I told him it would get fixed up, and it did. They made the ice regulation-size and built locker rooms for us and the visitors. We had to build another dressing room when we landed games in the Garden, because the existing rooms there were all taken. In the end, we played 19 of our home games in the Boston Arena, and the other 20, plus all the playoffs, at the Boston Garden.
The most interesting prospect we explored was the brand new arena in Providence, Rhode Island — the Providence Civic Center. Going to Providence seemed logical. It would have been a perfect fit, and Providence could have become what Hartford eventually did.
We tried to get into Providence, but there was tremendous corruption and we got scammed. For some reason the Civic Center authority, which consisted of some of the leading businesspeople in the city as well as a politician or two, were protecting George Sage, the owner of the Providence Reds in the AHL. Then, through Jack Kelley, we met a local businessman named Bob Reid, and he said, “I believe I have somebody that will be able to help you get into Providence.” Bob came up to lunch with us in Boston with a business associate named Jimmy and a “consultant” named Ray Badway. And if the last name wasn’t enough, all you had to do was look at Ray and you’d start thinking, “This may not work.” He looked like a real tough guy.
They asked for $15,000 for “expenses” to get us into the arena. We gave them the money with high hopes that this might work. Of course, we never got in, never got our money back and never asked for it, either. We took a chance and it didn’t pan out and we wound up in Boston in the Arena and the Garden.
However, there is a postscript to the Providence experience.
After our second WHA season, I got a telephone call from an assistant attorney general in Providence named Bud Cianci, saying that he’d like to come up and see me. Bob Caporale helped me deal with the issue. He is a very creative lawyer who would always find a way to solve a problem no matter what the size.
So Bob and I met with Cianci, and Cianci asked some questions about what we went through in Providence and why we thought we didn’t get into the new arena. I answered them truthfully. After Cianci finished questioning me, I asked for a short recess so Cap and I could go into another room to talk. I said “Cap, he didn’t ask the right questions. Why don’t we just tell him the truth, that we were scammed?” Cap said, “Okay, but I want to make sure you can’t get in any trouble and that I can get you immunity.” So Cap goes in and talks to Cianci and Cianci says, “Fine, I’m not after Howard, I’ll give him immunity.” So I come in and tell him about the 15 grand that was given to the group we lunched with in Providence. His eyes lit up like a Christmas tree. As a result, the corruption in the Providence Civic Center became his whole political platform when he ran for mayor. He won . . . and he became a legend. He’s actually gone to jail himself for corruption, but he did a lot of good things for Providence and helped rebuild the city.
So flash forward to two years later, and the trial’s going to start. Nobody cared about it except the three people who were in trouble — Jimmy Howe, Bob Reid and Ray Badway. And who’s the key witness, but me? By then I had become WHA president and the league All-Star Game was in Edmonton right when the trial was to start, so I said to the lawyer who prepared me, “It’s not going to take long, right?” “Oh no, it’s just going to take a day, Mr. Baldwin.” So I go to this courthouse in Providence, knowing that at the end of the week I had to go to Edmonton. I’m on the stand Monday. Then I’m on the stand Tuesday, then Wednesday, then Thursday. I’m totally frustrated as I needed to leave for the All-Star Game. During the recesses, Ray Badway had all his boys with him out in the hall and they’d come up to me and say, “Now, Howie, you don’t want to testify against us do you?” I’d say, “I don’t want to do anything, but I have to tell the truth.” Bob Reid’s daughter would come up to me crying, asking why I had to testify against her dad. I explained to her that she might be better off asking her father that question.
Now Friday’s session ends, and they say they need me back Monday. I said to Cap when we left the courthouse, “Enough already with this trial, I am going to Edmonton.” He said, “Write the judge a letter and say you’ll be in on Tuesday when you get back from the All-Star Game.” So I do just that and off to Edmonton I go. I arrived back at court on Tuesday and testified for another hour, after which they thanked me and said I was finished. But when I start to get off the stand, the judge says, “Mr. Baldwin, please stay right here.” She dismissed the jury and everybody else except for me and Cap. Then she starts telling me why I’m in contempt of court because I didn’t show up on Monday.
Bottom line: I had to write out a $350 check for Monday’s court costs. Meanwhile, within two weeks they dropped the case, because nobody cared about it. I have since learned that the $15K went into the pockets of one of the three businessmen and was used for the education of his kids.
Well, at least somebody got something out of the experience.
Building the Whalers
We had our arenas, we had our coach and GM, and it was already pretty clear that we were going to be one of the better-financed teams in the league. So now we needed a name.
We all came up with ideas and lists of names and various color combinations for the logo. It was actually Ginny Kelley who came up with the idea of “the Whalers.” We all loved that idea, and when it came to picking the colors we felt that there was already ample black and yellow for the other Boston hockey teams. So we went with green and white.
Then the question was: would it be the Boston Whalers or New England Whalers? That problem was easily solved for us as “Boston Whalers” was already taken by a successful boat-manufacturing line. And we preferred the New England designation anyway, as we wanted to reach out to the entire region, not just to Boston.
Next on our docket was dealing with the $250,000 franchise fee. It was February of 1972, and the league meetings were in Quebec. As promised, Bob Schmertz flew to the meetings with us. By now, everyone knew we had the highest-profile owner in the league and everyone was excited to meet him, until he stood up and said, “I’m glad to be in this room. I’m excited about the league. However, I want to make one thing clear: we aren’t paying the 250 grand for dues. You’ll find we will be great partners in the league, but just because we came in 30 days after the original 10 franchises doesn’t mean we are going to pay 10 times more than what they paid. Particularly when three or four of them are no longer in the room. We’ll pay the 25, but if you think we’re paying the 250, throw us out right now.” We didn’t have to pay it.
A couple of weeks later in Newport Beach, California, we had the first WHA player draft. Jack couldn’t be there, as he still had his coaching duties at BU, so he was in Boston, running our draft by telephone (not unlike the NFL did for years). Ronnie Ryan, Godfrey Wood, John Coburn, Bill Barnes and myself were at the draft table in Newport, with Ron connected by phone to Jack.
Before the draft officially began, Bill Hunter, the flamboyant owner from Edmonton, was really fired up. He was the classic P.T. Barnum type, and he said, “Now we’re going to introduce somebody, one of hockey’s most famous and influential people. And if he doesn’t support this league, we are going to send him back to Toronto in a hearse.” He was introducing none other than Alan Eagleson, the head of the National Hockey League players’ union. Of course Alan loved this league — as did every hockey agent in the world — as it did nothing but drive up the prices for the players. Alan only signed a couple of dozen players to our league, but he used the WHA to get better deals for his players in the NHL.
And here’s a very, very important point. At that time the NHL was not proactive in dealing with any outside threats to their player contracts. They were in a strictly reactive mode. They chose to believe that their reserve clause was valid. If the NHL had been smarter when they did their first expansion in 1967, they would have looked more closely at their contracts. Once the NHL realized the WHA w
as on the horizon, they then reacted by doing only the obvious, which was to announce further expansion, thereby enticing potential WHA markets to hold out hope for the NHL. Over the next several years the NHL went into Buffalo and Vancouver, Atlanta and Long Island, Washington and Kansas City.
But what the NHL missed was that no rival league can possibly start without the credibility of labor. If we were going to bill ourselves as a major league, we had to have major league players. But rather than look at their players’ contracts and ask themselves, “Do these guys have any chance at getting our players?” they were just arrogant and assumed their contracts would be held up in court. In hindsight, which admittedly is 20-20, they should have immediately collectively bargained a standard player contract that didn’t violate the anti-trust laws so blatantly. If Joe Blow signs a $10,000 one-year contract with the Toronto Maple Leafs, that shouldn’t bind him for life. It’s just common sense. But that’s what the reserve clause said: once you were with a team you were with them essentially until they traded you or officially let you go. In the WHA we felt strongly that the standard contract as written by the NHL at that time violated every existing anti-trust law, especially in the United States. None of us were going to sign a player if they had another year of their NHL contract, but if that contract was up, we believed the players became what we now call “free agents.”
Those were the principles that the WHA was luring players with. We would offer them more money, creating a competitive market for labor for the very first time. We would outlaw the reserve clause in our contracts and we would also argue that the NHL reserve clause was illegal, and that when the term of a player’s contract ended, he was free to sign anywhere. We had to win that battle in court, several times, because the NHL kept coming at us on several fronts.
We wouldn’t have had a league if we lost those cases. But we won them all, starting with a huge victory in the summer of 1972 in Boston, after the NHL filed an injunction to prevent Gerry Cheevers and Derek Sanderson coming to our league. Cap and I were in the courthouse when the decision was announced, as were Sanderson (in his suit and tennis shoes) and several other players. The case lasted about 10 minutes before the judge ruled in the WHA’s favor. Later that year in Philadelphia, with Bobby Hull and John McKenzie, we won another landmark case that settled the reserve clause for good. The judge spoke very harshly against the NHL, ruling that the reserve clause had not been bargained in good faith and was in fact illegal, and that the restraining order the NHL had obtained to prevent Hull from playing in the WHA was totally invalid. Hull immediately got on the ice with the Winnipeg Jets, and the war the NHL thought couldn’t possibly happen was on, full scale.
When we held the first WHA player draft, we thought all of this would eventually happen and that the courts would rule in our favor, so we went about our business as if we were going to win. But there was still a variety of drafting approaches from the 12 original teams. Several franchises went for the splashy signings, but we went for guys we thought could play right away, and whom we could sign.
Jack did a great job for us in the draft. His approach to building our team was based on realism. He didn’t want to pick guys he knew were unlikely to leave the NHL, but instead picked players who were not real fixtures with their NHL teams. Our first signing was Larry Pleau for three years at $30,000 a year. He’d been making $15,000 for the Montreal Canadiens. He was a New England guy, from Lynn, Massachusetts, and Jack was smart that way: we would go after players with New England roots. So we took Kevin Ahearn of the U.S. Olympic team, a Boston College player, and Tim Sheehy, also a Boston College player. They were Irish names too. We had a real Boston flavor to that team, starting with Jack Kelley.
Jack also had the courage to sign U.S. college players, a group that had traditionally been looked down on by NHL old-liners. Obviously the NHL couldn’t challenge the college players in court because they weren’t under contract to the NHL, and that was part of the reason to take them. So Jack signed Bobby Brown, Jake Danby, Ric Jordan, Guy Smith and John Cunniff, who were all good, solid players coming out of New England college hockey. He also made some good choices up front with Pleau, Tommy Webster (our first scoring star), Terry Caffery, Brit Selby, Mike Byers, and Tommy Williams, who had been the first American skater to play regularly in the NHL (with the Bruins). These were good players who were like third- and fourth-liners in the NHL — well, they didn’t really have fourth lines then — but who weren’t getting enough of a chance with their teams.
Our marquee signing was Ted Green, and it really helped that he had played so long for the Bruins. He had come back to play after suffering that horrible head injury in the fall of 1969, when Wayne Maki of the Blues swung his stick at him. He needed a two-and-a-half-hour operation for a skull fracture and was partly paralyzed for a while, but fought back to play and won the Stanley Cup with the Bruins in 1972. We signed him for 60 grand, probably twice what he was making in Boston, but he added instant legitimacy to our blueline and was a great veteran to have on the team.
We didn’t have a lot of identifiable names — Ted was the only player on the team who made more than $35,000. We had Al Smith in goal, from the Red Wings, and Bruce Landon from Springfield in the AHL. We had a good young defence, with Teddy, Paul Hurley (another New Englander), and three kids from the Toronto Maple Leafs — Ricky Ley, Brad Selwood and Jim Dorey. Those three were going to be mainstays for the Leafs, but because the Leafs didn’t believe the WHA would get off the ground, they lost all three of them, and along with them most of their future on the blueline.
We didn’t specifically target Harold Ballard and the Toronto Maple Leafs, although when I look back at what happened, maybe I shouldn’t be so firm in saying that. The WHA probably ended up picking on the NHL teams that were rigid. It wasn’t smart to go against Ed Snider, because you knew that he was progressive and smart. And of course I never would have done that, on principle. And Ed proved he was progressive. Somebody in our league signed Dave Schultz and Bill Flett, and Ed said “Screw that” and within the next 48 hours he went around and signed them both back again. He said, “I’ll see you in court,” and nobody took him on. Ed got it real quick, but some of those other guys didn’t. The Leafs didn’t. The Islanders didn’t. They were an NHL expansion team and the WHA took seven of their expansion draft choices.
Then there was the Adams family in Boston. Look who they lost: we signed Ted Green; Cheevers went to Cleveland; Philadelphia got Johnny McKenzie and Derek Sanderson. The Bruins had just won two Cups in three years, and they just didn’t get it. The Rangers got it, though, and they had the money to spend so they locked up their players so we couldn’t get them. Interestingly enough, most of the Original Six had enjoyed the benefits of the restrictive reserve clause for so long that they were the teams which struggled the most in losing players to the WHA.
Some of the other teams had splashier signings and drafts than we did — Sanderson, McKenzie, Cheevers, for example, and Winnipeg drafting Bobby Hull, which I thought was far-fetched at the time. The Miami Screaming Eagles drafted and signed goalie Bernie Parent, the league’s first big catch. Although Bernie became better known for winning two Stanley Cups for the Flyers, he was Toronto property in 1972, and the Leafs were refusing to negotiate with any player who used the WHA as a bargaining chip. So Toronto lost three of their young defencemen, and a franchise goalie.
Miami was supposed to be a cornerstone franchise of the league, securing us a toehold in the southern states while the NHL was trying to do the same thing with Atlanta. Because Miami was a new, non-traditional market, there were even plans not to use the traditional black puck. In fact, the WHA used a blue puck for the first week or two of all games. This was a natural extension of what Murphy and Davidson did in the ABA when they introduced the red, white and blue ball. (They never trademarked that ball, and that miscue cost them millions.) They did trademark the blue puck, but its chemical makeup created a harder texture an
d the puck tended to shatter the glass more. And the players hated it anyway, so the innovation was quickly abandoned.
Herb Martin, the Screaming Eagles owner, decided he would keep us all in the loop on the great things he was going to do in Miami, including building a fancy arena. He sent us black-and-white 9-by-11 photos of the arena, and it was Alan Eagleson who first noticed that something wasn’t right. He thought he could see palm trees through the front doors of the building in the pictures. “What kind of arena is this?” he said. “They’ve got a wall up and all you see inside is palm trees?” What the guy had built was a facade, and finally somebody had taken a moment to examine it. Al said all this in public and suggested that somebody check on the Miami franchise. The WHA did, found out the owner was a fraud, and moved the franchise to Philadelphia, where it became the Blazers.
There were some crazy bastards in that league. The Minnesota Fighting Saints, for instance, used one of their later picks in the first WHA draft to select Wendell Anderson, who was the governor of Minnesota and hadn’t played hockey since the 1956 Olympics. And the Winnipeg Jets chose Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin in the 70th round, as their final pick.
At that time in the WHA we were breaking new ground almost every day of the week. It was exciting. It was stimulating. It was fun.
And let’s be candid: it can’t be done that way any longer. For a new league to work, you need a labor pool, and there is no incentive now for any player to go league to league when they can already go team to team as free agents.
A lot of WHA people have said that they had a strategy right from the start to create a merger with the NHL, but there really wasn’t a strategy. We were all just trying to get a league going and make some money and we were having a lot of fun doing it.
Slim and None Page 8