Charlie in Charge

Just when the event is looking like a success, a 22-year season ticket holder rises from the tall grass to snipe at Jacobs. No one has time to tell him to duck. “How,” the man asks, “do I respond to fans and friends who question ownership’s commitment to winning? If Nashville and Columbus lose, that’s one thing. But we’re talking about the Boston Bruins. That’s hard to swallow.”

Jacobs tries to play the tough guy. “You’re damn right it’s hard to swallow,” he says. But the words sound meek and forced, Woody Allen reading lines written for Nicholson or De Niro. Jacobs gathers himself and tells the fan how the team has invested millions in the Garden, which the Jacobs family owns, and North Station. He tells him how the Bruins are going to spend right up to the league limit on player salaries this year, how the team has gone out and signed some big-name talent. All of this happens to be true. But Jacobs doesn’t stop there. And that’s when the trouble begins.

“Part of the turnaround,” Jacobs says, “is playing in front of a sellout. We were disappointed to only have 10 of our games sell out last year. We have a $10 seat out there and a $19 seat. It’s the general apathy that we have to break.”

It is an astonishing thing to hear. Telling these fans, who surely sleep covered in Bruins bedding, that their apathy is “disappointing” is the PR equivalent of telling your wife that she needs to do something about those saddlebags. It’s self-immolation. But Jacobs doesn’t blink—not when he strikes the match, not after flambéing himself to a blackened crisp.

Weeks later, he sees no reason to rub a balm on the wound. That’s because he doesn’t think he—or the team—has been scarred. In fact, he doesn’t even recall the incident. Which is part of the problem. During the same conversation, he asks what I think about his performance at the town hall meeting. I tell him. He doesn’t take it well.

“Really?” he finally says, his face flushed. “Everyone I talked to said it was fine.”

Back in 2001, Charlie Jacobs was living out in California with his wife and children. He had a nice, quiet, successful life, having just turned a tidy profit after selling a Web business he’d created. It was around this time that he and his father began knocking around the idea of Charlie moving to Boston and getting involved with the Bruins. While the team hadn’t won a title in some time, it still had a solid history—one that included 22 straight seasons of playoff hockey, from 1975 to 1996, under his father’s stewardship. It seemed like a good move. Jacobs was fit and handsome, if a bit introverted, and he loved the sport. Better yet, he knew Boston, having graduated from BC. He had also served as an alternate on the NHL board of governors (and still does), and had worked in the marketing and finance departments of the L.A. Kings for a short while. Jeremy Jacobs made no promises to his youngest son about running the organization—he simply told Charlie his role would “evolve” over time. At first, he would just watch and learn.

With Charlie observing from the background, the next few years would turn what had been a stable, relatively successful franchise into an unmitigated disaster. By 2004, hockey had already sunk far below the other three major sports leagues in popularity. Though it barely registered a pulse at the time, the NHL made the curious decision to approve a lockout, essentially shutting down operations until the players agreed to pay cuts and a salary cap. The owners were crying poverty, claiming that the sport was on the road to bankrupting itself. That was bad enough for loyal Bruins fans—having to go without hockey while millionaires bickered with other millionaires over who should be richer. Worse, though, was that right there in the middle of it all, busting heads as commissioner Gary Bettman’s chief Pinkerton, was Jeremy Jacobs.

Jacobs may own the Bruins, but at heart he’s a Buffalo guy. That’s where he lives, and where Delaware North, the umbrella company that houses all the smaller concerns that make up the Jacobs empire, is headquartered. The company employs some 40,000 workers to handle international interests in video gambling and race tracks, real estate holdings, and food service. Oh, and hockey. Which is pretty much how Bruins fans have always felt about Jacobs’s priorities—that hockey comes last. In 2006, the $86 million the Bruins reportedly brought in was less than 5 percent of Delaware North’s $2 billion in revenue. And though one of the league’s most recognizable and lucrative franchises, the Bruins have traditionally spent far less on player salaries than other big-market clubs. The year before the lockout, for instance, the team’s payroll was about $46 million. That same season, the Detroit Red Wings spent about $78 million, the New York Rangers spent $77 million, and the Philadelphia Flyers’ payroll was $65 million. The fans, taking all that in, have long suspected that Jeremy Jacobs cares more about the profit margin than the win column.

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