By JOHN JAMES MARSHALL, Journal Sports
You might think 30 years would erase a lot of memories, both good and bad. But not for Lonie Glieberman, who endured plenty of both as part of the ownership group that brought the Canadian Football League’s Shreveport Pirates to town in the 1990s.
“It doesn’t quite hit you until you say it out loud,” Glieberman says. “Wow … 30 years.”
He’s 57 now, but still has the youthful enthusiasm he displayed as the face of the front office during the team’s time here. And if you think Glieberman wants to erase the memories of the two CFL seasons in Shreveport, think again.
He can still rattle off the names of players and games and events as if they happened only a few weeks ago instead of a few decades. Close your eyes and you still here that voice of eternal optimism.
“It’s still a huge regret that it didn’t work,” Glieberman says.
These days, you can find Glieberman about as far away from Shreveport as you can get. He operates Mount Bohemia Ski Resort on the very northern tip of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
“It’s very remote and little population here,” Glieberman says. “It was a completely different world than the Pirates, but you’re still selling. It’s ski tickets instead of football tickets.”
The Pirates arrived in 1994; they left in 1995. It may not have been long, but plenty happened during those two years.
Tumultuous would probably be the best word to describe the birth of the Pirates in 1994. The organizational structure got flipped upside down basically before it even got off the ground. The head coach was fired before the first game. Front office personnel came and went.
All of that while many in Shreveport cast a wary eye as to why the Gliebermans (father Bernie and son Lonie), who were Michigan natives and had previously owned a team in Ottawa, would want to come to Shreveport, of all places, as the CFL expanded into the United States.
It didn’t help that the first season opened with loss after loss after loss. Fourteen of them, to be exact. The starting quarterback was 1 for 20 for nine yards in the opening game and then the position became a revolving door after that. The biggest off-season acquisition, All-CFL linebacker Elfrid Payton, was cut after a few games. (Payton would go on to be elected to the CFL Hall of Fame.)
“Yeah, there were a lot of things I would have done differently,” Lonie Glieberman says.
And he knows exactly what would be No. 1 on the list. “We tried to hire Forrest Gregg as head coach originally but he turned us down,” Glieberman says. “The biggest regret is not hiring Forrest to be the general manager and head coach from the start. If we had him at the very beginning, I think things would have been a lot different.”
Gregg, an NFL Hall of Fame player, was a head coach in a Super Bowl with Cincinnati and also was the coach when SMU resurrected its football program after being given the death penalty in the 1980s by the NCAA.
But as bad as the 1994 season started, it did give Glieberman his favorite memory.
“Beating Ottawa that last home game of the ’94 season when we had 31,000 people in the stands is my favorite memory,” he says. “To me, that’s when I thought it was really going to work. We had won three of the last four games.”
That momentum, however, didn’t last. Billy Joe Tolliver, who would go on to be a longtime Shreveport resident, was brought in to play quarterback, but the team finished 5-13. By the end of the season, the handwriting was on the wall.
“I think if we had played in ’96 we would have been pretty good,” Glieberman, still the eternal optimist, says. “We were building a team. Billy Joe improved a lot in the second half of the year and I think he would have been a very good CFL quarterback.”
Years later, Glieberman still looks back at what could have been by modeling another franchise. Shreveport was the smallest market in the CFL and the second-smallest was Saskatchewan.
“Saskatchewan has ended up being the most profitable team in the CFL,” he says. “That was the model we were following. Shreveport is a lot like Saskatchewan – civic pride, our team, our city – and was going to be the Saskatchewan of the South. That model did prove to work and I believe it could have worked in Shreveport,”
In 2005, the Glibermans got involved again with the Ottawa franchise. “I’d show the staff in Ottawa how we had 11,000 season ticket holders in Shreveport,” Glieberman says. “And at that time, Ottawa had about 11,000 season ticket holders. The lesson learned was patience. We never gave it time to develop in the United States. We thought we’d open up and we’d be busy.”
He points to the business plan Major League Soccer has used. “Major League Soccer drew worse in first 10 years than CFL expansion did in its first three years,” he says. “The difference is that Major League Soccer had a long-term strategy of sustained sizable losses for quite a while with the idea that it was going to turn around. And, of course, it did. The CFL just didn’t plan for the size of losses that the American teams had.”
Maybe it’s because it’s only a few miles across Lake Superior from Canada, but Glieberman says his experience in Shreveport has played a vital role in his new venture.
“We built the ski resort from scratch just like we built the football team from scratch,” Glieberman says. “Some of the things I learned in Shreveport were valuable lessons to apply to the ski resort. In 1998, I started researching a proposed ski resort in the northern part of Michigan. It had always planned to be built but was too far from the major markets to be a normal ski report. But I looked at it as a niche player that focused on advanced and expert skiing and snowboarding. But it took 10 years to break even and get to the right spot. The lesson I learned in Shreveport that was helpful was that we just didn’t give it time. And I regret that. This time, I gave it time to develop and it got stronger and in the last few years it has rapidly grown. We have a very strong cult following from advanced skiers and snowboarders in the United States.”
Bernie Glieberman passed away in August. “We talked every day, up until the last day,” Lonie says. “He had a huge influence on me. Obviously, he wished Shreveport had turned out differently. There just was this lack of patience. In fairness to my dad, it’s hard to be patient when you are losing $4 million a year.”
The passing of 30 years has not allowed Lonie Glieberman to forget about the two he spent in Shreveport.
Failure? Maybe. But the second-best professional football league in the world played in Shreveport for two years. Thirty years later, that’s still pretty remarkable.
“Regardless of the ski resort, the biggest thing in my life I’ve ever done is helping get the Pirates going,” Glieberman says. “There was a strong following in Shreveport. People cared about the team. Yeah, there were a bunch of mistakes, but to build that team in six months … I’m so glad I was a part of that.
Contact JJ at johnjamesmarshall@yahoo.com