Cut to three or four months later, and Rasmussen came to visit me in the office, and when I asked him how he was doing, he said, “Great, I bought a little satellite time and signed up UConn, and I’m starting an all-sports network out of Bristol, Connecticut.”
He’d become the founder of ESPN!
Like all people, I was skeptical of his venture because I didn’t think he’d get enough programming. However, being a dreamer myself, I supported him and said, “Billy, all I want you to do is promise me that the first pro hockey game that you put on ESPN will be the Whalers.”
“You’ve got a deal,” he said.
And he was good to his word. The first NHL game on ESPN was the Washington Capitals vs. the Hartford Whalers, and I think that conversation probably had a lot to do with that being the game.
The Final Six . . . and the Deal
We were going after junior players as part of our strategy to leverage the NHL, and there was no greater junior player ever than Wayne Gretzky. One day in the spring of 1978, Jack Kelley said to me, “Howard, I got a call from Gus Badali, Wayne Gretzky’s agent, and he feels that we could sign Gretzky.”
At the time, Wayne was a 17-year-old junior playing in Northern Ontario for the Soo Greyhounds and averaging about three points a game. Contacting us was smart for Gus, because we were the solid team in the WHA. And of course the league was signing juniors. Jack went up to Toronto and called to tell me that we actually could sign Gretzky.
But I’m thinking, “Now what do I do?” because I had only one objective, which was to get us into the NHL.
My thinking at the time was that, all things being equal, Hartford was not on the top of anyone’s expansion list. The only way that Hartford was going to get into the NHL was by becoming a solution to a problem, not by creating new ones. So I felt, rightly or wrongly, that if we signed Gretzky, then we’d be on the NHL’s shit list. Big time. And by then, we were the only American team that had a chance to get into the NHL, if they took any WHA teams in at all, not because of the city but because of the ownership. The NHL had a disease that wouldn’t go away called the WHA. And the NHL knew we were the glue that was holding the WHA together, and so they had to get rid of us in order to get rid of the WHA. We were a solution to a problem.
So I said, “Jack, we can’t do it, it will really hurt our chances of getting into the NHL.” And he was pissed at me. We could have had Gordie Howe and Wayne Gretzky on the same line.
Although I didn’t want to see him sign in New England, getting Gretzky into the WHA did fit the strategy of taking the cream of the junior crop. Therefore, I called up Nelson Skalbania in Indianapolis.
I called up Nelson because I knew he would understand that it was a huge opportunity and would help facilitate our strategy. And he knew his team wasn’t getting into the NHL anyway. Why? Because Indianapolis was a small market not on the NHL radar, and we were pretty well convinced that the NHL wanted only four franchises: Quebec, Winnipeg, Edmonton and New England.
So Nelson flew in and signed Gretzky. Wayne played only eight games for Indianapolis before Nelson sold him and 50 per cent of the Edmonton Oilers to Peter Pocklington, who already owned the other half of the Oilers. Most leagues had a rule against owning more than one team, but we didn’t.
Clearly, Indy wasn’t working out for Nelson, so on December 15, he folded the Racers and we stuck to the process of shrinking the league rather than propping up the franchise. We bought him out, the way we bought out the others before him, as part of the cleanup that would be required to get into the NHL. The NHL wasn’t going to do anything unless it was squeaky clean.
That meant we would finish the 1978–79 season with just six teams. The NHL had had its Original Six, and the WHA would have its Final Six.
By then, there was a lot of communication between the two leagues — we’d been playing pre-season games against each other for a while — and we had narrowed it down to which four WHA teams, if any, would be absorbed into the NHL: the Winnipeg Jets, with Barry Shenkarow and Michael Gobuty, who had bought the team from Benny Hatskin before the start of the season; Edmonton, with Peter Pocklington; Quebec, with ownership represented by their lawyer, Marcel Aubut; and us.
In the spring of 1978, Bob Caporale, Don Conrad and I went to the NHL’s annual meeting in Detroit, where the league had just had a vote about formally trying to work something out with the WHA. John Ziegler and Bill Wirtz met with me, Don and the other three WHA team reps and informed us that the vote had failed. At the same time, they made it plain that it was very close and now was not the time to do anything foolish or rash. John Ziegler made it very clear: “Howard, hold your house together. You and I will stay in touch, let a couple of months go by, and we’ll go right back at it at the end of the summer.”
The feeling coming out of Detroit was that we were over the emotions and we could sit down like businessmen and make a deal. But we knew it wouldn’t be easy, as the NHL still had a few militants, such as Harold Ballard. As we went into the late summer, Ziegler and I were on the phone frequently. He and Bill Wirtz told us not to give up and they urged us to work with David Stern, who was a lawyer from the enormously powerful Proskauer Rose law firm, which had major connections in sport. We were now getting into the realities of the legal ramifications of doing a merger between the two leagues, so we had to construct an environment that avoided anti-trust litigation from any and all parties. That is why when you read about any announcements from that period, it was always referred to as an expansion and not a merger. The strategy was that the WHA would fold and then four of the former franchises would be taken into the NHL as expansion teams. David Stern was the WHA lawyer for a short time before he went on to become general counsel for the NBA and, shortly thereafter, the NBA commissioner.
Dealing with our own side was extremely difficult too. It was a very delicate balance. Gobuty and Shenkarow in Winnipeg were great. Pocklington in Edmonton was great. Aubut in Quebec was a great partner, but he was way more hung up on keeping certain players, like Robbie Ftorek, than he should have been. We made the point to him that players had a short shelf life, but that this expansion would be forever. And if this deal broke up because of players, then New England was out and Quebec would end up with nothing.
But make a deal we did — or so we thought. Each WHA team would pay $4.25 million to get into the NHL. Each of us would be allowed up to four “priority selections” in the “expansion” draft, meaning we could each protect up to two skaters and two goalies. The NHL teams got to choose back WHA players whose rights they held — and the ones they didn’t want, we could keep.
John Ziegler and I both felt confident that he could bring this framework to the NHL at its mid-winter meeting in the Florida Keys and, in our various cities, we all waited on pins and needles, hoping to get the good news from John. Don Conrad even had the Aetna jet ready to fly down to Florida if necessary.
Thursday morning at 8 a.m. the phone rang and it was John Ziegler. I thought it was going to be to tell me to get on the plane, although I knew that 8 a.m. phone calls are rarely good news.
“We couldn’t get it done,” he said. “We lost by two votes. Vancouver and Montreal shifted gears on me.”
I could hear in John’s voice the pure disappointment and frustration. Just imagine the common sense, or lack of it, of Montreal and Vancouver and the few others, including Toronto, who voted no. They were going to receive $17 million in cash, most of their players back, and economic stability. Yet six franchises voted against it. Even “stupid” is not sufficient enough to describe those six teams.
I immediately set up a call with our group and informed them of the news. We all agreed we had to give off the immediate impression of proactivity and solidarity. Which we did. In Hartford we held a press conference to do so, as did the other WHA teams.
What none of us predicted, though, was the backlash in Canada toward Vancouver and Mon
treal. Imagine, you had three Canadian teams that were getting into the NHL and you had three other Canadian teams killing that opportunity.
At the Molson office in Winnipeg, there was a drive-by shooting. Nobody got killed but the shots came through the office window. There was a national hue and cry and a massive negative reaction against Molson, which owned the Canadiens. And in Vancouver there was a huge outpouring against the Griffiths family, who owned the Canucks.
Now it’s Friday and I wake up with a strange sensation, a premonition that maybe, just maybe, it is not over yet. Incredibly, my phone rings and it’s John Ziegler. He says, “Howard, do you think you can get your guys back together? Molson has called up and they’re going to change their vote, and so is Vancouver.”
I said, “John, I will do my best,” trying to sound a little uncertain, then I called a WHA meeting for early in the week in Toronto.
Shortly after John hung up, Morgan McCammon, the chairman of the board of Molson, also called. In his deep voice he said, “We made a mistake and I’m really counting on you to keep your guys together. I’d really like to fly you up to Toronto, have dinner with you and persuade you that we can change this whole thing around.”
I flew into Toronto the night prior to the Tuesday meeting and had drinks with Morgan McCammon. It was clear that he was on the hot seat and was counting on me to keep this together. And for the first time I was completely confident that we were finally going to pull this merger/expansion off.
Who is kidding whom? We might have been able to go on for another year with the WHA, but it would have been really, really hard. Now it looked like we wouldn’t have to.
As part of the merger plan we had to clean up the last two WHA teams — Birmingham and Cincinnati. We had agreed to pay Johnny Bassett $2.4 million because Birmingham wasn’t going to get into the NHL, and we had to negotiate with Bill DeWitt for his exit fee. The NHL didn’t want Cincinnati, and that really hurt Bill. And he would have been great for the NHL, so it was their loss. Because he felt hurt, Bill was difficult about his final settlement number, which ended up being $4.25 million.
The NHL had their vote, and we got in.
We made the announcement in February, then we had to clean everything up, pay off all the bills, pay off Ron Roberts and the players’ association and finish our final season. For posterity’s sake: at the final WHA All-Star Game that year, Gretzky did get to play on a line with Gordie and Mark Howe; Winnipeg won the final Avco cup over Edmonton; and Bill DeWitt’s final game with the WHA came against the Whalers in Springfield, where we eliminated Cincinnati in the first round of the playoffs. The next time we would play a hockey game (still in Springfield), it would be as an NHL team.
So, after seven years, the WHA was gone.
I’ll argue until the end that the league changed hockey forever. The reserve clause was gone and salaries had soared, so every player now has Gary Davidson to thank for that. We brought a wide-open, exciting European style into the game. We helped Canada double its number of major league teams. We introduced a number of new markets to hockey, including some in the Sunbelt. And, thanks to the efforts of Marcel Aubut, we also introduced regular-season sudden-death overtime, an element that the NHL adapted into their games as well. Players such as Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier, Mike Liut, the Stastnys, Ulf Nilsson, Anders Hedberg and many others came into the NHL via the WHA.
The City of Hartford, thanks to the Whalers, was to be the only American city to join the NHL as a result of the war between the two leagues. Hartford beat out cities such as San Diego, Phoenix, Denver, Indy, Cincinnati and a few others to be part of the NHL.
And when the four teams were introduced by the NHL as new “expansion” members, I looked around and realized that of all the people there, the only one who had also been at that first meeting to officially create the WHA was me.
The WHA chapter of my life was now complete. Miraculously, a league that started with nothing but smoke and mirrors in 1970 was able to effectuate a merger in 1979 and dramatically change the sport of hockey. I am often asked if the WHA was a success or a failure. The best answer I can give you is that it was a “very successful failure.” Although the league itself was short-lived, it opened up the sport of hockey to many new markets in North America and introduced some fun concepts that were eventually adopted by the NHL. The smartest thing the NHL could have done was to have agreed to the merger at the end of our first year. Unfortunately, the Original Six were so used to the monopoly that it was difficult for them to swallow their pride and think like businessmen.
The pioneers of the WHA were people such as Gary Davidson, Dennis Murphy, Ben Hatskin, Bill Hunter, Johnny Bassett, Bill DeWitt, Marcel Aubut, Mike Gobuty and Peter Pocklington. To a man, all had great spirit and great love of the sport. Our own internal group in Hartford — Bob Schmertz, John Coburn, Godfrey Wood, Bill Barnes, Jack Kelley, Ron Ryan, Dave Andrews, Don Conrad, Bob Caporale and I — all had a passion and commitment to build a franchise in a city that was in desperate need of a team to rejuvenate the downtown of the state’s capital city. And we were now in the NHL.
As I look back on the WHA Whaler years, I think about some of the extraordinary events that to this day still have great meaning. We were one of the first WHA or NHL teams to have our own store that sold team merchandise to the public. It was iconic in that the entryway was actually designed to look like the mouth of a whale, in honor of our mascot, Pucky, a friendly whale. Pucky was created during the WHA years and was a fan favorite. Our theme song, “Brass Bonanza,” is still played today at special events such as Red Sox games, college games and even at the Sochi Olympics. PRISM was one of the original all-sports networks. It became SportsChannel of New England and is known today as Comcast New England.
We launched some great careers. Bob Neumeier, our broadcaster, went on to become one of Boston’s top sportscasters and is frequently seen on NBC national broadcasts. Bill Rasmussen founded ESPN. Harry Neale went on to coach in the NHL and then became a favorite on national Canadian television broadcasts. Many of our players went on to coach in the NHL or to become successful front-office executives.
The previous eight years had been a roller coaster for me. I couldn’t help but hope that I could now, at the ripe old age of 37, relax a little and enjoy the fruits of my labor. Little did I know that that was not in the cards. In fact, the pressure dial was just about to be turned up a notch, not only in my professional life but in my personal life as well. During my first year with the Flyers, I married Anne Reddy and assumed the responsibility of being a father to her two-year-old son, Scott, whom I legally adopted. In 1969 my first child, Rebecca, was born. In 1971, Howard Jr. was born — the same year as the New England Whalers were “born.” The pressures of three children and launching a highly complicated business put tremendous pressure on the marriage. Sadly, right at the time the Whalers entered the NHL, Anne and I separated and were divorced.
PART THREE
THE NHL:
THE PROSPEROUS ’80S
Into the NHL at Last
Once we did the merger — or the expansion, as the lawyers will call it — there was no more WHA, and therefore no more interleague competition for players. So, in the 1980s, the pendulum would swing back to ownership’s side.
We had peace in the valley. I would describe the ’80s as the Prosperous Years.
It had been expensive to join the NHL. The expansion fee was $4.25 million for each of the four WHA teams, plus there was another $1.75 million needed for each of the four surviving teams to “clean up” the WHA.
Before the merger, my Hartford corporate partners expressed to me that, in anticipation of the merger, they would prefer to have me as the only individual to own part of the Whalers.
They gave me a reasonable bank of money to buy out the other individual owners. So I reached out to each partner to acquire their interest, and they were all pleased to receive a fair return
for their contributions.
I never really owned a large piece of the team. I had varying amounts over the years, starting at 12 per cent when we made the original deal with Bob Schmertz. Then, as money had to be put in for the NHL acceptance, my percentage was obviously diluted. Yet even though I had only a small percentage, I was the only individual owner and therefore was the face of the franchise. The way the partnership was structured, I had control of all operations, as long as I adhered to an agreed-upon budget that was approved annually.
As had been the case with the WHA, we entered the NHL playing in an arena that was not going to be our permanent home. The two-year rebuilding of the Hartford Civic Center would keep us at the Springfield Civic Center until early February of 1980. At the same time, we had a name change. We were no longer the New England Whalers — we were the Hartford Whalers.
The corporations that owned the team, being Hartford businesses, were motivated to promote the city, and their investment had been made as a civic responsibility to the City of Hartford and the State of Connecticut.
When all the smoke had cleared from the expansion draft, we weren’t stripped of as many players as the other three WHA teams were. We’d made a gentleman’s agreement with Detroit that the Red Wings wouldn’t reclaim Gordie Howe and, overall, we really only lost Brad Selwood, George Lyle and Warren Miller to the NHL, and we ended up getting both Lyle and Miller back within a couple of years.
Our first year in the NHL, we did well. We were placed in the Norris Division with Montreal, Pittsburgh, L.A. and Detroit, and we finished fourth, 10 points ahead of the Red Wings, with 73 points in 80 games, the most of any of the four WHA teams. Both Hartford and Edmonton made the playoffs, which can’t be said about too many NHL “expansion” teams.
Slim and None Page 13