THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, October 5, 1996 TAG: 9610050220
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Tom Robinson
LENGTH: 77 lines
Blake Cullen says that vacation he never took after he sold the Hampton Roads Admirals hockey team for a couple million dollars last spring is coming soon.
Sure it is.
And I'm Clint Eastwood.
``I thought I was going to have all this time on my hands,'' Cullen says, ``but it hasn't worked out that way.''
Cullen, tie crisply knotted, is sitting in his downtown office, taking phone calls, shuffling folders, jotting notes on a yellow legal pad.
It's the office he was supposed to have vacated by now. Gone by Labor Day, that was his plan. Probably gone to some new adventures. Definitely gone before the Admirals, whom he founded in 1989, hit the ice again.
``I don't want to be in the way,'' Cullen says, vaguely. Then, he clarifies. ``It would be very hard for me to watch. The Admirals are much more to me than a hockey team. You have to let go, but I think it's hard to let go.''
As coping mechanisms, a busy mind and a crammed schedule can be effective. So it's been for Cullen, 61, who upon selling the Admirals hinted he'd resurface as a minor league owner and impresario, leaving the day-to-day operational drudgery to others while calling larger shots from a central office.
The hints have become facts. Cullen now has three teams in his stable - an indoor soccer team in Daytona Beach, Fla., an independent league baseball team in Canton, Ohio, and a college summer league team in Manteo, N.C.
He's exploring a return to minor league hockey next season, probably on the West Coast. Plus, he is promoting a concert at New Orleans' Orpheum Theatre in two weeks that your mom and dad would love - singer Jerry Vale and comic Corbett Monica - with more shows in the works.
Did I mention he's also writing a book, ``The Complete Book of Sports Management,'' to give him more cachet as a guest college lecturer and business speaker?
``I like new situations,'' Cullen says.
He's loaded with them. Take indoor soccer, for instance. Cullen is a charter owner in something called the Eastern Indoor Soccer League, to start play in May. His team is the Daytona Beach SpeedKings, in the city in which Cullen once owned a minor league baseball team.
It is low-budget pro soccer which, Cullen says, could become a feeder system for the Continental Indoor Soccer League.
Then, a month after that kicks off, Cullen's new baseball franchises begin inaugural seasons.
In Canton, Cullen has bought into the independent Frontier League, which employs pro players unaffiliated with big league teams. Cullen's as yet unnamed club plans to move into Thurman Munson Memorial Stadium, which the Cleveland Indians' Double-A team left after this season for a new ballpark 28 miles away in Akron.
Cullen says surveys insist that fans will support his Class-A caliber club despite the proximity of Double-A ball. ``It's a gamble,'' Cullen says. But his stadium is in such good condition, he says, ``We could be the flagship of the league.''
His start-up venture in Manteo is something different still. The Coastal Plain League will feature Cullen's Outer Banks Daredevils and, like the Cape Cod and Shenandoah Valley leagues, will be comprised of players with college eligibility.
``I was going to do that anyway, even if I still had the Admirals,'' says Cullen.
He is still going to clear out of Norfolk, too, at least for the winter, and then maybe for good. Cullen's first options include November-through-April leases at a Bermuda resort owned by a friend, or a high-rise San Francisco apartment building in which he once lived, addresses fit for any sport's big shot.
Wherever Cullen's reach expands, though, a little of his time in Norfolk will follow. The name he's chosen for his company guarantees it.
Admiral Management. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
``You have to let go, but I think it's hard to let go,'' former Ads
owner Blake Cullen said. by CNB