Ex-Riders owner Horn Chen dead at 83
Former Ottawa Rough Riders owner Horn Chen, who never actually came to watch the team play, died earlier this week at the age of 83.
The Wichita Thunder, an East Coast Hockey League team of which Chen was a previous owner, announced on the team’s website that Chen had died Monday. Chen was also an investor in the Columbus Blue Jackets.
According to the Rough Riders’ 1995 fact book, Chen had “unusual capabilities, extensive knowledge and astute business skills,” which made him “an exceptional asset to the Rough Riders.” It described him as an “avid sports enthusiast with a superb business record.”
Phil Rimer, who was one of Chen’s lawyers in Ottawa, had kept in touch with him but hadn’t spoken with him recently. He described him as a “very discrete, low-key individual,” whose first loves were baseball in particular and hockey. He last spoke to Chen to call in a favour to help out someone looking to get into sports management.
“He just couldn’t do enough, which was just the type of gentleman he was.”
But when Chen, a Chicago businessman, owned the Rough Riders in 1995-96, both seasons were disastrous; in 1995, the team even tried to draft Derrell Robertson, who’d died several months earlier in a car crash. When Chen left, he took the team’s name with him, reportedly demanding up to $100,000 for its use, and it took the CFL years to reacquire the moniker.
“My first major mistake was buying the team,” he told the Citizen in November 1996. “If I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t have gotten involved.”
Darren Joseph, who played fullback and is now an Ottawa police officer, was at training camp in 1995 before being traded to Saskatchewan, and says he didn’t even get to meet Chen.
“He was supposed to come and address the team at training camp, and he pulled up in a limo and he looked out the window, and then the window went up and he drove away,” said Joseph. “True story. So we never actually met him.
“I don’t know if he met players after that.”
Chen was hailed when he first arrived — he was an investor in minor-pro sports — putting up the money and investing in Ottawa football after the team’s previous owner sent the Rough Riders into bankruptcy. But he lost $4 million on the Rough Riders in his first year and the 120-year-old football team more or less came down around him.