Mikita, who had already led the league in scoring four times when Magnuson entered the NHL, knew that the rookie would soon become a team leader.
“Most guys skate rather easily at the start of practice or for a pregame warmup, but Maggie looked like he was in a race. A lot of times, you find that players with that attitude are doing it for affect. Not Maggie. He was the real thing.”
Yet again, Keith wanted to waste no time in leaping onto the ice before all of his friends.
“After watching him for two days in his first training camp,” Mikita added, “I said to the other players, ‘This guy has heart.’”
Magnuson’s youthful enthusiasm, in fact, reminded some observers of a rookie who made his debut in Major League Baseball six years earlier. During a spring training game in Florida, a smirking kid from the west side of Cincinnati ran out every play as hard as he could—much to the jealous derision of some veterans watching him from the opponents’ dugout. “Look at Charlie Hustle there,” they said. New York Yankees legends Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford snickered at the Cincinnati Reds rookie named Pete Rose. The nonstop, all-out hustle of Rose, however, would become one of the hallmarks of his supreme career on the diamond over the next 24 years.
Magnuson would do the same for hockey in Chicago. “Talk about spirit. Have you watched that Magnuson before the game, when they play the national anthem?” Bobby Hull asked a writer just after the regular season began. “He looks like he’d take on the whole North Vietnamese army, doesn’t he? And when we come out to warm up for the game, he has skated three revolutions of the ice before the rest of us have done one. He gets that psyched up.”
Magnuson, however, had yet to encounter the wear and tear of a full NHL regular season, which at the time was 76 games; it was for this reason that Billy Reay asked Keith to “tone it down” and save some energy, not wanting his rookie defenseman to exhaust himself in the course of the marathon. But Reay discovered that his request was in vain. When the coach ordered wind sprints at the end of a Hawks practice, Magnuson would always lead the charge—even though he was not considered to be among the faster skaters on the team.
So in that very first home exhibition game in the fall of 1969, Magnuson made his way up the 21 treacherous steps from the Hawks locker room in the basement of the Stadium, a building which later gained the nickname “the Madhouse on Madison” for being one of the loudest arenas in the NHL.
Modeled in part after the old Olympia Stadium in Detroit (which had opened two years earlier), the Stadium was completed in March 1929. In many respects, it took much longer for the Stadium to enter the modern age of NHL-caliber venues. Like the Olympia and the Boston Garden, the Chicago Stadium still featured an old-fashioned, analog-dial clock, in use since 1943, which kept the game time and the penalty time for hockey games; Boston and Detroit ditched their antiques in favor of more modern, easier-to-read digital timepieces before the end of the 1960s.
By the close of that decade, the Stadium was showing its age. “Some of our best friends were the cockroaches that would scurry when the lights were first turned on,” Cliff Koroll would say of the locker room. Peter Marsh would confirm their presence when he arrived to play for the Hawks in the early 1980s. “When we hung our elbow pads and shin pads up in our stalls overnight,” he recalled, “we had to check them for cockroaches the next morning. There were also cats scattered everywhere in the basement of the Stadium—I don’t know if they were there on accident, or placed there to handle the bug problem.” Another creature, however, was certainly there on purpose. “When I was a rookie with Vancouver, it was an intimidating place to play,” Dale Tallon said. “Near the visitors’ locker room, there was a large German shepherd dog named Bruno that was caged up, and he would growl at you.” Bruno’s job was to roam the inner hallways of the Stadium at night, checking for prowlers.
The Stadium did have some amenities, however, as Koroll revealed. “Adjacent to the dressing room was a lounge with a TV and pool table. We would relax in this room before games,” he said.
It would be fair to say that, at least until the dawn of the 1960s, the Stadium got little attention for its hockey productions; for as local sportscaster Chet Coppock put it, Chicago was a “hockey graveyard” before the Hull and Mikita era, with chicken wire surrounding the ice instead of Plexiglas.
What the players perhaps dreaded the most were those last few steps before reaching the rink, which each time proved to be a difficult path to navigate.
“The road to the ice was an interesting one,” Koroll said. “We had to go through the lounge area, turn right, go about five yards, go up three stairs, turn right, and then make our way up to the ‘gladiator pit’— a total of 21 stairs. Over the years, several players fell down those stairs, especially trying to get down them.”
Keith, however, navigated them happily and quickly each day, as the entrance to the ice led to the grandest of all spectacles. “As soon as we came up the stairs, everything changed. The place was definitely to our advantage,” Marsh said.
Whether it was for a practice or a game, Magnuson was always first in line behind the goaltender in breaking into a full sprint upon reaching the gate, “with his fire engine–red hair flapping in the breeze,” as noted by hockey writer Chuck O’Donnell. “He had an unusual skating stride,” is how O’Donnell described Magnuson’s gait in accelerating around the boards, “almost as if he was sitting in a chair.” A Canadian writer watching the Hawks depicted his style another way: “His weight is forward, stance wide for balance, knees locked and slightly bent. Those short, choppy, deceptively awkward-looking strides of his suggest an extra surge of power coming from his thighs.”
As Magnuson made his dash through the gate and onto the ice in front of the Chicago crowd, the now-long-forgotten tune of “Here Come the Hawks!” would begin blaring from the Stadium’s speakers; it was a staple at every Hawks game through the 1990s. “We all file up that long, dark basement stairwell from the dressing room to the rink,” Magnuson remembered of the pregame ritual for the team. “Al Melgard on that giant organ right above us starts to play the team’s music as 20,000 fans roared. For me, this is one of the biggest moments of every hockey encounter.”
For anyone who attended a Hawks game at the Stadium, the song was part of the exciting anticipation that rose every evening:
Here come the Hawks, the mighty Black-hawks!
Take the attack, yeah, and, we’ll back you Black-hawks!
You’re flyin’ high now, so, let’s wrap it up
Let’s go you Hawks, move off!
Now all look out!
Here come the Hawks!
The Stadium had acoustics all its own, as noted by broadcaster Pat Foley. “That building was a small structure with brick walls that went straight up, so the place had a special noise,” Foley said. “The sound really bounced around in there. We just hung one crowd microphone from the booth. That’s all we needed.” To compare the decibels in the Stadium to the arena with which modern Hawks fans are accustomed, Foley pointed out that when the United Center took the Stadium’s place across the street in 1994, it housed two-and-a-half times the square footage of the Stadium—but held but only 3,000 more seats.
“Our broadcast booth was a small, separate balcony which hung off of the first balcony and over center ice behind the player benches,” Foley recalled about his perch above the Stadium ice. “It was a great perspective from which to call the game. The Stadium had a spirit, an atmosphere, and a life we will never see again.”
Bobby Hull reacted the same way when asked about his memories of the old building. “I have been all over North America and Europe,” Hull said, “but the Chicago Stadium was the greatest sphere of action and energy of any building I’ve ever played in.” The energy in the building was Magnuson’s fuel, the very jolt that got his adrenaline going each night.
Nonetheless, it took more than fight songs and th
e youthful enthusiasm of the Denver rookies to improve the team’s fortunes in the 1969–70 NHL season. Hull exercised an early fall holdout over his contract, which contributed to the Hawks’ last-place finish in the old Eastern Division; the Hawks allowed the most goals (246) in the division. It was undoubtedly the tougher division; a 1967 expansion brought six new teams into the league—St. Louis, Philadelphia, Oakland, Los Angeles, Minnesota, and Pittsburgh—all of which were placed in the West. The “Original Six,” meanwhile, comprised the East (Chicago, New York, Boston, Montreal, Toronto, and Detroit). Thus, the Hawks found themselves ending the season in the cellar of the Eastern Division in the spring of 1969 despite having a winning record. (The St. Louis Blues, meanwhile, were the only team in the Western Division with a winning mark.)
So the Hawks missed the playoffs for the first time in 10 years, and changes were to come. In much the same way that Cubs manager Leo Durocher had wanted to “back up the truck,” as he put it, and overhaul the roster upon his arrival in Chicago in the mid-1960s, Reay was also looking for new leaders to revive his own moribund club. As had Armstong, Magnuson noticed that Reay did very little yelling as a coach; the cold stare of each man sent his messages for him. Reay was encouraged by the prospect of talented youngsters like Magnuson, Koroll, Jim Wiste, Tony Esposito, Gerry Pinder, and others coming to the fore, but like most all NHL coaches and front office personnel at the time, he wasn’t sold on players coming from the college ranks.
“You can never be sure about players who pass up a chance to develop on Canadian Junior teams to attend college,” Reay would assert. “You have to wonder if they really are serious about making hockey a career. Because no matter how much college hockey has improved—and it has, plenty—it still hasn’t reached the class of hockey played by the Juniors in Canada. And unless a player is really something, he’s going to take a year or so in the minors before making it to the majors if he goes to college. On the other hand, plenty of players have come right out of Juniors and starred in the NHL.”
Reay could tell early on, however, that Magnuson and his Denver teammates were exceptions to the “softness” that some pro coaches perceived in the college player of that era. Those mentored by Armstrong had a special toughness, Reay thought, a special desire. This was proven to the Hawks coach when he witnessed Magnuson staying behind to work further on his game, all by himself, after one of those first team practices in September—just as he had with Harry Ottenbreit back in Denver. Walking to his office, Reay saw Magnuson shadow-boxing all alone on the ice, practicing the blows he planned to impart on opposing players.
In fact, at various points during the 1969–70 season, there would be as many as seven college men on the Hawks roster—including Magnuson, Koroll, Esposito, Eric Nesterenko, Wiste (who would be sidelined with a broken hand halfway through his first NHL season), Pinder (a 21-year-old who had been in his third year at the University of Manitoba), and Lou Angotti (who had been at Michigan Tech nearly a full 10 years before Esposito). While many college players were once considered second-tier in terms of possessing hockey “instincts,” several significant athletes from the NHL scene of the 1970s—including Magnuson, Koroll, Angotti, Red Berenson, and Lou Nanne, among others—also became coaches or front office employees in the NHL and the college ranks themselves once their playing days were finished.
* * *
As the 1970s dawned, Mikita and Hull were the unquestioned leaders of the team. Both were among the most physically gifted players in the sport to that time, and they did not waste those gifts. Hull, in particular, was not only perhaps the fastest skater in the game, but his peerless, legendary slap shot was reputed to travel at speeds in excess of 115 miles per hour.
“All of a sudden the puck became invisible,” said former NHL goalie Les Binkley of having the experience firsthand. “When Bobby Hull shot one at me, it started off looking like a small pea and then it disappeared altogether.”
On March 12, 1966, Hull became the first player in league history to score more than 50 goals in a season, and eventually posted a season total of 54. By the end of the 1968–69 campaign he had shattered his own mark, putting 58 pucks in the net. But as the new season began, Hull sat out of training camp once again over a sticking point in his existing contract. Rumored to revolve on how the club permitted him to invest some of his money in other ventures, the disagreement had carried over from a brief holdout by Hull at the start of the previous year. By the third week of October 1969, word was even circulating that Hull—nicknamed “the Golden Jet” for his unmatched skills—was planning to retire from hockey.
Without him, the Hawks were winless in their first six regular season games, managing only a 1–1 tie with the Rangers in New York as Koroll—now being called a Johnny Bench look-alike for his resemblance to the up-and-coming Cincinnati Reds catcher—got his first NHL goal. The Hawks had even been outscored by three expansion teams—the St. Louis Blues, the Oakland Seals, and the Minnesota North Stars—by an aggregate score of 13–4. Hull was sorely missed, and Sports Illustrated called the spat between him and Arthur Wirtz “one of the bitterest cases of player-management friction in hockey history.” Bill Wirtz had decided to fine Hull $1,500 for each game he missed, and simply stated that “Hull has a contract with us and we expect him to live up to it.”
Koroll’s tally in New York must have inspired the team. Despite the continued absence of Hull, the Hawks went on to win seven of their next eight games. Keeping the Hawks loose during Hull’s absence was Mikita’s sense of humor, in addition to that of Magnuson’s—the latter of whom did not go through the typical hazing and isolation that most rookies experience. This was because Magnuson’s teammates not only respected him immediately but liked him as well; they were comfortable giving him the same teasing he had endured from Koroll and Wiste in college. A couple of months into his rookie season, Magnuson approached the veteran Mikita for advice. “He asked me if there was anything he could be doing better,” Mikita recalled. “I told him, ‘You’re doing great, but there’s one thing I would suggest: When you take on a guy in a fight, lead with your left or your right—not your chin.’”
There was one brief, minor tussle with Marc Tardif of the Canadiens in the Montreal Forum on October 25, 1969 (during the first of what would be a remarkable number of shutouts for Esposito in his rookie year, a 5–0 win over the Canadiens). Magnuson engaged in his first real NHL combat a month later on November 21, when the despised Boston Bruins came to Chicago Stadium.
“Magnuson, the young pugnacious Hawks defenseman fought with [Bobby] Orr, Derek Sanderson, and challenged the entire Boston club,” noted Ted Damata. “The Bruins, earlier, had been taking runs at him and Keith ended up pouncing on anything that looked like a Boston uniform.”
This season would be the first dominant year in the league for the young phenom Orr, who at the age of 21 already had three NHL campaigns under his belt. In an incident that would provoke hard feelings between the Hawks and the Bruins throughout the next few seasons, Magnuson took offense to Sanderson—the NHL’s Rookie of the Year in 1968 who was back in the Boston lineup for his first game in nearly seven weeks after a knee injury—hitting Chicago winger Jim Pappin after the whistle. Magnuson, in an effort to cement his role as the team’s on-ice protector, leveled Sanderson near the boards—at which point Orr, underrated as a checker and a fighter because of his gaudy statistics on offense, flew in from behind with a hit of his own that sent Keith sprawling to the ice. As the battle played itself out, Magnuson was held punchless while Orr got in several right hands. Magnuson certainly got the worse end of the fight; as Boston goaltender Gerry Cheevers reflected, “I must say it was the worst beating I ever saw a player get. It was the biggest pool of blood I ever saw on the ice, too.”
Magnuson and Sanderson squared off once again later in the game, when Keith leapt out of the penalty box prematurely (good for a $100 fine) and assisted teammate Ray McKay, who at the time was fightin
g Sanderson himself. McKay would only play in 28 games in his three years with the Black Hawks, but he got the best of Sanderson that night thanks to several vicious blows.
A new era in Chicago hockey was born. The season was only six weeks old, but Keith Magnuson was indeed the new enforcer for the Black Hawks. Magnuson’s courage spoke volumes to the Hawks— no one, not even Orr, would be allowed to intimidate his team, especially on Stadium ice. Like an offensive lineman in football, Magnuson knew he would find little glory in his role but that his sacrifices would benefit the team as a whole.
Magnuson’s status as a policeman took full flight in a December 19 game against the Seals in Oakland as he gained his first fighting “victory.” He was challenged three separate times that evening by Carol Vadnais, considered one of the new tough guys in the league and rumored never to have lost a fight in the Juniors.
Vadnais had the upper hand in the first round, in which he clotheslined Magnuson near the boards, and was on top of him before he could respond. In the second round, with a faceoff occurring in the Hawks zone, Magnuson was not caught by surprise again—he squared off immediately with Vadnais after they jostled their sticks outside the circle. But the linesmen jumped in quickly and separated the men before any real punches could be thrown. The third bout between the two, however, proved to be the decisive one, once again occurring in front of the Chicago net, and two minutes into the third period.
Gloves and sticks dropped, Magnuson began to hover around his prey in a slow, backward circle. He then gave a quick shrug of the shoulders—showing his opponent that he was loosening his guns for the impending fracas. It was a move which would become a trademark of Magnuson’s fighting stance in the years to come. As the punches flew, Vadnais had the initial advantage, but Magnuson got in three solid, unreturned blows—each one collapsing the staggering Oakland player closer and closer to the ice. The final right cross caught Vadnais squarely on the nose, breaking it, and sending him down in a crumpled heap.
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