[From The Boston Globe]

Lawyer excels in closing sports deals

By Gregg Krupa, Globe Staff, 11/10/98

The taxicabs were downstairs lined up at the curb and idling outside Exchange Place as Boston lawyer Lyman G. Bullard Jr. watched a host of sports figures and bankers sign the legal documents he had crafted for months.

The cabs waited to carry the signatories - including officers of a syndicate of banks, the sports and concessions behemoth Delaware North, the Boston Bruins, the Boston Celtics, and Bullard - to the announcement of one of the biggest sports deals in the city's history.

What would eventually be called the FleetCenter was about to be born on the strength of a $120 million line of credit negotiated by Bullard. And until moments before the announcement he was still dispatching his duties as midwife.

''It was great to get something done in Boston ... for Boston, that a lot of people had walked away from,'' Bullard recalled in a recent interview, some six years after the deal was signed. ''I was still nervous at the end, and I had a weird thought: What happens with the cabs if someone decides not to sign? Who tells them we don't need them anymore?''

Bullard, 43, has been involved in some of the largest sports financing deals of the decade and, by all evidence, he is one of the top sports lawyers in the country.

Since June 1991, Bullard has been a counsel in establishing a total of $1.01 billion in lines of credit for sports enterprises. He has helped pioneer the use of lucrative television contracts to leverage long-term lines of credit, which enables the teams to have cash on hand, based on the television networks' guarantees.

Beyond the FleetCenter, Bullard has fashioned the structure and financing that secured a stable financial future for the Baltimore Ravens after their controversial exodus from Cleveland as the Browns. He also negotiated last summer's arrangement of a $425 million line of credit for Major League Baseball that banking sources call one of the largest of its kind.

Recently, Bullard helped structure a bid for the new Cleveland Browns that the National Football League eventually awarded to another bidder, Cleveland-area banker Alfred Lerner, for $530 million - the most ever for a professional sports franchise.

''Lyman has clearly established himself with a lot of the financial personnel in the leagues as someone who is at the very top of the list of lawyers with a lot of expertise,'' said Dan Williams, the managing director of corporate finances at Fleet Bank. ''He's one of a group of lawyers known by all of the executives with the leagues.''

Success for Bullard, though, has also afforded him a keen perspective on the future of professional sports. As he looks at the evidence of the continually escalating costs of sport that cross his desk, Bullard says that the sports fan, jock, and father in him cringes. He wonders whether some of the big-money deals are getting too rich for the good of the games.

''While $500 million for the Browns is just a huge price to pay for any sports franchise, it clearly was not too much to pay,'' Bullard said. ''Lerner's a very smart guy and he was willing to pay for it, and my guys [the lawyer Lawrence Dolan and his brother Charles, a founding owner of Cablevision Systems Corp.] were right behind them.

''But it just shows that over the next decade, fewer and fewer individuals are going to be able to buy these sports teams, and that more and more companies - especially media companies - are going to be the ones competing to buy these teams,'' he said.

''When corporations buy teams as part of an integrated business strategy, it will be interesting to see what it does to salary structures and other things, especially when the ownership may not need the team to make a profit.''

Bullard approaches sports business from the perspective of a guy who has actually played the games. In fact, 20 years later, he remains no small legend among the followers of hockey at Harvard.

At the time of the Beanpot Tournament in 1977, Bullard, a senior, was the captain of the soccer team and perhaps one of the best tennis players on campus. He also had gone out for the junior varsity in hockey. On the eve of the Beanpot, with injuries racking the Crimson, coach Bill Cleary made a surprise call to Bullard's room.

''Good luck in the Beanpot, coach,'' Cleary has quoted Bullard in the many subsequent retellings of the story.

''How could you like to wear a Harvard shirt in the Beanpot?'' Cleary said he replied.

''It would have been a good enough story at that,'' Bullard recalled, his exuberance only a little less diluted two decades after the fact. ''But then I figured in on some good plays.''

Good plays? The truth is that Bullard, playing as a forward, scored one goal and assisted on another, with 29 seconds left in the game, that beat Boston University 4-3.

By the time he graduated from Boston College Law School in 1984 and was admitted to the bar, sports still enthralled him. While doing some legal work with the old Shawmut Bank, he got an early suggestion of how he could combine his passion and his profession.

''A fellow there, David Splain, had a couple of sports matters before him and he told me, `Lyman, I know you played hockey and you like sports, why don't you get involved with this?''' Bullard explained. ''I really saw the visibility and the flash that sports would bring.''

Before long, he found himself in the middle of major deals.

During the months of all-day work preceding completion of the FleetCenter deal, Bullard said he learned some valuable lessons about how focus and a continuously positive attitude can bring deals to fruition.

''A lot of times when you deal with the different leagues you get bogged down in a lot of detail, and it's easy to lose focus and get overwhelmed, because they each have their rules and requirements that just adds to what is already a fairly complex situation. But not with Lyman,'' said Pat McAuliffe, an executive vice president in charge of Fleet's sports lending group.

''At the same time he is keeping on course and moving along, he doesn't lose focus on those devils in the details that he is addressing and protecting his parties from any problems.''

The lessons about fortitude and comity that Bullard learned in the FleetCenter deal served him well. The $185 million line of credit that he secured - as both a counsel to Fleet Corporate Finance and in his capacity as adviser to Ravens owner Art Modell was as difficult and complicated as the Browns's exit from the south shore of Lake Erie was unpopular.

''The NFL told us it just couldn't be done,'' Williams said. ''It was very difficult to line up the various requirements of lenders, and insurers, and the need to address some rather complex tax laws. I would describe it as a Rubik's cube: Every time you put one problem back into place, something came out on the other side.

''But Lyman is very adept at making people feel very comfortable with a very complex set of circumstances,'' Williams said.

Still, the college kid who leapt for joy at Harvard's Beanpot victory 20 years ago lurks in the heart of this high-powered lawyer.

''If you are one of the new owners, you charge local companies more and more for the stadium suites, and fewer and fewer fans are going to be able to afford to go to games,'' Bullard said. ''Increasingly, the next generation of kids will see more and more games on television and fewer and fewer in person than we did. And what's their commitment going to be, soon?

''Maybe that works,'' Bullard said, with a shrug. ''But that's where we're headed.''

This story ran on page D01 of the Boston Globe on 11/10/98.