“You get to know all its moods, its lights and shadows,” Magnuson said of the vast, expansive building which had so moved him when Koroll brought him inside the first time in September 1969. “There’s the game mood that’s a lot like a giant party, with 20,000 celebrants roaring…but practice the next day is like the morning after. No one’s there at all. The rink is a cold and solitary place then, echoing any number of moods I may be feeling.”
* * *
Magnuson knew that a majority of his summer would be spent rehabilitating from the requisite surgery that was to be done on his right knee. He was still uncertain about his place in hockey, Chicago, and on the Black Hawks—but he was not about to give up.
After a successful operation, Keith attempted some basic exercises to build strength, both with the knee and with his confidence. In an effort to have a little fun in the midst of the recovery, he and Koroll decided to spend an evening out at a Chicago bar. While at the establishment, an inebriated patron—a critic who likely had never been in the arena with his face marred with blood or sweat—stumbled over to their table. He started giving the immobilized Magnuson a hard time about the Richard goal (this occurred only when the man had waited in cowardly fashion for Koroll to leave the table and go the restroom). Completely helpless from his knee surgery, Magnuson could not even get up and walk away from the man, so he sat there and tried to look in another direction as the verbal abuse continued.
The man left after a couple of minutes, whereupon Magnuson paused, took a deep breath, and struggled to his feet. He got up onto his crutches, hobbled out of the place, and stepped into the rainy night in tears—not because of the man’s message, but from the memory that by not stopping the Richard goal, he surely had let his team down. When Koroll returned from the restroom, he had no idea where Magnuson was and was greatly concerned. Sprinting out into the street, he found Magnuson in a rain-soaked alley a few blocks away, still distraught and banging his fist in frustration against the bricks of an old building. Koroll put his arm around his buddy and guided him into a taxi. They went back home to their apartment, where Koroll had to carry Magnuson—who was now completely immobile from traumatizing his knee during his hastened limp out of the bar—up the stairs to their unit. Now a bit more calm, Maggie sprawled out on his bed and stared up at the ceiling, once again wondering if he could still play hockey at the level to which he was accustomed—or if he even wanted to.
Then, Koroll put an old favorite song of theirs from college on the stereo, and Magnuson felt a sense of comfort cover him like a blanket. He began to believe that everything would be all right, and it was thanks to his best friend. Keith came to grips with the fact that failure was a part of life and part of being an athlete. He also knew then that he could deal with it.
“I suddenly realized that part of being a true professional,” Magnuson would reflect years later on that watershed moment, “is learning to leave all your karma and guilt behind and not to carry your losses around like an enormous bag of yesterdays.”
He was forgiven, even if he did not know it—and even if he did not think he deserved it.
He had given all he had in that seventh game against the Canadiens, just as his teammates had. As they slumped into their lockers in the basement of the Stadium, they were all physically spent. And even though they came up short, Magnuson and the Hawks knew they had left every bit of themselves on the ice. Their effort was echoed the words of Sir Walter Scott:
One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.
5. Life without the Jet
“Magnuson is just so busy all the time. He gets the hell beat out of him, but he keeps coming back for more. You have to like a kid like that.”
—Philadelphia Flyers coach Vic Stasiuk, 1970
His knee stronger after a summer filled with intense workouts similar to his days in Denver, Keith Magnuson settled into a comfortable routine as a Chicagoan in the summer of 1971. He started making more personal appearances around the city, often stopping for a lunch of “milk, a bowl of clam chowder, a hamburger steak, and a vanilla sundae” at Bruno’s downtown before heading to the Stadium. On other occasions, he would meet his teammates in the suburb of Hillside, where many of them lived and frequented a local restaurant called Stimac’s. The bitter taste of the loss to Montreal still lingered, however, through the hot July and August days of picnics, parades, and ballgames. The Hawks eagerly awaited the start of training camp—dedicated to making the 1971–72 season the one in which they would not fall short again.
They indeed started the new campaign with a vengeance, sprinting out of the gate with seven victories in their first eight games. And just as they had in the previous year, the Hawks became virtually unbeatable in the Stadium the entire season. By Christmas they had not lost in Chicago, going 15–0–2 in their first 17 home games; they didn’t lose on Madison Street until the Bruins came to town on December 29. Lloyd Pettit and Harvey Wittenberg, meanwhile, had their WMAQ broadcasts moved to the north side of the Stadium, near the outer edge of the first balcony, which finally placed the announcers closer to center ice as opposed to the awkward angle in the corner from which they previously called the games.
Among the consistent home triumphs was a contest on October 13 against St. Louis, in which the Hawks beat the Blues for the second time in four days in a 1–0 shutout. (In fact, the Hawks would proceed to shut out the Blues all three times in the Stadium in this particular season.) Shortly into the second period, in a play behind the Chicago net, Magnuson collided with George Morrison, a teammate at the University of Denver and at whose wedding Magnuson had even been a groomsman. Magnuson dropped the gloves on a surprised Morrison and proceeded to inflict a savage beating upon him, despite the fact there was no known negative history between the two players. There were reports in the St. Louis papers the following day that the Blues should have retaliated on Magnuson, but they never did. As for Magnuson, he simply felt he had a job to do, part of an overall strategic plan in helping his team gain an edge toward victory—no matter the opponent.
Keith had recently noted, “If you leave your label on a guy convincingly enough, you’ll later see him skating around watching for you, either worrying about getting hit again or getting you back. He’s stopped thinking about the game itself.”
Two days later—and obviously confident that Magnuson could stand apart as the lone regular fighter on the roster—the Hawks unloaded their tough young defenseman, Rick Foley, to the Philadelphia Flyers, acquiring promising center Andre Lacroix in the process. Magnuson and Foley would do battle in the Stadium three weeks later as a full house turned out in hopes of seeing the one-on-one matchup; perhaps seeking desperately to prove himself, Foley had publicly questioned Magnuson’s ability in the Philadelphia papers after leaving Chicago.
But the date the Hawks and their fans truly had marked on their calendars was November 24, 1971. It was the date when the Montreal Canadiens would return to the Stadium, their first visit since downing Chicago in the epic seventh game of the previous year’s final round. (The two teams had played three weeks earlier at the Forum in Montreal, resulting in a hard-fought 2–1 Canadiens win).
In particular, Magnuson had been looking for Pete Mahovlich. Back in Game 3 of the 1971 Finals, it was Mahovlich who had slashed Magnuson in the corner at the Forum and stolen the puck, subsequently turning and firing on Esposito to score a crucial goal. Now, six months later and near the end of the first period, the two men’s paths crossed again, with their forearms high up in the air. Magnuson absorbed a couple of early right-hand blows from the taller Mahovlich and then went to work in “windmilling” his fists on him, in Ted Damata’s description, as the Montreal player “slumped leeward and was saved from complete collapse by
intervening officials.” Mahovlich emerged from the fight “with cuts over both eyes that bridged the nose” in a clear triumph for Magnuson. “Keith even won the debate in the penalty box,” Damata footnoted, “but the dialogue has been censored.” The two great teams skated on, extending their evenness from the past spring, battled to a 3–3 tie—Chicago’s first deadlock of the year.
It was only a matter of time before the Hawks would match up with their other great rival. They returned to Boston on January 15 to face the Bruins in Bobby Hull’s 1,000th regular season game. Magnuson was still Public Enemy No. 1 in Boston for having the audacity to take on local beloveds Derek Sanderson, Bobby Orr, John McKenzie, and others. During this contest, however, Bruins forward Wayne Cashman was Magnuson’s particular target of choice. He was a player who was a respectable scorer and a decent fighter but, like Mahovlich, also liked to raise his stick in opponents’ faces—something which Magnuson and most all of the league’s other pure fighters despised as dirty play. After Magnuson checked Cashman into the glass, the two dropped the gloves immediately and exchanged a flurry of punches in one of the better fights the league would witness during the year. It was also one of the few times that the Bruins seemed to allow one of their own to take on an opposing player one-on-one—especially in their friendly surroundings of the Boston Garden.
Later in the season, in another game in Boston, Magnuson would dispose of McKenzie with one punch after having dropped him earlier with a body check behind the net, despite the colorful goaltender Gerry Cheevers recently proclaiming McKenzie “the greatest corner man in the league.” That bout was the last of a series of three scraps that night, first with Jerry Korab of the Hawks taking on Carol Vadnais, then McKenzie going after Korab, and then Magnuson downing McKenzie. Just as McKenzie was sent sailing to the ice, however, Don Awrey came from behind and tried to pull Magnuson off of him, at which point Bobby Hull reached in to grab Awrey to keep it a fair fight. By late 1971, the escalation of such moblike brawls was something the NHL felt it needed to begin addressing.
Many national hockey writers considered this conduct typical of the Boston team. However, these brawls changed substantially in the 1971–72 season—even for teams known for regularly employing such tactics such as the Bruins and the Flyers—as it was the first year that the “Third Man In” rule was instituted in the NHL. The rule stated that a man interfering with a two-man fight was automatically ejected with a game misconduct penalty and slapped with a $100 fine. The effect on the Boston club had been obvious to Stan Fischler, one of those writers who did not care for the methodology of Harry Sinden’s men.
“The Bruins are gang fighters, or at least they used to be,” Fischler scoffed. “Guys like Sanderson aren’t as eager to get into fights now.” Overall, fights would indeed drop considerably over the winter of 1971–72; by March, Magnuson himself would have accumulated only nine fighting-major penalties—half the number he had posted at the same point in the previous season.
“At least with this rule, we know who the fighters are,” Magnuson added in a positive tone about the change. “The linesmen don’t break up fights as quickly as they used to, so a fellow has to be kind of careful who he gets involved with.”
Magnuson also believed the new rule would help curb those players whom he liked to refer to as “homers”—and many of them resided in Boston.
“It’s a term we use to describe those exhibitionists who are reluctant to play rough except in front of a home crowd,” Magnuson explained, “where their teammates will have to back them up once anything gets started. That’s why some players in this league are actually scared to play in Boston. It’s like walking into gangland.”
Mike Peluso, who in the 1990s would become an on-ice policeman for the Black Hawks for several seasons, readily admitted that there was an advantage to fighting on home ice.
“As a fighter it was way better fighting at home, because your home fans gave you even that much more adrenaline,” he said. “A good crowd, like at the Chicago Stadium, was a huge advantage for you. The fear you had going into it [the fight] wasn’t so much about getting hurt, but rather about losing and disappointing them.”
Despite all the temper troubles between the Hawks and the Bruins, Cheevers, Orr, and a large majority of the other Boston players had a great deal of respect for Magnuson and his teammates.
“Let me tell you about Chicago,” Cheevers said. “The Hawks are by far the most difficult test for any goaltender… They all shoot the puck so hard. You have to be alert every second against them because they can move the puck quickly to get someone in position to drill one…There’s a mental tension for the whole 60 minutes against Chicago.”
In addition to their dominance in the Stadium, the Hawks had been strong on the road through the fall, including a 4–1 win on December 22 over the struggling Seals in Oakland. The defense was completely suffocating opponents, and people around the league were beginning to take more notice of the continued improvement of Magnuson and Doug Jarrett as a defensive pair, along with Pat Stapleton and Bill White. In the game against Charlie Finley’s team, Bobby Hull recorded his 28th hat trick against former Hawks goalie Gilles Meloche, extending his NHL record in this category. It was also an evening that held another bout for Magnuson; he took on future Chicago teammate Ivan Boldirev, who surprised Magnuson in felling the Hawks defenseman with one big right hand.
With the sourness of the 1971 Finals behind them and a robust start to the new schedule, it finally looked to be the Hawks’ year. Evidence of this was shown by the nine Chicago players who were chosen to represent the Western Division squad in the 1972 NHL All-Star Game in Minneapolis, breaking their single-team record from the year before. No other team would come close to that total. The New York Rangers led the East squad with six selections. The Hawks present were Tony Esposito, Bobby and Dennis Hull, Chico Maki, Pit Martin, Stan Mikita, Stapleton, White, and Magnuson.
Magnuson was grateful for the honor, but for a true competitor like Keith, seeing and speaking with his regular opponents in the lobby of the hotel where the players stayed during All-Star week was uncomfortable—especially Orr, McKenzie, Phil Esposito, and Dallas Smith, who were there representing Boston. Magnuson simply did not care to get too friendly with those with whom he would have to compete the following week—much in the same way that St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Bob Gibson approached his appearances in the Major League Baseball All-Star Game with begrudging tolerance.
“Back then, we never socialized off the ice,” Magnuson would reflect years later, with a disdain in his voice for the way in which opposing athletes appear so comfortable in comingling in modern times. “So we were skating around before the game and Orr says to me, ‘Hey, Magnuson, we don’t fight in this game.’ I just looked at him.”
Dave Schultz, the man being groomed at the time as Earl Heiskala’s replacement as the policeman for the Flyers, would cite another such circumstance a couple of years later, when Magnuson could not check his competitiveness at the social door.
“In 1974, after the season, I had to fly to Detroit to speak at a banquet,” Schultz recounted. “Keith was there. He wouldn’t even talk to me. He said to someone, ‘Look, he and I are going to go at it again next year. I don’t want to talk to him.’ I certainly understood that.”
Unfortunately, during their stay at the hotel, the players would have to deal with more than just the discomfort of close quarters with their usual adversaries. While relaxing in his room, Martin happened to wander out to his balcony window at the same time that Danny Meyer, a front office worker in the minor leagues of professional hockey, approached his own balcony ledge in the adjoining room. In the next instant, a distraught Martin watched as Meyer suddenly leapt to his death below.
Greatly shaken, Martin at first had no interest in playing in the game after witnessing the tragedy. “I was shocked by the whole thing,” Martin said, “but I figured that if I played, I would
get my mind off it.” In between periods of the All-Star Game, Martin, Maki, Bobby Hull, and Toronto’s Paul Henderson—the last of whom had been rooming with Martin—were interrogated by the city coroner about the incident. Hull and Maki had been staying in the room beneath Meyer’s; Maki had woken up the sleeping Hull in a state of panic, exclaiming that a man had jumped off the building.
Back on the ice, Hull scored the game’s first goal with three minutes remaining in the opening period, but ultimately the Hawks-laden West team fell to the East 3–2.
Despite the success the Hawks had enjoyed in the past two years—in addition to its dominance of the All-Star roster—they continued to be subjected to second-class coverage in much of the Chicago sports media, at least according to some within the organization (with the exception of Bob Verdi’s work in the Tribune). Don Murphy, the team’s publicist, made his feelings known in a February 1972 interview with The Sporting News. “The [local newspapers] treat hockey like a stepchild,” he said. “While the Black Hawks are the only team in Chicago that has won anything since 1963, it is the team that gets the worst treatment in the Chicago press.”
Perhaps the recent shuffling of the roster had been confusing to the media and fans alike; the trade of Foley was just the first of a number of changes the team experienced over the course of the 1971–72 season. On February 8—just two nights after his picture appeared on the cover of the game program sold at the Stadium—Danny O’Shea, nearly a hero the previous season after his goal in Game 7 against the Canadiens, was traded to St. Louis after reputed disagreement with Tommy Ivan over his contract. Coming to the Hawks in return was a grateful Christian Bordeleau, fresh after missing a month with a broken foot, who called his new outfit “a sophisticated team.” Bordeleau’s brother Jean-Pierre—better known as J.P.—was currently playing in Chicago’s farm system at the time and had been a former first-round draft pick of the Hawks in 1969.
Keith Magnuson Page 11