"I gave John $50,000," says Westcott, "which was the initial capital into the deal. I said, 'Look, I don't want any papers, John. Just take the $50,000, write me a letter, tell me you got it, and we'll go from there. You get this deal put together, gimme my money back.' I got enough businesses. I was not out looking for another business. I wanted to help John chase his dream, but if he got it, I wanted my money back."
Bryant had a partner, Byron Pierce. They had met 17 years ago in an adult Sunday-school class at White Rock Methodist Church in Dallas and have been close friends ever since. They have children the same ages and are both baseball fans, but other than that -- despite Pierce's claim that "everything kinda matched" in their lives -- it's hard to imagine a more unlikely pair. Bryant, first elected to Congress in 1982, is well known to C-SPAN junkies for the way he slides his reading glasses down on his nose and drills witnesses with his gaze, and is headed, he hopes, for the governor's mansion. Pierce is a scattershot entrepreneur (paging devices, Christmas trees) and devoted amateur baseball coach who played left field on the Texas high school state championship baseball team in 1965. "Byron Pierce is a wonderful guy," says Westcott. "Baseball lover, sweetheart guy, this big around." Westcott holds his arms wide. "Everybody loves him.'
At first, all Bryant and Pierce wanted was to find a team and move it to northeast Texas. That proved unrealistic, given the limited supply of teams for sale and the high cost -- at least $3 million -- for the kind of class-AA franchise they had in mind. But while considering where to put a team if they got one, they were struck by the number of cities in the region that were not served by minor-league baseball. "We saw a team in every city of any size on the East Coast, in the Midwest, and on the West Coast," says Bryant. "The only place with hardly any teams was Texas."
That got them thinking in grander terms, about starting their own league. "We saw pretty quickly there was no reason not to be playing minor-league ball in the region," says Bryant. Later he talked "at some length" with friends in major-league baseball about what a new affiliated league might offer them. "They smiled on the proposal," he says. But the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues, the minors' industry group, did not.
"The minor-league teams were all making money hand over fist," explains Bryant, "and major-league baseball was providing those teams with players for free. Our proposal was that we would pay part or all of the cost of the players, providing the majors with something they otherwise couldn't get -- and then we'd have big-league affiliation and be up and running. But the other minor-league teams went bananas because they have a sweet deal. They claimed that their agreement made them the exclusive player-development arm of major-league baseball. Now, the agreement doesn't say anything like that. But that kind of a dispute has to be resolved by the commissioner of baseball, and there wasn't one in August of 1992."
Fortunately, Bryant and Pierce had other options. First, they decided to forgo affiliation in favor of independence, an idea they borrowed from the Northern League. That made possible a second, more radical innovation -- one league, one owner -- for which there was no precedent in baseball and only one in professional sports, in the Central Hockey League.
The more they "studied what succeeded and what did not in the starting of leagues," says Bryant, the more the idea of central ownership made sense. "People can't afford to do business with you unless they know all about the owners in every town. That's because the league is only as strong as its weakest link. If you get a weak team in one town and it doesn't show up to play, the league is finished. Besides, you can't guarantee any other way that you'll have uniform quality. I'm talking about the appearance of the product, the sales operation, what it means to go to a game in your league. It's got to be the same in every town. Anything else, I think, would have simply been unmanageable."
Bryant and Pierce took the new plan back to Westcott. "I thought, 'Boy, that's neat," Westcott says.
* * *
Early on, Westcott kicked in another $50,000. Once the league began to take shape, he invested $500,000 more, with help from minority investors. By opening day, the league's total capitalization had run to $900,000: the original $600,000, plus $300,000 in subordinated debt that would convert to equity if not repaid at the end of the season. Pending that conversion, Westcott and his coinvestors owned 40% of the league, and Bryant and Pierce -- neither of whom had put up a dime -- owned 60%. Westcott, however, insisted that he control all the voting stock. That gave him the right to name his own chief operating officer. Enter Doug Theodore, a former building contractor who was running a community organization for the prevention of substance abuse. Theodore's previous baseball experience amounted to his tenure as Little League commissioner for the Highland Park school district, which adjoins the tony Dallas suburb where the Westcotts and the Theodores are neighbors. Theodore was the first to run the numbers and develop the advantages of single ownership.
