Thin Ice RiverKings general manager Jim Riggs talks about his frustrating season. by Dennis Freeland hen the Memphis RiverKings sold out their first game in 1992, the minor-league hockey team was breaking new ground for professional sports in Memphis. The franchise proceeded to build a loyal fan base which continued to support the team throughout the Nineties, despite only sporadic success on the ice. Much of the credit went to ’Kings general manager Jim Riggs, a master promoter who has turned his background in theatre and love of hockey into a successful career. But the 1998-99 RiverKings’ season has been a test for the mild-mannered Riggs. After failing in his attempts to gain improvements to the Mid-South Coliseum, Riggs announced last year that his team would move to DeSoto County, becoming the primary tenant of a new arena under construction there. The Coliseum sued for breach of contract, and while neither side received a total victory in court, the RiverKings were allowed to continue playing at the Coliseum while the new arena is under construction. Meanwhile, Riggs’ coach, Kevin Evans, was unable to leave his native Canada due to problems with U.S. immigration rules. Someone else had to recruit players and run the ’Kings’ preseason training camp. When I sat down with Riggs last week to talk about his team’s future, the RiverKings were in last place (though within shooting range of a playoff spot), attendance at the Mid-South Coliseum was way off, and relations between the RiverKings’ front office and the Coliseum staff were still strained. Have you ever had a season quite like this one? No. This is year 14 of my hockey career and this has been very trying, very tiring. Hopefully we will finish strong with the on-ice product, so people go away with a good feeling about how the hockey team played. Then we start gearing up for next year. What has been the biggest frustration for you? The biggest frustration has been a lot of people’s misunderstanding of what transpired. It’s very easy now to condense this into a 45-second sound bite. When this whole thing started with DeSoto County, our general consensus was that we wanted to stay where we were, but in order for that to happen there had to be some corrections to the building. As we now see, in March 1999, we are in the same situation. Ultimately the right decision was made to get in a better facility, but unfortunately there has been a lot of wear and tear on people to make that happen. Do you have any doubts at this point that you will play next season at the Mid-South Coliseum? No, we are pretty confident we will be there next year. I think a lot of the issues have sort of faded. I would hope that the Coliseum and the Coliseum Board know that it is still in the best interest of both the facility and the RiverKings to try somehow to co-exist in our last year in the building. We have said all along that the contract is not hockey-exclusive. If they want to bring another team in there, it is certainly their right to do that. But I would think it would be beneficial to them if they addressed some of the needs of the building so that our last year there is good and they are able to sell a better product to the next team coming in. Can two hockey teams survive in this market? Absolutely not. The only way it might work — and this was something we addressed in the middle of the winter, but really it didn’t go anywhere — the only way two teams could co-exist in this market would be for both to be in the same league. Then you could do some co-marketing, you could buy equipment in bulk. The Coliseum didn’t express any interest in that happening. If you have two competing leagues, obviously they will argue which is better, which is doing the better promotions, then all it does is confuse the situation in a market which I think a lot of people admit is not that strong anyway. It seemed you were making some headway in creating a market for hockey, but that has suffered a setback. How do you see the future of hockey in this market? I think hockey can still be very viable in this market. We continue to find people who are moving into this market who are used to having that sport available. We probably get two dozen calls a month from people who say, “We’ve just moved here and we’re glad to see there is a hockey team here. Where can my son play youth hockey?” With that type of interest, you’ve got to figure the sport will continue to grow. I still feel there is a need for a recreational rink to be built somewhere. There has been some talk of that happening in east Shelby County. As soon as that happens you’re going to see the youth hockey market probably double in size. During this entire process, when you asked for improvements to the building, the lawsuit they filed, and everything that transpired after that, what role did county and city government play? Unfortunately for the Coliseum, it may have been the wrong place at the wrong time. With all the other issues of the moment — finishing The Pyramid, whatever is going to happen with the rock museum there, funding for the convention center, getting the baseball park up and running — I think maybe from that standpoint the Coliseum was down on the list of improvements, but I think it would have saved everybody, meaning the Coliseum staff and my staff, a lot of wear and tear if somebody had just come, even privately, and said, “At this time there is no plan to fix the building, make your decision accordingly.” Or, “Let’s look at the millennium and maybe then we will have a plan in place.” Then I think everyone could have made their decisions with a lot less wear and tear not only on the staffs but the fans as well. On the other hand, you don’t have local ownership. Has that been a problem for you in making your case? Only in that I think if we had had somebody who was more connected to the movers and shakers of the Memphis and Shelby County area, that might have helped. But we felt all along with the Mid-South Coliseum being the building that people remember from the heyday of Memphis State basketball and all the concerts that were held there, it just seemed a no-brainer that someone would step forward without the need for local ownership and say, “Hey, this building is a viable facility, let’s fix it up.” You’ve seen that happen in other cities. Charlotte, I believe, got federal funding to fix up their building and made it into a national landmark. I was in Jackson, Mississippi, at a building that was built the same year as the Mid-South Coliseum, 1964. They put $6 million into it two years ago and it’s like night and day. Your on-ice performance has been a detriment for you as well. Not having a first-place team has hurt you, hasn’t it? Kevin Evans has done a very good job of molding the talent he had. With the early-season headache of Kevin being stuck in Canada, that got us off to a rough start. In some ways, it’s like college sports: If the guys you recruit at the start of the season are not the answer, many times you have to live with them. Now you can fine-tune a little bit, and to Kevin’s credit he has done that. I know our goal-tending has gotten better over the course of the year. But there are still things I think Kevin would like to fix, but the people are just not out there until this summer when you can start recruiting again. You and I have talked a lot over the years about this sports market, its viability, the direction it is taking. How have your perceptions of this sports market changed over the last 12 to 18 months? It may sound like sour grapes, and I don’t mean it to be. I still like the area. The reason we have gone through all the turmoil we have with the DeSoto County decision is that we — I can speak on behalf of my family and Kevin Evans’ family — like the area a lot. The people here are terrific. But we know from a hockey standpoint that we will be a better product in the new facility. The thing that has surprised me is the fact that people haven’t stepped up, whether you call that leadership or whatever. People really haven’t gone public and said, “What is the future of the Mid-South Coliseum? Do we want the RiverKings there?” If those questions had been asked publicly or even privately, I think it would have helped everybody. One of the things I noticed is that once you were successful, people started talking about wanting to bring a higher-level hockey team to The Pyramid. What does that say about this market? I have sometimes said that Memphis is a wannabe city. We want to be Atlanta, or other places. I, as an outsider who now calls this his home, say, “Why do we want to be someplace else? There’s nothing wrong with Memphis. It’s a good city.” But, to that end, the city fathers need to speak up and say “Hey, we have a good hockey team, let’s support it. We have a good baseball team, let’s support it. We have a good college program here, let’s support it.” And not keep wanting to chase something else that, frankly, we may have no chance of being successful with. There was once a loose confederation of the various sports entities in town. Did anything every come of that? Unfortunately, no. I thought it was a great idea. Having a monthly meeting at each person’s different venue, like we did, and exchanging ideas — saying, “It would be better if you didn’t play on this date because it’s our big kickoff” — stuff like that was great. That went away when the Oilers came to town. They weren’t interested in being involved with that, and once that happened it all seemed to fade away. Without the NFL entity in town participating, then a lot of things couldn’t be solved. What do you have to do next season, your last at the Mid-South Coliseum, to keep the fires burning until you get to DeSoto County? First of all, we want to have a normal summer — which we certainly didn’t have last summer— where the court issues are non-factors and we are out promoting hockey. We’re even talking about expanding those efforts up to Jonesboro and more into DeSoto County this year. Kevin Evans hopefully won’t be stuck in Canada again. He’s looking to do some roller-hockey clinics around the area. Secondly, we are going to really try to promote the team from the standpoint of “support us at the Mid-South Coliseum for our last season there and get on our priority list for the new building.” Is the DeSoto arena on track for opening in 2000? Yes, construction has continued all winter. Apparently there is a concrete base in place with the idea that sometime in the summer of 2000 that building will be complete, with us playing our first game there in the fall of 2000. What will change about your marketing strategies once you move down there? Obviously we’re still going to be Memphis’ hockey team. We’ll still be promoting in Shelby County as heavy as we ever have. It’s almost like going back to 1992 [when the RiverKings first played here]. I’m sure there are a lot of people in southern DeSoto County who for whatever reasons don’t come to Memphis. We’ll have to go into those markets as well and educate them like we did in 1992 and 1993. Sometime this spring or summer, we hope to have some sort of function on the grounds of the new arena for our season-ticket holders and our sponsors. We’ll have the building manager there with updated drawings. We’ll make it a fun activity where people can come down, have a free hot dog, and begin to learn the drive to the new facility. When you look back over this tumultuous period, is there anything you would have done differently? The only thing I would have done differently would be to push our side, our management, our attorneys to try to get the court case decided sooner. I don’t know if that was possible or not, it wasn’t our lawsuit. To have that solved in August instead of late September would have made things a lot different. We’ve been behind the eight-ball since day one. When the lawsuit was finally settled, we didn’t get our schedule approved until two days before the first home game. That meant it was hard to market an entire season. We couldn’t even market our first game. What was disappointing to me was the fact that there seemed to be an unwillingness on the part of the Coliseum staff to want to work together — going back to opening night, when they had the T-shirts which said, “Let’s keep the fight on the ice.” My response to that was, “Who sued whom?” It began to affect the fans. They began to feel alienated by the building. That’s what hurt the most. It just seemed like the building upkeep was not what it was in the past. Like it or not, going to sporting events in the Nineties, a lot of the experience is about the facility you’re in. A lot of our fans have gone to Nashville to the new arena there and they are just amazed to see a modern hockey facility. Even in our league, the Fayetteville, North Carolina, building is a top-flight facility. The Carolina Hurricane, an NHL team, is thinking of playing some games there. But doesn’t the Coliseum keep the parking and concessions money from RiverKings games? Aren’t they spiting themselves? They get all the parking and all the concessions and we pay a nightly rental fee on top of that. I remember the day we told the Coliseum management of our decision to go to DeSoto County. I came back from that meeting and said, “They took that way too personally.” I think that is what I would say about this whole process. Instead of saying, “Okay, it’s a business decision, we don’t agree with it, but how can we co-exist until you leave?” it became very personal. We never had a chance to sit down with them after the decision was made. On came the lawsuit and all the headaches that followed with it.