For better or worse, Eugene Melnyk will not be forgotten

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This article was published 29/03/2022 (1477 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If nothing else, Eugene Melnyk will be remembered: in Ottawa, in Canada, in hockey. There are so many scoundrels and wastrels and near-invisible billionaires who own pro sports teams: they come and they go, if you wait long enough. Most of them, you’ll barely recall.

Eugene Melnyk will echo, though. The NHL’s most publicly interesting owner died Monday, at the age of 62; he had apparently been in ill health for some time. Melnyk nearly died in 2015 before using his hockey fame to get a liver transplant later that year: the donor apparently said the motivation was “to help Mr. Melnyk return to good health, to enjoy his family and friends, and most importantly to bring the Stanley Cup home to the Ottawa Senators.” Since then, they have made the playoffs once.

Someone dying at age 62 is sad, and sympathies are due to Melnyk’s family, his friends, those who knew him well and loved him. There was a human in there, and everyone is at least a little bit complicated. Rest in peace.

And as an NHL owner, Melnyk’s death is the end of a truly fascinating era in Canadian hockey, filled with farce and hope and villainy. There was nobody as grandiose, nobody as small-time, nobody as cartoonishly silly. Who was even close? Rangers owner James Dolan still has his vanity band, one supposes. Edmonton’s Daryl Katz hasn’t had a Brazilian model accuse him of sex for money in a lawsuit in five years. Chicago’s Rocky Wirtz has been embarrassing himself over the Kyle Beach abuse case. That one’s ugly.

But Melnyk stood out. A pharmaceutical entrepreneur, Melnyk was a sort of hero when he bought the team and the arena out of bankruptcy in 2003 for some $150 million, which was less than the sum of the team’s debts. Ottawa was a back-of-the-napkin franchise from the start — the original ownership was given a franchise without either the necessary cash or an arena, but as part of a real-estate leverage play, landing them in the then-wilds of Kanata, Ont. — and Melnyk was the biggest reason they stayed.

And then the hero lived long enough to become the villain, the punchline, the bête noire. Melnyk’s stock-based fortune took an almost immediate plunge of nearly a billion dollars, and he then spent two decades operating on the cheap — he sold a junior hockey team, some of his racehorses, and occasional stocks to help hit payroll and keep the lights on — and envying other franchises. The pre-game media and staff meal reminded one of leftovers. The arena was decorated with memorabilia of a sort of yard-sale quality. The team was actually pretty good, in his early years. They could just never quite deliver, especially against the Leafs.

And it eroded, as Melnyk kept being Melnyk: paranoid, colourful, singular. In 2009 he responded to suggestions the Senators rebuild by saying, “Anybody that says we should blow up this organization should get their own bomb and go blow themselves up, OK?” In 2013 he announced he would commission a forensic auditor to figure out whether Pittsburgh’s Matt Cooke meant to slice Senators star Erik Karlsson’s Achilles with a skate during a collision; the mystery stayed unsolved. He raised the spectre of the team leaving town during an alumni game on Parliament Hill in 2017, as part of a celebration for the league’s 100th anniversary. He’d go on Toronto radio to talk to the press, which in Ottawa is a poke in the eye.

It was still a bit of a back-of-the-napkin franchise, with passionate fans who began to stay away. Did other franchises have branded onesies recalled over being choking hazards? Did other franchises get dumped by their charitable foundation, which cut ties with the team in 2020? (Ian Mendes, who had served on the charity’s board for three years, said at the time that a tweet about George Floyd, whose murder ignited the modern Black Lives Matter movement, was indicative of the split.)

Did other owners enlist locally beloved players to do a painfully awkward five-minute promotional video? Did other owners recount how undistinguished local politicians accosted them during a Rolling Stones show? In 2019 provincial cabinet minister Lisa MacLeod screamed, “Do you know who I am?” Melnyk said no, to which the MPP replied, “I am your minister and you’re a f—ing piece of s–t and you’re a f—ing loser.”

We know because Melnyk made sure to write the exact words down. Other owners do not, uh, do that.

And when the glorious idea of a rink in nearer LeBreton Flats came up, Melnyk lacked the relationships, credibility, and money to make a deal, and lawsuits bloomed instead. He drove away franchise icons who wanted to stay: Daniel Alfredsson, Karlsson. In 2019, with attendance dropping further and vitriol in the air Melnyk was still chasing success, because that would show them: that would show them all. He said, “To win a Stanley Cup, honestly, God can take me, I’m done. Honest to God. It’s that important, yeah. I don’t put up with this kind of stuff unless it was important.”

Whatever else he did — and his charity benefiting Ukrainian orphans only has more resonance today — his Senators tenure overshadowed it, and he spent two decades craving acceptance that he actively undermined, over and over: the loudmouth cheapskate who harked back to wacky local businessmen who bought pro teams and ran them like little screwball kingdoms. As sports has grown the pockets have had to get deeper, the corporate facade more entrenched. Melnyk was like a walking, squawking anachronism, trying to triumph between his home in Barbados and the distant suburbs of the nation’s capital.

And now he’s gone and Ottawa will hope for a new hero, someone they can appreciate, maybe a rink nearer to downtown. But people will remember Eugene Melnyk. He may have been a bad owner; he may have turned a city against him, year by year. But he made hockey more interesting, more strangely human, and I think hockey will miss having him around. Sens fans, perhaps, excluded.

Bruce Arthur is a Toronto-based columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @bruce_arthur