The man who built Canucks? arena to be presented the W.A.C. Bennett Award Thursday
Ed Willes
The Province
Arthur Griffiths has been telling stories for an hour about his career, about the empire he built and lost, about the decisions that shaped his city.
Some are funny. When they first started looking for a second tenant for GM Place, Griffiths and his management team had their eyes on an Arena Football League franchise. The group met with Phoenix Suns and Arizona Rattlers owner Jerry Colangelo, who gave them this bit of intel: Toronto had three separate applications for an NBA expansion franchise. Why don’t you look into that?
This is how the Vancouver Grizzlies were born.
Some are poignant. When they were pouring the concrete foundation for GM Place, Griffiths placed a family photo of his four children — Stirling, Simon, Emily-Anne and Christian — along with his exwife Joanne, on the spot that would become centre ice.
That picture is forever preserved in the arena Griffiths built.
And some are just fantastic. When he was scouting for partners in the Grizzlies, Griffiths had a series of meetings with Magic Johnson and says the Lakers icon came this close to investing in Vancouver’s ill-fated NBA team.
“There’s a book here,” he says in a downtown office. “It really is quite a story.”
But is it a happy story or a sad story, he’s asked.
“It is a happy story,” he answers without missing a beat. “I know there are people, including friends, who say they’re so sorry about the way things worked out, but I know what a daunting task we had.
“My goal was to deliver that arena and the two franchises. The rest didn’t play out exactly as I wanted, but that happens. I’m proud of the fact I can look at that building and know we had a great team that made it happen.
“You can’t take that away. I wouldn’t trade away any of it.”
And, ultimately, that’s what makes this a happy story.
Thursday, Griffiths will be presented with the W.A.C. Bennett Award, the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame’s most prestigious honour, and the only wonder about this is why did it take so long?
Griffiths began working in the Canucks front office in his early 20s and was one of the driving forces behind Canuck Place. When his father and Canucks owner, Frank Griffiths, died in 1994, the son took control of the team and oversaw the construction of the Canucks new arena. That project came in at $165 million and was completed without public money.
When the Grizzlies were added to Orca Bay’s holdings in 1995, Griffiths owned an NHL team, an NBA team and their building, which became the working model for the industry. He also built an executive team that continues to influence the world of sports two decades later.
Tod Leiweke was part of that team. Today, he’s the COO of the NFL and the presumptive heir to Roger Goodell.
Tom Anselmi, the former COO of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, was part of that team. Chris Hebb, a former v-p at MLSE, was part of that team.
Victor de Bonis, the new COO of the Aquilini Group, was part of that team. So was Dave Cobb, the No. 2 man at VANOC.
What else? Oh yes. He was the chair of the Vancouver 2010 bid committee, the group that won the Canadian bid over Quebec City — the heavy favourite when the race started — and Calgary. He was passed over for the presidency of VANOC, but without Griffiths and his team’s effort, there is no 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.
Add it all up and it is a remarkable record, one that should have led to bridges or schools named for him.
But there’s another part of the Griffiths story that isn’t as happy, that paints a different picture.
It includes a near bankruptcy two years ago, involvement with a dubious Internet company 10 years ago and a failed Bon Jovi concert slated for Stanley Park last summer.
He doesn’t hide from any of it. He believes his latest venture — a consulting company which is active in China in the run-up to the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing — is right in his wheelhouse. But when asked about his post-Orca Bay career and the popular perception that he’s drifted from project to project in search of something to replace the Canucks, he says: “I get that. I don’t have any illusions about what people think or say.”
And that perception was formed when he flew a little too close to the sun.
Looking back, the wonder isn’t that Griffiths lost control of the Canucks, the Grizzlies and GM Place. It’s that he assembled it all in the first place.
Yes, he was the scion of a wealthy family, but by the ’90s, the business of sport had outgrown the reach of a successful family business. Despite this, Griffiths — with his sister Emily as a partner — was able to buy the land on which Rogers Arena now sits, privately finance the construction of the Canucks new home and come up with the NBA’s $125-million US expansion while buying out his two siblings in the family’s sports holdings.
How did he do this? Sit down. This might take a while. The original plan for the Canucks new arena was a comprehensive $50-million renovation of Pacific Coliseum, which would have left the NHL team, according to Griffiths, “in an old building in an undesirable location.”
Arthur eventually convinced his reluctant father to look at a new site, and there were several considerations — the area where the heliport now sits on Burrard Inlet, Main and Terminal, the Beatty Street Armoury — before he settled on the current locale. That left the small problem of financing for the 30-something executive.
“I’d never taken on a project of this size, but I remember meeting with a banker from CIBC and he said think of it as a shopping mall,” Griffiths recounts. “You have an anchor tenant, the Canucks. You’re going to have sponsorship revenue, suite revenue, food service contracts — all of those things are creditworthy. I learned very quickly how to finance something that complex.”
Griffiths would eventually go to the banks on three different occasions. The first was for $100 million for the construction of GM Place. The second was for $60 million to cover the NBA expansion fees. And the third was to buy out the shareholders from his father’s holdings.
That left him over-extended, and he was aware things had to go well in the startup phase of the new operation. But he’d built a dream team of sports executives and when the Grizzlies opened for business in ’95, it all seemed possible.
“It was a fantastic time,” says Cobb, Griffiths’ CFO, who now works for the Pattison Group. “It wasn’t easy, but we were pretty young back then and Arthur put a lot of faith in us.
“Most of us were local guys and we cared a lot about the team and the community. We grew up together. For a lot of us it was the first big job we had and we were invested.”
Two years after the Grizzlies opening night, however, Griffiths sold his remaining shares to John McCaw, cleaned out his desk at GM Place and left his arena for good.
McCaw and his brother Bruce were originally brought in as 20-per-cent stakeholders in Orca Bay in the early ’90s and never intended to assume a larger role. But a perfect storm hit the fledgling operation and Griffiths simply didn’t have the wherewithal to ride it out.
The Canadian dollar tanked. There was an NHL lockout in ’94-95, a year in which the Canucks lost $25 million, and the lockout didn’t produce a salary cap. Griffiths anticipated the NBA’s expansion fee would run between $75 million and $100 million US. It came in at $125 million, along with an onerous expansion agreement that, in Griffiths words, “tied one hand behind our back.”
With Griffiths unable to cover losses, McCaw assumed a larger financial role in Orca Bay. The problem was his lawyer, Stan McCammon, assumed a larger role in the day-to-day operation of the organization, which led to such remarkable decisions as promoting Steven Bellringer to the president’s chair over Leiweke; firing Tom Renney as head coach and Pat Quinn as GM, then, a day later, asking Quinn to come back and coach; and the removal of COO John Chapple.
Of McCaw, Griffiths says: “John was a good guy. I made my deal with him to sell my shares. I had no choice. I was going to lose everything.”
He declined to comment on McCammon.
On his last day at GM Place, McCaw asked Griffiths if he wanted a goingaway party. Griiffiths said fine, but nothing elaborate. How about lunch?
Two hundred people would attend. Griffiths still has a photo of them sitting in the lower bowl in GM Place.
“That was really my team,” he says. “The Canucks and the Grizzlies belonged to the community. But those were my guys. That was an emotional day. I’ll never forget it as long as I live.”
Some 20 years later, Griffiths, now 59, has moved back to Yaletown and lives in the shadow of his arena. Griffiths Way is nearby.
Thursday night, he’ll be handed the same award his father received in 1997, an award which is given “to an individual who has made a significant, unique and lasting contribution to sport in the Province of British Columbia.”
Significant? Check. Unique? Check. Lasting? Check.
Like we said, a happy story.
© 2016 Postmedia Network Inc.
