Shreveport never figured out Bernie Glieberman.
Bernie Glieberman never figured out Shreveport.
It was 30 years ago when he brought an expansion Canadian Football League team to town, a two-year marriage that was the troubled from the start and ended with both parties pretty much blaming the other.
But when you write the history of sports in Shreveport, there should be a chapter devoted to the Shreveport Pirates.
Bernie Glieberman died earlier this week at age 85 and that news was hardly even a footnote in this area. For those who were around in the mid-1990s, he was as significant – and somewhat mysterious — as they come.
Glieberman was a real estate mogul in the Detroit area who was the financier of putting a CFL team in Shreveport. But it was his son Lonie who ran the day-to-day operations.
Bernie was the exact opposite of Lonie, who was always exuberant and positive and determined to make this venture work. Lonie was the face of the franchise, but he was basically a kid in his mid-20s; certainly not the savvy businessman that his father was.
The Gliebermans tried to save the Ottawa CFL franchise, but when that didn’t work out, they decided to be a part of the CFL expansion into the United States and settled on Shreveport.
Looking back on it, it still seems a little surreal in how Shreveport got a CFL franchise to come to town. Suddenly, everything around here was changing. Before, the Class AA baseball Captains had basically been the only game in town and had been hugely successful. Now, here came professional football, with professional basketball (Shreveport Storm/Crawdads of the CBA) to follow.
Not only that, but the entertainment dollar was being stretched with the arrival of multiple casinos. Maybe the time was right for all of these things to happen.
Or maybe not.
The run-up to the ’94 season for the Pirates has not gone as smoothly as many – including the Gliebermans – would have wanted. There wasn’t exactly a red carpet being rolled out. Sports fans loved the idea, but the community as a whole cast a wary eye at these “carpetbaggers” from Michigan.
But there was the thought that once football was actually being played, all of that would die down.
There are a lot of milestone markers in the history of the Shreveport Pirates – first home game, first win, biggest crowd — but there is one that hardly anybody remembers that basically told that story of what was to come.
On June 11, 1994, the Pirates had their first “public showing” at an in-house scrimmage at what was then known as Caddo Parish Stadium. It would be Shreveport’s first opportunity to see what this CFL football thing was all about.
My brother Ben and I had been selected as the radio announcers for the CFL team – it was obviously a shallow pool of applicants – and I was unable to go to the scrimmage. But Ben did attend and when I got a chance later that night, I called to ask how it went.
“Lonie was fired up,” my brother said, “but I got a bad feeling about Bernie. He didn’t seem too pleased.”
It was a hot night in the summer and the scrimmage had to be postponed for almost an hour because of a late afternoon thunderstorm. Not exactly a recipe for an overflow crowd.
Lonie was as excited about the proceedings as he always was. Bernie, who looked around and saw only about 1,000 people, was not.
I have always thought the clock started ticking that night.
We were the broadcast crew for two years and I can’t remember a single conversation I ever had with Bernie. He just seemed more and more disinterested as time went on.
Granted, the product wasn’t great – the Pirates lost their first 14 games, but did win three of the last four and had more than 30,000 at the season finale. The team was better in the ’95 season but the attendance was not.
Lonie was always Mr. Positive, but you just knew that Bernie was going to hit the gong at some point. He was a businessman and this was not his idea of good business.
The Gliebermans tried to move the franchise to Virginia, but there were lawsuits filed over non-payment of bills in Shreveport and he had an antique automobile impounded over non-payment for the scoreboard at Independence Stadium.
They tried to go back to Ottawa and even were part of a planned start-up league in 1997 that never worked out.
Lonie, as you might expect, still has fond memories of 30 years ago. “It was fun to go into schools and communities in Shreveport and talk with people to build a fan base from the ground up, creating 11,000 season ticket holders,” he told an Ottawa online publication. “That first game in the stadium is a night I’ll never forget.”
As for Bernie, he probably wanted to forget it ever happened.
Contact JJ at johnjamesmarshall@yahoo.com