Not 20 minutes after DU had won the national title against Cornell—and just 10 minutes after learning of his selection as tournament MVP—Magnuson was approached by Black Hawks general manager Tommy Ivan to discuss a contract with Chicago. Ivan had already been with the Hawks for 15 years, after a successful run with the Detroit Red Wings that included being the first professional coach for Gordie Howe just as World War II was ending.
Ivan was under the employ of Arthur M. Wirtz, the owner of the Black Hawks who graduated from the University of Michigan in 1922 and was the son of a Chicago policeman. Few people gobbled up more Midwestern real estate during and after the years of the Great Depression than did Wirtz, who had quickly launched his own real estate firm in Chicago in 1927 after leaving Ann Arbor.
Surviving the pitfalls of the Depression when others in his field could not, Wirtz continued to acquire disbanded properties as competitors took losses. Along the way he would meet a man named James Norris, who would kindle his interest in hockey and with whom Wirtz would partner on many business ventures in banking and real estate. In 1929 the two men took over the Detroit professional hockey franchise, and, in turn, invested in the future growth of the NHL as a major league sports operation to compete with baseball (and the fledgling National Football League) in the United States. Wirtz also assumed controlling in interest in the Olympia arena in Detroit and the Chicago Stadium soon after. In time, Wirtz would control the St. Louis Arena as well, which had been finished in 1929 and would become the home of the St. Louis Blues upon their first season of play in the NHL in 1967. (Until the Blues entered the league, the arena was used by a Hawks farm team in the Central Hockey League before being purchased by St. Louis businessman Sid Salomon Jr.)
Wirtz and Norris struck again in 1946, taking ownership control of the Black Hawks, and five years later, Wirtz left behind his Detroit ventures to devote his attention to his Chicago matters. Norris passed away the following year in 1952, leaving Wirtz in complete charge of the franchise. In 1954 he hired Ivan as general manager, and by 1966 had installed his son, Bill Wirtz, as president of the Black Hawks, to handle most of the team’s business and hockey operations.
After a quick word in the corridors of the Broadmoor Arena in Colorado Springs (which, in addition to the world tournament in which DU played, also hosted the NCAA finals in 1969 for the first time after a 12-year hiatus), Ivan, Ottenbreit, and Magnuson took their meeting to a local hotel room a short time later. Sitting stoically across from Magnuson and Ottenbreit, Ivan pushed a piece of paper across the table that contained a $15,000, one-year contract offer. To Ivan’s shrewd pleasure, Magnuson was noticeably excited and was only a split-second away from leaping from his chair to extend Ivan an accepting handshake. But Ottenbreit grabbed Magnuson’s knee under the table just in time and stopped him. Instead, Ottenbreit countered Ivan with a multiyear deal at $25,000 per season. Irate, Ivan stormed out of the room as he snapped at the two men back over his shoulder.
“It appears, Magnuson, that you don’t want to play for the Chicago Black Hawks,” Ivan concluded simply.
Once again, Keith felt compelled to jump up from the table—but this time, it was to stop Ivan from leaving the room, to drop down to his knees, to beg Ivan for forgiveness, and to sign the contract for any amount. But Ottenbreit stopped him again. He had a plan, he assured Keith with a calm nod. Ivan left the building; and despite Ottenbreit’s assurances, Magnuson was beside himself with worry.
Ottenbreit convinced Keith that the Black Hawks did not have a “policeman” on their roster at the time—that is, one man to whom the team can turn to be a defender—or if need be, a fighter—against another team’s toughest players. The Hawks had long been in need of a more physical roster, since their home rink—the Stadium—was 12 feet shorter than the standard NHL arena, providing a more compacted playing area with less skating room in the neutral zone. (The Stadium ice was 188 feet long, as opposed to the regulation length of 200 feet—a rule which the NHL had put into force after the Stadium was built.) Fighting, while a controlled tradition in professional hockey, was not part of the college game; Magnuson, most of his teammates, and most of his opponents had little formal experience with it on the ice, unless they had previously played in the Juniors. Ottenbreit, however, told Magnuson that if he stepped up his fighting skills and general physical play, there would be a place for him in Chicago—at a much better price than what Ivan was offering.
As a result, Ottenrbreit and Ivan retreated to their calculators after their initial picket-line volleys, and subsequently dug in for contract negotiations during the summer of 1969. Magnuson, meanwhile, was given one job to do, and he did it: ramping up his already intense physical training while integrating some new pugilistic skills.
“Sure, it got monotonous and was pretty lonely as well, running up and down those stairs in that big empty stadium,” he said of once again traversing the steps of the DU football complex, sometimes with Wiste and Koroll, who had returned to work out with him, and sometimes by himself. “But now I felt driven…by pretending I was in the Chicago Stadium with the noise of the crowd echoing in my ears, I could psych myself up beyond description.”
For further lower-body training, Magnuson also began strapping five-pound weights to his skates when he hit the ice—just as Wiste had done during his valet job—all while continuing his karate practice in addition to still working 8:00 am to 5:00 pm most days for the Denver realty firm. And each time Keith would come into the office for work, Ottenbreit (who was an advisor for the firm) would instruct someone to take a jab at him—to see if Keith could block or avoid the punch. For extra pay in advance of looking forward to his first professional contract, Magnuson even supplemented his income by washing dishes at a sorority house on campus.
“That really bugged me,” Magnuson would say a couple years later about one aspect of that job. “For two years in a row I was named All-American, helped my team to two national championships, and those girls still laughed at me.”
And despite being an All-American, he was by no means getting wealthy at the job.
“A lot of times I’d be down to my last quarter…sometimes I’d write checks for a dollar or two, because that’s all I had. On weekends when the sorority house closed, I’d walk over to a restaurant called Pat and Lucy’s with a hungry look on my face. They were good friends and they knew what the problem was. They would see me and say, ‘Come on in, Maggie. We have some stuff in the back that we’re not using.’ I was really grateful. I only got about $40 a month in expenses for playing hockey, and that didn’t go very far.”
Koroll and Wiste had spent the past year furthering their own hockey education in the Central League, and Ottenbreit sensed another opportunity with them back in town, covertly instructing them to give Magnuson an advanced taste of the pro game.
“Harry still felt that one hole remained in my training: growing accustomed to being hit behind my own net and in the corners, something that hadn’t happened since my Canadian hockey days in Saskatoon,” Magnuson recalled.
Koroll, a strong, physical forward in addition to being a scoring threat, started to beat on Keith at Ottenbreit’s command in a way his friend was not familiar. At one point, they even got into a heated shoving match at the boards before Ottenbreit blew the whistle. Just as the whistle sounded, Magnuson and Koroll had grabbed each other by the jersey and were ready to throw punches at each other. They happened to look over at Ottenbreit and saw him smiling—his point had been made, as he believed that Keith had now graduated into the pro ranks. Later, after getting two cracked ribs as a result of his efforts to tangle with Koroll, Magnuson even thanked Cliff for the lesson.
“Wait ’til you get to Chicago,” Koroll replied with an ominous chuckle.
Magnuson left no stone unturned in his preparation for the next step in his career, and he also used unconventional methods to steel his body. As an example, he convinced Denver friend Hawle
y Chester to join him on the ice and fire slap shots at him—with Keith trying to block them with his body.
“We’d get a bucket of pucks,” Chester would recall, “and Maggie would say, ‘Come on.’ It used to hurt me just to shoot at him. I hit him in the head once or twice. After we were finished, I’d look at him in the dressing room and his arms and chest were black and blue.”
The persistence paid off. Perhaps learning of how hard Magnuson was working, Ivan made another call to Ottenbreit later in the summer with a $20,000 contract offer, plus an additional signing bonus. Ottenbreit and his client agreed to the terms, with the contract to be signed after Magnuson joined the team in Chicago. A few days later, with Wiste close behind them, Magnuson and Koroll jumped into a car and headed east to Illinois for Keith’s first major league training camp.
Upon arriving in the city, the boys from western Canada stared in awe at the massive skyscrapers along Michigan Avenue and marveled at the fancy stores (while Koroll and Wiste had been in camp with the Hawks the previous year, it was the first visit to Chicago for Magnuson). Before checking into the Bismarck Hotel where all the players would be staying during training camp, Koroll decided to drive Magnuson by the home of the Hawks—the massive Chicago Stadium, the largest indoor arena in the world at the time of its construction in the 1920s. Entering through the famous players’ portal on the north end of the building which adjoined the larger Gate 3 (an entrance for buses and service vehicles), Magnuson gazed upwards in amazement as they reached the open expanse of the Stadium’s interior.
“We walked in Gate 3½ and stood by the opening where the Zamboni was,” Koroll said. “Keith looked up and said, ‘Look at all the seats…this place even has its own smell.’
“I looked at him and said, ‘The circus was in town last week.’”
On September 15, 1969, Magnuson would set foot on the Stadium ice for the first time in his initial practice session at the Black Hawks training camp. That same evening, the talent-laden Chicago Cubs had just rung the death knell in their infamous 1969 collapse. After dropping an 8–2 decision in Montreal on the 15th, the Cubs had lost 11 of their last 12 contests, and in that span had seen their five-game lead in the Eastern Division transform into a four-and-a-half game deficit behind the hard-charging New York Mets, who had won four of every five games since the end of July.
The Hawks training camp would be a grueling two-week stretch of two-a-day practices in advance of their exhibition schedule. On the morning of the first workout, Keith was up out of bed at 4:00 am at the Bismarck, unable to sleep due to his excitement. He dressed quickly in the Stadium locker room; and just like back in his boyhood days in Wadena and Saskatoon, he leapt onto the ice with boundless energy before the rest of the players, undaunted by the lack of rest the night before.
“Keith Magnuson is a defenseman from Denver University [sic],” Ted Damata informed his readers in the Chicago Tribune, as he was checking out the team’s first skating session from the stands. “He is a towhead, is boyish-faced, and has the same strong happy-skating action of Boston’s famous Bobby Orr.”
In responding to Damata’s assessment of him, Magnuson’s first interaction with the Chicago press was as polite as he could make it, as he instead was trying to focus on his work.
“He was surprised when told he looked like the great one,” Damata continued about Magnuson’s response to the allusion to the Bruins defenseman. “No one had mentioned it before. ‘They don’t see Orr in Denver,’ he [Magnuson] suggested, but was pleased with the comparison.”
Another nervous rookie on the ice for his first practice was Esposito, the goalie from Michigan Tech whom Magnuson had faced in collegiate play. Esposito had appeared in 13 games for the Montreal Canadiens the season prior, but was claimed for $25,000 by the Black Hawks in June (as part of the intraleague draft of unprotected players on teams’ rosters—later to be known as “waivers”) and would be vying for the starting position in the nets with returnees Dennis DeJordy and Dave Dryden. Dave was the older brother of Ken Dryden, whom Magnuson had also faced in the 1969 collegiate finals. (Dave, unable to take a spot from Esposito or DeJordy, would be suspended by the Chicago organization in October for refusing an assignment to the minor league team at Dallas.) The team had not experienced a steady force in goal since the departure of Glenn Hall to St. Louis, who was left unprotected in the expansion draft in 1967 after winning the Vezina Trophy as the league’s top netminder.
Yet another individual making his debut at that first workout in 1969 was Gary Hull, the 26-year-old brother of more famous siblings Bobby and Dennis, and whom their father had claimed four years earlier would “be the best of them all.” While Bobby Hull had elevated himself to among the best the sport had ever seen (evidenced by his scoring a league-record 58 goals the past year)—and with Dennis not far behind—Gary had been in a brief hiatus in his hockey career while assisting Dennis on his cattle ranch before deciding to jump back into the game.
No one would match Magnuson’s energy from his very first day with the Hawks. He credited the physical training he did in the thin mountain air in Denver his advantage in his initial interaction with the big-leaguers in Chicago. “Though I was still a naïve, gullible, red-haired western Canadian kid, and sure as hell scared at my first pro camp, I nevertheless felt in better shape than anyone there… Right then I determined that if I didn’t make this team on my ability, I’d make it on my desire.”
Back in Denver, Ottenbreit had suggested to Magnuson that, at some early point in camp, he should pick a fight with someone to establish himself (but to stay away from the stars in doing so, such as the Hulls and fellow headliner, Stan Mikita). Afraid to make a bad impression, however, Keith instead chose not to fight anyone—except for one minor scrap in the corner with veteran Eric Nesterenko, which amounted to little more than an exchange of forearms. But at Magnuson’s gametime debut in a preseason contest in Toronto, that first fight came. Wiste had noticed that, in the locker room before each exhibition game that autumn, Magnuson would keep asking him or Koroll to name the toughest player on the opposing team. Regardless of which city in which the Hawks happened to be playing, Magnuson would make it a point to search that player out. In Toronto, the first fight was with Mike Walton, a veteran of the 1967 Stanley Cup–champion Maple Leafs. Walton was one of the Leafs’ top scorers, having finished 1968 just ahead of his linemate Bob Pulford on the team’s point list. Magnuson jumped on Walton early, on a play near the boards, but Walton got the best of him by unleashing several hard punches.
Magnuson was able to recover from the beating and tap a goal into the net in his first NHL game, and his presence that evening garnered him the “First Star” award in a 4–0 Hawks win. Greeting the rookie in the hallway outside the visitors’ locker room at Maple Leaf Gardens was none other than Tommy Ivan, just as he had greeted Magnuson after the NCAA championship. Ivan was ready and smiling with the contract he had promised, and the perspiration from Magnuson’s jersey dripped onto the page as he signed it.
Later that night, Magnuson, Ottenbreit, Wiste, and Koroll quietly celebrated Keith’s finalized contract and first pro game with a couple of beers at (what they figured to be) a discreet, out-of-the-way Toronto tavern. While leaving the place, however, they just happened to bump into a man named Billy Reay on the sidewalk. The Black Hawks head coach since 1963, he previously had been the head man of Toronto, and thus was well aware of the local establishments in the city that players enjoyed frequenting. As a player himself with a 10-year career with Montreal and Detroit in the 1940s and ’50s, Reay had won two Stanley Cup championships, but he was still searching for a title as the man behind the bench, having reached the final round as the leader of the Hawks in 1965 only to lose at the very end. The bitter defeat to the Montreal Canadiens in the seven-game series meant Chicago’s last Stanley Cup championship had come in 1961 under coach Rudy Pilous, who, like Reay, was a Winnipeg native.
Whe
n the men encountered each other on the sidewalk, Reay took one second to study and register the familiar faces, and then became incensed with Ottenbreit for having the players out on the town (even though the players immediately attempted—unsuccessfully—to head in the opposite direction upon seeing their coach). Magnuson was afraid all over again, just as he had been in the Colorado Springs hotel room when Ivan stormed out—fearing that his NHL career was in jeopardy before it even began. But Ottenbreit quickly explained to the coach that Keith had just inked his first deal, so the low-key outing was justified. Reay relented and even laughed a little bit with the men after hearing the news. All was forgiven.
As the group headed back to the team hotel, Magnuson realized that his boyhood dream was now upon him.
“Dad always said that if you work for something hard enough, with God’s help you’ll attain it,” he said.
Even so, he would have to work even harder, every day, to keep that dream alive—and to earn the respect of his peers in the rugged world of the NHL.
3. Rookie at the Madhouse
“‘Here Come the Hawks!’ is a punchline to most people today, but that song still gives us the chills because it reminds one of better days, a rockin’ Stadium, and always, always, of Keith Magnuson.”
—Sportswriter Barry Rozner, 2003
When the team arrived back in Chicago after the preseason game in Toronto, and put on the home sweater, Keith Magnuson could not wait to please the local crowd.
“Right from our first exhibition game,” Stan Mikita recalled of Keith’s first appearance at the Chicago Stadium for the 1969–70 season, “he climbed the stairs from our locker room and hit the ice in full stride.”
Keith Magnuson Page 4