Bill Reynolds - Life Real Loud - John Lefebvre, Neteller and the Revolution in Online Gambling

The role of the presidency was also a study in human nature, of the shallowness of people in the presence of power. “That was a good lesson,” says Lefebvre. “I knew I was getting plenty of attention that was attention not for me personally but for my office. Even the social, flirty kind of attention wasn’t about me — it was about social station.” Later he would try to apply these lessons to dealing with people in the presence of extreme wealth.

There was concern whether the inexperienced administration could get up to speed quickly enough or whether it even wanted to. For one thing, Ramsay had been president of the ski club, the biggest party gang on campus. Proudfoot, by this point a long-time student politician and thus part of the establishment, was initially wary of the upstarts. He had been through three administrations, all well-run organizations that accomplished things. “There was some trepidation about John,” he says. “Prior to him most people had worked their way up through the ranks to become president. Well, lo and behold, John came flying in, and at the same time Bruce came flying in, so I, who had lived with the establishment and the staff around the building and lived in MacEwan Hall, was thinking, Oh God, who are these guys? ”

Fear of the unknown dominated the first couple of weeks. Some of Proudfoot’s regular adversaries had been ousted, and now he didn’t have a clue as to what he was getting — maybe a repeat of the same tired arguments he’d fought and dispensed with the past three years: “Now I had two wild cards who didn’t know each other sitting around me.”

To Proudfoot and other experienced student politicians, the student union wasn’t some radical organization whose purpose was to chase after the latest cause; it was a business. A quarter-million dollars went through its budget every year. There were full-time employees who outlasted student politicians, there was payroll, there were labor laws, and there was a union:

But John stepped up. From the first meeting there was a lot more there than I’d anticipated from the campaign advertisements. The thing I saw first was he sat down and ran a meeting. And student council meetings, they’re bedlam. You’ve got a bunch of kids with opinions, everybody clamoring to be heard. You need a strong person in the chair: We’re going to have an agenda, we’re going to stick to the agenda, we have an allotted time. Some things we’re going to have to shelve, but we’re going to have to get through the business at hand, because people’s pay rests on decisions we make. I was impressed that he seemed to understand we had to run a business.

When Proudfoot was first elected to the student union in 1975, universities were in the shadow of the Vietnam War. Typically, on campus, there was much bickering between left and right over the war and its after-effects. “A lot of my youth was tainted by that. I lived with a draft dodger in my third year. His parents would come up a couple of times a year. He’d move into the living room and they’d move into his room. It was weird having someone’s parents moving in, but he wasn’t a wealthy guy.”

Not only was Proudfoot trying to distance himself from attitudes surrounding the war, he decided to cut off his ponytail because he was only a year away from the job market. The corporate world was beckoning and he wanted in. This seemingly strange combination of longhaired attitudes and capitalist moneymaking came to be the signature of this administration. It is easy to see now, looking back, that many baby boomers, despite their insistence on their freedoms, were just as hypnotized by getting rich as their parents — they simply wanted to do it their own way. Proudfoot found his way and became “a twenty-plus year veteran of big ticket technology environments,” according to a seminar blurb on the web.

To make their mark, Lefebvre, Ramsay, and Proudfoot set their sights on Dinnie’s Den, the campus bar. It was open 3–6 p.m. Friday; that was it. Draft beers were three for a buck. The chairs were laminated plywood that stacked together, the sort used for exams in the gym. U of C was a commuter campus, and the administration didn’t see any reason to change that. Lefebvre and company had other ideas, but they had to fight through the usual arguments about drinking and driving if the bar were to remain open every night. The goal was to wrestle control of the drinking establishment from the university establishment. Indeed, not just the Den but MacEwan Hall itself, home to the student union, student media such as the Gauntlet and CJSW radio, dozens of clubs, and a bowling alley, pinball arcade, and poolroom rolled into one. “We wanted to create a community on campus,” says Proudfoot, “because there was no reason to be there other than the bowling alley.”

The administration relented, finally. The student union poured $25,000 into the Den, opened it every day of the week, and put in a television. Naturally, it started to make money. Lefebvre told the Gauntlet the expanded bar would be the “best lounge between Sausalito and Montreal.” Other enticements to stay on campus were offered, such as dances in the Mac Hall Ballroom every Friday night. “Before that it was white bread sandwiches,” says Proudfoot. “There was no food that kids didn’t get from their mothers. On Friday there was beef dip. There was no reason to be there — it was all pretty grim.” Lefebvre also advocated — in a nod to future governments — that non-profit groups be allowed to hold casino nights to raise money.

After this great success, the next problem became the student politicians who followed in the wake of this radical turnaround. To those who followed, these initiatives became only about making money — fleecing students for every buck they could get. Conservative, even neo-conservative, administrations became proud of the union’s yearly profit-taking. For example, the union’s attitude about the student radio station in Lefebvre’s year was “You do your thing, we’ll do ours.” The next year it was, “Hey, how about we shut you guys down and turn you into a pay-per-listen shop for students?”

“In many ways, I’ve always thought John and Bruce and I started that process. We may have created a monster,” says Proudfoot.

While the union battled university administrators for its own building, Lefebvre’s marriage no longer had a thread to hang by. After five years, in the midst of his first hectic term running the union, the final act took place in the campus pub. “I used to say it was because she was fucking around with musicians at Dinnie’s Den, but it probably had as much to do with the fact that I was fucking around with Angie and just about anybody else who paid attention to me.”

What really irked Lefebvre was not so much that his wife was having an affair but that she was having an affair with a bass player who played music he could not tolerate:

I got Janice a job at Dinnie’s Den, and she started fucking this guy in a rock ’n’ roll band that was playing Foreigner songs. I fucking hate Foreigner. This guy sits down beside me in the bar and says, ‘Okay, we’re all adults here. I’m sleeping with your wife.’ I looked at him and then took the heel of my hand and shoved his nose up into his brain, really hard. He went over backwards and fell on his back. I took a smoke and flicked it right in his face and then I poured some beer on it to put out the fire.

At this point the bar manager came over and said, “John, enough’s been said,” and escorted the president out of the student bar. The next day, the university administrator in charge of campus services ran into Lefebvre on the sidewalk and told him, “John, we just can’t have the president of the student union beating up the patrons in the student union bars.”