Gut Punch: Former Madison Square Garden president tells the true story of how the Rangers won the Stanley Cup, the Knicks lost Pat Riley, and the Yankees struck gold with the YES Network

By Bob Gutkowski and Wallace Matthews

Unveiling the Secrets of NY Sports: Stanley Cup Triumph, Knicks' Near-Miss, New York Yankees' Game-Changing Network, and Celebrity Stories. The Untold Stories of Keenan and Riley's Exits. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
• Release date: Jun 17, 2024
• ISBN: 9798822951525

Bob Gutkowski

Bob Gutkowski is a renowned figure in the Sports, Media, and Entertainment industry. His illustrious career includes presidencies at Madison Square Garden, MSG Network, and MSG Entertainment. He began his journey at NBC's The Tonight Show and later held significant roles at ESPN and Paramount Television. Gutkowski co-founded The Marquee Group, a global sports and entertainment company, and is the current Founder of RMG SportsVentures LLC. His innovative ideas have led to the creation of the YES Network and Live Nation.

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Chapter One

MY CUP RUNNETH OVER

T

he first thing I worried about was Can I lift this thing over my head?

After all, the Stanley Cup is big, ring upon silver ring of the names of every player and coach who ever was a member of a team that managed to win it, topped by a bowl big enough to feed a Saint Bernard out of.

And then there was the weight of the history, fifty-four years of it, eight years longer than I had lived. Since the last time the Stanley Cup had been hoisted at center ice in Madison Square Garden, the world had experienced ten presidencies; a world war; the assassination of JFK; a man walking on the moon; the resignation of Nixon; the rise of Sinatra, Elvis, and the Beatles; the end of Lou Gehrig’s career; and the start of Derek Jeter’s. All that had happened between April 13, 1940, the last time the Rangers had won the Stanley Cup, and tonight. A heavy burden for an entire city to bear, let alone one man.

But it turned out to be easy. The weight of those fifty-four years dropped away as I drank in the moment, the incredible roaring of the crowd that seemed as if it never wanted to leave, and the happiness on the faces of Neil Smith, the GM who had bought the groceries, and Mike Keenan, the coach who cooked them into a sumptuous feast.

By the time the cup got to me, it had already passed through the hands of every player on the team, been kissed by two dozen pairs of lips, and hoisted finally by Keenan and Smith.

I watched them smiling at each other, and I thought, Nobody in this building knows how much these two guys hate each other. Except me.

The sight of these two flashed me back to where we had come from, a hotel room in Toronto in which we had hammered out a deal to bring Keenan to New York fourteen months earlier. And it flashed me forward to where I knew I was probably headed—out of a job because the Garden was about to be sold.

And it reminded me of the meeting I was forced to call, in mid-March, that probably turned our season around and won us the cup.

But I had no idea that within a month, give or take a week, the hatred between Smith and Keenan would cause a rupture in that winning combination that would unite them in the common goal of going their separate ways. That rupture reduced whatever dreams we had of a Rangers dynasty, or even a repeat of this magic moment, to a pile of ashes. I was the glue that was holding this unlikely partnership together, and I knew that once the Garden was sold, it would all fall apart.

For now, however, I was savoring the glory of the present. Still, I could hardly forget the tumultuous events of the recent past.

Since I had been named president of Madison Square Garden on December 6, 1991, I and my team had fought hard to bring the Garden back to the position of prominence it deserved to hold in New York City. I had always felt that in their hearts, every New Yorker believed they owned a piece of the Garden. But when I came in, although the building had just undergone a renovation, its reputation was tarnished, and its teams were struggling. There was little to no interest in promoting music concerts, and in fact, on nights the teams didn’t play, it was more like a twenty-thousand-seat rental hall.

In short, the place was no longer fun. My self-imposed mandate was to change that.

Now, standing at center ice while waves of love poured down from the hysterical crowd, I realized we had accomplished that goal. The Garden had become, once again, the most exciting room in New York City, and unless you were in that room on one of those magical nights, you really had no idea what went on.

The notoriously tough New York columnists gave me credit for the transformation, although it had been a team effort all the way.

Mark Kriegel of the New York Daily News called me the boss of the Garden…from his spot on the ramp, [he] keeps his eye on everything. In a lot of ways, it’s become his joint.¹

New York Times columnist George Vecsey characterized those three months in 1994, when both the Knicks and Rangers were in contention to win championships, as an unprecedented springtime in New York and said the building glittered and shook.²

But this was no accident. Many carefully calculated elements combined to create it, and as I stood there with the Stanley Cup over my head, I took a moment to reflect upon them.

I thought about the groundbreaking and industry-changing $486 million deal we had negotiated with George Steinbrenner and the Yankees when I was the head of MSG Network.

I thought about the wars we had won over powerful cable operators such as Time Warner, Cablevision, Comcast, and John Malone’s TCI.

I thought about forging associations with Ron Delsener, John Scher, and Al Haymon to bring big-name music acts such as Streisand, Dylan, Public Enemy, and Springsteen back to the Garden after years of absence.

I thought about the first signs of a fraying relationship between Dave Checketts and Pat Riley, which I sensed would culminate in an unhappy ending.

And I thought about having to negotiate the minefield of the battle of egos between Neil Smith, the Rangers GM, and Keenan, the coach he had wanted but could now hardly stand.

And I knew that if there ever was another night like this at the Garden, I wouldn’t be around to see it. The place was about to be sold, and when that happened, I was virtually guaranteed to be fired.

However, all those thoughts took a back seat to the ecstasy of finally having won the Stanley Cup and the anticipation of taking that first sip of champagne out of its gleaming silver bowl.

As I took that sweet swig, I also took a moment to relive the unlikely journey that had brought me here in the first place.

1 Mark Kriegel, "The Garden, The Gardner’’ New York Daily News, May 15, 1994

2 George Vecsey, "New Suits Can’t Wait to Wield Ax,’’ New York Times, Sept. 21, 1994. https://www.nytimes.com/1994/09/21/sports/sports-of-the-times-new-suits-can-t-wait-to-wield-ax.html

Chapter Two

BEGINNINGS

I

didn’t come out of school thinking that someday I’d be president of Madison Square Garden. In fact, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do.

As a kid, I was a die-hard Rangers fan during the era when the NHL consisted of a half dozen teams known as the Original Six. I was also a fight fan and remembered, as a fourteen-year-old, watching Emile Griffith beat Benny Kid Paret into a coma while playing a poker game with my buddies. I also watched the Knicks. To me, the Garden was a field of dreams, a place where magical things happened. I never dreamed that someday, not only would I work there, but I would run the place. The thought that someday my name would be engraved on the Stanley Cup for my grandkids to see? Unreal.

When I graduated from Hofstra University in 1970, I wanted to go into the music business. I was working in the mailroom of CBS Records, and I was hoping that someday, I’d get hired there full-time. It didn’t happen. When a sales job for Columbia Records Productions opened up, it went to my cousin Alex.

But that same day—December 1, 1969—I had more serious things on my mind. Like a lot of twenty-one-year-olds, I was listening closely to the radio to learn if my number was about to come up in the Vietnam War draft lottery. A low number was a ticket to the jungles of Southeast Asia, and there was a good chance you weren’t coming back.

At that point, I had a business degree, a fiancée, and a lot of dreams. Going to war was not one of them, and I had no wife, kids, or rich family to bail me out of it. My dad, John, had died of a heart attack at forty-two, when I was seventeen. If my number was called, I was going.

So it was me; my mom, Mary; and my fiancée, Laura, huddled around the radio, and when they called my birthday—March 9—and attached it to number 317, I felt a momentary sense of relief. But within a month, reality hit. By January, those numbers were being called up in a hurry, something like thirty a month. At that rate, I’d be in Nam before the next Christmas. I needed a job, and I needed it fast.

Over the summer, the number of boys being called up really slowed down and in fact never got close to 317. But I had no way of knowing that would happen. That lottery wound up serving as the impetus that pushed me into the career that would consume the next fifty years of my life.

My uncle Alex—yes, the father of the cousin who got the job I wanted at Columbia—got me a summer job in the mailroom at CBS. Uncle Alex knew a guy who knew a guy at NBC, and that guy got me hired as a page at 30 Rock. A page was basically an audience wrangler, a guy who herded the people who came to sit in the studio audiences at their live shows like The Tonight Show and the game shows that were all over daytime TV back then. We also answered questions from the audience, took tickets at the door, seated people, and stood at the edge of the stage during the show to make sure no one ran up on the talent.

I got to work on a show called He Said, She Said, hosted by Joe Garagiola. I knew I wasn’t going to be a page forever—the pay was lousy, ninety dollars a week, and the treatment was worse. Plus, I had a passion for sports. So I worked up the nerve to tell Garagiola I wanted to get into sports television someday, and could he help me?

Sure, kid, he said. I’ll buy you breakfast tomorrow.

And he did. It was unbelievable. The great Joe Garagiola sat and listened to me, and I’m sure he put in a word for me with Chet Simmons, who was second-in-command at NBC Sports and became one of my great mentors.

I was always indebted to Garagiola for that, and through the years he always kept in touch. Gutkowski, get over here, he would say. You get a job in sports yet?

The guy was a prince. Years later, I tried to hire him as the play-by-play man for the Yankees on MSG Network. By then he had hosted The Today Show and was pretty much done with sports. He ultimately decided against it.

But if you ever have an opening, I’ll do the dog show for you, he said.

I’ll get you the dog show, I told him. I hired him to host the Westminster Kennel Club show we did every year, and he loved it. He was terrific at it too. And I couldn’t help but think back about how we had come full circle. Eighteen years earlier I had been a kid asking him for help getting a job. And now, here I was hiring him.

But a lot of things happened in between.

I spent a year working as a page for NBC on The Tonight Show, Jeopardy (the original, tougher version, hosted by Art Fleming, not Alex Trebek), He Said, She Said, and Sale of the Century.

It wasn’t so bad being a page. We all wore the official NBC page uniform, which was black pants, black jackets, and white shirts with paper collars that were fastened with a stud in the back. We looked like bellhops. A lot of the guys I worked with wanted to be actors, and some of them made it, like Randolph Mantooth, who went on to star in the TV show Emergency!

And some NBC pages before me went further than that. Among them were Michael Eisner, who later became the head of Disney; Ted Koppel, who hosted Nightline for ABC; Regis Philbin; and Dave Garroway, who in the 1950s became the first host of The Today Show.

But as pages, we only had one line: Please follow me.

One of the perks of being a page was you got to work near the stars’ dressing rooms. One of the guys who made an impression on me was Maurice Chevalier, the old French crooner with the straw hat. I never forgot his smiling little face with the rosy cheeks, and how nice he always was to all the pages.

One day Jack LaLanne, one of the first fitness gurus, came in carrying these two heavy suitcases filled with weights that he was going to use as props during his appearance. He seemed to be struggling a little bit, so I asked him, Do you need me to open the door of your dressing room, or are you just going to walk through it?

All he said was, I’m fine, son. I opened the door for him.

Don Rickles would always stop by, to make fun of us, of course. One day, he said to me, Hey kid, where’s your monkey? The way we were dressed, I guess he thought we looked like organ-grinders.

And Ed McMahon, Johnny Carson’s sidekick for decades on The Tonight Show, always made a point of coming down to tell us a joke or two. Johnny, on the other hand, never said a word to us. As soon as the rehearsal was over, he’d leave the stage, and you wouldn’t see him again until show time. He looked uncomfortable all the time. Frankly, he seemed a bit unfriendly.

After my year as a page, I decided I wanted to be on the business side of things. They had a division called NBC Sales Service, which would track which shows were cleared in which markets around the country. You had to know which shows were being carried by which station, at what time, if they were carrying it live or on delayed tape, and if they were preempting it, and if so, what for? You had to do that for every show NBC had.

I started out doing Saturday morning kids’ shows. It was OK, but I really wanted to get into sports. What I wanted to do was chart the distribution of NFL games on Sundays. This was when the blackout rule meant you couldn’t show a game in its home market, to protect the ticket sales. So we’d have all these regional games, and we would work with the sports department to help determine which games were best suited for which markets each week. There was a real art to it, part of it based on market history, part of it on gut feeling, and Chet Simmons was a master of the art. He decided where every single game would go, every week. There were no computers or anything to help him do it. It was all done on paper.

I got his attention by coming up with a system involving maps, colored pencils, and a lot of red and blue lines. Chet liked me, he liked my system, and he liked the way I dressed. One day in 1971, I got called from Mel Black, who was the head of human resources for NBC. Black told me the network was looking to hire its first production assistant in sports, and Simmons had specifically asked for me.

I was dumbfounded. I ran into Simmons the next day and he said, You’re my guy. Go home and talk to your wife—Laura and I had gotten married the previous June—because this job entails a lot of travel, and a lot of people get divorced because of it.

So I went home and spoke to Laura, and we decided I would take it. Now we were sitting back waiting to hear from him. Months went by, and nothing. What was going on?

Turned out HR was giving Chet a hard time because he wanted to pay me like a production assistant, and they wanted to keep paying me like a page. So Chet wound up hiring the son of a friend of his, a guy named Ed Weisman, who was in ABC Sports PR. The son’s name was Mike Weisman, and he went on to become a legendary, iconic producer for NBC and later, Fox Sports.

So I never went into sports production. I wound up going into sports business instead. And Mike Weisman, the man who headed NBC’s Olympics coverage for years and created the excellent baseball coverage on Fox, remains a good friend to this day.

I’d say it worked out for both of us.

Chapter Three

MOVIN’ ON UP

T

he meeting I had been waiting for my whole life was finally scheduled for the spring of 1975.

For the previous four years, I had been in NBC Sales Service, eventually moving up to the Today/Tonight Show sales group, selling ad time on The Today Show with Jim Hartz and Barbara Walters, The Tonight Show (with Johnny Carson, of course), The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder, the Midnight Special with Wolfman Jack, and the soon-to-be-created Saturday Night Live.

My top client on both the Today and Tonight shows was Alpo, the dog food company, and their commercials were done live, with a host feeding a dog before the cameras. I don’t know if they starved the dog, but whenever they put the bowl down, the dog jumped at it. It was a different dog every night. But I must say, those dogs were troupers; during rehearsals sometimes, a dog would take a dump on the floor, but never on live TV as far as I can remember. Very professional.

On The Tonight Show, the responsibility for feeding the dog fell to Ed McMahon, Johnny’s sidekick. Every night, Laura and I would stay up long enough to watch Ed feed the dog. In fact, Laura had just given birth to our first son, Christian, and he never slept. So not only did she see the dog get fed on The Tonight Show, she also saw the dog eat on The Today Show and The Tomorrow Show as well.

By late 1974, I started selling ads for Saturday Night Live, which Lorne Michaels had just created but wouldn’t launch until the following October. The inaugural cast of that show was a bunch of unknowns but turned out to be one of the greatest comedy ensembles in TV history. John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman, Garrett Morris, Jane Curtin, and, of course, Chevy Chase, who wound up blowing the biggest account I had. It only took him two shows to do it. I’ll explain in a bit.

In the meantime, I had gotten an approach from Steve Leff, a VP of broadcast buying at McCann Erickson, a very influential ad agency. He was one of the guys involved in creating the famous Miller Lite Tastes Great / Less Filling campaign. Steve liked me and hated my boss, Bob Conrad. He also knew that what I really wanted to do was get into sports TV. He told me Mike Trager, the new VP of sales for NBC Sports Sales, was looking for a new salesman. He suggested we get together for lunch.

You guys will be perfect together, Leff told me.

Trager had been at NBC in New York for only a couple of months, and there was some resentment and suspicion toward him because he had been promoted from spot sales—selling local ad spots—to network sales. The guys who were already there didn’t like the fact that he had made the jump. They didn’t like the fact that he was the youngest VP on the staff. They didn’t know who he was, what he was about, or what he planned to do. And more than a couple of the older guys thought they should have gotten the job that was given to him.

This was the guy who was standing between me and my dream job. So I went to meet Trager at the Londonderry Pub in midtown Manhattan. I had seen him around the office—the first time I saw him, I thought he looked a bit like a shorter Paul McCartney—but had never spoken to him.

I admit, I was a little nervous. I had heard all sorts of things about Trager. He was a dynamic guy and really shaking things up. Unlike other VPs, who didn’t allow their sales people to make a deal without an OK from the pricing group—you would have to say, I think I can get this done and come back again, which a lot of times would kill a deal—Mike encouraged aggressive sales pitches and allowed his sales force to work with autonomy.

His basic marching orders to his staff were, if you go into a guy’s office to make a sale, you better come out with one.

All these things were going through my mind as I sat down in a booth in the back to wait for him. We seemed to have a lot of good things going for us—he knew I was tight with Chet Simmons, who was the president of NBC Sports, with whom he was close—and when Mike showed up, he was friendly and approachable. We exchanged some small talk.

But once we got down to business, something went wrong. For some reason, we didn’t quite mesh, or at least I didn’t think so. Sometimes, as a salesman, you try too hard and oversell your product. You can feel when you’re doing it but inexplicably, you do it anyway. And as our conversation turned serious, I could feel that I was overselling myself. I was saying things that just didn’t feel right. As good as I had felt going into the meeting, that was how bad I felt leaving it.

We shook hands, and Mike said he would get back to me, but I was sure that wasn’t going to happen.

When I got back to my office, Leff called to find out how it went.

Not well, I said.

That’s crazy, he said. I’ll get back to you.

I went back to my in-laws’ house in Dix Hills, Long Island, where Laura and I were house-sitting.

How’d it go? she asked.

I blew it, I said. I just wasn’t myself.

The next day, Leff called again. Trager wanted to meet again, in his office this time. He had a corner office on the eleventh floor of 30 Rock, four levels up from the Today/Tonight sales office.

This one, I knew, was really my last shot. We sat down again, and the first thing I said to Trager was, Look, I didn’t feel the first meeting went well, and I appreciate the opportunity to give it another shot.

This time, we sat and talked for two hours, about life, about family, about the direction and philosophy of NBC Sports Sales, and about ABC Sports, our main competitors.

At the end of this meeting, when Trager said, I’ll get back to you, I knew I had the job.

Little did I know Trager had a completely different impression of our first meeting. Years later, I found out he thought