Q&A with Jim Couch
Retiring city manager Jim Couch played a key role in bringing the NBA to Oklahoma City.
Jim Couch is Oklahoma City’s longest-serving city manager. During his tenure which started in 2000, he helped pull off what was seemingly unthinkable — bringing professional sports to the city.
In 2005, Couch was the lead negotiator in getting the New Orleans Hornets and Oklahoma City Thunder into the then-Ford Center, now Chesapeake Energy Arena. Couch is retiring effective Jan. 2, but his fingerprints will be left behind on Oklahoma City’s basketball history.
Couch spoke with The Oklahoman on Monday from City Hall.
(Note: A full story on Couch's retirement and impact can be found on Page 1A of today's Oklahoman.)
The Oklahoman: How do you get an NBA team to Oklahoma City?
Couch: "It wasn’t strategic, I’ll tell you that . ... Mayor (Mick) Cornett visited the NBA offices several times. He visited the NHL. He sat down with (then NBA commissioner) David Stern and said 'We’re open and available. We’re got an arena.' The commissioner said, 'Thanks for coming by. You’re a great mayor and things are great in Oklahoma City. Good luck at getting an NHL team, because you’re not going to get an NBA team.' This was about 2004, 2005.
"Then Hurricane Katrina came. It knocked out downtown New Orleans. New Orleans was in no position to host an NBA. That was Labor Day weekend. Training camp was about to start for the teams. They had almost no place to go. It was 'What are we going to do? Where are we going to put them?' Fortunately for us, Kansas City — which has a really nice arena and you’d think of as more of a 'Major League' city — didn’t have the dates. We had the dates and our building was pretty good, too. We actually were able to get them to Oklahoma City and negotiate a unique deal with them. They wanted revenue guarantees that we were going to bring in this money, and if the revenues weren’t there they wanted the city to fill in the gap. They wanted us to guarantee they were going to get 'X' amount of revenue, but if they exceeded the revenue, then we’d share 50/50. So we got together and there was a group of private investors led by Clay Bennett. He took a part of that risk and the state and the city took part of that risk, and we negotiated a deal. Mr. Bennett got a bunch of people to step up as sponsors and the tenants were marvelous the first two years. It was good that we exceeded it. We made around $1 million or $2 million on this deal. They had an option for a second year, but in the second year, they didn’t want the revenue guarantee because they didn’t want to have to pay us for anything more than that. They stayed the second year and I think the owner probably wanted to stay, but the league said they needed to go back. But we proved to the league we could support an NBA team. With that, Mr. Bennett and his co-investors thought it was a pretty neat deal and were interested in the league.”
How much experience did you have in negotiating deals in sports, and how did you feel about it?
“There was a little anxiety. We had a consultant who assisted on it. We also had SMG who runs the building now, they brought some resources to the table. So, between the outside consultant and SMG, I did have some professional resources. We had a couple of good attorneys on our side. But part of it is just business, just sitting down and cutting deals. I’ve cut a lot of big deals. I’ve been involved with the Skirvin, hotels, water rights, a lot of things. I’m not saying it’s just another deal, but it’s a business deal.”
What did you do to get past that anxiety? Did you get past that?
“Probably not. You’ve gotta just get the contract done. It was a very stressful time for both of them. The Hornets contract there was no time. The negotiations only lasted like two weeks because it couldn’t go any longer than that. The urgency on it helped because you knew this wasn’t going to drag out into November. The Thunder we did a two-phase approach because we couldn’t get the contracts done. There wasn’t enough time. We did a memorandum of understanding that outlined the general business terms. It was maybe a 20-page document, then we went into that and formalized it into the hundreds of pages agreement we had later on down the line. So we had to be flexible, and we weren’t sure if the NBA was going to buy off on that approach. They were comfortable enough with the memorandum of understanding that they gave us enough time.”