An emotional Tod Leiweke just held a press conference to talk about his decision to leave the Seahawks and Vulcan Sports to take over as the CEO and part owner of the NHL’s Tampa Bay Lightning.
“This was a hard decision,” he said. “I was trying to tell my kids that you get to a point and time in your life where sort of a dream comes true, and that dream as a lifelong hockey fans was a chance to go and work for this great guy in [owner] Jeff Vinik and to work with [general manager] Steve Yzerman and be a minority owner. Any yet with the dream came some asterisks. The asterisk is that I’ve given this place everything I’ve had, and we’ve built something special here. Walking away from that, those are the things that do keep you awake at night. So there’s no other way to sort of resolve those asterisks other than to say that this is a dream come true, and this place is in good shape and if we do it right in the transition we just simply won’t miss a beat.”
Leiweke, who grew up a hockey fan in St. Louis and still plays the game in what he described as a “beer league,” said he plans on staying with the Seahawks as long as it takes to find his replacement, and said that process will take a manner of months, not weeks: “I’m going to be here until I get it right.”
Leiweke became particularly choked up when talking about his boss in Seattle the last seven years, Seahawks and Trailblazers owner Paul Allen.
Leiweke said the recent turmoil with the Seahawks and Blazers—both teams changed general managers in the offseason, and the Seahawks also fired head coach Jim Mora and hired Pete Carroll—had nothing to do with his decision to leave, noting that things were harder when he first came to Seattle and the team had a season ticket base of around 30,000 (it is now at 61,000).
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