Ken had a multitude of great baseball stories which I, of course, loved to hear. He had a very dry wit, and one time he told me how he was chauffeuring “Mr. Rickey,” who was always a terrible back-seat driver, and his wife to training camp in Florida. When they came to a railroad crossing, Rickey told Ken to slow down, look both ways and make sure no train was coming. He’d already been at his back-seat driving best that day, and out of sheer frustration, Ken stopped and, to the shock of the Rickeys, got out of the car, walked over to the track, bent his ear to the rail just like in the Old West and came back to the car and announced to Rickey, “It’s safe to cross.”
Who could have guessed that 40 years later I would be working as a producer with Branch Rickey Jr. and Robert Redford on a Jackie Robinson movie? Life is like that — a nature walk with many paths that keep crossing.
The Flyers also hired a consultant to work with me, a guy named Leo Carlin, who was the Eagles ticket manager and came from an old Philadelphia ticket family. To this day Leo still works with the football team, and in 2012 he was inducted into the Eagles Hall of Fame. Leo taught me the fundamentals, one of which was to understand the importance of what I was in charge of. Tickets were the absolute lifeblood of any franchise. In those days they made up at least 95 per cent of a team’s income. Teams didn’t have electronic advertising in the stadium. The ice and boards were all white — no advertising. In-arena advertising was modest at best because there wasn’t the electronic/TV coverage which drives so much of sponsorship revenue today.
So I had my hands full, figuratively and literally too. We had 600,000 tickets at the start of the year to cover the whole season. Eventually we would put in the first computerized ticketing system in sports, but that year it was all hard tickets. (The computerized ticket system for which we became guinea pigs was called Ticketron, which morphed into the giant company Ticketmaster). I got all the tickets printed by Globe Ticket or by National Ticket, and Leo told me that I had to learn to count them by hand. I just had to, and I did. To this day, if you give me a pile of tickets, I can fan them out in one hand and count them quickly and accurately. I used to do that with a deck of cards to impress my kids.
Hockey was a hard, hard sell in Philadelphia. We were selling, then giving, selling, and giving. Joe Scott liked to take a handful of tickets and go out to a bar and give them away.
Joe Scott, who was used to it from the beer business, really loved the direct sales. He was a guy who would drive me crazy . . . in a good way. He had tons of contacts in old Philadelphia, and as a new owner he really rolled up his sleeves and went at it. He’d say to me, “Come on, grab 200 or 300 tickets and we’ll stop in a bar or a restaurant.” He gave a lot of tickets away, but he really worked it. He exposed the product to thousands of new fans, and hockey is a game that people turn on to once they see it live. Ed, Joe and Bill Putnam taught me that ownership that’s willing to roll up its sleeves and actually work will be successful.
The Philly experience would be invaluable to me later, when I ran the New England Whalers. Our ticket manager, Chris Gallagher, was inexperienced, and 24 hours prior to our opener at Boston Garden I got a panicky request from him for help. I went down to the basement ticket office and saw piles of tickets for opening night on a large table. Chris was overwhelmed and didn’t know how to deal with it all. I told him I’d work through the night with him and together we’d get the job done. And we did, counting every single ticket by hand and arranging them for the next night’s game. It wasn’t beneath my dignity to do this — I’d had the training in Philly.
The Flyers Get off the Ground
We couldn’t possibly have thought it then, couldn’t even have imagined it, but the Flyers would become the most iconic of all the new franchises, and one of the most iconic in the entire sport.
Philadelphia is a fantastic sports city, but the history of hockey there was not a vast one — and what there was, was atrocious. Every team there had folded except the Jersey Devils, who were playing about seven miles from the Spectrum. Fans were already locked into the Philadelphia Phillies, the 76ers and the Eagles. It was also the best college basketball city in the country, and those teams had nearly the following that the pro teams did. And Flyers games with Stu Nahan and Gene Hart were on Channel 48, a UHF station that didn’t have great penetration. Only the road games were on TV, and they didn’t do the seven games from the West Coast. The home games were only on radio, but during that first year the broadcast wouldn’t start until the third period, because the airtime cost too much.
So the Flyers were the classic underdogs in terms of future survival, and people were scratching their heads wondering about them, especially when you had other places with a long history of hockey, like Buffalo, Vancouver and Seattle, which didn’t get expansion teams. And probably should have.
The Original Six hadn’t helped very much either. The $2-million expansion fee seemed high for that era, and for that the six new teams were rewarded with the chance to select from a pool of players from the very bottoms of the rosters of the existing six. The new teams got really young players or ones that were way past their prime. But Bud Poile, the general manager, and Keith Allen, the coach, did a brilliant job of drafting for the Flyers and managed to get a few, like Bernie Parent, Joe Watson, Ed Van Impe, Gary Dornhoefer and Brit Selby, who would become Philadelphia fan favorites for a long time. And when they bought the Quebec Aces of the AHL that May, they also got a couple of dozen players there, including Andre Lacroix, Serge Bernier, Jean-Guy Gendron and Simon Nolet, who became stars and gave the Flyers a bit of a French feeling the first few years.
Another surprise for fans who think the Flyers have always been the Broad Street Bullies is that we weren’t a very tough team at the start. Actually, we were kind of bland.
I wasn’t involved with the on-ice stuff, but I was a real fan and followed it closely. We began our first season on the West Coast, and it didn’t go well: we lost 5–1 in Oakland (for the record, Bill Sutherland scored the first goal in Flyer history) and 4–2 in Los Angeles. Our first win came in the third game, a few days later, a 2–1 victory in St. Louis on the night before the home opener.
Meanwhile, we were going balls-out to get ready for the opening bell. We had our seating manifest, and were selling tickets based on it. But in a new arena you never really know, until all the seats are put in, what you actually have and whether the manifest matches up with the seats available. Ownership had made up their minds, thank God, that they weren’t going to open the Spectrum with a hockey game. Instead, the Quaker City Jazz Festival was the first official event, a couple of weeks before the Flyers were scheduled to open. Everybody in ticketing, whether we were working in hockey or for the 76ers, agreed that we would all work the jazz festival that night to help out and learn, and it’s a good thing we did, because 350 tickets were printed and sold that didn’t have corresponding seats in the building. And that became a recurring nightmare all season long.
Our first home game was against the Pittsburgh Penguins, a no-brainer piece of scheduling because Pennsylvania had suddenly gone from zero NHL teams to two. It was a defensive battle, which became our style that year, and the only goal came from Sutherland three minutes into the third period for a 1–0 win, with Doug Favell getting the shutout. Sutherland was one of the players Philadelphia acquired when they bought the Aces. He and Leon Rochefort were the only Flyers to reach 20 goals that year, and they had only 20 and 21, respectively.
Back then, so much of our gate was driven by the walk-up crowd. We had only 1,500 season tickets, about 10 per cent of the Spectrum’s seating capacity.
How did we do that first night? There were 7,812 people in a new building that could accommodate 14,646 for hockey, and the gross gate was about $21,000. I didn’t know how to judge that, because we didn’t have any other games to compare to, but I remember that everybody was disappointed. One fan walked right through a window because they didn’t h
ave the signage on it yet. He’s lucky he wasn’t beheaded.
So we went along from game to game, taking in 13 grand here, 17 grand there. It was really, really tough, money-wise. If I were Ed and Joe, I would have been scared shitless. And I’m sure they were. Ticket sales were the way you had to make your money, and I think the whole year we grossed only about 750 grand at the gate. Remember, there were no box seats then; there were no club seats then, no dasher-board advertising.
We always had an eye on the weekend of February 3 and 4 — this is weird how I remember the dates but that’s how important it was — when we had back-to-back home games with Chicago and Toronto. The Leafs had just won the Stanley Cup, the last one of the Original Six era and, since then, the last for the franchise. And the Blackhawks had Bobby Hull, who would lead the NHL with 44 goals that year, and Stan Mikita, who would finish first in overall scoring.
There was a capacity crowd for both those games through sold tickets and “comped” tickets. And when I say that, understand that there were a good two or three thousand comps at each one. But it was worth it. We beat Chicago 5–3 behind Bernie Parent on Saturday night, and Toronto 4–1 on Sunday with Doug Favell in net. (It wouldn’t be the last time that a team I was involved with would take something important from the Leafs. Only with the Hartford Whalers, it wouldn’t be two points, it would be three young defencemen.)
That weekend was when things turned the corner for the Flyers, and the team really started to take hold in the city.
I was learning everything I could about the ticket end of the business from Leo and Joe and also a lot from simple trial and error. The system wouldn’t be computerized for a couple of years, and we couldn’t process credit card orders over the phone yet either. We had 16 ticket windows spread around the Spectrum concourse, and I would allot 400 or 500 hard tickets to each one.
One of those was Gate 9, the Will Call Window. We used to do what today is a cardinal rule of don’t-dos: if someone called up the day before the game and said, “I’d like to have you hold the seats in my name and I’ll pay for them at Will Call,” we did it, just for customer service. But we never had a 100 per cent pickup. After those two games against Chicago and Toronto, there started to be a huge demand for tickets and we had massive numbers at Will Call. I usually had young guys in there because it was hectic and they could handle it better. But one day when I had to use an older guy, Harry Crumlish, in the booth, this friend of Ed’s showed up and his tickets weren’t there. The guy found Ed and Ed comes down and the door is sealed — remember just about everything was in cash those days — and Eddie demands to be let in but Crumlish said he couldn’t do it. Eddie started kicking the door. I was downstairs in my ticket “bunker” and a stretcher came by with Harry Crumlish on it. We thought he might be having a heart attack, but thankfully it was just stress-induced chest pain. I was convinced I was going to be fired, but Ed just said, “I’ll see you tomorrow.” To this day Ed and I have a good chuckle over that story.
The First of My Missing Roofs
That first year we started out really slowly, but none of the six expansion teams were a bang-out success at the beginning. Certainly Oakland wasn’t, and Minnesota didn’t make an impact right away. L.A. was a question mark, but at least it was backed by big bucks. And Pittsburgh had a lot of problems, even though it was a good hockey town. Every one of us struggled. And then, slowly, across the league, things started to build for the new teams. St. Louis probably started the quickest because they made the Cup finals in the first year and the next two as well before the divisional format was changed. They were the hottest of the expansion teams.
Although the established teams hadn’t given the expansion teams much in the way of proven players, they did guarantee them some success by lumping all six newcomers in the West Division, while the Original Six formed the East. That meant that one of the new franchises was sure to play in the Stanley Cup final. In year one, the Flyers finished first in the west, one game under .500, but with Parent and Favell we allowed the third-fewest goals in the whole league, which was a positive sign heading into the playoffs.
But, in keeping with the hardscrabble theme of the Flyers’ first year, naturally we couldn’t finish the regular season without one more major stumbling block.
On March 1st, 1968, a massive wind blew a huge section of the Spectrum roof right off. There were 11,000 people in the arena, waiting for an Ice Capades matinee to begin, and they suddenly found themselves gazing right up at the sky. The Spectrum was located in a wind tunnel, and a huge patch of tar paper and shingles measuring 100 feet by 50 feet was torn off and crashed to the ground outside the arena. Communication wasn’t instant back then, and I learned of the situation when I arrived at work the next morning. Everybody was already standing around with long faces. When the mayor, James Tate, went up on the roof to take a look, the wind almost carried him off too. The mayor declared the building closed, and we’re all looking at each other saying, “What do we do now?” We had a home game two days later against Oakland, and five other home dates to finish the regular season.
The Flyers were carrying loss-of-business insurance, and Bill Putnam came to me and said, “Howard, take about 10,000 of those tickets and lose them so we can claim the loss of business.”
“Really?” I said, a little nervous about the order.
But what was I going to do? So I bundled the tickets up, threw them into the trunk of my car, and just left them there.
We hastily arranged to play Oakland at Madison Square Garden, then a few days later we rented Maple Leaf Gardens to play the Bruins, and then we moved into Le Colisée in Quebec, where we owned the Aces, for our final five home games. (And how’s that for foreshadowing? I’ve got to be the only hockey guy who’s ever been through losing two arena roofs, and when it happened in Hartford 10 years later, where would I be at the time? In Quebec City.)
A week or so after our conversation about the 10,000 tickets, Bill asked to see me. “Just curious,” he said. “What did you do with those tickets? Did you throw them out?” And I told him I hadn’t. I just knew it — I knew it wasn’t the right thing. Bill knew it wasn’t the right thing too. He was under tremendous pressure, so I had figured not to take him literally when he told me to lose them.
When I told him I still had them in the trunk of my car, he said, with obvious relief, “Thank God! Go get ’em and put ’em back in your ticket racks.”
We were both lucky I hadn’t followed his orders.
We got the Spectrum back in time for the playoffs. Even though we had home-ice advantage against St. Louis in the opening round, we fell behind three games to one. But we forced a game seven when Don Blackburn, later to become a Whaler player and our first NHL coach, scored in double overtime in game six, right in St. Louis. Then we lost the deciding game 3–1 at home, and St. Louis went on to their first of three straight appearances in the Stanley Cup finals, all losses.
End of the Apprenticeship
In my second year with the Flyers, Bill added “sales manager” to my portfolio, and I was learning things rapidly by watching Ed Snider at work. Ed included me in all the sales and marketing decisions, which was great because I thirsted for the knowledge. I couldn’t have been given a better gift than working for Ed. It was like studying for my PhD in hockey ownership.
Ed was incredibly charismatic and incredibly aggressive. He didn’t have a lot of experience with the sport of hockey, but he knew business and marketing. Ed was about as smart and creative a guy as you would ever want to meet. The Flyers were his calling, and Ed had the vision to understand that through the Flyers would come many other opportunities for him, such as the Spectrum and many of the wonderful companies he has built since then. He did intimidate people — I was actually a bit afraid of Ed, although not physically. Still, he was always good to me, and to this day he’s a friend. I learned so much from Ed and one of the things in my life that has made me
most proud was that when he was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1988, I was the one who nominated him.
During those few years in Philly, I saw what went into the process of doing it the right way: how to move seats around, how to raise prices, how to make decisions based on economics.
The team slumped after the first year, dropping from 73 points to 61 in 1968–69, and to 58 points in 1969–70, missing the playoffs completely. But while the team struggled on the ice, each year our season ticket sales progressed and the dollars went up. The Flyers were gaining popularity, but part of the revenue increase was also because we knew how and when to raise ticket prices. What I learned in Philadelphia was that the way you price a house, and scale a house, is everything. I carried that on to my Hartford years. When we got to the NHL, I was most proud of the fact that in the smallest market in the league and in the smallest arena, we had the third-highest gross gate.
What I loved about Ed and Joe Scott was that we didn’t make a decision on a price change without thorough and thoughtful study, walking up into the seats and really looking at what the impact would be. It’s really a judgment call, so we would climb into the stands and study whether the price could change from, say, $3.25 to $4.50 starting at Row 10 instead of at Row 11. Those prices may sound way too low, but they were real. I can still tell you, to this day, which section of the Spectrum cost how much in the first year of expansion. The tickets were colored by price: red was $2.00 per game; yellow, $3.25; green, $4.50; blue, $5.50; and orange, $6.50. Not exactly today’s face value!
When we made price changes, we tried to offend as few people as possible, and that was a little easier if we didn’t already have season ticket holders in that area, because they’d sure let us know about it. I was blessed to have that time in Philadelphia — it taught me that you had to listen to people, because we just had to try so goddamned hard!
Slim and None Page 5