Q&A with Alan Bass, author of ‘The Last Sports Mogul,’ a new biography of Ed Snider

As a fan of the Flyers and the third-generation owner of his family’s hobby business, author Alan Bass grew up viewing Ed Snider as more than just a man who ran his favorite team. Influenced by conversations with his parents and grandparents at the dinner table, Bass always saw the world through a business lens. In turn, he saw Snider through that same frame of mind — he was a businessperson that, from the outside looking in, Bass found a bit mysterious.

In 2020, Bass published his second book, Professional Hockey in Philadelphia: A History. Bass interviewed Snider for a chapter in that book about the Flyers and spoke to his family to learn more about Snider’s rocky relationship with Jerry Wolman, the former owner of the Eagles. After he finished writing the book, Bass thought to himself that one day, someone would write Snider’s biography and he looked forward to reading it. But while Bass was in touch with Snider’s family, he learned that no one was writing the story. Bass asked Snider’s family members if he could take on the project, they consented, and he began the writing process.

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Over the last couple of years, Bass conducted 50 hours of interviews and waded through 450 pages of transcripts to write Ed Snider: The Last Sports Mogul, which was released on Tuesday. While Bass wrote the book with the full cooperation of Snider’s family and Comcast Spectacor, neither party had the final right of approval, allowing Bass to provide what he called a “real, honest look” at Snider’s life. The Inquirer recently asked Bass about the book, the stories he unearthed about Snider, and the legacy of the former Flyers owner.

(Questions and answers have been edited for brevity.)

A: I think what interested me was the fact that he was so consumed with information from a young age, and when he was running the Eagles [as part owner and vice president] is really where you can see where it started. ... He wanted every angle and every opinion, and that way he could make the best decision in his mind.

I’m sure if you write this, fans are going to say, ‘Yeah, right,’ or call it B.S., because they already have to me. But I always looked for that idea that he always meddled in everything. ... And I could not find more than a couple of times in his 50-year career with the Flyers that he outright made any decisions from a hockey perspective.

What he did, and what was confirmed with me with all the people that worked for him over the years in general manager and coaching roles, is he would ask a million questions. And that was always his style. ... And if he got to any point where he thought you didn’t think it thorough enough, then he would send you back to the drawing board. But if you could answer every question showing you had thought it through ... even if he disagreed with you, he’d say, ‘All right. Whatever you want to do. It’s your team.’

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A: So he was a real old-school entrepreneur. It was one of those, if he felt in his gut that something was the right thing to do, then that’s what he was going to do. I think at one point later in his life, he joked around with an old friend of his that if they had tried to do that today, it would never have worked, because they would have been doing market research and studies and whatever, and all of it would have come back terribly. And he would have said, ‘Never mind, we’re not going to take this risk.’

But in ‘66, or whatever year they started considering it, all he had to go on was his gut. There was that story in the book where he went to the Rangers game and really just fell in love with the sport. There was a story where he was in line at Boston Garden and saw Bruins fans lined out the door to buy tickets to see a last-place team. And he was like, ‘Well, Philly is a better city than Boston.’ So it was really just a deep, gut feeling. And that’s what he went on with his entrepreneurship. If he felt passionate about something, and if he firmly believed deep down that something would work, he didn’t care how much it was going to cost, he was going to go after it.

A: There are a lot of great stories in the book, and even some that didn’t even make the cut, of his teenage years in D.C. He was like a fake tough guy. He was in this little posse group that he liked to call a ‘street gang’ in his later years. But when you delve into the research, it wasn’t really a gang. It was like a group of guys that kind of just hung out and smoked and hit on girls and stuff. So they didn’t get into fights and stuff.

It was, ‘Don’t mess with me, don’t mess with my people, don’t mess with my friends.’ And I think that’s kind of a perfect analogy for Philadelphia. It’s such a close-knit city. We call it an underdog city, right? ... We’re protective of our own. We’re protective of our sports teams, as long as they try.

I think that just spoke to Ed when he moved to the city to work for the Eagles. I think he saw that immediately. Eagles fans, they are rough, rough, rough. And they were back then, too. And I think he just loved that. He loved that passion. He loved that wear-your-heart-on-your-sleeve type of mentality because that was him. He grew up that way. I think it’s more that he always had that Philadelphia attitude in him. He just happened to find the city to go along with it. I think from a young age, he was meant to be in Philadelphia. His personality so matches this city way more than it does D.C.

A: One thing that was interesting to me was, I think it was the Daily News in 2001 [1999] or something, they named Ed the city’s greatest mover and shaker of the millennium. And when you have a city where people like Ben Franklin lived, that’s a pretty lofty honor for someone. So it kind of boggled my mind that nobody had written that story, because forgetting the fact that he ran the Flyers ... Ed’s legacy goes well beyond hockey, and well beyond sports. The amount of good he’s done in the community, Snider Hockey specifically, but even past that, just charitable donations, his family’s foundation.

He created the modern-day sports organization, in terms of back in the ‘70s, 80s, and even to an extent the ‘90s, most teams were still just owned by a person and there was no other company associated with the team, maybe an arena. Well, in the ‘70s, Ed was already expanding out to all these businesses that Comcast Spectacor now has. Arena management, concessions, marketing, ticketing software, WIP radio station at the time, Comcast SportsNet, what became NBC [Sports Philadelphia].

Ed was doing all of this decades before anybody else was and now what he was doing 40, 50 years ago is pretty much the only way to run a sports organization, because you can’t just run one team and nothing else. Because if they have a bad year, financially, you’re really in a hole. Ed figured out a way to make sure that the Flyers were insulated from a bad year or two or a string of bad years. ... And I think that he was just so ahead of his time.

He was so progressive in his views of business and how to build a company like that. I think it gives perspective to anybody who ... so many people are entrepreneurs. There are so many small business owners. And that’s what Ed was at the beginning. He was just a small business owner. He was fortunate that it turned into a multibillion-dollar business. But he was just a small business owner, like millions of other people. And I think the way that he was able to have success gives some really good guidance to a lot of people and how they can go about hitting their entrepreneurial goals and dreams. I think from a business perspective, and, of course, a charitable perspective, there’s so much to learn from Ed, and I think it’s important that people understand why he is so important to the city of Philadelphia.