“Then it hit me. I wasn’t VP of Operations. I was the General Manager.”
Roller Hockey International (RHI) was the brainchild of veteran sports entrepreneurs Larry King and Dennis Murphy, joined by co-founders Ralph Backstrom and Alex Bellehumeur. King was Billie Jean King’s husband.
King and Murphy were the guys behind several other notable and innovative sports leagues, including World Team Tennis, the World Hockey Association, and the American Basketball Association. These guys invented basketball’s three-point shot, the fabulous red, white, and blue basketball, and pioneered the Slam Dunk contest.
Roller Hockey (photo courtesy Allegiant Goods)
Getting involved in RHI was my own slam dunk. The league founders were an experienced group. They had succeeded and failed enough times to know how to avoid pitfalls—getting in early and making something from nothing. Andy Dolich would really approve of this.
Inline skating had become one of the fastest-growing recreational activities in the country and was exploding as it crossed over and into the mainstream. But don’t call it Rollerblading™. That is a brand name. Think Kleenex™ versus tissue. And it’s not roller skating either. Those skates are quads. We’re talking inline wheels.
Promoters were calling roller hockey “the sport of the new millennium.” Maybe they were right. My ambivalence toward working in sports spontaneously evaporated.
I was back on the bus.
—
My first day as an employee of the San Jose Rhinos began very early on February 25, 1994, catching the first Southwest shuttle from SJC to LAX. Sporting a musty, ill-fitting blazer, I paid out of pocket for an overpriced taxi to the hotel and arrived at the LA Westin a few minutes after 9 a.m.
I approached the registration desk, got a name tag, and was shown into a darkened conference hall where a couple of dozen round tables were arranged in a giant horseshoe, one for each of the 24 teams. Being at a league meeting was so exciting, like a low-end version of the Galactic Senate in Star Wars.
Dennis Murphy (right) with Bill Sharman (photo courtesy NY Times)
I entered as league founder, Dennis Murphy, was already addressing the delegates, making his welcome presentation. The hollow, multi-purpose banquet room was appointed with tightly woven carpets, conference room furniture, and gaudy chandeliers. I made my way to the Rhinos table, where three men sat, and Rich gave me a wave. He offered a quick welcome and a quiet round of whispered introductions to Rob (the Rhinos’ general manager) and Gene Wiggins (Sharks group ticket sales), making room for me to sit.
Rob glared at me, studied my name tag, shot Rich a look, and asked him for a private word. I exchanged pleasantries with Gene, whom I’d known from our Sharks days, and pretended not to notice the awkward conversation to the side.
Gene leaned over and asked in a stage whisper what my job was. “Oh, I’m the new VP of Operations,” I blurted. Mind you, at 25, I am still getting carded—just a few years after finishing puberty.
Gene’s furrowed brow betrayed him. It became instantly clear that only Rich had been expecting me. A couple of minutes later, Rich’s animated side conversation broke off, and Rob stepped out of the ballroom. Rich sidled over and offered a curt smile.
Murphy’s presentation went on for another 15 minutes, and still, Rob had not returned. When the lights came up, I asked Rich about it. “Who, Rob? He just quit. He’s on his way to the airport and moving back to Canada.” He grinned and slapped me on the back.
First, Rich hit me. Then it hit me. I wasn’t VP of Operations. I was the General Manager.
—
There wasn’t much time to get over the utter shock of getting drafted to be the GM of the San Jose Rhinos. I’d arrived uncertain about which seat on the rocket ship was mine. I sure didn’t expect it to be inside the cockpit.
Of the 24 franchises that were there for the league meetings, 12 were returning after their inaugural season, while the rest of us were brand new. The league had doubled overnight.
The overall agenda for the meeting was to debrief on the recently completed season, conduct a player draft for the expansion franchises, and share best practices for the upcoming second season, which would commence in just four months.
Larry King in 1981 with then-spouse Billie Jean King (photo courtesy NY Post)
Larry King led a session on ticket sales strategies. Pricing. Bundling. Season tickets. Corporate sales. Group sales. Our 22-game season meant we had 11 regular-season home games to sell. Maybe more if we made the playoffs.
League officials went around the room, asking each team to report on their sales progress—notably how many season tickets had been sold. The teams that were returning for their second season had the advantage of being able to build their base with renewals from last season, and Anaheim’s slick management bragged that they had already sold several thousand season tickets.
As it neared our turn, my anxiety grew. Highly conscious of my own innate ticket-selling prowess (not!) and daunted by our building capacity of 17,562, I was dying to know where we stood. Too chicken to ask, I awaited our turn to find out along with everyone else.
When it was time, Gene rose and revealed “The San Jose Rhinos report… 182.”
D’oh!
We had a logo, a head coach, and 182 season tickets sold. I flipped through my pleather Franklin Quest day planner and counted 14 weeks until opening night. Rich and Doug were right, after all. “There were many things to do,” indeed.
—
Throughout that day, we heard pitches from hockey manufacturers who saw the RHI as their golden ticket to gigantic new retail categories of roller hockey products. Skates. Wheels. Pucks. Sticks. Gloves. Uniforms. Pads. The roller hockey craze would catalyze a potential retail extravaganza. Every hockey brand was there, pitching us and the other teams on their state-of-the-art gear.
After lunch, the RHI held the league expansion draft to select players for the 12 new franchises. There would be 14 rounds to fill out each team’s full roster.
Roy Sommer (photo courtesy The Hockey News)
Rich had hired Roy Sommer to be our head coach. Sommer was the coach of the Richmond (Virginia) Renegades, an East Coast Hockey League affiliate, a minor league professional ice hockey league that served as a feeder to the NHL. The ECHL was a league for young talent to develop on their way up and for not-quite-good-enough players to hang on as long as they could on their way down.
Sommer was chosen in part for his nominal Bay Area roots, as he was born at San Francisco General Hospital. He had been a good ice hockey player in his own right and made it to “The Show” for a total of three NHL games with the Edmonton Oilers in 1981. In his mid-30s, Roy was married with a young family to support. He couldn’t pass up the offer to return to California for a paid hockey coaching gig during the otherwise lean summer.
The Anaheim Bullfrogs had dominated the RHI’s inaugural season, winning the championship. The Bullfrogs had bucked the league’s conventional wisdom of converting the world’s best street players into hockey thugs and instead assembled a roster of ice hockey players and taught them how to play on wheels. The RHI was “full contact.” With body-checking and plenty of fisticuffs, the lifelong ice hockey players had a considerable edge over the beach boardwalk kids, who had superior inline skating skills but lacked the pros’ physicality. As Mike Tyson famously once said, “Everyone’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
Roy was fully aware of Anaheim’s success and emulated their approach. He’d faxed in a list of hand-picked ice hockey players for the draft, including many of his own Renegades who were eager to join him for some summer fun in California.
Inline Hockey Central (2012)
A microphone and podium were featured under a bright spotlight in the darkened hall. Team representatives took turns at the podium, announcing their picks. League officials tried to create as much pageantry as possible for the scant media in attendance. Journalist Richard Neil Graham describes the scene from the 1994 draft in his book, Wheelers, Dealers, Pucks & Bucks: A Rocking History of Roller Hockey International: “Attractive ‘round-card girls’ in hot pants carried around signs announcing the number of each draft round written in dry-erase marker on a whiteboard.”
I have no recollection of any markers or whiteboards whatsoever.
After the first five rounds, and after most of the remaining allure of the draft had worn off, the room thinned out. As the sixth round progressed, I was alone at our table when it was our turn to pick. No one had given me any instructions, so I had no choice but to roll with it. I found Roy’s faxed list on the table and approached the podium. I chose a name that was not yet crossed off and one I was confident I could pronounce to avoid unnecessary embarrassment in my public debut.
“The San Jose Rhinos select… Jay Murphy,” I announced into the microphone, my words echoing against the tall ceilings and bouncing around the room. I moseyed off the stage. It was an out-of-body experience, saying those words and hearing them rattle around the room. One day, I’m unemployed, watching Beavis and Butt-Head, and the next month, I’m on stage drafting players for a professional sports team as its General Manager.
Huh huh. That’s pretty cool. Huh huh.
—
The RHI community, including players, coaches, league officials, company sales representatives, and the entire hockey ecosystem, seemed to know one another. Naturally, they would. RHI was an offshoot of the ice hockey world and its (mostly Canadian) fraternity, which I was decidedly not part of and into which Rich was eager to be initiated.
Dennis Murphy had founded the World Hockey Association in 1971 as a challenger to the NHL. Just seven seasons later, it went kaput, but not before four of its franchises were folded into the NHL: the Edmonton Oilers, the Winnipeg Jets, the New England Whalers, and the Quebec Nordiques.
As such, the old-guard hockey network in the Westin conference room was thick. These people had grown up together, played midget hockey together (yes, that is a thing), and had attended each other’s weddings. The RHI was a summer camp for the ice hockey family.
Me back in the day (photo courtesy X and Amazon.com)
At 25 years old, I was the second-youngest general manager in the league, behind only Glenn Gretzky, the GM of the Edmonton Sled Dogs. Put another way, I was the youngest GM who was not in the same bloodline as the greatest hockey legend of all time. Wayne Gretzky was one of Dennis Murphy’s star prodigies in his fledgling World Hockey Association in the late ‘70s.
Gretzky, also known as “The Great One,” is widely credited with personally creating the California hockey gold rush in the first place. He paved the way for a profitable expansion of hockey to warmer climates when he made the move in 1988 from relative obscurity in Edmonton to the bright lights of the Los Angeles Kings.
To say I was out of my depth as a GM of an RHI franchise would be a grave understatement. The only thing I had going for me was a handful of personal relationships with various Sharks staff, a can-do attitude, and a willingness to work for $3,500 a month. I’d for sure have to step up my game and do more than just show up on time and not be a pain in the ass.
Coming out of those league meetings, I began to feel clarity in my mission—find a way to glue together the team’s operations, Gen X style. Problem solve. Improvise. Thankfully, unlike other general managers, I had no responsibility for the hockey part of the enterprise. My job was everything else. I had some staff to potentially leverage at SJSEE—a couple of interns—and no approved budget. I was the conductor of a motley orchestra when I didn’t know how to read sheet music and didn’t recognize the melody. What had I gotten into?
As the meetings concluded and we parted from the Westin, Rich gave me a quick heads-up that he was sending his 20-year-old daughter to help out in the office and shadow me. She will arrive next week. Fantastic.
Unlike poor Rob Tambelini, if I were Plan B, at least I knew about Plan C.
______________________________
Porteus Press (2025)
Brad Porteus is the author of Roll With It, and this excerpt is from Chapter 13.
