Richard Peddie - Dream Job: My Wild Ride on the Corporate Side with the Leafs, the Raptors and TFC

T he popcorn at Maple Leaf Gardens was stale. Really, really stale. And it had been stale for a long, long time without anyone apparently noticing. I noticed.

I was telling this to Lawrence Scanlan as we toured the Air Canada Centrewhich I am proud to say I was instrumental in building and whose cornerstone bears my name. Lawrence is the writer who was going to help me write my memoir, and we were just days into the project. He is also a long-standing Leaf fan from southeastern Ontario and had expressed an interest in seeing the ACC, the dressing rooms, the boardrooms, the works. The Leafs, I told him as I played tour guide, played their last game at the Gardens on February 13, 1999, and their first game at the Air Canada Centre a week later. Much connects the old barn on Carlton Street that Conn Smythe famously built in 1931 and the still-slick and constantly being reinvented hockey/basketball palace by Union Station, but much separates them too.

The only food you could get at the Gardens, I told Lawrence as we paused by the gleaming copper kettles of the microbrewery inside the ACC, was pizza and hot dogsthat and stale popcorn. The reason it was stale was this: they had far too few popcorn makers to make it fresh, so it was produced in batches weeks and months ahead of time. The whole operation was archaic.

I was appalled, and Im still appalleda decade and a half later. My first forays as a young entrepreneur and CEO were in the world of potato chips and crescent rolls, with Hostess and Pillsbury, and I well knew how freshness and customer service counted. Two words capture my lifelong approach to business: vision and valuestwo seemingly simple words that have long guided me on where I wanted to go with my dreams and precisely how I planned to get there. I had dreamed since I was twenty years old of being the president of an NBA basketball team, and every move I had made in my career was meant to inch me closer to that goal. One of the values we would adopt at the Air Canada Centre was Excite every fan, so the notion of peddling old popcorn to fans was for me at best an insult and at worst a form of heresy.

Maple Leaf Gardens was the company that time forgot. It was an historic holewith the sex scandal hanging over the place, horrid food, bad washrooms. I have always believed that management gets the workforce it deserves, and the relationship between management and the hourly staff at the Gardens was absolutely toxic. By sex scandal I am referring to the tragic case, brought to light only in 1997, of how some ninety childrenmost of them boyswere sexually abused by several Gardens employees between the 1960s and the 1980s. Red Kelly, who played for the Leafs in the 60s and coached them in the 70s, would observe a decline at the Gardens that coincided with the arrival on the scene of the late Harold Ballard. The Gardens, Kelly said, had been run with military precision, but when Ballard came, it was as if a bunch of pirates had taken over.

Management-staff relations at Maple Leaf Gardens were poisoned as a result. Not so at the ACC. On one of my last days on the job there, I spent the entire day giving to each of 600 employees a fine bottle of wine encased in a wooden box bearing an inscription by American novelist Brian Andrews: Someday, the light will shine like a sun through my skin and they will say, What have you done with your life? And though there are many moments, I think I will remember in the end that I will be proud to say, I was one of us.

It was a good bottle of wine from Sterling Vineyards in Californias Napa Valley and supplied by Diageo, one of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainments corporate sponsors. I footed the bill.

When I gave a bottle to Dwane Casey, along with the other Raptor coaches, he said he would read to the players the quotation inscribed on the box before an important future playoff game. Every single employee, whether at BMO Field or Ricoh Coliseum, at our broadcast centre or on the floors and in the offices of ACC and Maple Leaf Square, got a bottle in a box. My favourite handout of the day was to each of the unionized hourly workers (ice crew, cleaners, maintenance). I had had a rough start with them fourteen years previously: I was seen as an outsider with all kinds of new ideas. They called my approach Raptor land. In the end, we developed an authentic respect and affection for one another. This confirmed my belief that for employees as for customers, the rule is this: Respect first, affection second.

In addition to the formal retirement party put on by the Board of Directors at Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, there was also a part-time and full-time employees party held for me in the arena. I ended my speech by reciting the same Brian Andrews quotation that was inscribed on the wine box. I was so emotional that it took me about a minute to get it out. This was a rare showing of feeling, one that most of my employees had never seen before.

As Lawrence and I stood at Gate 1, the canyonesque entryway to the Air Canada Centre, I spotted a tall (like, really tall) man in a matching brown overcoat and fedora. I am a former Boston marathoner who used to be a rail-thin five feet, eleven inches and 140 pounds, though these days Im closer to 185. The man clad in brown seemed to get bigger and bigger the closer we got to him: he turned out to be Jamaal Magloire, six feet, eleven inches and 265 pounds.

The Toronto Raptors centreman recognized me right away. Hey, said the gentle giant, and a big paw reached out to envelop first my hand and then Lawrences. Magloire, the first Canadian-born player to suit up for the Raptors, was, at age thirty-four, in the final stretch of a twelve-year career with the NBA. The team would release him in October 2012, but a month later he would be hired back as a basketball development consultant and community ambassador.

What are you doing now, my friend? he asked me. It was early in March 2012exactly sixty-five days after I had stepped down as president and CEO of MLSE, a hockey/basketball/soccer/broadcasting/real estate/restaurant/rock music empire now worth $2 billion and one that I played a pivotal role in building and shaping. In my time there, not only did the Leaf franchise expand mightily but the entire MLSE corporation increased in value almost sixfold.