by Bobby Orr
I am especially fond of the memories I have from a gathering I was fortunate enough to attend many years after my playing career had ended. It was held in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1999. During that particular Ryder Cup competition, there was a dinner at Symphony Hall in Boston. It was a night to honor Arnold, who had just turned seventy, and it was a very special evening indeed. Attendees included the likes of President George Bush Sr., an avid golfer himself, and I recall that the legendary sportscaster Jim McKay was the emcee that evening. Steven Tyler was one of the performers, as were the Boston Pops. So you can see, it was a star-studded evening. I was there along with many good friends, including Dick Connolly, a man who is also close friends with Arnold.
Dick had made arrangements for a few of us to golf with Arnie while the King was staying in the Boston area. I had been at several functions he had attended over the years, specifically at various pro–am events associated with the Champions Tour. I had never spent a lot of time with him one-on-one, however, so being on the course and golfing together was going to be very special for me. We showed up at the designated time at the Kittansett Club in Marion. As I leaned over to put my ball on the tee for my first shot of the day, I was so nervous I could hardly see the ball, let alone swing at it. All I wanted was to get the thing airborne.
I looked over at the King and said, “Arnie, I bet you’re really nervous teeing it up with us, eh?” He laughed at that one. I wasn’t in my element, and I wasn’t on my turf, so as a result it was all quite nerve-racking. Put me on a sheet of ice, and everything is nice and easy. But here, in this world, I was a wreck. Leave it to Arnie to make me feel comfortable almost immediately. That allowed me to laugh and enjoy the moment. He can do what only the truly great personalities can do: make you feel comfortable in his presence. He has a wonderful sense of humor and a twinkle in his eye that just makes you feel at ease.
I would play again with Arnie a few years later at his golf course at Bay Hill during the pro–am portion of the tournament. There was one hole during that round that stands out in my mind. We were on a par-5 hole with a tee shot that had to carry over a body of water, and Arnold hit his drive over the hazard and right down the middle of the fairway. His second shot set him up for a short club into the green. His approach shot was a little wedge that landed about twelve feet from the pin, and everyone in the gallery, his famous “Arnie’s Army,” was going absolutely bananas. You guessed it—he stepped up to the putt and drained it for a birdie. With waves of applause coming from the gallery, Arnold reached into the cup, picked up his ball, and looked over at me. He had the greatest smile on his face you can imagine, and when I said, “You really are a show-off, aren’t you?” he responded with, “Bobby, I used to do that ALL the time!” I’ve played a lot of golf over the years, but that is a highlight that will be tough to beat.
Arnold has the type of personality that gains the attention of everyone, even his peers. During that pro–am at Bay Hill, as he walked to each tee box, fellow competitors would stop and just watch him go by. They were in awe of him. What has remained consistent about Arnold across all the years is the way he conducts himself so professionally, regardless of his environment. It doesn’t matter who he is with, Arnold treats them all in the same respectful way. I have always maintained that the best experience any athlete could ever have would be to spend a day with Arnold so they could watch how a real pro acts around others. In that one day, they would very quickly come to realize that with great success comes great responsibility, especially to the fans. Arnold Palmer respects that idea, day after day after day. He will certainly go down as one of the greatest golfers of all time. More importantly, he stands as a role model for how to carry oneself as a pro.
I’ve also been able to meet some people from the entertainment world. One actor who stands out for me is a Canadian by birth and a man who has demonstrated great courage in his life. When I was playing in Boston, he would have been a ten- or twelve-year-old youngster growing up in Vancouver. I never met Michael J. Fox back then, but I do remember our first meeting at a celebrity hockey function. I was immediately struck by something about him. Here was a very famous TV and movie star, yet he was obviously someone who was very humble and easy to be with. There were no airs when it came to Michael, and I have always enjoyed his company.
But that was some time ago. Since then, I have come to respect Michael on a whole different level. His battle with Parkinson’s disease has been an inspiration to millions of people who suffer with this terrible affliction. Rather than go underground, Michael has chosen to take this condition in his life and do something about it for other people. The word I think of now whenever I see Michael doing an interview is perseverance, because he just keeps grinding at this disease. Michael keeps working at it and will not allow any setbacks or discouragement to stop him. He is an inspiration to all who meet him. A while back, someone sent me an article in which Michael was asked which living people he most admired. He responded by saying, “Nelson Mandela and Bobby Orr.” Imagine him saying something like that. Well, I’ll say this: Michael J. Fox is on my own list of most-admired as well. He is a wonderful person, and I am better for knowing him.
Meeting all these people meant a lot to me, and taught me a lot. There was one celebrity in particular who also played in Boston whom I had hoped for years to meet. Our paths didn’t cross until I had retired and we both found ourselves at a black-tie fundraiser benefiting Tony Conigliaro, the great former Red Sox player.
On that particular night, April 26, 1983, I was there with Joe Fitzgerald, a reporter with the Boston Herald. As I glanced around to take in the sights and sounds, I noticed a man on the other side of the room. He was the only guy not wearing a tuxedo. All at once I could see the profile, and I turned to Joe and asked, “Is that who I think it is?”
It was Ted Williams, in the flesh. Joe told me to go over and introduce myself. I was hesitant. I may have been a Boston Bruin, but this was Ted Williams. He was chatting with some other people as I made my way toward him, and when it finally looked like I was next in line, I stuck out my hand and said, “Mr. Williams, it’s a pleasure to meet you. My name is Bobby Orr.”
He stood up, shook my hand, and without missing a beat replied, “So, I hear you caught a big one this summer, kid. Tell me about it.”
Ted was much more than a great baseball player, and actually holds a distinction I don’t believe any other major-leaguer can claim: he is the only player named to the Baseball Hall of Fame who is also enshrined in the Fishing Hall of Fame. As much as Ted loved baseball, I know that fishing was right up there as one of his great passions in life. That is something the Red Sox slugger and I had in common.
Although he fished many sites in Canada, Ted could often be found at a fishing camp on the Miramichi River in New Brunswick. As fate would have it, I was fortunate enough to have landed a forty-five-pound salmon that summer, and it was the talk of the town. All of the fishing guides in the area soon heard of this big fish, and the news spread pretty quickly.
Through the fishing-guide grapevine, news of my lunker had even reached the man I still think of as the best hitter ever to pick up a bat. He studied everything he could that was related to his craft, especially when it came to hitting. I once asked him, years later, about a story I had read detailing what was going through his mind as he stood at the plate. It was claimed that Ted could actually see the seams on a baseball as it left the pitcher’s hand. He laughed at that one and said, “Look, I studied pitchers. I knew what pitches they could throw, and when they tended to throw them. That stuff about seeing seams is a good story, but just not true.”
Just like he studied pitchers, he apparently studied other fishermen as well. He asked me all kinds of questions about what fly I’d used to get my big catch, what the weather conditions had been like, and so on. For those twenty minutes, there was no one else in the room, just him and me talking about fishing. At one point, while I was
recounting the story, I made a demonstration of my casting technique. He grabbed my arm and said, “No, no, no! You’ve got to get your arm more up and back.” Right then and there, in a room full of people dressed up in tuxedos (me included), Ted Williams taught me how to properly throw a fly.
What I saw that night from Ted was something all great athletes, perhaps all the greats in any discipline, possess, and that is the ability to focus. We were just talking, and this was probably Ted Williams at his most relaxed, but his eyes bore in on me, and there was nothing that was going to interrupt our discussion.
There have been some tremendous athletes who played in New England. I know all about Larry Bird and Carl Yastrzemski, Bill Russell and, in modern times, Tom Brady. They are all great athletes, without question. But whenever you think of New England sporting legends, Ted Williams has always stood at the top of the heap. As I write this, he remains the last major-leaguer to hit over .400 in a season, a feat that looks more and more untouchable. Given the new age of baseball, with relief specialists and the like, I doubt that .400 will ever be achieved again.
To be able to spend that time with a living legend was a great thrill for me. I was fortunate enough later to actually head out on some fishing trips with Ted and see him in action. He was a master angler, and he always tied his own flies, which tells you a lot about his passion for fishing. He loved my wife, Peggy, who likes to fly-fish. I got to know him pretty well—and I’m not sure I ever saw him in a tuxedo.
I guess you could say Ted Williams was a man’s man. He was a big, gruff guy, and a lot of people found him pretty intimidating. But I can tell you, he was a very humble man, with a great sense of humor. If you really want to know what kind of man he was, this is a guy who gave up years, not only when he was in the prime of his life, but in the prime of a record-setting career, to fight for his country. He was a combat pilot in two wars, and was shot down over Korea. Ted was a special athlete, sure, but more importantly, once you got to know him, he was someone it was impossible not to respect. He was someone who always knew who he was and what he wanted. I guess what I’m saying is, there was nothing phony about Ted. Now that I think of it, there were a lot of similarities between Ted and Don Cherry. Both men had their opinions and stuck to them, and both men did things their own way. Those characteristics have always impressed me. That night, meeting and speaking with Ted for the very first time, stays fresh in my mind to this day.
When I think about the men I have just mentioned, it is obvious that they are role models, especially for young people. If you really wanted to find fault with these men, and were willing to dig deep enough, I’m sure you could. But in the big picture, they all understood their responsibility. What they did in their fields, and what they did away from the spotlight, tells me that they all “got it.” There are many other people I could mention, but these are the guys who stand out for me.
Many years ago, a star basketball player claimed he didn’t have any responsibility as a role model and that he didn’t believe that those types of expectations should be placed on pro athletes. I have to respectfully disagree. To suggest there is no responsibility as a role model is dangerous. After all, it’s the fans and the public who inevitably pay the bills, and therefore your salary, so pro athletes need to accept some kind of responsibility toward them. The moment you sign on as a professional athlete, or even at the elite levels of amateur sport, you automatically become enrolled in the “Role Model Club,” whether you like it or not. How you handle membership in that particular club is up to you.
If someone is looking up to you as a role model, chances are you have been very lucky in life. You may have worked hard, but you have also received some pretty spectacular gifts. That doesn’t mean you’re better than anyone else, and it doesn’t mean you deserve what you’ve got. It just means you received a gift. In my view, that means you’ve got an obligation to share that gift.
Not that anyone should expect an athlete to be perfect. No one is superhuman, and no professional athlete (or a retired one, for that matter!) can be perfect twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Athletes will make their share of mistakes. But when you do make a mistake, you own up and accept responsibility. People are very forgiving in most cases and will give a lot of rope to an athlete if they only admit to and accept their faults. I’m no different than anyone else—there are things I did at certain times during my career that I am not particularly proud of. Some of those things happened on the ice, some off it. It’s almost as if you go through different stages in your development as a person: your parents first put down a solid foundation for you, you end up making your mistakes, and then you find your way again. You are suddenly hoisted up there on that pedestal, and it can be tough on anyone and can sometimes affect your judgment. I think that eventually, when you end up on the other side of your career, when that pedestal has been removed, you become more centered again and everything turns out alright. At least I hope that’s been the case in my life, though I leave that judgment to others.
• • •
We won that second Stanley Cup in 1972, but we would not win it again. Of course, I’m greedy. I feel we should have won in 1971, and again in 1974. Once you have a taste of the Cup, you want it again. We started thinking about a dynasty as soon as we were back in the dressing room after our overtime win in 1970. To this day, fans who followed us during that era will come up to me and share their opinion that we should have won more than two championships. I have to agree with them. But we never got to raise the Cup again.
That’s not to say the Bruins went into steep decline. We played a lot of great hockey, and Boston was a powerhouse for the rest of the decade. But the ingredients you need to win it all, the good luck and the hard work, and the sense of destiny, just weren’t all there. We had a strong regular season in 1972–73, but lost to New York in the first round. The fact that we lost Espo early in that series didn’t help our chances.
On a personal note, Bep Guidolin, who had been my coach when Oshawa went to the Memorial Cup, replaced Tom Johnson behind the bench partway through that season. Guidolin had played for the Bruins himself when he was younger (in fact, when he was sixteen he was the youngest player ever to suit up in the NHL). He also coached the Belleville McFarlands to victory at the World Championship, so no one could say he didn’t know the game. Harry Sinden was back with the Bruins as well.
On the other hand, the team that won that first Cup was being chipped away, piece by piece. We lost a few guys to expansion, most notably Ed Westfall to the New York Islanders. And we lost Gerry Cheevers and Pie McKenzie to the newly formed World Hockey Association, which had already made a splash by luring away Bobby Hull. Derek Sanderson left for the WHA, too, but came back. Not that anyone in the dressing room judged those guys harshly. We were definitely disappointed to see them go, but we also understood they had to take care of themselves and their families. For most professional hockey players, you have only a very small window of time to play, so who could blame anyone for trying to maximize their financial return. If the NHL wasn’t prepared to pay, they now had a viable alternative. But the end result for Boston was that an era was fast coming to a close, and the Big Bad Bruins would never be the same.
Still, we dominated the regular season in 1973–74, and once again had the top four scorers in the league. We swept the Leafs in the first round of the playoffs, and took care of the Rangers in six games in the second. In the Stanley Cup final, we faced the Philadelphia Flyers. Philadelphia may have been an expansion team, but they were not to be taken lightly. In Bernie Parent, they had a goalie who could steal games, in Bobby Clarke they had a captain who would do anything to win. And as a team, they didn’t take a backseat to the Big Bad Bruins when it came to toughness. We were the regular-season champions, though, and most of us had a couple of rings already, so we knew we had what it took to get a third.
But we lost that series in six, and we lost on the road, so we sa
w the Philadelphia Spectrum fans celebrate the way the Boston fans had in 1970, just four years earlier. That series stands as a bitter disappointment to me. Like the loss in 1971, we had that Cup within our grasp and let it slip away. If losing a Stanley Cup final weren’t so crushing, winning it wouldn’t be so exhilarating.
We weren’t conceding anything the following season, either. We still had the top two scorers in the league, and we were still playing with pride. There wasn’t a guy in the room who thought he’d never raise the Cup again. But we never did. In the spring of 1975, we were knocked out of the playoffs in a five-game preliminary round by Chicago. And that was that.
We had a great run as a group, with three appearances in the finals over a five-year span, and we had two unforgettable Stanley Cup victories. And though in many ways that season ended in disappointment, I met someone that year who would come to mean a great deal not only to the Boston Bruins and to the game of hockey in general but also to me in particular. It simply wouldn’t be proper if I didn’t dedicate some space in these pages to him, because he deserves more than a passing mention, and he is going to receive his due. It is rare in sport when a person, regardless of his or her success as a player or coach, ends up being someone that average fans truly identify with. It is rarer still when someone retires from their sport and actually gains in popularity as they grow older. And in hockey, there is one person in Canada most everyone in the country would identify immediately.
In case you haven’t guessed, his name is Don Cherry.
Seven
GRAPES
Don “Grapes” Cherry came to Parry Sound for an Easter Seals skate-a-thon fundraiser many years ago. I took him over to meet my Grandma Orr just before he was to leave town. She was in her nineties by then, but Grandma walked right up to Don, looked up at him (though she couldn’t see very well anymore), and poked a finger in his chest. She said, “Mr. Cherry, I like you, because you’re the only one who always tells the truth.”