Opinion | Right Field: Shake-up for NFL old boys' club
Asian-born woman's taking over the helm of the Buffalo Bills could signal the rebirth of more than just a decaying franchise
There have been very few Asian owners in North American sports. There are even fewer female owners, which makes the notion of a minority female sitting as one with her haughty cohorts at a recent NFL owners meeting basically unimaginable.
They have basically saved Buffalo and rescued the ultimate underdog
However, in many respects, Kim Pegula is a godsend for a league desperately in need of positive spin. Born in Seoul, Pegula was a homeless five-year-old who was adopted by an American couple and raised just outside of Buffalo, New York. Bright, vivacious and driven, after graduation from university she applied for a job with East Resources, a natural gas drilling company.
She ended up getting more than a job, eventually marrying the company founder and president Terry Pegula. This is much more than a tale of a gold-digging tai-tai. Kim helped Terry grow the business and was pivotal in the sale of the company in 2010 for a nifty US$4.7 billion.
But now what? For Terry, it was an easy decision. A huge ice hockey fan, he had long expressed an interest in buying his beloved Buffalo Sabres and when the time came he was basically bidding against himself. For US$180 million, a mere pittance in today's sporting firmament, he bought the largely impoverished team in 2011 and almost immediately started purchasing property around the downtown arena in hopes of revitalising the stagnant area. Talk about ambition. For decades in western New York common logic held that if you wanted to succeed in Buffalo the first thing you had to do was leave.
In 1950, the population of the city was close to 600,000. Today it is under 260,000. Traditionally, Buffalo is not where dreams are made; it's where they are abandoned.
Even the Bills, a source of so much passion and pride in Buffalo, seemed cursed. The only team to ever appear in four straight Super Bowls, the Bills lost all of them.
While network talk-show hosts have long made Buffalo the butt of jokes, local residents did not have to look far to feel inferior. A mere 90 minutes north across the Canadian border, metropolitan Toronto was the antithesis of Buffalo. International, vibrant, sophisticated and self absorbed, Toronto is the fastest growing metropolis in North America and now trails only New York, Los Angeles and Chicago in population.