Tom Monaghan

Thomas Stephen Monaghan

• School Ferris State College, University of Michigan
• High School St. Thomas the Apostle High School

• Born March 25, 1937 in Ann Arbor, MI USA

Biographical Information

Tom Monaghan, the founder of Domino's Pizza, bought the Detroit Tigers in 1983. He sold the club to rival pizza mogul Mike Ilitch in 1992.

He was a self-made man. His father died when he was young and he spent a number of years in an orphanage in Jackson, MI because his single mother could not take proper care of her children on her meager income. He was a poor student in high school and could not get along with his mother. He enrolled in the United States Marines in 1956 in order to earn money for college, but when he mustered out in 1959, he quickly got swindled out of all of the money he had earned during service. He did attend the University of Michigan and studied architecture for a while, working on the side to pay his way, but quickly dropped out.

In 1960, he and his brother bought a dilapidated pizza parlor called "DomiNick's Pizza" near Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, MI and went into business. He soon bought out his brother's share and started to expand the business in other nearby cities, and after a few reversals, incorporated under the name "Domino's Pizza" in 1965. His business philosophy was simple: a strict control of inventory and ingredients, and a promise that customers would receive their pizzas within 30 minutes of ordering. The quality of the final product may have been a victim of this approach, but it worked as a business model, as he began franchising his stores and eventually became a multimillionaire, although he almost went into bankruptcy in 1970, when he tried to move from his core business of around university campuses into trying to expand into residential neighborhoods. His empire reached 100 stores in 1975 and 1000 (including the first one outside the United States) in 1983. That year, he bought the Tigers for $53 million from John Fetzer, who remained as chairman of the board.

The Tigers were tremendously successful in the first years of Monaghan's ownership, winning the 1984 World Series after a storybook season, and returning to the postseason in 1987. However, trouble soon brewed. In particular, the Tigers did not have a particularly good broadcasting deal, at a time when the development of cable television was making many teams' games available practically every day. Fan support was going down and the team suddenly got old, finishing in last place with only 59 wins in 1989. That's when Monaghan made the mistake of hiring legendary football coach Bo Schembechler of the University of Michigan as the team's President; he had no experience in professional sports or in baseball however, and his tenure was disastrous. Retaining two old hands in charge of baseball operations in Jim Campbell and Bill Lajoie proved to be another mistake, as both were quite getting on in years and had lost their edge when new and younger blood would have been needed. Jerry Walker was then hired as General Manager in late 1991. In probably the most talked about wrong move in team history, legendary broadcaster Ernie Harwell was dismissed after the 1991 season, angering fans some more. With his pizza business encountering difficulties, Monaghan had cash flow difficulties, and was eventually forced to sell the team to Ilitch, owner of the Detroit Red Wings of the National Hockey League and of the rival Little Caesars Pizza chain at the end of the 1992 season. Schembechler and Campbell were fired ahead of the change of ownership, which resulted in Schembechler suing Monaghan for breach of contract. By then, Monaghan had lost all of his enthusiasm for the Tigers, and two decades later, he would tell a reporter that buying the team had been the biggest mistake of his life.

Monaghan was also prominent for his very conservative Catholic views, as founder of the "Ave Maria Institute" and as a prominent spokesman against abortion, a position that hurt his business's profits as it was the subject of boycotts. In the 1980s, he had gotten away from focusing on his core pizza business, which was still growing at the time, and made a number of moves intended to boost his profile, including purchase of various costly assets, such as a luxurious business lodge on Lake Huron in a remote part of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, throwing lavish parties and the like. His purchase of the Tigers can be seen as a move in the same vein, an attempt to get his foot into a world he aspired to join, without a real business plan in place. He was also hurt by a string of lawsuits, when his philosophy of delivering his pizzas within 30 minutes showed its downside as a number of innocent bystanders were injured in accidents with drivers speeding to meet the target. He changed his outlook in the 1990s, selling off his conspicuous possessions and selling off 93% of his business to Bain Capital (better known as future Presidential candidate Mitt Romney's investment fund), earning a billion dollars in the process. After getting out of the pizza business, he invested a part of his fortune in attempting to found a new Catholic university in Michigan, Ave Maria College, although that project ran into various problems as its Law School, supposed to be jewel of the college, quickly fell to the bottom of national rankings and had to be absorbed by another university with the college itself closed in 2007. A plan to create an Ave Maria University in Florida ran into similar problems, while his move to the Sunshine State was an acknowledgement that his very conservative views no longer squared with the relatively liberal social and business climate in Michigan. The new university, which opened in 2003, was hit full on by the real estate collapse of 2008 (Monaghan's plan was to, in effect, built a new city around the university's campus), putting the whole venture's long-term future in doubt.

Further Reading

• Gary Gillette: "Tom Monaghan", in Mark Pattison and David Raglin, ed.: Detroit Tigers 1984: What A Start! What A Finish!, SABR Publications, Phoenix, AZ, 2012, pp. 172-179. ISBN 978-1933599441
• James Leonard: Living the Faith: A Life of Tom Monaghan, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI, 2012. ISBN 978-0472117437
• Tom Monaghan and Robert Anderson: Pizza Tiger, Random House, New York, NY, 1986. ISBN 978-0394553597

Related Sites

• Tom Monaghan at the SABR Bio Project