• • •
I remember how well guys like Paul Shmyr, Rob Ramage, Morris Lukowich, Robbie Ftorek, and Mike Gartner played on that 1979 All-Star team. And I got to spend four days with Dave Keon, the great Maple Leafs captain.
Keon had been a Junior B player at St. Michael’s College in Toronto, where he was coached by Father David Bauer, who founded the Canadian men’s national Olympic team. He also happened to be the brother of future Hall of Famer Bobby Bauer, of the Bruins’ Kraut Line. At a practice one day, Father Bauer began a backward-skating checking drill. But Keon couldn’t do it. He was a river skater—a beautiful skater, but not a checker. Father Bauer wasn’t letting him off the hook.
Finally Keon said, “I’m not doing this anymore. I’m done.”
They had a real argument, and Father Bauer kicked him off the ice and marched him into the dorm. When they got there, Father Bauer said, “I’ll tell you what. Let’s wrestle, and if I pin you, you practice my checking drills. If you win, you don’t have to.”
Keon agreed and they went at it. Father Bauer won, and Dave Keon went on to become one of the great two-way players in the game. (When he played for the Leafs, he was checking Gordie Howe one time and had him in the corner. He wasn’t riding Gordie or anything, but he was controlling his space, and then pinned him. Finally Gordie had enough. He turned back to him and said, “Look, kid, remember—the elbows come back fast.”)
Everybody always talks about good scorers or good defensive rushers, but good checkers get kind of overlooked. The fundamental behind a great check is that you close the distance between you and the player with the puck. You have an angle, your head is up, you’re looking at his chest, and when he stops and changes direction you have to be able to stop and recover and then close the gap again. That’s the kind of checking that Father Bauer introduced. That’s how elite defenseman can play almost half the game. They’re not chasing guys around the ice. They’re just maintaining their gap.
So playing with Keon was my link to Father Bauer and the Kraut Line. I was always grateful that Jacques Demers gave me that opportunity.
• • •
Several established NHL stars moved over to WHA teams in those first few seasons: Pat Stapleton from Chicago; Marc Tardif, Réjean Houle, and Frank Mahovlich from Montreal; and Paul Henderson from Toronto. The WHA also took on good junior players who were too young to sign with NHL teams. I’ve already talked about how you had to be twenty to qualify for the NHL draft. So when you were seventeen, eighteen, nineteen and someone offered to pay you to play pro hockey, it was hard to say no. Nelson Skalbania, the owner of the Indianapolis Racers, signed me in June 1978. He signed Mark Messier later the same year.
I got to Indianapolis at the end of August because that’s when school started. One of the deals I’d made with my dad when I turned pro at seventeen was that I would go to school until I turned eighteen. So I signed up for night school twice a week. Broad Ripple High. David Letterman went there. I made a lot of friends my age, which was good because the guys on the team were much older. One of them even had a baby.
Fridays before hockey season, our goalie Eddie Mio and winger Peter Driscoll would roll up to the Steak ’n Shake in Peter’s new baby-blue Biarritz Cadillac. It was his pride and joy. Drisc and Eddie looked like Starsky and Hutch. Drisc had a black shag and wore long, pointy collars and an Indian red leather jacket. He was a big, rugged guy who could really play. The season before (1977–78) he had fifty-six points, forty-six with Indianapolis and ten with Quebec. But he was also our tough guy in Indianapolis. Peter’s nickname was Grenade because he didn’t have the softest hands and tended to shoot wide. But you had to be careful about calling him that. He had to be in a certain mood. Eddie was blond with a cool mustache and sideburns. He always wore a light calf-leather jacket and a black T-shirt with bell-bottom jeans. Years later he told me that the jacket was actually made of plastic because he couldn’t afford the real deal. Didn’t matter, he still looked sharp.
Our GM and coach, Pat Stapleton—or “Whitey,” as everyone called him—had told Peter and Eddie, “Hey, there’s a kid coming up, Wayne Gretzky. He’s going to be billeted right around the corner from you guys, so check in with him once in a while until the season starts.”
That’s why the two of them would drive up to the Steak ’n Shake on Friday nights, where I’d be hanging out with the kids from school. They’d call out, “Hey, everything okay?” I’d wave at them. “Yeah.” And they’d drive off.
I wasn’t a hit in Indianapolis. I remember my first mall signing. Three people showed up. Eight games in, Drisc and Eddie and I were on a plane to Canada. We’d been traded. Peter Driscoll was a key player in the trade because it gave Edmonton a power winger they didn’t have. Edmonton had Dave Semenko, who could fight anybody. He could play hockey too, but he wasn’t a power winger like Peter. The Oilers were also looking for a goalie. They had Dave Dryden, but he was getting older and they wanted another guy to back him, so they went after Eddie Mio. It was a package deal: three players for a final price tag of $400,000.
When we got off the ice after practice in Indianapolis, we were told to grab some basics and get on a plane. So we had maybe two suitcases each. We were on this little Learjet 25, the three of us with our hockey equipment. Those small Lears don’t have any undercarriages. They’re basically puddle jumpers.
We were squeezed in. Eddie and Peter were sitting on their equipment. We were all in a daze. I was a very nervous flier, but the guys didn’t know it, so they told me to sit at the back on a little jump seat. Eddie looked over and saw me shaking pretty bad. He opened the cooler and handed me a sandwich and a beer. He said, “It’s okay, kid, I don’t think there’s any air police going to check your ID.”
We weren’t even sure where we were going. Maybe Edmonton, maybe Winnipeg. Still, I’d known the trade was coming. A few days earlier, after a game against the Jets, their stick boy had come up to me and said, “Bobby Hull wants to talk to you.” So I went to dinner with Bobby. He said, “Would you like to play in Winnipeg for the Jets? They’re gonna trade you.” He told me that they were going after me and our coach, Pat Stapleton. So there I am, seventeen years old, and Bobby Hull is asking me if I want to play with him. I said, “Wow! Okay, sure.”
The day after that was a Monday. We went home, and the Racers’ owner, Nelson Skalbania, called and told me that I had two choices: Winnipeg or Edmonton. My agent, Gus Badali, advised me to go to Edmonton. He said that the NHL and WHA were going to merge, and that since Winnipeg’s arena could hold only eleven thousand people whereas Edmonton’s could hold sixteen thousand, Edmonton had a much better shot at getting into the NHL. Going to Edmonton would be a good business decision, but playing with Bobby Hull would have been great too. In any case, Bobby hadn’t given up. He and Nelson were still negotiating while we were on the plane.
We had to stop in Minneapolis to refuel. At that point, the pilot told us that we were heading to Edmonton. Jets GM Rudy Pilous had passed on the deal. He thought I wasn’t good enough to play pro hockey.
• • •
The very existence of the WHA (and speculation about its longevity) could influence contract negotiations within the NHL. Montreal Canadiens GM Sam Pollock’s deal with Guy Lafleur is one example.
Pollock knew in order to get Lafleur he would need the first overall draft pick in 1971. He figured the California Golden Seals (formerly known as the Oakland Seals) would come in last. So he traded Ernie Hicke and his 1970 first-round draft pick to the Seals for François Lacombe and their first-round pick the following year. But the Hicke brothers started to gel and the Seals started winning. That meant the L.A. Kings, not the Seals, were going to come in last place in 1971. Sam had to make the L.A. Kings stronger, so he traded center Ralph Backstrom, a guy who averaged forty to fifty points, to Los Angeles in exchange for Gord Labossiere and Ray Fortin. Just as Pollock had hoped, L.A. started winning
and the Seals came in last place. And that’s how Pollock managed to get the first overall pick to draft Guy “The Flower” Lafleur.
By the spring of 1973 Lafleur had just finished his second season with the Canadiens. That’s when the WHA’s Quebec Nordiques (Guy’s father-in-law was one of their directors) offered Guy a three-year, $450,000 contract. Now, Sam Pollock had gone through a lot of trouble to get Guy Lafleur, and there was no way he wanted to lose him to the WHA. The trouble was that he couldn’t pay $150,000 a year. That was way above the salaries of the other players. On top of which, there were guys picked later than Guy in ’71 who were putting up bigger numbers.
Pollock decided to offer Guy a million dollars for a ten-year contract for $100,000 a year, but first he called his coach, Scotty Bowman, and his assistant, Claude Ruel. A ten-year contract was unheard of at the time, and so Pollock wanted to know whether they thought a lesser team would eventually want Guy in a trade. Bowman said he didn’t know how good Guy would be because he hadn’t played up to his potential, but that he was confident Guy would always be an NHL player, not a superstar. Claude, who’d scouted Guy in the first place, was more attuned to his possibilities. He said, “He will develop.”
So Pollock offered Guy the contract. And because Guy wasn’t sure whether the WHA would survive, he signed it. Guy Lafleur would go on to win five Stanley Cups with Montreal. Larry Robinson, who’d won all those Cups with Lafleur and had signed as a free agent with the Kings a year after I got there, told us how amazed he’d been by him. Robinson said that as long as you passed the puck in Guy’s direction, whether it was off his skates or on either side, he’d somehow find it. They say there is no such thing as a bad pass to a good player, but Lafleur was truly phenomenal. And Guy was explosive, so he could move away from a hit like a fly. Years later I’d have the opportunity and the privilege to play on the Flower’s line at the 1981 Canada Cup.
• • •
When the WHA added two teams for the 1974–75 season, the NHL responded in a defensive move by adding the Kansas City Scouts (now the New Jersey Devils) and the Washington Capitals. That meant thirty-two teams in total—and since almost all the players were from Canada, the talent level was getting thin. Teams started to look to Europe, mostly Sweden and Finland, as well as to a few defectors from Czechoslovakia. No players behind the Iron Curtain were free to leave at that time.
The Jets brought over two Swedes, Ulf Nilsson and Anders Hedberg, to play on Bobby Hull’s line, and together they were pretty special. Really entertaining. They played the game with crisscrossing wingers and creative passing. Their opponents had no clue where to pick them up. That line was one of the greatest lines ever in the history of the game. And it really changed hockey in North America.
Hedberg and Nilsson were two of the bravest players ever. When they came and played in North America, they were better than a lot of players here, so they got hacked and whacked a ton. When Glen Sather became coach of the Oilers near the end of the 1976–77 season, he wanted his team to be patterned after what Bobby Hull had built for the Winnipeg Jets.
• • •
It was a sign that things were getting desperate in the WHA when the Houston Aeros and Winnipeg Jets announced that they were going to merge for the 1978–79 season. The Houston Aeros and the Winnipeg Jets were huge rivals in the WHA. The Jets couldn’t stand the Aeros and vice versa. They even fought in the penalty box. Now that rivalry carried over into the locker room. They didn’t play as a team. Their coach, Larry Hillman, once a defenseman with the Maple Leafs, was caught in the middle. He got fired and Tom McVie came in for the last nineteen games.
Tom and the club’s general manager, John Ferguson, went way back—they’d been friends since they were kids growing up in Vancouver’s Eastside. McVie was three years older, and when he was leaving bantam and John was just starting, he gave John his old pair of skates.
McVie was a workaholic and a rough, gruff coach. In the locker room the guys would call him Sergeant Major. He would say, “If I can put eighteen hours in at the rink, you can put in two or three.” The practices were so tough that the players would leave the ice with their tongues hanging out. And their pregame warm-ups were just as hard. It was like playing two games in one day. As for Ferguson, he was as tough as they come. He revolutionized the tough-guy role by skating shotgun with Jean Béliveau—and keeping up. He could play the game with the best of them, but no one was going to take any liberties with Béliveau when Ferguson was on the ice.
Finally, one of the players convinced the guys to bring their families and meet at a restaurant so that they could all get to know each other. It pulled them together. They started to play as a team, not as individuals. And they made the playoffs.
When Ulf Nilsson and Anders Hedberg went over to the Rangers in 1978, the Jets’ goalie, Joe Daley, said, “Bobby Hull lost the fingers on his glove.” Bobby played only four games into the season that year.
In 1979, the Jets ended the season on April 18 in third place and were supposed to have a couple of days off before the first round in Quebec against the Nordiques on April 23. But Tom called the team in and worked them hard every day. It was not a popular decision. Still, they swept Quebec in four games and then got ready to play us, the Edmonton Oilers, for the WHA championship—the Avco World Trophy.
• • •
In that playoff series, four guys from Winnipeg really stood out for me. The first was their goalie, Gary Smith. When I signed with Indianapolis, Gary was the guy who took me under his wing. He was just tremendous to me. Then, when the Racers folded, the Jets signed Gary as a free agent. He walked into their dressing room with long hair, his shirt untucked, dragging his bag. Then he flopped down on the bench, looked around, and said, “Guys, my name is Gary “The Axe” Smith. They call me Axe because I’ve been axed from so many teams. My goals-against in Indianapolis was 5.51, but don’t let that fool you. I’m not that good.” Everybody laughed. But Gary went on to play very well for the Jets.
And like all goalies, Gary had some unusual habits. He wore seven pairs of socks in his skates, but depending on the day, he might pull on up to fourteen pairs. After every period, he’d go for a shower. But as soon as the fifteen minutes were up, he’d be back on the ice in time for the next period.
Kent Nilsson was another top player on the Jets. Kent was a natural. He was such a smooth skater, and his slap shot was unbelievable. He was once challenged on television to hit the crossbar from the red line. He tees it up, glances at the net a hundred feet away, then calmly cranks it off the crossbar. They called him the Magic Man.
Like Kent, Morris Lukowich was a great Jets forward. With Kent and Morris on their team, you knew they’d get a whole lot of points because Kent had incredible puck-handling skills and Morris had one of the quickest release wrist shots I’ve ever seen. A goalie had no time to adjust or square off, and his shot was deadly.
Terry Ruskowski was the Jets’ natural leader. He was a tremendously hard worker. Unfortunately, though, he hurt his shoulder in Game Three and missed Games Four and Five. What happened was, he went against the boards with his elbow up and then someone hit him from behind and really stretched it. He couldn’t lift his arm. But he was back for Game Six with his shoulder covered in heat and plastic. He had to skate to the bench in warm-up and pull the plastic off because his skin was blistering. Still, he went back out, finished the warm-up, and played very hard. Throughout the game Terry was giving his defenseman Barry Long these nice little saucer passes, and Barry scored twice on them.
It was do or die. Terry got four assists and the Jets beat us 7–3. We knew going into the series that it was going to be the last Avco Cup ever. I know we wanted to win and be part of that history. But Winnipeg was just better than we were in those six games.
• • •
The WHA and the NHL had been battling it out for seven years, and it was costing teams in both leagues. But while so
me owners thought it only made sense to stop the financial bleeding by joining forces, others couldn’t let the hard feelings go. So it took a few years to work out a merger deal between the two leagues.
In 1977, two years before the merger, John Ziegler took over for Clarence Campbell as NHL president and discovered that the league was in terrible shape financially. So John pulled the hardliners together and got them talking. It was finally looking like four WHA teams—Edmonton, Quebec, Winnipeg, and New England (renamed Hartford)—would be joining the NHL. Thirteen of the seventeen teams had to agree in order for that to happen, and so a vote was held. Ziegler was sure he had the votes, but they lost by one. It turned out that Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver had all voted against adding three new Canadian teams.
Once again, it was about television. Molson owned the rights to the Canadian teams in the NHL and didn’t want to compete with other sponsors, especially in Quebec. They had lobbied the owners to vote down the merger, and it worked a little too well. Fans wanted to see the merger and there were calls for a boycott of Molson beer. Members of Parliament passed a resolution unanimously asking the NHL to admit the Canadian teams. It got ugly. A bomb threat was called in to the Molson brewery in Quebec, and someone fired a bullet through the window of the Molson facility in Winnipeg.
So another meeting was called, and the vote went through. The second vote wouldn’t have been necessary if the owner of the Canucks, Frank Griffiths, had attended the first meeting. But he couldn’t and had sent his team president, William Hughes, with directions to vote yes. For some reason, Hughes voted no—and when Griffiths found out, he fired Hughes on the spot. The two had been friends and business associates for years.
So the four WHA teams finally joined the NHL in the 1979–80 season, but the NHL owners wanted their pound of flesh. I think they were afraid of how well the WHA teams would do. How would it look if a WHA team won the Stanley Cup? So the NHL charged each of the WHA owners an expansion fee of $6 million. And then, in a dispersal draft, they reclaimed players that the NHL teams held rights to. The WHA teams could protect only two skaters and two goalies. That was it. And then they got the bottom four picks in the 1979 entry draft.
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