These are heady days for fans of the Texas Rangers, who now find themselves in the unusual position of supporting winners. Not since the turn of the century have the Arlington-based team reached baseball's play-offs, not since 2004 have they really been in contention to win the American League West.
There may be many reasons for this sustained run of mediocrity, but prime among them surely has been the club's apparently insatiable appetite for financial dramas. When things are going well on the field, the Rangers can usually be relied upon to stumble into some kind of off-the-field tribulations guaranteed to sidetrack players, officials and supporters. So it has been in recent days with the announcement that Tom Hicks is willing to cede control of a team he bought in 1998 from, among others, George W Bush.
"With the right partners, I would be willing to sell a controlling interest in the Rangers. My family and I want very much to stay involved with the club, but we understand that we may have to be open to solutions that may include partners who own a controlling interest in the Rangers,'' Liverpool's co-owner said in a statement at the end of last week, before adding a pay-off so lacking in self-awareness that it was almost comical: "I don't want any of this to be a distraction to the team and our fans."
If any of this sounds familiar to Liverpool fans, who have watched their beloved club slide into almost constant tumult, at least off the field, since Hicks and his business partner George Gillett arrived on Merseyside back in 2007, then it was the same old story, too, in the States, where Hicks has earned a reputation for what the New York Times called wrong-headedness.
"How can it not be a distraction?" the paper asked this week of his announcement about his plans to sell the Rangers. "This is a team for which being in first place a third into the season is a new experience, and its players have to deal with reports and questions about the team being for sale."
Hicks, an old school Republican, can live with the criticism of a liberal newspaper like the New York Times. Harder to bear is the personal embarrassment that comes with the acknowledgment of defeat in his battle to remain in control of the Rangers. Only three months ago, he had insisted that while he wanted to sell at least some of his 95% holding in the Rangers he was interested only in having minority partners. Much has happened since then, not least the Hicks' decision to default on over $500m in loans tied to his ownership of the Rangers and the Dallas Stars ice hockey team.
At the time the Rangers owner was bullish, calling the move a "non-event" designed to bring his creditors to the negotiating table. Clearly, it was more complicated than that, to put it one way. To put it another: he was unwilling to accept the truth; that he did not have the financial wherewithal to meet demands from Major League Baseball to reduce the size of the club's debt. The only option he was left with was to sell the club.
This is embarrassing indeed for a man such as Hicks, who relished the caché that came with owning a major league baseball team and never missed an opportunity to throw his money around, lest anyone in Texas and elsewhere was unaware of exactly how rich he was.
Not for him the low-key approach adopted by others, the likes of Randy Lerner (owner of the NFL's Cleveland Browns), Stan Kroenke (owner of the Denver Nuggets of the NBA) and Malcolm Glazer, who controls the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the NFL. Gillett was another who preferred to remain in the background, stewarding one of ice hockey's most storied clubs, the Montreal Canadiens, in a fashion entirely at variance with the man who was to become his business partner in English football.
While Lerner, Kroenke and Glazer, who have all bought their way into English football in recent years, at Aston Villa, Arsenal and Manchester United, respectively, could give Greta Garbo lessons in maintaining studied mystery, Hicks has seldom come across a microphone he did not want to pontificate into or a stage he did not want to hog.
His outgoing personality (or out-sized ego, depending on who you ask) was an asset in the world of leveraged buy-outs, where his chutzpah helped him build a personal fortune using other peoples' money to buy and sell companies. But it ill-served him in the world of sport, where he allowed his ego to cloud his better judgment, both in what he said and in what he did.
Famously, or rather infamously, he allowed himself to be talked into the biggest single contract for an athlete in history – a 10-year, $250m deal for the short-stop Alex Rodriguez. At the time, this was seen as a bold declaration of intent by the Rangers owner. Looking back, now that Rodriguez has long departed for the New York Yankees and details of the deals have been made public (the next highest bid for Rodriguez's service at the time was a reported $170m), it would be fair to say it was a supreme act of folly, perhaps the greatest ever in American professional sport (which really is saying something).
Yet Hicks ploughed on: on to the next bad baseball deal, on to the next losing season and finally on to Liverpool, where he and Gillett have guided the Merseyside club towards the financial precipice.
The news that Liverpool are hampered by debts of £300m-plus – that their owners, who promised to be "different" from the Glazers, who borrowed other peoples' money to buy Manchester United, were in fact exactly the same – has shocked English football. But perhaps more shocking is that few people had apparently noticed before now. Hicks himself had admitted, in an interview shortly after he and Gillett bought the club, that any profits earned would be used to service their debt.
"When I was in the leveraged buy-out business we bought Weetabix and we leveraged it up to make our return. You could say that anyone who was eating Weetabix was paying for our purchase of Weetabix. It was just business.
"It is the same for Liverpool. Revenues come in from whatever source and go out to whatever source and, if there is money left over, it is profit," he said at the time, with commendable honesty.
Like Weetabix, Liverpool FC is an enduring brand name. It was there before Tom Hicks arrived and it will be there when he is gone, as inevitably will happen one day, probably sooner than later. Whatever happens before, expect the Texan to issue a statement expressing his hope that none of the tumult at Anfield is a distraction for the club and fans.
Expect him to be sadly disappointed.
There may be many reasons for this sustained run of mediocrity, but prime among them surely has been the club's apparently insatiable appetite for financial dramas. When things are going well on the field, the Rangers can usually be relied upon to stumble into some kind of off-the-field tribulations guaranteed to sidetrack players, officials and supporters. So it has been in recent days with the announcement that Tom Hicks is willing to cede control of a team he bought in 1998 from, among others, George W Bush.
"With the right partners, I would be willing to sell a controlling interest in the Rangers. My family and I want very much to stay involved with the club, but we understand that we may have to be open to solutions that may include partners who own a controlling interest in the Rangers,'' Liverpool's co-owner said in a statement at the end of last week, before adding a pay-off so lacking in self-awareness that it was almost comical: "I don't want any of this to be a distraction to the team and our fans."
If any of this sounds familiar to Liverpool fans, who have watched their beloved club slide into almost constant tumult, at least off the field, since Hicks and his business partner George Gillett arrived on Merseyside back in 2007, then it was the same old story, too, in the States, where Hicks has earned a reputation for what the New York Times called wrong-headedness.
"How can it not be a distraction?" the paper asked this week of his announcement about his plans to sell the Rangers. "This is a team for which being in first place a third into the season is a new experience, and its players have to deal with reports and questions about the team being for sale."
Hicks, an old school Republican, can live with the criticism of a liberal newspaper like the New York Times. Harder to bear is the personal embarrassment that comes with the acknowledgment of defeat in his battle to remain in control of the Rangers. Only three months ago, he had insisted that while he wanted to sell at least some of his 95% holding in the Rangers he was interested only in having minority partners. Much has happened since then, not least the Hicks' decision to default on over $500m in loans tied to his ownership of the Rangers and the Dallas Stars ice hockey team.
At the time the Rangers owner was bullish, calling the move a "non-event" designed to bring his creditors to the negotiating table. Clearly, it was more complicated than that, to put it one way. To put it another: he was unwilling to accept the truth; that he did not have the financial wherewithal to meet demands from Major League Baseball to reduce the size of the club's debt. The only option he was left with was to sell the club.
This is embarrassing indeed for a man such as Hicks, who relished the caché that came with owning a major league baseball team and never missed an opportunity to throw his money around, lest anyone in Texas and elsewhere was unaware of exactly how rich he was.
Not for him the low-key approach adopted by others, the likes of Randy Lerner (owner of the NFL's Cleveland Browns), Stan Kroenke (owner of the Denver Nuggets of the NBA) and Malcolm Glazer, who controls the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the NFL. Gillett was another who preferred to remain in the background, stewarding one of ice hockey's most storied clubs, the Montreal Canadiens, in a fashion entirely at variance with the man who was to become his business partner in English football.
While Lerner, Kroenke and Glazer, who have all bought their way into English football in recent years, at Aston Villa, Arsenal and Manchester United, respectively, could give Greta Garbo lessons in maintaining studied mystery, Hicks has seldom come across a microphone he did not want to pontificate into or a stage he did not want to hog.
His outgoing personality (or out-sized ego, depending on who you ask) was an asset in the world of leveraged buy-outs, where his chutzpah helped him build a personal fortune using other peoples' money to buy and sell companies. But it ill-served him in the world of sport, where he allowed his ego to cloud his better judgment, both in what he said and in what he did.
Famously, or rather infamously, he allowed himself to be talked into the biggest single contract for an athlete in history – a 10-year, $250m deal for the short-stop Alex Rodriguez. At the time, this was seen as a bold declaration of intent by the Rangers owner. Looking back, now that Rodriguez has long departed for the New York Yankees and details of the deals have been made public (the next highest bid for Rodriguez's service at the time was a reported $170m), it would be fair to say it was a supreme act of folly, perhaps the greatest ever in American professional sport (which really is saying something).
Yet Hicks ploughed on: on to the next bad baseball deal, on to the next losing season and finally on to Liverpool, where he and Gillett have guided the Merseyside club towards the financial precipice.
The news that Liverpool are hampered by debts of £300m-plus – that their owners, who promised to be "different" from the Glazers, who borrowed other peoples' money to buy Manchester United, were in fact exactly the same – has shocked English football. But perhaps more shocking is that few people had apparently noticed before now. Hicks himself had admitted, in an interview shortly after he and Gillett bought the club, that any profits earned would be used to service their debt.
"When I was in the leveraged buy-out business we bought Weetabix and we leveraged it up to make our return. You could say that anyone who was eating Weetabix was paying for our purchase of Weetabix. It was just business.
"It is the same for Liverpool. Revenues come in from whatever source and go out to whatever source and, if there is money left over, it is profit," he said at the time, with commendable honesty.
Like Weetabix, Liverpool FC is an enduring brand name. It was there before Tom Hicks arrived and it will be there when he is gone, as inevitably will happen one day, probably sooner than later. Whatever happens before, expect the Texan to issue a statement expressing his hope that none of the tumult at Anfield is a distraction for the club and fans.
Expect him to be sadly disappointed.
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