good luck with all that

Tom Hicks, owner of local sports teams, can't make interest payments on his credit facility. I don't know the man personally, but he shows up in the media a lot, and my impression is that he's an arrogant dick. He did very well with his investment company during bubble years. Not so well during the bust years. If I were a bit better at convincing people of stuff I wasn't very sure about myself... I could probably do the same. But I'm not, and he is, and so he's got this house to show for it.

From the story:

Hicks announced last week that he was seeking to sell up to 49 percent of both the Rangers and Stars. Such a sale could add between $400-500 million in cash to the HSG reserves.

You know what, Tom? No one wants to buy 49 percent of a sports team, and especially not at those inflated bubble-era prices. Sports teams are generally not a good investment from a purely financial perspective. The reason is that the price of buying them is inflated because of the "toy factor". People who are rich buy them not so that they can make money, but so that they can play at being a sports owner: hobnob with famous athletes, get mentioned on SportsCenter, get quoted in Sports Illustrated, and generally get a lot more fame and publicity than would normally be accorded to a boring (though rich) business guy. This results in a premium being placed on the price of sports franchises. Which means it is hard to make money from them. Which means that a non-controlling interest is worth a heck of a lot less, proportionally, than the controlling interest. But then again, I'm just a lowly blogger with living in a house that would fit in the master bathroom of your pool cabana, and therefore probably don't know what the hell I'm talking about.