Bernard Glieberman
Encyclopedia
Bernard "Bernie" Glieberman (b. Detroit
, Michigan
) is an American
real estate
mogul and the president of Crosswinds Communities. Despite having made his fortune in real estate, Glieberman was perhaps best known for, with his son Lonie, making several unsuccessful and controversial forays into sports team ownership and management in the Canadian Football League
.
Glieberman's father died when Glieberman was 17 years old, and after this the young Bernard took over control of his family real estate holdings. He became a partner in a real estate firm when he was twenty-one, and at thirty-one he was able to buy out his partner's shares. By 1971, he had started the Crosswinds Communities corporation, which he runs and in which he is the sole shareholder to this day.
and the United States. Glieberman put up the money while Lonie usually handled media relations and football operations. These operations proved controversial and invariably died within a few seasons.
franchise. The team was losing money (and would, indeed, fold before the decade was out) and was over C$
1 million in debt. With his son as the franchise's frontman, Bernie bought the team for a dollar, assumed the debt, and provided the capital city's team with what must have seemed like stable ownership.
However, relations between the Gliebermans, the league, and its fans soon soured. Bernie merely provided the money but Lonie was making controversial and unpopular moves. In 1993, the younger Glieberman fired general manager Dan Rambo while ordering the team to sign and play former National Football League
Pro Bowl
defensive lineman Dexter Manley
, despite his skills having faded and a cocaine
habit which had caused him to be banned from the NFL. Lonie also mandated that players cut during the team's training camp be signed again, driving away assistant coaches Jim Daley
and Mike Roach
. Meanwhile, Bernie made noises about moving the team to the United States, further driving down enthusiasm.
The CFL let it be known that it would not even consider allowing one of its longest-standing franchises to move south of the border. Eventually, Glieberman agreed to a deal in which he split the franchise in half. The Canadian half that retained the Rough Riders name, colours and history. Glieberman kept the American half, which became the Shreveport Pirates
as part of the ill-fated CFL USA
expansion. The Pirates went 8–28 over two seasons. Glieberman initially attempted to stay in for the long haul, trying to move the team to Norfolk, Virginia
. However, city officials were put out upon discovering that Glieberman had faced a number of lawsuits over his CFL career for not paying the bills.
, and former Shreveport coach Forrest Gregg
started the All-American Football League with the objective of playing by March 1998. Glieberman planned to play a 20-game season in the spring and summer, buy television time from networks, and make money by having the league sell the advertising rather than the network. The league would be a single-owner entity in much the same vein as the early days of Major League Soccer
. The league also planned to have players directed to markets where they might be popular.
Despite Glieberman's ambitions and some minor media attention, the league never got off the ground. The league's plans included teams in Dallas
, New York
, Los Angeles
, Detroit
, Chicago, Philadelphia
, Houston
, San Francisco
, Miami
, Boston, Washington
, and Tampa
.
after a season in which the league had financed the team. Lonie was once again installed as team president. The Renegades had struggled both financially and in the standings almost since their inception, and few parties were interested in running the team, leaving the CFL little choice but to turn to the Gliebermans.
The first move made by the Gliebermans was to bring 71-year old Forrest Gregg into the system after the latter had spent a decade away from professional football. Gregg did not help his own cause, forgetting starting quarterback Kerry Joseph
's name during a radio interview. Lonie's Mardi Gras
promotion of trying to lure women to Renegades games by offering them beads (a reward traditionally given in the celebration for the baring of breasts) was also criticized. Before the Renegades' final game of the 2005 season, Lonie announced the firing of head coach Joe Paopao
and his staff, leaving them to coach the final game knowing that it would be their last. The Renegades missed the playoffs.
On March 2, 2006, Lonie resigned his post with the Renegades, leading to speculation that Bernie Glieberman would sell. The Renegades lost $3.8 million in 2005 but Glieberman agreed to continue operating the Renegades if the team received a $2 million loan from the league. This proposal was rejected and, unable to find a buyer after Glieberman backed out on March 22, the Renegades suspended operations for the 2006 season
.
Detroit, Michigan
Detroit is the major city among the primary cultural, financial, and transportation centers in the Metro Detroit area, a region of 5.2 million people. As the seat of Wayne County, the city of Detroit is the largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan and serves as a major port on the Detroit River...
, Michigan
Michigan
Michigan is a U.S. state located in the Great Lakes Region of the United States of America. The name Michigan is the French form of the Ojibwa word mishigamaa, meaning "large water" or "large lake"....
) is an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
real estate
Real estate
In general use, esp. North American, 'real estate' is taken to mean "Property consisting of land and the buildings on it, along with its natural resources such as crops, minerals, or water; immovable property of this nature; an interest vested in this; an item of real property; buildings or...
mogul and the president of Crosswinds Communities. Despite having made his fortune in real estate, Glieberman was perhaps best known for, with his son Lonie, making several unsuccessful and controversial forays into sports team ownership and management in the Canadian Football League
Canadian Football League
The Canadian Football League or CFL is a professional sports league located in Canada. The CFL is the highest level of competition in Canadian football, a form of gridiron football closely related to American football....
.
Glieberman's father died when Glieberman was 17 years old, and after this the young Bernard took over control of his family real estate holdings. He became a partner in a real estate firm when he was twenty-one, and at thirty-one he was able to buy out his partner's shares. By 1971, he had started the Crosswinds Communities corporation, which he runs and in which he is the sole shareholder to this day.
Football involvement
From 1991 to 2006, Glieberman was involved as the financier of several football operations in CanadaCanada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
and the United States. Glieberman put up the money while Lonie usually handled media relations and football operations. These operations proved controversial and invariably died within a few seasons.
The Rough Riders and Shreveport
In 1991, Glieberman and his son arrived in Ottawa to bail out the troubled Ottawa Rough RidersOttawa Rough Riders
The Ottawa Rough Riders were a Canadian Football League team based in Ottawa, Ontario, founded in 1876. One of the oldest and longest lived professional sports teams in North America, the Rough Riders won the Grey Cup championship nine times. Their most dominant era was the 1960s and 1970s, a...
franchise. The team was losing money (and would, indeed, fold before the decade was out) and was over C$
Canadian dollar
The Canadian dollar is the currency of Canada. As of 2007, the Canadian dollar is the 7th most traded currency in the world. It is abbreviated with the dollar sign $, or C$ to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies...
1 million in debt. With his son as the franchise's frontman, Bernie bought the team for a dollar, assumed the debt, and provided the capital city's team with what must have seemed like stable ownership.
However, relations between the Gliebermans, the league, and its fans soon soured. Bernie merely provided the money but Lonie was making controversial and unpopular moves. In 1993, the younger Glieberman fired general manager Dan Rambo while ordering the team to sign and play former National Football League
National Football League
The National Football League is the highest level of professional American football in the United States, and is considered the top professional American football league in the world. It was formed by eleven teams in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association, with the league changing...
Pro Bowl
Pro Bowl
In professional American football, the Pro Bowl is the all-star game of the National Football League . Since the merger with the rival American Football League in 1970, it has been officially called the AFC–NFC Pro Bowl, matching the top players in the American Football Conference against those...
defensive lineman Dexter Manley
Dexter Manley
Dexter Keith Manley, nicknamed the "Secretary of Defense" is a former American football defensive end in the National Football League for the Washington Redskins, Phoenix Cardinals, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in an eleven-year career from 1981 to 1991. He also played in the Canadian Football...
, despite his skills having faded and a cocaine
Cocaine
Cocaine is a crystalline tropane alkaloid that is obtained from the leaves of the coca plant. The name comes from "coca" in addition to the alkaloid suffix -ine, forming cocaine. It is a stimulant of the central nervous system, an appetite suppressant, and a topical anesthetic...
habit which had caused him to be banned from the NFL. Lonie also mandated that players cut during the team's training camp be signed again, driving away assistant coaches Jim Daley
Jim Daley
Jim Daley was the special teams coach for the Saskatchewan Roughriders of the Canadian Football League for the 2010 season. He was the 25th head coach of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. He became acting head coach after Dave Ritchie was let go part way through the 2004 season, and was named the head...
and Mike Roach
Mike Roach
Michael Stephen "Mike" Roach was a professional baseball catcher who played for the Washington Senators in ....
. Meanwhile, Bernie made noises about moving the team to the United States, further driving down enthusiasm.
The CFL let it be known that it would not even consider allowing one of its longest-standing franchises to move south of the border. Eventually, Glieberman agreed to a deal in which he split the franchise in half. The Canadian half that retained the Rough Riders name, colours and history. Glieberman kept the American half, which became the Shreveport Pirates
Shreveport Pirates
The Shreveport Pirates were a Canadian Football League team, playing at Independence Stadium in Shreveport, Louisiana, USA, in 1994 and 1995....
as part of the ill-fated CFL USA
CFL USA
The term CFL USA refers to the abortive expansion of the Canadian Football League into the United States in the early-to-mid 1990s. The 1993 CFL season saw the addition of the first American team to the league, the Sacramento Gold Miners...
expansion. The Pirates went 8–28 over two seasons. Glieberman initially attempted to stay in for the long haul, trying to move the team to Norfolk, Virginia
Norfolk, Virginia
Norfolk is an independent city in the Commonwealth of Virginia in the United States. With a population of 242,803 as of the 2010 Census, it is Virginia's second-largest city behind neighboring Virginia Beach....
. However, city officials were put out upon discovering that Glieberman had faced a number of lawsuits over his CFL career for not paying the bills.
All-American Football League
After the failure of his CFL experience, Glieberman tried again in football. In 1997, Glieberman, John RitchieJohn Ritchie
John Ritchie was an English footballer. He is Stoke City's all time record goalscorer.-Playing career:Born in Kettering, Ritchie is Stoke City's top marksman of all-time having scored 176 goals in 343 games during two spells at the club, from June 1962 to November 1966, and from July 1969 to May...
, and former Shreveport coach Forrest Gregg
Forrest Gregg
Alvis Forrest Gregg is a former American football player and coach in the National Football League. During a Pro Football Hall of Fame playing career, he was a part of six championships, five of them with the Green Bay Packers before closing out his tenure with the Dallas Cowboys with a win in...
started the All-American Football League with the objective of playing by March 1998. Glieberman planned to play a 20-game season in the spring and summer, buy television time from networks, and make money by having the league sell the advertising rather than the network. The league would be a single-owner entity in much the same vein as the early days of Major League Soccer
Major League Soccer
Major League Soccer is a professional soccer league based in the United States and sanctioned by the United States Soccer Federation . The league is composed of 19 teams — 16 in the U.S. and 3 in Canada...
. The league also planned to have players directed to markets where they might be popular.
Despite Glieberman's ambitions and some minor media attention, the league never got off the ground. The league's plans included teams in Dallas
Dallas, Texas
Dallas is the third-largest city in Texas and the ninth-largest in the United States. The Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex is the largest metropolitan area in the South and fourth-largest metropolitan area in the United States...
, New York
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, California
Los Angeles , with a population at the 2010 United States Census of 3,792,621, is the most populous city in California, USA and the second most populous in the United States, after New York City. It has an area of , and is located in Southern California...
, Detroit
Detroit, Michigan
Detroit is the major city among the primary cultural, financial, and transportation centers in the Metro Detroit area, a region of 5.2 million people. As the seat of Wayne County, the city of Detroit is the largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan and serves as a major port on the Detroit River...
, Chicago, Philadelphia
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Philadelphia is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the county seat of Philadelphia County, with which it is coterminous. The city is located in the Northeastern United States along the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. It is the fifth-most-populous city in the United States,...
, Houston
Houston, Texas
Houston is the fourth-largest city in the United States, and the largest city in the state of Texas. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, the city had a population of 2.1 million people within an area of . Houston is the seat of Harris County and the economic center of , which is the ...
, San Francisco
San Francisco, California
San Francisco , officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the financial, cultural, and transportation center of the San Francisco Bay Area, a region of 7.15 million people which includes San Jose and Oakland...
, Miami
Miami, Florida
Miami is a city located on the Atlantic coast in southeastern Florida and the county seat of Miami-Dade County, the most populous county in Florida and the eighth-most populous county in the United States with a population of 2,500,625...
, Boston, Washington
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
, and Tampa
Tampa, Florida
Tampa is a city in the U.S. state of Florida. It serves as the county seat for Hillsborough County. Tampa is located on the west coast of Florida. The population of Tampa in 2010 was 335,709....
.
Return to Ottawa
In May 2005, Glieberman resurfaced in the CFL, purchasing the Ottawa RenegadesOttawa Renegades
Ottawa Renegades was the most recent name of a Canadian Football League team based in Ottawa, Ontario founded in 2002, seven years after the storied Ottawa Rough Riders folded...
after a season in which the league had financed the team. Lonie was once again installed as team president. The Renegades had struggled both financially and in the standings almost since their inception, and few parties were interested in running the team, leaving the CFL little choice but to turn to the Gliebermans.
The first move made by the Gliebermans was to bring 71-year old Forrest Gregg into the system after the latter had spent a decade away from professional football. Gregg did not help his own cause, forgetting starting quarterback Kerry Joseph
Kerry Joseph
Kerry Tremaine Joseph is a quarterback who is currently playing for the Edmonton Eskimos. He was born in New Iberia, Louisiana....
's name during a radio interview. Lonie's Mardi Gras
Mardi Gras
The terms "Mardi Gras" , "Mardi Gras season", and "Carnival season", in English, refer to events of the Carnival celebrations, beginning on or after Epiphany and culminating on the day before Ash Wednesday...
promotion of trying to lure women to Renegades games by offering them beads (a reward traditionally given in the celebration for the baring of breasts) was also criticized. Before the Renegades' final game of the 2005 season, Lonie announced the firing of head coach Joe Paopao
Joe Paopao
Joe Paopao is a long-time coach in the Canadian Football League, who last served as a head coach in the CFL for the Ottawa Renegades from 2001–2005....
and his staff, leaving them to coach the final game knowing that it would be their last. The Renegades missed the playoffs.
On March 2, 2006, Lonie resigned his post with the Renegades, leading to speculation that Bernie Glieberman would sell. The Renegades lost $3.8 million in 2005 but Glieberman agreed to continue operating the Renegades if the team received a $2 million loan from the league. This proposal was rejected and, unable to find a buyer after Glieberman backed out on March 22, the Renegades suspended operations for the 2006 season
2006 CFL season
-2006 Rogers CFL Awards:* CFL's Most Outstanding Player Award – Geroy Simon , BC Lions* CFL's Most Outstanding Canadian Award – Brent Johnson , BC Lions* CFL's Most Outstanding Defensive Player Award – Brent Johnson , BC Lions...
.