Keith Magnuson

by Doug Feldmann

  The demoralizing defeat was a prime example of the erratic performance of the Black Hawks that season, and further changes to the club appeared imminent. On December 15, the Hawks’ new divisional adversary, the Vancouver Canucks, came calling at the Stadium. Four minutes into the game, a fight erupted between Magnuson and Canucks defenseman Harold Snepsts. Immediately after Magnuson got out of the penalty box, he took on Vancouver forward Chris Oddleifson with even more fury, breaking Oddleifson’s jaw with a tremendous right hand. Noticing that the fist with which Magnuson was punching was taped (which was illegal), referee Bruce Hood gave Keith a game misconduct penalty—something that was somehow overlooked during the earlier bout with Snepsts. Oddleifson, meanwhile, would miss the Canucks’ next 18 games with his injury while the Vancouver team already began contemplating its revenge.

  “It’s a long season, and we’ll get Magnuson,” vowed coach Phil Maloney.

  Reay immediately came to Magnuson’s defense, saying that his player knew the rule but had forgotten to keep his gloves on.

  Shortly thereafter, Canucks officials would appeal to the league for Magnuson to be suspended for as long as Oddleifson was out; instead, Keith was off the ice for only three games. And while waiting to serve his punishment, he was permitted to play and had other battles to wage.

  Two weeks later, on December 28, he fought Schultz for the third time, with the champion Flyers visiting Chicago and their confidence at an all-time high. Yet despite his earlier victories, Schultz knew better than to take any confrontation with Magnuson lightly.

  “In the NHL jungle, an enforcer learns that winning a battle does not necessarily mean winning the war, if only because the loser of one fight—if he has any gumption at all—is likely to come back the next time with all guns blazing,” Schultz said. “So it was with Magnuson on another night at Chicago Stadium.”

  Less than two minutes into the game. Magnuson had given Philadelphia center Rick MacLeish a crushing hit at the whistle, to which Schultz took exception. Schultz jumped in between them as he knocked into Maggie while holding both gloves up by his chest, using them like a bumper before the fists started flying.

  “Magnuson scored early but Schultz scored heavily and late,” said Verdi, summarizing the bout.

  Video of the incident shows Magnuson’s head recoiling violently and multiple times from the pulverizing shots, though he was remarkably able to stay on his skates. Schultz, known for getting in one last punch as officials pulled him off his opponent, uncorked a final right hand on Magnuson that shook the defenseman once again. Schultz laughed in being separated from Maggie. The Stadium crowd was delirious with rage at the Philadelphia player, hurling insults in his direction.

  After the two had been finally escorted off the ice by the linesmen, Schultz never sat down in the penalty box—instead he chose to stand on top of the seat and beckon angrily across the ice to the Chicago bench, challenging anyone who wished to go at it again.

  “There were no takers,” Verdi disappointedly noticed.

  Later in the game, Phil Russell would have some words for Schultz during a stoppage in play, but nothing came of it. Dennis Hull was able to notch his 250th career goal, which permitted Chicago to sneak out with a 2–1 victory.

  Despite the win, several writers—including Verdi—were beginning to believe that a majority of the Hawks (save for Magnuson, Russell, and a few others) were clearly displaying a lack of heart when it came to the ever-increasing physical tone of play dominating the NHL at the time. Fred Shero had noticed it as well.

  “The players don’t back each other up,” the Philadelphia coach would tell The Sporting News a month later in his assessment of the Hawks. “For years, the fans in Chicago Stadium have been booing Jim Pappin,” Shero gave as an example. “He’s one of their best players, and yet not one of the players has stood up and defended Pappin.”

  Shero pointed out how the same thing had happened the previous year in Philadelphia with one of his defensemen, Tom Bladon, and that the other Flyers players put an end to it by telling the Philly fans the criticism was unwarranted. “That might not be a very good thing to tell your own fans, but the team comes first… There are things I would do for my players that I wouldn’t do for my own family,” he said.

  So it was up to Magnuson, despite all his pain, to provide inspiration to a lethargic team once again. And the pain continued to worsen; by late spring of 1975 it was a lingering high ankle sprain. It was part of the reason Magnuson would not score his first goal of the season until March 26 at 2:10 in the first period of a home game against Buffalo, a feed off a smooth behind-the-net pass from Mikita in a 5–1 Hawks win.

  Magnuson would be on the other side of a “taped fist” situation on January 29, just a month after the Oddleifson incident. With the Hawks in Pittsburgh to face the Penguins, Magnuson ran into another Bob Kelly—not the one who fought alongside Schultz with the Flyers, but another with the first name of “J. Bob,” or as he was known around the league, “Battleship.” A few seasons later, Kelly would become a teammate of Magnuson’s in Chicago, but on this night they squared off on the ice of the Civic Arena in the Steel City.

  Kelly had been picked up by Pittsburgh in the middle of the previous season from St. Louis, along with defenseman Steve Durbano. Both young players had piled up immense penalty minutes in the Juniors. Durbano, in fact—a former first-round draft pick of the Rangers in 1971—would surpass the 400-minute mark in 1972 with Omaha of the Central League. And after just one year of NHL play, Kelly had established his own reputation as one of hockey’s tougher fighters.

  “On the ice in the National Hockey League, nobody messes around with Pittsburgh Penguin Bob ‘Battleship’ Kelly,” asserted John Clayton a couple weeks after Kelly’s encounter with the Hawks. (Clayton was then a college student at Duquesne University, covering the Penguins and football’s Pittsburgh Steelers for the Beaver County Times.)

  Kelly thought of himself as a scorer, and was in fact proving himself as one—he was on the way to posting 27 goals during the season, a level he would not reach again. Still, he publicly wondered why he was not getting the puck more often from his center, 19-year-old rookie Pierre Larouche. “You can’t score if you don’t get the puck,” he complained to Clayton.

  When referee Wally Harris saw Kelly with the taped fist in his fight with Magnuson, he was suspended two games and fined $250. Kelly did not mind.

  “I don’t care how much the league tries to suspend the players for fighting,” the unconcerned player said after the news of his banishment. “It is still part of the game. When I played in the American Hockey League, there were only a few players that fought and the refs could watch certain players. In the NHL, everybody can potentially explode into a fight, so they can’t watch certain players.”

  “Referees are all bad,” Kelly then concluded. “Some are just worse.”

  Joining Kelly on the Penguins’ scratched list over the next couple of games was Durbano himself, out with an injury. But in one year’s time, by the spring of 1976, Durbano would take the league penalty-minutes title away from Schultz with 370 as he split the year between Pittsburgh and Kansas City. Durbano’s career would fade in the WHA, while Kelly would land in Chicago in the fall of 1977.

  To the surprise of many, the moribund Hawks—now with lots of unexpected competition in the Smythe Division, thanks to their own inconsistent play—had missed their own chance to retool by letting the NHL trading deadline pass without making a deal. Left leading the team were veterans Magnuson, Koroll, Mikita, Martin, White, and Dennis Hull, several of whom were recently injured. Along with Magnuson’s ankle, Hull and White were both suffering significant back problems. The Hawks front office had indicated some measure of interest in finding a replacement or two, but claimed there was nothing available to be had.

  “This league isn’t like it used to be in pre-expansion days,” Reay explained of the genera
l reluctance most clubs were having of parting with anyone. “Not many teams have great depth.”

  Meanwhile, Vancouver had recently won in the Stadium for the first time in 14 tries, snapping their 0–11–2 stretch in Chicago and Snepsts, Oddleifson, and Magnuson engaged each other this time without incident. The two teams played on three more occasions in close succession at the end of the regular season schedule, with first place up for grabs in each contest (and a first-round bye in the playoffs at stake).

  In the midst of the stressful and turbulent year, the Hawks turned to humor, pranks, and preying upon the idiosyncrasies of each other even more often—even in the absence of Stapleton, perhaps the biggest jester the team had seen. That role now fell to Pappin, in what would be his last year in a Chicago jersey, and who with White’s assistance still enjoyed pulling one of the team’s more famous jokes on the rookies.

  At the end of a team practice session at the Stadium, White would tell an unsuspecting first-year player that Pappin was an accomplished organist, a prospect at which the rookie would be skeptical. “Hey, Jim,” White would then holler over to Pappin, “would you go up and play us a few tunes?” So Pappin would make the steep climb up the stairs to the box of Al Melgard—who in 1974 at the age of 85 was in his 41st and final year of playing the famous Stadium organ—and took a seat. Slowly and reverently stretching his fingers in an arm-circle above his head, Pappin then lowered his hands, raised them again dramatically with his palms down, and proceeded to slam them down onto the keyboard as he simultaneously pressed “Play” on a stereo that sent a recording of one of Melgard’s performances blaring through the Stadium’s speakers. Pappin then continued to run his fingers smoothly along the keyboard during his air-organ routine while gazing upon the stunned face of the rookie down on the ice.

  Pappin, an integral part of Chicago’s talented teams in the past decade, took his goal scoring and practical jokes to the California Golden Seals at the end of the season. Tommy Ivan then informed Dennis Hull that he would be next to go, as the Hawks had received a young forward named Joey Johnston from the Seals for Pappin. However, in the time when Hull was waiting for the call from a new team, Johnston was involved in an auto accident that prevented him from passing a physical and temporarily put the deal on hold. So Hull, though nearing the end of his career himself, was still a Black Hawk for the time being, although Ivan continued to shop him around while J.P. Bordeleau received more ice time in Pappin’s spot on the old MPH Line.

  Mikita, like Magnuson, was another veteran on whom Reay was counting for leadership. At age of 34, Stan continued to amaze hockey followers with his strong play at the center position. He led the Hawks in scoring once again in 1974–75 with 86 points, reaching 50 or more assists for the eighth time in his career.

  “There’s no way a wing can keep from scoring and playing well when Mikita is really going,” Koroll said. “All you really have to do is give him the puck and get into position.”

  Mikita was legendary for taking great care of his body with his in- and off-season diet and exercise regimen, and even worked to improve his eyesight in the same manner as Boston Red Sox slugger Ted Williams had—Mikita would look at the license plate numbers of approaching cars while driving, attempting to see which ones added up to 21 (his jersey number). Mikita and Martin (the two whom Magnuson claimed to be the sharpest dressers on the team) were named cocaptains of the Hawks in 1975, the first time the club had named any captains in the five years since the title was taken away from Stapleton.

  With his team in desperate need of all available and experienced bodies for the 1975 playoffs, Magnuson returned from his ankle injury earlier than anticipated. On April 10, with the Hawks already down 1–0 in their opening-round series with the Bruins, he exchanged punches with Terry O’Reilly once again, the third time in which the two men had squared off in the NHL. The fight, at 8:24 of the second period, inspired the Chicago team in a 4–3 overtime win at the Stadium. The next night, in Boston, Magnuson—still in tremendous pain from his ankle, in addition to his scrap with O’Reilly—scored on the Hawks’ first shot of the game, part of a 6–4 win, as Esposito turned away 52 shots from the formidable Boston offense to help give Chicago an upset in the best-of-three series. Esposito had shown remarkable resilience after being pulled in Game 1 by Reay in favor of Michel Dumas, when Tony surrendered seven Boston goals in a game in which Phil Esposito noticed that his brother looked overly fatigued.

  No one would realize at the time that the series was the last hurrah for Bobby Orr, who in the regular season had smashed his own record of goals by a defenseman with 46. The loss to Chicago signaled the end of his final, dominant year, as more knee problems and a schism with Boston management would unravel a sequence of stunning events with the player in the final years of his career, which lay just ahead.

  The Hawks’ season, meanwhile, ended in a five-game loss to Buffalo in the following round of the postseason. Nonetheless, with Magnuson fighting through his pain, a renewed sense of spirit was seen in the club and on the new faces of Mulvey, Rota, and others. (That past fall, Mulvey had become the youngest player—at age 18 years and 32 days—to score a goal in the post-expansion era of the NHL.)

  It was the Sabres—led by their high-scoring “French Connection” line of Gilbert Perreault, Richard Martin, and Rene Robert, with each man nearly totaling 100 points—that met the Flyers in the Finals as Philadelphia was looking for its second-straight Stanley Cup. Fred Shero’s team would not be denied, as Schultz and company slugged its way to a six-game victory. Bernie Parent permitted only 12 goals, taking home another Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP as well as the Vezina, and Bobby Clarke claimed his second Hart Trophy as the league MVP.

  The unadorned Schultz, meanwhile, had shattered his own NHL single-season penalty minutes record from the previous year with a whopping 472, still a league record to this day (comprising nearly eight full games’ worth of playing time, and nearly twice the impressive second-place figure that his teammate Dupont had logged with 276). In third place on the league’s penalty list was Phil Russell of the Hawks with 260; it was apparent that Magnuson was finally getting some assistance in the carrying the fighting load for the team.

  “Billy Reay would instruct me and Maggie to find someone to hit right after the opening whistle, and have us nail him as hard as possible,” Russell said. “That way, the other team knows it’s in for a fight the entire night.”

  Magnuson, dogged by his ailments the entire year, played in a total of only 48 games, which had limited his own ledger to 117 minutes in the penalty box. Russell had established himself as another force on the blue line, and while he had offensive skills, Russell’s first preference was the physical aspect of the sport.

  “I remember Stan Mikita asking [former Detroit and Chicago player] Ted Lindsay one time, ‘How do you stay in the league so long?’” Russell recalled. “His answer was three words: ‘You hit first.’”

  But with fighting in the NHL at an all-time high, the topic became the elephant in the room that the league was forced to confront. Some individuals, who felt fighting unnecessarily debased the sport, wished to see it gone altogether. In November 1975, Sports Illustrated ran an article lamenting the amount of fighting in professional hockey (as well as its general brutality, as perceived by the writer of the article), and would call upon its immediate cessation—a possibility, the magazine granted, that was unlikely.

  “The NHL will continue to be plagued by a split personality that threatens a ruinous alienation of affections,” wrote Ray Kennedy in his piece entitled “Wanted: An End to Mayhem.” Bobby Hull, interviewed for the article, concurred with Kennedy’s premise.

  “[Fighting] will ruin the game for all of us,” Hull was quoted as saying. “I’ve never seen such vicious stuff going on. Instead of making hockey a better game, we’re tolerating people and things that are forcing a deterioration of the game.”

  Soon, offici
als in Canada including the attorney general, members of Parliament, and prominent Toronto lawyer Bill McMurtry, were calling for criminal penalties for players who wantonly and senselessly attacked opponents on the ice. But on the other side, some hockey legends were not so sure that the problem was out of control.

  “I don’t think we need any of his [McMurtry’s] legislation,” Gordie Howe said when interviewed by the Toronto Star about the lawyer’s plan.

  Thus, the sport appeared to be at a crossroads heading into the 1975–76 season. With fighting contributing to hockey’s growing popularity, would the NHL be prepared, or even willing, to curb it?

  7. Transitions

  “One thing you’ve got to have to be a success in this league can’t be taught…The ingredient is guts—and this means not being afraid of anyone.”

  —Keith Magnuson

  Times were changing at the old Chicago Stadium. While still a respected elder among indoor arenas, by the mid-1970s the Stadium had been falling behind other venues in the NHL, particularly those of recent expansion teams which received brand-new buildings, such as in Washington, D.C., and Kansas City.

  While the Black Hawks still did not have player names on the backs of their jerseys as of yet, a more pressing modernization need was about to be addressed. By 1976, a new scoreboard that included a modern digital clock would be hung above center ice at the Stadium, replacing the old analog clock that players, coaches, officials, spectators, and the media had tried to decipher for decades. The analog clock, in use at the Stadium since 1943, had faced in all four directions, with the “big hands” keeping the game time and the “little hands” keeping the time for penalties. The new scoreboard, however, was still of the most basic variety compared to others seen around the league; a more advanced board would not be placed in the Stadium until 1984.