On Saturday mornings, Tim Leiweke has a routine.

He gets up early, as he does every morning. He goes to the gym at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and climbs the stairs to nowhere for an hour. He’s been living in the Ritz since his arrival in May.

His wife, Bernadette, has remained in Los Angeles, helping plan daughter Francesca’s wedding in mid-August. She’s marrying journeyman Troy Bodie, who was signed a week ago by the Maple Leafs. Once married, toute la famille will move north.

But for now, Leiweke is alone. Working out is a focus. The 56-year-old has lost 40 pounds since January.

He takes in his laundry. He picks up the dry cleaning. Putters around for a bit. Around 10:30, he sets out.

The most powerful man in Toronto sports walks for three or four hours every Saturday and Sunday, randomly plotting the city in his mind. One day, he walked out toward Exhibition Place, looking for a bar he’d heard Toronto FC fans gather at on game days.

“It took a while for me to figure out a way across the railroad tracks.”

He found the bar. Now he’s forgotten the name. He leans toward the door of his office and calls out to his receptionist.

“Barb, what was the name of that bar that our fans go to at BMO Field?”

Muffled reply.

“Exactly. The Brazen Head. Awesome place.”

Leiweke is impressive in front of a group. One-on-one, he’s Clintonian.

You get hit with the sharp smile and the individually tailored compliments straight off, and you’re thinking, “Here we go.” But after 15 minutes, you’re swaying in place. A half-hour in, you’re wondering about job openings.

The key to this charisma is the apparent guilelessness of his enthusiasm, the easy confidence. He throws himself down on a couch, body posture wide open, slapping his knee to pound out the syllables of his key points. He has a reputation as a crier. He’s embraced that.

On the possibility of winning a Stanley Cup: “I gotta convince everyone around here. Think about it. Dream about it. Get tears in your eyes just imagining what it would do to this city.”

Leiweke has set off in the direction of success, and he’s leaving laggards behind. It was on one of these long solo marches that he mapped the championship parade route.

When he first drops it into conversation, I think he’s speaking metaphorically. Then unprompted, he brings it up again.

“You mean, you have the actual route?”

“Right.”

I press him for the details. He tries to drift off into another topic, but keeps being dragged back. He wants it to start somewhere uptown. He mentions Varsity Stadium non-specifically. He points out that the waterfront is nice in June, and might be a logical ending point. His real worry is spacing.

“If Chicago had one million people, Toronto will have two.”

I’m sitting there thinking, ‘Does this guy know how this is going to play?’ I ask him if he can be more specific.

“That I won’t say,” Leiweke says. “That’s for my mind.”

I leave his office about an hour later, and check my phone. I discover that he’s told the same story earlier in the day to Bloomberg News.

This is the first lesson of Tim Leiweke. He has come to Toronto to win things. More importantly, he has come here to write himself into history.

He already has that route plotted in his mind as well.

* * *

Leiweke’s bona fides are the sort to make the rest of us feel lazy, stupid or some combination thereof.

One of six children, he was raised in St. Louis by his father after the early death of his mother. No college degree. Wrangled his first job in sports at age 21. Became the continent’s youngest GM at 24.

In 1988, he joins the Minnesota Timberwolves as a vice-president. Tucks himself under the wing of NBA commissioner David Stern, who air drops him into a failing Denver Nuggets organization as president. While there, he hands out Nuggets tickets to trick-or-treaters at Halloween.

A small sojourn as the boss of U.S. Skiing before he is recruited in 1996 by (oh, that old cliché) reclusive billionaire Philip Anschutz to run the L.A. Kings. Five years later, Leiweke becomes the public face of Anschutz’s primary venture, AEG. He oversees a vast, privately held sports and entertainment empire that includes the Lakers, Kings and Galaxy. The main part of the business is venues.

“We’ve built more arenas and stadiums that anyone in the world, ever — including the Romans!” Leiweke boasted last year.

His focus becomes the quixotic pursuit of an NFL team for Los Angeles. That dream runs aground in March, when he splits with AEG.

According to Leiweke, he was preparing to start his own company — “I had partners and was pretty set” — when MLSE called.

It was six weeks between ending one professional life and beginning another. He recalls the moment he decided he was coming to Toronto.

“I asked (Rogers CEO) Nadir (Mohammed) and (Bell CEO) George (Cope), ‘If I came to you with David Beckham, would you let me sign him?’ And they said, ‘Yes’.

“Then I said, ‘If that’s the case, then why haven’t you?’ And they said, ‘Because no one ever asked.’ And that was it.”

Beckham is an omnipresent point of reference. Convincing the world’s most famous athlete to effectively give up on sport and enter showbiz in 2007 remains Leiweke’s great get.

That’s his M.O. — the big splash. He isn’t a builder. He’s the guy who stages the place before the open house. Stern once admiringly called him “a modern-day P.T. Barnum.”

Back in the office, Leiweke carefully coils the cord of an iPhone charger into makeshift worry beads, then squeezes it gently for the next 45 minutes.

This interview is an exercise in catharsis. In a nod to Cortes, Leiweke’s journey begins by burning the boats.

He arrived alone, bringing no staff with him from California. He took a look around. He didn’t like much of what he saw.

First to go were the reminders of the past. The pictures of the Leafs’ Stanley Cup teams of the ’60s were removed from the hallway that leads to the dressing room. Game operations were told to stop staging nightly celebrations of the past. Self-congratulatory bromides were banned.

“I made them take down the stickers that say, ‘Winning is everything.’ I thought, if we need stickers, we’re dead.

“I’m tired of talking to fans about ’62, ’63, ’64 and ’67. I get that it’s important. I honour our history, but it ain’t what we’re selling any more.”

What he’s selling is over in the corner of his office — a replica Stanley Cup that Leiweke references with small nods when the frequent subject of winning comes up.

“This was a big debate on whether or not to put this in here, because it’s disrespectful,” Leiweke says.

Later, he will point out that between the Lakers and the Kings, he held six parades during his time in Los Angeles.

“You know what I told them? We need a few of these.”

Once in place, Leiweke made a series of snap judgments. The Leafs? Tabled until after the playoffs. The Raptors? Disaster. Toronto FC? Mitigated disaster.

He’s since grown bullish on the Leafs and their GM, who is renegotiating his own deal.

“Dave Nonis and I are absolutely, 100 per cent on the same page. That really pleased me a lot, because it was something I wasn’t sure about when I came in.”

He takes paternal pride in prying goalie Jonathan Bernier away from his former team.

“I know this ’keeper very well. I don’t know the one we inherited (James Reimer). If the one we inherited is anything like the one we’re bringing in, we have the best tandem of goalkeepers in the NHL.”

Pressing two key points — that they’ve blooded the kids, and added winning experience in Dave Bolland and David Clarkson, Leiweke ballparks the opening of the hockey window.

“We know we have some holes to fill. It may take us a year or two to the fill them. But we’re on the right course.”

With the hockey set-up in safe hands, Leiweke turned the laser beams on basketball and soccer.

On the Raptors: “We’re in a ditch. It’s going to take us some time to get out of it.”

He won’t discuss his alternate-president-for-a-day, Bryan Colangelo, but he does offer a half-hearted kick now that he’s well out the door.

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“Basketball was exactly the opposite (to the Leafs). We needed to change the view, the culture and the leadership. . . . Energy, enthusiasm and work ethic are what we need to get the Raptors out of the hole they’re in. I came here, and I didn’t think we had it.”

Basketball’s a ways off, but Leiweke’s all right with that. He gushes about new GM Masai Ujiri — “a kindred spirit” — and says he’s willing to give him nearly limitless rope.

“It’s going to take us a few years, but that doesn’t depress us, nor does it scare us.”

His highest near-term hopes and largest heaping of scorn are saved for Toronto FC. Leiweke is comfortable in all three of his worlds, but seems most conversant when it comes to soccer.

“We can fix (TFC) quicker than the other two because it’s more free-wheeling. In the NHL, there’s no Stanley Cup that does not come from the draft. You cannot free-agent your way to a Stanley Cup.

“MLS is a little different. Much of that roster has to be made up of trades.”

Speaking more generally about the moribund soccer team, Leiweke is ruthless in his assessment of its first seven years.

“We disrespected the fans by not giving the kind of players that teams like New York and L.A. are signing. The fans act like New York and L.A. We acted like . . . well, I’m going to piss somebody off here . . . ” — he almost names the city that pales next to his new home, before thinking better of it — “ . . . like a small-market team.

“We changed the entire league’s opinion of the viability of soccer in North America. And then we blew it because we chickened out. When we could take the big dives, we always found the ‘B’ player. We found guys that we thought, ‘Well, he’s not David Beckham, but he’s awful good.’ No, he’s not. Why not get the ‘A’ guy?”

Off the record, Leiweke names two “A” guys the team is currently pursuing. Both are massively expensive, major international stars.

We’ll see in the next little while if Mohammed, Cope and the rest of the board meant what they said about Beckham at that initial meeting, because now they’re being asked.

Leiweke spends the weekdays walking as well. He plans to visit every corporate partner.

“We’ve never done that. They’re shocked that it’s me walking in the door.”

Recently, he popped in on his only real competitor and pronounces himself smitten.

“I love (Blue Jays president) Paul (Beeston),” Leiweke says, jumping up for emphasis. “I found him invaluable for his opinion on this organization. I’m looking at him like, ‘Six weeks I’ve been wasting my time. I should’ve just come to you my first day.’”

This leads to the logical question — since they share the same landlord, wouldn’t it make sense for everybody to live in the same house?

“We’re going to have a better relationship. (Hand sharply to thigh.) That’s. For. Certain. The Jays and this organization are going to be very committed to each other going forward. I want to do anything to be part of their world.”

He’s careful that that not be construed as an imperial ambition.

“Do I think we could run them better? Absolutely not,” Leiweke says, edging into one of his favourite themes — that the Raptors need to emulate the national scope of the baseball team. “Quite frankly, we’d be better off talking about them running some of our teams, rather than us running their team.”

There’s also the one that got away — an NFL franchise. Leiweke couldn’t manage it in L.A. with an aging owner in Anschutz who, by all accounts, wasn’t terribly interested. He can’t manage it here since all NFL teams must, by rule, be owned by individuals rather than corporations.

He still can’t stop talking about it. Earlier in the day, he has called the prospect of an NFL team in Toronto “intriguing.” Is that a realistic ambition?

“The best way to get the NFL here is to be quiet and do the work behind the scenes. So I’ve been reminded today after that comment came out that we should be quiet and we will.”

Reminded by whom?

“By those who would ultimately like to bring the NFL here,” Leiweke says, then doubles over laughing at his own joke.

As has already been noted, all of this is remarkable. Most CEOs enter quietly. Leiweke has walked in tossing firecrackers.

In less than an hour, he has rubbished his own franchises and some of the remaining employees who had a hand in running them; tipped the city’s sporting legacy in the recycle bin; pointed out that the best run team in town is the one he doesn’t get any say in; and reintroduced the disorienting topic of the NFL.

Sifting through all this, one’s eye is caught by a relatively minor observation.

“As painful as the Boston series was, we will make that the best thing that ever happened to us.”

Had the Leafs won that Game 7 and made a deeper push into the playoffs, Leiweke would have arrived into a very different civic sporting landscape. If that had happened, Nonis and Randy Carlyle are the ones who beat the jinx.

Instead, the curse remains in place. Now Leiweke gets to perform the exorcism.

“Our fans are mad at us. Across all the teams. Even with the Maple Leafs — yeah, we had a good run, but they’re in a lot of pain.”

You know who wants to take the pain away.

That’s the not-too-hard-to-figure-out secret to his arrival. Big vision and the promise of free rein were the lures. They’re not the catch.

Had Leiweke gone off into business for himself, or accepted a similar position in New York or Chicago, he’s another smart guy in a suit who talks a great game.

But in Toronto, he’s got a whole country in the tent listening to his sermon. Now he wants to heal the sick.

“That’s what I’m doing here with you right now — creating accountability. The fans are going to have expectations based on an interview like this, and that’s a good thing,” Leiweke says, lowering to a solemn tone. “It’s time. It’s time we re-engaged in a relationship of integrity.”

This is the first part of the route he has mapped — “All eyes on me.”

The last stop, the waterfront of his imagination, is also clear.

“The idea of winning is very intriguing because whoever does do that here is going to be a hero.”

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