Correction appended

If all goes as planned, Kevin Anderson will no longer be the owner of the Sports Café and Grille by this time next year. For the first time in its lifetime, the bar will come under new leadership.

In some ways, it's like he's already left. Anderson has been reticent in speaking publicly since the Café's reopening -- for a time, the 51-year-old's employees wouldn't acknowledge to reporters he was present at the bar, even when he was sitting at a table nearby. You might catch sight of him sitting outside the bar with a little white dog on a pink leash or puttering around while talking on his cell phone.

But for the most part, he flits like a

ghost over the premises that many customers aren't aware he owns.

It's a far cry from the man who opened the Sports Café in 1998, delighting students with an open-air porch and sports entertainment.

It's hardly reminiscent of the man who fought tooth and nail with his business partner in 2004 for control of the company, hotly denying charges he inappropriately paid himself from the till while running the business into the ground.

But it's something that you'd come to expect, associates said, from the mercurial boss who could be your best friend one minute and screaming at you the next, an owner who let his workers walk away without wages as the establishment suffocated under piles of debt.

Anderson came to State College in 1997 with a plan: He was going to turn the defunct Pizza Hut on the corner of College Avenue and Burrowes Street into a thriving sports bar, one of the first of its kind in State College. And with court records, associates and employees all indicating Anderson has sacrificed much for his business, the question goes unanswered -- when and why did Kevin Anderson give up on the Sports Café?

The going wasn't always bad. The bar capitalized on its popularity for several years after its debut, court records indicate, bringing bigger and bigger profits every season. But trouble started in 2004, when co-owner George Ferris sued Anderson for dissolution of the company, painting a portrait of a irritable manager who hoarded control while running the business into the ground.

As Ferris put it in court testimony, "He can't work with anybody else."

The judge ruled a neutral manager would oversee the bar while the lawsuit worked its way through the system. Even in his court-enforced exile, Anderson couldn't keep himself away, court documents indicate. According to Ferris, he would drive around to his employees' houses early in the morning and honk his horn to wake them up.

"I am very concerned about the direction of the Company," Anderson wrote in a May 2005 letter.

That was 2005. The partners eventually settled; Anderson survived to fight another day. But things are different now.

Something happened after 2006. The Sports Café started missing rent payments, stopped paying its food vendor and couldn't keep up on its taxes, according to court documents. Anderson piled up mortgages, sold off his other properties, even stopped paying an advertising bill to Lionmenus.com, prompting a lawsuit and several heated court exchanges. Associates said Ferris' lawsuit had drained him, taxed his financial resources to the limit.

"I think he was trying to play out who he could get out of paying money to," said David Lederman, Lionmenus' chief of operations. "He was making decisions for his business."

Here is when the horror stories from former employees begin, the accusations of missed pay and shoddy management. Stephen Fleming, now a chef in Charlotte, N.C., said when he worked at the Sports Café in 2007, Anderson was already neglecting the business.

"He took out a half-million dollar loan from the bank, and he wasn't even buying food for the Sports Café," Fleming said. "We didn't have hard alcohol for the last three, three-and-a-half weeks. The staff was taking food -- It was the only way we could eat."

Again, the bar owner turned away all input, Fleming said. "He would sit down and ask for your advice -- and belittle every little thing you said," he said. "If you tried to tell him anything, he would just get furious. There were many times he would just start screaming at employees, just cussing them out."

Fed up in late 2007, Fleming went to collect his unpaid wages. Anderson called the police, he said. To this day, he says he has not been paid what he was owed. Anderson refused comment for this article.

The Sports Café closed shortly afterward, facing foreclosure threats from Nittany Bank for an unpaid mortgage. The rumors about a sale to LaVar Arrington surfaced, making headlines but failing to come to fruition. Two weeks ago, the bar reopened -- and for an instant, it looked like Anderson might have pulled through again.

This time, apparently, he did not. And regardless of who picks up the pieces of the troubled establishment, its current administrator leaves behind a reputation that is equal parts persistence, bravado and ineptitude.

"He just has a personality that says, I can get away with everything,'" Fleming said. "And then it probably finally dawned on him -- no, I can't."

An editing error in this article led to several incorrect statements being reported. Stephen Fleming works in Charleston, S.C. The correct spelling of a name reported in the story is David Laiderman. Kevin Anderson sent a letter expressing concern about his business in March 2005.