Texan vows to protect spirit of Liverpool
By David Bond in Dallas
Daily Telgraph 10/2/07
Tom Hicks' secretary Becky is staring anxiously at a giant flat-screen television on the wall of the Dallas billionaire's vast office and fiddling with a remote control.
"We've got in all the soccer channels for him now, but I just can't get this darned thing to work," she says in a very Texan drawl.
Suddenly Hicks, who has been posing for pictures on a balcony outside in the chilly winter air, walks back into the room. "What time are the midweek kick-offs?" he asks.
I tell him they are usually 7.45pm and his face lights up. "Great. I can watch them during the day while I'm doing some work," he says.
Not everyone can spend at least £100 million on one of England's most revered clubs just to give themselves a little post-lunch entertainment. But then not everyone is as wealthy or as powerfully connected as Liverpool's new joint owner, Thomas O Hicks.
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To prove the point, on the opposite side of his vast office – more a hotel suite than an office, really – is a framed letter from George W Bush and four pictures of Hicks and his family with the American President in the Oval Office.
Hicks, who made his fortune from raising private equity to finance multi-billion-dollar corporate takeovers, has long been one of Bush's biggest supporters but is troubled by the perception that he is part of his inner circle.
"I consider him a friend," he says in his deep, slow southern accent. "I know his father and I consider him a friend, too. But I'm not a close friend with either one of them.
"He's a big sports fan, big baseball fan. Three or four times when we play up at Baltimore he invites me to pass by and bring four or five players to the Oval Office and meet him, and it's a great treat for the players. Actually, I think it's a great treat for the President."
Bush was one of 32 partners who owned the Texas Rangers baseball team before selling it to Hicks in a deal worth $250 million in 1998. At the time he sold it he was the governor of Texas and there was controversy over the $15 million the future President was supposed to have netted from the deal.
It was not the first time Hicks' relationship with Bush had been used as a political tool to attack him. But with America now bogged down with the war in Iraq, has he ever wavered in his support for Bush?
"We should all let history decide about his reputation because we're going through a very difficult time," he says. "Tony Blair is immensely popular in the US but not in his own country. But history may be very kind to Tony Blair."
With the election race for the White House in 2008 already under way here, Hicks is now throwing his considerable influence behind the former mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani.
"Actually I'm more closely aligned to Rudy than I am to Bush," he says. "I'm chair of his Texas exploratory committee and if he runs his Texas campaign I am on his national executive committee.
"I think he will be a great President. He's the guy who can both figure out how to fight this war on terror and bring this country back together. We are too divided, we have too much red states versus blue states. We should all be one team and I think Rudy can do that."
It is a sign of the increasingly bizarre world of the Premiership – a world where Russian oligarchs rub shoulders in the boardroom with Icelandic biscuit tycoons – that Liverpool have become part of the Hicks portfolio. But he is taking his new venture so seriously that, during talks to buy the club with his fellow American George Gillett nine days ago, he missed a dinner for Giuliani and 200 Republican Party supporters in Houston to have lunch with the former Liverpool chairman, David Moores, and his wife, Marge.
That week was a real adventure for Hicks, who the night before had had his first experience of Premiership football in Liverpool's 2-1 victory over West Ham at Upton Park. It helped to convince him that he wanted to add Liverpool to his sports empire, which already includes the Rangers and Dallas Stars ice hockey team.
"Wow, West Ham's fans are pretty colourful," he says, smiling. "We were the only people wearing suits and ties and that night we heard variations of certain cuss words that I'd never heard before."
The next day, perhaps sensing that Moores and Liverpool chief executive Rick Parry had been convinced by Hicks and Gillett, previously favoured bidders Dubai International Capital pulled out.
That night Hicks and Gillett went to the Emirates Stadium to watch Arsenal play Tottenham in the Carling Cup. Hicks flew home the next day before returning last Sunday to complete the deal on Monday. The whole takeover had taken just two months from the moment Gillett, who had initially been overlooked by Parry and Moores in favour of DIC, approached him about becoming a partner.
So why was he so keen to get involved? "Well, George called me in early December and said, 'Do you have any interest in England's Premier League?' Hicks explains. "And I said, 'George, I don't think so. I already own two teams; I don't think I need a third.'
"He gave me a bunch of financial numbers which sounded attractive, but then that weekend I went online for hours just reading about the football club.
"Of course I had heard of Liverpool – who hadn't? But I was fascinated with the history. No teams in the US are that old and very few are old at all. The legacy of the 115-year history, the 18 championships, the gigantic worldwide fan base, the tragedies.
"The fan side was easy. To feel the passion of a Premiership game and the noise – I've never seen anything like that. In the US we just don't have that. I found that very exciting.
"On the financial side, I've been in the sports business now for 12 years and I understand all the commercial drivers. Looking at Liverpool, what struck me, with the 67 per cent increase in domestic TV rights, was that the Premiership is soon to be on a par with the NFL.
"Increasingly the internet is going to be huge, and as I look a the next 20-25 years I find that very economically attractive. When the new stadium is built, revenues will be comparable to any NFL team but NFL teams are going for two or three times that price.
"We have to be sensitive to the great fan base – that's the asset we have to protect. But if we can keep that overwhelming support and grow the perception of Liverpool around the world, if you look at Real Madrid or Manchester United, they do that and I think Liverpool can do that, too."
Hicks has identified two markets – South America and China – in which he can try to grow the Liverpool legend. But he and Gillett are determined not to jeopardise their relationship with Liverpool's fiercely proud and loyal supporters, and want to strike the right balance between tradition and exploring new opportunities.
"I knew about the tragedies [of Heysel and Hillsborough], but I hadn't associated them with Liverpool. As I read up on it and spoke to people, it became clear to me that those are a big part of what the club are about."
As he plans for Liverpool's move away from their spiritual Anfield home, Hicks also says he is focused on delivering a new stadium which re-creates the special atmosphere at the same time as providing the best stadium in the league.
But he won't be looking to replicate all the old customs of the Kop.
"Oh yeah, I've heard about the tradition of the 'warm leg'," he says, in a reference to the old days when fans could not get out to go to the toilet. "They were packed in too tight back then. The new stadium design will ensure a much more comfortable experience for the fans. But it will be our intention to protect the Kop."
Hicks, who was 61 on Wednesday, grew up in Dallas and, besides spending some time working in New York and as a student in California, has lived his whole life in the city made famous for us by the TV dramas of JR Ewing and Miss Ellie.
But the reality of modern Dallas, America's ninth largest city, is very different. It is now far more cosmopolitan and has become known for banking and telecommunications.
The typical Dallas image of plate-glass skyscrapers shimmering in the intense summer sun also seems a long way away. On the day I meet Hicks, a grey fog hangs over the tower blocks and, while snow rarely falls in these parts, it is very cold.
Apart from the winter chill, however, there still don't seem to be too many similarities with Merseyside. "Both cities love winners," Hicks says. "And they are very proud and loyal people," his son, Tom Jnr, adds.
Although Hicks' new purchase made headlines here earlier in the week, another type of football was making front-page news yesterday. The Dallas Cowboys have just hired Wade Phillips as their new head coach – such a big deal that The Dallas Morning News devoted page one and seven more inside to the story.
So to be talking about the Premiership in the office of one of America's wealthiest men is a rather odd experience. But Hicks soon explains why England is proving so attractive to sports tycoons on this side of the Atlantic.
"I haven't talked to [Malcolm] Glazer at all – we're in totally different orbits – but I can totally understand what he saw with Manchester United. The long-term media contracts are much better than the NFL, because football is the most popular sport in the world. American football can't do it. It's tried but it's not going to work.
"He showed us how not to do it. And we didn't approach it the same way. We were hand-picked by David Moores to be his successor and we paid the highest price to do it.
"But from everything I have been told, he [Glazer] is not unpopular any more. Human nature is not to like change. It would be easy to demonise the Glazers, but you know, they paid a lot of money to buy something that was successful – why would they change it? Why would we change Liverpool? We want to make it more successful."
Hicks masterminded his first leveraged buy-out when he was 31 and has been doing them ever since. His former company Hicks, Muse, Tate and Furst, handled $50 billion-worth of takeovers, most notably the deal which sold drinks brands such as 7Up and Dr Pepper to Cadbury Schweppes. He now runs Hicks Holdings but is much less involved in corporate mergers and acquisitions. Instead he devotes an increasing amount of his time to sport.
In the reception area of his offices is a replica of the Stanley Cup, the NHL's championship trophy, which he won with the Stars in 1999. He explains that what started as a short-term investment has now become a passion.
"I bought the Stars thinking it would be a three to five-year investment," he says, his enormous, diamond encrusted Stanley Cup winner's ring flashing in the light.
"I figured I would do up their arena and then sell it, but along the way I fell in love with hockey. Then I bought the baseball team and I fell in love with baseball. Now I have a chance to fall in love with football."
By David Bond in Dallas
Daily Telgraph 10/2/07
Tom Hicks' secretary Becky is staring anxiously at a giant flat-screen television on the wall of the Dallas billionaire's vast office and fiddling with a remote control.
"We've got in all the soccer channels for him now, but I just can't get this darned thing to work," she says in a very Texan drawl.
Suddenly Hicks, who has been posing for pictures on a balcony outside in the chilly winter air, walks back into the room. "What time are the midweek kick-offs?" he asks.
I tell him they are usually 7.45pm and his face lights up. "Great. I can watch them during the day while I'm doing some work," he says.
Not everyone can spend at least £100 million on one of England's most revered clubs just to give themselves a little post-lunch entertainment. But then not everyone is as wealthy or as powerfully connected as Liverpool's new joint owner, Thomas O Hicks.
advertisement
To prove the point, on the opposite side of his vast office – more a hotel suite than an office, really – is a framed letter from George W Bush and four pictures of Hicks and his family with the American President in the Oval Office.
Hicks, who made his fortune from raising private equity to finance multi-billion-dollar corporate takeovers, has long been one of Bush's biggest supporters but is troubled by the perception that he is part of his inner circle.
"I consider him a friend," he says in his deep, slow southern accent. "I know his father and I consider him a friend, too. But I'm not a close friend with either one of them.
"He's a big sports fan, big baseball fan. Three or four times when we play up at Baltimore he invites me to pass by and bring four or five players to the Oval Office and meet him, and it's a great treat for the players. Actually, I think it's a great treat for the President."
Bush was one of 32 partners who owned the Texas Rangers baseball team before selling it to Hicks in a deal worth $250 million in 1998. At the time he sold it he was the governor of Texas and there was controversy over the $15 million the future President was supposed to have netted from the deal.
It was not the first time Hicks' relationship with Bush had been used as a political tool to attack him. But with America now bogged down with the war in Iraq, has he ever wavered in his support for Bush?
"We should all let history decide about his reputation because we're going through a very difficult time," he says. "Tony Blair is immensely popular in the US but not in his own country. But history may be very kind to Tony Blair."
With the election race for the White House in 2008 already under way here, Hicks is now throwing his considerable influence behind the former mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani.
"Actually I'm more closely aligned to Rudy than I am to Bush," he says. "I'm chair of his Texas exploratory committee and if he runs his Texas campaign I am on his national executive committee.
"I think he will be a great President. He's the guy who can both figure out how to fight this war on terror and bring this country back together. We are too divided, we have too much red states versus blue states. We should all be one team and I think Rudy can do that."
It is a sign of the increasingly bizarre world of the Premiership – a world where Russian oligarchs rub shoulders in the boardroom with Icelandic biscuit tycoons – that Liverpool have become part of the Hicks portfolio. But he is taking his new venture so seriously that, during talks to buy the club with his fellow American George Gillett nine days ago, he missed a dinner for Giuliani and 200 Republican Party supporters in Houston to have lunch with the former Liverpool chairman, David Moores, and his wife, Marge.
That week was a real adventure for Hicks, who the night before had had his first experience of Premiership football in Liverpool's 2-1 victory over West Ham at Upton Park. It helped to convince him that he wanted to add Liverpool to his sports empire, which already includes the Rangers and Dallas Stars ice hockey team.
"Wow, West Ham's fans are pretty colourful," he says, smiling. "We were the only people wearing suits and ties and that night we heard variations of certain cuss words that I'd never heard before."
The next day, perhaps sensing that Moores and Liverpool chief executive Rick Parry had been convinced by Hicks and Gillett, previously favoured bidders Dubai International Capital pulled out.
That night Hicks and Gillett went to the Emirates Stadium to watch Arsenal play Tottenham in the Carling Cup. Hicks flew home the next day before returning last Sunday to complete the deal on Monday. The whole takeover had taken just two months from the moment Gillett, who had initially been overlooked by Parry and Moores in favour of DIC, approached him about becoming a partner.
So why was he so keen to get involved? "Well, George called me in early December and said, 'Do you have any interest in England's Premier League?' Hicks explains. "And I said, 'George, I don't think so. I already own two teams; I don't think I need a third.'
"He gave me a bunch of financial numbers which sounded attractive, but then that weekend I went online for hours just reading about the football club.
"Of course I had heard of Liverpool – who hadn't? But I was fascinated with the history. No teams in the US are that old and very few are old at all. The legacy of the 115-year history, the 18 championships, the gigantic worldwide fan base, the tragedies.
"The fan side was easy. To feel the passion of a Premiership game and the noise – I've never seen anything like that. In the US we just don't have that. I found that very exciting.
"On the financial side, I've been in the sports business now for 12 years and I understand all the commercial drivers. Looking at Liverpool, what struck me, with the 67 per cent increase in domestic TV rights, was that the Premiership is soon to be on a par with the NFL.
"Increasingly the internet is going to be huge, and as I look a the next 20-25 years I find that very economically attractive. When the new stadium is built, revenues will be comparable to any NFL team but NFL teams are going for two or three times that price.
"We have to be sensitive to the great fan base – that's the asset we have to protect. But if we can keep that overwhelming support and grow the perception of Liverpool around the world, if you look at Real Madrid or Manchester United, they do that and I think Liverpool can do that, too."
Hicks has identified two markets – South America and China – in which he can try to grow the Liverpool legend. But he and Gillett are determined not to jeopardise their relationship with Liverpool's fiercely proud and loyal supporters, and want to strike the right balance between tradition and exploring new opportunities.
"I knew about the tragedies [of Heysel and Hillsborough], but I hadn't associated them with Liverpool. As I read up on it and spoke to people, it became clear to me that those are a big part of what the club are about."
As he plans for Liverpool's move away from their spiritual Anfield home, Hicks also says he is focused on delivering a new stadium which re-creates the special atmosphere at the same time as providing the best stadium in the league.
But he won't be looking to replicate all the old customs of the Kop.
"Oh yeah, I've heard about the tradition of the 'warm leg'," he says, in a reference to the old days when fans could not get out to go to the toilet. "They were packed in too tight back then. The new stadium design will ensure a much more comfortable experience for the fans. But it will be our intention to protect the Kop."
Hicks, who was 61 on Wednesday, grew up in Dallas and, besides spending some time working in New York and as a student in California, has lived his whole life in the city made famous for us by the TV dramas of JR Ewing and Miss Ellie.
But the reality of modern Dallas, America's ninth largest city, is very different. It is now far more cosmopolitan and has become known for banking and telecommunications.
The typical Dallas image of plate-glass skyscrapers shimmering in the intense summer sun also seems a long way away. On the day I meet Hicks, a grey fog hangs over the tower blocks and, while snow rarely falls in these parts, it is very cold.
Apart from the winter chill, however, there still don't seem to be too many similarities with Merseyside. "Both cities love winners," Hicks says. "And they are very proud and loyal people," his son, Tom Jnr, adds.
Although Hicks' new purchase made headlines here earlier in the week, another type of football was making front-page news yesterday. The Dallas Cowboys have just hired Wade Phillips as their new head coach – such a big deal that The Dallas Morning News devoted page one and seven more inside to the story.
So to be talking about the Premiership in the office of one of America's wealthiest men is a rather odd experience. But Hicks soon explains why England is proving so attractive to sports tycoons on this side of the Atlantic.
"I haven't talked to [Malcolm] Glazer at all – we're in totally different orbits – but I can totally understand what he saw with Manchester United. The long-term media contracts are much better than the NFL, because football is the most popular sport in the world. American football can't do it. It's tried but it's not going to work.
"He showed us how not to do it. And we didn't approach it the same way. We were hand-picked by David Moores to be his successor and we paid the highest price to do it.
"But from everything I have been told, he [Glazer] is not unpopular any more. Human nature is not to like change. It would be easy to demonise the Glazers, but you know, they paid a lot of money to buy something that was successful – why would they change it? Why would we change Liverpool? We want to make it more successful."
Hicks masterminded his first leveraged buy-out when he was 31 and has been doing them ever since. His former company Hicks, Muse, Tate and Furst, handled $50 billion-worth of takeovers, most notably the deal which sold drinks brands such as 7Up and Dr Pepper to Cadbury Schweppes. He now runs Hicks Holdings but is much less involved in corporate mergers and acquisitions. Instead he devotes an increasing amount of his time to sport.
In the reception area of his offices is a replica of the Stanley Cup, the NHL's championship trophy, which he won with the Stars in 1999. He explains that what started as a short-term investment has now become a passion.
"I bought the Stars thinking it would be a three to five-year investment," he says, his enormous, diamond encrusted Stanley Cup winner's ring flashing in the light.
"I figured I would do up their arena and then sell it, but along the way I fell in love with hockey. Then I bought the baseball team and I fell in love with baseball. Now I have a chance to fall in love with football."
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