http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/12/sports/hockey/ed-snider-dies-philadelphia-flyers.html?_r=0

Ed Snider, who co-founded and owned the Philadelphia Flyers of the National Hockey League for nearly 50 years and was chairman of a sports management company that provided services to hundreds of arenas, stadiums and convention centers in North America, died on Monday at his home in Montecito, Calif. He was 83.

His family said he had died of cancer.

The son of a grocery store owner, Mr. Snider and several partners launched the Flyers as an expansion franchise in 1967 in a city with no hockey tradition, no base of hockey fans and no hockey arena. They built one on Broad Street, called it the Spectrum and installed their team.

After a shaky start, the Flyers turned the City of Brotherly Love into a town that loved bare-knuckle fights on the ice. Mr. Snider hired a cadre of roughneck fighters after seeing his team of aging retreads and young castoffs humiliated by brawlers like the St. Louis Blues and the Montreal Canadiens. Blood flowed. Sellout crowds roared. In 1973, The Philadelphia Bulletin dubbed the Flyers the “Broad Street Bullies.”

And in 1974 and 1975, the Flyers won consecutive Stanley Cup championships. Philadelphia became a hockey town and never looked back.

The Flyers were the league’s first expansion team to win hockey’s holy grail, and repeating the feat a year later left fans ecstatic. Bursting with pride, two million people turned out for back-to-back celebratory parades. Mr. Snider’s Flyers won no more Stanley Cups, but the team became one of the best in the N.H.L, making the playoffs 38 times and playing in six more Stanley Cup finals, the last in 2010.

“Ed basically created hockey in Philadelphia,” Peter Luukko, the Flyers president, told The New York Times in 2011.

“Luukko was talking about his boss, but just about everybody in Philadelphia says the same thing,” Jeff Z. Klein, a Times hockey reporter, wrote. “Tantalizing as the prospect may sound to Rangers fans — and Penguins fans and Devils fans and Islanders fans and on and on — without Snider there would probably have been no Flyers, no legacy of the Broad Street Bullies, no hockey.”

In 1974, Mr. Snider formed Spectacor as a holding company for the Flyers and the Spectrum, with himself as chairman. The company became landlord to the Philadelphia 76ers of the National Basketball Association, which also played at the Spectrum, and acquired Prism, the first regional sports network on cable television, and WIP-AM, one of the first all-sports radio stations. Mr. Snider also wrote innovative contracts to manage arenas in New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Virginia and Florida.


In the late 1980s, Mr. Snider and Spectacor built a new arena in South Philadelphia that became the Wells Fargo Center. In 1996, he sold a majority stake in Spectacor to Comcast, but retained a one-third interest and the chairmanship of the merged sports and entertainment behemoth, Comcast Spectacor. It bought the 76ers and acquired companies that managed and provided food, ticketing and other services for hundreds of arenas, stadiums and convention centers in the United States and Canada. It sold the 76ers in 2011.

Mr. Snider attended nearly all the Flyers’ home games and was involved in day-to-day team matters.

“The owner is supposed to be the guy with the money, who sits back in some big office and smokes hand-rolled cigars while he watches the bread roll in,” Maury Z. Levy wrote in Philadelphia magazine in 1971. “He is not supposed to get his custom-made suits spoiled by the smell of the locker room after a good game. These are the unwritten rules of being an owner, and Ed Snider breaks every one of them.”

Edward Malcolm Snider was born in Washington on Jan. 6, 1933, to Sol and Lillian Bonas Snider. His father owned three grocery stores in the nation’s capital. Ed graduated from Calvin Coolidge High School in 1951 and from the University of Maryland in 1955 with an accounting degree.

He was named a vice president for business affairs of the Philadelphia Eagles in 1964, after his sister, Phyllis, married Earl Foreman, a part owner of the football team. In 1966, when the N.H.L. disclosed plans to expand its league from 6 to 12 teams, Mr. Snider and several partners, including Jerry Wolman, a principal owner of the Eagles, applied for a franchise in Philadelphia.

The city had little experience with pro hockey. The Arrows of the Canadian-American League, a forebear of the American Hockey League, had played there in 1927-28 and in 1934-35. The Quakers, an N.H.L. franchise, played for a season in 1930-31, but quit after a dreadful campaign. While Hockey News said Philadelphia was “least likely to succeed,” the N.H.L. awarded the Snider-Wolman group a conditional franchise.

In a division agreed upon by the partners, Mr. Wolman largely financed and controlled the Spectrum, which was built in little more than a year, and Mr. Snider assumed control of the Flyers, which began its inaugural season in October, 1967. But Mr. Wolman ran into financial problems, the Spectrum fell into bankruptcy, and Mr. Snider, under a court-approved plan, agreed to pay the creditors and assumed control of the Spectrum in 1971.

Mr. Snider, who also had a home in Gladwyne, Pa., became the longest tenured owner in the N.H.L.

He was married four times. With his first wife, the former Myrna Gordon, he had four children, Craig, Jay, Lindy and Tina. They were divorced in 1981. In 1983, he married Martha McGeary. They had two children, Sarena and Samuel, and were divorced in 2001. His 2004 marriage to Christine Decroix ended in divorce in 2012. In 2013, he married Lin Spivak.

She survives him, as do his children; 15 grandchildren; and a sister, Phyllis Foreman.

In 1999, a Philadelphia Daily News poll named Mr. Snider the city’s greatest sports mover and shaker, surpassing the legendary Athletics Manager Connie Mack and the basketball broadcaster Sonny Hill. In 1988 he was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame and in 2011 into the United States Hockey Hall of Fame.

In 2005, he created the Ed Snider Youth Hockey Foundation, which maintains ice rinks and provides equipment, coaching and hockey programs for thousands of inner-city children in Philadelphia and Camden, N.J. He also endowed a research center at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

And you will know MY JACKET IS GOLD when I lay my vengeance upon thee.