Strange things happened to Richard Peddie when he was the most powerful CEO in Canadian pro sports.

Disgruntled fans rented an airplane to tow a sign urging ownership to fire him. A deranged soul phoned him and threatened to kill him.

And fans of the Toronto Raptors have probably heard the story about Raptorland’s infamous attempted “palace coup,” wherein a metaphorical spilling of executive blood was only narrowly averted after Peddie squashed a plan by then-Raptors coach Butch Carter to take the job of GM Glen Grunwald.

It’s on page 133 of Peddie’s new memoir, “Dream Job.”

“Butch Carter tried to talk me into making him the GM and Glen the team president — if he could get (Tracy) McGrady to re-sign with the club,” Peddie writes. “This struck both Grunwald and me as an end-around, one that would seriously undermine Glen’s effectiveness. Glen and I called him in and told him we were letting him go.”

That’s an interesting bit of remembering by the former CEO. At the time, when the tabloid headlines accused Carter staging of a “coup,” the thrust of the coach’s alleged lust for Grunwald’s job wasn’t spun as hypothetical. Carter was portrayed as blatantly disloyal to Grunwald, his former University of Indiana teammate. Supposedly caught deviously angling for a management title, the coach was handed a far more poisonous one, that of would-be GM killer.

Carter doesn’t think it’s a coincidence he hasn’t worked in the NBA since.

“(Peddie) blackballed me,” Carter, now 55, said in a recent interview.

Asked if he blackballed Carter, the 66-year-old Peddie said: “Absolutely not. No one phoned me about coaches. Think about who their reference would be. If a general manager is going to phone about a coach, they’re not phoning Richard Peddie. I don’t believe Glen (blackballed Carter) either. Butch went a little off the rails, but he still did a nice job for us. There was no animosity with us and Butch.

“No reason to do it, and we didn’t do it.”

Speaking in a downtown eatery this week upon the release of his book, Peddie said he’d never considered the idea that Carter was effectively frozen out from future coaching jobs because of the circumstances of his departure from Toronto.

“I don’t know I’ve ever heard someone say that before. I could see it,” Peddie said. “They say (former Buffalo Sabres coach Ted) Nolan was a GM killer, and I guess that’s true, because, boy, he’s been all over and never got a job. I didn’t think of Butch being blackballed. But I guess. I don’t know. I’m not in that fraternity.”

In a series of interviews with the Star this week, Butch Carter said his motive in asking for a possible executive role was far different from what has ever been portrayed.

“What I was trying to do was get rid of Richard,” Carter said.

It could be argued that the former coach would have done basketball fans in Toronto a considerable service; even Peddie has since acknowledged that, given his lack of NBA experience and a long list of other responsibilities running Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, he did a poor job shepherding the franchise in his 15 years at the helm. One playoff series victory during his tenure speaks to his expertise.

Carter said the suggestion that he be given an executive role if he could convince McGrady to re-sign was simply one item among a long list of suggestions put forward during a year-end performance review at which both Peddie and Grunwald were present.

Carter said giving an NBA head coach an executive reach would have hardly been an unprecedented move; more than a few before and since have occupied front-office roles, de facto or otherwise. He said he wanted more power in a locker room filled with veterans who weren’t above going over the head of a coach to complain to a GM. And Carter provided the Star with a page in his Raptors coaching contract that indicated he possessed first right of refusal on the title of assistant GM should the Raptors ever hire one.

“What I was asking was, ‘Could I get that clause in my contract to kick in if I can get McGrady to re-sign?’ ” Carter said in a recent interview.

As it turned out, Carter’s executive aspirations were a hypothetical pipe dream. At the time, nobody with a close eye on the franchise thought free agent McGrady would stick around. Soon enough, the 21-year-old all-star-to-be was exiting to his home state of Florida to play for the Orlando Magic.

“I didn’t have any confidence at all I could get Tracy to sign,” Carter said.

Still, the narrative that Carter staged a coup has been repeated ad nauseum, even if Grunwald has publicly dispelled it.

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“I don’t believe it was a palace coup,” Grunwald, who didn’t respond to a request for an interview for this story, was quoted as saying at the time.

Peddie, for his part, said he still believes Carter’s motive was to dislodge Grunwald.

“I think it was still a coup,” Peddie said. “I didn’t feel he was trying to push me out. I think he was trying to push Glen out. Who was really going to be making the decisions then? Knowing Butch the way I did, he would have wanted to make the decisions.”

During his waning days as Raptors coach, Carter did plenty of self-inflicted damage to his professional reputation by unfurling a stream of headline-grabbing stunts, most notably filing a defamation lawsuit against New York Knicks forward Marcus Camby as the Raptors were to face the Knicks in the first playoff series in Toronto franchise history.

Carter now acknowledges the ill-headedness of that lawsuit: “I was young and stupid.” He said he would have understood if he’d been fired simply for filing it.

But Carter, in a statement emailed to the Star, took issue with what he sees as Peddie’s re-framing of the circumstances of his departure in “Dream Job:” “In his book Richard confirms he lied the past 13 years about my dismissal from the Raptors. His conduct clearly damaged a portion of my life. This conduct never should of been allowed to happen. As it was I hope a sincere apology is forthcoming.”

Peddie said he has no plans to apologize: “What I (wrote) about Butch was my recollection, and I believe it to be true.”

Carter has lived in the GTA for most of the years since he was fired, lately in a condo a couple of blocks from the Air Canada Centre. He was last seen on TV crying tears of happiness at the Pro Football Hall of Fame, where his younger brother Cris, in a memorable enshrinement speech, lauded “a guy named Butch Carter” as his “father figure” and “hero.”

If the memories of Toronto’s 45-win season in 1999-2000 have long faded, Butch Carter’s reputation as a sideline savant endures. Jeff Van Gundy, coach of the Knicks when they swept the Raptors in the 2000 first round, said in a recent interview that he considered Carter a formidable opponent and “a great coach.” Many observers believe he remains the finest strategist in Raptors history, if also the most complicated.

Carter, who received a severance of about $6 million upon being fired, has used the ensuing decade-plus to spend time with his wife and four sons and to work as an entrepreneur. He has also made inquiries about returning to the NBA; in 2006 he sent a letter to Raptors patriarch Wayne Embry asking Embry to consider bringing him back to work for the organization.

If nothing ever came of that letter, perhaps it’s because Peddie was still ultimately in charge of Toronto’s team. As for employment with other teams, Carter said he had a meeting with an NBA executive in Florida a couple of years ago, wherein the executive indicated that there’s a perception among some in the NBA that Carter had been “blackballed.”

More than 13 years on, a fiery coach’s blood still boils at the mention of a former nemesis.

“(Peddie) blackballed me,” Carter said. “They knew I was such a good coach that if I went somewhere else I was going to win. If there’s one thing I can do, I can coach.”

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