In that short meeting, Jack and I made an impression on each other. He was very strict but very fair. I greatly appreciated, and loved, that he was a strong disciplinarian. He was, and is, just a wonderful guy.
I wasn’t sure what impression I made on Jack — somebody who was not afraid to say what I thought, I guess. Rather than drifting into a situation I wasn’t sure I wanted, I had been proactive.
That started a strong personal and professional relationship between Jack and me that continues to this day. When John Coburn and I started the New England Whalers in 1972, we hired Jack as coach and general manager, and Jack hired Bob Crocker as his assistant. Bob is now with the Los Angeles Kings and is still one of the most respected scouts in the NHL.
I have always loved baseball, so with hockey no longer in the picture I decided I would try out for BU for the fall season and made the team as second-string catcher. I was proud of that, because I hadn’t even played baseball in high school.
Things weren’t going quite as well in the classroom. I started out in business administration and knew right away it wasn’t for me. With my love of sports, I went into physical education but didn’t look at it closely enough. When I started classes, I found out that, oh my lord, you’ve got to study chemistry, biology and anatomy. I hadn’t counted on that.
I was barely getting by and, being impatient, also wanted to see if I could play baseball at a higher level, so after the fall semester, I decided to leave school to take shot at professional baseball. I realized that it was very unrealistic, as I had played only one year of organized baseball, and I played very little in that one year. If I was going to leave BU, I needed some reason, and baseball was it. I said to my mother and father, “There are better things you can do with your money than have me burn it here at BU.”
To finance my trip to a two-week baseball camp in Bradenton, Florida, where major league scouts were supposed to attend, I took a painting job, then became a guinea pig for high-paying medical experiments on withstanding pain. They’d wire me up, jolt me with electricity, and the further I could go, the more they would pay me. They said that I’d shown the highest tolerance for pain to date. I didn’t know exactly why that was, but then I had just come from Parris Island.
When I got to Florida, wouldn’t you know it, my old friend Bob Meyer from Parris Island was there too, a week away from his training camp with the Kansas City Athletics, so we worked out together. My roommate was a pitcher from Springfield — a city which would later play a major role in my hockey life — named Dave Motyka, who had played the year before for the Giants farm team in the Appalachian League, the lowest of the minors.
After a couple of days in camp we realized that although we had paid, we weren’t going to get the advertised scouts. So Dave and I went up to Lakeland to try out for the Detroit Tigers. We just walked in. I had only a modicum of baseball credentials from BU, but Dave had real credentials so they decided to give both of us a look and I got to play a couple of inter-squad games at the double-A level.
The Tigers camp was a great experience but they didn’t have any openings in their system for us. A Washington Senators scout who was there said we could come to Pompano Beach for a tryout. Dave went home and I continued to Pompano Beach, but after running into another old friend, Henri David from Salisbury School, I decided not to go to the Senators camp. Henri and I went up and down the state, attending car races and watching jai alai games. Deep down I knew I was not going to make it in professional baseball, but I’m glad I gave it a try.
When I came back north, my anxious parents felt it was time for me to do something, so I got a job with Alex Taylor and Company, a sporting goods company in New York, at $75 a week. I started as a clerk in the store, but Mr. Taylor put me on the road to go to schools and sell them equipment and uniforms. I hated the job. I have no trouble selling a concept, but I don’t like selling products, and there were many days when I wouldn’t go to work. After I commuted in from home in Bedford, New York, I’d just sit in Grand Central Station and read.
Meanwhile, my Marine status had changed because of the time I’d taken to try my luck at baseball, so I had to do another 30 days at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, in the fall of 1965. My third week there, we were playing touch football, and after I caught a pass, I turned and snapped my Achilles tendon. The medical staff had gone home for the weekend, so a corpsman looked at it and said I had a sprained ankle. They gave me some crutches and I wrapped the ankle with an Ace bandage, but the pain was incredible. I went to the doctor on Monday and he misdiagnosed it as a sprained ankle too. I flew home, and my shocked parents immediately took me to a doctor. Within hours they were performing a very difficult surgery that would require a long recovery period. My father was angry and sent letters wondering how the injury could have been misdiagnosed. The Marines paid for everything, and even though I had another year of duty left, I never heard from them again until I got my honorable discharge a year later.
I went back to work at Alex Taylor’s, but I was living in Hell’s Kitchen and had to take the uptown bus, then the cross-town bus, while on crutches. I couldn’t get around like that, and I knew I’d have to leave.
New York Shenanigans, and a Big Break
I had come to the realization that I wanted to get into the sports business in some capacity, and I had been putting out feelers to friends and family about my future.
My initial connection to the business came from a family friend named Bill Putnam, who was a lending agent at J.P. Morgan, a company my family had ties to. I met Bill at his office to ask him to keep his ears open for me. Bill was close to the Philadelphia people, Ed Snider and Jerry Wolman, who would eventually get an NHL franchise there.
I didn’t know at the time that Bill was angling to get into the sports business himself. He soon went to Los Angeles to work with Jack Kent Cooke and was part of the application process to get an NHL expansion team, which they were awarded in 1966, to start play in the fall of 1967.
One day early in 1966 I was in my New York apartment, still laid up on crutches, when the phone rang. It was Jack Kent Cooke, and in his great big booming voice he informed me that he was coming to New York and would try to squeeze me in for a quick meeting.
I told him how excited I was to get his call, but that I had a cast on my ankle and couldn’t go anywhere, so I wouldn’t be any good to him for the next six months.
“Oh dear,” he said. “Well, let me know when you get it off.”
Soon Bill Putnam had left Los Angeles because Cooke was evidently a hard guy to work with, and he went to Philadelphia to work with Wolman and Snider, who now had their expansion franchise.
Nothing was happening in New York for me, so when the headmaster of the Harvey School called to offer me a job as interim baseball coach while the regular coach recovered from an emergency appendectomy, I jumped at it. The headmaster knew me well because I had gone to the Harvey School — which had since moved from Hawthorne to Katonah, about 20 minutes away — and by then my mother was the head of the lower school and my father was a trustee. It was a great experience coaching and working at the same place as my mother. However, when summer came that job ended, and I returned to New York.
I went back to being a laborer for a construction company I’d worked with the previous summer. I worked on a skyscraper on Central Park West at 74th Street, and spent most of the time leaning out over the edge, sometimes 40 floors up, passing lumber up to the next floors. I drew the line when they put me on the last floor being built and there was no ceiling you could hang on to as you passed the lumber. I said I wasn’t going to the top of the building ever again, and they put me on the cleanup crew, still on the edge, but not on the top floor.
Then my youngest brother, Philip, with whom I always had a great time, came to work with me. We were working in the Bronx to clean up a construction-lumber yard. If you’ve ever seen Fort Apache, The Bronx, this was it. Rig
ht in the absolute bowels of the Bronx.
It was about a six-week job, and the foreman, Paul LeDuke, couldn’t grasp that these two privileged young men were driving in from Bedford in a yellow Mustang (mine) to the Bronx to work for him. Philip was mischievous and drove Paul crazy with all kinds of shenanigans.
At the time, Philip was friends with the daughter of John Lindsay, the mayor of New York. After work one day, he had to go to Gracie Mansion, where the mayor lives. We rigged up a bucket by poking holes in it with a screwdriver so Philip could take a shower. When Paul asked where he was going, Philip replied that he was headed to Gracie Mansion for a date with the mayor’s daughter. It was inconceivable to Paul that anyone working in the Bronx for him would be dating the daughter of the mayor of New York, and he never believed that the story was true.
We managed to stretch the job out into August, and then I got my first big break.
Bill Putnam called from Philadelphia to tell me that the new Flyers franchise had bought one-sixth of a team in the lowest minors called the Jersey Devils, and that there was a job for me there as operations manager. It was a real turning point. I felt I was finally going to get my chance. I was ecstatic.
The Flyers were building a new arena, the Spectrum, but it was just a hole in the ground at the time, so I met Bill at his temporary office at 15th and Locust Street in Philadelphia. We had a wonderful visit and he offered me $7,500 for the job in Jersey. I would hold out hope that they then might take me up to the Flyers when they started in the NHL the following year.
Bill could have offered me 10 cents and I would have found a way to work there. So I packed my car and headed for New Jersey, feeling that the right door had finally swung open.
Jersey: A Devil of a First Year
So in the summer of 1966, at the age of 24, I began what I call my college undergraduate education in sports. And it was all four years rolled into one.
On a hot, humid day in August, I arrived in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, for my first day on the job. I went over to the Cherry Hill Arena to meet the other five partners, the businessmen for whom I’d be working directly. Bill Conway co-founded the Mister Softee ice cream company, Bud Meier was a builder, Cal Silver was an accountant, Harold Aranow was a roofer and I was never exactly sure what the fifth partner, Rex Van Zant, did for a living.
Obviously I felt my future in hockey, if I had one, was going to be eight miles to the northwest, with the Philadelphia Flyers when they started playing in the NHL. But I wanted to please these five men, who were all well-intentioned guys but who knew about as much as I did about running a hockey team . . . which was nothing. I wanted to learn everything I could about the hockey business, and Cherry Hill turned out to be exactly the right place to do that.
The Cherry Hill Arena was decaying and seemed ancient, even though it had opened only eight years earlier. Some of the cooling pipes were defective, and when you were playing near center ice you had the sensation of skating over a gully. The dressing rooms were small and, if we’re being kind, “rustic.”
The fans sat in wooden theater seats and the press box was a gondola, small and kind of perched out over the stands. To get in, you had to climb up a ladder like a fire escape. The arena was already on its third name and it looked like an old Stop & Shop, a warehouse almost, with a peaked roof over the front entrance. It was set into a very large parking lot; after it was torn down in the ’80s, the space became a shopping plaza. The arena seated 4,500 and had been home to the Eastern League Jersey Larks in 1960–61, and didn’t host pro hockey again until the Devils brought EHL hockey back to town in 1964.
I could not have guessed that six years later I would be back at the Cherry Hill Arena with my own team, in a league that nobody had even yet thought of, to play the WHA’s New Jersey Knights. Sports Illustrated called it the worst arena in the WHA, while others called it the worst hockey rink in pro hockey. Anywhere.
To me, the Cherry Hill Arena was a shrine. It was the greatest thing I’d ever seen, and oh my God, I loved it, because it was a rink, because it was pro hockey.
The Flyers already had their general manager (Bud Poile) and coach (Keith Allen) in place for the following year, and it was up to them to oversee the hockey operations in Cherry Hill. To coach the Devils, they brought in Vic Stasiuk, who had just finished his terrific 19-year pro career a few months earlier. Vic played for the Chicago Blackhawks, had his name on two Stanley Cups with the Detroit Red Wings and then became left winger on the Bruins’ famed “Uke Line” (they were all of Ukrainian descent) with Bronco Horvath and Johnny Bucyk, and scored 20 goals — a major benchmark for the 1950s — four times. He was brought back to the Detroit organization for the final half-dozen seasons of his career. He was really, really bitter at the Wings because they sent him all the way down to Memphis of the Central Professional Hockey League for the 1965–66 season, his last, to make room for Gerry Abel, the son of Detroit coach Sid Abel.
I rented an apartment in Haddonfield, and when Vic got there he suggested that he and I “batch” it together.
Vic was a great big powerful man with one of the warmest and most engaging smiles I’d ever seen. In all my four decades in hockey, there are few people I’ve met who had more passion and love for the game than Vic did. He had left his wife and four children back in his home town of Lethbridge, Alberta, during the hockey season, because he knew he’d only be in Cherry Hill for the one year. The next year he expected to become the coach of the Flyers’ top farm team in the American Hockey League, which eventually turned out to be the Quebec Aces. The Flyers bought the team in May of 1967 and, true to their word, would send Vic there to coach.
We set up a bed for Vic in a little area off the kitchen, split the monthly rent ($150, as I recall) and drove to work together every day. To be more accurate, I drove to work every day. I didn’t know it yet, but Vic had a reputation in the hockey world for being “tight with the dollar.” So it turned out that one of my jobs was to be Vic’s chauffeur, since he didn’t have a car with him. But I didn’t mind that, because for me it was a big thrill. Here I was working for a team, batching with a real NHL guy, and by living and spending all my time with Vic, I knew I’d meet more great hockey people and learn a lot more about the league than I would have otherwise. I was only 24 years old.
Vic and I shared a small single office. If we stood up straight, we’d smack our heads on the concrete tiers on which the stands sat. And we had two other employees in there with us too: our secretary/office manager, Jeannie Verlandin, who was a jack-of-all-trades and, thank God, was very familiar with the area; and a local celebrity named Stu Nahan.
Stu was a real character and, like Vic, became a great friend. The Flyers hired him as a PR consultant to get him on the payroll and, frankly, to kiss his ass hoping for a little publicity and to establish some validity in a town that was already loaded with high-profile pro teams and great college basketball. He had his own kids’ show called Captain Philadelphia on a UHF channel and also did the weather. He was known as the voice of the Philadelphia Eagles locally and on CBS nationally, so he had a high profile. Stu worked maybe all of half an hour a day for us. He’d come into the office, make some calls to his agent, and then leave again. So in reality, the front office was Jeannie and me.
I was the operations manager but quickly became a one-man band. I organized all the tickets, handled the PR, did finance, sales and marketing, wrote the game-night notes, sold advertising on the back of tickets, got the players in and out of town and organized their working visas, and even drove the team bus once in a while.
I did everything, but 90 per cent of my job was ticket sales. I think we had only 200 season tickets, so it was all gate sale and advance tickets. We had a little reception desk to sell “hard” tickets. Hard tickets were literally that. They weren’t printed off on a computer right as you buy them, like they are today. We played 36 games at home, and had 4,500 seats, so we had ov
er 160,000 tickets that arrived in a box, each one standing for a specific seat on a specific night.
We were doing the games on the radio, with Gene Hart — who became the voice of the Flyers, forever — making the calls. The Flyers also got their longtime trainer, Frank Lewis, from the Devils that year. Walt Schumann of the Camden Courier-Post covered the team and even went on the road with us. And because the Flyers were soon going to start up, we got some coverage from the three Philadelphia daily papers too.
We worked at it 24/7, and although I don’t know if we ever filled the building completely, we never fell below 1,500 to 2,000 fans a night, and near the end of the year we were nearly selling out.
The Eastern Hockey League:
The Real Slap Shot
I was familiar with the NHL from going to Rangers and Bruins games with my father and friends, but until Bill Putnam offered me the job, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as the Jersey Devils and had no idea what the Eastern Hockey League was. I just knew they were minor league guys. It was pretty close to the bottom rung on the pro hockey ladder, and the best that most of the guys could hope for was to make it to a higher minor league like the AHL. The team was heading into its third season and had finished last in the northern division the previous year, so Vic had his work cut out for him.
We had players like Benny Greco, who played six seasons in the EHL, and Wayne Caufield, who played seven, then another seven in leagues ranked even lower. There was the odd player who had played a few games in the NHL, like our goalies, Marcel Pelletier and Norm Defelice. Marcel was a career minor leaguer, pushing 40, who had played a half dozen NHL games and was brought in to help coach and sometimes fill in for Normie, who had played 10 games with the Bruins exactly a decade earlier and didn’t see the NHL again. This was the 15th of Normie’s 16 years in the EHL, and he played for seven different teams in the league. He was a tough customer and foul-mouthed, really foul-mouthed. Almost every word he spoke began with an F and ended with a K.
Slim and None Page 3