Counsel in the Crease: A Big League Player in the Hockey Wars »

"In his diverse, intriguing, and very active forty-five-year career, spent mainly in the world of professional sports, attorney Robert O. Swados has worn many hats - owner, league executive, counsel, and franchise builder. With this wide-ranging and good-humored memoir, Swados offers many behind-the-scenes insights into the players, coaches, executives, and owners who have created today's sports entertainment industry." "Swados describes his early involvement in professional sports through his efforts in the 1960s to bring a Major League Baseball franchise to his hometown of Buffalo, New York. The deal was so close that a New York Daily News headline erroneously announced that a new franchise would be going to Buffalo." But things really got interesting when in 1969 Swados helped Seymour Knox III and Northrup Knox to establish the Buffalo Sabres. Thus began an exciting thirty-year journey through the ups and downs of the National Hockey League. As part owner, vice chairman, and counsel of the Sabres, Swados has had many opportunities to "score from the crease," and sometimes the action behind the scenes is just as rough and tumble as that on the ice. He tells many fascinating tales about his dealings with winning coaches including Scotty Bowman, with general managers Punch Imlach and John Muckler, with owner John McMullen, and with commissioners John Ziegler and Gary Bettman, among others. He also talks frankly about the impact of Adelphia's bankruptcy on the fate of the Sabres and about the obsessions and frustrations of the 2004 NHL lockout as well as the future of the NHL. Perhaps no one in professional sports has had such an engaging and productive view.

Publishers Weekly

Reading attorney Swados's fascinating if overlong autobiography of his half-decade of legal battles is rather like reading the full transcript of federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's recent indictment of vice-presidential aide "Scooter" Libby. Initially, both seem interminably meticulous accounts of relatively simple events, yet readers who stick with them until the end are greatly rewarded, since each author uses an obsession with detail in a sophisticated way to reveal the complexity behind his subject. In Swados's case, the bulk of his career was as counsel to various professional baseball and hockey organizations, and most of his book covers his single-minded efforts to bring sports franchises to the Buffalo, N.Y., area. But starting with an account of his WWII experience liberating Dachau when he was in the army, he begins a theme of unremitting conflict in which most incidents in the book are described in military terms, as wars Swados must win. One of his major battles was establishing the Buffalo Sabres in the National Hockey League, and fans of that team will thoroughly enjoy Swados's insider views of the Sabres and its various owners. General hockey fans will be enlightened by Swados's insights into the sport's various financial and legal imbroglios. (Jan.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.