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The XFL, which was acquired over the summer by Dwayne Johnson, Dany Garcia and RedBird Capital Partners, says it will not play in 2021 but plans to return in 2022, Deadline.com reported. “It’s an uphill battle,” Johnson wrote in a tweet, “but we’re hungry, humble and no one will outwork us.” The upstart off-season rival to the NFL, a reanimated version of the one created by NBC and wrestling magnate Vince McMahon two decades ago, got a few weeks into its season before COVID-19 struck the U.S. McMahon funneled some $200 million into the effort to revive the league, but it declared bankruptcy in the spring. The new owners picked it up for just $15 million. In addition to the pandemic, which has limited fan attendance at football games and created logistical complications for teams and leagues, emerging from bankruptcy is a tall task for the new owners. Many former coaches and league employees are listed as creditors in the bankruptcy proceedings, presenting challenges in terms of ramping back up quickly. Former commissioner Oliver Luck has filed a $23.8 million wrongful termination lawsuit against McMahon. 

Walt Disney Co. said yesterday that it will lay off roughly 28,000 employees, mostly at its U.S. theme parks, where attendance has been crushed by the coronavirus pandemic, especially in California where Disneyland remains closed, Reuters reported. About two-thirds of the laid-off employees will be part-time workers, the company said in a statement. Disney shut its theme parks worldwide when the novel coronavirus began spreading this year. All but Disneyland — nicknamed the Happiest Place on Earth — reopened, though the company was forced to limit the number of visitors to allow for physical distancing. “We have made the very difficult decision to begin the process of reducing our workforce at our Parks, Experiences and Products segment at all levels,” Josh D’Amaro, chairman of the parks unit, said in a statement. He cited the parks’ limited capacity and uncertainty about the pandemic’s duration, which he said was “exacerbated in California by the state’s unwillingness to lift restrictions that would allow Disneyland to reopen.”

The Aspen Club and Spa’s debts to construction firms, lenders and other creditors, as well as the recent foreclosure action taken against it, will be consolidated into a single case overseen by a state district judge, the Aspen (Colo.) Times reported. Pitkin County (Colo.) District Judge Chris Seldin yesterday ordered that the outstanding cases, which had been on hold because of the club’s bankruptcy, be folded in with the foreclosure case. Judge Denise Lynch will preside over the case moving forward, Judge Seldin said. Attorneys for the majority of creditors attending the conference call agreed that consolidation would help simplify an indisputably complex matter where there are more than $25 million in mechanics’ liens the club still owes, as well as $42 million owed to one note holder, GPIF Aspen Club LLC, and $12 million to another, Revere High Yield Fund, among other creditors. Aspen Club declared Chapter 11 in May 2019, effectively staying a case carried against it by mechanics’ lien-holders with claims for labor and material related to the Aspen Club’s redevelopment project. Unable to get the Denver bankruptcy court’s approval for a $140 million exit loan, the Aspen Club gave up on the bankruptcy proceedings earlier this month, agreeing with its creditors to dismiss the case Sept. 1. On Sept. 2, GPIF took foreclosure action against the club in Pitkin County District Court. With Seldin’s ruling, the foreclosure case as well as previous litigation in district court against the club are now folded into once case.

The operator of New York City’s historic Martinique hotel, one of Manhattan’s oldest, filed for chapter 11 protection, hoping for relief from rent payments and union obligations as the Covid-19 pandemic hammers the Big Apple’s lodging market, the Wall Street Journal reported. Built in 1897 in a French Renaissance style at 32nd Street and Broadway, the Martinique earned a notorious reputation as a “welfare hotel” in the 1970s and ’80s, when municipal leaders used it to house the city’s burgeoning homeless population. Developer Harold Thurman acquired the Martinique in a 99-year lease in 1989, a year after the city stopped using the hotel for emergency housing. Reborn under the Holiday Inn banner, the Martinique was designated a city landmark in 1998. He still owns the hotel. The 531-room Martinique, now carrying the Hilton brand, features a restaurant and wine bar, more than 33,000 square feet of retail space and a concierge desk, according to court papers filed by Brad Thurman, vice president of Herald Hotel Associates LP, the hotel’s operator. In addition to the pandemic’s devastating impact on hotel occupancy, he blamed the Martinique’s financial woes on a $3.5 million employee severance bill and a failure to strike deals with the hotel’s landlord, Seasons Affiliates, and mortgage lender. (Subscription required.)

Hertz Global Holdings Inc. must change its plan to pay 14 top executives up to $5.4 million in bonuses if it wants win approval for the incentive program, says the judge overseeing the car renter’s bankruptcy, Bloomberg News reported. Judge Mary Walrath sided with opponents of the payouts, who argued that the bonus program comes too soon after $16.2 million in retention money Hertz agreed to hand out to about 340 employees just days before it filed for bankruptcy in May. Judge Walrath’s order also nixed a new plan that would have split as much as $9.2 million among about 295 lower-ranking managers. “It seems offensive to give senior executives bonuses” when some of them got retention payments immediately before Hertz headed for court, Judge Walrath said in a hearing held by telephone yesterday. Under the pre-bankruptcy retention plan, Chief Executive Officer Paul Stone received $700,000. With the new plan, Stone could have collected as much as $1.6 million.

Flywheel Sports Inc., the operator of spin boutiques that gained popularity with the rise of stationary biking, has filed for bankruptcy and is shutting down, the latest fitness-industry casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Wall Street Journal reported. The company filed for chapter 7 protection in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York on Monday after closing all its gyms. Unlike chapter 11, which is typically used by companies seeking to reorganize, chapter 7 is used to wind down businesses and address unpaid bills. Closely held Flywheel was founded in 2009 and, unlike rival Peloton Interactive Inc., it had relied heavily on bricks-and-mortar studios. Flywheel struggled as some of those studios closed down amid the pandemic. Just before the pandemic forced it to shut down its studios, the New York-based chain settled a lawsuit with Peloton over technology theft. Peloton had sued Flywheel, which also produces stationary bikes for home use, accusing the company of stealing its so-called leaderboard technology. Flywheel acknowledged that it copied Peloton and promised to remove the technology from its bikes. Financial terms weren’t disclosed. Flywheel then reached a deal to sell itself to Town Sports International Holdings Inc., the operator of the New York Sports Clubs chain. But amid government-mandated gym closures to stem the spread of the coronavirus, Town Sports scrapped the deal in April.

Hotel owners, who spent years loading up on a cheap type of debt, are now faced with the potential for default as the pandemic saps revenues, the New York Times reported. Billionaire investor Thomas J. Barrack Jr. has run into an unexpected patch of red ink thanks to the pandemic: He has struggled to keep up with payments on $1.97 billion in Wall Street debt he used to buy a collection of more than 160 hotels. Monty Bennett is in a similar tough spot after he recently halted payments owed on the $2.6 billion worth of Wall Street debt used to acquire his own hotel collection. “Imminent monetary default” is the term a Wall Street research firm used this summer to describe more than $300 million in debt on a luxury hotel in Austin, controlled by Doug Manchester. The precarious financial position that some donors to President Trump and other hotel executives are now in has fueled an intense lobbying campaign aimed at persuading the Trump administration, the Federal Reserve and Congress to rescue hundreds of hotel industry players that relied on riskier Wall Street debt to finance their lodging empires before the virus hit. Industry executives and their lobbyists say that a federal rescue will save thousands of jobs and help local economies, and are hoping their argument resonates with a president who is a hotelier himself. They are making the case that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has the power — and access to the billions of federal funds he needs — to extend existing coronavirus relief efforts to the commercial real estate sector, which so far has been cut off from most of the stimulus money. But Congress prevented Mnuchin from tapping the main pot of $454 billion in coronavirus relief funds on his own, and doubts exist in the Treasury Department about the economic case for propping up a relatively small slice of the market that would primarily benefit wealthy investors who knowingly made high-risk bets. One industry lobbyist involved in the negotiations said that department officials remained concerned that some of the borrowers — which include hotels, shopping malls and other commercial real estate — might be “zombies” that are not going to survive, and taxpayer money sent to help them out would be lost.

Hertz Corp. should be blocked from paying as much as $5.4 million to 14 top executives because the proposed bonus program would “potentially squander limited resources,” a group of retired company managers said in court papers, Bloomberg News reported. Paying top managers a bonus while in bankruptcy may make it impossible for Hertz to honor the $5.6 million in deferred compensation owed to the seven retired executives, including the car renter’s former general counsel, Paul M. Tschirhart, according to the objection filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Delaware. The bonus program is “a fairly transparent attempt to continue doling out cash in a manner similar to the $16.2 million that already has been bestowed upon favored employees,” the employees said, referring to payments Hertz made to top executives just before it filed bankruptcy in May. 

The owner of the Triple Crown-winning horse American Pharoah filed for personal bankruptcy protection, seeking to discharge more than $19 million of debts, Bloomberg News reported. Ahmed Zayat’s chapter 7 bankruptcy case, filed in New Jersey, lists around $1.9 million of assets and $19.4 million of liabilities, most of which are business obligations, court records show. Zayat’s stables are listed as insolvent in the papers filed on Tuesday. The filing lists between 100 and 199 creditors, including Bob Baffert Racing Stables. Baffert trained American Pharoah ahead of his historic victory and is owed nearly $228,000, court papers show. Baffert’s thoroughbred Authentic won last week’s Kentucky Derby. American Pharoah clinched the Triple Crown in 2015 at the 147th running of the Belmont Stakes. The then 3-year-old colt was the 12th horse, and first since Affirmed in 1978, to win the sport’s most celebrated title. In 2010, Zayat put his company, Zayat Stables, into bankruptcy, blaming a court fight with Fifth Third Bancorp, which had accused him of trying to get out of a personal guarantee to repay tens of millions in loans, according to previous court papers.