TO understand just how close the Panthers came to crumbling to the ground, you really can't go past Phil Gould's first meeting to persuade Ivan Cleary to coach the Penrith side.TLPG wrote:Yes I have and you haven't backed it up with proof. You have no right to demand that I go look it up, because it is YOU who made the claim. It is up to you to back it up. You are trying to bully me into doing your biding and I'm fighting against it. If that's bullying in your eyes then you should back track and look at what led to this to begin with.
Instead of the big sell he withdrew the offer before he had even made the offer.
"I can't do it," Gould told him. "I'm sorry, but I can't offer you the job because I don't know if we're going to exist."
Days earlier, Panthers Group chief executive Warren Wilson had stood in his office at the back of the club's enormous premises on Mulgoa Rd and scratched his head.
He'd stepped onto the Panthers grand final Harbour cruise in early October 2011 and stepped off it as the Group's new saviour, but here he was a month or so later wondering which bill from a pile of many to pay.
"We were days away from liquidation," he says, ominously. "In the short-term, the football was the least of our concerns."
Buckling and twisting beneath an unfathomable debt of $90 million, the Panthers' fate could not have been any clearer.
"We were gone," says Gould.
This isn't the story about the Panthers turning the corner. It's about how they are getting there, inch by inch. More than that, it's about how close they all came to having no corner at all.
Picture: Gregg Porteous
It's about how the heartbreaking loss of some local juniors in Luke Lewis and Michael Jennings wasn't really heartbreaking but fundamental to survival for the first grade side.
It's about how Cleary and even Gould himself are committed to staying in the long-term, because that's how far Penrith are looking ahead.
And above all that, it is about how the best legal and financial expertise billionaire James Packer's money can buy - and a lot of that, too - dragged the Panthers back from the precipice of oblivion.
"People can find a hundred reasons why we should have held on to those players, be it their ability or whatever," says Gould of the departures of Jennings, Lewis and others. "We're not dumb: we know all those reasons, too. But we decided to do it anyway, so our reasons must have been very strong. And that's pretty much what people have to trust. We don't make those decisions lightly. We've done it with the best long-term interests of the club in mind, and that is like every decision we make."
Then he says this: "It took a few months for me to realise the precarious position we were in. I often wonder what would've happened if our chairman Don Feltis and his board hadn't have made some tough decisions before I got here. There wouldn't have been a club to save."
Nobody, except for those within, ever really knew how dire the situation was.
Falling drink and food revenues, poker machine tax, smoking bans and previous mismanagement were all to blame for Panthers Group eyeballing $90 million in debt.
When creditor ING sold the debt to the Torchlight Group, the Panthers were suddenly given limited time to pay.
Picture: Gregg Porteous
Gould's friendship with Packer extends back to the 1990s, when he coached the Roosters. He handed the club's financials over to billionaire's best business and legal minds, hoping to learn where the Panthers stood - and how to dig themselves out of it.
The pathway out of it involved selling off four of the licensed clubs the group owned, even if some had been turning a profit. "We had no choice," Wilson says.
Critically, it also came down to Packer providing a deposit on the debt. How much? Gould describes it as "millions of dollars".
"There is no getting away from the fact that the enormous assistance given to us by James Packer was crucial in our survival," he says. "He didn't have to do that, but we're deeply indebted to him. It's a great show of friendship that he and I share."
Just as the Panthers Group had to sell off its assets to survive, so did the football club in its bid to be competitive.
The financial pressures on one side of Mulgoa Road were felt on the other at Centrebet Stadium, where the football department was unloved and under-resourced.
"Mulgoa Rd may as well have been the Grand Canyon," Wilson says.
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/sport/ ... 6598539653
