Article content continued

That’s not to say he wouldn’t have pulled the pin early if things didn’t work out. Dube says he wasn’t ready to, as Francis puts it, “lose his shirt.”

“It was a high-risk thing,” Dube says. “On the other hand, we had the option, if we bought them and moved them here, to move them out after one year. There were some options there — not that we discussed it. That was the last thing you’d want to say for them to approve the transfer. You get it done, then you make your plans after that. But I think (it would have gone well) for at least a couple of years.

“You had to recognize we were a small city going into the big leagues. While we have great fan support here and lots of good volunteers, at the end of the day it’s the dollars that count. If we’d taken a big loss after year two, we might have had to look at selling it anyways. And that might not have been a bad deal (with the rate of franchise appreciation).”

Dube says his group had the option of purchasing the club and keeping it in St. Louis after the NHL rejected Saskatoon. He was willing to do it, but Hunter wasn’t. It was Saskatoon or bust for the old promoter.

“Bill had no interest in that, and if he had no interest, I wasn’t going to move there and do anything with the team,” Dube says. “It would have been a good financial move on our part, though. At the time, I thought there was good potential. Ralston Purina just wanted out of the business; there was nothing wrong with the team. And the Checkerdome (where the Blues played) was part of the deal, which would have been a very, very good acquisition.”

Dube notes that Harry Ornest bought the team a few months later for a firesale price and turned a huge profit when he flipped it a few years later.