At 1 o’clock in the morning on Aug. 24, 1995, in a meeting room on the mezzanine level of Loews Vanderbilt Plaza, Byron Trauger and Mike McClure were having it out. xxxxxxxxx xxx xxx xxAs the principal players in the negotiations to bring the Houston Oilers to Nashville, McClure—the team’s executive vice-president—and Trauger—Nashville Mayor Phil Bredesen’s close friend and attorney—were at the end of their rope. Only two weeks earlier, at a bash at Wildhorse Saloon, Oilers owner Bud Adams had clearly indicated an urge to move his team to Nashville. Already, however, Metro had hit a stumbling block—it was $13.8 million shy of making a deal work. A tax hike was not a desirable option, Trauger insisted. The Oilers were going to have to chip in with some rent.

Trauger demanded that the Oilers pony up $1 million a year. McClure, for his part, said that demand was unreasonable and outrageous. He argued that these days some pro football teams were relocating and hardly paying any rent at all. Bud Adams, he said, was not going to cotton to the idea.

The discussion grew more heated, and the decibel level rose. Rising from the table, McClure walked wearily over to Trauger and said, “In 32 years of marriage, I have never gone to bed mad at my wife. And Byron, I don’t plan on being mad at you in the morning.” Trauger agreed to go home and let his temper cool down.

Straightaway, Bredesen and Adams were warned that negotiations were flying off track. In a matter of hours, and unbeknownst to the local media, Bredesen boarded a jet for Houston. In an airport meeting room, he and Adams spent four hours hammering out an agreement. The Oilers would indeed agree to pay $1 million in rent. However, it was also agreed that if additional monies became available, perhaps because of higher-than-expected sales of permanent seat licenses or reduced operating costs at the stadium, the Oilers’ rent would go down.

Disaster was averted. The negotiations resumed. Ever since last August, it seems, a handful of Metro negotiators and Oilers representatives have been meeting—sometimes around the clock, sometimes in a state of serious agitation—in an attempt to strike a deal. At times the talks have gone smoothly. At other times, they have been the stuff of nightmares. There has been no lack of high drama. Political animosities have surfaced, and massive egos have threatened to clog the works. Sometimes the talks have almost ground to a halt, stalled by the outlandish complexity of so many moving parts.

Despite the fact that the Oilers’ relocation here has occasionally threatened to veer out of control, the negotiations have played to Bredesen’s strengths. Some may have criticized the mayor for not paying attention to the tedious fundamentals of government, but he shines as a dealmaker. When state funding was in jeopardy, Bredesen sat at home, studying spreadsheets and printouts and designing a proposal that would work. When Adams balked at the last minute over details in the contract, Bredesen faced him down in a no-holds-barred meeting in Houston and kept the deal on track. To this day, when any state or Metro official needs clarification on some point concerning the Oilers deal, the best source for information is probably the mayor himself.

The entire process has been a sequence of conflicts followed by compromises. In fact, the Oilers deal, in its final form, is less attractive than the deals recently offered to teams by the cities of Baltimore and St. Louis. To that end, the Oilers deal is a victory for Metro, but it also demonstrates the Oilers’ commitment, from day one, to moving to Nashville.

“The give and take has been phenomenal,” McClure says, describing the process. According to Trauger, the Oilers “asked us for the sun, the moon and the stars, and clearly that has not been where we ended up.”

This is the story of how the agreement took shape. It begins in late May 1995, when the Oilers began looking for a new hometown; it ends on Nov. 16 of that year, when Adams and Bredesen agreed on the basic outline of a deal that might well have gone up in smoke.

It is a saga that sometimes gets ugly. It is a parable that teaches us that business, viewed from the right perspective, looks a lot like a contact sport too.

Mike McClure, the top negotiator for the Oilers, is a straight-shooting, cigarette-smoking guy who, at various times in his life, has been a reporter for the Chicago Tribune and the top public relations official for the Chicago Bulls. He has earned the respect of the Nashville negotiating team. According to one Metro negotiator, “McClure does not play games.”

In late May 1995, McClure was upset. The Texas state Legislature had just defeated a bill that would have created “sports enterprise zones” that would have encouraged Texas pro sports teams to build their own stadiums. The Oilers had spent two years and $1.5 million trying to get the bill through. Now the team was back to square one. Within days, Bud Adams summoned McClure for a meeting.

Already, McClure recalls, Adams was considering relocation, perhaps to Baltimore or Los Angeles. Adams, after talks with NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue, knew those cities were looking for teams. McClure asked Adams for another meeting. “I asked if he would consider other places,” McClure says. “He said he would.”

For McClure, the foremost issue in selecting the Oilers’ new home was finding a city that promised a massive television market for its games. The Neilsen ratings indicated that Tennessee was home to three of the country’s top 65 media markets—Memphis, Knoxville and Nashville. He also realized that none of those three cities had its own pro sports team.

McClure visited a Houston public library and consulted an atlas. He saw three interstates passing through Nashville. He instructed one of his assistants to request information from the Greater Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce and from the state Department of Economic Development. The materials, which were mailed to an untraceable address, were “all very good stuff,” McClure says.

McClure began to be convinced that, in Nashville, he could duplicate the success of the new Carolina Panthers, a team that had established an identity with an entire state, not just one city. He researched teams in markets comparable to Nashville, including Kansas City, Jacksonville and Buffalo. After compiling his data, McClure sent Adams a memo naming Nashville as his number-one choice for the Oilers’ new home.

The memo spelled out the facts and figures, but McClure also knew it would have another kind of appeal for his boss. “I could not fathom him going to L.A. or Baltimore, and since then he has said he doesn’t care for the fruits and nuts out in California. He has also said he is distantly related to Sam Houston, who was a Tennessean, and he liked that idea.”

McClure also insisted that the negotiations remain top secret. If word got out, Houston’s simmering hostilities toward Adams would only increase. The endeavor, he decided, would need a code name. He called it “Operation Cherokee.” Adams liked the name; his ancestry is one-quarter Cherokee.

To keep Houston reporters confused, McClure started booking flights to Baltimore and Los Angeles under his name. They were tickets he would never use. For his trips to Nashville, he flew under the name of DeStewart Mcintyre, a soldier who had fought alongside his great-grandfather during the Tennessee campaign of the Civil War.

In mid-June, McClure made a phone call to a Nashvillian, whom McClure to this day will not identify. He asked the Nashvillian to ask around and find out whether Nashville would be interested in having its own pro team. McClure’s contact called back. Nobody was interested, the Nashville source said.

Frustrated, McClure had some friends in Houston call Butch Spyridon, executive vice-president of the Nashville Convention and Visitors Bureau. Spyridon got the call on June 28 and jumped at the opportunity. Still, when he attempted to set up a July 7 meeting between McClure and a group of Nashvillians, nobody’s schedule seemed to work. Attempting to involve a prominent local figure with ties to both the business community and the mayor, Spyridon tried unsuccessfully to get in touch with Trauger. On the afternoon before the Oilers meeting, which was to take place in Chicago, Spyridon reached Trauger. “Byron said he would go,” Spyridon says. “Just like that.”

Spyridon and Trauger took Chamber of Commerce president Mike Rollins with them to the meeting, which Spyridon recalls as formal and cold. It was, after all, taking place just as the New Jersey Devils hockey team was slamming the door in Nashville’s face. The Devils had used the threat of a Nashville move to negotiate a better deal from their hometown. Months earlier, the Minnesota Timberwolves basketball team had done much the same thing.

As they huddled around a table in the Chicago airport’s Admiral’s Club, McClure began reading from a legal pad. He started by facing up to the subject of Jacksonville. In 1987, the Oilers had jerked the Florida city around in order to negotiate a better lease in Houston. McClure knew the Oilers had a reputation as opportunists. Then he explained why Tennessee—and not just the city of Nashville—was prime territory for a pro football team.

The meeting ended as formally as it had begun. By happenstance, however, Rollins, Spyridon and Trauger returned to the Admiral’s Club after checking in at their gate. There they encountered McClure and his companions having drinks. The atmosphere relaxed. They talked some more. The Nashville team agreed to call.

In Nashville, Bredesen was in the midst of a mayoral campaign. It was a race he could have won with his left hand. At the same time, however, he was fighting the lingering impression that he was a man of big deals, not a guy who cared about sidewalks, water bills and other details of ordinary life. When Trauger told him about his trip to Chicago, a doubtful Bredesen said, “When you finish getting these guys, try and get the Cowboys too.”

Trauger, Bredesen’s closest political advisor, was concerned about exposing the mayor to another pro-sports embarrassment. At the same time, down in Houston, Adams and McClure were turning up the heat. They demanded that Houston’s mayor go on the record, stating whether or not he would build a new stadium for the team. On July 19, the mayor sent a letter to the Oilers. His message was clear: He had no intention of building a stadium.

Within hours, the mayor’s letter was faxed to the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce. “We started thinking by now something was really going on,” Spyridon says. As the days went by, no mention of the Oilers’ talks with Nashville appeared in the Houston press. The silence was encouraging. If the Oilers had been using Nashville as a bargaining tool, they would have made sure that word of the Chicago meeting was leaked to the local press.

McClure decided to fly to Nashville to see the city for himself. On July 25, he ate lunch with Trauger at the Cumberland Club. Then Trauger took him to see the mayor. McClure could not have imagined a better first meeting.

“After 20 minutes, Bredesen told me, ‘If you come to Nashville, we’ll build you a stadium,’ ” McClure remembers. Trauger had been playing it cool, but Bredesen was immediately gung-ho. “I didn’t want to be swinging at strikes, but at least I was thinking that this might be a ball coming over the plate,” the mayor recalls. “I knew it was something we should pursue.”

McClure says that, from the start, he was struck by Bredesen’s business acumen. Clearly, however, he sensed that the Metro negotiators had little interest in involving state government in the deal. McClure admits now that he did not know that Bredesen and Don Sundquist had been been opponents in a recent, bloody gubernatorial race and that they “were not the best of friends.” At that time, McClure says, he “didn’t know Sundquist at all.”

As a matter of fact, on the day of his introduction to Bredesen, McClure confronted Trauger with the fact that he hadn’t been introduced to any state officials. Trauger remembers telling McClure that it was still too early for an Oilers representative to be meeting state officials. If the deal should backfire, Trauger said, he didn’t want the state to get egg on its face too. Then, he says, he filled McClure in on the history of Phil Bredesen vs. Don Sundquist. Trauger remembers telling McClure, “You have every reason to believe that I am trying to favor Phil Bredesen over Don Sundquist, but let me tell you, I think my actions will prove me out if this works.”

In the Aug. 3 election, Bredesen easily destroyed his opposition. On election night, he delivered a moving speech, describing how he wanted Nashvillians to have the simple necessities of life: a home, a good education, decent streets and sidewalks. Then Bredesen and his wife, Andrea Conte, along with Trauger and his wife, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Aleta Trauger, jetted off for some vacation time in the Bredesens’ Jackson Hole condominium.

Late one afternoon, while standing on the condo’s deck overlooking a broad valley, Trauger and Bredesen were chatting with their friend, Stryker Warren, a Nashville health care executive. Trauger and Bredesen grew talkative, and before long they had given Warren the scoop on the Oilers deal. Warren, a sports fanatic, was overjoyed at the prospect. Before long he was giving Bredesen, a sports neophyte, the complete history of the team. Bredesen was liking football more and more.

The Jackson Hole vacation did not last long for either Trauger or Bredesen. The Oilers wanted to present a deal, as Trauger had suggested, on Aug. 8. It would be an all-day affair.

In the meeting, McClure’s team, which included Minnesota sports consultant Craig Skiem and Oilers attorney Steve Underwood, laid their cards on the table: They wanted a 75,000-seat stadium, to be built in the suburbs. They wanted Metro to pay the team $6 million a year to operate the stadium. They wanted 25,000 parking spaces, which were to generate still more revenue for the team. They wanted the income from permanent seat licenses, including income from license renewals. They wanted a practice facility at the stadium. For hours, they described what they wanted.

When the Oilers’ presentation ended, the Metro team, which consisted of Trauger, Chamber of Commerce chairman Denny Bottorff, Chamber president Mike Rollins and Metro finance director Joe Huddleston, adjourned to another room. The team’s deal, they concluded, was expensive, beyond reason. Rather than a deal, in fact, it was a wish list. When the Nashville negotiators returned to the table, Trauger said, “I only have one question: Why didn’t you ask for my firstborn child?”

Two days later in a conference room at Trauger’s law offices, Skiem, McClure and Underwood made a similar presentation to Bredesen. At the end of the meeting, Bredesen did not talk about numbers. Instead, he said he wanted an “exclusive negotiating agreement” between the Oilers and Nashville. He wanted a document to restrict either side from negotiating with anyone else. McClure said he would propose the idea to Bud Adams.

During a break in the action, Bredesen and Trauger placed a call to Sundquist. Earlier in the week, they had discreetly informed the governor of Nashville’s dalliance from the Oilers. Now, Bredesen decided, it was time for the two men to speak directly. He placed a call to Sundquist, who was vacationing in Destin, Fla., where he keeps a double-wide trailer.

The call was hardly casual. It was, rather, a tightly scripted conference call involving Bottorff and Knoxville businessman Jim Haslam. Spyridon and Rollins had brought Bottorff into the negotiations to serve as a friendly emissary between Nashville and the Sundquist administration. As the negotiations would wear on, he would turn out to be an invaluable peacemaker. It was he who had recruited Haslam, a leading Republican and an acquaintance of Adams, for the negotiating team.

During his phone call to Florida, Bredesen gave Sundquist a rough description of what an Oilers deal might look like. He suggested that the deal might cost $250 million. Nashville, he said, would put up $100 million. The state, Bredesen suggested, could put in $50 million. And then, as if to please the businessmen who were listening in on the call, the two politicians pledged to put politics aside. They agreed to treat the project as a deal that might benefit Nashville and the state.

When Bredesen and Trauger returned to the negotiating table, McClure suggested that Adams, who would be en route to an Oilers exhibition game in Knoxville, might be able to stop over in Nashville for a visit the next day. Bredesen and Trauger liked the idea. The mayor telephoned Adams and asked him what sort of party a Texan in Nashville would want. “I asked him if he wanted something small, and he said he wanted something big,” Bredesen recalls. In approximately 24 hours, the mayor’s staff would throw a major wingding.

When Adams’ company plane landed at the Nashville airport the next morning, McClure was on hand to meet him. During their limousine ride to the Wild Boar, where Adams was to meet Bredesen for the first time, McClure began to feel uneasy. He knew Adams loved Houston, which had been his team’s hometown for three decades. And he knew that Houston residents would go ballistic when they heard, later that same day, that Adams was thinking of moving the Oilers out of town.

McClure also had his misgivings about the chemistry between Bredesen and Adams. He could see little common ground between the two men. “I had a Harvard northeasterner, who is a Democrat, meeting a guy raised in the oil fields of Texas, who leans Republican, and I don’t know how they’re going to hit it off,” McClure recalls.

In one of the tony private dining rooms at Wild Boar, however, the servers began uncorking bottles of Chateau Montrachet. Within minutes, Bredesen and Adams were talking about their collections of Indian art. Bredesen, who collects artists from the Taos school, and Adams, who has one of the most significant collections of Southwestern art in the country, were off and running.

Meanwhile, in another room, Trauger and Underwood were putting the finishing touches on the exclusive negotiating agreement. Never, in a professional football team relocation, had such an agreement been signed. Never, some believe, has one been signed as part of any professional sports relocation deal. Soon, Adams and Bredesen were presented the document. Soon, both the city of Nashville and the Oilers had agreed, for 60 days, not to discuss a relocation with anybody else.

For McClure, the moment was like “crossing the Rubicon.” He knew that the deal had promise.

That night, Adams was guest of honor at a reception at Wildhorse Saloon. Reporters from Houston filmed Adams saying he intended to come to Tennessee “if all goes well.” Nashville reporters—alerted to what was going on because the top brass from their newspapers and TV stations had been invited to the party—filled their notepads. For Bredesen, it was a heady day.

“Between all the wine at the Wild Boar and the party at the Wildhorse, I wasn’t feeling too good the next day,” he says.

On the following day, Adams flew to Knoxville to attend the exhibition game. At the Knoxville airport, he was introduced to Sundquist, who had flown in from Florida. Officially, the meeting had been arranged so that Sundquist could sign the negotiating agreement. Unofficially, it gave Sundquist and Adams a chance to size one another up.

As they chitchatted, McClure remembers, Sundquist told Adams that if the Oilers came to Tennessee, Adams and his team would be “bigger than Elvis.” Adams told Sundquist, “I already weigh that much.”

That night, McClure and Adams watched the Oilers exhibition game from the suite belonging to UT athletic director Doug Dickey. Next door, in his own suite, Tom Ingram, a paid consultant to the Sundquist administration, was also watching the game.

As the game proceeded, Ingram’s phone rang. Bredesen was calling, asking Ingram for the phone number in Dickey’s suite. A few seconds later, Ingram heard the phone ringing next door.

Looking through a window, Ingram saw Adams sitting alone in the suite, watching the game and not bothering to answer the phone. Ingram opened the door of Dickey’s suite, walked in, and picked up the phone. “Mr. Adams, you have a call,” he announced.

Bredesen’s next step was to appoint his own negotiating team. Bottorff, Trauger and Huddleston were shoo-ins, but Bredesen also wanted a negotiator with connections at the state level; so did the Oilers. So on Aug. 14, he asked state Finance Commissioner Bob Corker to consider a seat on the committee.

“The state was going forward and backing up and going forward on the subject of their participation,” Bredesen recalls. Still, the mayor liked Corker. During a lunch meeting, the two had discovered that they were “two guys of similar backgrounds in private enterprise who are now in government service, and it was fun talking.”

Corker promised to ask the governor about Corker’s appointment to the committee. A day later, before Bredesen had heard any response from Corker, a local television reporter asked the mayor to comment on Sundquist’s decision to appoint his deputy, Peaches Simpkins, to the committee.

During Bredesen’s unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign, he and Simpkins had locked horns when she claimed that he had pushed her after a particularly vicious televised debate. Now, with a reporter listening, Bredesen struggled to find nice words about Simpkins. He also struggled to say something nice about the governor’s obviously discomfiting public relations move. “Given all the statements of how we’re going to put politics aside and work together,” Bredesen told the reporter, “I think it’s an odd choice.” The next day, the governor and the mayor were on the phone again. This time, the mayor recalls, the tone of the conversation was “a little testy.”

The fragile truce between Bredesen and Sundquist seemed more and more shaky. Meanwhile, the negotiating committee began the actual structuring of the deal. Ultimately, the agreement would involve funding from three sources: Metro, the state of Tennessee, and the sale of permanent seat licenses. Bottorff agreed to oversee the marketing and sales of the PSLs. The involvement of the state and Metro was more difficult to finalize. The size of Metro’s investment in the project would be dependent on how much the state was willing to contribute. Before long, it became clear that it was anybody’s guess how much the state would be able to spend.

Metro, at the same time, was broaching any number of financing models. For sheerly political reasons, Bredesen saw a tax increase as his last possible choice. Nevertheless, Huddleston, the finance director, says he pushed for a temporary three-quarter-cent sales tax increase, which would have financed the deal quickly and easily. The Tennessean reported that the mayor’s office was debating a 1 percent restaurant tax and a 10-cent to 12-cent temporary property-tax increase. Those reports were nothing but red herrings.

Bredesen was eyeing another funding source. For a long time, he had been watching the excess dollars being pumped out by the Metro Water and Sewer Services Department. With interest rates falling, and staffing being cut in the department, Bredesen saw a flow of readily available income. The department had already implemented rate reductions, but department director BuddyWilliams assured Bredesen he could come up with about $4 million a year. “At the time,” Bredesen says, “I didn’t have it tagged for anything, and this was an occasion to put it on the table.”

Meetings of the negotiating team dragged on, with Simpkins, in particular, feeling that the state was being left out in the cold. At one meeting, she recalls, Trauger and McClure referred to a “term sheet” of which she had no knowledge whatsoever. When she pressed for more information, she discovered that Metro and the Oilers had roughed out some figures, without even telling her or another committee member. “We wanted to do what we could,” Simpkins insists, “but no one was saying what was wanted of us.”

The cold war between the state and Metro threatened to burst into outright hostility on Thursday, Sept. 21, when a Tennessean headline proclaimed, “State offering waters down Oiler talks: Contribution only $10 million.” Sundquist was now explaining that his contribution would be limited to revenue from sales taxes at the stadium site, along with highway improvements and an offer of land. All the talk about a state contribution of $50 million seemed like no more than a pipe dream.

Bredesen began turning up the heat. The state’s failure to put up “hard cash,” he said, would jeopardize the entire deal. To add to the confusion, on Monday, Sept. 25, Sundquist and Nashville Sounds manager Larry Schimittou, also a Bredesen foe, held a joint press conference to announce that two major-league exhibition games would be held in Nashville that spring.

To this day, Ingram, Corker and Simpkins all insist that the support from the governor’s office was always solid. The governor did, however, have a problem with Memphis’ opposition to the Oilers deal. Memphis is Sundquist’s hometown and political base.

Members of a downtown Memphis Rotary Club booed when it was announced that Bredesen planned to address them on the topic of the Oilers. Editorials in the Commercial Appeal savaged the idea of the state providing financial support for the team. Calls poured in to Sundquist’s office from friends and supporters in Memphis. All were negative.

At the same time, the governor’s Republican supporters in Middle Tennessee were equally as vehement in their approval of the deal. With the heat coming on ever more strongly, Sundquist called Corker and instructed him to begin looking into ways of financing the deal. Bredesen was invited for a breakfast meeting at the Executive Residence. Looking back on the situation, and the heat the state was catching at this juncture, Simpkins says she felt at times that the state negotiators were committing “Hari-Kari.” She said that “The decision was made by us just to stay focused on getting a proposal together with Metro, rather than coming out and telling the media what was going on, and we just kept on catching the heat.”

At 7:30 a.m. on a Monday, Bredesen arrived for breakfast with Simpkins, Corker, Ingram and the governor. Over the weekend, working at his own computer, the mayor had drafted a proposal to present to the state. He had also made direct phone calls to Corker, who was now emerging as Metro’s preferred contact on matters relating to the Oilers. An ongoing friction between Simpkins and Corker did not seem to help things.

During the meeting, it was agreed that Metro would give the state its sales tax revenues from football-related activities. The state would then use those monies to float a $55 million bond package. In addition, the state would offer land, some improvements around the stadium site, and some rent from Tennessee State University, which would play its football games in the stadium.

The state’s participation was further solidified the next morning when House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh and Lt. Gov. John Wilder joined the mayor, the governor and others for a briefing at the Executive Residence. Later that morning, on Sept. 27, the governor held a press conference to announce the state’s participation in the deal.

Now it was the mayor’s turn to figure out where to grab for funds to solidify the Oilers deal. From the beginning, or at least once he figured out how much the project would actually cost, Bredesen had been uneasy about the deal. Already, he was building a costly, and still controversial, downtown arena. He had long wanted to build a new public library. As he began to crunch the numbers, he says, he began to get a grip on just how much Nashville could spend on a pro football team.

“I looked at how it added up in terms of economic impact, of redevelopment of the East Bank of the river, those kinds of things,” Bredesen says. “Basically, I became satisfied with how much we were going to spend to get them. I have certainly seen plenty of communities that chase these things to the point of absurdity. But the way I came away looking at it was that it was about $10 million a year in public money. In a $900 million budget, was I willing to do that? The anwer was yeah.”

Still, Bredesen had to convince Metro Council to fund the deal. On Oct. 5, with resistance to new taxes coming from all parts of the city, Bredesen unveiled his financing package. The Water and Sewer Department’s $4 million in excess funds would go into the project. He also proposed earmarking 1 cent of the existing hotel-motel tax for the deal, thus freeing up $44 million in bonds. Bredesen also asked Metro Council for $2.25 million to begin marketing permanent seat licenses. There would be no tax increase.

To spell out the fundamentals of the lease deal, the mayor asked the Council to approve a letter agreement between Metro and the Oilers. That agreement set out various “milestones” that negotiating parties would have to reach. One of those milestones required the Oilers and Metro to agree on a “stadium project agreement” by Nov. 25. Such an agreement would be the backbone of the deal. Without it, the entire venture would fall apart.

As October wound down, McClure, Trauger, Huddleston, Metro Legal Director Jim Murphy and others were working mornings, noons and nights to whip the project agreement into shape. By Nov. 1, McClure was predicting to reporters that the agreement would be completed and inked by all major parties in 10 days. As Nov. 10 arrived, however, Oilers officials and Bredesen’s own press secretary were revising that date and predicting the deal would be signed Monday, Nov. 13. To the press, to sports fans, to the Chamber of Commerce, to just about everyone, the deal seemed close to becoming a reality.

Then, just hours before he was to sign the deal, Adams began having second thoughts. As he scrutinized the 52-page agreement, questions began popping into his head. On Sunday, as reporters grew more curious, it was announced that Adams had only made it halfway through the document. On Tuesday, the Banner announced that Adams was reluctant to commit to a 30-year lease on the stadium. On Tuesday night, Adams called Bredesen and explained his major concern. After an hour-and-a-half of talking, Bredesen told Adams he was going to jump on a plane. Once again, he was headed for Houston.

Adams was troubled by the section of the lease that specified what would happen if the Oilers decided to leave town, or what was called “liquidated damages.” The contract required that, if the Oilers left town, the team would have to pay financial penalties. Essentially, they would have to pay off all the bonds. Adams argued that no other team in the NFL had been required to sign such a contract. To him, it was a point of personal pride.

Talking to reporters, Bredesen was all self-assurance. “All the feedback I have is that [Adams] is comfortable with what he has learned,” Bredesen told The Tennessean. “I think what will happen in the next day or two is this will all get resolved.” Now Bredesen remembers that period as a dark time. “It was as close as it ever came to not getting done,” the mayor recalls.

Throughout the negotiations, Bred-esen had made several trips to Houston. Most of the time, he made the trip to iron out difficulties in the deal. On one occasion, however, he and Adams spent a day together, just chatting about art. “Basically, I have really grown to like the guy,” Bredesen says.

When Bredesen, Trauger and Bottorff set out for Houston that Tuesday, they knew they weren’t going to be talking about art. When they arrived, Bredesen sat at a long conference-room table. Adams sat next to him. For a couple of hours, they went at it.

“It was a tough, two-hour negotiating session,” Bredesen recalls. “It was a tough meeting in the sense that the camaraderie and the Western art were not going to be talked about. From [the Oilers’] perspective, we had pushed them about as far as they were going to be pushed. And I [was thinking] there’s also some moment of truth at hand. It was like, once we agree to this stuff, this is the one that there is no going back from.”

Bredesen laid his problems on the table. He offered a revised financial schedule that he said would be acceptable to Metro Council, but he insisted on having some protection for the bondholders. Otherwise, he said, the venture simply would not fly.

Ultimately, after some tweaking here and there, Adams agreed to the numbers. Bowls of gumbo were served, and Adams and Bredesen signed on the dotted line.

When the meeting ended, Bredesen, Adams and Bottorff scurried out the back door and into a waiting car. A half-dozen TV cameras were stationed out front. Back in Nashville, Bredesen once again appeared utterly calm. “Everything seems on track,” he told reporters.

The next day, Adams flew to town to attend the official signing ceremony in the lobby of the Metro Courthouse. He flashed a wide grin as he presented Bredesen with an Oilers jersey. Then the two men signed the documents. They had agreed to the actual deal 24 hours earlier. This one was for the cameras.