The Director’s Lounge at Wells Fargo Center has forever been a special place for friends and families of the Flyers and Comcast to meet before games.
This was Ed Snider’s gathering place hours before he would go downstairs to Box 4 on the Suite Level.
It wasn’t the same this season without his presence.
Because of a recurrence of bladder cancer, Snider was healthy enough to attend just one game this season. He spent nearly the entire fall and winter convalescing at his estate in Santa Barbara, California, while receiving medical treatment at UCLA Medical Center. Snider died early Monday morning at the age of 83 (see story).
The Director’s Lounge and his suite were a vibrant source of fun and entertainment during games.
“It was a whole different vibe this year,” said Lou Scheinfeld, Snider’s first vice president of business operations back in 1966. “You didn’t have that intensity.”
Snider always had invited guests at his private suite during games. But there was one rule. No idle chit-chat during play. Talk between periods.
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“Every game to him was the seventh game of Stanley Cup when Ed was around,” Scheinfeld said. “In his suite, if people were talking during the game, he’d turn around, give them a look. You talk between periods. He is polite and welcoming, but the game was his focus.”
Recently, the Flyers held a special ceremony on Feb. 11 against Buffalo to announce their Alumni had pledged $2 million to construct the Edward M. Snider / Alumni Ice Rink in 2016-17 as part of the organization’s year-long 50th anniversary celebration of the founding of the franchise.
The ceremony was moved up several weeks because so many players were still in Philadelphia from a previous Alumni Game held in Reading.
“It’s remarkable that one man helped create all of this,” Scheinfeld said. “One man was responsible for sustaining and maintaining it with the same passion today that he had 50 years ago. Ed didn’t do anything halfway. Everything was 120 percent.”
If you look around and try to find a single person who was with a franchise from the very start as an owner and maintained that relationship with the same team until the very day he died, it was Ed Snider.
Sure, he sold two-thirds of his stake to Comcast in 1996, but he was still the club chairman and very much in control of the franchise until only recently, when his illness forced him to step back.
Historically, within Philadelphia, when you think of individual team ownership, you had the Carpenter Family with the Phillies, but they no longer own the team. You had Eddie Gottlieb with the Philadelphia Warriors, but they’re no longer around. You had Connie Mack with the Philadelphia Athletics, but he didn’t own the team until later in life even though he managed it for 50 years.
Ed Snider stood alone in Philadelphia as the Flyers’ owner from the team's birth.
“He was unique,” said Scheinfeld, who is credited with coming up with the name, The Spectrum. “I don’t know anyone in the history of sports who for 50 years had his hands on the organization. His imprint. It’s not the fifth generation of the Rooney family in Pittsburgh.
“Ed took this team, The Spectrum, Spectacor, put it on his back and carried it from Day 1. He has probably created, as one person, more jobs in Philadelphia than anyone. Nothing of major importance was ever done without his imprint.”
Snider developed nearly a dozen different companies during his lifetime with help from Peter Luukko and others. His methodology was always the same.
“He could take the most complex business situation and break it down into a headline,” Scheinfeld said. “Ed Snider was Twitter before Twitter.
“He could cut through the fog and confusion and get right to the core of an issue. Whether it was a bad situation or something that would expand the business. The man was brilliant.”
Philadelphia sports likely will never see such a man again.