“I remember our freshman games against [the University of] Colorado,” Magnuson stated about his very first year of skating in the States. “CU was a team of Americans who had simply not grown up in the rough, tough Canadian tradition. We soon let them know we were on the ice by running at them every chance we got. And if an American came out for the Denver team, we’d give him a hard time, too. Nothing dirty, mind you, just good, hard checks. And if he couldn’t hack the hitting, he’d leave. Quite a few did.”
But it was not only Armstrong who made an instant impact on Magnuson’s game and life; so did Armstrong’s assistant coach, Harry Ottenbreit, who at the time was also going through law school at DU. Ottenbreit complemented Armstrong’s knowledge by impacting Keith’s development in hockey from an intellectual standpoint.
Since freshmen were ineligible for varsity play, much of Magnuson’s first year at Denver was spent working and learning, learning and working, until Armstrong’s system had been fully ingrained in his mind. Ottenbreit would stay on the ice with Keith long after the regular team practice was over and work one-on-one with Magnuson on the weaker points of his game. Ottenbreit noticed that the young Keith was often running at players wildly and out of control, so the coach introduced Magnuson to the value of the hip check as a more controlled and effective physical option, and modeled the technique for him until the defenseman mastered it.
In addition to following the advice of their coaches, Magnuson and his fellow freshmen also made it their task to emulate the characteristics of the upperclassmen who made the program successful. During his initial year in Denver, Keith was rooming with four of the other plebes from Saskatoon (Gould, Neil McQueen, Bob Sutcliffe, and Dale Zeman). They helped each other adjust to life in college as well as life in America. Also among the freshmen in 1965 was Craig Patrick, the son of former NHL player Lynn Patrick (and grandson of hockey legend Lester Patrick) who himself had already played three years in the Juniors.
While much knowledge was gained, there were also considerable challenges. In battling players in practice a few years older while juggling a first semester at college far away from family—Keith had struggled to attain a modest report card in his initial term—the first few months at Denver had taken their toll on Magnuson. Thus, Keith enjoyed a much-needed rest over Christmas 1965 back home in Saskatoon, catching up with local news from his parents, siblings, and friends. It was just the refreshment he needed; and upon leaving town, he was grateful to receive a car from his father to take back to Colorado and use on the Denver campus.
Naturally, the likable Magnuson’s popularity with his college friends increased even further after he returned to a school with a car of his own. One night, he offered to transport some friends out to the local bowling alley to roll a few frames. But when they returned to the parking lot later that evening, the car was missing. Thinking it had been stolen, Keith called the police while hoping the situation could be resolved—in one way or another—before he had to inform his father of what had happened.
As Magnuson stood talking to the officer in the previously occupied parking space, a man suddenly came running up the street, screaming in a frenzied state that a car had crashed into the living room of his home—and was still sitting there—and also claiming the car had a license plate displaying a “state” that he never heard of, and could not even pronounce. Keith then suddenly realized that he had forgotten to set the parking brake. The car subsequently had rolled down a long hill—completely unscathed, amazingly, through three busy intersections—before coming to rest inside the man’s home (at which point the car and the man’s home was certainly scathed). Fortunately, the victim was also a big fan of DU hockey, like most everyone near the campus, and forgave Magnuson and his friends, even offering to call a towing company for them.
A week or so later, the phone rang at the Magnuson house back in Saskatoon. It was the family’s insurance man, who happened to be calling about another matter—but who also inadvertently gave Keith’s dad his first inkling of the accident: “By the way, Joe, the car’s almost fixed.”
After the mishap, Keith returned his focus to his hockey and academic work, and his growth continued through the end of his first year of college. He and his freshman classmates continued to labor against the sophomores, juniors, and seniors in practice, helping the older players ready themselves for play in the tough Western Collegiate Hockey Association while improving themselves at the same time. That season, the varsity finished with a solid 18–11–3 record, but everyone could sense that greater things were ahead with Magnuson and his promising fellow youngsters in the pipeline. And as Keith soon learned, Armstrong and Ottenbreit would suddenly be expecting much more of him.
Perhaps one reason Keith was a popular driver among his friends was that he did not drink alcohol during his freshman year at Denver. It was a practice he brought with him through high school, which had made him a safe choice behind the wheel. Nonetheless, he admitted his habits changed in his sophomore campaign—first for the slightly worse in the short term, and then for the much better in the long run.
He endured a rough beginning to his initial season on the varsity in the fall of 1966; the team lost its first two games in the third week of November by scores of 2–1 and 3–2 at Michigan Tech University. Denver struggled to score against the home team’s formidable senior goalie, Tony Esposito. Esposito, two years earlier, had led MTU to the national championship back in his own sophomore year in 1965.
Armstrong was not only enraged to start the season 0–2; he was even more disgusted by the team’s lackadaisical play in doing so. Knowing that leaders had to emerge from the new cadre of players, he openly challenged Magnuson and the rest of the team after the opening loss. Things came to head after the second defeat, when the team went on a consolatory drinking binge—after which Keith could barely make his way back onto the Pioneers bus. Now finished with his anger and sensing a teachable moment, Armstrong gently sat down next to Magnuson for the ride to the airport, as well as on the plane to Denver.
“You know, if you play it right, you can have quite a future in hockey,” he said to Keith. “You’ve got all the credentials: desire, determination, you want to learn, and you don’t mind working hard.
“But just look at yourself right now. I don’t mind my players enjoying themselves, letting off steam, and having a few beers once in a while, but you’re running around half-cocked. And the point is, there’s a great pro future waiting for you, if you’ll but work for it.”
Keith was so embarrassed that he decided, then and there, that no distractions would get in the way of his development ever again. He worked harder in the classroom, and his grades improved. He spent even more time on his hockey skills after practice with Ottenbreit, staying at the rink to work until dinnertime and beyond, often missing the meal altogether. But most of all, he became obsessed with making Armstrong proud of him.
Magnuson could feel the camaraderie among the rest of his teammates growing. On the day of home games at DU, the team started gathering for steak dinners at the Writers Manor Hotel in Denver in the early afternoon—and left the heavier partying to its appropriate time, as their experience had taught them. The result was a very strong year with a final record of 22–8. The season ended with a loss to the powerful North Dakota squad in the NCAA playoffs. (Despite the team’s alleged abstinence, Armstrong believed one reason for the loss was a spring break trip to Mexico that was being planned by several Pioneers players upon season’s end.)
Magnuson’s work ethic had not wavered, however, just as he had promised. And it had paid off, as he was named (along with co- winner Bob Munro) the WCHA Rookie of the Year, an honor annually given to the sophomore who makes the greatest impact in the league. Magnuson was confident he could carry his club even further; great things were expected of the DU team entering the fall of 1967, as the tremendous recruiting class of which Magnuson was a part was expected to blossom after a
year of varsity play under its belt.
The captain of the 1967–68 DU team was Cliff Koroll, Magnuson’s former youth league opponent back in Saskatoon, now a senior. It would also be the second straight year that the two young men would be roommates, their first living off campus. They were joined by Wiste, yet another pro prospect on the Pioneers from Saskatchewan, who had gained valuable experience playing for his hometown of Moose Jaw in the Juniors. Now settling comfortably into the college milieu, Magnuson began exhibiting several entertaining personal habits and routines for which Koroll and Wiste would tease him for the rest of their lives.
“Maggie was very gullible at times and usually the brunt of our jokes,” Koroll revealed about the living arrangement. “It was all in good fun and he took it well. Keith would incessantly write reminders to himself on little pieces of paper, which were found all over the apartment.” The practice would follow Magnuson for years to come. “He would always screw up the punchline of jokes,” Koroll added about his friend, “which was funnier than the jokes themselves. That’s why we gave him nickname ‘the Riddler.’” In an effort to relieve stress from classes or hockey workouts—and perhaps as a form of superstition in the midst of a winning streak (a characteristic that would also follow Keith in later years)—the guys attempted to relax in the apartment by listening to Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake over and over again.
As another form of entertainment—as well as an opportunity to earn a few dollars—Magnuson, Wiste, and some of the other players had found jobs at the local horse racing track. Wiste parked cars as a valet (wearing leg weights while running back and forth from the parking lot to build his strength) while Magnuson took bets at the ticket window. Not long after being employed there, Magnuson stunned Wiste with some news.
“Jimmy,” Magnuson said, “I’ve just hit six races in a row, and I have a system for picking the winners.”
“Tell me the system!” Wiste replied.
“Well, I look through the program for each race, I see the weights of each of the horses, and I simply pick the lightest one—that one has to be the fastest, right?”
“Maggie,” Wiste told Keith, “the weight listed is the jockey’s—not the horse’s.”
Wiste also recalled an incident from the summer of 1967, during which time Magnuson was especially admiring Paul Newman’s character from the movie Cool Hand Luke, which had just hit the theatres. It gave Wiste an idea.
“Maggie, can you eat 25 hard-boiled eggs?” he asked his friend. Magnuson replied in the affirmative, and Wiste and others began taking bets—just as the cellblock leader Dragline had done in the movie. And the red-haired kid from Saskatchewan did not disappoint anyone, downing the 25 eggs without hardly batting an eye.
But time for such jocularity was rare; there was much work for the young men to do, both on and off the ice. With sights on NHL careers further down the road, the three could more often be seen running up the stairs of the DU football stadium, again and again, challenging themselves to push their physical limits.
Unlike the Christmas season during his freshman year when Keith returned home to Canada, Joe and Birdie instead returned the favor to their youngest son in December 1967 and drove down to visit him over the holidays. Unfortunately, they were involved in an auto accident on the way; and when they finally met up with Keith, Joe displayed a black eye and Birdie had a sore back. They saw him get his first taste of international hockey in the Broadmoor World Tournament in Colorado Springs, in which DU competed against the Finnish, Italian, American, and Russian national teams.
Denver began their portion of the schedule on December 26 by playing Finland to a 2–2 tie, followed by a 5–4 loss to the American national team before beating the Italians 5–2. Next were the vaunted Russians on December 30, the mysterious and powerful opponent whom everyone in international hockey feared. Getting a glimpse of their training methods, even Armstrong and Ottenbreit were stunned by the unmatched intensity with which the Soviets went about their work. For example, Magnuson himself noticed that on the day of their game with the Russians, the Soviet players not only did an hour of calisthenics and runs around the mountains but also held a full practice session, including seemingly endless skating drills with no pucks (suddenly the football stadium stairs on campus did not seem so bad to Magnuson, Wiste, and Koroll after all). The Russians then capped their busy day with an 8–1 thrashing of DU, providing Magnuson another lesson about the lengths to which a hockey player could drive himself to improve.
Keith and the entire Denver team took the defeat as instructive—they did not lose again that year. After departing Colorado Springs, Armstrong’s men ran off 22 straight wins to finish the season, capped by a 4–0 shutout of North Dakota in the 1968 NCAA championship game that vindicated the Pioneers’ ousting from the previous year’s WCHA tournament by UND.
After experiencing the thrill of the national title, Magnuson was determined to leave Denver on just as high a note after his senior campaign the following fall. As a senior, he once again chose to live off-campus—along with Patrick and other teammates Cab Stitt, Jerry Powers, and Jeff Jennings. Koroll and Wiste had moved on; both men were now in the farm system of the Black Hawks, playing at Dallas in the Central League and preparing for their first taste of training camp in Chicago with the big-league team in September. It was now Magnuson’s turn to be captain, as he gratefully took the C from the sweaters of Koroll and Wiste (which Magnuson would also share for the season with Patrick and fellow teammate Tom Miller).
Not resting on his laurels, Magnuson’s intensity during Denver practice sessions actually heightened in his final season. In the summer before the start of school his senior year, he had also begun studying karate at nights (while earning money by collecting rent for a Denver real estate firm during the day), believing that training in the martial arts would be extra preparation for professional hockey down the road. While he did not care much for other aspects of the karate classes, Magnuson instead much preferred the free-sparring segments of his training sessions. Seeking physical activity wherever he could, in the previous year he had even joined the DU lacrosse team with Koroll, Wiste, and Patrick—and the hockey players took to the sport naturally. Magnuson’s burning desire for victory, not surprisingly, was not checked at the door.
“In a game against Air Force Academy, the first fight ever in Colorado lacrosse took place,” Koroll revealed with a chuckle. “Guess who started it.”
While still unrelenting in his dedication to his sport and teammates, Keith knew that leadership also involved the wisdom to know when a little levity was in order to keep the team loose. In addition to the Writers Manor Hotel, the players would also hang out at the Ninth Hole bar in Denver, where the owner had already put large pictures of local heroes Magnuson, Koroll, and Wiste on his wall. While there relaxing one day—in sandals—Keith bet his friends that he could make the three-mile run back to campus in 20 minutes or less. Popping off his flip-flops and sprinting barefooted, he bolted off and soon phoned the rest of them from his friend’s apartment on campus—exactly 18 and a half minutes after leaving the bar. Not coincidentally, Magnuson was the “patient” the next day in his athletic training class, taught by team trainer Gene Bradshaw, who demonstrated the proper technique for treating foot blisters while Keith yelped in pain.
By this time, an easy confidence was bursting from every part of the Pioneers roster. As Magnuson and his classmates had done as freshmen, a new crop of hungry recruits challenged the varsity in practice. Following their 22 straight wins to close out the 1968 championship, the upperclassmen lost the first two games to North Dakota in November 1968 before winning 15 of their next 17 games with Magnuson at the helm as captain. An eight-game winning streak then closed the season in the spring of 1969, which not only included a two-game sweep of the Canadian National Team but a defeat of Cornell University in the NCAA finals as well, bringing DU its second straight national championship. To get by
Cornell, Denver had to contend with another outstanding goaltender—a young man named Ken Dryden, who two years earlier had led the Big Red to the NCAA title and who had compiled a career record at Cornell of 76–4–1 in goal. (A year later in 1970, after Dryden’s departure, Cornell would reclaim the NCAA title from DU with a perfect 29–0 record, the only college team to finish a season undefeated while Denver, without Magnuson, slipped to a 21–10–1 mark and bowed out to Wisconsin in the playoffs.)
In addition to excelling on defense, Magnuson also outscored all the forwards in the 1969 NCAA tournament in total points (goals and assists combined), and was named the Most Valuable Player as he prepared for the next step of his hockey career—the largest one of all.
Few players had ever jumped from the college ranks to the NHL while bypassing the Juniors system, but Magnuson looked to be one of them. He had also finally proven himself in the classroom, earning his degree in business administration. Just as Keith’s family had done back home in Saskatoon, Armstrong had carefully prepared him for life after college, and the coach always knew that Magnuson would be able to take care of himself.
“You never, ever worried about Keith being ready to play or doing the right things,” Armstrong would say in 2003 at the age of 87. “He was our captain. He was the heart and soul of our team, and one of the most outstanding young men I ever had the privilege to be around.”
As for Magnuson himself, he had no doubt he had made the right choice in coming to the Mile High City. “I wanted to become a hockey player,” Keith would say in 1970, a year after he finished his work at the campus. “And there’s no better place than Denver for that. You play a good, long schedule and you get all the practice time you want. And Murray Armstrong is really an excellent coach for a guy who wants to play in the NHL.”
* * *
Sensing that Wiste and Koroll would need business-related representation in negotiations with the Black Hawks, Ottenbreit had offered to be their legal adviser and business manager in 1968; in 1969, he assumed the same role with Magnuson. They were his very first clients.
Keith Magnuson Page 3