Lawyer drops briefs to become athletic supporter.

• Position: Brief Article

Art Donaldson wants you to know that he's not a hockey fanatic. "Hockey is not my life" is the first the first thing the Greensboro lawyer says when asked how he became the principal owner of the East Coast Hockey League's Greensboro Generals in June. "It's not as if I have always wanted to buy a hockey team."

Nor did he fantasize about owning an arena football team or an indoor pro soccer team. But less than two months after buying the hockey team, there he was: majority owner of three professional sports teams, all based in Greensboro.

The Tarrytown, N.Y., native, who got a law degree from The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., in 1963, also never planned to practice law. Instead, he fulfilled his dream of becoming an FBI agent and went to work in North Carolina. When he was transferred to New York City in 1966, he missed the South so much he left the bureau and moved back. Unsure of what to do, he dusted off his law degree and hung his shingle in Salisbury in 1967. The firm, now called Donaldson & Black, moved to Greensboro in 1988 and has 10 lawyers. It handles personal-injury and product-liability cases.

In the 1980s, he started the Republican Lawyers Association of North Carolina, a forerunner to the Raleigh-based Lincoln Forum, intending to put other GOP lawyers on the ballot. But "I couldn't get anybody else to run, so I had to." He ran for a state Supreme Court seat twice and got 45% of the vote against future Chief Justice Burley Mitchell in 1984 and Louis Meyer in 1986.

In early 1999, Donaldson, 61, began talks...