Two Big-League Team Presidents Charted Very Different Routes To Las Vegas

By ALAN SNEL
LVSportsBiz.com

 

One guy has spent his entire adulthood with a single NFL team from California that is building a $1.8 billion domed stadium in Las Vegas. His Raiders land in Las Vegas in 2020, but he’s roaming metro Vegas all the time these days.

 

The other fella began in minor league baseball in Oklahoma and Iowa before he landed a business executive job with the Cleveland Cavaliers  — and then the top business position with the Vegas Golden Knights in 2016.

 

Oakland/Las Vegas Raiders President Marc Badain and Vegas Golden Knights President Kerry Bubolz have followed divergent personal paths to Las Vegas, with both major-league team business executives making daily decisions and plotting long-term business strategies that are shaping/will shape the Las Vegas sports landscape for years to come.

 

 

 

 

A Queens, NY native, the 48-year-old Badain grew up in Rochester, NY about two hours east of Buffalo and earned his undergraduate degree at Emory University in Atlanta in 1992. Badain did an internship at Raiders training camp in Oxnard, California when the team was based in Los Angeles between his junior and senior years at Emory, assisting coaching staff and football operations departments at training camp.

 

Badain then moved to California to work full time for the Raiders after his 1992 Emory graduation.

 

He has worked for the Raiders ever since.

 

Badain, a numbers guy with a schmoozy personality and sense of humor, is the Raiders’ buck-stops-here business chief behind balancing operations for an NFL team that is playing in Oakland while planting new roots at the same time in Las Vegas. While the team trains at Napa Valley training complex in California, Badain commands a robust ticket sales crew in Las Vegas and has watched more than $300 million already spent on construction of the Raiders stadium on 62.5 acres on the west side of Interstate 15 across the highway from Mandalay Bay. Badain even reached out to veteran broadcaster Brent Musburger to sign him to do radio play-by-play for the Raiders to replace veteran radio man Greg Papa.

 

 

While Badain is from Queens in New York City and western New York state, the 52-year-old Bubolz has roots in Oklahoma. Bubolz is a Tulsa native and 1989 Oklahoma State University graduate who began his sports marketing and business work where so many do — minor league baseball in the heartland of America for the Tulsa Drillers and Quad Cities River Bandits in Davenport, Iowa.

 

Football may be king in Oklahoma. But Bubolz got hooked on hockey as a kid watching the local Tulsa minor league hockey club. That attachment to watching the game in an ice house is apparent when you see the Golden Knights president roaming T-Mobile Arena in his signature blue-checked blazer before VGK home games and chatting with fans and staff.

 

 

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Like Badain, Bubolz can schmooze with the best of them, whether talking to fans about ticket prices or addressing hundreds of Las Vegas business leaders at a breakfast meeting on the Strip about how the Golden Knights jersey is the top-selling hockey sweater in the NHL or how the team crushed it when it came to per-capita merchandise spending at T-Mobile Arena during the NHL playoffs.

 

Not only did Badain and Bubolz arrive in Las Vegas via contrasting routes, the Killer Business Bees lord over very different team cultures and histories.

 

The Raiders were founded in January 1960 and were a charter member of the old American Football League. In 1963, a new head coach (and future owner) by the name of Al Davis ushered in an era of winning and a renegade culture that continues today with a professional football brand that will likely drive tens of thousands of out-of-state Raiders fans to the Las Vegas stadium when it opens in 2020.

 

The Raiders’ organization is literally family — a word that is not used loosely at a team that saw ownership go from Al Davis to son Mark Davis after the senior Davis died in 2011. Badain is part of that Raiders family culture, working for the only employer he has known as an adult.

 

 

After his modest start as an intern, Badain worked his way up the Raiders’ business ladder, becoming the team’s chief financial officer in 2004, three years after earning an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business in 2001.

 

“Everyone in school then was figuring out how they were going to leave their current job, join a dot-com, and make millions,” Badain told the Haas business school publication in 2014. “When they asked me what I was doing after I graduated, I said, ‘I’m staying with the Raiders.’ ”

 

Badain had worked for the Raiders for 23 years by the time Mark Davis owner told him in January 2015 that he was officially the team’s president, charged with finding a new stadium for the Raiders.

 

“He has been running it for the last two years just as an interim president of this but he’s been doing a phenomenal job,” Mark Davis told ESPN in 2015.  “It was just time to take the tag off. He’s president. He will also be focusing on the stadium situation.”

 

Badain found his Raiders stadium out-of-state in Las Vegas, where Las Vegas Sands Corp. CEO Sheldon Adelson used his political clout to convince the Nevada Legislature to approve a $750 million public subsidy for the Raiders’ $1.8 billion stadium. The $750 million is a record subsidy for a pro team’s venue in the U.S. and southern Nevada will spend the next 30 years collecting more than $1 billion in hotel room fees to cover the debt for the $75o million.

 

During the Raiders’ lavish Nov. 13 stadium groundbreaking event, Badain thanked Adelson for his help — even though the billionaire casino tycoon had dropped out of helping fund the venue when he took his $650 million commitment off the table in January 2017 because he said at the time that Sands was not involved in the discussions behind the lease agreement between the team and the local stadium board.

 

While Badain was in his early 20s when he showed up for internship duty at the Raiders headquarters more than a quarter-century ago, Bubolz was a grizzled sports team marketing veteran in his early 50s when Golden Knights owner Bill Foley hired the Tulsa native to be the NHL club’s first team president in October 2016.

 

By the time Bubolz arrived at the Golden Knights offices in Summerlin after working 13 years in the Cleveland Cavaliers organization, including serving as president of business operations from 2013-2016, Foley had already baked the team brand.

 

While the Raiders had history and a distinct silver-and-black identity, the Golden Knights were months away from their playing their inaugural season when Bubolz showed up. The Knights’ identity was fashioned from scratch during a historic run to the Stanley Cup Final, with a team-before-individual mentality that extended from Foley to the business operations led by Bubolz to the players on the ice.

 

Like Badain, Bubolz is personable and the VGK prez uses his earthy heartland of America style to chat with fans along the T-Mobile Arena main concourse and even with supporters at a downtown Los Angeles hotel where Golden Knights fans had gathered for Game 4 of the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs when the Knights beat the Los Angeles Kings, four games to zero.

 

Bubolz traces his early start to minor league baseball and enjoyed the Cavaliers’ NBA championship in 2016, but his love for hockey born in Oklahoma of all places made him a good match to launch the Vegas Golden Knights’ business operations in the desert.

 

Keep in mind that while working for the Cavs, Bubolz was also the president and alternate governor for the various teams owned by the Cavaliers’ operating company, including the Cleveland Monsters — the NHL Columbus Blue Jackets’ American Hockey League affiliate.

 

Bubolz also had previous NHL sales experience even before starting with the Cavaliers. Bubolz was vice president of sales for the Carolina Hurricanes and Southwest Sports Group, which includes the Dallas Stars. Bubolz even spent some time with an International Hockey League team called the Cleveland Lumberjacks where he served in several business executive positions.

 

Both Badain and Bubolz also have a good sense of humor, which comes in handy when you’re a team president of a major-league team these days.

 

In Badain’s case, he joked after stadium board chairman Steve Hill’s long-winded speech after the Raiders stadium deal was done that Hill probably would have been cut off if he made the same speech at the Oscars.

 

And in Bubolz’s case, he took one look at a New York Mets’ blue-and-orange warm-up jacket being worn by an LVSportsBiz.com writer at a cold Las Vegas 51s ballpark groundbreaking in Summerlin and quipped, “Where did you get that Starter jacket — did you get it for free for subscribing to Sports Illustrated?”

 

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