Boston Garden also made it easier for one of their forwards, Steve Kasper, to stay in my back pocket. Steve would literally follow me around on every shift to try to keep the puck away from me. Steve was a good player and played the game hard—and the small ice made it that much easier for him to shadow me. That tactic happened more in my era. You don’t see it much anymore. Eventually, I figured out how to handle it. I’d shadow one of their players, which would take out two of their guys and open up ice for the rest of our guys.
Of course, the other thing the Bruins always seemed to have more than their fair share of was elite defensemen. It is almost unfair that the same team has had Bobby Orr, Brad Park, Ray Bourque, and Zdeno Chara. I remember playing against Bourque in the Garden. The neutral zone there is so shallow that if Bourque came out of the zone with any speed, he was at the red line before you knew it and could either tee up a slap shot or blow by a flat-footed backchecker.
The size of the ice at the Garden seems to have been ideal for counterattacking defensemen, and Eddie Shore was possibly the most exciting defenseman in the world before the rink was even built.
On October 1, 1924, it was announced that Boston would have the first American NHL team under the leadership of club president Charles (C.F.) Adams, the founder of the First National grocery store chain. Adams first heard about the game of hockey from his young son, Weston, over breakfast one morning. C.F. Adams started going to games in Montreal and, after watching the 1924 Stanley Cup playoffs between the Canadiens and the Calgary Tigers, he decided to bring a team to Boston. The Bruins and the Canadiens have one of the deepest rivalries in the game, but the fact is that if Weston Adams hadn’t fallen in love with the game in Montreal, there might never have been an NHL team in Boston.
One of the first things Adams did was hire Art Ross, a Stanley Cup winner with the Kenora Thistles in 1907 and the Montreal Wanderers in 1908. Ross had coached at McGill University and then refereed in the NHL. He would become one of the great men of hockey. In fact, the annual trophy for the player who leads the league in points is named after him. But when he was twenty-two, he was just another hockey player. Ross moved to Montreal to play with the Wanderers and became good friends with other players in the league including Frank and Lester Patrick. And so when the WHL folded, the Patricks gave Ross the heads-up about a twenty-three-year-old farm boy from Saskatchewan—a tough, fast defenseman with the Edmonton Eskimos named Eddie Shore. Adams bought the rights to Shore and six other players (one of them was Frank Boucher—soon traded to the Rangers) for $50,000.
Like Bobby Orr and Paul Coffey, Shore changed the game by rushing the puck. Teams just didn’t have an answer for that kind of offensive threat coming from the back end. But Shore was more like Orr in that he was very physical and loved to mix it up. Paul was a player who would pick you apart with his skating. He found holes and would accelerate past guys, but Shore earned some of his open ice by making guys think twice about taking any liberties with him.
In fact, Shore is still in the record books. He is the only defenseman to win the Hart Trophy four times, but he also holds the unofficial record for most fighting majors in a single game—five. He was absolutely fearless, and more than a little mean. He hit like a freight train but also skated the puck through the middle of the ice, inviting guys to hit him. Usually, they would bounce right off, but still, when you play that way, you are pretty much taking on the whole league. Everyone wanted a shot at Shore. He ended his career with nearly 1,000 stitches, fourteen broken noses, and five broken jaws. Like most top-pairing defensemen of his time, he would also play over fifty minutes a game—at least double what an elite defenseman plays today.
Shore wasn’t just indestructible—he was absolutely electrifying on the ice. Like Bobby Orr and Paul Coffey, he could open up the ice for his teammates by drawing the defense to him, and he had the vision to go with it. If you were open, the puck was coming. And like Orr and Coffey, he had a stride that others just couldn’t match. It was like those guys were gliding. You see guys really working when they skate, digging into the ice. But somehow the truly gifted skaters seem to stay on top of the ice like it takes no effort at all. Everybody else was always a step or two behind. Shore is credited with inventing what was called the “power play” back then. Today it means that you’re outnumbering your opponent when they’re penalized. But when Shore was on the ice, it meant playing as though the other team was outnumbered, because Shore was such an efficient skater that it was like he was at both ends of the ice.
It would be hard to exaggerate how important Shore was to the game. He was named to the first All-Star team just about every year he played. The Hockey News ranked him among the top ten ever to play the game. But even that doesn’t capture the effect he had on the league. Remember that the NHL had just expanded into the United States. When the league expanded again years later, there were franchises that didn’t make it. A team like the Penguins might not have survived if it weren’t for Mario Lemieux coming along. It was the same way with Shore. When the league needed a star, there he was.
Fans crowded into the tiny Boston Arena to see Shore. It became clear right away that the Bruins needed a bigger rink. So Tex Rickard, who had just built Madison Square Garden, figured he would do in Boston what he had done in New York. Boston Garden opened in 1928. Because Rickard was a boxing promoter, the rink was designed to bring the fans as close to the action as possible. People would call it “the house that Eddie Shore built.” Interestingly, the Arena is the only original NHL rink still standing and still in use. It was home ice for the New England Whalers for a season, and today it’s the home of the Northeastern Huskies.
The first time I saw the Garden, I was still playing in the World Hockey Association (WHA). A friend of mine from the Oilers, Garnet “Ace” Bailey took me to see a Bruins game, and I could not believe an NHL team could play in a rink so small. It looked like a Junior B rink. There was just no room to move. Then I looked at the bench and saw the Big Bad Bruins. My next thought was, “Guy Lafleur must be more incredible than I imagined.” Even with those guys trying to stop him, he always managed to play great hockey out there.
The thing is, Boston was such a tough place to play that it brought out the best in some players. We had to respect the Bruins and their building. And there was more than a little fear of being embarrassed on national television. That’s probably true of all the great rinks, but none was as intimidating as that one. Personally, I never saw a team focus better than the 1988 Oilers going into Boston for Game Three.
On the other side of the coin, the visitors’ dressing room was notoriously small and uncomfortable. But we really didn’t care. The only thing we complained about was that it was like a sauna down there. We’d plug in a few fans and that helped a bit.
I understand why so many of those old rinks were replaced—Boston Garden, the Forum, Maple Leaf Gardens. And I can certainly see the appeal of the modern NHL dressing rooms, with their chefs and other amenities. But I was lucky to have had the thrill of using the ice and the dressing rooms that guys like Eddie Shore once used.
Five
THE HAWKS
I will never forget my first game in the NHL. You grow up imagining it, then there you are, walking out the tunnel to the ice surface. So many things are just the way you imagined them, while other things are exactly like a hundred other rinks you’ve played in. Ice has a special smell wherever you go. But we were at the old Chicago Stadium, which was unlike any other arena. There were more fans than I was used to at WHA games, and the organ was just blasting. My heart was pounding with excitement.
I was even more excited when I lined up against Stan Mikita for the first draw of my NHL career. Mikita was one of my heroes and possibly the best center in the league for a decade. But he wasn’t a big guy, and as I put my stick down at the faceoff dot, I visualized winning the draw. It wasn’t even close. It was a while before I started beating legends.
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br /> Chicago was always a loud rink, and the fans there had a tradition of singing through the anthems. But it was never louder than the night we played the All-Star game there in 1991. The coalition bombing that started off Operation Desert Storm had begun two days earlier, and the crowd was in a patriotic mood. When the announcer expressed the NHL’s and the NHLPA’s support for the troops, the crowd’s roar started to build. There was a moment of silence, when people were encouraged to think about the men and women in the Persian Gulf. The cheering started to grow again as singer Wayne Messmer approached the end of “O Canada,” then exploded as he began “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The building was shaking with the cheers. I had a cousin in the United States Marine Corps at the time, so when I was standing there at center ice, taking in all that emotion, I was also feeling it myself.
In 1994, just days before the Blackhawks’ last game in their old barn, Messmer was on his way home after a Blackhawks win when he was shot in the throat by a robber while sitting in his car. He recovered eventually, but it was touch and go whether he’d sing again. Rather than replace him, the Chicago fans sang the national anthem in tribute to him and were every bit as loud singing as they had always been at cheering. It might have been the most emotional anthem ever heard in an NHL rink.
• • •
Not many people know this, but the Chicago Blackhawks got their start in Regina, Saskatchewan. In 1921, the Regina Capitals were a great team in the Western Canadian Hockey League. Their two top players were Hockey Hall of Famers George Hay and his best buddy Dick Irvin. But the team went downhill, and by their fourth season they won only eight out of twenty-eight games. They relocated to Portland, Oregon, and were renamed the Portland Rosebuds. When the league folded the next year, the Rosebuds were sold to Major Frederic McLaughlin, who’d just won the NHL franchise in Chicago.
In civilian life, McLaughlin was the president of his family’s coffee import business. He’d taken a leave of absence during the First World War to join a machine gun unit in the U.S. Army. His unit’s nickname was the Blackhawks after Black Sparrow Hawk, a Sauk warrior (part of the Algonquian people) who fought on the side of the British in the War of 1812. And so that’s what McLaughlin called his hockey team.
Dick Irvin moved to Chicago to play with the Black Hawks and at thirty-four years old, he managed to come in just one point behind the Rangers’ Bill Cook in the league scoring race. Irvin had 18 goals and 18 assists in 43 games. Howie Morenz was third. Howie Morenz was, you know, Howie Morenz, so the fact Dick Irvin beat him in scoring tells you something.
But early the next season, Irvin suffered a fractured skull when he was hit by Mervyn “Red” Dutton, who had three inches and twenty pounds on him. He came back, but his playing days were numbered. For the final twelve games of 1928–29, he was behind the bench as the Hawks’ coach. He accepted the lead coaching job full-time in 1930. That season, the team made it to the Stanley Cup final against the defending champions, the Montreal Canadiens. It was the best the Hawks had ever finished. But when Chicago lost the series, McLaughlin fired him anyway.
McLaughlin hired a constant stream of coaches—fourteen of them between 1926–27 and 1944–45. In 1933, he brought in Godfrey Matheson to coach after meeting him on a train. Matheson lasted two games. Conn Smythe called McLaughlin “the biggest nut I met in my entire life.” McLaughlin also fought constantly with Red Wings owner Jim Norris.
McLaughlin was married to a Broadway actress named Irene Castle. That would be like being married to someone as famous as Nicole Kidman today. He got her to design the team emblem. She did a nice job—a version of it is still used today.
McLaughlin was born in Chicago and he was a super patriot. He wanted to build a team with all American-born players, but there weren’t many, so he scoured the country. By 1937–38, eleven out of the twenty-five guys who saw action with the Hawks were born in the U.S., including Cully Dahlstrom who won the Calder Trophy that year. McLaughlin even hired an American-born coach named Bill Stewart. Stewart’s background was major league baseball. He was an umpire. It sounds incredible, but Stewart coached the team to a Stanley Cup his first year.
I think there’s a real connection between hockey and baseball. At any given moment the game can turn on the measure of one guy’s skill—the batter, pitcher, or fielder—but you still win as a team. It’s such an exciting game. It’s the only major league sport without a clock, so you are never out of it. You could be down seven runs in the bottom of the ninth and still win. And it’s way harder to play professionally than anyone can imagine. Harder to hit, harder to pitch, harder to field. So when you see it played well, it’s beautiful.
There are a lot of hockey players who could have played pro baseball—Eddie Mio, Marty McSorley, Theo Fleury. Jarome Iginla was the starting catcher on the Canadian National Junior team and Jamie Benn was MVP when the AAA champion Victoria Capitals won the provincial championships. Gordie Howe was scouted as a baseball player and used to practice with the Detroit Tigers just for fun. Not surprisingly, he could hit it out of the park.
In any case, the season after Chicago won the Cup in 1938 McLaughlin fired Stewart. The Black Hawks came in last the season after the 1938 Cup win and didn’t rebound for years. They came in last nine times between 1947 and 1957, and then everything turned around when Bobby Hull joined the team. McLaughlin died in 1944 and took his dream of icing an all-American team with him.
I think one of the great things about hockey is the sportsmanship, and you can see it in the way the Original Six stepped up during those lean years for the Hawks. The other teams didn’t want to see Chicago fail so they made a few trades with the Hawks to help out and to create some parity. In 1950 Detroit traded Al Dewsbury, Jack Stewart, Don Morrison, and Pete Babando, along with a great goaltender, Harry Lumley, for Sugar Jim Henry, Bob Goldham, Metro Prystai, and Gaye Stewart. And in 1954, the Canadiens sent Ed Litzenberger over to the Black Hawks. Litzenberger was awarded the Calder Trophy as the top rookie that year and he captained Chicago to a Stanley Cup win in 1961.
But when I think of pre–Bobby Hull Chicago, I always think of Al Rollins. In 1950–51, rookie Al Rollins split Toronto’s goaltending duties with Turk Broda, who was near the end of his Hall of Fame career. Having two goalies was unusual. Most teams ran with one for the entire season. By February 1951 Rollins had lost only four out of thirty-one games. He won the Vezina that year.
When Rollins finished the regular season with shutouts in two of the Leafs’ last three games, he was given the nod to start the playoffs. He injured his knee in the first period of the first game. Broda took over the series and the Leafs eliminated the Bruins to advance to the finals against Montreal. All five games in the 1951 final went into overtime. Broda played the first two games of the series, a win and a loss. Rollins’ knee was better so he took over and won all three final games. The Cup-winning goal in Game Five was scored by a happy-go-lucky kid named Bill Barilko. Barilko’s plane went missing on a fishing trip in Northern Ontario that summer. The Leafs didn’t win another Cup until 1962, the year the wrecked plane was discovered. It became kind of a Leafs superstition.
But Rollins was with the Leafs only one more season. He started 1952–53 as a Hawk. So Rollins went from winning a Stanley Cup and a Vezina with the best team in the league to trying to win games for the worst team in the league. Despite the fact Chicago won only twelve games in 1953–54, Rollins was awarded the Hart that season in spite of Chicago’s last-place finish. Three of those wins were shutouts. At one point he said he faced more breakaways in a game against Chicago than in a practice in Toronto. But playing in Chicago was really tough for him because he hated losing. It wore on him. He was a team player. Rollins, along with Brooklyn Americans’ star player, “Cowboy” Tom Anderson, are the only two Hart Trophy winners prior to 2002 not in the Hall of Fame.
The hockey world is such a small one. Al’s son Jerry was my teammate on the first professio
nal team I played for, the Indianapolis Racers. Jerry was a tough defenseman. At training camp in 1978 our coach Pat “Whitey” Stapleton told Jerry, “Go out and hit Gretzky, lay it on him and see how he responds.” So Jerry chased me all over the ice. Thank God he didn’t catch me. Later he said, “Man, you evaporated out there. You just disappeared on me.”
Six
THE WINGS
Pretty much everything is connected to everything else in the history of the NHL. I was lucky enough to play with guys who were in the league in the 50s and 60s—and even Gordie Howe, whose career started in the 40s. I am just one guy, and I was on the ice with players who had skated in eight different decades. Through coaches and teammates and guys on other teams I found a reason to talk to, I made connections to many more. Every player does. Recently, the sons of the guys who were in the league with me have been showing up in the NHL. That’s just one more way that the stories of our game come together.
Another way we are all connected is through the buildings we played in. A lot of the old barns are gone now, of course, but I feel especially lucky that I got to play one game in the Olympia in Detroit. If the NHL and the WHA had merged a year later, I would never have had that chance. The last game at the Old Red Barn, as it was called, was in December 1979—and the Oilers were the visiting team on November 7 that year. (By coincidence, our first home game in Edmonton was against Detroit.) I was cutting it close, but I got to skate out onto the ice I had imagined when I was a kid in the backyard. I grew up pretty close to Toronto, so I had the opportunity to see a few Leafs and Marlies games at Maple Leaf Gardens, but the first time I ever saw the Olympia was the night I played there. It was kind of overpowering, getting the opportunity to play in a place I had grown up dreaming about. It’s one of the things I’ll never forget about my career.
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