Changes were also occurring within the Hawks broadcast booth. The 1975–76 season would mark the final one for Lloyd Pettit at the radio microphone, as the popular announcer decided to retire to Wisconsin—whereupon he would purchase the Milwaukee Admirals of the American Hockey League with the hopes of one day landing an expansion NHL franchise in the city. Over the following four years, a parade of different play-by-play announcers would pass through the Stadium, all primarily paired with Lou Angotti as the color man, and the team moved its broadcasts from WMAQ back to WCFL, the station that had previously carried the team’s games before WGN assumed the role. WCFL, whose call letters stood for “Chicago Federation of Labor,” had been one of two major pop music stations on the AM dial in the city (along with WLS) until its switch to an adult-contemporary format in the same year it added the Black Hawks. Billing itself as “the Voice of Labor” since going on the air in 1926, WCFL had formerly published a newsletter for Chicago union workers.
With the departure of Pettit, stability in the Hawks play-by-play radio chair would not arrive until the appearance of 26-year-old Pat Foley in 1980. The Chicago-area native would come back home after attending Michigan State University and subsequently broadcasting the games for the Grand Rapids Owls of the International Hockey League.
Back in 1975, Pettit began his final season in the Stadium by witnessing a poor showing on Madison Street with a 5–3 defeat at the hands of the Los Angeles Kings. Reay said such losses were being caused by inattentiveness on the defensive end, with some players putting too much focus on trying to score goals. (Another reason may have been the departure of Doug Jarrett, Magnuson’s longtime partner on defense, who was dealt to the New York Rangers shortly after the season had started. Jarrett had finally made his first All-Star Game the season before, an honor which Magnuson felt was long overdue.)
“Come contract time and all they talk about is the goals they scored,” Reay complained of some of the team’s forwards. “We should bring up the goals that were scored against us when those guys were on the ice.”
Reay was speaking indirectly to the “plus-minus” statistic, in which individual players receive a “+1” each time he is on the ice when his team scores, and a “-1” each time he is on the ice when the opponent scores. The aggregate sum is then meant to judge a player’s relative worth to his team. Magnuson, despite his modest yearly goal and assist totals, had piled impressive numbers in this department since his rookie year:
The loss to the Kings served as a wake-up call, however, as the Hawks rebounded in their next game three nights later, beating the Canadiens 2–1 at the Stadium in what developed into yet another great battle between Tony Esposito and Ken Dryden. It was the second of only two losses that Montreal would suffer in the first month of the season, and one of only 11 times they would be defeated the entire year (a standard they would actually surpass in the following season).
“It just proves that against supposedly easier teams, you have to go all out, all game,” said Cliff Koroll afterward. “You can’t just show up in your uniform and expect to win.”
Magnuson was playing with a renewed sense of vigor, finally healthy and now being paired more often on defense with Dale Tallon, something with which Reay had experimented two years previous.
“He was my first partner when I came to Chicago,” Tallon recalled. “I would always tell him make sure nobody touches me.”
Tallon, with three excellent years in Vancouver before coming to the Hawks in 1973, joined Phil Russell and Dick Redmond as another true force on the Chicago blue line after a great career in the Juniors.
Nonetheless, momentum for Chicago proved to be difficult to grasp. The team fell into a deep early-season tailspin once again; the Hawks won just once from November 19 to December 19. Soon, the first widespread grumblings about Reay’s job began to be heard around Chicago. There appeared to be somewhat of a generation gap forming between Reay’s old-school philosophies and some of the younger players who were joining the team.
“Though the old guys were all Billy’s players,” Dennis Hull pointed out, “the new ones didn’t fit in with Billy’s thoughts on the game. It caused some friction. Some of the new guys would be off the ice as soon as practice was done. But that wasn’t Billy’s way. Most of us veterans would be on the ice for an hour after practice was officially over. It was a new breed of player.”
Additionally, the Wirtz family was trying to modernize the team in its training procedures.
“Fitness was all the rage,” Hull continued in his recollection of the Hawks from the mid-1970s. “There were all these machines in our dressing room. I think we used them one day and then hung our coats on them. It just wasn’t the way Billy ran his team. Billy Wirtz told him we had to work on fitness. We’d do sit-ups and push-ups on the ice. It was bizarre.”
Meanwhile, the WHA was already showing signs of financial decline after just four years of operation. The fledgling league continued to hang its hopes on the retention of a handful of ex-NHL superstars. “Had the Black Hawks somehow persuaded Hull to remain in the NHL,” Stan Fischler wrote in early 1976, “there wouldn’t be a WHA today, or in 1975, 1974, or 1973. But they didn’t, and Hull kept the league and the Winnipeg Jets in business.”
Fischler went on to say that certain average or above-average NHL players, such as the former Boston goalie Gerry Cheevers, “were deluded into thinking they really were stars and that lots and lots of people would come and see them [in WHA games]…instead, what Cheevers learned in Cleveland [with the Crusaders, the city’s WHA entry] was that he had the personal drawing power of a dead battery on a zero-cold night.”
Pat Stapleton, meanwhile, had left Chicago and the Cougars after being claimed by the Indianapolis Racers in the WHA’s “dispersal draft.” Fischler unapologetically not only saw him as a deserter of the Black Hawks and the NHL, but one who accelerated the demise of the Cougars and the entire WHA as well. “Stapleton not only didn’t save the Cougars,” Fischler claimed, “he marched with them toward extinction, then jumped off the bandwagon and re-leaped again at Indianapolis.”
Stapleton would play two seasons in Indianapolis and then one with Cincinnati’s entry in the WHA, the Stingers, before returning to Indy to coach the team in the league’s final year, 1978–79. For the first eight games in that concluding season, one of Stapleton’s charges was a 17-year-old center from Brantford, Ontario, named Wayne Gretzky, who would be traded to the Edmonton Oilers on November 2.
* * *
In the wake of the excitement that had been generated by the Summit Series in 1972, the event had been repeated in 1974. Bobby Hull was permitted to play this time, and would lead the series in scoring with nine points despite the Soviets getting their revenge with four wins against one victory for the Canadians (and three ties). Then, the NHL would announce on May 28, 1975, that a select number teams would play exhibition games against the two top teams from the Soviet Union—the Soviet Wings and the Central Red Army—over the upcoming holiday season.
The plan was the culmination of the vision of legendary Soviet hockey godfather Anatoli Tarasov, who long dreamed of sending his country’s best players up against the premier teams in North America. The new set of games would be called the “Super Series,” as promoted by NHL president Clarence Campbell. “At the time being,” Campbell said, “I believe it is the only way to develop the game of hockey.”
Eight contests would be scheduled, with the Central Red Army (which was considered the elite Soviet team) taking on Montreal, Boston, Philadelphia, and the New York Rangers (with all those contests televised on the Canadian Broadcasting System) while the Black Hawks would join Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and the New York Islanders in games against the Wings (with only the Buffalo contest televised). As part of the agreement between the two parties, NHL rules would be used in the games to coincide with a Soviet referee. Additionally, the Soviet teams were allowed to add players to the W
ings and Red Army rosters from other clubs around Russia.
Like the famed Summit Series tilt of 1972, the political importance of the games was in no way being underestimated by the media, as exemplified by Al Strachan of the Montreal Gazette. “In approximately seven weeks,” Strachan pronounced solemnly that autumn, “the National Hockey League will begin the most crucial two-week period of its 50-year history.”
When it was announced that the Wings would play a game in Chicago Stadium, Magnuson once again was reminded of his battle against the Russians as an amateur at the University of Denver back in December 1967 at the Colorado Springs tournament, and how the Soviet players displayed unparalleled physical conditioning. “If I were to rate the best hockey teams in the world today,” Keith had noted back in 1973, “I’d have to put the Russians right up beside Boston, New York, Chicago, and Montreal.”
So in the midst of the Hawks struggling to find their new identity, a standing-room-only crowd of at least 18,500—well beyond the fire code–permitted 16,666 that was usually listed officially for sellouts—entered the Stadium on January 7 to see the Soviets take on the hometown Black Hawks. Just a few days earlier, the Buffalo Sabres had rattled the Wings by a 12–6 final score. The Wings had watched Buffalo’s 9–6 loss to the Los Angeles Kings on New Year’s Day and consequently had pegged the Sabres as a weak team.
For most of the contest, the fans in Chicago would lambast the Russian referee, Yuri Karandin, for a perceived inequitable amount of calls against the Hawks (although both of the linesmen, Matt Pavelich and Neil Armstrong, were from the NHL).
The game was broadcast back to Russia on radio, with an actor from the Moscow Arts Theatre named Nikolai Ozerov conducting the descriptions. Ozerov told his audience to “watch Phil Russell—he is a good and experienced defenseman” And as the game progressed, even Ozerov criticized Karandin when Russian player Sergei Kapustin slashed Bill White and opened a gash on the leg of the Hawks defenseman. “They gave him two minutes when they could easily have given him five,” he told his listeners back in the U.S.S.R. of the referee, while praising Armstrong and Pavelich during the evening as “exact and just.”
Over the course of the game, the Hawks would be called for twice as many minor penalties as the Soviets (12 to six), but Bob Verdi still believed the team was playing soft—as he had been noting quite regularly over the past couple of years.
“The Black Hawks sometimes play as if they covet the Nobel Peace Prize,” Verdi wrote after watching the international contest. “[They are] one of the National Hockey League’s most polite squads, who [tonight] suddenly turned chippy. They couldn’t have picked a more untimely occasion.”
Young John Marks, quickly assuming a leadership role on the team, concurred with Verdi’s assessment. “What are we, last in the league in penalty minutes?” he asked anyone who could respond with an answer.
Due to an intestinal blockage that was now hampering him, Magnuson—whom Reay and other observers believed was off to the best start to a season in his career—did not appear in the game. Redmond filled his role well, aggressively going after the Russian players at every opportunity and scoring the first Hawks goal, which left the game tied at 1–1 at the end of the first period.
Chicago fell behind, and then a long Dennis Hull slap shot that got past Wings goaltender Alexander Sidelnikov pulled the Hawks to within a two-goal deficit in the third period, but that was as close as they would come. Ozerov was impressed with Stan Mikita and called him “a good and experienced one,” but decided that the Black Hawks “just cannot restrain our young players.” The final score was 4–2 in favor of the Soviets, with the Hawks managing only 18 total shots on the Russian net.
Other Chicago players claimed that there was overt bias displayed during the evening on the part of Karandin, as the Russians scored three of their four goals on the numerous power-play chances they enjoyed, which proved to be the difference in the game.
“When you get the kind of refereeing we saw tonight,” added Pit Martin, “after a while, you just say to yourself, ‘What the hell’s the use?’ It’s a shame that the game had to turn into that, but it did.”
In postgame comments by both Ozerov and Wings coach Boris Kulagin, the point was repeatedly stressed that the Russian players were merely “amateurs” playing against professionals in the NHL, apparently to make the effort all the more impressive.
Eight days earlier, on New Year’s Eve 1974, the Soviets’ Red Army squad had played to an epic tie with the Canadiens in the Forum in Montreal. In retrospect, it would be considered one of the most competitive matches in hockey history. Additionally, the Red Army had also beaten the powerful Bruins in the Boston Garden despite the Russian players’ almost mystical reverence of Bobby Orr, who did not play in the game, instead continuing the rehabilitation of his knee. According to Todd Denault, the Russians stood numb, with mouths agape, when noticing Orr’s No. 4 jersey hanging in his locker when receiving a tour of the Bruins dressing room at the Garden. They reached out respectfully to place their fingers on it, as well as the array of equipment he had left on the floor in front of the locker, as if the items were holy relics through which some supernatural power would be transmitted.
“They just kept touching everything that was his, stroking his sweater,” recalled NHL chief of security Frank Torpey, who was watching the scene. “It was really strange.”
Later, when a Russian player found his hockey sticks broken before the game with the Bruins, he had to borrow one from the Boston club. The Bruins equipment man brought him one that happened to have the name “Orr” stamped on the top of the shaft. Immediately, the other Soviet players began grabbing at it, each wanting to claim it as his own.
On January 11, the Red Army would play the final game of the Super Series against the bullying Flyers at the Spectrum, with tension already building days before the match.
“For Fred Shero and his Flyers,” wrote Denault, “this game was nothing less than the unofficial World Championship of hockey.”
Shero had long admired the Soviet style of play, even to the point of once traveling to Russia to study their methods with 100 other North American hockey coaches; Shero, in leading the pilgrimage, was the only NHL-level coach.
The atmosphere in the stands at the Spectrum was as turbulent as it was down on the ice, with Philadelphia fans displaying as much fervor as the Flyers themselves. Faces were torn open with rage toward the communist visitors, as disparaging signs hung from the railings, some even in the Russian Cyrillic alphabet, many of which read Free Russian Jews.
Once again, the high-scoring Soviet forward Valeri Kharlamov was the prime target, just as he was more than four years earlier in the attack from Bobby Clarke—who was also on the ice again this evening. In addition to that infamous Summit Series assault from 1972, the 5'9", 165-pound Kharlamov had also been beaten badly in a postgame fight with the New England Whalers’ Rick Ley during one of the games from the 1974 version of the Summit Series.
Halfway through the first period, Ed Van Impe—a Saskatoon native who previously had wrestled with Clarke in the Chicago Stadium seats and who been a Black Hawk defenseman 10 years earlier as a rookie—knocked Kharlamov to the ice with a tremendous hit. Kharlamov was in the process of receiving the puck in front of the Philadelphia net, so the timing on the check was legal, but the blow also came mostly from behind, and with Van Impe’s forearms thrust into the back of Kharlamov’s head.
When Van Impe’s act went unpenalized, Red Army coach Konstantin Lotkev became enraged and took his team off the ice, at which point Lotkev himself was whistled for a delay-of-game penalty by the referee when he called them over to the bench. The Russians then retreated to the dressing room, none of whom wanted to return—as confirmed by their star goalie Vladislav Tretiak.
“No Red Army player wanted to play against the Philadelphia Flyers,” Tretiak said. “Each of us could have been hit from behind,
cross-checked, kicked—what kind of sport was this? It had nothing at all in common with the sport of hockey… The Stanley Cup winners demonstrated their highly unfriendly, if not hostile, attitude. Nobody came over to welcome us [before the game].”
In a short time, however, the Soviets returned to the game when informed they would not be paid if they did not finish the evening’s play. Some writers felt that Van Impe’s check was nothing beyond a strong hit commonly seen in a typical NHL game, and that Kharlamov’s subsequent sprawl to the ice was planned acting—directed by his superiors—in an effort to illustrate to the world what they viewed as the “barbaric” North American version of hockey. (Van Impe himself later claimed that he had dealt many other harder hits in his professional career.)
Clearly shaken, the Central Red Army lost that evening for the only time on their North American tour, by a 4–1 score. Tretiak was pounded with 49 shots as the physical Flyers dominated the play in the Soviets’ zone, while Philadelphia goalie Wayne Stephenson (subbing for the injured Bernie Parent) handled a mere 13 tries during the entire contest.
Thus, once again it was the unfortunate Kharlamov who was placed at the center of a geopolitical sports battle. One of the greatest players the game has ever known, Kharlamov would be struck again by violence both on and off the ice. A few months later, injuries from his involvement in an automobile accident would prevent his playing in the Canada Cup tournament. He had helped lead the Soviets to the gold medal in the Winter Olympics in February, just after the Soviets’ tour of North America. Five years later, another auto collision would take Kharlamov’s life at the age of 33. In 2005 he was posthumously inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame, while the Kharlamov Trophy was established to recognize the top Russian player in the NHL each season, as voted upon by the Russians in the league at the time.
Keith Magnuson Page 18