Slim and None

by Howard Baldwin

  EHL legend Reggie Meserve, our highest-paid player, probably making only about $7,500 for the year, was in his third year in Jersey and 13th in the EHL. Except for one solitary game in the AHL, his entire 15-year pro career was spent in the EHL, and at that level he could score, set up goals, and really mix it up. That year he had 106 points in 72 games for us, and 94 minutes in penalties, one of the few times he didn’t top 100. Reggie couldn’t really open his hands out flat. His fingers were really curved from gripping the stick and from punching, because the shape you make with your hand is kind of the same in both actions. I found out later that Meserve had once played for the Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League, as did another one of our tough players, Bobby Taylor. Bobby spent a number of years in the CFL and was a fierce-looking guy. He had almost no neck. He wasn’t that great a hockey player, but Vic needed a tough guy and Bobby always kept coming back for more. I remember thinking at the time, “There’s a movie in that guy!” Once he was running to catch the bus and Vic said, “Have you ever seen a guy with that much power?” He was just fascinated with Taylor’s athletic prowess.

  The league was all guys playing on the way down, and none on the way up, except for the one year I was there, when a couple might hope to make it because of the coming expansion. One was our 21-year-old rookie, Rosaire Paiement, who had been a junior star in Niagara Falls the year before. Rosaire was from a northern Ontario family of 16 kids and was naturally tough, which helped him carve out a decent pro career. It was his only season in the “E,” a rarity, and he scored 61 goals and 126 points for us, and spent a whopping 175 minutes — nearly three hours — in the penalty box. He made the Flyers within two years and eventually played in the WHA for six years, one of them for me in Hartford.

  If you couldn’t fight you couldn’t play in the Eastern Hockey League of that era. I didn’t know that when I arrived there, with my main exposure to hockey coming at high school and college games, where fighting is rare.

  We scheduled our first exhibition game against our biggest rivals, the Long Island Ducks, who had the notorious John Brophy on defence. Five minutes into the game, I’m in the office with Jeannie counting the meager gate receipts and I can hear all this screaming and yelling from the stands, which were right above us. I said, “My God, there must be a riot out there! Watch the cash, I’m heading out to see what happened.” I run into the arena and into total bedlam. Every single player from both teams is on the ice; they’re all punching one another, and the fans are screaming in joy. I look over at our bench, and there’s Vic standing there with arms folded across his chest and a big smile on his face, giving me the thumbs-up sign. He was loving it. “Holy mackerel,” I’m thinking, “this is going to be some wild ride.”

  The Johnstown Jets, the team the movie Slap Shot was based on, were also in our division. Eventually Steve Carlson, Jack Carlson and Dave Hanson — Steve and Dave were two of the “Hanson Brothers” goons in Slap Shot — would all play for us in New England. That movie came out in 1977, just 10 years after I was in the Eastern League and people had no idea how accurate it was. They assumed it was only a parody, but that’s the way it was. The games would go on for three and a half hours. In Clinton, New York, where the Comets played, most of the seats in the arena were fold-up chairs, and during fights the fans would throw their chairs right onto the ice. Now that’s audience participation.

  In the Stands and on the Road

  Later in the season, we were going on the road to play the Ducks again, and since we had family on Long Island, I said to my father and mother, “Why don’t you join me for the game?” They hadn’t seen us play yet. They did and, naturally, there’s a brawl right away. Right away. I could see my father getting madder and madder because he came from the college game, was a hockey traditionalist and never believed in fighting. And some time later, but still in the first period, Vic leaned over to the penalty box to yell at the referee and the Ducks player in the box. Unfortunately that was also where the P.A. announcer sat . . . and he didn’t have his mike off. So out of all the arena speakers you could hear a series of really juicy expletives directed at the referee. He threw Vic out of the game, of course, and the police came to the bench to escort Vic out through the stands. They took him right past our seats and he stopped, one cop on each arm, and proceeded to introduce himself to my mother and father. “Mr. and Mrs. Baldwin!” he said. “Sorry I can’t stay longer . . . but nice to meet you.” And down to the locker room he went, still held by two cops. And my dad said, “Well, what a unique introduction to your roommate.”

  I learned a lot about hockey that year, besides fighting, because I spent so much time with Vic. If we didn’t have a game at night, we went to one somewhere, sometimes driving for hours. All in my car, of course. We used to go up to Madison Square Garden, and one time when my car was in the shop, we drove the team bus up to see the Rangers. The bus had been renovated with bunks — it was a 10-team league and we had to travel all day and night to places like Nashville and Charlotte. Vic was always anxious to get to the arena in time for the pre-game warm up, and when I asked him why that was so important he said, “I can tell how everybody’s going to play by the way they warm up. I’ve gotta see if they have bounce in their legs.”

  It was on one of those bus trips up to New York that I first met Gordie Howe. Vic loved Gordie—and who didn’t? — and after we watched the Red Wings play the Rangers, my favorite team when I was growing up, we went to the locker room to meet Number 9. For me, it was a huge event and Gordie didn’t disappoint — he was very witty and gracious. I had no idea how our paths would cross so dramatically a few years later, but I never forgot that initial meeting.

  I was meeting hockey people and steadily increasing my hockey knowledge, so I guess Vic figured I could probably handle another assignment. He had to go back to Lethbridge for a while because he was buying a golf course, his lifelong dream. We didn’t have a game until Friday, when we were hosting our big rivals from Long Island, so Vic said he would fly back home on Monday, do the business deal, then be back in time for the game, and he wanted me to run the practices while he was gone. Plus he didn’t want Bud Poile, Keith Allen or anyone in the Flyers organization to find out. I was worried about it, but agreed, as long as he wrote everything down that he wanted me to do.

  Onto the ice we go on Monday for practice and the players are all there with condescending smirks all over their faces. They’re humoring me. We have a good practice until I see in Vic’s notes the dreaded words, “Make them do 20 wind sprints at the end.” I hold my breath and then say, “Okay guys we’re doing wind sprints.” Up and down they go, but after a just a few I feel a stick hit my ass and it’s Reggie Meserve. “Howard, we’ve done enough wind sprints today. Okay?”

  I might not have excelled at school, but I know when to listen to a big guy with a hockey stick whose fingers are permanently curled into a fist. “Okay, Reggie,” I say, as if it was my idea.

  Friday comes and a big blizzard is supposed to hit. I’m suddenly worried Vic won’t make it back in time. And it just so happens that Bud Poile calls me looking for Vic. I told him he wasn’t in, and when he asked why, I had to tell him. Bud was not pleased at all. He mentioned the blizzard then said, “Howard, you coached the team this week? Okay, if you two schemers are thinking like this, if Vic doesn’t get in you’re going to have to coach the team tonight. So get ready for it.” I was in shock — not only at having to be behind the bench but also because I wanted to please Bud and all the Flyers personnel. I desperately wanted a position with them the next year. I’m in there writing out the lines just in case, but I figured the guys would do whatever they wanted to anyway. I was absolutely praying that Vic would get back, and he did . . . about an hour before game time. Bud and Keith came to that game, and Bud said to me afterward, “Well, Howard, now you can add ‘coach’ to your resume.”

  Blizzards are a recurring theme in hockey stories. One day we w
ere heading up to Clinton, New York, through a raging snowstorm, with Vic driving the bus. The defroster was broken and Normie Defelice was standing beside him, wiping down the windshield occasionally, and I’m in the front seat, praying we’ll get there.

  About an hour outside of Clinton, this car comes at us out of nowhere, and Vic has to swerve sharply to the right. We go right through the guardrail, and I figure we’re dead. Down an embankment we go, the bus rolls, and all I can hear is Normie saying, “Hang on, Vic, keep the wheel until we turn right side up.” Of course, because it was Normie, it was more colorfully stated and peppered with words that all began with F. We end up in a field, but we have all four wheels on the ground. The players have all been tossed around badly and Vic is still gripping the steering wheel hard, stunned beyond belief. But Normie doesn’t miss a beat and tells Vic to open the door. He goes outside, looks around, and says, “We can get out of here! Drive right across the field.” By now, cars are stopped all along the road and people are running down the hill toward us to help out. But Vic starts driving, crosses the field, goes through a little gate in a stone wall, and we continue all the way to the game. We were an hour late and lost the game 6–1, but who cared? All that mattered was that we were alive. Believe it or not, we all jumped on that same little red bus and drove back to Cherry Hill.

  We ended up in second place in the Northern Division, and who do we play in the first round but the Johnstown Jets? The series went the limit, with the deciding game in Johnstown. The place was packed, and their fans figured they were going to win. And if I thought the regular season was fight-filled, it was nothing compared to the playoffs. I drove to the game with Stu Nahan in his brand new Cadillac, and neither of us was too optimistic. But we won 6–1 in a real upset. As the game ended, Defelice flipped a puck into the stands, trying to do a nice thing for a fan. It was an innocent gesture, but as luck would have it, the puck hit the face of a woman who wasn’t looking in that direction. It turned out to be the team owner’s secretary, and the fans immediately assumed it was a deliberate action.

  While we were in the dressing room celebrating, there was a loud knock on the door and I told Vic not to go out there, but he’s a tough guy and opened the door anyway. There’s the team owner in front of a lynch mob of hundreds of fans. He said the police were on the way “and they’re going to arrest Defelice because my secretary had two teeth knocked out.” Vic came back in the locker room and said, “You gotta get Normie out of here.” Stu immediately assumes the role of Captain Philadelphia, sees a small window in the dressing room, tells me to crawl through it and go get his Cadillac and back it up as close as I can to the window. I did as instructed, and there was Stu — a Philadelphia celebrity, the guy who does the CBS football game of the week — stuffing himself and Normie through the window. Normie’s still got his helmet on and every second sentence out of his mouth is, “Howard, what the fuck?” or simply, “What the fuck?” We stuffed Normie into the trunk with his full goalie gear on, and he’s hysterical with laughter. We told the guys we’d meet the bus 30 miles out of town, and just as we were leaving the parking lot, I swear to God the cops arrived with sirens blaring. They flooded into the dressing room looking for Normie, but Vic acted all innocent and said, “I guess he got scared and ran.”

  We ended up winning two playoff rounds and losing the final to the Nashville Dixie Flyers in five games. They were a good team and defending champions, so it was a pretty impressive first season for us, and the franchise just about broke even too.

  I hoped to be with the Flyers five months later, but to this day I feel that the season with the Jersey Devils, as crazy as it got, was my favorite year in hockey.

  And it was a pretty good prelude to another crazy league which would start in only five years.

  The Move to Philly

  I had crammed all four years of my hockey undergraduate degree into just that one season with the Jersey Devils, but I earned my MBA at the Philadelphia Spectrum.

  I spent the first few weeks of the summer of 1967 on the edge of my seat, antsy and just waiting for the phone to ring. I expected the Flyers would eventually call, and in mid-July Bill Putnam finally did, asking me to a meeting in midtown Philadelphia.

  The Flyers rented temporary office space while they were waiting for construction of the Spectrum to be completed, hopefully in time for the home opener. The team was meant to play their first three games on the road, to provide a little cushion for construction delays, then open at the Spectrum on Thursday, October 19.

  When I walked into Bill’s office, I would have signed on as a janitor if that’s what they wanted, but Bill offered me the job of ticket manager at $7,500 per year. There was no raise from what I’d made with the Devils, but that was fine with me. After learning to skate on the ponds of Bedford, and playing a little college hockey, I was going to be working in the NHL. The league might have doubled in size from the Original Six to 12 teams, but there still weren’t that many jobs available in the game and I felt really lucky to have one.

  I want to emphasize how small front offices were in the first year of expansion. Each might have had a staff of 8 or 10 people, while today there are more than that in just the sales and marketing departments of most teams. So you could really learn a lot if you were willing to commit yourself, which I was, because you had to do a little bit of everything, no matter what your actual job title was. It was great training for me, and I was really lucky to be able to watch Ed Snider. He can be an intimidating guy, but I realized that if I paid attention I would learn how a good owner can operate. I was there to learn, learn, learn, and for the rest of my life in hockey I have used many of the principles and tactics I picked up from Ed.

  The Flyers have been such a profitable and model franchise for so long, people forget that initially their success was far from a sure thing. There was a lot of financial turmoil around the team in the early years, even before they dropped the first puck. The franchise was originally owned by the wealthy real estate developer Jerry Wolman, who also owned the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles. His good friend was Ed Snider, who was also the executive vice-president of the Eagles at the time and had a minority interest. A contractor named Jerome Schiff also had a piece of the franchise, and Bill Putnam got a piece for doing the behind-the-scenes politicking that helped land the expansion franchise, even though Philadelphia wasn’t among the favorites to get one of the six new teams.

  But Joe Scott, who had just retired from the beer distribution business after making Ballantine one of the most recognized brands in the area, still had to help the group arrange the extra financing when they fell short of the $2 million NHL expansion fee. Snider knew Scott from his dealings with the Philadelphia Eagles, which Snider was helping run.

  Although it was Wolman who financed the arena, Ed was the one who saw the potential in hockey and led the drive to build the Spectrum. Ed had seen the huge lineups at the Boston Garden a couple of years earlier to buy tickets for the then-last-place Bruins. He figured that if people would line up to see a team in last place, then the NHL must be on to something. The promise of the new arena, and the prestige of having high-profile NFL people such as Wolman and Snider involved, was probably why the NHL chose to put an expansion team in Philadelphia instead of Baltimore, despite the fact that Baltimore had a far more successful minor league hockey history and was considered by most people in hockey to be the front-runner to land a franchise for the area.

  People forget now that the day before the Flyers’ home opener, Wolman fired Ed from the Eagles. It was a huge falling-out. Wolman was having financial difficulties with a building in Chicago that had problems with the foundation and was costing him millions, so he went to Eddie and Bill and said, “Look, I gave you your stock in the team, and I need your interest to collateralize this.” Eddie wouldn’t do it. Eddie was right too; he had earned that stock. So Wolman soon sold out to Ed, and Ed brought in Joe Scott for 15 per cent. Ed had 60 per ce
nt, and Bill, who was running the team as president, had 25 per cent.

  Right away it was clear there were going to be some interesting dynamics around the Flyers, because Bill and Ed couldn’t have been more different personalities. Eddie is a very strong and aggressive Easterner, and Bill is a laid-back Texan. Bill is a dear, dear guy, but he wasn’t aggressive enough for Ed. From the start, he blended into the old boys’ network which had run the NHL for years, and there were even a few newspaper columns over the years that suggested he might be the next president when Clarence Campbell retired. Bill ended up lasting only three years there and left the Flyers in 1970, not long before I did, when he lost a power struggle with Ed to buy the team. I will always be indebted to Bill for opening the door for me to get into the world of professional sports. I was pleased years later when (in Hartford) we started our own regional network called PRISM, later renamed SportsChannel, and I was able to hire Bill in an executive capacity to work for me.

  So all that was going on — not that it would really affect me, because I was pretty low on the totem pole.

  I shared an office with Bill’s executive assistant, Ken Blackburn, a great guy who was a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. Blackburn was very helpful to me with my department. He loved Bill Putnam, and he worshipped Branch Rickey, the famous baseball pioneer who had signed Jackie Robinson to break the color barrier. For years, Ken had been the male secretary to “Mr. Rickey,” which was the only way he ever referred to him. A couple of times I called him “Branch” and was admonished for it.