The swat team: Charlotte business leaders were confident they could deliver a downtown arena. What the Hornets got was a ticket to ride.

• Author: Speizer, Irwin
• Position: Feature - Brief Article

Raw prime beef glistens behind glass in the wood-paneled foyer of McIntosh's, a steakhouse in a gentrifying section of old mills and warehouses almost in the shadow of downtown's office towers. Back in a private dining room, two bankers, a developer and a venture capitalist break bread -- and, they hope, new ground -- with Ray Wooldridge, co-owner of the Hornets, Charlotte's professional basketball team.

Business, they told him on that muggy summer night two years ago, is ready to play ball. The state's two biggest banks, its largest power company and a few developers and manufacturers are prepared to buy luxury suites, club seats, naming rights and more in a new downtown arena where the Hornets would play. What will it take to get Wooldridge and partner George Shinn, the man who brought pro basketball to Charlotte in the late 1980s, to sign a lease with the city?

Wooldridge believes he made that clear at a City Council meeting that spring: They need a publicly financed arena. Any contribution from them or their team would be minimal. "That's not going to work," replies Nelson Schwab, managing partner of Carousel Capital, an investment firm. "If that's the approach you're taking, it's going to lead to trouble."

But Woolridge, whose team is losing $1 million a month, wants even more. He wants Charlotte, in effect, to guarantee that the Hornets will be profitable. That's what other cities are offering, he says. At a later, less cordial meeting, he's more explicit: "Look, for this to work for us, you all need to approach this as a new franchise."

That night at McIntosh's, Schwab tells him: "We don't think the will is here to do that." A blunter way to put it: People are fed up with Wooldridge and Shinn and their demands. Both are outsiders, self-made men who've never fit in the clique of executives who run the businesses that historically have run the city. But the corporate chieftains are desperate to give them what they want. Losing a National Basketball Association franchise would be a blow to their image of Charlotte as a world-class city.

Problem is, with public animosity toward Shinn and Wooldridge growing by the day, business is not sure it can deliver. Taxpayers will have to pick up the bill for the new arena, so the issue will have to be decided in the political arena, not in a backroom at a tony restaurant. The only way to save professional basketball in Charlotte, many believe, is to bring in new owners.

In the end, both sides got some of what they wanted. Shinn and Wooldridge won guaranteed profitability -- from New Orleans. The Hornets decided to move after voters thrashed a referendum to build a downtown arena. But with their departure, other owner groups began vying to bring a new team to town. All the city has to do, NBA Commissioner David Stern has hinted, is build the arena -- which will wind up costing taxpayers many millions more than what the Hornets had originally asked for.

That's not how the Charlotte Way -- the tradition of business deciding what's best for everybody -- is supposed to work.

Neither Shinn, who has not spoken to the North Carolina press in years, nor Wooldridge, who bought a minority share of the team in 1999, responded to requests for an interview for this article. But Spencer Stolpen, Hornets president from 1989 to 1996, says, "It was a matter of Shinn and Wooldridge not being part of the power structure. Whether it is because they didn't try hard enough or the group wouldn't let them in, I don't know. It boiled down to that nobody was going to go out of their way to help those two guys."

Before he was a heel, George Shinn was a hero in Charlotte. When the NBA granted him an expansion franchise in April 1987, the prestige-mad city gave him a parade. A billboard-size greeting card greeted the procession at The Square, the heart of downtown. It read: "Nothing can stop us now. Thank you, George."

His was a Horatio Alger story -- in fact, he won the national Horatio Alger Award in 1976 -- a poor boy from Kannapolis who, through grit and guile, grew up to become a multimillionaire, owning a chain of business schools, car dealerships and other businesses. In many ways, he reflected his adopted hometown -- on the make, outwardly pious, prickly and more than a little insecure...