One thing I remember about Bill was his enthusiastic way of celebrating a goal—it was known in the media as the “Goldie Shuffle.” Players were a little more conservative in the way they celebrated back then, and even now guys get called out for celebrating too enthusiastically. But I don’t blame them. It’s so hard to score in today’s NHL. It’s hard to score twenty goals now, never mind forty or fifty. When a guy scores a goal, I love to see that excitement and jubilation.
I got to know Goldie a little when I went to Edmonton. He didn’t play much that year, due to injuries. And one thing that all hockey players have in common is that we all get old. There was a group of older guys on that team—Ace Bailey, Paul Shmyr, Dave Dryden, Bill Flett. They were all great to me. Because Goldie was a little banged up, I got to know him more away from the ice than at the rink, and he was a great guy. He called me Kid. That kind of thing means a lot to a rookie.
• • •
The North Stars’ coach was a fiery character. You never knew what Wren Blair was going to do. People in Minnesota weren’t familiar with professional hockey, and Blair felt he had to coach the fans as much as the players. If the team was bungling a power play, he’d stand on the bench or the boards, turn toward the crowd, and wave his hands and yell at the fans to boo his players.
Blair was famous for signing Bobby Orr. In 1959–60 Wren was managing the Kingston Frontenacs of the Eastern Professional Hockey League (EPHL), a Bruins-affiliated team. Harold “Baldy” Cotton, who was scouting for the Bruins (and had been involved with the NHL since playing left wing with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1925), saw Bobby playing with his bantam team in Parry Sound. At that time Boston was building up its farm system and starting to get its hands on some young players. Cotton went to Lynn Patrick and said, “You gotta see this kid.” So a group of them, including Blair, drove up to Gananoque, Ontario, to watch Bobby Orr, who had just turned thirteen, take over the ice for a full sixty minutes. Scotty Bowman, who was scouting for the Canadiens, was there that night too. He thought Bobby was so small that it was hard to figure out how good he’d be, but he also saw that Bobby had the puck the whole night.
Scotty sent a report to Ken Reardon, a former Montreal defenseman who went on to scout, manage minor-league affiliates, and become team vice-president. He told Ken, “You know, Bobby could really move and he’ll be ready to play junior in a year.” But Bobby wasn’t even in high school, so Reardon replied, “We’re not moving guys in public school.” (In fairness to Reardon, it is absolutely unheard-of for a kid in grade eight to play junior hockey. But Bobby did it.)
Blair was the point man assigned to get Bobby. In the days before the draft, NHL teams developed young players through affiliated amateur teams. That meant that they could own a kid’s rights from the time he was fourteen. At that age, a player would be invited to sign what was called a C card. Most kids couldn’t wait to sign those cards because it guaranteed that at least one of the six teams was going to take a really good look at you. But Bobby’s parents were in no rush to sign anything—they wanted him to have as many options as possible. So Blair had his work cut out for him to bring them around.
He got the Bruins to sponsor Bobby’s Parry Sound team for $1,000 a year. Eventually he built up enough trust with the family that, in 1962, Bobby’s parents signed his C card. Bobby was thrilled. In return, the Orr family got their house stuccoed, his dad got a car, and Bobby got $1,000 cash. He would be playing for the Oshawa Generals, a team Blair had all but built himself. He had also been GM of the world champion Whitby Dunlops. So he knew what he was doing when he helped build the North Stars.
• • •
In 1963, the NHL began to phase out team sponsorship, and held its first amateur draft of sixteen-year-olds. By 1969 the draft was universal and there were no more protected junior players. So by the time I was Bobby’s age, the C cards were gone. But you had to be twenty to be drafted to play pro. At sixteen, I was an underage junior in Sault Ste. Marie.
I really got along with my coach, Muzz MacPherson, who was a great guy. When Muzz left he was replaced by Paul Theriault. Paul was very big on positional hockey, which is a very good way to develop players. In fact, when he was coaching for Oshawa and Marty McSorley was with the Belleville Bulls in 1981–82, Marty was playing in an All-Star game and Paul was his coach. He was really good to Marty and taught him a ton. Marty just loved him.
But without sounding egotistical, I didn’t need to start with the basics. I’d been studying hockey all my life. When I was seven years old and watching Hockey Night in Canada with my dad, he handed me a piece of foolscap and a pen. He told me to follow the puck on the paper without looking down. It developed my peripheral vision, which in turn helped me develop a more creative approach. I knew where guys were, so I could go where the puck was going to be. That’s why Paul Theriault’s style of coaching didn’t really work for me. I started thinking about going pro, but the NHL didn’t draft underage juniors.
My agent, Gus Badali, called the WHA and got me an offer for $80,000 from John Bassett with the Birmingham Bulls. John was building a team full of great young guys like Rick Vaive, Michel Goulet, Craig Hartsburg, and Rob Ramage—a collection of future NHL captains, Team Canada players, and Hall of Famers. Paul Henderson was their veteran. I would have loved to play with those guys, but Gus thought the offer was too low. And then he got me an offer from Hartford to play with Gordie Howe for $200,000. That would have been a dream come true, but they pulled it back. The WHA owners were all hoping their teams would fold into the NHL, and since I was underage, they thought I might be out of it. I believe everything happens for a reason.
Bassett recommended me to his friend Nelson Skalbania, a wealthy real estate developer from Vancouver who was starting to invest in sports teams. Nelson owned two WHA teams. In 1976 he bought the Edmonton Oilers but then sold them to Peter Pocklington the next year. Then he bought the Indianapolis Racers on speculation that the WHA would merge with the NHL. He wanted to pump up the value of the league, and had decided that his best bet was to buy a good underage junior. That way, the NHL would have to come to the WHA, either to take the teams in or to keep plugging them with money to get the underage kids.
Nelson called my mom and dad in June 1978, and along with Gus, we flew out to Vancouver on Nelson’s private plane. I was seventeen, too young for the NHL, but I really wanted to play professional hockey. As soon as we got there Nelson asked me to go for a run with him. I think it was his way of testing my endurance.
Starting all the way back when I was a kid, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, I didn’t just play hockey. I used to look forward to the summertime because I loved lacrosse and track and field too. I was a huge track and field guy. Even at ten I was running long distance, eight hundred meters, fifteen hundred meters, cross-country. I trained hard every day and I loved it.
We used to drive out to my grandmother’s farm every Sunday, and the first thing I’d do is put my running shoes on and take off along the country roads. I’d run for miles and miles. I wasn’t doing it to become a hockey player, but it built up my endurance and oxygen intake, or VO2. So did playing box lacrosse (that is, indoor lacrosse). We’d play four games on a Saturday and then three games the next day. I played almost each entire game, four fifteen-minute quarters. That’s like seven hours of lacrosse each weekend.
Years later, when I was with the Oilers, Jari Kurri always had the highest VO2, next to Paul Coffey, and Messier was always ridiculously fit. It was just a part of their makeup and a result of their hard work and training. But the difference was my heart recovery time. They took twice as long to recover. I could go, say, one minute and be completely recovered in ten seconds, ready to go back on the ice at a high level, whereas Jari and Paul might take twenty seconds. That was my strength.
Back in ’84 when I got eight points against Minnesota, after the second period Glen Sather came in and said, “When you wanna go on the ic
e, just go. The door’s open.” It was the only time in my career that something like that ever happened. Glen always played me a ton, but that was only time a coach said, “Just go.” So in the third period of that game I gave myself a four-minute shift.
Athletes today are incredibly conditioned. When I see defensemen playing thirty-minute games it’s unbelievable. I can remember Paul Coffey and Kevin Lowe playing twenty-seven minutes. That’s nine minutes a period. You’ve got to be in immaculate shape to do that. Duncan Keith plays twenty-five to thirty minutes every single game. That’s amazing to me.
I was a centerman who played twenty-one minutes a game. Again, a lot of minutes. Seven minutes a period. That’s a lot of hockey. If I played seven, Mark Messier was playing seven, and the third and fourth guys might be splitting six. But I see some of these centermen today who can play eight and a half minutes in a period. That may not sound like a big difference, but every additional minute on the ice is one less minute of recovery. It catches up to you quickly. The shape these guys are in is remarkable.
Back in 1978, all those years of playing a lot of hockey and skating and running and lacrosse had built up my endurance to a high, high level. So when Nelson and I went for that six-mile run and I came back fresh, I think it impressed him.
That month we signed a personal services contract that I handwrote as he dictated it to me on his private plane. It was for four years, $550,000 total, with a signing bonus of $250,000. If the merger happened and the NHL refused underage players, I could keep any money I’d already received. It was a good deal, and I was thrilled with the offer.
• • •
Something most people don’t know is that even though I signed that contract with Nelson and went on to play with the Oilers in the WHA, when the league folded into the NHL I came close to going back into the draft. That’s because at first the NHL owners couldn’t agree on a deal to take in the WHA teams.
So they called in Lou Nanne, the longtime Minnesota North Stars GM, to meet with the owners on Chicago Black Hawks owner Bill Wirtz’s yacht in Florida and hammer out a deal. Nanne was a legend. He was a Canadian-born American who hung in with North Stars for a long time. If it weren’t for him, the team would have moved to Dallas a lot sooner.
Lou structured the proposal so that each WHA team could keep two players and two goalies, but that the rest of the players would be dispersed throughout the league. And underage players, like me, who’d signed with the WHA but weren’t yet NHL-draft eligible, would have to go back into the draft when we came of age. That meant Edmonton wouldn’t be able to protect me.
Then Frank Griffiths, who owned the Vancouver Canucks, stepped up and said that unless I was allowed to stay in Edmonton, he wouldn’t vote for the deal. Sometimes NHL owners get a bad rap, but I think that showed the generosity and the consideration of a man like Griffiths.
• • •
When Minnesota started out, it wasn’t a great defensive team. But by 1978–79, when Lou Nanne took over as GM from Blair, he hired Glen Sonmor, a former tough guy, as coach. Nanne thought he was the best coach the North Stars ever had. Sonmor put his heart and soul into the game.
In 1978 Lou drafted Bobby Smith, Steve Payne, Curt Giles, and Steve Christoff. This was a strong core group of players. And then, when the Cleveland Barons folded and joined the Minnesota North Stars that same year, they got some more key guys, including Gilles Meloche in goal.
Minnesota was already strong up the center, and then in 1979 they drafted Neal Broten, who, along with Christoff, was part of the 1980 Miracle on Ice win. Neal played seventeen years and 1,235 games in the NHL and scored more than a thousand points including playoffs.
The Stars drafted Craig Hartsburg with their first pick (sixth overall) in 1979. Hartsburg was terrific. I played with him in the Soo in 1977–78. (He’d play with Minnesota for the next ten years. And if Craig hadn’t had such bad luck with injuries to his knees, groin, back, and hip, he might have been another Bobby Orr.) Although they didn’t draft Dino Ciccarelli, they were smart enough to sign him as a free agent when he went undrafted in 1979.
In 1980, Sonmor made history when the North Stars faced off against a Flyers team coached by Pat Quinn. As a young player, Quinn had faced a choice between playing minor-league hockey and accepting a scholarship. He had asked a high school phys-ed teacher in his hometown of Hamilton for some advice. The teacher was Glen Sonmor. He told Quinn to take the scholarship.
Quinn went on to have solid career as a bruising defenseman (and ended up captaining the expansion Atlanta Flames), then quickly became one of the best coaches in the league, winning the Jack Adams Trophy for coach of the year in 1980. Part of what he did to earn that honor was coach the Flyers to the longest unbeaten streak in North American sports history—thirty-five games. That streak ended in Minnesota in front of the largest crowd the North Stars had ever drawn. The North Stars smoked the Flyers 7–1 to keep a twelve-game home unbeaten streak of their own going. The teams met again in the semifinals. This time Quinn’s Flyers had their revenge, and took the series 4–1.
By 1981 they made another solid run for the Cup. In the history of the club, Minnesota had never beaten Boston at the Garden. But on February 26, 1981, Glen Sonmor took Lou Nanne aside and said, “Lou, I think we gotta make a statement here and show them what we’re made of.” When Nanne agreed, Sonmor told the team, “We’re going to fight every one of them every time they look at us.”
By the end of the game, Minnesota had five guys left on the bench and Boston had six. They set the NHL record in penalty minutes. It seemed to set the table for the playoffs. Minnesota beat Boston and then they beat Buffalo. The North Stars then came across Calgary, who had a very good team, and they put the Flames out, which set them up in the finals against the defending-champion New York Islanders. They lost the first two games on Long Island, but started out playing well in Game Three. The Islanders’ Butch Goring recorded a hat trick, including two goals right after Minnesota power plays, and it turned the tide. The Islanders took the game 7–5 and won the series in five games. But no one was going to beat New York that year. The Isles lost just three games in the four series they played.
• • •
Norm Green already had a history of moving hockey teams when he bought the North Stars from George and Norman Gund in the early 1990s. He had bought the Atlanta Flames in 1979 and moved them to Calgary, and he was still a part owner when they won the Cup in 1989. But still, it was a shock when he decided to move the North Stars to Dallas in 1993, not even two years after the team had made a Cinderella run to the final, where they had the misfortune of running into Mario Lemieux.
Green had his reasons, of course. The Met Center, the North Stars’ rink, was notoriously cold and aging—though players loved it because the ice there was the best in the league. Green claimed to be losing money, and local government was doing little to help make staying look more viable. Green wanted to move the team to Los Angeles, but the NHL already had plans to partner with Disney in Anaheim. Green’s next option was Dallas.
At the North Stars’ last game, fans were carrying signs blaming Norm Green and making their feelings about him pretty clear. Others were tearing up the seats, either to take them as souvenirs or throw them. Today there is an Ikea where the Met Center used to be, but the North Stars’ legacy has not been erased. Hall of Famer J.P. Parise was on the North Stars’ roster in their first season. His son Zach was born there and has gone on to stardom in the league—now playing for the Minnesota Wild, who joined the league in 2000–01 as part of the three-year process of expansion that included Nashville in 1998–99, Atlanta (now Winnipeg) in 1999–2000, and Columbus and Minnesota in 2000–01. It’s ironic that, while the Minnesota Sports and Facilities Commission wouldn’t spend $15 million to keep the team, it took $285 million to bring the NHL back.
But Minnesota fans have not forgotten their first team, and the Stars haven’t f
orgotten their roots either. In 1991, they created a patch to commemorate their twenty-fifth anniversary. It featured Bill Goldsworthy in the original green sweater facing off against Mike Modano in what became Dallas black.
Twenty-One
THE OAKLAND SEALS
Don Cherry has a lot of great Bobby Orr stories. But there is one he calls the greatest. Bobby was killing a penalty in Oakland one night, ragging the puck for over a minute, circling back behind his own net as no one else could do. There was no way the Golden Seals were going to touch the puck.
But then Bobby saw an opening, and he was gone, up the right wing and in on goalie Gary Smith (who I would later play with). He tried to go top corner on his backhand, but Smith got a piece of it. He didn’t catch it cleanly though, and the puck squirted up. By this time, Bobby’s momentum was carrying him around the net. But he saw the rebound sort of hanging there, just under the crossbar, so he tapped it out of midair as he skated by. According to Cherry, it was the only time in hockey history that both teams have given a standing ovation.
There is a reason there aren’t more standing ovations like that. Hockey players are taught to never give up. You may be behind in the game, but anything can happen out there. I am not blaming those Seals players. I’m sure I would have been impressed too. But if you’re standing up to cheer the other team, that’s not a good sign. You’re probably not going to win a lot of hockey games.
Unfortunately, the Seals (or the Golden Seals, as they were called by the time Bobby scored that goal) didn’t win a lot of hockey games. They seemed to have problems from the very beginning, and even though they had some solid players on the roster, they never did manage to establish the game in the Bay Area.
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