It’s Time for Sullivan’s $8,000 Investment to Pay Off

During Notre Dame’s Frank Leahy era 40 years ago, William H. (Billy) Sullivan was a school publicist and a fan of both college and pro sports when he first dreamed of owning a pro club.

It seemed absurdly out of the question then, and it was still unlikely in 1959, when, one day, Sullivan got a call from his old coach.

By then, Leahy was based in California as the general manager of a new Los Angeles football team, the Chargers, and Sullivan was in Boston doing publicity for a coal and oil company.

“We need one more (American Football League) franchise,” Leahy told Sullivan. “We have seven firm cities now, and you can have Boston if you want it.”

“How much?” Sullivan asked.

“Twenty-five thousand,” Leahy replied.

“I’ve only got $8,000,” Sullivan said.

“Borrow the rest,” said Leahy. “You’ll never regret it.”

It isn’t quite true that he’s never regretted it, but Billy Sullivan did get into pro football on borrowed money, and, to stay there, he’s been borrowing ever since, more or less.

An acquaintance once said: “Billy’s the only guy I know who could run an $8,000 stake into a $30-million debt.”

At the same time, as the owner of the New England Patriots, Sullivan has a property that is now worth perhaps $70 million.

Some people are money poor. Sullivan is property poor.

To get his hands on some money, he would have to sell the property, and he has decided to do that.

Throwing in a couple of other properties, including Sullivan Stadium, the home of the Patriots, he will gross something like $100 million if and when the purchasing group exercises all its options.

The group includes Drew Lewis, former U.S. Secretary of Transportation.

If he’s lucky, after paying off his debts, Sullivan will walk away with maybe $25 million.

And if he does, that will give him one sunny moment in what has been a cloudy year.

The sale of the club doesn’t really seem related to the Patriots’ more prominent 1986 troubles--in such areas as drugs and gambling--for Sullivan started looking for buyers last October, before his biggest problems surfaced.

But his decision to sell does throw some light on another major sports problem, the economics of modern pro football. Or, how to make ends meet as the owner of a $70-million team.

The Patriots have seldom known a richly profitable season, and, in a championship season, they say they even lost money last year.

“It’s getting more and more expensive to put a winning team on the field,” General Manager Patrick Sullivan said the other day.

Patrick, the youngest of Billy’s six children, said the family doesn’t really have to sell but added: “Dad doesn’t want to run the club on a shoestring when his top priority is to win.”

The family has also had some financial setbacks in other businesses, including a race track and a concert tour featuring Michael Jackson that was promoted by Sullivan’s oldest son, Charles.

The Sullivans could weather these losses unblinkingly, they believe, only if the football team paid off like a slot machine. Apparently it doesn’t.

Salaries, they say, have rolled up like TV revenues in recent years, making the budget bigger, but not the profits.

The same is said to be true in such places as New York and Chicago, where the pro football franchises are similarly owned not by wealthy merchant princes but by old-line NFL families, the Maras and the McCaskeys, descendants of the late George Halas.

Sullivan has an additional problem in Foxboro, where associates say he is tiring of a long-standing feud with the Boston Globe.

There are two Globe football writers, Will McDonough and Ron Borges, competing for exclusive-story displays in the same paper. As an old PR man, the Patriot patriarch doesn’t mind the publicity, except that scoops tend to be unflattering.

Meanwhile, at 71, Sullivan is spending his last year as an NFL owner looking in on the shop from time to time from his home on Cape Cod. He and his wife Mary live there in a small house with a lot of big windows looking out on Vineyard Sound.

“I’ve never had money,” he said again this week, talking through a big smile as he always does. But he’s closing in on some. And in the meantime he still has a job that beats writing PR releases in a Boston office--or even a Notre Dame office.