Sports mogul brought Stanleyto New Jersey
John J. McMullen, who brought the National Hockey League to New Jersey in 1982, then presided over Devils teams that won two Stanley Cup championships, died Friday at his home in Montclair, N.J. He was 87.
McMullen, a career naval officer who founded a marine engineering firm after leaving military service, turned to the sporting world in the early 1970s. He became a limited partner in the group headed by George Steinbrenner that purchased baseball’s New York Yankees from the CBS television network, but famously remarked that “nothing is as limited as being a limited partner of George’s.”
A far larger role in sports ownership arrived for McMullen in 1979, when he became the owner of baseball’s Houston Astros.
In 1982, McMullen bought the Denver- based Colorado Rockies, a floundering NHL franchise, and moved it to the Meadowlands in north-eastern New Jersey. In its early years the team, renamed the Devils, operated in the shadow of the two New York teams, the Rangers and the Islanders, but under McMullen it went on to win the Stenley Cup in 1995 and 2000.
John Joseph McMullen, a native of Jersey City, N. J., graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1940, served in combat during the Second World War and retired from military service in 1954 with the rank of commander.
He founded John J. McMullen Associates, an international firm of naval architects and marine engineers, in 1959, and acquired Norton Lilly International, a shipping agency, in 1972, operating it until 2002. He was president and chief executive of the United States Lines from 1968 to 1971.
He received a master of science degree from MIT and a doctorate in mechanical engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
McMullen was part of an investment group that bought the Astros from the Ford Motor Credit Corp. in the summer of 1979 for an estimated US$13-million. The following season, the Astros won a divisional title for the first time in their 19-year history and drew a club-record attendance of almost 2.3 million to the Astrodome.
But McMullen came under sharp criticism for dismissing Tal Smith as the club president, and the Astros never won a league championship pennant under his ownership. They did complete smart deals, bringing in stars such as Jeff Bagwell, Steve Finley and Curt Schilling, and many Astros players remained close to McMullen after he sold the team. He also gave current Major League Baseball executive Bob Watson a position that led to his becoming general manager of the Astros in October 1993, making him the lone African-American at the time to hold such a post.
McMullen sold the Astros to Drayton McLane Jr. in 1992. By then, the Devils were on their way to becoming a leading NHL franchise, after the hiring of Lou Lamoriello as general manager in the late 1980s. The Rangers, though, remained in the New York regional spotlight given their marquee home, Madison Square Garden.
“ The Rangers are in the most dominant position of any New York team from the standpoint of fan base and adoration,” McMullen told Dave Anderson of The New York Times
in April 2000, when the Devils were en route to their second Stanley Cup title. “I’ve had to live in their shadow all this time.”
But the Devils flourished that season with a US$37.6-million payroll compared with the Rangers’ payroll of US$61.2-million — for a team that didn’t make the playoffs.
Having spent about US$30million to buy his NHL franchise, McMullen sold the Devils to the YankeeNets organization for US$176-million in the summer of 2000 after being unable to obtain state assistance toward building a new arena in Hoboken, N. J.
In his final months as the Devils’ owner, McMullen looked beyond pro sports in assessing the franchise’s impact.
“I think our legacy is the proliferation of junior hockey in New Jersey,” he said. “I think more kids under 15 can name more Devils players than they can any other professional team in this area.”