Jordan courted Grizzlies as potential team owner
However, His Airness was spurned over level of control he desired: report
Remember the time Michael Jordan was in talks to become owner of the NBA Vancouver Grizzlies? You’re right, you don’t.
And yet there is this tiny nugget, a throwaway, in a story last month from ESPN’S Greg Wyshynski about His Airness’ brief foray as an NBA owner.
“After his retirement, Jordan spent much of 1999 flirting with the idea of owning an NBA team. His bid to buy the Charlotte Hornets — a decade before he would buy the Bobcats — fell through. So did a bid to purchase the Milwaukee Bucks. There were discussions with the then-vancouver Grizzlies, but nothing materialized,” Wyshynski wrote.
A search of Postmedia archives reveals no mention of such a meeting. None of Howard Tsumura, Mike Beamish, Tony Gallagher, Iain Macintyre, Lowell Ullrich or Ed Willes, who were covering the Grizzlies in those days, had any memory of hearing such a notion.
There is one other reference in the media to Jordan and the Grizzlies’ brass meeting, in Michael Leahy’s 2012 book Nothing Else Matters: Michael Jordan’s Last Comeback.
Leahy describes Jordan as having “briefly” listened to representatives from the Grizzlies and the Charlotte Hornets — who were also after a new owner — in September 1999. Neither group, he writes, was interested in giving Jordan the level of control he apparently wanted, and so the talks didn’t continue.
Establishing a timeline for this meeting begins to crystallize a few things. This is in the window when then-owner of Orca Bay Sports and Entertainment John Mccaw was looking to off-load at least some of his ownership to a more interested party, Tom Mayenknecht pointed out.
Mayenknecht, who is now the principal at Emblematica Brand Builders in Vancouver, was a PR executive for the Grizzlies in the mid-’90s. He may not have been working for the Grizz when the Jordan encounter took place, but, nonetheless, was aware of it.
“It was really peripheral, nothing substantive. Probably nothing beyond one conversation,” he said. “The Mccaw group was starting to put the Grizzlies out there for sale. It was during a real tire-kicking phase.”
A somewhat self-induced tire-kicking phase, to be clear.
Earlier in the year, Mccaw had made a verbal agreement with Seaspan owner Dennis Washington, the Montana-based billionaire, who would become a minority partner in Orca Bay, which controlled the Vancouver Canucks and GM Place on top of the Grizzlies. But instead of quickly moving to formalize the deal, Orca Bay CEO Stan Mccammon decided to shop around the agreed-upon figure, hoping to find a bigger offer.
When Washington found out, he walked away from the handshake deal, leaving Mccaw once again in search of a partner.
He would find Bill Laurie a few months later. Laurie, married to one of the Walmart heiresses, was open about his desire to move the Grizzlies to St. Louis. The NBA quashed his ambitions.
Mccaw eventually partnered up with Michael Heisley, who came in talking a brave game about keeping the team in Vancouver, only to reverse course within a year and take the team to Memphis, Tenn.
Arthur Griffiths, the Grizzlies’ original owner who had to sell his stake in the team to Mccaw because he’d found himself overstretched financially, hadn’t heard about the Jordan connection until it was broached to him recently.
Over the phone, he paused, notably. You could almost hear the “pop” in his head as he quickly contemplated an alternate universe, one where a Jordan-owned Grizzlies never leave Vancouver.
“Boy, that would have been something,” he said. “I didn’t know about that one. What an amazing experience that would have been.”
Griffiths met Jordan once, the night before the now-infamous first visit by the Chicago Bulls to Vancouver. The Nov. 30, 1995 game is best remembered for Jordan subbing back into the game in the fourth quarter after he’d been trash-talked by Grizzlies point guard Darrick Martin — the Grizzlies actually carried a lead well into the final quarter — and scoring 19 points over the game’s final eight minutes, leading his team to the victory.
“I hosted him (Jordan) in my suite,” Griffiths recalled. “’What a nice guy, what a super nice guy,’ I thought. I didn’t realize how intense he was until I watched the ESPN documentary last month.”
Boy, that would have been something ... what an amazing experience that would have been.