Slim and None

by Howard Baldwin

  An additional motivating factor to act quickly was that Bob Schmertz was starting to have a few financial difficulties. During our first year, Bob had also acquired the Boston Celtics. Basketball was his first love and the Celtics were a great acquisition for him, and frankly, it enhanced the credibility of the Whalers in the marketplace as well. Although I never had an avid interest in, or an understanding of, basketball, it was always a privilege when Bob came to Boston for a game, to sit with Bob and the national treasure, Red Auerbach.

  Bob and I met and agreed that we should look for a new home for our hockey team and new ownership that could take Bob out as well. I obviously wanted to stay in as I intended to make this my life for the foreseeable future. I now had another big challenge in front of me.

  And, as with the WHA, it was an article in the newspaper that led me to a new opportunity.

  Goodbye to Boston

  I saw the headline “Hartford Breaks Off Negotiations with Charlie Finley to Bring Basketball Team to City” and read that Finley owned the Oakland ABA team and was hoping to bring them to a new arena they were building in Hartford. But talks had fallen through.

  So, once again, I reached for the phone and I called Bill Lillyman, who was manager of the Hartford Civic Center. Bill said, “Howard, we’d love to talk with you, come on down.” Godfrey Wood, Bob Caporale and I were naive enough about the location of Hartford that we chartered a plane from Boston, when it is only a 90-minute drive. Off we went in a snowstorm, and we nearly crash-landed on the runway in Hartford. It was a rather inauspicious debut, and I told the pilot to go on back home. We were going to rent a car for the trip back because we were all terrified.

  We met with Bill, and Don Conrad, the CFO of the Aetna insurance company, to discuss moving the Whalers to Hartford, as well as securing new local ownership. This meeting was like the first meeting we had with Bob Schmertz in New Bedford. We happened to be in the right place at the right time. It was clear to us that the city was desperate to have a prime tenant for the Civic Center, which was being built to revitalize downtown Hartford. And we just got lucky.

  We were all starting families, so we wanted to find the nearest place in New England for the team. The people in Hartford hadn’t solicited anyone else after Finley. So both sides were in the right place at the right time: it was a perfect match. We had found a new place to play and we agreed on a deal to sell 50 per cent of the team to a local ownership group made up of eight or nine Fortune 500 companies. We thereby had one of the strongest ownership groups in all of sport, not just the WHA.

  Even though Hartford was just the fourth-largest city in New England, it had become one of the wealthiest cities per capita in the country because it was the “Insurance Capital of the World.” The city was building a downtown arena with a mall attached, trying to become an entertainment and shopping destination, which was a very progressive concept in 1973.The agreement was that we would move the team to Hartford when the new rink was ready, and our group would keep 50 per cent of the team and the local business group would buy the other half. And they would pay off all the debt in Boston, which would be about $600,000 by the end of the year; we weren’t doing well at the gate and Bob could no longer afford to put the money in. We also had to find a place to play until January 1975, when the Hartford Civic Center would open. So we arranged to go to the Springfield Civic Center, which had been built just the year before.

  Today it would take a year to close a deal like that, but we did the deal in two months. We made the agreement in December and kept it out of the papers until late January, because we were still selling tickets to games in Boston and we didn’t want people to know we were moving. We announced it ourselves at the end of February, but by then it had already broken in the press. Our fans were really mad at me because I was the face of the franchise. I always sat with the crowd because there were no such thing as skyboxes back then, but I had to stop going to games because the fans all wanted to kick my ass. I’m a big guy, but I couldn’t beat all of them up. They’d be waiting before the game, with their signs up — “Keep Our Whalers Here” — that kind of thing. I don’t remember all of them, but some of them got very personal. There was a real hard-core group, which is what makes Boston fans great: they are passionate.

  The Bank of Boston had provided us with a line of credit. They knew that the business group in Hartford was going to cover our losses when the deal closed, so we were being given credit based on that closure happening in the near future. And they knew that if they didn’t keep lending us money, we’d fold and they would get nothing. But the account executive at the bank was really getting impatient. We had a payroll every two weeks, and at one point late in the season I called the banker up to make sure he was going to back us on the next payroll. And he said, “Nope, I can’t do it. I’ve gone as far as I can with you. I just can’t do it anymore.”

  I said, “Tell you what. I’m going to come down there and try to convince you.”

  So I went and found an old key somewhere, went down to his office and dramatically tossed the key onto his desk.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “It’s a key to the locker room,” I replied. “We have a game tonight. You go tell Ted Green, Jim Dorey and those guys that you’re not going to pay them. I’m not doing it, because it’s your team now.”

  He said, “I’ll give you two more weeks, Howard.”

  As God is my witness.

  By the way, that account executive was Chad Gifford, and he went on to become chairman of the Bank of America. When I see him these days, we still chuckle about that little scene.

  Everyone in Boston was paid off 100 per cent, and I’m proud of that, because I didn’t want to stiff anybody, including the Boston Garden.

  We knew we had to shift our playoff games to the Big E in Springfield — a 6,000-seat arena that was nearly half a century old — because our Boston fans had disconnected from the team when they found out we were moving. So once we lost to Cleveland in our last regular-season game, we were done with the Garden. We still owed them rent, though, and while I was at home in Marion with a terrible flu, Cap called me up and said he’d received a call from the Garden’s legal counselor, Charlie Mulcahy, and they were not going to let our equipment vans out of the building until we paid the rent we owed in full. So they had the Zamboni blocking our vans in.

  I said to Cap, “To hell with them. They can keep the equipment. I’m going to torture them, because they’ve tortured us for two years.”

  We went back and forth all day. Who was going to blink first? The trainers were getting mad at me, the coaches were mad at me, but I said, “Just leave it alone.” And sure enough, around 4:30 p.m., Weston Adams had to go home and his Corvette was on the wrong side of the Zamboni. So when the Zamboni moved to let Westie out, we immediately drove those vans the hell out of there.

  We ended up paying them, in full, but we wanted to punish them a bit.

  We finished up our second regular season in first place in the East Division by four points over the Toronto Toros, who had moved from Ottawa.

  The Toros — which stood partly for the T.O. in Toronto and partly for the snorting bull that was their emblem — brought Johnny Bassett into my life. We were both young and adventuresome and would do some similar things in our careers: start hockey teams without much of a chance of succeeding, own a football team, get into the movie business and have a whole lot of fun.

  We were close friends until John died of brain cancer in 1986, when he was only 47 years old. John came from a wonderful, high-profile Canadian family (his father had been part-owner of the Leafs), and he brought a great breath of fresh air into the WHA. Every moment I ever spent with John, I enjoyed. To this day, I still think of him often.

  Start-Up Fever

  The 1970s were the Revolutionary Years, the War Years, in professional sport. Football, basketball and then hockey all got new riv
al leagues, and toward the end of our first WHA season, another football league was in the works.

  Gary Davidson left the WHA at the end of our inaugural season in order to start the World Football League. Originally, the WFL was supposed to start play in 1975, but the prospect of a rival league and an impending NFL players strike moved it forward a year. It might have been better to wait, as the WFL became the only one of the three Davidson leagues which did not result in at least some of its teams being taken into the pre-existing league.

  I was one of what Gary called the “Founding Fathers” of the WFL. Bob Schmertz was another, and so were Ben Hatskin, Nick Mileti and Johnny Bassett, most of the WHA’s “better” owners. Johnny had the Toronto franchise, called the Northmen, and had made a huge splash when he signed Paul Warfield, Larry Csonka and Jim Kiick, the stars of the Miami Dolphins’ 1972 undefeated season. Those signings would eventually get Johnny and me out of a little hot water, but that’s a WHA tale for a little later on. The Northmen never played in Toronto, because the Canadian government threatened legislative action to protect the CFL, and Johnny moved the team to Memphis.

  My team, the Boston Bulls, never played in Boston either. I put some of my own money into it for the franchise start-up, part of which was for designing a logo. I can prove that the Chicago Bulls’ snorting bull of today is a replica of our logo from the WFL.

  I hired Babe Parilli, the famous old Patriot, as coach and Dusty Rhodes, the first female general manager, but I soon learned that I had way too much on my plate. I couldn’t do the football and also handle the responsibilities of the hockey team moving to Hartford, so I made a deal with Davidson and Schmertz that Gary would help me sell the Boston football franchise and I would then relocate Babe and Dusty to Bob’s franchise in New York City, the Stars, to help him get the team started there. Gary negotiated the sale of my former franchise to a Canadian gentleman named Bob Harris, who relocated the team to Portland, Oregon.

  The New York Stars were playing at Downing Stadium on Randall’s Island, a dismal place and the worst stadium in the league, and were going up against the Jets and Giants, so they didn’t have much chance of succeeding despite getting a lot of publicity. I was already trying to get Schmertz out of the New England Whalers because of his financial setbacks, and soon he said, “Howard, please get me out of this too!”

  A famous Broadway producer named David Merrick, who had won at least one Tony every single year since 1958, had called Bob when he heard the Stars were for sale. Bob said to me, “You handle Merrick. I just don’t have the patience, the guy’s high-maintenance.” I did, and found he was a delightful guy to meet with. He made an offer for me to convey to Bob of $4 million. This would clear up the balance sheet for Bob, but would have given him no profit. Bob rejected it and said to look around for a better offer. After a while he called back and asked if I could go back to Merrick and see if I could revive the offer he had made. Merrick then said, “You tell that partner of yours I wouldn’t pay a dollar for that team. He had his chance. It’s over.”

  Then I reached out to Upton Bell, whose father, Bert, had been the commissioner of the NFL. Upton had been Patriots GM but was fired by the Sullivans. He loved football and was dying to get a team. Upton acquired the team for no cash down, and everything Bob was to receive was on the “if-come.” If the money came, he would get some.

  We signed this deal in Bob’s beautiful Fifth Avenue apartment in NYC. I was relieved for Bob, as I now had been able to sell off his interest in Hartford and in the WFL. At the end of signing the documents Upton said, with a straight face, “Bob, this is so great, thanks for everything, and could you loan me 15 grand to open up an office?”

  Despite that, Upton had enough money to get the team off Bob’s back, out of New York and into Charlotte.

  Almost everybody but Johnny in Memphis and Bill Putnam in Birmingham were announcing bogus attendance figures. The league had a very short life, which was probably longer than it deserved.

  Hockey Comes to Hartford

  With Boston in our past and Hartford in our future, our present was in Springfield, Massachusetts. With the Hartford Civic Center not scheduled to open until mid-January of 1975, the Big E in Springfield was where we would be for the 1974 playoffs and to start the 1974–75 WHA season.

  The Big E was a relic of a building that was home to the AHL’s Springfield Indians, owned by the famous and sometimes infamous Eddie Shore. It was a classic “cow palace,” home to the state fair and also used for livestock exhibitions, rodeos and concerts. It was loaded with character, but that didn’t help us in the 1974 playoffs. We were eliminated in the first round by Chicago, losing the seventh game 3–2 at “home.”

  We played a weird schedule in year three because, from mid-November until December 5, we had only one home game and 13 on the road. But we went 7–6 in those games, on the way to winning the East Division for the third time in the WHA’s first three years.

  The league had expanded to 14 teams, adding Phoenix and Indianapolis as expansion teams, and now had a Canadian division with Quebec, Toronto, Winnipeg, Vancouver and the Edmonton Oilers, who had dropped the “Alberta” from their name. And while we were planning our move from Boston to Springfield to Hartford, the Jersey Knights had already moved to San Diego as the Mariners, and the Los Angeles Sharks had moved to Detroit to become the Michigan Stags. It was a lot to keep up with. (The WHA would never get any larger than that. By January of 1975, Michigan was dead and we moved the Stags to Baltimore as a league-owned team called the Blades, just to finish the year. They were then folded at the end of the season.)

  On January 11, 1975, the Whalers moved into the Hartford Civic Center, the arena part of which was called the Veterans Memorial Coliseum. It was a watershed moment for the city and for hockey too.

  What was so incredible was that the city leaders had built an arena in a mall and made it into an entertainment center. One end of the arena ran along Trumbull Street and one of the long sides ran along Asylum Street. When we moved in, the arena had 10,500 seats for hockey, with no private boxes, which were still a luxury of the future. Since the arena footprint was small, the pitch of the seats had to be quite steep, so the sightlines were great. I remember at the beginning, though, we had to switch seats for some people who were a little anxious about the height.

  Flanking the other two sides of the arena were two floors of mall spaces, with as many as nine restaurants, and upscale stores — Hartford is an insurance town, so there was money, a very high per-capita income — and a third floor of offices. The two outside streets which ran along the arena would restrict any building expansion for the future, but that was absolutely the last thing on our minds at the time. We were ecstatic to be in the new rink, and the city was glad to have us, and to have the downtown complex. You had the arena, you could shop, you could go to dinner. We were the first place that really had that. Now every arena and every stadium is replicating in some form what we did back in the early ’70s — an entertainment destination center built around an arena.

  It probably helped that we were doing pretty well (21–15–2) by the time we left Springfield to move to our new home, but the Whalers were welcomed with open arms from the start. Tom Webster, Larry Pleau and Wayne “Swoop” Carleton were scoring, and we still had the solid defence and Al Smith in goal. Hartford now had its own pro team, and the fans came out in droves.

  We won our first game in Hartford 4–3 in overtime, over San Diego. I remember it was Gary Swain who scored the winning goal. After Minnesota beat us in our fourth home game, we went a month before losing again at home, and after the first 18 games at the Civic Center, we’d won 13 and tied 3. Obviously the Civic Center felt like home.

  Our average attendance that year was only seventh in the league, at 7,845 per game, because we’d spent the first half of the season at the Big E, but the big crowds in Hartford were pushing it up. In the playoffs, we averaged 10,174, and th
at probably would have gone higher if we hadn’t been put out in the first round. We lost in six games to the Minnesota Fighting Saints, who had four of the toughest players in the game in Gord Gallant, Jack Carlson, Bill Butters and Ron Busniuk. Gallant had led the league in penalties the previous two years, but any of the others was capable of that too. They were an intimidating, violent team. (Busniuk, Butters and Carlson all eventually ended up with the Whalers.)

  The reason we did well in Hartford, even when we had some weaker teams later on, was that the front office was solid. And the market was solid too. It was the perfect blend of the corporate and the political coming together in harmony. The key people in the early years were Don Conrad from the Aetna; Nick Carbone, the power broker on city council; and seven or eight business leaders from the insurance companies that owned the team who were going to make damn sure that this team succeeded. The city had built the arena, and the corporate sector had landed the team to make Hartford a better place, building up the civic pride, and they really threw themselves into it.

  The half-dozen largest insurance companies in Hartford at the time employed about 50,000 or 60,000 people, so you had a virtual market within a market that we could call upon for sales. What we did, led by Bill Barnes, was learn to implement the team sales into their marketing culture. If you had a mid-week game against an opponent that was somewhat of a dud, you’d get the word out that there would be discounted tickets.

  From my Flyers experience I had already learned a lot about ticketing, marketing and listening to your customers. We applied those lessons in Hartford. What I’m most proud of was that when the Hartford team was sold in 1988, we had the third-highest gross gate in the league, while playing in the smallest market and in an arena with the smallest capacity.