Bruce McNall

...

I'm kind of an infil- infiltrator, but-

Uh, yeah, I, I wanna ask you that.

So you were-

It has reverberated through everything and it will continue to do so.

I think that the best comparable I have in my career is when Bruce McNall bought Wayne Gretzky from the Edmonton Oilers and then said, well, Wayne should be in the same stratosphere as other athletes in other sports and raised him to whatever it was that he raised him to at that time.

Well over a million, I think it was, which at the time was...

astronomical.

Yep

... and getting invited into the locker room, and Gretzky meeting people, and Bruce McNall holding court, and the whole thing.

Yeah.

I, uh, I, I, I was pretty young, too, like, at that time.

I, I remember- Oh, go ahead.

No, no, I, no, I was gonna...

I remember, I remember having dinner, uh, with Bruce McNall, uh, at Alan Thicke's house in Toluca Lake, uh, a long time ago.

[laughs] Wow.

So I'm walking to the coach's room and I'm thinking, why in the world would Tony Robbins want to meet the worst goalie in the National Hockey League? That's how I was thinking.

And when you're the starting goalie on the LA Kings, maybe not the best team in the world, but most popular with Wayne and Bruce McNall, our owner and all the great players we had.

And so I get in there and Barry introduces Tony and he says, would you be willing to work with Tony and see if you can get out of this situation you're in? And I said, of course.

But Barry said the coolest thing, Rod, because this is confidential stuff, right? You're revealing your soul, right? You're talking about what you're going through personally.

Uh, maybe I'm, uh, being overly dramatic.

But the Kings' sale to AEG was finalized today, and I think a lot of people misremember that the sale was from Bruce McNall to Phil Anschutz, but there was an interim group of owners in between McNall and AEG.

It was Sudikoff and Cohen, who also got into legal trouble.

One of them, I don't remember which one, went, also served prison time on top of Bruce McNall, and the team was placed into bankruptcy.

And Anschutz purchased the team out of bankruptcy for, I don't know, $150 million or something like that.

And, you know, say what you want about AEG as an ownership group, they certainly struggled early, and I would argue that they haven't, that they've struggled lately.

Well, okay, there's always been local pockets rather than national interests, and you could have argued that with the New York Islanders and the New Jersey Devils in the New York area.

And how about the Anaheim Ducks? R- you know, Bruce McNall got them put in their backyard.

So I'm, I'm not saying it's my first choice, but I tr- a, a second team in Toronto could almost open two streets down the road-

Right

I don't think that that's going to happen, but I'd be okay seeing it.

Where's Bruce McNall when you need him? Can we get Bruce McNall back to make that? Yeah, that

was a hell of a thing.

That was not quite the Islanders guy.