room, if you ever ask him about this, he’ll say, “I can’t believe it. He only had one chair there. One of us had to sit on the bed, and he was gonna buy the team! I didn’t think he had enough money to buy two chairs for the room.”
Silver: I remember I got to the lobby of the hotel, picked up the house phone, asked for Mr. Taylor and was put through to his room. He said just come on up to my room. It wasn’t like we met in the hotel lounge or something. I went to his room. In fitting with sort of his modest approach to the world, he had a small room with one queen-size bed. There was a queen-size bed and a desk. And that was the room he was staying in.
Taylor: Those guys in New York, they’re so used to staying in the suites. I’m looking at it and saying, “Which one do you pay $17 for?”
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Silver: Many of the team owners’ hotel rooms I’ve been in since then have closets that are bigger than the room that Glen was staying in that night.
Taylor (laughing sheepishly): He told me, “This isn’t the way you do it. But we’re gonna do it this way.”
Silver: David Stern had said to me, “Remember, we had a lot of false starts.” This is after there had been attempts to move the team out of the market. … David Stern had said to me, “If you’ve got a live one, call me.” David wasn’t going to fly out based on the phone call. But he said if you really think we have something here, get me on the phone. It was really my job to connect the potential buyer with David. It was much less about me.
Taylor: He was business, I was business. It was strictly get the deal done and how are we going to do it.
Silver: We spoke for about an hour, just me following my boss’s instruction. The goal was to get Glen on the phone with David. It must’ve been 11 o’clock at night in New York. I said, “Mr. Taylor, let’s call David Stern.”
Taylor: Straight to the point because I wanted to get back to work and get back to Mankato.
Silver: I think his wife answered. I said, “I’m so sorry I’m calling this late, but David told me to.”
Taylor: He’s got a good story to tell for his part of it. It’s even worse what he says. He says there were no chairs and we both had to lay down on the bed to discuss it.
Silver: There was a queen-size bed and a phone on each side of the bed. Nobody had a cell phone with a speaker phone on it. So for us to both talk to David, I said, “All right, I’ll sit on one side of the bed if you sit on the other.” We ended up being on the phone with David for more than an hour. Here’s this man I just met, and we’re both as this call went on, you can imagine us both sort of reclining. Not lying on the bed, but sort of as if you were reading a book, on each side of the bed, having a conversation with each other and David Stern. Lying on this queen-size bed in a hotel room and talking through the deal with David.
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Taylor: He said, “Well, Commissioner, I think we found the guy we’ve been looking for for the last three years and he’s here right beside me.”
Right beside him.
Silver: I think it began with us sitting on the edge of the bed on each side. I think I followed Glen’s lead. He was the first one to lay down while we were talking. And then I did, too. The rest is history, so to speak.
Taylor: Then they said I had to come out there and meet them. I didn’t have any power. I didn’t really own it. They said I could come to the meetings and get involved and do everything as fast as I could while they got me approved.
Silver: His deal at the time, was not done done. I know when I went out we had lots of back and forth that I was sort of an intermediary between Glen and them trying to resolve the issues.
Taylor: It’s such a strange thing, isn’t it? I don’t know I could tell it to somebody that didn’t know me.
Silver: When I first became commissioner, he became chairman of the board. We knew each other well over the years, but we worked extremely closely over the last several years during my first few years as commissioner.
Taylor: That was really important because he was the person that came out and met with me and ever since then, we have had such a strong, close relationship. As it ended up, it was very valuable to both of us, the time we spent.
Silver: I think, first and foremost, he would’ve been very satisfied if somebody else had bought the team and was keeping the team in Minnesota. First and foremost, I think he saw this as a civic matter, that the team needed to stay in the Twin Cities. That was his priority, that the team stay in Minnesota. Just as it is now, by the way.
After Silver helped Taylor wrap up the formal negotiations, it was sealed. The city eventually purchased the building and Taylor took control of the team, with Sexton joining as a minority partner.
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Sexton: I got a phone call from Glen. We talked a while and talked about how much time and effort we had put in and he asked me if I wanted to be a limited partner. I looked over at (my wife) Joyce and she said yes.
Hanneman: It’s basketball, not hockey, but I still say that Glen made one of the great saves in Minnesota sports history in stepping in and buying the team.
Silver: He’s a highly respected voice in the boardroom when he speaks out on issues. People never have a doubt that it comes from a genuine place when Glen speaks. He’s always looking long-term and looking at the best interests of the league and not his particular franchise.
IX. ‘Maybe next year.’
The Timberwolves went 21-61 in Taylor’s first season as owner, but things turned quickly after that. Taylor hired Kevin McHale and Flip Saunders, who drafted a skinny kid out of high school in 1995 named Kevin Garnett. Beginning in 1996-97, the Wolves made eight straight playoff appearances, including a run to the Western Conference finals in 2004.
LaFrenz: Getting into the late ’90s and early 2000s, there couldn’t have been a better place to work.
Coleman: That’s why it was so rewarding for us who stuck around. KG, Stephon Marbury, Tom Gugliotta — coming out of that, we had the foundation for a real exciting run.
The bottom fell out after 2004, and the Timberwolves have largely been known for dysfunction, bad luck and losing — lots and lots of losing. One playoff appearance in the last 15 years. Sam Cassell’s hip. David Kahn’s incompetence. Kevin Love’s knuckle push-ups. Jimmy Butler’s practice. Tom Thibodeau’s stubbornness. Ricky Rubio’s knee. Rick Adelman’s wife. Flip Saunders’ passing. It’s been heartbreaking, frustrating and downright depressing at times. But for those involved, having the team in Minnesota beats the alternative.
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Wright: You look at all of the different people and all of the different circumstances that this franchise has weathered over a period of time and it really takes a very unique human being as an owner to do that. We are very, very fortunate to have Glen Taylor save the franchise from going to New Orleans, No. 1. And then No. 2, the uniqueness of many things that this franchise has had to overcome — without an owner like him, I don’t know where this franchise would be.
Hanneman: I would say look at our situation right now. To be without sports, I think over the four or five months, we’ve all learned a lesson. We knew it was important. We knew we loved it. But it’s not until you lose it, even for a short period, that you realize this is a part of my life that I can’t replace. It’s fun. If you’ve had a tough day at work, to watch the Twins, watch the Vikings, watch the Wolves and the Wild — it’s irreplaceable, I think. Yeah, there’s been no NBA championships for this franchise. Some people, that’s the only measure they’re going to look at. But along the way, it’s kind of like your life, not every week, not every month, not every year is a great one. But they’re all memorable. They’re all important.
LaFrenz: It’s just what brings everybody together. I couldn’t imagine not having a basketball team to help do that. Obviously right now it’s not happening, but the hope every year is maybe next year.
Taylor: I would say that when I look back, forget the other things. The things we couldn’t control were the injuries. Every team has those, so I’m not saying it was just us. But the unfortunate time of our injuries really killed some years that I thought we could and should’ve done better. I look at that as the biggest thing when you come in and buy the team, you just have no control over these injuries. I’d say that is No. 1.
No. 2 is that we just made some poor selections in people. Some of them I participated in the interview and some of them I didn’t and the general manager did it. Either way, it’s my responsibility. We believed what we were told in the interviews. When the person really was hired, they were somewhat different than what they said they would be. That’s my responsibility and probably the general manager’s responsibility on that.
Taylor watched his $88 million purchase explode in value as the NBA signed lucrative new television contracts and inked new collective bargaining agreements with the players. Taylor later purchased the WNBA’s Lynx and turned that team into a dynasty with four championships. Now as he looks to sell the teams, it is expected he will get $1.2 billion or more on the open market.
Taylor: What happened after that is Dallas became for sale. I don’t know how long that was. It wasn’t real long after that and Mark Cuban came in and offered, I’m not sure, something more in the area of $200 million. When I saw that, all of a sudden that’s when it occurred to me, holy cow, I bought mine at 88, this is 200. I don’t know what mine is worth, but it’s close to 200. That was the first time it was in my mind that gosh, this was really a good deal.
Cuban purchased the Mavericks in 2000 for $285 million.
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Silver: While our teams are on average worth close to $2 billion now, $88 million was as large a transaction as I had ever been involved in my life. In fairness to Glen, too, it wasn’t easy to sell the team at that time. There weren’t many people who were prepared to spend $80-90 million for an NBA franchise. It was a very different time and a very different sense of the league.
Stein: There’s a lot that comes without a clearly defined price tag value from any kind of major entertainment in a community. And sports in our culture is the No. 1 entertainment. For all the reasons that entertainment is important and social interaction is important, we’re certainly seeing it under a microscope right now, sports are important and the Timberwolves have been an important part of the Twin Cities and Minnesota. You’d much rather see them win than lose. Hopefully, that will change. But in the NBA, the other part of it is, you know the overwhelming effect of one or two spectacular players. Getting those one or two players changes everything.
Munneke: I look at it as of course we want to win a championship. At the same point, that orange basketball brings all these people together and unites people that are basketball fans. I would say that regardless of whether we moved. Just that leather basketball, you unite all these relationships into what happens on the court. What happens in the concourses and in conversations, when you’re creating memories with kids. That’s the best part for me.
(Top photo: Wes McCabe / The Athletic illustration)
