The Flyers haven’t won another Cup since then (though Pat Quinn coached them to the final in 1980, and Eric Lindros brought them close again in 1997). But they have become one of the most respected teams in the league. Since 1967, only the Montreal Canadiens have won a higher percentage of their games than the Flyers. And Bobby Clarke has been a huge part of that history of success. He holds franchise records for most games played, most playoff games played, most points, most playoff points, best plus/minus, and many others. He is also fourth all-time in penalty minutes. He played in eight All-Star games, won the Hart Trophy (most valuable player) three times, as well as the Selke Trophy (top defensive forward), the Ted Lindsay Award (formerly the Lester B. Pearson Award, given to the top regular-season player as voted by other players), and many more.
Just as importantly, when Clarke retired, he stepped right into management, and has done as much to steer the Flyers over their impressive history as anyone. Some players are defined by their teams, but the Flyers have definitely been defined by Bobby Clarke.
• • •
I think the reason Ed Snider and I got along so well was that we wanted to beat each other. I had so much fun with him over the years, especially after I retired. He got a real kick out of talking about the Flyers with me because I know so much of their history.
He was good friends with David Foster, the music producer, and I’ve known David since 1979. He once invited Janet and me to a dinner at Christmastime along with Ed and his wife and some of David’s other friends. David loves to get on the piano and sing, and everyone joins in. David always says, “I can make anyone sound good—except Wayne.” Anyway, at this dinner we were all singing when David shook his head and said, “I didn’t think it was possible, but Ed’s worse than Wayne.”
Ed Snider died this past spring. It was a sad day for hockey. He made such a great contribution to the Flyers and to the league. I remember a conversation we had where he summed up the three things that had changed the franchise. Number one was that they went into the community and started programs for kids to play youth hockey. Number two was when they lost to St. Louis and then made the team tougher. And then Ed said, “Number three, Wayne, was when we drafted a guy named Bob Clarke.”
Twenty-Four
THE WORLD HOCKEY ASSOCIATION
Looking back now, the World Hockey Association probably looks pretty crazy. The franchises that came and went, the wild hair and the wild fights—it was pretty different from the game we know today, and the game that came before it.
But I honestly think the WHA was good for hockey. For one thing, the on-ice product was actually surprisingly good. Any league with stars like Bobby Hull, Dave Keon, Gordie Howe, and Gerry Cheevers is a pretty serious league. The WHA players hung in there with the Russians in 1974, and whenever a WHA team squared off with an NHL team in an exhibition game, they more than held their own.
Part of that was a result of the WHA’s openness to European players and the style of play they brought with them, and part of it was the fact that by raiding junior teams they were injecting youth into their lineups. Think of the impact that some eighteen-year-olds have in the NHL today. That should give some idea of the effect that guys like Mike Gartner, Rod Langway, Mark Messier, and Mark Howe had in the WHA as teenagers. Youth wasn’t really part of the game before then.
The other benefit to the game was that it opened up a lot of new jobs for players and raised their salaries. The fact is, I wouldn’t have had a job playing hockey at the age of seventeen if it hadn’t been for the new league.
A lot of those teams had great fans. People in Winnipeg, Quebec City, Edmonton, and Hartford knew hockey. Those were great rinks to play in. Even Cincinnati and Indianapolis were close enough to Detroit and Chicago that fans knew the game and appreciated it. Now, until the mid-80s, hockey wasn’t widely broadcast on television in the United States, so if you didn’t grow up with hockey you probably didn’t know what was going on at ice level. Even when the Atlanta Thrashers started up in the 1990s, people used to joke that fans would cheer whenever a team iced the puck. But who can blame them? If you’ve never seen a hockey game, icing probably looks like a great idea. And it’s true that we saw some crazy things in places like Birmingham, where fighting seemed to be a big part of the Bulls’ marketing. But on the whole, hockey fans should be glad the WHA was there when it was.
• • •
The WHA started up in 1971, with its first games played in October 1972. The twelve-team hockey league was the idea of American promoters Dennis Murphy and Gary Davidson, both from California. They’d seen it done in 1960, when the American Football League was formed to take on the NFL, and were directly involved in the American Basketball Association when it took on the NBA in 1967. Now they wanted to do the same with hockey, but they knew nothing about hockey. They hadn’t even seen a game. So they recruited Wild Bill Hunter to help them out.
Hunter was the president of Edmonton’s junior team, the Oil Kings. Before that he founded the Western Canada Junior Hockey League, which became the WHL. (Juniors now call it “the Dub,” for W.) Because Hunter knew a lot of people in the hockey world, he traveled all over North America looking for investors to buy franchises for $25,000 each. One of his first investors was Ben Hatskin, who’d played football for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and won two Grey Cups in 1939 and 1941. (In 1967, during the NHL expansion, Hatskin had taken a run at a franchise, but then-president Clarence Campbell told him he’d need a sixteen-thousand-seat rink and a $2 million entry fee. Hatskin thought that was too steep.)
In order to bring in good players (and the fans who would follow), the fledgling WHA needed to begin with stars. And fortunately for them, the NHL itself paved the way. Although average NHL salaries were competitive with those in other pro sports, top hockey stars were paid less than top stars in baseball and basketball. So the WHA owners figured they’d be able to recruit a few great players from the NHL—and they were right. By 1972–73, the WHA’s first season, sixty-seven players had jumped from the NHL.
• • •
But the WHA still needed a big name. Gordie Howe was retired, and there were really only a handful of active players in hockey everybody knew: players like Phil Esposito, Bobby Orr, Bobby Clarke, and Bobby Hull. The trouble was that most of them were tied up in contracts. Except the Chicago Black Hawks’ Bobby Hull. At thirty-three, he was still in really good shape with many good years ahead. And he was a huge hockey star.
Bobby Hull had already scored 604 NHL goals. Only Gordie Howe had scored more. Hull had led the league in goals seven out of ten years in the 1960s. And he had one of the hardest slap shots in the history of hockey, shooting the puck at 120 miles per hour. Who does that? No one. Shea Weber can shoot the puck hard enough to go right through the mesh (which he did at the 2010 Olympics against Germany) and he has never been clocked at anywhere near 120, even at the All-Star game, where he is allowed a running start and a stiffer stick than he uses in real games. Bernie Parent says there were times when Bobby’s shot would rebound so hard off the glass or the end boards that his own goalie would have to make the save. He used to amuse teammates by firing pucks over the boards and down the tunnels and trying to break the glass doors of the old Chicago Stadium.
Ben Hatskin offered Bobby $250,000 a year for five years with his new Winnipeg franchise, plus another $100,000 a year to coach or manage for five years after that. Bobby said no thanks. He wanted to stay in Chicago. He really liked Chicago and had played there for fifteen years. But he was having problems negotiating his contract with Bill Wirtz. Attendance was dropping at Black Hawks games. Fans could watch the home games of the White Sox and Cubs, the Bears, and the Bulls on television, but not the Black Hawks. Even though Hawks games had been on TV as early as the 1940s—certainly before Hockey Night in Canada—Wirtz refused to televise most of his home games because he thought it would mean fewer ticket sales. (Later, when Chicago did decide to
air their home games, their fan base grew. So did their crowds at the arena.) In any case, he was in no mood to open the bank for Hull.
Hatskin continued to call Bobby’s agent, Harvey Weinberg. Finally, just to get Ben off his back, Bobby said he thought the $250,000 a year for five years was fine, but that he wanted a million-dollar signing bonus up front. He thought it would never fly because no one had ever been paid that much to play any sport, let alone get it up front.
Hatskin said yes. To acquire a star of Bobby’s caliber would give the WHA the instant credibility it needed, so each of the first ten owners kicked in $100,000 and raised the million. It was a huge deal in hockey, one of the biggest ever.
When it came out that Bobby was going over to the WHA, Bill’s father, Arthur Wirtz, who was still the chairman of the Hawks, sent over a contract for $1,250,000. But Bobby says he told him to “stick it where the sun don’t shine.”
The WHA owners cost the NHL owners a lot of money and changed the game forever. For the first time since the Western Hockey League folded in 1926, a rival league had the power to compete with the NHL for elite players.
Legal challenges arose involving the reserve clause in NHL contracts, which restricted a player’s movement for the rest of his life. But the courts ruled that once a player’s contract was finished (and several NHL players were on single-season contracts in 1972), a player was free to sign with the team that held his rights—in either league.
This was the beginning of multiyear deals to keep a player’s rights. Several NHL stars followed Bobby into the WHA, including goalies Gerry Cheevers from Boston and Bernie Parent from Toronto, defensemen Ted Green and J.C. Tremblay, and an exciting young center named Derek Sanderson.
Before the WHA, the players had no voice. The teams called the shots because there was no one else to negotiate with. That’s why you always hear the story about Glenn Hall threatening to take a year off to paint his barn instead. (It turned out that there was no barn—that was just Glenn negotiating.) The players had no power at all. It was the WHA that finally gave them some bargaining power.
• • •
Meanwhile, the NHL thought that if they ignored the WHA it would go away. Consider the case of Tom Webster.
Webster had played pretty well in Detroit, and then got traded to the California Golden Seals. Then, when Webster’s Seals contract was up, Howard Baldwin, part owner of the WHA’s New England Whalers, offered him a three-year deal for over $50,000 a year guaranteed. At the time, it was a lot of money—Tom was making only $12,000 a year with the Seals. So he called Finley and said, “The WHA has drafted me and offered me a three-year contract and I’m considering taking it.”
Finley said, “Well, son”—if he liked you he called you son—“why don’t you fly down and meet me here in Chicago?”
Webster jumped on a plane, flew into Chicago, went to Finley’s office, and showed him the contract.
Finley read it over. “Well, son, listen, it’s a very good offer. I don’t blame you for looking at it, but you know what? I’ve had experience with this kind of stuff in baseball. Do you remember the Pasquels?”
Webster said he didn’t.
What Finley was talking about was a Mexican league. In 1946, Jorge Pasquel brought major leaguers to Mexico. He offered them huge contracts. Some big names like Brooklyn Dodgers catcher Mickey Owen and Giants second baseman George Hausmann packed up and headed to Mexico to earn top dollar. Altogether, twenty-seven major leaguers moved down to Mexico. But after just one year, it all started to come apart when the league couldn’t pay some of the players. So they headed home. And of course when they came back, the money was much, much less than what they’d been making before they left.
Finley asked, “How much are you making now?”
“Well, last year you paid me $12,000.”
“I think I’ll pay you $11,000 to come back and play for me next year.”
“Sir, this is a legitimate contract here. I’m not trying to pull any punches, or lie to you, or B.S. you . . .”
“Yeah, I understand that. But I told you, I had this experience. Eleven thousand now, much less if you have to come back.”
Webster stood up. “Thank you very much, sir, but I’m going over to the WHA.”
• • •
After Bobby Hull went to Winnipeg and others began to follow, NHL general managers started calling their star players and offering to raise their salaries. Agents weren’t above taking advantage. In August 1975, when Bobby Orr’s contract with the Boston Bruins was up at the end of the coming season, his agent, Alan Eagleson, began negotiating with the Bruins. But the Bruins were lowballing, so Eagleson went looking for other opportunities. The president of the WHA’s Minnesota Fighting Saints, Wayne Belisle, offered Bobby a multimillion-dollar contract with a $1 million signing bonus. Eagleson turned it down. He was just looking for leverage.
But there were other legends of the game who did make the jump to the new league. Dave Keon played in the WHA, as did Frank Mahovlich, Paul Henderson, and Kent Nilsson. And then there was Gordie Howe, who came out of retirement to play with his sons.
I was at a 2015 Kinsmen dinner in Saskatoon honoring Gordie Howe when Mark told a story about him at that first training camp. He said he remembered Gordie huffing and puffing and turning fifteen shades of purple. The boys thought he was going to have a heart attack. But Mark said that his dad had incredible stamina: a week later they couldn’t keep up with him. And the special part, he added, was seeing bodies flying around his dad, even in practice. (Terry O’Malley, who played on three Canadian Olympic hockey teams, was once talking with Danny O’Shea, a checker who played against Gordie in Minnesota. Terry said, “It’s amazing he can play at such an age.” And Danny replied, “I could play at fifty too if I had fifteen feet on each side of me whenever I got the puck.”)
Terry Ruskowski was drafted by the Black Hawks but signed with the Houston Aeros instead because Gordie was there. Just before playoffs they were playing scrimmage, and although Terry knew he shouldn’t do it, he put the puck between Gordie’s legs and stepped around him. Gordie turned and rapped Terry with his stick right above the eye. Cut him for about four or five stitches. There was blood all over the place, and the trainer had to run out with a towel. Gordie tapped his stick on Terry’s pants in a friendly way and said, “Hey, sorry about that, kid.” And then in a quiet voice, he added, “Don’t ever make me look bad.”
Gordie always wanted to be the best. He hated to lose. And he was the ultimate teammate. In Houston he would fight guys, make plays, score goals. Everyone knew that when the game was on the line you could sit back because Gordie would be taking over.
Other young guys, like Morris Lukowich, whose brother Ed is a former world curling champion, were offered similar contracts from both leagues, but like Terry, Morris chose the WHA because of Gordie.
Gordie was interested in helping younger guys, but he demanded respect and good manners. Morris would sit beside him in the dressing room and on the bench just because he loved being near him. When Gordie would get ready to go on for his shift he’d have sweat pouring off him, but instead of using his own sweater, he’d always lean to his right and wipe his forehead on the jersey of the guy next to him. Morris told me that the first time Gordie did it to him, he thought, “Wow! I’m hitting the big time!”
If Gordie was tired between periods, he’d sit back in his stall and sleep through intermission, or he’d open up his fan mail, read it, sign it, and hand one of the younger players the envelope to lick it. Morris says he licked so much glue that he’d be dizzy going out for the next period.
In 1978–79, the final season of the WHA, I was seventeen years old. It was my first season of pro hockey and I was just thrilled to be there. I was having a pretty good year with the Edmonton Oilers. We finished in first place, and I was third in the scoring race and starting to find my way. I hadn’t expect
ed to get picked for the three-game All-Star series against the HC Dynamo Moscow, a pro team from Russia, but Edmonton was hosting, so that probably helped get me on the team.
Jacques Demers, who’d go on to coach in the NHL for fourteen years and win a Stanley Cup with the Canadiens in 1993, was the assistant coach of the All-Star team. In those days everything was run so differently. The team wasn’t put together by the media or a panel. I think Jacques pretty much handpicked the players himself. So when he called me, I knew it was a great honor.
I went down to the locker room one day ahead of our first game thinking, “If I dress tomorrow, great. If I don’t, I’m seventeen, I understand.”
The trainer told me, “Jacques Demers wants to see you.”
I walked into his office. Gordie Howe and Mark Howe were there too. I’d already developed a friendship with Gordie, but I was still really nervous.
Demers said, “You’re gonna center Mark and Gordie.”
I was kind of shocked. I thought, “Oh my gosh, I’m playing—and I’m playing with Gordie Howe.”
We practiced, and the next day we had a light skate. When we got to the arena that night before the game I was really scared.
I was sitting in my stall, and at one point I turned to Gordie to ask him a question, but his eyes were closed. He was having a nap.
“Gordie? Gordie, I’m really nervous about this game.”
He opened one eye, looked at me, and said, “So am I.”
In the end, we won 4–2 and our line had eight points. But for me the real thrill was just lining up for the faceoff beside Mr. Hockey.
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