Slim and None

by Howard Baldwin

  It’s interesting that some of the owners in the early WHA clearly didn’t know hockey. The Canadians — Benny Hatskin, Bill Hunter, Scott Munro, Johnny Bassett when he joined the league — they knew the game. The guys in America were not as well-versed, but they understood the concept of a new league and the business of sports.

  Those who instinctively knew enough to hire hockey guys did okay. But in Chicago, Jordan and Walter Kaiser were the original owners of the franchise and they hired Ed Short, the former GM of the Chicago White Sox. After the draft in Newport Beach, everyone went home to their respective markets and began the task of signing players. We would do weekly conference calls updating each other on the signings. On each call, Ed Short announced no players had been signed. Finally someone fearing the worst (that the franchise had no money) said to him, “Why haven’t you signed any players?”

  Ed then told us that he had had his secretary type up 50 contracts, each with a salary number on it that he thought a player should earn, and he mailed them to the 50 players. He couldn’t understand why none of the players responded. In baseball this was the way it was done, but at the time, of course, baseball had the reserve clause and you either signed or you stayed home. The WHA was signing players all over the place and we were looking at Chicago and they hadn’t signed anybody. They finally ended up getting hockey people in there and they stumbled their way through that first year, and in the second year they actually took us out of the playoffs.

  Right from the start, franchises were moving around, and it continued that way for seven years. Before the first puck dropped, San Francisco moved to Quebec to become the Nordiques (proving to be one of the great franchise shifts, ever), Miami moved to Philadelphia to become the Blazers, the Dayton Arrows moved to Houston to become the Aeros, and the Los Angeles Aces took San Francisco’s original nickname, the Sharks. Everybody was nervous about one another, but everybody was also starting to feel confident that the league would be launched successfully. Everybody was apprehensive about the future, and that never changed until we did the merger with the NHL seven years later. Every year in June, when we would have the end-of-the-year annual meetings — I called it Russian Roulette — we’d be wondering who would be in and who would be out.

  The “W-Hull-A” and

  the Whalers’ First Season

  Very early on, Benny Hatskin came to the board and said, “I think I can sign Hull.” Hatskin had grown close to Bobby Hull’s agent, Harvey Wineberg, and although Hull would score 50 goals in the NHL in the 1971–72 season, his contract with the Blackhawks was set to run out in October. And I’ve already told you what our league thought about the reserve clause that the Blackhawks believed would keep Hull in Chicago as long as they wanted him.

  “It’s going to cost a million dollars signing bonus, plus his salary,” Ben said. “And I’m asking everybody in the league to chip in, because you’re all going to make money on it when Winnipeg comes into your building.”

  We knew enough to know that you needed a star to make a new league work. A lot of owners think people want to look up at them in their private box, but I’m a great believer that the athletes are the stars, so we — the Whalers — immediately voted to chip in our share for Hull. We trusted the people around the table and we assumed that when they said they were going to chip in, they were going to come up with the money. Hull was going to be great for the whole league. A million bucks divided by 12 teams, so call it about $100,000 each for the signing bonus. And the Jets would pay the salary, about $250,000 a year. Remember, Gordie Howe had retired then, so Hull was the most charismatic player (along with Bobby Orr) in the NHL.

  I don’t think people, including me at the time, ever thought that Ben could sign Hull, but he was able to do it. You could make the case that it was one of the biggest signings in sports history. It solidified our league, gave us legitimacy and, once Hull was joined in Winnipeg by Anders Hedberg and Ulf Nilsson a couple of years later, it set a new style of play for the game that the WHA eventually took with it into the NHL.

  When it came time for people to pay for Hull, only three or four of us did. Three of us, as well as Winnipeg, added another $150,000 to our original contribution of $100,000 because we recognized the enormous value that this held for the league.

  Hull signed, and the WHA had two big press conferences. The first one was in Winnipeg, where he signed the contract under Canadian law. We presented him with an oversized check for a million bucks, and that picture made it into all the newspapers. Then we took that check, and Bobby, to Minnesota to sign him under U.S. law. Bill Barnes and I flew in for PR purposes, to register with our fans that Hull was in the league. There’s a picture somewhere of Barnsie, me, Bobby and young Brett Hull after the Minnesota signing.

  It was huge for the league. We marketed it like crazy and we knew when Winnipeg came into our building we were virtually guaranteed to have a big crowd. We were originally going to put the first Winnipeg game in Boston Arena, but we were able to manipulate it so that we could play them in the Garden. We never sold the Garden out, but we came mighty close with Hull. He was an attraction. Just like Sanderson, Parent and McKenzie were attractions.

  We weren’t a team full of marquee names ourselves, but Jack Kelley was building a solid nucleus of players, all of whom came from winning traditions. The closer I got to Jack personally, the more I realized that he was the perfect hire for us because he was such a take-charge, hard-working guy.

  The first confrontation we had was in June, before the first season started. We had set a budget of $650,000 for the whole team’s salary, and Jack was relentless in trying to get more. His number was 750K. I remember saying to Coby, “You know what, John? We’re never going to make it if we don’t stand up to Jack and get our point across.” With apprehension, I called Jack up and asked him to meet me at our offices at the Statler Hilton in Boston on a Saturday morning for the purpose of resolving the payroll issue.

  Jack and I had a fabulous meeting, and it solidified even further what was to become a very positive working relationship. We split the difference, and the budget went to a compromise of 700 grand. He was happy . . . and I was really pleased. He now knew that there would be a line somewhere, which was a big moment for me, because Jack was more of an icon than I was. Actually, I certainly wasn’t an icon at all.

  Jack put together a terrific staff. His assistant GM and assistant coach was Ron Ryan, who had been coaching at U of Penn, had played for Jack at Colby College and who ended up being president of the Philadelphia Flyers. When Ron came out of Colby there seemed little doubt that he would have been the number one draft choice for the NHL — he was that good a player — but that wasn’t the system when he played. They didn’t draft back then.

  Jack also hired Bob Crocker as an executive and scout, and Bob is still scouting in the NHL. His chief scout was Jack Ferreira, a former all-American goaltender at BU. Jack surrounded himself with people he’d worked with before and who were loyal to him. It worked well all the way around.

  Jack really took charge of the hockey end of things, which was great because although I had no trouble with tickets and sales, I didn’t really know that much about the on-ice stuff. We were doing quite well in sales, and had about 4,000 season tickets, more than twice what the Flyers had had in their first season, five years earlier. And we sold a bunch of smaller ticket packages as well.

  We opened our first season at the Boston Garden on October 12, 1972, and drew 14,114 fans, nearly a sellout. We got off to a good start with a 4–3 win over Philadelphia, and we kept that start going, winning nine of our first 13 games. We got it up to 21–10–1 by mid-December and ended up with 94 points from 78 games, to finish first in the East Division and with the best record in the entire league. Winnipeg finished first in the West with 90 points. In our seven years in the WHA we were never a team that won a lot of league awards, but that first season Tom Webster finished second in the scoring
race with 53 goals and Jack Kelley was named the first WHA coach of the year, which he richly deserved.

  After our home opener we went down to Philadelphia for the Blazers’ first home game, and that was the night the ice broke. The Blazers were playing in an old building, the Philadelphia Convention Center, and when the Zamboni came out to prepare the ice for the game, it crashed right through. It was shell ice and extremely brittle. After the franchise had moved from Miami to Philadelphia, they’d signed Derek Sanderson of the Bruins to the largest contract ever given to a team athlete ($2.6 million for five years), and because he was the “face” of the franchise, I guess, they gave him the microphone to tell the fans that they were sorry, but the game would have to be postponed. Unfortunately the team had given away free commemorative pucks before the game and, this being Philadelphia, as soon as Sanderson finished talking, the crowd began pelting him with the pucks. I was standing with my old friend Joe Scott, the minority owner of the Flyers, and I was completely mortified.

  The Blazers were kind of symbolic of the majority of WHA teams. They moved to Vancouver after the first year, their third city in two seasons, and two years after that moved to Calgary for two years before folding in 1977. There had been a lot of excitement around Philadelphia because of Sanderson, Johnny McKenzie and Bernie Parent, but they got off to a terrible start and the excitement soon fizzled. And after just eight games, the owners paid Sanderson a million dollars not to play for them, and he ended up back with the Bruins. Complete craziness. But very WHA.

  There were a lot of arena problems in the WHA’s first year. Actually, there were arena problems most WHA years. I was always really nervous about the Boston Arena. So the night of our first game there, against Alberta at the end of October, I got to the rink more than an hour early to check it out. I walked into the lobby and all the lights were out. It was like a blackout, and there were already fans milling around. The building manager, Chuck Toomey, came up to me and said, “Now, Howard, don’t you worry about a thing, we’ve got everything under control. We’ll get the lights going.” And I’m thinking, “Ay-yi-yi, we can’t have this.” So he said, “C’mon, I’ll show you. It’ll give you comfort.”

  We get to the electrical room and he opens the door and it doesn’t give me any comfort at all. He’s got three or four portable fans in there cooling down the fuses. That’s the solution? I’m thinking, “Oh my God.” But we got the game in. Every game there, and thank God there were only 19, I’d sit there and just stare at the clock, praying that the game would just end. We couldn’t have played there another season, and luckily we had the Garden for the playoffs.

  Even using the Arena for nearly half our games, we led the WHA in attendance at 6,981 per game, and the 8,874 we averaged in the Garden for playoffs was by far the highest post-season attendance. We beat Ottawa in the first round and Cleveland in the second, both times in five games, to qualify for the best-of-seven final against Winnipeg. Bobby Hull wouldn’t have his two Swedish line mates for another couple of years, and we beat the Jets, again four games to one, to win the first WHA championship.

  We took the fifth game 9–6 at home, with Pleau scoring three times and Webster twice, but right before the game I had this vague feeling that I’d never seen the league championship trophy, which was sponsored by Avco Financial Services. That’s because there wasn’t a trophy. It had not yet been manufactured. So Bill Barnes sent a PR guy out to a local sporting goods store and he comes back with this large trophy that cost 20 bucks. It was cheap but big, and it was shiny, so it looked good on 1973 television.

  It really was a story of things falling into place nicely. It’s not much of a stretch to say that we won everything that first year. We took on the toughest market in the league — Boston. With Smith in goal, Webster up front and Dorey, Selwood, Ley and Green on defence, we had a good team. We finished first in the division, won the Avco cup, led the league in attendance and Jack was coach of the year. It seemed as though everything we did that first year, we did right. It was great for us. We went from having a dream to the reality of winning the whole shooting match in the WHA’s first year.

  Right after we beat Winnipeg for the Avco cup on a Sunday afternoon, I went onto the ice with Bob Schmertz and on CBS national TV challenged the NHL to a championship game. The next day, NHL owners were laughing at us saying, “This is ridiculous. Their final game is 9–6, what kind of league is this?” But two days later, in game five of the six-game Stanley Cup final, Chicago beat Montreal 8–7. I mean, really. These guys, they were so easy to compete against then because they were so full of their own self-importance. It was easy to take them on because they were old and stodgy, and we were young and likeable — at least, I thought we were!

  The “W-Howes-A” and

  the Whalers’ Second Season

  What has been long forgotten is that we had our very first merger talks with the NHL at the end of that first season. There was a rump group from each side: from the WHA there was a group led by Bob Schmertz, Nick Mileti of Cleveland and Benny Hatskin, and on the NHL side were Ed Snider, Bill Jennings from the Rangers and Peter O’Malley from Washington. A plan was formulated where all 12 WHA teams would pay $2 million each to enter the NHL. It was a hell of a plan, creative and ballsy, and it would have solved everything and prevented the escalation of the war that had already started and was only going to get worse. The Whalers would have had to pay an additional indemnity to the Bruins to play in New England, and the Chicago Cougars would have had to do the same thing in the Blackhawks’ territory. But when the NHL militants found out — with Bill Wirtz and Clarence Campbell leading them— they went crazy and the whole plan blew up.

  The Howes’ situation didn’t help thaw any of the ice between the WHA and the NHL. At the WHA draft in Toronto before our second season, Houston announced that they were taking Mark Howe, Gordie’s younger son, with their first pick. This was a sensational event. Mark had scored five points in the final game of the Memorial Cup for the Toronto Marlboros only five days before that, and wouldn’t turn 18 for another week or so. Therefore he wouldn’t be eligible for the NHL draft for a couple of years. The WHA didn’t have a formal age rule. We were a rebel league, remember? Even some of our own GMs were pissed, because they were hockey traditionalists. A few rounds later, the Aeros also took Mark’s brother Marty, adding more fuel to the fire.

  Originally, Bill Dineen of the Aeros didn’t have it in his mind to sign Gordie Howe, who had been retired for two years after wrist problems and was working, unhappily, in the Red Wings’ front office. But the Aeros ended up signing not only Mark and Marty, but also their hockey-legend father as well. NHL president Clarence Campbell had already called Gordie to warn him against having Mark sign in Houston. Obviously his warning didn’t have any impact, because it was Gordie who phoned Dineen and asked if he “wanted another Howe.”

  This was a major marketing coup for the WHA. The first year it was Hull, the second year it was the Howe family. Of course, the NHL naysayers were ridiculing Gordie’s age, but once the season got going and he led the league in scoring, that quieted down significantly.

  From a marketing point of view, right away Bill Barnes and I knew we needed to take advantage of the signing. We had a lot of seats to fill in the Garden and I knew the Howes would help sell them. I met Gordie and Colleen Howe for the first time when Houston came to Boston in late November. We made a presentation to them at the old Boston Garden Club, gave them a gift and told them how honored we were to have Gordie in our building. We started a nice relationship with Gordie and Colleen that would blossom into something much fuller a few years later with the Whalers.

  What Gordie did in his first year was extraordinary. He won the MVP trophy (named after Gary Davidson), finished third in scoring and led Houston to the league championship. Mark was rookie of the year. Together, the Howes increased Houston’s home attendance by nearly 50 per cent. Gordie helped put people in buildings aro
und the league too.

  The WHA was proving to be a tougher sell in its second year, especially for us in Boston, where we were facing a lot of competition for the sports entertainment dollar and getting little help from Garden management, who kept sticking us with every little expense they could.

  Going into the second WHA year, everybody, including me, misjudged the situation. The truth is that in the first year you get a free pass, in that it’s a novelty. It’s not unlike expansion. If you get an expansion franchise, your first year should certainly be profitable. People are so excited to have major-league sport, they’re going to come out in droves regardless of the level of the product. The second year, reality will set in, you’ll be judged by the production on the ice, and you’d better start having a good product to sell.

  That holds true for new arenas as well. Of course, a state-of-the-art arena is needed for a team to have a chance to be economically viable. However, you must then have a competitive product fairly quickly because — bottom line — that is what sells tickets.

  We knew we had to have a damn good product because we were in Boston, right in the heyday of the Bobby Orr–led Bruins.

  In our second year we were able to play all our games in the Boston Garden, which proved to be a mixed blessing.

  At the Arena in our first season we were averaging only 3,000 or 4,000 per game, but at the Garden it was 8,000 to 10,000. So in the second year, when the Garden people said they’d give us all 39 dates I said, “Thank God.” I figured that average would carry right over.

  I misjudged that.

  The season opened in October, and we were doing 4,000 to 5,000 a night, and it quickly became clear that the bloom was off the rose. We were competing with an NHL team, an AHL team and an iconic NBA team. Including our own games, that consumes almost 160 dates in a seven-month period. Our relationship with the Bruins was always a bit of an adversarial one anyway, so right away we knew we were in trouble and we would have to act quickly.