Dolan just keeps on bidding. Although the bidding for the Boston Red Sox closed

formally on Dec. 20, his latest $790 million bid (including $40 million in

assumed team debt) to buy the team, submitted late Monday night, keeps throwing

the talks into disarray. Negotiations among the competing parties are ongoing,

with the two other interested parties in the sale-corporate lawyer Miles

Prentice, supported by the Quadrangle Group and cable giant Comcast

Corporation; and the supposed declared winner, the John Henry–Tom Werner– New York Times group-also tweaking their

bids.

But this much is true: Red Sox chief executive John Harrington,

Commissioner Bud Selig and the clubby cabal of major-league baseball's owners

will now face a scary realization when they vote on the sale this week: Chuck

Dolan seems determined not to walk away from this deal, so they'd better close

it quick.

Since the Red Sox current ownership signed off on Dec. 20 on the

$700 million, Bud Selig–approved offer fronted by Mr. Henry, the Florida

Marlins owner, and Mr. Werner, the ex–San Diego Padres owner, with $100 million

in cash added on from The New York Times ,

the fax machine at Mr. Dolan's Boston lawyer's office has been struggling and

cranking away.

$700 million, $740, now $790 million-all for a team that pays

Jose Offerman $6.5 million a year to play second base.

Unlike the competing bids, Mr. Dolan's offer is a simple one:

there are no high-profile buddies of Bud Selig, no flashy Wall Street bankers,

no George Mitchells, no conditional financing agreements-just Chuck and his

Cablevision stock. Take it or leave it.

Which is what scares the heck out of Major League Baseball. Since

1980, Mr. Dolan, who through Cablevision's ownership of Madison Square Garden

owns the Knicks and Rangers, has been in pursuit of a major-league baseball

team (he has also tried to buy the New York Jets and the Cleveland Browns). He

bid for the White Sox in 1980, the Yankees in 1998, the Mets in 1999-all to no

avail. For some reason that has yet to be made public, Major League Baseball

wants no part of Chuck Dolan and his Cablevision billions. Indeed, according to

one banker involved in the ongoing Red Sox sale talks, Chicago White Sox owner

Jerry Reinsdorf, one of Mr. Selig's most ardent supporters, has reportedly said

that there is no way that Mr. Dolan will ever get approved by the owners-a

condition of any eventual sale of the club.

One wonders why. Yes, Mr. Dolan's brother Larry owns the

Cleveland Indians, but so what? Mr. Henry has a 1 percent, limited-partner

stake in the Yankees, in addition to owning the Marlins. Mr. Werner still owns

a small piece of the Padres. Indeed, the most recent excuse put forward by Red

Sox president John Harrington-that Mr. Dolan's ownership of the Knicks and

Rangers was also a potential conflict of interest-elicited chuckles from those

close to the negotiations. Didn't Ted Turner own the Atlanta Hawks as well as

the Braves? For whatever reasons, Bud Selig and his gang are obviously ready to

pull out any stops available to keep Mr. Dolan with his nose pressed to the

owner's-box window, looking in. "If Al Goldstein bid $2 billion for the Red

Sox, Baseball would say, 'I'm sorry you are not qualified,'" said one banker

involved in the talks. "Baseball is a club of rich guys who can do whatever

they want. Chuck can say whatever he wants but the owners will never let him

into the fraternity."

Mr. Dolan first came up against the forces of Mr. Selig and

company in 1980 in his bid for the Chicago White Sox. Cablevision was then a

mere sprite of a $250 million company and the Knicks and Rangers were still 14

years away. But Mr. Dolan, with his small cable-subscriber beachhead in the

Long Island suburbs, knew the importance of sports programming-in New York or

Chicago. He was nevertheless outbid by construction magnate Edward De Bartolo

Sr., but when Mr. Selig, then the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, led the

owners in a campaign against Mr. De Bartolo, the club was sold to Mr. Reinsdorf

and his partner Eddie Einhorn instead, and Mr. Dolan turned his attentions to building

up his suburban cable empire.

Ever since then, Mr.

Reinsdorf and Mr. Selig, who was named acting commissioner in 1992 and took the

post officially in 1998, have been thick as thieves. Their club is an exclusive

one, led by Mr. Selig; Mr. Reinsdorf; Carl Pohlad of the Minnesota Twins;

George Steinbrenner of the New York Yankees; and Fred Wilpon of the New York

Mets. They are men who have gotten rich together and gone to the wall for each

other.

Serving as the club's gatekeeper has been Commissioner Selig, the

used-car dealer from Milwaukee who, nine years after replacing former

Commissioner Fay Vincent, spends 99 percent of his time on the 30th floor of

the Firstar building in Milwaukee as

opposed to the grander Park Avenue suite that Major League Baseball makes

available to the commissioner. Make no mistake-the gates of baseball will open

for a certain breed of owner.

Take Mr. Henry and Mr. Werner, both in their early 50's, and

Montreal Expos owner Jeffrey Loria, who is in his early 60's. These are guys

who have made enough money in their careers-commodities trading, TV sitcoms and

art dealing, respectively-to take a seat at the table, but who lack the

billions to allow them to do it on their own. Plus they are fans: baby boomers

who get dewy-eyed talking of their love for the game.

They are also very adept at swearing fealty to Mr. Reinsdorf, Mr.

Steinbrenner and the other owners. Chuck Dolan is not a fan, nor is he anyone's

vassal. He rarely attends Knicks and Rangers games and at 74 years old, he is a

seasoned Fox Sports Net partner of Los Angeles Dodgers owner Rupert Murdoch and

came within inches of buying the Boss' beloved Yanks in 1998. Unlike Tom

Werner, he will commission no sappy documentary about Fenway Park, nor will you

see him move his family to Boston if he gets his team as Mr. Henry has promised

to do.

There is a midlife-crisis quality to this new breed of owner-Mr.

Werner is romancing Katie Couric; Mr. Henry is an amateur musician with an

interest in Eastern philosophy-that contrasts with Mr. Dolan's harder,

Eisenhower-era sensibility. For Mr. Dolan, this is all about business; the Red

Sox and their NESN cable network are just another soft asset to add to his

collection.

To be sure, he has made it clear that his bid is a personal one,

linked in no way to Cablevision. That may well be, but separating Cablevision,

the company, from the Dolan family will never be an easy task.

Which is what scares the lords of baseball. They all know Chuck

Dolan and they know that they can't control him, plus they have no idea what

his intentions are. Where is the money coming from? Is he borrowing off his

stock, or will he sell to raise cash? Bankers close to the deal say that the

primary objection of Major League Baseball remains Mr. Dolan's brother's

interest in the Cleveland Indians. While a Chuck Dolan link to the Indians has

never been made public, those who have talked to baseball officials suggest

that if need be, a money trail could be established. Larry Dolan is a Cleveland

lawyer, they say. Where did he get $320 million to buy the Indians?

Owners are also worried that Mr. Dolan, with his ready billions,

would be the new Steinbrenner on the block, bidding up contracts in search of a

winner-as he has with the Knicks and the Rangers. There is another reason that

Mr. Selig does not want the Dolans to win. Mr. Selig's plan for contraction had

always hinged on the fact that Mr. Henry would sell his Marlins to Mr. Loria

after getting the Red Sox. The plug would then be pulled on the Expos, leaving

either the Minnesota Twins or the Tampa Bay Devil Rays as the other team to go.

But now the back room, Bud Selig way of doing business is under

attack. Massachusetts Attorney General Thomas Reilly has suggested that the

Henry group was favored by the commissioner's office despite its lower bid. And

the revelations that Mr. Selig accepted a $3 million loan from a company owned

by Mr. Pohlad have not helped his image either.

All of which Chuck Dolan knows, and hopes will work in his favor.

By allocating the extra $50 million in his latest offer to the Yawkey Trust

(which owns 53 percent of the Sox), Mr. Dolan is addressing the root cause of

the Massachusetts attorney general's complaint: that the Red Sox, in taking the

lower $700 million offer from the Henry group, are selling short the interests

of the charitable foundations that are to receive the trust's share of the

funds. Strange as it may seem, Mr. Dolan, whose visits to Boston have been

cloaked in secrecy, now sees himself as a savior of sorts. While Mr. Henry and

Mr. Werner did undertake a P.R. offensive in Boston last week, they suffer in

the smarting eyes of Red Sox fans due to their association with the current

team president, the much-reviled Mr. Harrington.

So it has come to this: Mr. Dolan, that old monopolist whose

cable service charges some of the richest fees in the country, might suddenly

have become a man of the Red Sox people. But time is running out. Baseball

owners have the Red Sox sale to the Henry group on their agenda at their

meetings in Phoenix on Jan. 16. The sooner they approve the sale, the sooner

they will be able to once more slam the door on Chuck Dolan's

baseball-ownership dream.

Madison Square Garden. The New York Knicks, Cablevision's supposed jewel, blew

another one-in epic fashion. Playing the Magic, and up by 10 with three

minutes–plus to go, Allan Houston and Latrell Sprewell watched stone-faced as

the closing seconds dribbled through the floorboards. Spike Lee shook his head

at the horror of it all. Howard Stern, Chris Rock and Robert Wuhl, sitting next

to him, seemed perplexed. Throughout the sold-out Garden, boos rang out.

Somewhere out there, a stomach may have been churning, and it may

have belonged to Jim Dolan, president and chief executive of Cablevision and

chairman of Madison Square Garden. Mr. Dolan wasn't present Sunday night-his

family's four courtside seats underneath the Knicks basket were empty.

Wherever he was, though, it was his difficulty: Former Garden

chairman Marc Lustgarten had passed away, longtime president Dave Checketts had

been cashiered. Madison Square Garden and the Knicks were now Jimmy Dolan's

production. And the Knicks could well be in danger of missing the playoffs for

the first time in 10 years.

The foundation of Cablevision's empire-constructed painstakingly

by Jimmy Dolan's father Chuck over 30 years-has been its ring of three million

wealthy cable subscribers surrounding Manhattan in Long Island, northern New

Jersey, Fairfield County in Connecticut, Westchester County, Brooklyn and the

Bronx. While Jimmy was weaned on the hard-asset side of the business-starting

out in the early 1970's as a gofer in a Chicago Cablevision warehouse-there's

no mistaking the fact that since becoming chief executive in 1995, Mr. Dolan

has become more closely identified with the flashy Cablevision software: the

Knicks, the Rangers, the Radio City Music Hall and its programmer, Rainbow Media

Holdings-home of Bravo, American Movie Classics and the Independent Film

Channel.

Indeed, on Wall Street these days, the buzz is growing among

traders and bankers that the Dolans might finally cash in their cable assets

and restructure as a media and entertainment company, the Knicks

notwithstanding.

The signs are numerous.

On Dec. 27, the company announced that it would lay off 600

employees and take a $55 million restructuring charge against fourth-quarter

earnings. "It is always very difficult to reduce staff; however, it is also

imperative that Cablevision position itself to achieve maximum operational

results," said Mr. Dolan. He declined to comment for this story, but for a

family-run company like Cablevision-four Dolans sit on the company's board,

including Mr. Dolan's brothers, Patrick and Thomas-such a market-appeasing move

came as something of a surprise. Like all other media companies, Cablevision

was feeling the recession's bite, and its stock-at 47 and change-was way off

its high of $91. But the Dolans have always been known for keeping the concerns

of the Street at a far remove.

Unlike its peers at AOL Time Warner, Cablevision has never been a

company to throw sweet growth promises to investors. For years, it has borrowed

and spent billions on building up its cable systems and acquiring its

entertainment assets. Profits and dividends, as with all cable companies, have

been nil, and during Mr. Dolan's reign as C.E.O., the stock has increased more

than sevenfold. Those that didn't like it-well, they could go elsewhere.

There was also a nicely choreographed Jim Dolan interview in the

Dec. 3 Barron's . "Is the family so in

love with the business that they wouldn't consider an offer to sell? In fact we

would," Mr. Dolan said. The piece was peppered with flattering comments from

longtime Cablevision bulls like Merrill Lynch analyst Jessica Reif Cohen and

one of its largest shareholders, Mario Gabelli of Gabelli Asset Management.

All of this occurred against the backdrop of AOL Time Warner's

losing to Comcast in its bid for AT&T's 16 million cable subscribers. For

years, speculation has been rife that Chuck Dolan's endgame was to build up a

suburban cable empire and then sell it for a princely fee to Time Warner, the

cable giant of greater Manhattan. While bankers say that C.E.O.-to-be Dick

Parsons aggressively bid for Comcast, a Time Warner–AT&T fusion would've

had to clear major regulatory hurdles in Washington. Could it be that Mr.

Parsons, with his deep Washington connections, stuck his finger in the

regulatory winds and chose to pass on AT&T? Could he be preparing to lock

in New York by bidding for Cable-

vision's three million subscribers? Whatever the case, the market has punched

Cablevision's stock up from a low of $33 in early November to today's $47. "I

think the Dolans are trying to send a message to Wall Street that they are

finally serious," said one media banker familiar with the company. "The cable

systems have reached a level of maturity, while Rainbow is growing. What smart

guys do is sell the stuff that is mature and keep the stuff that is growing."

And if there is one thing that Jim Dolan is desperate to prove,

it's that he is a smart guy. It

hasn't been easy; past attempts to portray the family relationship have

backfired. For example, in Newsday in

1997, Chuck Dolan was asked what he did when he came into conflict with his son

the C.E.O.

"I let him run up and down the room until he gets tired," Mr.

Dolan said.

"See, it's just like it was when I was 5 years old," Jimmy Dolan

responded.

Mr. Dolan  the Younger has also worked hard to counter

the image of himself as a somewhat callow scion by charging into a number of

deals. In early 1998, he bought electronics retailer Nobody Beats the Wiz

(renamed the Wiz) after it declared bankruptcy, and later that year he acquired

the Clearview Cinema chain. Both units remain loss-makers, and as for the

promised synergies-"Clearview theater lobbies will be a great place to display

some of our products, like our high-definition television and video-on-demand,"

Mr. Dolan said at the time-well, when was the last time you saw a Cablevision

display booth in a Clearview movie house?

Make no mistake, Jimmy Dolan is a deal guy, and there have been

some very good deals. In 1997, he made a deal with John Malone and TCI in which

Cablevision gained 820,000 regional subscribers in exchange for TCI taking a

stake in Cablevision. He also was instrumental in pulling the plug on

Cablevision's partnership in the now-bankrupt Internet service provider

Excite@Home before other investors (such as AT&T) did. While his dad is

famous for sitting back and saying no-Chuck Dolan refused to sell out to Time

Warner in 1993-the son, say bankers who have worked with him, is always eager

to deal. Indeed, they say, Jimmy Dolan was on the verge of selling Rainbow

Media to Barry Diller early in 2001, before Chuck Dolan swooped in and took the

deal off the table.

Now-perhaps not coincidentally-Jimmy is beginning to assume a

larger public profile. He was front and center in organizing the Concert for

New York City at the Garden on Oct. 20 to raise funds for the families of the

World Trade Center victims. And he attended the press conference announcing the

signing of Allan Houston's $100 million contract. Mr. Dolan also seems to be

easing into his identity as a media player. This March, he is set to remarry in

Florida-he has four children from a previous marriage-and Rupert Murdoch and

Viacom's Mel Karmazin reportedly have received invitations.

Nonetheless, his presence around New York remains a little

ghostly. Forty-five years old, he lives next-door to his father. He sails a

yacht and plays the guitar in his own garage-style band, the Simpson House

Band. There are echoes of a George W. Bush–like reckless youth followed by

salvation: Mr. Dolan has admitted to having been an alcoholic and chemically

dependent, and he has been sober for the last nine years.

If there is one thing that would permanently bring him out from

behind his father's shadow, it would be the sale of the cable systems-especially

if he could finagle a price higher than the $4,500 per subscriber that Brian

Roberts at Comcast is paying for AT&T Broadband. To that end, he has sunk

over $2 billion into upgrading the system, to a point where he thinks he can

charge over $100 per month to customers. While it's certainly doubtful that his

subscribers will eventually be worth $10,000 a head due to all sorts of

interactive e-commerce type offerings, as he recently said to Forbes , if he can get a price well north

of $4,500, he might well do it.

It would be a smart move,

too. The growth numbers for cable subscribers remain soft, and the specter of

further market-share encroachment on the part of satellite-television providers

is a constant one. AOL Time Warner is looking to deal-and on a sentimental

note, Gerald Levin, who started out in the cable business with Chuck Dolan in

the early 1970's, is retiring this May. So the Dolans might be very happy if

Mr. Dolan turns their Cablevision stock into cash or AOL Time Warner stock

while keeping his grip on the

really fun stuff-the Knicks, the Rangers, the Rockettes, the TV programming.

And if the Knicks don't make the playoffs, so what? Madison Square Garden's

cash flow will take a hit, but they'll have the money to hire a very expensive

new coach.

little man stepped up to the podium at Cablevision headquarters in Bethpage,

Long Island. It was almost 10 a.m., time for the shareholders' meeting to

commence. "Good morning, everybody. I'm Chuck Dolan, chairman of the

Cablevision Corporation and a director-candidate for Class B shareholders," he

said.

After running through the other directors up for election,

he followed with a brief state-of-the-company address and then opened the floor

to questions.

"Good morning, Mr. Dolan," a heavily accented voice piped up

from the crowd. "So I look at the numbers you talk of here, and they are so

beautiful. But I have to ask a question. Since I am a shareholder, the only

thing I do is to lose money. If the numbers are so great, why is there not just

a penny per share that you can give me?"

Mr. Dolan looked up into the crowd, more professorial than

corporate with his round-framed glasses and contemplative mien. Another stupid

question about dividends? When would they understand that Cablevision was not

AT&T, a stodgy old stock drip-dropping small dollops of cash into the I.R.A.'s

of pensioners and the like? He'd never paid a dividend in his life-why start

now, when there was so much more to buy?

"I assume you are speaking about dividends," Mr. Dolan said,

as if talking to a young child. "We, too, look forward to dividends, but we are

not there yet. And I don't think our shareholders would want us to dissipate

our capital structure and ignore investment opportunities just to pay out

dividends." He paused and gave just a hint of a smile. "But I do hope we get

there."

Chuck Dolan has a big idea. As the founder and chairman of

Cablevision Systems Corporation, the regional cable-entertainment giant with

its 3.1 million subscribers and ownership of Madison Square Garden, he wants to

be the one who offers you a seasonal diet of Rangers, Knicks and Yankees games.

He wants to provide you with movies on a range of channels, as well as 24-hour

local news, weather and traffic, and jazz concerts taped in local clubs, on the

Metro channel. And if it means taking up a more permanent residence in your

mind, he also has a Catholic cable channel in development. He wants you-all of

you. And he'll buy or develop whatever it takes to reach you.

Because he is a nice guy, he is also planning to throw in

for free the latest digital set-top box from Sony, with all its whiz-bang

interactive and enhanced-channel features. He will charge for these services

$44 to $48 a month, which is about as high a cable bill as there is to be found

in the nation these days. But he thinks you will pay because, since the early 1970's,

when he first came up with this idea, you always have.

He wants to do this on his own terms, in his own way, with

full control of both the business and the ideas that have made it what it is

today. And though he has taken on his son Jim, as president and chief executive

of Cablevision, it was evident at the June 5 board meeting in the company's

Long Island headquarters just who was in charge: Chuck Dolan, the elder, the

chairman, the very vision of Cablevision. Indeed, if one didn't recognize his son's

signature goatee and gelled hair, one would not have known that Jim Dolan was

even there.

Chuck Dolan's idea has manifested itself in a series of

low-slung buildings of gray glass in an office park in the Long Island suburbs.

Like a lot of good ideas these days, his is a costly one. This year he will

spend close to $2 billion on his idea, buying up and expanding his terrain, and

once again he plans to go to the market to ask investors to pay their fair

share. Chuck Dolan will also readily tell his investors that his company has

never netted a dollar in profits or paid out a penny in dividends-though the

cash certainly does flow before being evaporated by interest payments.

Perhaps the best way to look at it is: Cablevision as the

first dot-com. It's a dreamy, expensive and profitless proposition entirely

dependent on the from-the-mountaintop salesmanship of its top guy-and utterly

reliant on a procession of financial engineers, aggressive investment bankers

and compliant banks to give it access to the vast pools of other people's money

needed to sustain its very existence.

As one would expect, when your idea is also your company,

you go the extra mile to keep a pretty tight lid on things. So excuse Mr. Dolan

if he is just a little bit of a control freak. Take a walk around the hushed

sprawl of the Cablevision compound and you will see about as many security

guards-meaty guys with blank expressions, all dressed uniformly in red polo

shirts and matching slacks-as employees. The company has a security office called

"intelligence services." And just outside the cafeteria is a Big Brother–esque

sign explaining the Cablevision-employee compact: 10 benefits that workers can

expect from the company (a safe and clean work environment, for example), and

what the company expects in return (adherence to Cablevision's rules and

regulations, to name one).

Then there is his board

of directors. In a time when chief executives strive mightily to salt their

boards with ego-inflating independent directors-think Sandy Weill's Citigroup

board, loaded with Mike Armstrongs and Dick Parsons-Mr. Dolan has taken the

opposite tack. It's an Old World philosophy: pick your inner circle and stick

with it. Indeed, who needs a big shot like Vernon Jordan when you have board

member Dick Hochman-Mr. Dolan's personal banker at Drexel Burnham in the

1980's, when Drexel raised billions in junk bonds for Cablevision.

There's also Charles

Ferris, a former Federal Communications Commission chairman in the Carter

administration, now a partner in the Boston law firm of Minz, Levin, Cohn,

Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo-a firm that not only represents Cablevision but is

also, through a subsidiary, advising Mr. Dolan in his recent pursuit of the

Boston Red Sox.

Then there is Victor Oristano, an 84-year-old wireless and

cable entrepreneur, who joined the board in 1985 after his company was acquired

by Cablevision. There's also Vincent Tese, a former adviser to Mario Cuomo who

is also a board member at Bear Stearns, the successor to Drexel as

Cablevision's house investment bank. Insiders all-but not as inside as the

directors elected by the Class B shareholders.

Cablevision has two classes of shares-A and B. A

shareholders have one vote per share; B shareholders have 10 votes each. The

Dolan family controls 100 percent of the Class B stock, and hence all the

votes.

At the top of their B list is John Tatta, 81, the classic

Dolan guy and a consigliere of sorts

to the Cablevision chairman. A tough-talking type from Manhattan's Lower East

Side, Mr. Tatta was there when the soft-spoken young man from the Cleveland

suburbs needed help navigating the dank thickets of Manhattan cable-TV politics

in the mid-1960's. William Bell, the finance whiz, has been on board since

1978, and Sheila Mahony, a lawyer with cable and public-policy expertise,

joined up in 1980. Representing the younger generation is Robert Lemle, the

company's vice chairman and general counsel, who signed on with Mr. Dolan in

1982.

Finally, there's the

family itself, which includes, besides Dolan père and his son Jimmy, two other Dolan boys: Patrick, a senior

vice president for news at News 12, the company's Long Island news station, and

Thomas, the company's chief information officer.

To all of them, Mr. Dolan is as much a Midas as he is a

Messiah. And as the company's stock soared last year, many old hands like Mr.

Bell, Ms. Mahony, Mr. Tatta, Mr. Lemle and Mr. Oristano cashed in small bits of

their shareholdings for millions.

But not Mr. Dolan. He isn't selling. And it's not as if he

hasn't had the opportunity.

Back in 1993, Time Warner's Gerald Levin, who had been hired

by Mr. Dolan to run HBO in the early 1970's, came back with an offer for Mr.

Dolan's cable systems that not only would have paid him a huge premium in

stock, but would have allowed him to keep control of his programming assets.

For a year or so, Mr. Dolan's top people-Mr. Bell, Mr. Tatta

and Marc Lustgarten, a former vice chairman of the company who died of cancer

in 1999-toiled countless hours to set up what would be Chuck's defining deal.

All he needed to do was sign on the dotted line, and everyone would get rich.

He could sell the hardware and keep the higher-prestige software.

But he never signed. Frustrated after more than a year of

the Chuck Dolan negotiating  dance, Mr.

Levin gave up and went after option No. 2: Ted Turner and Turner Broadcasting

Systems. A year or so later, Mr. Dolan bought Madison Square Garden, and since

then the stock is up more than 400 percent.

Gerry Levin is now back. Who could blame him? Chuck Dolan's

idea is still there, and it's better than ever. More expensive, yes. But worth

more, too.

Let the negotiations begin.

America the Beautiful

The question is: Will Chuck Dolan sell? He's not saying.

Both he and his son declined requests for interviews.

You would think, though, that now, halfway through his 70's,

Chuck Dolan might be tempted. He is worth $3 billion, is happily married to his

college sweetheart and lives very nicely on an oceanside retreat in Oyster Bay,

in a compound he shares with his son. He sails 73-foot boats and loves to

travel the world with his daughter, Debbie, a world-class equestrian rider. And

he's known in his circle as a good guy; he gives millions to the Catholic

Church, as well as to a slew of other community organizations in Oyster Bay.

"Chuck Dolan is the best thing to happen to Oyster Bay since

Teddy Roosevelt," says Richard Aurelio, a former Time Warner cable executive

and an Oyster Bay resident himself.

Then there's his Fourth of July bash-an annual extravaganza

at which thousands of people from the community get invited into the compound

overlooking the Long Island Sound to enjoy fireworks, the Rockettes, clowns for

the kiddies and food and drink galore. Mr. Dolan also uses the occasion to

celebrate his wedding anniversary (last year was the 50th), as well as his

daughter Kathleen's birthday.

God, America and family-a perfect 1950's event for a very

1950's guy. And what's wrong with that?

But don't let this Norman Rockwell scene fool you. This is

still a very hungry man. He's lived through too much to become complacent. Or

to sell.

Think about it: In 1973, at the age of 45, he had all of

southern Manhattan wired for cable; he had a young executive named Gerry Levin

pushing a revolutionary new for-pay station called HBO; and he had a deal with

Madison Square Garden to cablecast Knicks and Rangers games. Still, his little

company, Sterling Manhattan Cable TV, was losing money hand over fist.

Those were not easy days. In the recession-plagued early

1970's, there were no junk bonds, no venture-cap funds, no daring banks willing

to take a flier on a shy little guy from Cleveland with a big scary idea about

TV.

Mr. Dolan did what he could: He turned to a strategic

investor, Time Inc., which by 1973 owned more than 80 percent of Mr. Dolan's

company. Still the losses mounted-in 1973, to an astonishingly high $10.3

million-and Mr. Dolan had no choice: Time bought out Mr. Dolan's 20 percent

interest in Sterling for $600,000.

They left Mr. Dolan one slice of pie, though: He was allowed

to buy back a small band of cable-TV subscribers on Long Island. Time Warner

got HBO and southern Manhattan. Mr. Dolan watched as his big idea was subsumed

into a company begun by another visionary, Henry Luce.

But from that slice grew Cablevision. To accomplish that,

however, Mr. Dolan needed cash. So he contacted a Chicago tax lawyer and formed

a number of complex partnerships, all of which he served as managing partner.

Early investors included Hugh Hefner and economist Milton Friedman, who were

attracted by the tax-shelter benefits of the cable business. And the more he

grew Cablevision, the more Mr. Dolan borrowed-from his partners, from hardware

suppliers and eventually from banks as well.

In the 1980's, with his appetite for capital still ravenous

and with investor tolerance for risk having grown, Mr. Dolan hooked up with

Michael Milken and raised billions more in junk bonds. Ever mindful of his

experience with Time, though, in 1984 Mr. Dolan bought out his

partners-borrowing heavily to do so-and then paid off this debt by taking the

company public in 1986. Now he had the pipes, the content (a growing stable of

movie channels that soon became Bravo, American Movie Classics and the

Independent Film Channel) and the sports programming through Sportschannel (now

MSG Networks). He had enough to charge subscribers exactly what he

wanted-Cablevision soon had the highest revenue-per-subscriber ratio in the

industry.

How did he get away with it all?  

"There has always been a mystique to Chuck, going back to HBO,"

says John Reidy of Solomon Smith Barney, a former Drexel Burnham analyst. "It

was always clear that they were doing something different from the other cable

companies due to their use of multiple-tier programming."

In late 1994, he made another giant step in that direction,

grabbing content by the handfuls with his purchase of Madison Square Garden.

It was quite a deal. Not having the funds to buy it

outright, he partnered with ITT, putting up only 13 percent of the capital

needed; ITT put up the rest. Included in the 

deal was an option for Cablevision to buy ITT out, which it did in 1997.

"It was a phenomenal deal," remembers Mickey Tarnopol, a

vice chairman of the investment-banking division at Bear Stearns and an adviser

to Mr. Dolan on the deal. "Chuck recognized that having the content that the

Garden brings to the metropolitan area was a tremendous drawing card for

Cablevision. He really believes that it's local sports, not national sports,

that attract cable subscribers. He is a macro thinker who sees things that

other people don't see, and he is not afraid to invest in what he believes in."

Get Me Phil Jackson

With that purchase and all it meant-the Knicks, the Rangers

and, later, Radio City Music Hall and some smaller venues, all of which provide

content to Cablevision's ever-higher-paying subscribers-Mr. Dolan seemed to

have it all. A Stanley Cup soon followed. Then an almost N.B.A. championship.

But seven dry years is a long time in Dolanland-as both Ernie Grunfeld and Dave

Checketts found out.

Meanwhile, Mr. Dolan's idea has been validated many times

over. Mel Karmazin, Mr. Levin, Ted Turner, Mike Armstrong at AT&T, his old

pal John Malone, they all echo the Chuck Dolan mantra: Content is king. It's

fine to have the box, but it is what's inside the box that is important.

Which is why he is making the big bet on his digital box and

the increased access to Cablevision content he thinks it will provide. It's a

classic Chuck Dolan strategy: lay out big for a value-added feature, then

charge the customer an arm and a leg for it.

AT&T sees this one differently. It announced this month

that it was scaling back its set-top-box strategy due to cost and

customer-taste concerns. But what does AT&T know? Though it has a 30

percent share in Cablevision, Mr. Dolan surely won't be taking his cues from a

badly run, over-leveraged distribution company that is sadly lacking its own

version of the Idea.

Mr. Dolan, it appears, is still fine-tuning his idea,

testing the market to see where it will take him-and his sons-next. He recently

spun off all his programming assets to a tracking stock called Rainbow Media

Group while enhancing his focus on the company's content hub, Madison Square

Garden. Mr. Dolan was no doubt sad to see Dave Checketts go-the Mormon-on-the-outside,

Gordon-Gekko-on-the-inside personality surely appealed to the old man. But Mr.

Checketts was never family, and for a non-Dolan he may have liked the limelight

just a bit too much. And with the Garden empty this June-and his son Jimmy,

also the Garden chairman, champing at the bit-something had to be done.

So now it is Jimmy Dolan's time. He's got Phil Jackson's

cell-phone number; he is pals with Wayne Gretzky; the internship is over.

Indeed, by all accounts, the younger Mr. Dolan has matured as an executive. He

is no longer the callow, shoot-from-the-hip chairman's son who would strike

fear in the hearts of Garden employees whenever he made his rounds. He has been

running the Wiz (the troubled retail-electronics outlet bought by Cablevision

in 1998) and has been overseeing the company's digital strategy.

Still, even with young Jim Dolan moving to the top of the

Cablevision mount, Chuck Dolan plays on, front and center-at the annual

shareholders meeting and at the negotiating table with his old friend, Gerald

Levin.

Which is most likely

fine by Jimmy Dolan. "This is not Nepal," says one longtime acquaintance of the

family. "This is not where some guy comes in and shoots the royal family and

says 'I'm king.' In this family, Dolan is king and his first name is Chuck."