Stern, Spiegel forever own a small part of CFL history

Understanding what transpired between the Canadian Football League and Montreal Alouettes on Tuesday requires a reminder of how we got here.

For more than two decades, the Alouettes were owned by New York investment banker Robert Wetenhall, who was attending a wedding in the summer of 1996 when someone at his table said they had a football team for sale in Quebec.

Wetenhall, who once owned a piece of the NFL’s New England Patriots, was so in love with the idea of being an owner again that he took on what seemed like a hopeless cause.

The reincarnation of the Alouettes had been an accident of history, a shotgun marriage that came about when the rest of the CFL’s U.S. expansion arm collapsed at the end of the 1995 season.

With the NFL’s Cleveland Browns relocating to Baltimore as the Ravens for the 1996 season, the CFL’s Stallions franchise was on borrowed time. Owner Jim Speros packed up his gear and moved Tracy Ham, Mike Pringle and what was left of the team to Montreal, where they took up residence at Olympic Stadium, playing before mostly empty stands for two seasons.

The forced moving of a playoff game to Percival Molson Stadium on the grounds of McGill University in the fall of 1997 seemed to delight fans, so Wetenhall, as the new owner, boldly decided to take his team there permanently.

Thus began the blooming of the Alouettes, who kept winning on the field as the crowds swelled to capacity in their intimate, 20,000-seat home. It was a good story for a league desperately in need of one and provided hope that similar revivals could take place in other major cities like Toronto.

Unfortunately, the business side got in the way.

No one knows how profitable the Als were in those good years of the early 2000s, but the common thinking was that the team was a break-even operation at best. The only way to make money was to stage a November home playoff game at the Big O before a crowd of 30,000 or more.

And given Montreal’s dominance on the field, even while transitioning from Ham to Anthony Calvillo, Wetenhall got his end-of-year reward most seasons.

The Als’ fortunes on the field started to fade just as Wetenhall was entering what turned out to be the final years of his life. As the losses started to mount on the field and off, it was up to his son, Andrew, to oversee the team.

Andrew had neither the passion nor the touch of his father, so by the end of the 2018 season the family had had enough. There was never a public effort to sell the team, but presumably if they could have sold it locally, they would have.

Instead, with losses in excess of $30 million over the previous four seasons, the Wetenhalls threw the keys at the league in a longstanding CFL tradition where the rest of the franchises are burdened with carrying the team to new owners.

That effort went on throughout the 2019 season, without a deal coming together.

At the end of November, CFL commissioner Randy Ambrosie gave his annual state-of-the-league address during Grey Cup week, telling those assembled how excited he was by the various groups and individuals the league had encountered during the sale process.

Two days later, Toronto businessman Gary Stern was at a Grey Cup party with his boyhood friend, Dale Lastman, a director of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, which owns the Toronto Argonauts.

Then the CFL chairman of the board of governors, Lastman was attune to the crisis unfolding in Montreal and suggested to Stern that he buy the team.

Roughly five weeks later, Stern was standing before cameras and microphones assembled on the upper floor of a downtown Montreal hotel, being introduced as one of two new owners for the Montreal Alouettes.

The other was his father-in-law, 90-year-old Sid Spiegel, who did not attend.

Given Spiegel’s age and the fact that the owners were not local and had no experience in the sports entertainment industry, the pair seemed a curious choice.

Several groups had given the Als a close look, although it’s never been clear how many of them were willing to pay upfront money for the franchise. That was a problem for the CFL, since the eight other franchises had all kicked in roughly $1 million apiece to get the Als through the 2019 season and wanted as much of that money back as possible.

Stern and Spiegel provided the teams the best return on their money, backed by a willingness to invest in the Als, which they followed through on even when the 2020 season was lost and the team had no revenue.

When Spiegel passed away in 2021 before ever seeing his team play a game, there were obvious questions about what that might mean. But it wasn’t until late summer of 2022 that the issues between Stern and Spiegel’s estate became obvious, at least when it came to how the football team should be run.

When team president Mario Cecchini’s contract was not renewed after the season, Stern promised the process of replacing him would begin within two weeks.

That didn’t happen and subsequently things got very quiet. Alouettes players who were pending free agents – such as quarterback Trevor Harris and receiver Eugene Lewis – started to look elsewhere.

We may never know how it all went down, or what sums of money were involved, but at some point during the past three weeks the league managed to convince Stern and the estate to step aside so that it could run the club and steer it into new hands.

Will that be any easier now than it was in 2019?

The league stated in its Tuesday release that it’s been in contact with multiple local parties interested in the franchise. The franchise’s books are believed to be in much better shape than they were when it was for sale four years ago.

There is reason to believe the CFL’s partnership with Park Lane, a sports-focused investment bank, may aid the process of finding suitable owners.

Stern and Spiegel were two unlikely characters who surfaced during a desperate time when the league needed them most. They will forever own that small part of CFL history.