Corpus Christi Caller Times Caller.com - Abilene, Waco franchises in disarray

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Sunday, December 12, 1999

Abilene, Waco franchises in disarray
Aviators forced to postpone games; Wizards may find themselves homeless
By Mark Button
Caller-Times

Fires are ablaze in the Western Professional Hockey League's Central Division.
   We're not talking about teams on winning streaks, either.
   First there's Abilene. The ownerless Aviators had three home games postponed last week, including Saturday's game against Corpus Christi, while the league scrambles to find a new ownership group after the old group defaulted Nov. 26. The league is resuming talks with potential buyers during the weekend.
   Next there's Central Texas, where potential buyer Bob Carlson backed out of an option to purchase the franchise and has yet to reach an agreement with the Canadian-based group which owns 71 percent of the team.
   Now Waco could fold.
   Wizards general manager Stu Kehoe last week bounced a rent check for $58,333 to the Heart O' Texas Coliseum, resigned and skipped town. Team owner Rick Dames said he has no idea where Kehoe is, but that's the least of Dames' problems.
   Mark Miller, president and general manager of the Heart O' Texas Coliseum complex, has given Dames three days to pay the debt. If he doesn't get the money, he will evict the team.
   After sinking nearly half a million dollars into the franchise, Dames says is not going to pay the debt.
   He's through.
   Dames' intent in buying the team on June 20 was to pump in some cash and hopefully sell the team for a small profit by or soon after opening night. Dames said Kehoe told him that he would have buyers lined up by the season's start, but Kehoe never presented Dames with an interested group. Meanwhile, the Wizards rank dead last in attendance at an inflated per-game average of 1,624. After an exhaustive search to find a buyer on his own, Dames has finally called it quits.
   "For $400,000, I've had just about all the fun I'm going to have," said Dames, who also owns four Corpus Christi radio stations. "I've put in all the money I'm going to put in."
   So the question becomes: How many fires can the league put out at once?
   Hopefully all three, says Brad Treliving, director of hockey operations for the WPHL.
   "I know for the people sitting out there it comes as a shock," he said. "You hear about Abilene, you hear about the sale in Central Texas, and now all the sudden there's Waco. But we were very aware of all three of these situations going into the season. Obviously, Abilene was one we had little or no control of because of the bankruptcy situation. We had some concerns going into the season about the strength of the group, but it was awarded (to the owners who have now defaulted) through the bankruptcy trustee and there was not a whole lot of say on our side.
   "Waco was another situation where we look at back at it and the sale of the team took place quicker than we would have wanted, but gave the people going in there less time than we would have wanted prior to the start of the season. So that was a concern, given the track record of troubles we had in Waco over the first three years. So we knew that was going to be a problem. So this is not coming out of the blue for us. It's just a matter of trying juggle ourselves in a way that we prevent a problem taking place where a team doesn't play."
   Treliving said the Central Texas sale is nearly complete, but that the league would spend the weekend looking into all three situations.
   As for Waco, Treliving said the WPHL has "securities in place" and "resources to go to" to satisfy the Heart O' Texas Coliseum.
   "We're looking at all the options of how we can get through this," Treliving said. "Our intention is to not have any teams fold, and I feel comfortable in saying that."
   CRIME ON THE ICE?: Did you catch the story out of Chicago about the high school hockey player who cross-checked another teen-ager into the boards - a hit which paralyzed the youth from the waist down - at the end of a lop-sided game?
   The injured player, 15-year-old Neal Gross, and his family are pursuing both criminal and civil lawsuits against both the offending player and the game's referees. Gross says he went to the referees during the Nov. 3 game between New Trier and Glenbrook North High Schools before the hit took place and asked the officials to stop the "taunting and body slams" he was receiving early in the game.
   The referees did not control the game, Gross says.
   Gross, New Trier's captain, was severely injured. His life has been changed, possibly forever.
   Hockey is violent.
   But does the act - it reportedly happened as Gross skated off the ice seconds after the game ended - mandate legal repercussions?
   So far, the answer is yes.
   The 15-year-old who cross-checked Gross (because he is a minor, his name has not been released) was charged Tuesday with aggravated battery.
   A civil suit was filed Wednesday. Included in the list of defendants is the Illinois Hockey Officials Association because, according to the suit, its referees were unable to "adequately and ably control the game."
   The question of whether the arm of the law should reach out onto the ice surface has been circulating for a few years now. This story is not going away anytime soon. There is a Jan. 5 hearing set in a Chicago juvenile court for the civil case.
   Maybe when this is all sorted out we'll finally get an answer as to where penalties end and crime begins.
   BOUCHER CLEARS NAME: New Mexico's Tyler Boucher, a fan favorite as an IceRays forward last season, was not too thrilled with the content of a recent story posted on the In the Crease Web site.
   The story, posted Nov. 23 on the NHL and minor-league Internet magazine (www.inthecrease.com), referred to last season as a "year in exile" for Boucher, who played in New Mexico for two years before coming to Corpus Christi last season. The story also states that Boucher said he never "really wanted to leave Albuquerque to begin with."
   Not true, Boucher said.
   "That's a bunch of crap," Boucher said. "I know the guy who wrote it; he comes and talks with us once in a while. I think he asked me once if I was glad to be back and I said, 'yeah.' But I didn't know he was doing a story."
   Boucher said he thought the writer might have confused some of his comments about what happened at the end of the 1997-98 season in New Mexico with his time in Corpus Christi.
   "If it never would have sucked so bad in first place, I never would have left - maybe that's where he took it from," Boucher said. "They screwed it up bad (in New Mexico) after the first two years, that's why I left. That's why Harps (Regan Harper) left. That's why a lot of players left. Maybe that's what I said and he (the writer) took it to mean I never wanted to come to Corpus.
   "But that's not true. I chose to go to Corpus Christi because I knew it was a good town and I heard they had a good thing going there. And it wasn't an easy decision for me to leave Corpus Christi, either."
   After serving the remaining 14 games of his 15-game suspension he earned in last season's playoffs for butt-ending a Lake Charles defenseman in the forehead, Boucher has scored two goals and recorded two assists in 10 games. The fiery, 5-foot-6 forward has accrued 46 penalty minutes in 10 games this season.


Staff writer Mark Button can be reached at 886-3613 or by e-mail at buttonm@caller.com

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