Just over a year after purchasing Liverpool with George Gillett, things were going so badly for Tom Hicks that he invited Sky Sports News to his mansion in Dallas. Apparently hoping to capture the reassuring aesthetic of FDR’s fireside chats with the American people, he instead whinged, moaned and pointed the finger of blame at others around the club for various failings. As he sipped from a liver bird mug while watching the team play Blackburn Rovers on a ginormous flat screen, no amount of flames flickering in the background could convince doubting Scousers to buy his whining shtick.
“The most repulsive PR stunt ever pulled by anyone connected with Liverpool Football Club,” wrote Brian Reade in An Epic Swindle – 44 Months with a Pair of Cowboys, a wonderfully evocative title summing up the fractious, chaotic nature of that ignoble time in Anfield history.
Following his death at 79 from complications from throat cancer last week, Hicks is survived by his beloved wife Cinda and six children (one of whom was on the board at Anfield until he emailed a supporter the rejoinder “Blow me, f**kface!”).
Every obituary in these parts invariably made at least passing reference to his own lingering bitterness about the way things ended so acrimoniously for him at Anfield. The man who once dubbed Liverpool fans “internet terrorists” and told Rafa Benítez to “shut up and coach” remained angry at being forced to sell to Fenway Sports Group in 2010.
He was not the first private equity guy to overstretch himself and find out the hard way that running a club requires a different type of acumen to taking over badly run corporations, trimming the fat and selling them on for a huge profit.
Having amassed a fortune buying out companies (often with borrowed money) that produced everything from computer circuit boards to soft drinks, from backyard swing sets to movie theatre popcorn, none of those experiences prepared him for the unique challenge of owning a team that is the heartbeat of a city. Indeed, it is a measure of the difficulties he encountered in sport that due to financial woes the Dallas Stars hockey club, Texas Rangers baseball club and Liverpool were all sold out from under Hicks’s ownership in the end.
Exactly a quarter of a century has passed since he signed Alex Rodriguez to a 10-year, $252 million deal to play shortstop for the Rangers – his unwanted footnote in baseball history. The largest and most ill-conceived contract the sport had yet seen, it was slightly more than he had paid to buy the entire club from a group including his close friend George W Bush three years earlier. No one else had been willing to get within $100 million of that sum for A-Rod’s services, so Hicks ended up spectacularly outbidding himself. Worse still, in emptying the coffers for a megastar, he neglected to budget for the need to surround him with a half-decent supporting cast.
When he was subsequently forced to pay the New York Yankees, the richest club in the game, to take Rodriguez off his hands just three seasons later, one newspaper columnist dubbed him “Tom Dumb”. It was one of many monikers earned during a peripatetic working life that began as a teenager, DJing on Port Arthur’s KOLE radio. He styled himself “Steve King the Weekend Wonder Boy” in those days, not wanting listeners to know his budding media mogul father John owned the station and a slew of others.
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Like many Texan boys, Hicks’s own sporting career peaked playing football in high school but, over time, he became as influential a booster around the University of Texas Longhorns gridiron team as just about any alumnus ever. Heavily involved in courting coaches of the highest calibre, he brought that approach with him to Liverpool when flirting with getting Jürgen Klinsmann in to replace Benítez at one point. Later, he blamed that doomed initiative on Gillett accidentally meeting the German at a doctor’s office in a Colorado ski resort and admitting he had to Google who the guy actually was. That sentence there contains multitudes about their woebegone regime.
Among the many eclectic entries on his resume was his involvement in Rudy Giuliani’s short-lived 2008 presidential election campaign, a disastrous effort for all concerned. More laudable was Hicks and business partner Charles W Tate stumping up nearly $400,000 to purchase the diary of Lt Col José Enrique de la Peña from the Battle of the Alamo in order to donate it to his alma mater. A controversial historical artefact, it contends Davy Crockett did not, as Americans traditionally believed, go out in a blaze of glory with his trusted musket Betsy in hand but was captured and executed by the Mexicans. A brave move to spend that kind of money undermining the ultimate local legend.
Ice hockey was where Hicks first dabbled in sports ownership and did best. Despite barely knowing the rules of the game at the time, he paid $82 million for the Dallas Stars in 1995. He increased the payroll to attract better players and the squad improved from worst to first, eventually winning the Stanley Cup in 1999. He also helped them move to a salubrious new arena, one of many extravagances he promised but couldn’t deliver at Anfield. For his contribution to the Stars’ triumph and decades of philanthropy he is, inevitably, a lot more fondly remembered in Texas – there’s even a primary school named for him there – than on Merseyside.
