Losing 'Mr. Nashville'

On Thursday night, while the world was watching to see who might win or lose the White House, we all lost Rick Regen.

If you were fortunate to know Rick, you were lucky in a lot of ways. You got to know what joy was, and also commitment and good spirit and true friendship. And you experienced what an unalloyed belief in the city was – and the value of good neighbors and helping hands and knowing how to organize them.

Rick Regen was an extraordinary Nashvillian. He was a big man with a big magnetic smile that you remembered. Friends who knew him used lots of big adjectives to describe him, all positive words. He was a businessman, but in his presence you quickly learned that the causes Rick embraced were never about the mundane impulses of pecuniary profit – which characterize so much of this metropolis now – but of civic spirit and how to generate more of it, of the future and what a good one might look like.

We usually met up with Rick in the happiest of contexts: There campaigns to bring the NFL or the NHL to Nashville. Or his many efforts, with many other good folks, to boost our appreciation of sports in general and all the teams and high spirits, whether amateur or pro, from the Clinic Bowl to Music City Bowl. 

But I quickly learned that Rick was much more than a sports booster. He was part of the soul of our city, a dedicated true citizen, eager to pitch in, and advocate for what athletics can do for us all, young and old. When Rick was involved, it was always about something larger than yourself.

Some three years ago, I was digging into my research on the rise of our modern Nashville. I spoke with certain leaders in business, government, and community activism for their memories on how, for instance, the Nashville Predators and Tennessee Titans came to be. Of all the authorities I interviewed – mayors, governors, captains of industry – none was more helpful than my friend Rick.

Rick Regen, second from right, celebrates the citywide victory of the NFL Yes! campaign of 1996 with Dick Darr, Robin Fuller, and Mike McClure of the Houston Oilers organization.

One of his memories was especially poignant: He recalled the day, in April 1997, when the NHL Expansion Committee came to town to have a look at our new (but then empty) downtown arena. A decisive moment came at the very end of that building tour.

As the visiting VIPs approached the exits at Fifth and Broadway, they were met by a jubilant throng of hockey fans that one reporter estimated at between 2,500 and 3,000. These fans crowded around an immense red carpet, many of them wearing faded jerseys of old favorite NHL teams of northern cities - the Blackhawks, Red Devils, Maple Leafs - whom they had cheered in earlier homes.

“It was crazy,” Rick, who helped organize that spectacle, told me. “The place erupted. When we opened the doors, the roar of the crowd just came in and echoed off the walls.” 

What Rick and his fellow volunteers had known was that many who joined this cheering throng were relatively new Tennesseans, the autoworkers who ten years earlier had relocated to middle Tennessee to join Nissan and General Motors here. Arriving here for new jobs from Detroit, Cleveland and other hockey towns of the industrial Midwest, they had brought with them cherished team jerseys of those favorite franchises, but had them put them away. There was nowhere here to sport them.

On this day, by the time the league’s decision-makers finished their building tour, these displaced hockey fans had responded in great numbers to a call from Rick Regen. They were ready, he knew, to cheer again. And on this day they did so, loudly.

“When we opened those doors,” Rick told me, remembering an organizing job well done, with a gleam in his eye and that broad smile across his face, “we proved to the NHL owners we could be a hockey town.”

© Keel Hunt, 2020