"We call it the Return of the NHL. That’s the big picture,” the principal owner says. His voice bears a trace of his Dartmouth days as well as the acumen that comes from years spent in boardrooms. “We had some mountain moving that had to be done but with God all things are possible.”

Hockey has been a part of Naegele’s life since he was young. He grew up in the Fifties on Lake Minnetonka playing hockey with his younger brother Bill, on a neighborhood rink rimmed with wooden boards in Excelsior. “It had the charm of a Currier & Ives painting — snow falling under the lights, and a little warming house with a potbelly stove inside and a guy smoking a pipe. It was classic, middle-America pond hockey,” Naegele says, never dreaming he would one day own 70% of a hockey franchise. “If I knew then what I know today, my heart would have failed because not in my wildest dreams could I ever have expected to be where God has led me.”

Though his parents did not attend church, Bob and his sister and brother attended the town’s Episcopal church. “My parents used to have a neighbor take us on Sundays.”

His passion for the puck followed him through junior high and high school, where he played goalie for the Minnetonka Skippers.

Upon graduation in 1957, Naegele attended Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, coming home to marry Ellis, his childhood friend. “Our mothers went to Washburn High School and both coincidently wound up moving out to the Excelsior area right around the end of World War II.”

Naegele and his wife raised their three daughters and son in the western suburbs.

In 1965 Naegele and Ellis attended a Billy Graham Crusade. “Ellis heard the Word and walked forward and gave her heart to the Lord. I heard but it never germinated,” he says. Seven years later, at a lay-ministry retreat called Cursillo, Naegele heard the Gospel for the first time and accepted the call of Christ on his life and the family began to attend Jesus People Church in Minneapolis. On a Sunday morning several years later, Naegele and his son, (“Three,” he affectionately calls him) were coming from his son’s hockey game and the two stopped at Speak the Word International, pastored by friends Randy and Roberta Morrison. “It was precious and it was a nice little mixture of people. We saw that church grow from 50 people to a packed house with three services.”

Billboard of Happiness

The oldest of three children, Naegele was named after the founder of Naegele Outdoor Advertising Company. “Dad actually started in the electric sign business in 1934, going into the billboard business after the war,” Naegele says. The company specialized in single-pole designs and set size standards for outdoor signs nationwide. At one time the Richfield-based company owned over 80% of billboard faces in the Twin Cities. In 1970, Naegele and his brother purchased their father’s business, with Naegele serving twelve years as CEO until the company was sold in 1982.

After selling the billboard company, Naegele became what he calls, a project person. “I was always a team player. I like being on a team and building teams in business. I enjoy the project feature of life.” Some of his past projects include ownership of the inline skating company, Rollerblade, Inc. (now owned by Benetton Group, the Italian apparel firm), being on the planning commission and council for the city of Shorewood, serving on the advisory board of Speak the Word Church and involvement in Minnesota Prayer Breakfasts.

From 1987 to 1994, he and Ellis lived in Minneapolis and for the past nine years the couple, in their 42nd year of marriage, have made their home in Naples, Florida. “We decided we were being lead to come down here and have that white stuff between our feet that was not cold,” he chuckles. In his early sixties, he still plays hockey several times a week at TECO Arena in nearby Estero. “Keeps me young,” he says.

The Birth of a Franchise

When former North Stars’ owner Norm Green took his team on a permanent road trip to Dallas in 1993, many Minnesota hockey fans felt the professional sport was gone forever in the state. But in June of 1996, the NHL announced it would accept applications for expansion teams. Inspired by St. Paul Mayor Norm Coleman’s vision that the NHL could return to Minnesota, Naegele turned to God for guidance. “A scripture that has fared well for me is Philippians 4:6-7. ‘Don’t worry about anything. Pray about all things, telling God what your needs are. Don’t forget to thank Him and then He’ll give you the peace that passes all understanding and if you don’t get the peace, don’t proceed.’” He pauses then continues. “I can assure you I’m fallible, and several times I’ve proceeded without the peace and wound up in chaos so I know the difference between proceeding peacefully and just winging it.”

Though Naegele compares building an expansion team from scratch to a couple deciding to have a baby, he felt at peace to proceed. “The message, really, is to trust God where’s He’s leading you and if He can get you there, He can get you out of messes.”

And messes there were. Coleman said in Tom Tuttle’s book, A Wild State of Hockey, “This deal was dead a thousand times.” The birth of the new expansion franchise was not without its face-offs, the most crucial being that the NHL wanted assurance there was still a fan base in Minnesota, capable and financial leadership to manage the organization, and a new arena built. “Impossible,” Naegele says about the project. “But the road to glory is paved with naysayers so every time something isn’t possible, that is exciting, because to me, that just becomes an opportunity for God to show up big.”

Both Governor Carlson and Mayor Coleman were proponents of getting a professional hockey expansion franchise to Minnesota. The state and city each offered $65,000,000. However state bonds were only offered on even years. To make matters worse, the state legislature had ended their session. The possibility of netting an expansion franchise seemed as out of reach as a three-goal deficit with seconds to play.

The NHL required a commitment to build an arena. On the day of the deadline, Coleman committed to the hockey venture group and the NHL that the city of St. Paul would back the entire $130 million arena costs. (The state legislature later committed funds to the project in 1998.) Naegele’s group put up the $80,000,000 franchise fee.

The risks paid off. In June 1997 the NHL awarded Minnesota an expansion franchise. “It’s just a matter of believing God can move something from the impossible to the possible,” Naegele says. “When you see the manifestation of that then you say, ‘Wow, only God.’” Within an hour of the franchise expansion announcement, 6,000 hockey fans put down one hundred dollars each to guarantee season tickets. Minnesota was, now, as the Wild anthem says, “The great state of hockey.”

Naegele and his venture group built a solid, well-seasoned management team that focused its efforts on employing marketing experts and creating community relations to regenerate fan interest throughout the state, including youth, high school and collegiate hockey organizations.

His group, Minnesota Sports and Entertainment, has hired some of the best in the business, including head coach, Jacques Lemaire, winner of eleven Stanley Cup championships. Naegele says, “Creativity is a gift from God. He didn’t create stones with creativity. He didn’t create trees with creativity. He only created humans in His image. He is the creator ergo there’s creativity in mankind and it has showed up in this whole project.”

The Minnesota Wild silenced its critics, and since its opening game in September of 2000, has sold out of every home game. There are 2,500 people on the waiting list for the 12,000 season tickets.

As for a mascot, there purposely isn’t one, Naegele says. “Minnesota hockey fans don’t need to be entertained between periods. They enjoy the purity of the game without extended hype. If we would have been the Minnesota Blue Oxs, that might have been different, but the Wild says it all. It is a fun word to say and everybody has their own impression of what the Wild is.”

The group considered hundreds of ideas that fans submitted to name the team. “The word ‘wild’ started out as an adjective at first,” Naegele says, “but “the Wild” had a stand-alone feature that captured the imagination. We knew that if it did that for our group, it would do it for the fans and they would embrace it.”

The Wild logo, a pictogram, is the shape of a wild animal, the North Star, evergreens, a red sky, and a stream, or, Naegele impishly says, “could it be a loon?” The green, tan and red colors take their roots from Minnesota’s landmarks. “There’s the rugged, natural element of Minnesota and then you toss in a little harvest wheat because we’re an agricultural state and then we have the Iron Range heritage.”

He grows reflective when he talks about the milestone markers in his life. “I had the privilege of God rescuing me from a wreck. The story of the bitter divorce of the North Stars moving out of state, well the wreck, per se, was reversed with the return of the NHL to Minnesota and I had the privilege to help provide the rescue. I like to extend hope to others.”

Home