Ted Rogers spent his life defying expectations. He feared he would die by the time he was 38 - the age when his father was felled by a ruptured aneurysm, leaving a six-year-old son with the pristine image of a heroic dad. Driven by this memory, he managed to live almost twice as long as his father, surviving a lengthy catalogue of physical ailments.
A sickly child, he was always picked last for sports teams at upper-crust Upper Canada College, but made himself into a decent boxer. As an adult, he bought the major-league Toronto Blue Jays, while conceding that he was "the village idiot" on baseball matters.
But his greatest expectation-smashing act was escaping bankruptcy, as his flagship Rogers Communications Inc. survived a parade of near-death experiences. In the end, he was master of the Canadian communications universe, the owner of the dominant cable television system, of radio and TV stations, magazines, residential telephone services and a wireless network. He was the rare communications titan to solve the convergence conundrum, combining media content and transmission in a single corporate entity.
"He was not a strong person, and he had a pretty vulnerable physique. But as long as there was a deal in the air that he could sniff, he would make it," says Robin Korthals, a former president of the Toronto Dominion Bank, who negotiated the bank's first loan 40 years ago in what would become a mutually beneficial relationship with Mr. Rogers.
In time, he would triumph over naysayers to become one of the wealthiest Canadians with a personal net worth estimated at more than $5-billion, even after dropping a bundle in the equity value of RCI in the recent market meltdown.
Like all history-changing people, Mr. Rogers was locked into his personal mission, often unmindful of wife, children, friends and colleagues. To the outside world, he would display the guileless innocence of an untrained puppy dog. Yet he practised confrontation as a management style, and sported a hair-trigger temper that was capable of unleashing torrents of abuse. Mr. Rogers could be warm and reflective one moment, merciless in dispatching underperforming managers the next. "He has the skin of a rhino and the balls of a hippo," an admiring cable executive once told journalist Matthew Fraser.
Although a scion of old-money Toronto, he portrayed himself as an underdog as he battled telephone giant Bell Canada all his life - and finally triumphed, in a fashion. RCI has now surpassed Bell's parent BCE Inc. in terms of total stock-market value. A long-running bid to take BCE private is on the ropes, while Rogers Communications is in relatively strong position.
A risk-taker in business, Mr. Rogers could be archly frugal in his personal life. Yet he clearly enjoyed his yacht, a luxury beach house at Lyford Cay in the Bahamas, a retreat in Muskoka and a mansion in Toronto's Forest Hill with an indoor pool and an outdoor tennis court.
Descended from Quaker roots in the United States, he was the son of a man who was celebrated for inventing a radio that ran without batteries and could be plugged into the wall. The elder Mr. Rogers, also named Ted, became Canada's largest manufacturer of radios and the founder of Toronto radio station CFRB (the last two letters stood for "Rogers Batteryless.")
Young Ted Rogers was a gangly child with reddish hair who was born almost blind in his right eye. When his father died in 1939, his mother Velma could not carry on. After the sale of the radio factory and CFRB, the estate added up to $384,000.The boy went to Upper Canada College, where he defied the rules by rigging up an antenna to present TV shows in his dorm room and charging admission, and by operating a business that supplied bands for dances. Later, like his father, he went to the University of Toronto and then to its law school.
Meanwhile, his widowed mother married John Graham, a lawyer who helped Velma overcome her alcoholism and became a mentor to Ted in his entrepreneurial years.
Mr. Korthals remembers early in TD's relationship with Mr. Rogers, when the entrepreneur and his stepfather came to the bank requesting financing that, in Mr. Korthals' opinion, would require a loan covenant. Mr. Rogers stormed out, leaving Mr. Graham and Mr. Korthals to work out the terms. It marked a pattern: Mr. Rogers was a tough negotiator who pushed things to the limit.
Mr. Rogers also married well, to a woman who loyally supported him through his near-death experiences. In 1957, he was visiting a friend in the Bahamas and happened to go to a party where he met Loretta Ann Robinson, the 18-year-old daughter of a British MP, who later became Lord Martonmere and a governor of Bermuda.
They married on Sept, 25, 1963, and Loretta immediately got her father to advance $450,000 from her inheritance to fund her new husband's first venture into radio.
After a lacklustre career at law school, Mr. Rogers sought a position with the Toronto law firm Torys, where he begged John A. Tory, son of the founder, to take him on. John and twin brother Jim liked the bumptious, slightly younger man, and hired him despite his poor grades.
"Ted Rogers probably would not have been on our list to interview," John A. Tory told Caroline Van Hasselt, author of the recent biography High Wire Act: Ted Rogers and the Empire that Debt Built. "Whether we would have kept him is a different story. He wasn't around very much."
At first, Jim Tory refused to sign the document confirming his full-time articling attendance but relented when his brother pointed out that Mr. Rogers had pledged he would never actually practise law.
Mr. Rogers also promised to get down on his knees and shine Jim Tory's shoes "at any time in any place for the rest of his life." For years afterward, he did just that whenever he met him at public events.
He was lucky with his Tory connections - with the Tory party, which he supported (his hero was former prime minister John Diefenbaker), and with the Tory family, who became his lifelong advisers. John A. Tory's son, John H. Tory, became a key RCI executive before pursuing an elected political career.
In business, however, Mr. Rogers largely followed the model of Roy Thomson, the media entrepreneur who believed in using debt leverage to finance growth. But while the Thomsons would deploy free cash flow to pay down existing debt before launching another spending spree, Mr. Rogers gleefully lurched from one leveraged deal to another.
"Maybe he found that exciting," said John A. Tory, but Mr. Rogers was always confident of his ability to salvage any situation. He was somewhat insulated by the nature of his businesses, such as cable and broadcasting, which were regulated and subscription-based, thus providing steady cash flow. What's more, the heavy capital spending and debt payments allowed RCI to avoid paying tax year after year.
At Torys, he spent most of his articling time researching how to acquire communications assets. At 26, while dabbling in a new private TV station for Toronto (CFTO), he used an inheritance - about $100,000 - to buy Toronto's first FM station, CHFI. He plunged into the media industry, managing the radio station and opening an AM version of CHFI in 1962.
Meanwhile, cable TV was getting started in Canada, and would eventually replace millions of household antennas. In July, 1967, Mr. Rogers landed his first 300 cable customers in the Toronto suburb of Brampton. The next year, he managed to get the licence for York, then a borough of Metropolitan Toronto, and then landed the richest franchise in the country - downtown Toronto. Mr. Rogers spent the next 20 years expanding his cable-television franchise and acting as an industry consolidator. In 1994, he acquired Maclean Hunter Ltd. in a $3-billion deal that brought into the fold such other media interests as Maclean's magazine and, for a while, the Sun newspapers. It helped cement RCI's position as the country's largest cable company.
Indeed, it took years for Rogers Cable to make money as its entrepreneurial maestro reinvented it through new properties or other ventures, such as the challenge to Bell Canada's monopoly of long-distance telephone service in Ontario and Quebec.
Files on the applications to dethrone Bell filled metre after metre of shelf space at the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission in Ottawa. Mr. Rogers and his partners had taken over the old telegraph and telex monopoly, CNCP Telecommunications, and renamed it Unitel. It went on to win the regulatory challenge but competition eventually depressed prices so much that Rogers eventually sold Unitel to AT&T after losses hit about $500-million.
It was Mr. Rogers's most crushing business setback and only cemented his enmity toward mighty Bell, which he argued enjoyed an unfair advantage. If anything, he worked harder than ever to bring it down.
While he kept one eye on the big picture, Mr. Rogers was the classic micromanager who contacted executives at all hours to discuss minute details. One manager, later fired by Mr. Rogers, said he used to break away from lunch meetings by saying: "I've got to get back to the office. I have 25 e-mails from Ted to ignore."
Executive turnover was often rapid, and the survivors indulged in mordant, joking acceptance of their harried but well-rewarded fate. During one of Mr. Rogers's periodic health crises, he underwent bypass surgery at the Mayo Clinic. Later, a senior RCI executive quipped that when surgeons opened his chest, one of them exclaimed: "This heart has never been used!"
Mr. Korthals said his big weakness was that he was "an administrative disaster." He always had some good people around him but his centralizing approach impaired the development of management depth. Also, "for a long time, client service left a lot to be desired."
All the while, his optimism and drive meant he bounced back. If long distance was a loser, then the cellphone was a winner. He was a co-founder of the pioneering Cantel system in 1985, which eventually became Rogers Wireless.
Mr. Rogers was slow to adapt to the Internet, but he was smart - or lucky - in many of his technological choices. In 2000, he switched wireless modes to adopt the GSM format (for Global System for Mobile Communications) which is the dominant standard outside North America. Mr. Rogers cemented this status in 2004 by snatching wireless contender Microcell away from rival Telus, an acquisition that capped off his Lazarus-like business reincarnation.
The Microcell deal may have put RCI on top of the communications industry, but it only stoked speculation about the future of the company. Ted and Loretta Rogers had four children, the oldest of whom, Lisa, was adopted after he and Loretta had trouble conceiving early in their marriage. Later, Loretta gave birth to Edward Jr., Melinda and Martha.
Two of the children now work in senior jobs at RCI - Edward is cable-division president and Melinda is vice-president for strategy and development. Yet Mr. Rogers seemed to signal his succession strategy in 2005 by appointing Nadir Mohamed, a bright recruit from Telus, as president and chief operating officer of the major division that spans wireless and cable.
Mr. Rogers has said it was unlikely that one of his children would succeed him initially as CEO. Meanwhile, he worked with John A. Tory to develop a trust to administer the family's pivotal voting shares.
In his later years, Mr. Rogers travelled back and forth to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota - and recently the Cleveland Clinic - for life-saving procedures, followed by regular maintenance. "I'm goddamn lucky to be alive," he said in an interview in 2001. "I've had a heart attack, a quadruple bypass, a single aneurysm, a quadruple aneurysm and a carotid artery here that was 95 to 98 per cent blocked. Another week and I would have died."
Perhaps as a result, he turned to philanthropy and became ubiquitous in Toronto as much for his monuments as his media footprint. There is the Rogers Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at U of T and the Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University, and the list goes on.
The past year has been a kind of farewell tour for Mr. Rogers, who became increasingly frail. His 75th birthday was an extravaganza in which he bused 7,000 Toronto employees to the Rogers Centre stadium for a midday party, and held an evening affair for 350 family members, friends and associates. Entertainment was provided by Harry Connick Jr., Harry Belafonte and Paul Anka, who sang a Rogers-centric version of My Way.
Mr. Rogers could be as tender as he was tough. One of his last public appearances was at the launch party for his autobiography, Relentless, a collaboration with journalist Robert Brehl. Mr. Brehl told the assembled group that he often scheduled his interviews with Mr. Rogers on Sunday mornings to fit into the communication czar's crowded schedule.
During one session, they ended up talking about losing loved ones and mortality, and Mr. Rogers welled up with emotion. One of his daughters arrived to the sight of both men crying, and asked what in the world was going on.
Mr. Rogers defied expectations to the end. As the Canadian provider of the popular iPhone, he was able to buck bad economic vibes by delivering higher sales and profits in RCI's most recent quarter. Even as his health failed, he was making his trademark folksy sign-off: "The best is yet to come."
TED ROGERS
Edward Samuel Rogers was born May 27, 1933, in Toronto. He died Dec. 2, 2008, in Toronto as a result of congestive heart failure. He was 75. He is survived by wife Loretta and children Lisa Anne, Edward Samuel III, Melinda and Martha, plus four grandchildren.