Keith Magnuson

by Doug Feldmann

  Meanwhile, Billy Reay and Tommy Ivan fully expected Magnuson to not only return from having broken his jaw, but once again assume the undisputed role of the enforcer on the team. For four days after the conclusion of the 1973 Finals, the two men worked to trade Jerry Korab and Gary Smith to Vancouver for Dale Tallon, who like John Marks was a versatile young player in showing an ability to play either defenseman or forward. But in dealing the potential fighter in Korab, the Hawks left Magnuson (except for the continuingly developing Phil Russell) as the lone established policeman on the team.

  The other void on the blue line would be the impending absence of Pat Stapleton, along with Doug Jarrett and Bill White the senior Hawks defenseman, who announced on July 24, 1973, that he was heading across town to the Amphitheatre and the Cougars of the WHA for $1 million over five years—nearly the same money Bobby Hull had gotten with Winnipeg. As with Hull, part of Stapleton’s responsibilities with the Cougars would be administrative, as he was to serve as player-coach for the first three seasons of his contract and then as coach alone for the final two.

  Stapleton, a former captain of the Black Hawks, was reported to have never been given a reason from the front office for being stripped of that title after the 1969–70 season. The team would have no captain until 1975. At the same time Stapleton decided to sign with the Cougars, Brad Park—Magnuson’s most recent nemesis after his powerful slap shot to the jaw, but also another of the league’s top defensemen—had been given $200,000 by the Rangers for the upcoming season, making him the highest-paid player in the league.

  In one of his national columns, addressing Park’s contract alongside the Stapleton situation in Chicago, Stan Fischler claimed that Stapleton was worth at least three-quarters of that figure to the Hawks, but had been denied such a salary by the ownership. Both the agents for Hull and Stapleton would later claim that their salary requests were never even acknowledged by the Chicago executives, let alone heard and/or denied. “There’s no excuse for one of the sport’s richest franchises to treat two of its most distinguished athletes as shabbily as the Black Hawks have treated Hull and Stapleton,” Fischler concluded. Therefore, Stapleton—like Hull—saw not only larger dollar signs in the WHA, but perhaps also believed those dollar signs could be a proverbial slap in the face to the Hawks’ perceived stinginess.

  But Stapleton’s gripe was not with the entire administrative wing of the Hawks. In joining the upstart Cougars (who had just finished with a league-worst record of 26–50–2 in their first WHA season, under coach Marcel Pronovost), one of the most difficult aspects of Stapleton’s decision to leave the Hawks—perhaps in addition to no longer being able to pull pranks on willing victim Magnuson—was that he would be parted with Reay, his longtime coach, whom he loved and respected. “He was a gentleman,” Stapleton said, “and I really can’t say anything bad about the man. I played eight years for him in Chicago, and if there’s a regret in leaving the Black Hawks, it’s leaving him.”

  Upon taking the coaching reins of the Cougars, Stapleton made it a priority to court Magnuson across town to join him. In fact, he also had his eye on several former teammates toward the same purpose—and the biggest names on the Hawks roster were among them.

  “The No. 1 order of business is getting Stan Mikita [for the Cougars],” Stapleton would boldly announce on August 10. “We’ll have a good team, and by 1974, we’ll have a new rink.” Stapleton was referring to the in-progress Horizon being constructed in the northwest Chicago suburb of Rosemont, designed to be the permanent home of the Cougars and replace the aging Amphitheatre.

  In addition to Mikita and Magnuson, Stapleton also set his sights on Koroll, veteran Ralph Backstrom, and young Hawks prospect Dan Maloney—all of whom, as Bob Verdi pointed out, were “able bodies who like Chicago, like security, and like Stapleton.” Of these, only Backstrom made the move, but it proved that Stapleton would not be standing pat with the roster he inherited from Pronovost. (Lou Angotti would be yet another ex-Hawk who Stapleton was able to recruit to the Cougars, leaving his newfound role in St. Louis to play one abbreviated season for Stapleton in the WHA in 1975, at the age of 37.)

  Not to be upstaged by the Cougars’ clamoring for a new arena, Arthur Wirtz—with backing from Mayor Daley—also announced that same month that he wished to expand Chicago Stadium to 30,000 seats by selling $15 million worth of municipal bonds. Despite Wirtz’s outright ownership of the building, however, the project encountered an insurmountable number of hurdles in getting off the ground.

  * * *

  Magnuson arrived at training camp in September 1973 with his broken jaw healed, yet he once again encountered misfortune. In a collision with a teammate during a practice session, he cracked an elbow which forced him to be shelved for the first portion of the regular season schedule. Taking his place on the roster would be another University of Denver Pioneer, 21-year-old rookie center Rob Palmer, who had made the squad. Palmer would play in only one game that season (and a total of only 16 in his three-year NHL career), but he was further testimony to the quality of players that Murray Armstrong was continuing to produce.

  Returning to the ice in mid-autumn, Magnuson was surprised to discover a new cast of “tough guys” had entered the league. As had Dave Schultz, these individuals appeared to go out of their way in an attempt to make their marks. Among them was Garry Howatt of the fledgling New York Islanders, who would challenge Magnuson to fisticuffs with just under four minutes left in a game on Long Island on December 15, 1973. Former Hawks player Al Arbour—one of the few bespectacled skaters in league history—had taken over as head coach of the second-year expansion team in New York, and was searching for an identity for his inexperienced club. The undersized rookie Howatt was, like Schultz, seeking to take on seasoned fighters like Magnuson in order to more quickly establish a reputation in the league—even if that meant resulting to unconventional tactics.

  “Howatt is small,” Schultz said of the 5'9" winger, “but the first thing he would do is go for the hair. He was ultimately responsible for what would fittingly be known as the hair-pulling rule. The NHL voted a game misconduct penalty for anyone who pulled hair during a fight.”

  The melee started when Magnuson planted Howatt with a hard check as he entered the Chicago zone, battling to keep the puck away from the Hawks net to maintain a 3–3 tie. Howatt grabbed hold of Keith’s jersey, showing impressive strength for one of his stature, and threw Magnuson down to the ice as the diminutive Howatt unleashed a flurry of wild punches. Finally freeing himself, Magnuson matched the voracious Islander blow-for-blow, ultimately knocking Howatt’s helmet off his head as a hearty cheer from the novice Uniondale hockey crowd followed the two men to the penalty box.

  “Magnuson said afterward that the brawl didn’t do his ailing right elbow any good,” Verdi reported in reference to Keith’s training camp injury. “‘But I owed it to him,’” Maggie said.

  Just one week later, it would be Schultz’s turn, again with Magnuson, as the legend of both men had been growing further around the NHL.

  Schultz was from Rosetown, Saskatchewan, on the other side of the province from Magnuson’s hometown of Wadena. He claimed to have never had a street fight, even as a kid, but yet came from the same tough western Canadian turf as Keith. “I grew up on the thin edge of poverty, moving from town to town across the Saskatchewan prairie,” Schultz recalled from his youth. In contrast to how some sports historians have painted him—as a lifetime goon—Schultz was actually quite the opposite type of player in amateur hockey before coming into the professional ranks—and was extremely frank in admitting so.

  “I wanted no part of that rough stuff,” Schultz said of avoiding physical play early in his career and into his first year of Juniors. “[I] let other guys fight my battles. I was a coward and I proved it when a fight broke out on the ice in Flin Flon. I hid in the bench area. If I could have crawled under the bench I would have.”

  S
oon, however, Schultz would shed this initial self-image and become one of the most feared players in the game. In three years of play in the minors from 1969 to 1972, Schultz accumulated season totals in penalty minutes of 369, 382, and 392, respectively. By the start of his rookie season in Philadelphia in the fall of 1972, he was a perfect fit for the Flyers, who intimidated opponents who entered the Spectrum with their unrelenting brutish play. The team had acquired such nicknames as “the Mad Squad” and “Freddy’s Philistines” (after head coach Fred Shero) as they solidified into a unit. But their most famous moniker was that of the “Broad Street Bullies,” a name surmised by Philadelphia Bulletin reporter Jack Chevalier and headline writer Pete Cafone which first appeared in that paper on January 4, 1973. Cafone’s banner that morning read Broad Street Bullies Muscle Atlanta after the Flyers had savagely beaten upon the Flames the prior evening.

  Word quickly spread around the league about the terror that teams were starting to feel in visiting the City of Brotherly Love.

  “I used to hear stories from opposing players about when they would have to come into Philly to play us at the Spectrum,” Schultz said. “They would all be laughing and joking on the bus from the airport until they came to the Walt Whitman Bridge, then the entire bus would go silent.” According to Schultz, some visiting players would even feign an injury to avoid playing in a game in Philadelphia. “We were proud of guys coming down with ‘Philly Flu,’ because that meant they were intimidated before they even stepped foot in our building.

  “Intimidation went both ways, though. Going into Boston to play the Big Bad Bruins was tough. I will never forget sitting in the penalty box and having Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito skate by and say, ‘Hey asshole, the boys are going to get you tonight.’ There were times I had the ‘Boston Flu’ too, trust me.”

  But his coach generally disagreed, saying that Schultz himself made the Flyers a formidable opponent, even as a visiting team. “So many clubs are tough only in their own rinks,” Shero would say. “But Schultz gave us courage on the road. You can’t measure the value of a man like that.”

  Nonetheless, having a team-wide reputation of thuggery had its downside, and Schultz believed there was prejudice on the part of NHL officials when dealing with him and the other Flyers. “I believe referees get up for certain games, just like players,” he added. “And when they’re assigned to the Flyers, they’re automatically watching me closer than anyone else.”

  According to several NHL experts, what made a 1970s Philadelphia Flyers player different from the basic, traditionally tough hockey man was that, in fighting and other matters of physical play, they generally did not obey the Code. In opposition to the Code’s protocol, the Flyers would attack the opponents’ skill or “finesse” players—who, while able with the puck, were generally weaker fighters, or not even fighters at all—just as frequently as they did the opponents’ enforcers. And in an era when bench-clearing brawls could still occur (despite the implementation of the third man in rule), the inevitable “pairing up” that followed was typically very bad news for another team’s finesse player—as even the Flyers’ skill players were dangerous customers. “So, if you were a goal scorer,” advised 1990s NHL fighter Marty McSorley, “you might have to square up with Bobby Clarke, who was tough as hell. A lot of teams were simply afraid of them.”

  McSorley echoed a sentiment that Magnuson had professed over and over throughout his career.

  “And once your opponents are afraid in this business,” he added, “the game is over before it even begins.”

  Borje Salming, a talented player for the Toronto Maple Leafs during the 1970s who later became a chef and author, was one of the many Flyers opponents who did not look forward to a game on Philadelphia ice.

  “It wasn’t just two or three guys you had to worry about,” Salming said of Shero’s men. “It was 20 guys. You would see their sticks come flying at you. If they hit you, you’d be dead… They really tried to kill you. They really tried to force you out of the game. If they did some of those things today, they would be suspended for life.”

  Salming, while one of the league’s best defensemen, was also Swedish—one of the very few Europeans in the NHL at the time—and the Europeans were accustomed to their style of play from across the pond that involved much less contact.

  But while they indeed had a considerable amount of actual hockey skills, the Flyers were hardly concerned with spending any great deal of time honing them. On this topic, Shero was as unapologetic as any of his players.

  “If it’s pretty skating the people want,” he said of local fans, “let them go to the Ice Capades.”

  Shero had been an amateur boxer, and was well aware of the psychological edge that the simple willingness to fight—or “showing up,” as Magnuson called it—which Schultz and his other players outwardly possessed, could give a player or an entire team.

  “We lose as many fights as we win,” the coach pointed out, “but that’s not important. We use our bodies to get the puck in the corners and along the boards and, when we can, to open things in front of the net.”

  And the numbers supported Shero’s claim, as the team’s tactics were indeed opening up scoring opportunities—not only for Clarke, Bill Barber, and other top-line forwards on the Flyers, but even for third- and fourth-line checking forwards such as Don Saleski, Bob Kelly, and Schultz himself. In fact, in an eight-day stretch in January 1974, and a few weeks after the Flyers hosted the Hawks in the vaunted Spectrum, Schultz posted two hat tricks, and his 18-of-75 shooting to start the season, to the surprise of many, led the league in scoring percentage.

  Clarke, the Philadelphia captain and Canada’s motivational hero/villain of the Summit Series (with his stick chop at Valeri Kharlamov), was as unrepentant as Shero, Schultz, or anyone else on the Flyers about what he saw as the necessary, brutal side of hockey.

  “If I hadn’t learned to lay on a two-hander once in a while,” Clarke uttered, “I’d never have left Flin Flon.”

  His statement was in reference to the rugged community from which many of the game’s roughest personalities had come, a blue-collar mining town on the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border comprised of old houses built on stone and with many sewer pipes running above ground.

  By the end of the 1973–74 season, Clarke was named by a panel of retired players (including John Ferguson, the man who allegedly green-lighted him to go after Kharlamov) as the “league’s toughest player;” he had also been nicknamed “Captain Courageous” by some, for his leadership of the Flyers. Many around the league, however, would highly dispute the legitimacy of these titles—including Schultz. Schultz’s reaction to such praise of Clarke seemed not to be out of jealousy, but rather for the way in which Clarke conducted his business on the ice.

  “If ever a player led by inspiration, Clarke was the man,” Schultz admitted. “But there was a darker side to him, one that many Philadelphians and Flyers personnel chose to ignore or, at the very least, dismiss as irrelevant. I am referring to the manner in which Bobby played the game. Dirty. Very dirty.”

  In particular, Schultz over time became resentful that he had to clean up the messes when Clarke chose to be underhanded with an opponent.

  “The unwritten rule was that he could dish out the rough stuff but that nobody on the opposition was allowed to retaliate,” Schultz explained.

  Specifically, Schultz felt that Clarke—along with Wayne Cashman and Bobby Schmautz of the Bruins and Dennis Hextall of the North Stars (and later, the Red Wings), among others—was extremely dangerous in the way he wielded his stick, “at times employing it in a manner of an infantryman handling a bayonet,” Schultz claimed. And while Schultz, like Magnuson, firmly believed in the requisite role that honorable fighting played in professional hockey, he felt that attacks with the stick were not only dangerous but cowardly. Schultz asserted that Clarke’s run at Kharlamov would not have been considered so “heroic�
� if it had been an NHL player on the receiving end— particularly a noteworthy player—rather than a Cold War opponent.

  “Any penalty involving the illegal use of the stick should be increased to a five-minute major penalty rather than a two-minute minor as is the case today,” the slugger would state near the end of his career, in the late 1970s.

  Schultz also made it clear that he held his team’s captain among the most culpable for hit-and-run attacks. “It is an indisputable fact that Clarke rarely backed up his stickwork with his fists,” he added plainly. “Too often, I was called upon to do the fighting for him… I felt that if he was going to start something he should have been able to finish it; when he didn’t, I lost respect for him.”

  Writing in the midst of the Flyers’ rise to NHL prominence in the mid-1970s, New York Post reporter Mike Shalin felt much the same way. “Bobby Clarke is a very dirty hockey player, perhaps the dirtiest hockey player ever to lace on a pair of skates,” he wrote. “The victims of his vicious attacks are too many to name… Why has nobody taken it upon himself (or themselves) to beat the living stuffings out of this counterfeit angel?”

  The answer to that question was that the opposition would then have to go toe-to-toe with Schultz, Saleski, Kelly, Andre Dupont, Mel Bridgman, and other willing fighters on the Philadelphia roster, Schultz explained.

  So despite countless tussles in front of Tony Esposito and the Hawks net, Magnuson never threw fists with Clarke in an NHL game—but he went the distance with Schultz four times.

  And on December 22, 1973, the Black Hawks were the visitors at the Philadelphia Spectrum, as the Flyers sought to wrestle control of the NHL’s Western Division from Chicago—in any manner they needed. The two teams had played 10 days earlier in the Stadium to a 2–2 tie without a major extracurricular incident, but a simmering powder keg was about to go off.