Charlie in Charge

And he’s been hammered because of that perception. Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy, ever subtle, once wrote that Jeremy Jacobs is a “Montgomery Burns character who runs a bottom-line business from Buffalo and wouldn’t know a hockey puck from a hamburger.” Way back in 1999, before he started covering the Patriots, the Herald’s Mike Felger called Jacobs a “thief.” (Jacobs threatened to sue, and the paper was forced to print a retraction.)

The irony was that the lockout was supposed to change all that. The Bruins all but promised fans that, while it would be painful, once the lockout was over the team would be better positioned to deliver the championship Boston so desperately craves. Instead, the opposite happened. Management seriously miscalculated the effects of the very league overhaul they’d been out front promoting. Harry Sinden, who served for 17 years as team president, recalls that “we let five or six players go because they weren’t going to fit into the salary cap. That’s what we thought. Well, as it turned out, they would have if we had kept them.... So we got stuck, and there’s no denying it.”

It quickly became evident that the fans had reached their breaking point—they were no longer going to abide Jacobs’s business-as-usual approach. As Cam Neely says, “For the most part, the fans are dying to come and support the team.... But they’ve gone from being disappointed to mad to wait and see.” Adding to the problems, when Jacobs looked in the mirror he saw, by default, the face of the franchise: a man who didn’t live in town and who lacked the energy and passion displayed by the new breed of owners, palm-pressers like Robert Kraft and John Henry here in New England or, in the most extreme case, Mark Cuban down in Dallas. Jacobs wasn’t the sort of man to move to Boston and marshal a parade down Boylston Street (and he definitely wasn’t going to be doing the Charleston with some leggy blonde on Dancing with the Stars). But things were going to have to change, and fast, before fans stormed the Garden with pitchforks and torches. With the organization reeling, the job of salvaging the Bruins’ image and, harder still, the Jacobs name, fell to the only person who wasn’t expressly tied to the lockout disaster.

As his father had promised him years earlier, Charlie Jacobs’s role had at last evolved. His apprenticeship was over, and he was now the face of the franchise. His relatively thin résumé left some people openly questioning whether he was seasoned enough to lead in that way, especially since the job at this most challenging of moments would have been a nearly impossible task for even a battle-tested NHL executive. Whatever the drawbacks, there was no other choice. The Bruins started offering him around town for media interviews, and parading him in front of potential team sponsors.

After all, what was the worst that could happen?

Sitting in his office at the Garden, Charlie Jacobs leans back in a deep, comfortable chair with huge armrests—the kind of chair that looks like it could swallow a man whole. The room overlooks the Expressway and a giant advertisement reminding motorists to buy Celtics tickets. Jacobs has short, sand-colored hair, which makes his ears appear to stick out a little, and a strong chin and cheekbones. He’s also thin—perhaps because he likes to stay in shape (he was on the U.S. equestrian team), perhaps, it’s easy to imagine, because of the pressures of the job.

The Bruins have gotten off to a decent start this year. But even as the team is playing better (thanks in large part to Chiarelli, whom Jacobs hired as general manager before last season), Jacobs’s task, in many ways, remains as taxing as ever. His job is rooted in something less easily defined than winning—it’s about perception and marketing, about making the city love the Bruins again, about getting fans to trust ownership. His is a battle for hearts and minds, and we all know how difficult those wars are to win—particularly in a town where the other teams are so wildly popular. No matter how well the Bruins play, there’s no guarantee in this newly title-demanding city that anyone is going to pay attention.

“It could be a lot worse,” Jacobs says. “My job becomes stressful when the team doesn’t perform well. In a lot of ways, I feel responsible when that happens. We’ve had our knocks. And we have high expectations for the organization. So do the fans. In many ways, this team is a public trust—you’re more of a steward than an owner when you run the Bruins. But I don’t see it as a burden. I see it as a great opportunity.”

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