At 9:15 a.m. on Monday, April 27, 1981, the sheriff walked into Cliff Wallace’s office with legal papers filed by the mayor of Pittsburgh saying Wallace was never to set foot in Pittsburgh again.
Who says sports isn’t political? And, of course, there is a story behind the headlines blaring that Cliff Wallace and New Orleans were interfering in negotiations between the City of Pittsburgh and Major League Baseball’s Pittsburgh Pirates.
The surprise banishment, and one of Wallace’s more unusual claims to fame, came the day after his return to New Orleans. He had a quick trip to Pittsburgh to chat up the owners of the Pittsburgh Pirates regarding a desire to host a baseball team at the Louisiana Superdome. Wallace was general manager of the Superdome and executive vice president of Hyatt Management Corp. (HMC), which managed the dome at the time.
It all started one morning when the late, great Denzil Skinner, CEO of HMC which later became Facility Management Group, called Wallace at home.
“Cliff, I need you to do something as a favor to A.N. Pritzker.”
“Okay, let me have it.”
“John and Dan Galbreath are renegotiating their contract at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh. I want you to go to Pittsburgh and go through your normal marketing spiel and go through the exercise of telling them that you want to move the Pirates to New Orleans.”
The Galbreaths owned the Pittsburgh Pirates at the time and were locked in litigation over the lease at Three Rivers Stadium they claimed had them swimming in red ink over maintaining the venue.
“Denzil always said one of his goals was to bring a baseball team to the Superdome,” Wallace recalled. “We worked hard to do that. I attended the baseball meetings each year and we hosted Yankees spring league-type games every year.”
The Galbreaths were good friends of A.N. Pritzker of Hyatt Hotels, who also owned HMC Management Corp.
“What Denzil was saying in so many words was ‘you don’t have a chance in hell to get the baseball team, but Mr. Pritzker would like you to help his friends get a better deal at Three Rivers Stadium,’” Wallace recalled. That’s the politics of sports. It’s a relationship business.
So Wallace hops on a plane Sunday morning. He goes directly to Galbreath’s office at the stadium. It’s a game day. “I meet with them. It was really just happy talk. We never got down to business,” Wallace said.
“Then Dan, the son, said, ‘Now Cliff, we’re going to have a little get together in the room next door in a few minutes and we want you to participate.’”
“What’s this all about?”
“It’s just a little media thing we want to do. We want to introduce you and tell them you’re here from New Orleans and you’re interested in a baseball team in New Orleans and you’re here waving the flag.”
Wallace had not known about the “little media thing.” Moreover, he didn’t know if it would suit Denzil or even A.N. “But I knew it would be one hell of a story in the New Orleans newspapers,” Wallace said.
“We all get up and walk over to the door and the double doors open and there must have been 50 TV cameras and media people in that room. They’d been told I was there, I had made the deal and the Galbreaths were considering going to New Orleans. I didn’t know what to do. And then I had to go to the podium.”
“All I could say was, ‘Guys, I’m here and I’m very serious.’ And I was. I had wanted a baseball team for a long time. ‘We had good meetings, good discussions and I am hoping to hear back from the Galbreaths real soon.’”
Wallace was on a plane home that night, getting back late Sunday. Monday morning’s headlines were along these lines, “City sues to stop Superdome wooing Bucs.” (The Pirates were often referred to as the Bucs or Buccos at the time.)
The mayor of Pittsburgh had filed suit against New Orleans, HMC Management, the Louisiana Superdome and all its officials to, as Pittsburgh Mayor Richard Caliguiri was quoted as saying, “serve notice on the city of New Orleans and the management of its Superdome to butt out of this city’s present contractual dispute with the Pirates management.”
“I was thinking to myself it was wise on the mayor’s part; he was standing up for his team. The sport writers I knew in New Orleans could see through it all, but they respected I was out there trying,” Wallace said.
Handling the press was the least of Wallace’s concerns thereafter. Denzil and A.N. weren’t so happy about the headlines, probably because A.N. Pritzker was very sensitive about causing problems for government given his multiple dealings with it in building his hotels.
The Superdome staff thought it was a scream. “My attorney laughed for an hour… It was so funny and so clever. The mayor of Pittsburgh had so quickly stood up for his position and told the potential competition to fly a kite and never come back. He was going to do whatever it took to keep the Pirates from leaving that city,” Wallace said.
And it’s all a day in the life of a venue manager.
Wallace doesn’t believe there is a viable book that can be written about “standards” in venue management because “the way we do business varies from city to city. There is no formula. You have to develop it as you go. It’s based not so much on the business, but on the personality you are negotiating with.”
We don’t know if he’s ever gone back to Pittsburgh. — Based on a true story as told to Linda Deckard.