Entrepreneur brought WhirlyBall to Chicago
As Sam Elias lay in his hospital bed receiving treatment, two doctors asked about the WhirlyBall shirt he was wearing.
Well, they were told, he was the founder and chief executive officer of WhirlyBall’s three Chicago-area locations and two more in Milwaukee and Colorado Springs, Colorado.
“The two doctors absolutely lit up,” said Sam Elias’ son Adam Elias, who since 2013 has worked with his father as WhirlyBall’s vice president.
Mr. Elias, 59, died from cancer Sept. 4 at his Northbrook home.
“All the way up through his last days, people were still telling him how much fun they had at the concept he brought to Chicago,” said his son, who helped engineer the relocation of the Chicago-area flagship from Lombard to Naperville last November.
Like the other locations, it combines a restaurant and bar with the crazy concoction that is WhirlyBall — imagine a combination of basketball, lacrosse and hockey played while careening around a rink in bumper cars.
Growing up in North Miami Beach, Florida, Mr. Elias was running his own information technology company, Computer Classified Incorporated, when his wife, Robyn, surprised him with a 30th birthday party at a WhirlyBall in Miami. He was instantly hooked.
He wanted to be in a cooler climate and, visiting a WhirlyBall in Detroit, he figured that, if it worked there, it would work in Chicago, Adam Elias said.
He found a vacant, column-free building at 800 E. Roosevelt Rd. in Lombard and pitched the idea to the landlord, who hadn’t heard of WhirlyBall.
Mr. Elias had brought a videotape of a TV show that featured WhirlyBall. They traipsed across the street to a Highland Superstore and shoved the tape into a videocassette recorder.
A salesman saw it and said he’d played WhirlyBall in Detroit and how fun it was.
“Right there, on the spot, the landlord said, ‘All right, let’s do this,’ “Adam Elias said.
Completed in six weeks, that first WhirlyBall in the Chicago area opened Jan. 15, 1993. In three months, it became the highest-grossing location in the country.
“At the time, it was only the game,” Adam Elias said.
Mr. Elias later added food and drink.
Locations followed on the North Side of Chicago and in Vernon Hills, Colorado Springs, Milwaukee and Naperville, with Mr. Elias’ family — his wife and their sons Adam and Ryan and his sister Beth Roscoe — helping run the business.
Mr. Elias became the sole licensee of WhirlyBall equipment in 2012 and, in 2014, after the city of Chicago used eminent domain to force him out of his Fullerton Avenue to make way for the Elston Avenue bypass, he built a new building and moved the operation to Webster Avenue in Bucktown.
Mr. Elias had taken up snowboarding at 40 with his three sons, Adam, Ryan and Jacob and, until last spring, was still snowboarding during a family trip to Colorado.
In warmer months, Adam Elias said, he’d be in his backyard in Northbrook listening to music, “particularly the Grateful Dead” — whose music he was listening to when he died.
Funeral services have been held.