Mike Rogers, who’d spent the last five WHA years with us, finished fifth in scoring with 105 points and would go on to do something that nobody else but Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux and Peter Stastny would do — score 100 points in each of his first three NHL seasons. And he scored significantly more goals in each of those three NHL years than he did in any of his five WHA years. Meanwhile, there were four WHA grads in the top 11 scorers and Wayne Gretzky won the Hart and Lady Byng Trophies. So maybe our rebel league wasn’t as easy a place as many hockey people, especially in the NHL, had assumed.
For us, Blaine Stoughton also ended up with 100 points and Mark Howe had 80. Dave Keon put up 62 points and Gordie, who was 51 and in what would be his final season, still came through with 15 goals and 41 points. We hadn’t been sure Gordie would even play because he’d had dizzy spells near the end of the last WHA season and underwent a bunch of medical tests before he was declared healthy enough. But he was terrific.
We were a good team that year but we were also ridiculed by certain NHL teams, such as Toronto, because we had 51-year-old Gordie Howe and 40-year-old Davey Keon, and then late in the year we signed 41-year-old Bobby Hull.
Sometimes our coach, Don Blackburn, who had a good sense of humor, would throw all three out there on the same line. Harold Ballard thought we were jerks and made great fun of us and the WHA: “Gordie Howe and this league that has all these relics.” That kind of thing.
There was also bad blood between Ballard and Keon. Keon was a beloved Leaf captain in the early ’70s. I don’t know what went on with him in Toronto, but with us you could not have asked for more. I loved Dave Keon, a first-class quality guy. Harry Neale couldn’t say enough about him. Harry was a great guy and I trusted his judgment.
So we went into Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens on Halloween and beat the Leafs 4–2. Gordie got the game-winner and Keon got two goals. I had seats with Jack Kelley down in the corner of the stands, and Harold was located up the wall in the corner in something like a bunker, like the Germans used to have in the war. He and his older buddy King Clancy were sitting in there and they looked like a couple of bobblehead dolls. When we won that game, the fans in that section turned around and they really gave it to Harold. I got a lot of satisfaction from that game. Jack and I left the arena on cloud nine, not only for us but for Gordie and Keon as well.
In the middle of that season, Jack Kelley traded Alan Hangsleben to the Washington Capitals for Tom Rowe. Hangsleben had been with the Whalers since 1975 and my daughter really liked him. Rebecca was 13 at the time, and she was mad! She wouldn’t even talk to me after the trade. One day after she finally started to warm up to me again, we were watching practice and there’s poor Tommy Rowe standing there. And she said to him, as only Becka could, “My dad traded my favorite hockey player for you.” I cringed in embarrassment, but Tommy was a great sport about it.
My three kids literally grew up with the Whalers. They loved the players and the players loved them. I would pull the kids out of school — too much, I admit — to take them on hockey trips. I remember we went to Winnipeg for a big playoff game when Rebecca was eight. She got tired partway through the game, so I took her down to the dressing room and she went to sleep on the trainer’s table. We won the game and the players stormed into the locker room and were really whooping it up. But as soon as they realized Becka was sleeping, you could have heard a pin drop. They just shut right up. I came down all excited and nobody in the room is saying a word. I’m wondering, “Did somebody die here?” Then I looked in the training room and there was my daughter, sound asleep.
We played our first 22 NHL home games in Springfield, then opened the rebuilt Hartford Civic Center on February 6, 1980, two years and 19 days after the roof collapsed. The place was sold out. We beat the L.A. Kings 7–3. The night before, at the NHL All-Star Game in Detroit, Gordie Howe was our only representative. It was his final NHL All-Star Game and it was Wayne Gretzky’s first. The crowd at The Joe gave Gordie two standing ovations and he had to skate to the bench to make them sit back down.
Three weeks after that, we got Bobby Hull from Winnipeg in a trade for future considerations. He’d come out of retirement to play for the Jets just 20 games or so earlier. We’d had a shot at signing Bobby before the season, but when Jack and I met with him in Boston to see how he felt about playing for us, he was very negative toward Rick Ley, and Rick was our captain. In fact, Rick’s sweater now hangs from the rafters in Hartford. I’ll never forget Bobby’s comment: “Rick Ley? I wouldn’t piss in his ear if his brain was on fire!” I’m thinking, “I don’t think this will work.” I usually just start to laugh at things like that, but Jack was horrified, so we didn’t sign him then.
But when we did get Hull, it went great. He got seven points in the nine regular-season games he played. We lost in three straight to Montreal in the preliminary round of the playoffs, and when Bobby and Gordie skated off the ice at the Hartford Civic Center, it was the last game for both of them.
Off the ice and in the boardroom, there was a bit of what-goes-around-comes-around to our inaugural NHL season.
One of the very first NHL issues I had to vote on as Whalers governor was the sale of the Los Angeles Kings from Jack Kent Cooke to Jerry Buss. That made me pause for a moment, because it was Mr. Cooke who first offered me an interview away back in 1965, when I had to turn him down because I was on crutches. And now I was voting on his successor. It was a complicated transaction, but Jerry bought the whole shooting match: the Forum, the Kings, the Lakers and Mr. Cooke’s huge ranch in California too. Jerry turned out to be a good owner, and people don’t give him enough credit for creating things like club seats, which every arena in the world now has. He took that lower level of the L.A. Forum and said, “You’re not getting a seat between the goal lines there unless you buy everything.” Meaning NHL, NBA, concerts, everything. And it was big money back then, something like $15,000. He was a very smart guy. And he loved the girls. Before the boxes were put in he had those seats in the end zone that I called a Fornicatorum.
And, of course, there was the Halloween-night visit to Toronto. The first year I was in the NHL was really fun because we’d go to all these buildings that we had heard and read so much about, and Maple Leaf Gardens was one of them. At the start of the WHA, we hurt the Leafs more than anybody else when we took Jim Dorey, Ricky Ley and Brad Selwood off their defence, and Ballard always had issues with me because of that. We targeted teams that were incompetent, and Harold was set in his ways and living in a cave, metaphorically speaking, so the Leafs were easy for the WHA to compete against.
And we were competing well in the NHL. With the new building and a playoff team, you’d have to say that our first year in the league was a good one.
Then it all went downhill.
The Whalers’ Dark Ages
After we made the playoffs in our first season in the NHL, we then had five years of on-ice futility. The seasons from 1980 to 1985 were what I call the Dark Ages.
We played one more year in the Norris Division and then moved into the Adams Division with Montreal, Quebec, Boston and Buffalo. It was a really tough division but it didn’t matter who we were playing, we were just losing. We finished last the first four years we were in the division, and in 1982–83 we won only 19 games.
Two days after Christmas in our second NHL season, Mark Howe had a horrifying accident when he slid into the net and virtually impaled himself on the pointed piece of metal that balanced the back of the net. He had a deep cut on his thigh, lost 35 pounds and nearly lost not only his career but his life.
During the Whalers’ first couple of years in the NHL, Anne and I had separated and were going through the pain of that separation as we started a divorce process. This caused additional pressure on me that I was never expecting and, as a result, I was impulsive and made decisions for the hockey club that were not well thought-out, instead of methodically talking to people a
nd thinking things through.
One of the decisions I most regret was the parting of ways with Jack Kelley as our GM. Sadly, there were people working for Jack who weren’t as loyal to him as he was to them. And I listened to the wrong people. I went along with changes that ended up being detrimental to our growth process on the ice. Subsequently, Jack and I worked together again in Pittsburgh, and we remain close to this day.
Jack and I have so much history together. One of the stories that is rarely told in Whalers history is that Jack left the team in 1976 to return to coach Colby College. I was really disappointed and didn’t want him to go. Ron Ryan became the GM and Don Blackburn the coach, but I brought Jack back to Hartford in 1978 as the GM. I admire Jack’s whole family. Karen and I have worked on two film projects with Jack’s son David, and Jack’s other son Mark has won two Stanley Cups as a well-regarded scout for the Chicago Blackhawks.
Overall, there were just too many changes in the Whalers hockey department. Larry Pleau, who had taken over as coach and GM when we fired Don Blackburn, was only 34 years old. We had three different coaches in 1982–83 alone. And Larry then traded away some of our biggest stars to try to get some depth and get a little younger — Mark Howe and Mike Rogers, who were the first Whalers voted into the NHL All-Star Game. Those were two trades that didn’t work out well for us.
As bad as we were on the ice for the first five years of the ’80s, those were the years that defined Hartford as a great hockey market. I say that because even though we were struggling on the ice, we never dropped below 72 per cent paid attendance.
The definition of a solid market is one which supports its team during losing streaks as well as it does during winning streaks. It’s easy to support a winner, but it’s not so easy to support a team that is consistently losing games.
“The Cat” Emile Francis used to say this all the time: Hartford was the Green Bay of hockey.
We did all the things a team should do off the ice, immersing ourselves in the culture of the community. The players did more events than any other team, and we won league awards for that. The players were beloved in our market. It’s very hard to root against a team whose players would come to your local school and read to your kids in the classroom or spend their free time encouraging sick kids in the local hospital. Hartford is different than other places because the Whalers were the only show in town — we were the only professional team the city had ever had. We became a fixture in the marketplace, and despite all the losing, we still would never draw a crowd of less than 7,000 or 8,000.
I was fortunate to have had the experience I’d picked up in Philadelphia. We had just over 15,000 seats in Hartford, which was the smallest capacity in the league, but the key is not so much the number of seats as the gross dollars you generate from them. It is critical that you scale the house in such a way that you generate a gross gate that allows you to compete with teams in bigger markets. At the same time, you have to be very cognizant of having a low price for those fans who are more economically challenged.
Quite frankly, when you get into the upper price tiers, the cost itself isn’t that big a deal. Back then it would have been $15 to $20 for the top seat. Today, the difference between a corporation paying $100 or $150 isn’t that big a consideration. So we worked hard at trying to price it in such a way that we touched all the bases. What we ended up doing in Hartford was making the lower level seats all one price.
We worked at it constantly, and one of the things I’m most proud of is that when I left in 1988, we had the third-highest gross gate in the league in the smallest building, in the smallest market. Hartford had become a cult team. And even though the team no longer plays in Hartford, sales of the old Hartford Whalers merchandise still rank among the top in the NHL.
Francis and Francis and Co.:
The Renaissance Begins
They always say that a winning streak begins while the team’s still losing, and that can be true of a franchise’s fortunes too. Our two biggest moves — drafting Ron Francis and hiring Emile Francis — came while we were in the midst of five seasons out of the playoffs.
Ronnie wasn’t going to be our first choice in the draft of 1981. We thought we were going to get Bobby Carpenter. He was the best American player at the time, he had been on the cover of Sports Illustrated and he was a local boy from New England. But right at the draft, Max McNab leaped over us with a trade into the third slot and Washington selected Carpenter.
So Larry Pleau, who was GM, then picked Ron Francis from the Soo Greyhounds. I really think it was a credit to Billy Dineen’s advice that we made that choice and to Larry for having the courage to support it. I love going back in time and looking at the drafts because you see what an extraordinarily imprecise business it is. This draft was memorable in that it had two Hall of Famers in the top four: Dale Hawerchuk to Winnipeg first overall, then Ronnie at number four. And Bobby Carpenter became the first American to go from high school hockey directly to the NHL, and he eventually made the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame.
Pleau had a philosophy that a player had to serve time in the minors. So when we started the 1981–82 season, Francis was back with his junior hockey team and we started off October and November losing many more games than we were winning. It was not good.
In early December Ron was called up for a game because of Whaler injuries and he scored a couple of points. Everyone in the building could see that he was something special, and it was like a dark cloud had lifted when he got on the ice.
We won the game and it seemed clear to me that this was a turning point for the franchise. For the first time that year, we got some positive local press. But I arrived in the office the next morning and Larry informed me that he was going to send Ron back to junior hockey.
I was totally dumbfounded and said, “Larry, we finally get something to hang our hats on and you’re going to send him down? That is ridiculous, we need to keep him here!”
Larry stubbornly said, “Well, I’m the GM.”
My reply: “Well, you’re the GM, but that can change too. We have tickets to sell and sponsorships to sell, and just when we finally get a young player that people can hang their hats on, you are going to send him back? That makes no sense.”
I believe that Larry felt that Ron was so young at 18, that it was too much too soon. And he was trying to stand up for what he was doing as GM.
Bottom line: Ron Francis ended up staying — for a decade. To this day, he is the most beloved Whaler of them all.
It was risky for me to take that stand, because when you become part of the GM’s decision-making, then you become part of the crime. And it is hard to tell a GM he is fired when you are responsible for many of the decisions he has been making.
That said, Ron ended up with 68 points in just 59 games that year, so he was by no means out of place in the NHL.
The next year, we drafted Ulfie Samuelsson, Ray Ferraro and Kevin Dineen, all in the third round or later. That’s what made the franchise. Those guys all came together at the same time. Those kind of back-to-back drafts are what made all the good teams of that era, the Oilers and Islanders particularly.
If you said to me, “Of all the players who played for you, who were your favorites?” Ronnie would have to be at the top of the food chain. The closest comparison I can make is Derek Jeter. Totally professional, never going to say the wrong thing. They have the highest level of professionalism . . . and they’re good. Ronnie’s a great guy and was like a treasury bond. Every year you knew you were going to get 80 to 100 points from Ronnie Francis. And quietly, at the end of 20 years, he accumulated enough to be fourth in all-time scoring. Of course, I loved Gordie too, but in a different way. It was such an honor just to have him on our team.
When you’re building a team, how could you do better than to have a Ron Francis as your leader on and off the ice? He was captain of the Whalers franchise twice, and was captain of Pittsbu
rgh twice, the only NHL player ever to do that. I don’t think Ron ever got enough recognition until he joined the Penguins. As soon as he came to the Penguins, they won two Stanley Cups.
In the spring of 1983, as we were about to miss the playoffs for the third straight year, my partners and I sat down and decided we’d have to get a real strong person in to run the hockey organization.
So we hired Emile “the Cat” Francis as general manager, to take over from Larry Pleau. The Cat had just spent eight years as GM in St. Louis, helped them find a new owner and went behind the bench twice to coach. Elected into the Hockey Hall of Fame only the year before, the Cat was a guy who knew how to take control and run things.
The Cat had been a professional goaltender, mostly in the AHL and the Western Hockey League, but he also played for the Blackhawks and Rangers in the late ’40s and early ’50s. He got his nickname because he was small and fast in the net. Even as a player he was known as a leader, and it had been his idea to change the goalie’s catching glove to resemble a baseball first baseman’s mitt — easier for catching the puck, and not so hard on the goalie’s arm.
The Cat coached the New York Rangers to the Stanley Cup final in 1972 and spent 16 years in that organization, including 11 as the general manager. Then he became coach, general manager and vice-president of the St. Louis Blues, and they set a franchise record of 107 points just two years before we hired him.
When the Cat was formally introduced, Larry wanted to resign. So I called him up and asked him to meet me for a private breakfast meeting. I said, “Larry, you can’t quit. You are a young man. Blame me for putting you in a position you weren’t ready for. You’ve got to suck it up. Go to Binghamton to coach, or do whatever the Cat wants you to do. You’re learning from a guy who’s had a thousand years of experience, and you’ll come back. Don’t quit.”
Slim and None Page 14