from Jason Scavone of Vegas Seven,
William Foley’s father was in the Air Force, up in Ottawa for three years in the early 1950s when Foley was just starting elementary school. Under those circumstances, pond hockey isn’t so much something you take up as it is part of the atmosphere. You put on a hat because it’s cold, you go to school because you have to and you play pond hockey because it’s January in Canada.
Foley, the 69-year-old chairman of Jacksonville, Fla.-based Fidelity National Financial who made Forbes’ “Billionaire Up and Comers” list in 2013, drifted away from the game in his subsequent years. When he talks about his favorite hockey teams today, he sounds like a presidential hopeful stumping across primary states. (“I like the Blackhawks. I live in Northern Cal part of the year, so I follow the Sharks. I’ve got to say the Blackhawks and Sharks are kind of my teams.”)
Perhaps not for much longer. That’s because Foley is the head of a group (which includes the Maloof family) that’s trying to put an NHL team in the under-construction MGM/AEG arena by the start of the 2016-17 season. And he’s not shy about his ambitions for what would be this city’s first major professional sports team: “Our feeling is we want to have a really fast team. We don’t want to be the big guys who get into fights. We want to be highly skilled. The first couple of years are going to be difficult. But we’re going to invest in the team, and my goal is to bring a Stanley Cup to Las Vegas within eight years. It may take eight years, but we can do it if we make the right investment in the team. The Islanders did it.”
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