Former Consultant Poised to Preside Over O.C. Sports : Personalities: As head of Disney Sports Enterprises, Tony Tavares could oversee both Ducks and Angels.

The man who soon could rule big-time sports in Orange County--the Mighty Ducks and the Angels--got the job by not applying.

Tony Tavares, then merely a consultant, spent countless hours the fall of 1992 and early ’93 crunching numbers and quietly delving into whether the Walt Disney Co. should acquire a National Hockey League team--and how much money could be made. When Disney Chairman Michael D. Eisner decided to make the company’s first venture into major league sports by bringing the NHL to Anaheim, he asked Tavares--perhaps a bit coyly--for a list of candidates to run the franchise.

Eisner rejected Tavares’ first list, and his second. Finally, he asked Tavares one more question: “Why isn’t your name on the list?”

Whether a consultant’s ethic, a form of modesty or a savvy reading of Eisner kept Tavares from putting down his own name, it was the perfect move. Eisner tossed the lists and hired Tavares to be president of Disney Sports Enterprises.

The plural in that title meant there would be more, and now there is. Little more than two years after his work earned the arena management specialist a chance to build an NHL team from scratch, Tavares is the head of Disney’s burgeoning athletic kingdom, poised to oversee both the Ducks and the Angels--once major league owners give their approval for Disney to take over direction of the team by purchasing 25% of it from Gene and Jackie Autry.

No formal announcement has been made about any role for Tavares with the Angels, but Jackie Autry has said that speculation about him ultimately running both teams “is fairly accurate.”

But could Tavares really run two teams during an unending season that would stretch from October to October?

“Tony has the capacity to handle four teams,” said Andy Roundtree, chief financial officer of Disney Sports Enterprises. “It all depends on the layer beneath him and how well it performs. Tony can ask questions, make a decision, ‘Boom, boom, let’s go.’ ”

If Tavares’ record running the Ducks is any indication, the Angels will still be salary-conscious, though perhaps willing to loosen the purse strings for young marquee players the way the Ducks did for Paul Kariya. Tavares was a hard-liner during last season’s NHL labor dispute, adamant that the growth of player salaries had to be controlled.

The Autrys claim they have been hemorrhaging money for years. Tavares not only expects a profit, he budgets one.

If player costs go up, so do, say, Duck ticket prices. Along with old-fashioned marketing, another thing that would probably end is any claim that the Angels are a “small-market team.” On the other side of the Orange Freeway, the Ducks’ profits have stamped them big-market from the start.

Tavares, 45, has a reputation for being straightforward, but he also shuts up when a deal is in its delicate final stages. He is declining now to talk even about himself, much less what his role with the Angels might be, until baseball’s owners approve the sale.

His skittishness seems unwarranted, because unless Eisner proposes that games last five innings and the manager wear a suit, baseball’s owners figure to greet Disney with open arms.

Those who know Tavares well call him bright and driven, a hands-on manager who is demanding but fair, blunt but honest.

“Tony’s a workaholic and always has been . . . and he’s got a computer for a brain,” said longtime friend Roy Mlakar, a former president of the Kings who, with Bruce McNall, recommended Tavares to Eisner as a consultant.

“He has an exceptional memory,” Roundtree said. “It’s almost sickening. We call it selective memory: He remembers everything you don’t want him to remember.”

Tavares also is a negotiator so dogged that when opponents emerge after finalizing a deal, Mlakar said, “they’re bruised.”

In 1993, talks went nearly around the clock as Tavares negotiated the Anaheim Arena lease with Ogden Entertainment Services and city officials.

“That was an ordeal. I don’t know how to describe it,” said John MacAniff, executive vice president at Ogden. The contract is considered so advantageous to Disney that industry experts say the only way an NBA team will move there is if Disney owns it--or makes major concessions.

“Tony’s a tough negotiator, which makes him fit in with Disney,” MacAniff said. “In the parlance of the street, you’re not going to B.S. Tony. He strikes a tough deal, especially when he has leverage.

“I wouldn’t say he’s pleasant in negotiations, but he’s got a demeanor that gets things done. It’s not screaming and yelling; it’s not posturing. He knows what he’s doing, and he doesn’t posture. He deals in facts, not emotions. There is humor there, though. It’s not all a death march.”

Tavares’ reputation for one-liners was cast on the Ducks’ opening night two years ago, when the “Iceman,” an abrasive, glittering rock-star character was booed by fans. He never appeared again.

“The Iceman cometh, and the Iceman goeth,” Tavares said. “He’s in a cryogenic freeze.”

Eisner read the quotes and chided him, “Don’t be so urbane.”

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If Angel employees are worried about their future, some of them probably should be.

“Absolutely, he’s tough to work for. He’s also fair,” said Dana Warg, a former colleague in the arena business who now manages Minneapolis’ Target Center. “If you work hard for him, he’ll reward you. And if you’re a good employee, he’ll back you 100%. You’re going to get challenged all the time, but he’ll turn around and back people up. Even if you got in trouble, if a guy made an honest mistake, he’d back him up. I don’t think he’d allow a second or third mistake, though.”

The day the Angel deal broke last week, Tavares called the entire Duck staff into a meeting to tell them--and to warn them ominously not to be quoted, even anonymously.

“I’ve recommended people to him, but I wouldn’t recommend anybody to him I didn’t believe in 150%,” Warg said. “He’d eat them up and spit them out.”

But in a business where ownership and upper management are known for interfering with those they hire to choose the players, make the trades and coach the team, Tavares has so far kept to his expertise.

“He really lets you do your job,” said Duck General Manager Jack Ferreira, an NHL veteran who has worked for half a dozen teams. “He has a great ability to cut to the chase. He can look at a situation and really get the fluff out of there and . . . get to the meat of the matter.

“Because of that, he asks a lot of questions. . . . I call them mental gymnastics: If this happens, what would we do? What if something we want to happen doesn’t? What’s the ultimate plan? He’s never come in and said, ‘You’ve got to do this.’ He’ll ask what your plans are, what you’ll do in that situation.

“For someone who did not come from a hockey management background, yeah, he doesn’t try to impose things on you.”

The one time Tavares did impose himself came when he was quoted the day of a Kings game saying that Wayne Gretzky uses his standing to influence calls. “He cries all the time,” Tavares said. “He has influenced more calls than any other player probably in the history of sports.”

Tavares also said Gretzky is the greatest player in the history of the game, but so does everybody else.

“I walked in the dressing room,” Mlakar said, “and Gretz threw the paper at me: ‘Look what your [expletive] buddy said.’ ”

Mlakar headed for Tavares’ office, laughing at his old friend’s mistake. “Keep your eye on No. 99 tonight,” he said. Gretzky had two goals and three assists in a 5-3 Kings victory.

Tavares built the Ducks from the ground up in seven months--from a team that had no pucks, coach or players to opening night--by working what his staff jokingly calls “half days”: 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., one-half of a 24-hour day. Many days, Tavares would look up at the end of a meeting and see that it was almost 10 p.m.

The pace took a toll. Tavares gained weight to the point his friends were concerned. The stress affected his health, and even he has said he might have put some nails in his coffin--and in some of his employees’.

Only weeks before the franchise’s first game in 1993, Tavares fired Ken Wilson, vice president for sales and marketing. Wilson had trouble adjusting to Disney’s way of doing things, and a crucial mistake in negotiating the broadcast schedule angered Tavares.

“The bottom line was it was just a decision we kind of knew had to be made--both of us,” Tavares said at the time. Wilson has declined to comment.

It wasn’t until the NHL labor dispute delayed the start of the Ducks’ second season that Tavares slowed his pace and started taking care of himself, working out on the team’s equipment before work or on a break.

“He was running around in his sweats all the time,” Ferreira said. “I started calling him ‘Prime Time.’ ”

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Those who expected Eisner to be the face of Duck ownership have been surprised. Eisner was the driving force behind the Duck and Angel deals, but he is less and less a presence at Duck games. He is rarely seen in the dressing room and, though he talks to Tavares almost daily, is removed from decisions on players and trades.

Instead, Tavares has been the image of ownership. He has seen a project that some stockholders once viewed as Eisner’s dalliance turn an estimated $9-million profit in its first season and grow in value from an original investment of $37.5 million to an estimated worth of more than $100 million.

Until Eisner hired him, Tavares had never held a job in sports, other than some consulting work. His career had been spent on the periphery, making sure such things as the arena lights and sound and box office worked smoothly for a sports tenant while he booked Fleetwood Mac concerts and saw that the building made money. Associates describe him as a “sports nut,” and even now, with an NHL team to run, he will sit at lunch and maneuver sugar packets to illustrate plays from his 15-year-old son Mark’s youth hockey games.

Tavares and his wife, Elizabeth, live in Villa Park. They also have two daughters, Sheila, 21, and Kristen, 19. He grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood in Bristol, R.I., not far from Providence. He rose quickly from comptroller of the Providence Civic Center to president--by age 30--of Spectacor Management Group, a Philadelphia-based facilities management company that grew from managing a handful of buildings to managing more than 40.

Tavares still carries a walkie-talkie during Duck games, the better to stay in touch with the inner workings of the building. If something goes wrong that could have been avoided, his fuse can be short. His goal in all his years in the arena business, he has said, has been “zero defects,” even on opening night.

“I think what drives him is multiple projects,” said Tim Ryan, who worked for Tavares at Spectacor but now works for Ogden Facility Management as assistant general manager of The Pond at Anaheim. “When I heard Tony was named president of Disney Sports Enterprises . . . I did not expect his involvement to stop at one franchise, and I don’t expect it to stop at two. He thrives on this. He really has an amazing ability to juggle multiple complex projects and get the results he’s striving for.”

When Tavares left Spectacor to become a consultant in the early 1990s, he sent a fax to employees around the country telling them he was going to “stop and smell the roses.”

“All of us associated with Spectacor read that and said it’s just a matter of time before he comes back and plants an entire new garden,” Ryan said.

Whether Tavares imagined that a consulting job for Eisner might end up putting him in charge of two major league teams--and counting--is open to speculation.

“Knowing Tony,” said Warg, a former Spectacor colleague, “I think he had a damn good idea.”