Despite the reputation that Vadnais had carried with him from the Juniors, the 1969–70 season would be the only one in his lengthy NHL career in which he compiled an excessively large number of penalty minutes (212, which was one fewer at season’s end than Magnuson’s league-leading 213). In the locker room after the game, Magnuson admitted to a couple of teammates that it was one of the first times he had experimented with his karate skills on the ice—in practice or a game situation—since leaving Denver. The knockout galvanized the Hawks and Esposito, who got his fifth shutout that night as the defense permitted only 23 shots against him in the Hawks’ 4–0 win over the Seals. Chicago had previously struggled with the expansion franchise on Oakland’s home ice, as this was their first win in the Bay Area since Dave Dryden shut them out in February 1968.2
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With the help of Armstrong, Ottenbreit, Reay, and his careful observance of veteran players, Magnuson—more adroitly and more quickly than most rookies—developed a deep understanding of what is known as “the Code.” The Code is a tradition in hockey, similar to those seen in other professional sports—an unspoken, unwritten policy manual, followed among the fighters as well as nonfighters in the NHL, with consequences for each type of player if it is broken.
For those outside of hockey who may wonder why fighting is somewhat permitted in the NHL, the Code gives an explanation as to its purpose. Hockey, being a highly physical contact sport, involves aggressive interaction between opponents. But in the process of being a properly aggressive player, there are things that are permissible to do and things that are not. The term “policeman” began to emerge in the 1960s (whereas its role, without the name, existed even earlier). The policeman, as the moniker implies, keeps order; he is an unofficially appointed individual (or perhaps two or more) on a given team whose job is to make certain that his team’s nonfighters—typically the faster-skating but less-intimidating goal scorers—are freed up to manage the puck. If another team’s tough guy takes an intimidating run at a team’s scorer, it is the policeman’s job to retaliate with either a punishing body check or a full-blown fistic assault. The deterrent that provides peace, ironically, is a show of strength.
“Fighters are there to keep the peace and protect their skill players,” as author Ross Bernstein put it. Bernstein wrote specifically about the role of fighting in the modern NHL in his book The Code. “In order for the skill players to do their jobs effectively, they must be allowed the freedom to skate, pass, and shoot without the fear of being run over by a bigger player who is out to intimidate them.”
The Code also contains the codicil, or at least the notion, that “justice is best served cold.” It is a concept best understood by veteran players—often at a rookie’s expense—as noted by former NHL goalie Darren Pang.
“If a guy like Gordie Howe ever got disrespected out on the ice,” Pang said, “he took that guy’s number down and saved it for later. He didn’t tell anybody about it, he just locked it in his memory.”
An example of Howe’s patience in meting out justice came after an incident involving a young Stan Mikita. Mikita recalled the time early in his career when he elbowed Howe in the face in the corner, part of Stan’s effort to establish his presence on the ice. When he returned to the Black Hawks bench, Mikita’s older teammates warned him to watch out, as Howe would be sure to get even at some point.
Several matchups between the two teams came and went without incident, so the inexperienced Mikita assumed that Howe a) did not care about the elbow, b) had forgiven him, or c) had forgotten about it altogether. A couple of months later, however, Howe found Mikita in the perfect situation, and returned an elbow directly to Mikita’s mouth. It was part of an amazing (and self-admitted) transformation that changed Mikita’s career.
“I stopped mouthing off to referees,” he said. “Another thing I did was make an honest assessment of my behavior on the ice. I studied the score sheets after each game to break down what kind of penalties I was taking.” The result was two Lady Byng Trophies, given to the most gentlemanly player in the league, in 1967 and 1968. “I guarantee you, if you had placed a wager during my first few seasons in the NHL that I would someday be hailed for sportsmanship and gentlemanly conduct, you would have gotten some really long odds.”
Magnuson, during his rookie year in the fall of 1969, would be the latest NHL youngster to feel Howe’s wrath. In a November game at Detroit, Magnuson tried to push his boyhood idol out from in front of the net. The 41-year-old Howe—whose picture still sat on the Magnuson family mantle back in Saskatoon—quickly disposed of the rookie with a single right forearm to the head, skillfully landed while the referee was otherwise occupied.
“Howe cuffed Magnuson’s ears and turned away,” reported Sports Illustrated about the momentary clash after which Howe skated by the Chicago bench, “muttering to Doug Jarrett, Keith’s partner on defense, ‘He’s a tough kid, but he’ll learn.’”
Howe would not soften with age. Ten years later in October 1979 at the age of 51—in his final season, and with the Hartford Whalers, Howe was unceremoniously slammed into the boards at the Chicago Stadium by rookie Hawks defenseman Keith Brown, a 19-year-old playing in only his third NHL game. When the Hawks visited the Whalers in Hartford a month later, the patient Howe once again found the right place and time to get retribution.
“Right in my face,” Brown would say years later to Chicago Tribune writer Bob Verdi about where Howe’s vengeance had landed. “I come out of the corner bleeding, he comes out of the corner and scores. Howe is the same age as my dad… Naturally, I’m upset, so I start yapping. I yell at Howe, ‘I’m gonna get you!’ Finally, [fellow Chicago defenseman] Greg Fox, who knew better, told me to go sit down on the bench and shut up.”
Unlike some other fighters in the league in 1969, Magnuson honored and obeyed the Code, abstaining from cheap shots and going after anybody who did not want to fight. “I just can’t hit a guy if he’s turned sideways to me or hasn’t got his dukes up,” he said. He also had the wisdom and mercy to know when to back off a beaten opponent. “If a man goes down when I’m fighting him, I simply can’t hit him again,” he continued. “If he wants to keep going, fine. But I’ll drop it the moment he stops responding. By then he knows he’s made a mistake, and that’s all a good policeman is trying to prove. So that’s where it ends for me. Anyone who can’t exercise such controls on himself has to be a little sick in the head.”
“Keith was not a bully,” Bobby Hull said. “He minded his own business, but he also made sure nobody on the Hawks was bullied.”
Like Howe, Manguson developed his own way of settling scores as he became a veteran himself. He would look closely at himself in the mirror and see a scar from a particular opponent’s fist or stick from a past game—“Twelve stitches owed Ferguson, 15 for you, Fleming…”—and would then note the “amount” owed in his mental ledger.
But for Keith, fighting in hockey was not about the physical marks left behind on an opponent, but rather the mental ones. “To me, blood doesn’t mean anything,” he explained. “What counts is what you’ve done to the guy inside, what he’ll be thinking about next time.”
Thus, with every night in an NHL arena, Magnuson was increasing his understanding of the psychology behind the pro game. He used his intelligence to his advantage and carefully crafted a long-term strategy for each opponent.
* * *
Magnuson, Koroll, Esposito, and the other young Hawks watched their experienced teammates and tried to make good first impressions as the veterans showed them the ropes. To start the season, Magnuson was paired on defense with Pat Stapleton, a crafty player who stood only 5'8" but used his quickness as his main weapon—whether moving the puck or disrupting an opponent with his stick.
Coming off his second NHL All-Star Game appearance, Stapleton—nicknamed “Whitey” for his brilliantly blond hair—had been named the captain of the team after Pier
re Pilote left for Toronto a year earlier. (Pilote was the captain of the Black Hawks from 1961 to 1968; the team had gone without a first captain for the 1968–69 season.) And while Magnuson was fully aware that he was being thrust into an important role with the team, he also figured he would have time to make some adjustments. In reality, little time passed before Reay asked him to take on a heavier burden.
In February 1970, Stapleton went down with a serious knee injury after playing in only 49 games, which put Magnuson in a defense pairing with new partner Jarrett and which necessitated the summons of another young defenseman from the minors in Paul Shmyr. To further shore up the back line, Tommy Ivan also swung a deal on February 20 to obtain the highly regarded Bill White from Los Angeles, along with center Bryan Campbell and goalie Gerry Desjardins, in exchange for goalie Dennis DeJordy, defenseman Gilles Marotte, and forward Jim Stanfield. Naturally, this move also cemented Esposito as the undisputed No. 1 goaltender in the Chicago nets.
Jarrett had been with the Black Hawks since 1964 and was a product of their farm system. His nickname was “Chairman of the Boards,” as he was the biggest of the Hawks defensemen at the time at 6'3" and 205 pounds and used his frame to physically pound on opponents. “There’s nobody who can quite hit like him,” Magnuson observed. “He just splatters guys, sometimes even two at a time. And that’s a beautiful sight. Like homemade apple pie, my favorite dessert.” Dennis Hull confirmed Magnuson’s assessment: “He could skate backward like the wind,” he once claimed of Jarrett, “and would line a guy up and jump in his face and smash him with a hip check.”
Jarrett was also sometimes called “Tuna” by his teammates because he dreamed of being a big-shot owner of boats and cars and driving them around Chicago like Tony “Big Tuna” Accardo, one of the mob bosses of the city. But the one peccadillo that would constantly annoy Reay was Jarrett’s tardiness for team practice sessions.
“Practice was at 10:00 am, and Billy used to close the door to the rink right on the hour,” Dennis Hull recalled. “Doug would always just make it as Billy was closing the door. But Doug has these wonderful excuses. It finally got to the point where Billy would call everyone to center ice just to hear the excuses. ‘Okay, Dougie,’ Billy said, ‘what is it today?’ ‘Well, the dog ate my keys.’ ‘Both sets?’”
Stapleton had been with the Hawks nearly as long as Jarrett (coming from Boston in 1965) but was only slightly more adept at arriving at practices on time. According to Magnuson, Stapleton was the team’s fastest dresser, and would sometimes get to the Stadium 10 minutes before practice began. If a player was late getting on the ice, he would usually try to sneak quietly into whatever drill or talk was going on to avoid Reay’s glare; unfortunately for the tardy player, his teammates would good-naturedly smack their sticks on the ice to let Reay know of his transgression. Magnuson and the rest of the Hawks were always amazed with the timing with which Stapleton made his appearance, which was always mere moments before the clock struck 10:00—a skill which seemed to elude Jarrett. “Whitey always steps on the ice with just a few seconds left. And we all give him a big hand,” Keith recalled with a laugh.
Along with Mikita, Stapleton was unquestionably the team’s top prankster. “Without out a doubt he was the No. 1 practical joker on [the Hawks],” affirmed Dennis Hull, “and he may have been the best in the league. He was unbelievable.”
One of the gags Stapleton frequently liked to pull was hiding the microphones of the broadcast crews—not just those of the Chicago television (WGN) and radio (WMAQ) stations covering the Hawks, but even those of the national CBS broadcasts. Once, he even located the luggage of NHL referee Bill Friday, who was on the same flight as the Hawks to an out-of-town game, and stole Friday’s skates. “At least Bill got his skates back just before the game,” Stapleton’s linemate and accomplice Bill White told Verdi. “That’s one rule Pat and I always had. We never kept anything.”
Then, addressing Verdi directly, White added, “You should know. You got your typewriter back after we stole it from you on the plane to Vancouver, didn’t you?”
But Stapleton’s main target was Magnuson, and much like his friends in college, none of Magnuson’s teammates could figure out if he was really being fooled or deftly playing along. Stapleton regularly liked to tell Keith that, while walking by Tommy Ivan’s office, he overheard talk of a deal being struck that would send Magnuson out of town. “I can’t count the number of times Stapleton convinced Maggie that he was about to be traded,” recalled Mikita. Others confirmed the ploy. “Once a week [Stapleton] would tell Magnuson he was traded,” added Verdi, “and once a week Magnuson would believe him. Or pretend to.”
Magnuson was also a victim of a “snipe hunt” prank in his rookie year, courtesy of Mikita and Stapleton. One night, Magnuson and fellow rookie Terry Caffery were convinced by the two veterans to head out into the countryside beyond Chicago’s western suburbs, along with a couple of ropes and a canvas sack, and were told to be on the lookout for the dreaded creature known as a “snipe.” Incredibly, in the next 10 minutes, the pair was picked up by the playfully complicit Elmhurst Police Department and booked into custody for the charge of “snipe hunting without a license.” Stapleton and Mikita let their teammates sweat it out for a few hours before arriving to post their “bail.”
While Jarrett relied on his checking and Stapleton on his skating speed, Bill White relied more on the skillful use of his stick to thwart opponents. By the time he came to the Black Hawks, White had nearly spent more seasons in the Juniors than in the NHL, toiling for a long duration under the notorious watch of Eddie Shore at Springfield of the American Hockey League. (White, a Toronto native, started in the Juniors at age 17 in 1956 and did not reach the NHL until 1967.) Jarrett and Magnuson would soon be established as partners for the long term; the same would hold true for White and Stapleton.
“Pat and I just seemed to click right away,” White said once in an interview. “I was more of a stay-at-home type, and Pat liked to rush the puck. It was like we always knew what each other was thinking and was going to do.” White, like Stapleton, had been selected as a league All-Star in the 1968–69 season and would proceed to make six straight All-Star Games from 1969 to 1974.
Jarrett, Magnuson, Stapleton, and White would ultimately make up one of the best defensive foursomes ever seen in the NHL. And the newest player among the group was impressing Chicago’s foes as much as any of them.
“He was tall and he had long arms which made it tough to get around him,” veteran Rangers forward Pete Stemkowski said in remembering his first one-on-one battle with Magnuson. “He would take two or three strides and he’d catch up with you.”
Soon, the defensemen were often heard yelling “None against!” to each other before faceoffs in the defensive zone, a phrase started by Keith and a sacred pact to do whatever was necessary to keep the puck out of the net.
They began doing so at an unprecedented rate.
The Hawks, after a slow start to the season, were firing on all cylinders as the winter progressed. On the last day of January 1970—with three months still remaining in the regular season—Esposito garnered his 11th shutout of the season, in Philadelphia, one short of the Hawks record set by Chuck Gardiner in 1933–34 and just two shy of the league mark held by Toronto’s Harry Lumley (1953–54). During the 5–0 win over the Flyers, Magnuson went toe-to-toe in a fight with Reggie Fleming, a favorite of Keith’s father, Joe. The salty veteran Fleming gave Magnuson some fighting tips, just as Big Swede had done back home; he lowered Keith’s body toward the ice and pulled his jersey up over his head, then proceeded to pound Magnuson with a couple of uppercuts, leaving a severe cut over Keith’s left eye.
After the shaky start to the season and having to rely on so many young players, the Hawks were nearly unbeatable in the second half of the season. Just three weeks after Magnuson’s fight with Fleming, Bobby Hull scored the 500th goal of his career; the roar was s
o loud at the Stadium that public address announcer Harvey Wittenberg had to wait several minutes before he could even give the official summary of the score. The team lost only seven times in their final 41 games, and their swelling confidence was palpable as they sprinted toward the playoffs.
“You could feel it starting to build,” said Magnuson, who in his quickly growing role would play in every Hawks game as a rookie. “The whole team [was] jelling, coming together as a unit, every single guy contributing something.”
On March 29, 1970, Esposito notched his 15th shutout of the season in a 4–0 blanking of Toronto at the Stadium, a season standard that no goalie has equaled since. One of the Hawks’ goals had been set up on a beautiful pass by Magnuson, on which he found Pappin near center ice, who in turn slid the puck to Pinder for a breakaway in on the Maple Leafs goal. Bobby Hull also scored twice in the win, which moved the Hawks into a first-place tie with Boston.
When the final buzzer sounded, the Hawks pounced on the puck that was in play to ensure that Esposito got it for his trophy case to commemorate the record-setting shutout. Magnuson retreated from the celebrating pack on the ice, skating over to the boards to take a moment just to catch his breath.
“Usually I’m one of the first to congratulate Tony,” Magnuson said of Hawks victories, “but tonight I was one of the last. I was just limp. The pressure of that game was unbelievable.”
The game was also payback for the Hawks’ lackluster performance the night before in Toronto, a 1–1 tie during which Magnuson was flattened by Toronto’s Bob Pulford in the corner, his face slammed against the glass.
“Really, all that hurts is my lips,” Magnuson revealed to an inquirer in the locker room.
“If anyone’s got tough lips,” offered Koroll from a few seats away, “it’s you.”
Keith Magnuson Page 6