MLSE CEO Keith Pelley stands in the company's offices in Toronto, on Oct. 8.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
A few days before the big reveal on Saturday night, Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment chief operating officer Nick Eaves is leading a tour of the Scotiabank Arena’s refurbished platinum club.
This high-roller area used to house a series of pokey, low-slung bunkers. Over the off-season, they’ve blown it out into a vast, white-linen-table-cloth restaurant. The players will have to walk through it between periods, like the world’s richest zoo animals.
This place is buzzing with staff. The tables are already set. A bunch of suits are standing around admiring the atmosphere.
Spirits are high until Mr. Eaves’s boss, MLSE CEO Keith Pelley, points to a TV.
“First of all, we’re going to make the TVs bigger,” Mr. Pelley says. He says it like he’s been asked a question that wasn’t asked.
Yes. Yes. Definitely bigger, they all agree.
“We’ll have to change that TV,” Mr. Pelley says. I can see one guy in a suit stifling the urge to run up and tear it off the wall right now.
Mr. Pelley, 60, is trailing around behind this tour, like someone visiting a friend’s new house for the first time. He’s overseen this project during his six months on the job, but every time he turns a corner he is frozen in wonder.
The thing that really works him up is at the end of the tour. It’s a new flat-screen in a hallway. This place isn’t anywhere. It’s a corridor leading to other, better places.
“Look at this,” Mr. Pelley says, voice jumping. “Dave is going to love this.”
Dave is the long-serving security guard who minds a curtain on game nights. Staff and media pass through it to get to backstage.
Dave has apparently mentioned to someone who mentioned to someone who mentioned to Mr. Pelley that he has nowhere to watch the game, even though he’s standing a hundred feet from the ice.
“We have to make sure the game is on this,” Mr. Pelley says, pointing rhythmically at the screen. “Dave is going to go crazy when he sees this.”
Unlike a lot of high achievers, Keith Pelley didn’t have a plan. What he had was an irrepressible urge to say “Yes” to things.
Mr. Pelley started out at TSN in the 1980s as what he said they called a flügen – the kids who cut highlights. A friend got him the job. He was still working days at his dad’s import-export food business.
Why ‘flügen’?
“You know,” Mr. Pelley says, leaning back at his desk. “I have no idea. That’s just what they called it.”
Mr. Pelley’s office is the traditional 15th-floor aerie at 50 Bay St. of MLSE CEOs – from the transformational (Tim Leiweke) to the nearly anonymous (Michael Friisdahl). The room is very beige. All the furniture looks box fresh. Like no one’s ever in here.
Mr. Pelley rode flügen to producer of live sports, including the CFL. When Fox got its first NFL deal and was scouring the Earth for experienced football producers, Mr. Pelley’s boss put his name up. The understanding was that Mr. Pelley would return after three months. Three months later, Mr. Pelley phoned his boss to tell him that he would not be returning.
A couple of years after that, as Mr. Pelley was about to sign a long-term deal with Fox, the same boss called him up and offered him the position of vice-president of programming at TSN.
“I didn’t know anything about programming,” Mr. Pelley says. He was 33 years old when he took that job.
You ever watch one of those YouTube videos that show an acrobat climbing two facing walls by leaping back and forth from one to the other? It doesn’t look like it should be possible, but there’s this guy doing it. That’s how it feels listening to Mr. Pelley narrate his CV.
Like the time he got the job running the Toronto Argonauts, despite never having run any sort of sports team before.
Mr. Pelley was by then president of TSN, re-negotiating the network’s broadcast deal with the CFL. He wanted to include a reduction clause that would kick in if the Argos folded. He was told that could not happen. Mr. Pelley persisted. The CFL asked him to meet the Argos new owners. They would persuade him.
So Mr. Pelley went to lunch. Then he went home to his wife, Joan, and told her that he’d agreed to run the Argos.
This pattern of meals equals new jobs defines Mr. Pelley’s professional life.
After a meal with then-CTV boss Ivan Fecan, he agreed in principle to run the Olympic consortium at Vancouver 2010.
At another dinner with then-Rogers CEO Nadir Mohamed, he took the job running Rogers Media.
Mr. Pelley may have a problem saying “No,” but he also has a knack of knowing when to leave. The signal move of his career remains Rogers’ 12-year, $5.2-billion broadcast marriage with the NHL.
Commissioner Gary Bettman recalls his first meeting with Mr. Pelley in Toronto about the rights. Mr. Bettman’s impression was that Mr. Pelley wasn’t interested – “I thought he was seeing us as a courtesy.” The mood shifted when the NHL group said that streaming would be included in the package.
“That intrigued him, and he got more and more invested in the conversation,” Mr. Bettman says. “This was more than 10 years ago. People weren’t talking about streaming, but he got it. He’s that smart.”
“The deal was offensive and defensive at the same time,” Mr. Pelley says of it now. “If we had been shut out of hockey at that point, then Sportsnet would have meandered in mediocrity in perpetuity. Not even mediocrity, maybe less than that.”
After the switch, the revamped Hockey Night in Canada broadcast foundered, and the sports hive mind agreed that Rogers had overspent. Conventional media thinking has caught up to Mr. Pelley – nowadays, there’s no such thing as an unattractive live sports property. They are all beautiful in their own way.
But Mr. Pelley didn’t wait around for the shift. He was gone again.
This time, he was headhunted to run the European PGA Tour. He likes golf – that was his only qualification.
By then, Mr. Pelley was in his 50s, with a young family, including a son, Jason, and a daughter, Hope, who suffers from spina bifida. This was the unique instance in which he wasn’t raring to go. But after another chat with Joan, he was talked into a case of the yeses.
“It’s tough to get a wheelchair around in the snow,” Mr. Pelley says. “So I told Joan I’d call them up the next day and tell them I was interested.”
It was during this process that he received what he calls the worst advice he was ever given – not to take the job in London.
“Well, they told me the same thing about the Argos job, but I’d already announced that one, so …”
Was the PGA job the first one in your life that you interviewed for?
Mr. Pelley returns to the thinking position, leaned back in his captain’s chair. After a long beat – “You know what? I think it was. Wow.”
He spent nine years in Europe, the last bit of it playing peacekeeper between warring American and Saudi golf factions. Then he got another call and had another nice meal and another heart to heart with Joan.
There is clearly some sort of personal magic at work here, but it’s hard to spot it. Mr. Pelley is a big presence, but not an overwhelming one. He has a way of lunging into a handshake and giving you a real bone crusher that is the mark of someone who knows they need to work to be memorable.
If you had to pick a word to describe him, it might be dreamy. He tends to wander off somewhere in his own mind in the midst of conversations. You can tell by the way he relocates you with his eyes after a few seconds. If he’s not telling a story, his sentences often tail off.
He’s unlike the executives and wannabe bosses who surround him, most of whom have been taught to focus on their rhetorical targets like bug-eyed Bill Clintons.
So what’s the secret? He wasn’t born to this. He doesn’t have any particular training to do any of it before he does it. Is it making friends or not making enemies or what?
Mr. Pelley gets back in his thinking pose. This one troubles him.
“That is a very profound question,” he says. Another pause.
“I don’t think it’s about any of those things. I think … I think … I think it’s about results.”
Then he stops. I’m waiting for him to expand, before I realize that he’s finished. It’s not much of an answer, which isn’t unusual. What is unusual is that the guy saying it seems to realize it.
Mr. Pelley’s friend, PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan, says of his qualities: “If you spend the amount of time he’s spent in an industry, having the effect he’s had, your relationships grow exponentially. A lot of people in this business – powerful people – have seen what he can do, and gravitate toward him. He’s not necessarily looking for the next thing. But it finds him.”
Great athletes – the real physical geniuses – cannot explain how they do what they do or why they’ve got where they’ve got. They just do it. Prompting them to go deeper confuses and alarms them. It’s like insisting your buddy explain to you exactly how he breathes so well.
Maybe Mr. Pelley is a less-studied professional type – the natural boss. People just see it in him, and can’t help themselves but ask him to run things. Whereas most of the small set of people who are offered such things are inclined to be cautious, Mr. Pelley just wings it.
And unlike the even smaller subset of winging-it types, he figures out how to make it work. And then down to the infinitesimal group of successful winging-it leaders, he doesn’t get caught posing in the end zone. He leaves before the reconsideration phase.
The least interesting thing we talk about are his plans for MLSE’s sports properties. “Culture and chemistry” is the plan. As opposed to “command and control” – which he leaves to the presidents and GMs. All of which is designed to fend off “consumer confusion.”
“That’s a lot of double Cs,” Mr. Pelley says.
According to Mr. Pelley, the Leafs have culture and chemistry, the Raptors are on their way to having it, Toronto FC couldn’t find it in a dictionary and the Argonauts need customers more than they need slogans.
He says things like “entertainment powerhouse,” and “community titan” and “relentless pursuit of championships.”
He says all the right things about ownership, which is in the midst of turning over the keys to his former bosses at Rogers Communications Inc.
“There’s been a lot of interesting findings in this role in the first six months,” Mr. Pelley says. “We have to keep everything – the Leafs, the Raptors, TFC, the Argos – moving in one direction.”
Does this work without the Blue Jays brought under the MLSE banner?
“Yeah. Sure,” – and then the sales pitch continues.
It is hard to reconcile this very conventional Mr. Pelley with the guy who, when asked about what he wants out of the MLSE job, says “Legacy is for Winston Churchill.”
Sorry?
“Like, people asked me, ‘What is your legacy at the European Tour?’ There is none. You think in 100 years, people are going to say, ‘Oh, he started the Rolex Series’? I don’t do things for legacy. I do them for a moment in time, and the experiences I can have.”
Which you’ll agree is an unconventional way for a sports executive to talk.
So Mr. Pelley, a man who likes to say yes to people, isn’t promising Toronto anything. He’ll give you the buzzwords if you force him, but mostly he’s in it for the vibes. He wants to make millions of Daves go crazy when they see this.
Is this his last job?
The chair is tilting back before I can get all five syllables out.
“That’s another conversation that my charming bride has had with me,” Mr. Pelley says. “And I say to her, ‘Well honey, let’s just play that one day at a time.’ ”