Once again, Jurich leveraged the basketball team to maximum advantage, negotiating
an astonishingly lopsided lease that gave the athletic department almost total control of the arena from Oct. 1 until the end of basketball season, while reaping almost 90 percent of the revenue from premium seats and all the profit from VIP, courtside seating. Not only did the basketball team play in the new arena, so did the women’s volleyball team, which drew fewer than 1,000 spectators. “Jurich took advantage of a city that was willing to do anything to get a downtown arena,” says Aaron Yarmuth, the editor of Louisville Eccentric Observer, the city’s alternative weekly.
"Tom has a Trump-like negotiating style, where he folds his arms, stomps his feet, and is very strong and unyielding in his position,” says Todd Blue, who’d been a local developer during the arena controversy and is critical of the university’s dominance over the city.
When it was completed in 2008, at cost of $238 million, the KFC Yum! Center was one of the biggest arenas in college basketball, with 22,090 seats. And thanks to the deal Jurich struck, the basketball team’s revenue leaped from $25.9 million to $40.9 million, making it by far the richest college basketball team in the country. But the area around the arena never developed as the city had hoped, which meant those property tax increases Louisville was depending on to pay the bondholder didn’t materialize. That shortfall, combined with the onerous lease, meant the KFC Yum! Center struggled to meet its bond obligations. By 2015, while the basketball team was making $20 million a year in arena profits, the Yum! Center itself was losing about $17 million a year. The bonds were rated junk. Default seemed inevitable.
None of which seemed to trouble Jurich. Indeed, under the terms of the lease, the university had the contractual option to buy the arena outright if it went into foreclosure. One former trustee called that provision “the Jurich special.”
