The whole time in Philly, I was like a kid in a candy factory. The executive offices were right across the hall from the ticket offices, so whether you were a basketball player or a hockey player, you had to come into the back end of the Spectrum, walk down the corridor, down the hall and past my office. I had a Dutch bay door, so I saw everybody. I had chats with Wilt Chamberlain and Bobby Orr when they’d pop their heads into my office. One day during the first year, Bud Poile yelled over, “Howard, get your ass in here,” and I had to be the legal witness to Bernie Parent signing his first contract. It wasn’t the only one I witnessed either.
One night that year, I was working late while the Philadelphia Indoor Tennis Championships were being played at the Spectrum. I went out to the arena floor and there was Althea Gibson, all alone, practicing her serve. For those who don’t know, Althea was one of the greatest female athletes in history. She broke the color barrier in two sports — international tennis and the LPGA. Althea was the first person of color to win a Grand Slam event (the 1956 French Open), and she won 11 Grand Slam titles in all. She was about 40 when I met her that night, and still playing on the tennis circuit.
Thinking I’m the hot-shot tennis player, I asked her if she wanted me to hit some balls back to her so she didn’t gave to chase them around the arena. She said she’d love that, and I’m thinking, “I’ll show her.”
Her very first serve just about took my head off. I ended up getting only a few back to her, but what a thrill it was.
In the Flyers’ third year, Vic Stasiuk had taken over as coach. Bobby Clarke had arrived as a rookie, and Keith Allen was promoted to GM after Ed Snider fired Bud Poile. Bud Poile and Bill Putnam were close and Ed didn’t tell Bill before he fired Bud, and that created a deep rift. Ed was a dominant owner, so you could see him wanting to get the front office to his liking, not to Bill Putnam’s liking. And Keith was absolutely the perfect GM for Ed, as easygoing and mild-mannered a fellow as you’d ever want to meet. Bill had never really stood a chance there. He lost the power struggle, sold his stock and was gone from the Flyers by June of 1970.
I wouldn’t be far behind him.
Instinctively, I felt like I had to move on. Not that I was unhappy — in fact, it was quite the opposite. But I am by nature restless, then as now.
I had actually begun to have stirrings the previous year. I used to car pool with Bill Henderson, who worked in sales with us and would later become the first sales manager for the Hartford Whalers. One time as we drove home, we were talking about our goals in life. Just as we came onto the Walt Whitman Bridge, which is right outside the Spectrum and runs over the Delaware River, I suddenly blurted out, “One day I want to own a team.”
Bill looked at me like I was completely nuts. “How are you going to do that?”
“I have access, contacts, through my family,” I said. “And I hope one day that I can put a deal together to get a team.”
I think that was probably the first time that thought had come out of my mouth, and maybe even the first time it went from the back of my brain to the front. I don’t know why I had decided I wanted to be an owner. I’ve never really thought about it. I guess I always thought it was prestigious to own something, to own something you love and that you can work with and that you understand. I knew I was never going to be a banker, which a lot of people in my family became, or get into a job that had anything to do with tradition. But I had to do something that would get me recognition and give me a career.
Strangely, in 2013, when we were clearing up my mother’s estate, I found a letter to my dad that I don’t even remember writing. It was written that same year, and I was telling him my goals about maybe someday owning a team, so it was obviously more on my mind than I realized. My parents never gave me any money to invest in ventures — I wouldn’t have expected them to — and although my father had contacts, I wasn’t asking him in that letter to set me up with those people, nor would I ever dream of that. It was just a fantasy, really; a pipe dream. Now, having a dream of owning and actually owning are two very different things. Remember, I was only 28 then, and hadn’t had the time to accumulate any of my own money.
I got the 1970–71 season organized that fall, but one day I woke up and realized it actually was time to go. NHL front offices were very small, and I sensed that I’d gone as far as I could. I felt that if I stayed in Philly I might have still been there 20 years later, but I also might have still been ticket manager and sales manager. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s not what I felt I wanted to do or be. Plus I wanted to get back into the New England area, and I really wanted to have my own thing going, whatever that would turn out to be.
People in that environment had been so good to me, and I had learned so much from Ed Snider and Joe Scott. I was thankful for it, and I left on good terms. I knew that you don’t ever burn bridges because you’re never sure when you might be crossing over them again.
My decision to leave the Flyers was crazy. It was insane. I had a good position, the company was very happy with me, and I was in hockey management. Even talking about it now, I know that it was a stupid decision on paper. However, all of my instincts were leading me in the direction of taking that next step, which would have to be bold if I were going to achieve the goal of ever getting my own team.
So in November I left the Philadelphia Flyers. I was taking a big chance, but in the early 1970s, a lot of people were taking big chances and I would soon become involved with quite a few of them.
As I pulled away from the Spectrum in Philly for the last time, I realized I was taking one hell of a risk in leaving what was then a very tight-knit fraternity of an NHL team’s front office. I knew the minute that I hit “home shores” I would be second-guessed about taking this big chance. Somehow, however, I knew that it was my time and the right decision to make.
For the NHL, storm clouds were on the horizon. The league had doubled in size and in doing so had created a much greater awareness of the passion people had for the sport, but had also created an awareness that there were flaws in the league as it related to their player relations. The good news in the expansion was that the league doubled in size and stoked widespread excitement for the sport. The bad news was that other markets that were on the outside looking in now wanted to get into the game, which created a demand that the WHA would meet. Hockey was about to experience the 1970s — the decade of revolution. Who would have thought as I left Philly in 1970 that within a year and a half there would be a rival league with twelve new teams, and I would have one of the twelve?
As they say: gentlemen, start your engines, because here comes the WHA.
PART TWO
THE WHA YEARS:
THE ’70S
Winging It
It was the spring of 1971, six months since I’d left the Philadelphia Flyers. I’d taken a gamble in leaving a steady job in hockey, and I was searching for my next career opportunity in sport. I was starting to get worried. My expenses were mounting and I was borrowing from family and friends to make ends meet. I had two children to support. All I knew was that I wanted to get back into pro sports, and in the New England area.
My old friend Johnny Coburn and I had taken over his parents’ clothing store in Wareham, Massachusetts, and we had an office for ourselves in the back of the store.
While running the store, Coby and I also put together a business plan for building a small rink somewhere in Cape Cod, because the area didn’t have one. We thought maybe we could attract an Eastern Hockey League team, or maybe a franchise for the North American Hockey League, which was just about to start up. We had started to raise money when Vince McMahon — yes, the wrestling guy — beat us to the punch. He broke ground later that year for the Cape Cod Arena in South Yarmouth, which would seat 4,500 people and become home to the Cape Cod Cubs of the EHL in October of 1972.
One typical weekday morning in our store, I was reading the Boston Globe w
hen I saw a brief article about the two founders of the American Basketball Association, Dennis Murphy and Gary Davidson, who were apparently at it again and were forming a league called the World Hockey Association to compete with the NHL. And they had already been talking to potential investors.
I showed the article to Coby, and he seemed to be as excited as I was. So I made a suggestion which would turn a small newspaper story into a major event in our lives:
“Let’s call these guys.”
We knew from the Globe article that they were in Newport Beach, California, so we dialed Long Distance Information and, just like that, got a number for the World Hockey Association. Dennis Murphy himself picked up the phone and I got right to the point.
“Hi, I’m Howard Baldwin and I have a partner, John Coburn. I worked with the Philadelphia Flyers but am currently in the Boston area and we’re extremely interested in learning more about the WHA and are interested in putting a team in the New England area. We feel we have the financial backing for this type of venture, depending upon what the deal is.”
The WHA had a great interest in Boston because it was the hottest market in hockey at the time. The Bruins had just won their first Stanley Cup in 39 years on the famous overtime goal with Bobby Orr flying through the air, the AHL Braves were drawing really well in the Garden and college and high school hockey were still as popular as ever in the city. But so far nobody had expressed an interest in having a WHA team there. Dennis was excited about the idea.
“I’m going to fly out there in the next 30 days and meet you two guys!” Dennis said.
“What do we do now?” we asked ourselves, a question that we’d find ourselves repeating quite regularly over the years. We were young and fearless, with nothing to lose. All our instincts told us this could be the brass ring we were looking for. So why not go for it?
And that began our quest for a WHA franchise, with us fully cognizant of these facts: we didn’t have any money, and we didn’t have an arena. But we both felt we could “pull this off,” as we described it, and we should try. We knew the ABA and the American Football League had worked, and now it was hockey’s turn, and these were the same two guys who had started the ABA!
I knew enough from my three years with the Flyers that presentation is half the battle. So Coby and I put together a really nice brochure articulating the history of hockey in New England and listing the compelling reasons why the WHA should establish a foothold in the New England marketplace. We also put together an impressive board of directors consisting of friends and family who were in prominent positions.
Of course, we had to have an office that gave an impression of legitimacy — not extravagance, but understated elegance. We rented a small office, and then went to our friend Albert “Guppy” Ford, an antique dealer, who let us borrow some really good antiques to make the office look like it had substance and that we were established. For that we gave him 1 per cent of the “team.”
Gary Davidson and Dennis Murphy were kindred spirits and hustlers of a sort, and were seasoned pros at attracting investors after their years promoting the ABA. Physically they were polar opposites. Davidson had movie-star good looks — think Robert Redford — and tremendous charisma. Murphy was a short, roly-poly Irishman who also resembled a movie star — but unfortunately that star was Mickey Rooney.
Davidson didn’t come to Boston, just Murphy. We picked him up at Logan Airport. This was before the jet-way was installed, so he had to come down from the plane on the portable stairway. He stumbled, hit the tarmac and sprained his ankle. So we started our first meeting with the WHA in the hospital emergency ward. There was probably some kind of symbolism in that. Dennis scouted out our “operation,” including the new and improved office, and was impressed.
A few weeks later, Davidson and the league’s attorney, Don Regan, came to visit us too, and as part of their tour we drove them past our parents’ homes. Neither of us mentioned the fact that our families weren’t about to invest one red cent in a crazy hockey venture, but we wanted to give them the impression we had access to money by showing them our family homesteads. They clearly believed that we were entrepreneurs with access to money, based on what they had seen, and that this would be good for the league. Keep in mind that, without question, they were selling us and we were selling them. We didn’t know what they had and they didn’t know what we had. Both sides had a silent commitment to find out, though.
They said, “Here’s what you’re going to need. You have to show us you have a suitable arena to play in, and that you have the financial backing, and you must come to the first league meeting with the $25,000 entry fee and another $10,000 for league dues.”
Coby and I just looked at each other, shrugged and agreed. Sounded reasonable to us.
That wasn’t a lot of money, even back then. We thought we could come up with it, but I’ll emphasize this: at the time we did not have it. That said, they didn’t have a league yet, either.
Eventually we were able to borrow the $25,000, and we gave 1 per cent of the action to a fellow named Peter Leonard for putting up the 10 grand for the league dues.
The first WHA organizational meeting we attended was in October of 1971 at the Hotel Americana in New York City. The league was going to be formed that week, and we were showing up with almost no business experience, without an arena to play in and with our financing limited, and all borrowed. It seemed overwhelming but we felt we had come this far and we were up for the rest of the ride.
We had expanded our little group to include Godfrey Wood, a great friend of Coby’s and a former all-American goaltender at Harvard. Woody’s role was to work with us on raising capital. We also had our lawyer, George Perkins, from a small New Bedford law firm, who was willing to roll the dice with us regarding his legal fees.
In New York, we were invited up to the presidential suite to meet the league brass and the rest of the owners. Murphy was there and so were Davidson and Regan. Davidson and Regan were Californians, real surfer types who seemed to find everything slightly amusing. We quickly nicknamed these two “the Laughing Boys” — and it stuck.
When Coby, Woody, George and I walked in, everybody looked up at us and the room went silent. Three icons of western Canadian hockey — Ben Hatskin of Winnipeg, Bill Hunter of Edmonton and Scotty Munro of Calgary — were in there, and we could easily see that in their minds we didn’t fit the profile at all. Hatskin was in charge of league finances, Hunter was running the hockey end of things and Munro was the great ideas man. Visualize Goodfellas and you get what we saw when we walked in. Ben eventually became a dear, dear friend, but he was a very tough guy. And all of them were looking at us like, “Who are these young upstarts?”
The idea was for the WHA to come out of the New York meetings with 12 franchises that they could announce to the hockey world, which would develop publicity and momentum. Murphy and Davidson were brilliant: for most of the three days that we were in New York they kept everybody, all the potential franchisees, separate from each other. I don’t think they wanted us to compare notes and figure out that the team investors were the important ones, not the league founders, because without franchises there is no league. Gary and Dennis were making it sound like people were lining up to get into the league, when in fact they weren’t. Far from it: they were lucky to get 12 applicants. But they had the credibility of having started the ABA, so people felt that there was at least some substance there. Gary was the charismatic one, with a winning smile, while Dennis worked his ass off all the time. They were a good team. But they didn’t know a thing about hockey, which became evident when we had a chance later to read through the league by-laws — in many instances the ice surface was referred to as “the court.”
I would be remiss if I didn’t point out here that the $25K each franchise put up would go directly to Mr. Murphy and Mr. Davidson.
When it was our turn to appear to make a pitch, the entire
process was testimony to the theory that sometimes when you have nothing to lose, you can achieve great success. Bottom line, we were clear to them: we didn’t have an arena but could get one, and we felt the financing wouldn’t be an issue.
We were able to convince them that we had the potential to be a stable ownership group. We didn’t tell them we had the money, and we remained steadfast in our confidence that we would be able to find a place to play. We mentioned the new rink being built in Providence, Rhode Island, as well as the old Boston Arena, which we thought we could get, and the Boston Garden, which was a long shot. We were earnest and committed, and because of that, and of the appearance of wealth behind us, they agreed to give us 30 days to do what we said we were going to do.
They said, “We’re having a second meeting in November at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami. Come back then.”
The WHA was announced to the world as 10 franchises — the Miami Screaming Eagles, the Los Angeles Aces (owned by Murphy), the Chicago Cougars, the New York/Long Island Raiders, the Dayton Arrows, the San Francisco Sharks (owned by Davidson), the Calgary Broncos, the Alberta Oilers, the Winnipeg Jets and the Minnesota Fighting Saints.
We went back home and started going a hundred miles an hour looking for financing and for an arena. The Bruins owned the Garden and weren’t really taking us seriously. The Boston Arena was old and misshapen. And we got scammed in Providence, which I’ll tell you about later. When it was time to go to Miami 30 days later, we knew we could get the Boston Arena but also knew that it wasn’t adequate, although at least it was a place to play in New England.
We decided to go to Florida because Dennis and Gary were encouraging us to come and we felt strongly that they needed a New England presence — besides, the weather in Miami in November is nice.
Then fate stepped in or, rather, sat down behind us. Coby and I went to the airport to catch a plane to Florida, and who should get on with us but a fellow named Phil David Fine, whom I’d met once with my father. He was the brains behind getting the New England Patriots’ stadium in Foxboro built and he also knew the lawyer for the Boston Garden, Charlie Mulcahy. By sheer chance, Phil was sitting right behind me on the plane, and I re-introduced myself to him. He remembered me and asked why we were going to Miami. So I told him about the WHA, the meetings in Miami, our bid to get a hockey franchise for New England and that we were hoping to find a place in Boston to play our games.
Slim and None Page 6