At one time, the Hicks Mansion listed for more than $100 million, although as the sports and business empires collapsed for Tom Hicks, who died early Sunday at 79, it eventually sold at auction for $36 million. At any price, it was quite a house for Dallas, and on my one visit there, I was seated just to the right of Hicks at a table that had room for 14.
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I believe it was the 2005 season. Manager Buck Showalter was there and so were baseball writers Evan Grant and the late Gerry Fraley, sports editors and other Rangers officials, including a young assistant GM named Jon Daniels. The Rangers owner was trying to fix the team’s rocky relationship with reporters and columnists from The Dallas Morning News, and the evening was going smoothly enough until John Hart, the general manager seated to our extreme right, finally spoke up and expressed his feelings about his treatment by The News, and it all fell apart. I can still recall Hicks’ shoulders dropping, his body slumping next to me as he realized the entire evening was going to resolve absolutely nothing.
In its own way, this was the beginning of the end for Hicks, who had already captured a Stanley Cup with the Stars and played a senior role in the approval and building of the American Airlines Center. The Rangers, who had gone to the playoffs against the Yankees twice on his watch, would not reach the World Series until after he had been forced to sell the club along with Liverpool FC by his creditors.
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But if you’re going to remember one thing about Hicks and his time in local sports, it needs to be this.
After Hicks signed a letter of agreement to buy the Stars from Norm Green in the fall of 1995 and less than a week before it became an official purchase for $84 million, the club traded Jarome Iginla and Corey Millen to Calgary for Joe Nieuwendyk. Last month, the Stars enshrined Nieuwendyk (somewhat belatedly in my mind) into the team’s Hall of Fame. He was the Conn Smythe winner in the 1999 playoffs. With the Nieuwendyk trade, the hockey team went from an interesting novelty that had been imported from Minnesota to a team that was serious about winning playoff games and, eventually, the 1999 Stanley Cup.
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Although Hicks’ entire purchase price is less than the value of Mikko Rantanen’s contract today, his arrival on the scene changed everything for the Dallas Stars. They never come close to trading for a player of Nieuwendyk’s quality while Green is still owning the team. Given that the other suitor for the Stars, John Spano, proved to be a complete fraud after his failed attempt to purchase the New York Islanders a few years later, Dallas sports fans were blessed that Hicks — riding high in the private equity world — was desperate enough to become a sports owner that he bought a team playing a sport completely foreign to him. He was far more interested in baseball, which led to his purchase of the Rangers in 1998, the second of three times they tried and failed to beat the Yankees in an American League first-round series.
With not just Hicks’ money but his enthusiasm in place, the Stars went from missing the playoffs in 1996 to winning the Central Division in 1997, reaching the Western Conference finals in 1998 and capturing the Cup in triple overtime at Buffalo in 1999.
Tom Hicks, owner of the Dallas Stars and the Texas Rangers, pictured in his office with replica of The Stanley Cup on Monday, January 23, 2006.
2006 File Photo / Staff
General manager Bob Gainey praised Hicks as an owner who wanted to learn more about the game, was a willing listener to arguments pro and con on the pursuit of players and ready to step up to the plate when opportunity presented itself.
Once we get past this NFL season, there will be just three championship teams to have come out of Dallas in the past 30 years. The Rangers did it under Ray Davis in 2023 and the Mavericks triumphed under Mark Cuban in 2011. But first on that list will be Hicks, whose life in the private equity world led to wild fluctuations in money that ultimately pushed him out as a sports owner. But without his arrival, there is no special night for Nieuwendyk and the Stars last month, no memory at all of a Stanley Cup parade through the streets of Dallas.
Find more Stars coverage from The Dallas Morning News here.