“It’s against everything we stand for—firing people in the middle of the season, firing people during the holidays,” explained Wirtz of Reay’s expulsion. “But it had to be done… We need to get this thing straightened out right away.”
Soon after, however, it was discovered that the team’s administration had not informed Reay of his dismissal in person, but instead by slipping a note under his office door.
“That’s a rotten way to treat a guy who been in your organization for 17 years,” said one player under the condition of anonymity. Then, the player rethought the words he wished to use.
“I’ll take that back. It’s a disgrace.”
On the contrary, it was also reported that some on the Chicago roster felt Reay’s time had come.
“Three years ago, almost no Hawk players would have dared questioned Reay’s modus operandi,” wrote Verdi. “But lately, there have been whispers here and whispers there that other teams were passing the Hawks by because of better systems.”
White, at the age of 37, assumed the title of interim head coach for the rest of the season. Reay ended his NHL career with 542 wins, second in league history at the time.
Mikita did not have any plans to coach, but for the good of the team he reluctantly agreed to be an assistant while continuing to play as well. Before the team had a morning workout on Wednesday, December 22, Mikita had a brief, closed-door meeting with Reay from which, according to Verdi, Stan emerged wet in the eyes.
“Deep down, I really believed that if this group of players was not going to produce for Billy Reay, they weren’t going to play for anybody,” he wrote. ”When White was asked what his first move would be as head coach, he responded, ‘I’m going to take all my doors off their hinges [to prevent any further notes under the coach’s office door].’”
White’s next move was to name the universally respected Keith Magnuson as his captain (Mikita had started the year as Reay’s captain, but had to surrender the role in becoming a player-coach). But even this serious shift in the organization’s structure did not come without White pulling one more of his famous pranks, with poor Maggie on the receiving end one last time.
“I called him [Magnuson] and asked to have dinner with Keith and his wife, Cindy,” White remembered. “We had a nice meal, then I told Keith I wanted him to be our captain. He deserved it. He was very happy about it, I think. Then I got up and left him with the check. Why shouldn’t he pay for dinner? He’s our captain, right?”
Reay, meanwhile, quickly adjusted to his new reality. “I sort of had a feeling that, the way things were, there might be a change,” he told the Chicago papers two days after his dismissal. “I’ll never have any bad words to say about Billy Wirtz. Never. Did the players let me down by not putting out? Oh, I could never say that. I don’t think that.”
Then, motioning with his hand toward the other side of the hall from his office in the Stadium, he added, “I only wish the guys in that locker room the best of luck.”
For several veterans on the Hawks roster, including Magnuson and Dennis Hull, Reay was the only NHL coach they had ever known. Hull himself admitted an immediate desire to quit the game he loved after Reay was fired, especially for the way in which the change had transpired.
The new coaching plan met with skepticism in the Chicago press. “This year [the Hawks] gambled heavily on Bobby Orr’s knees and the gamble appears to be lost,” Robert Markus of the Tribune summarized. “The crowds have fallen off alarmingly and perhaps that panicked Bill Wirtz into making a move. The move seems pointless. It had already been announced that Reay would retire at the end of the season.”
When a friend reminded Reay that now he could at least celebrate New Year’s Eve in the coming week without any work obligations, Reay responded, “Yeah, but like Tony Esposito says, ‘I’d rather play. It costs less.’”
Shortly after the holidays, more rumors started to swirl. The new gossip was that Bob Pulford of the Los Angeles Kings was Wirtz’s choice to take over the team on a permanent basis, perhaps as the general manager in addition to being the head coach.
Temporarily unavailable to the team while his jaw continued to heal, Magnuson began watching the Hawks games from the press box at the Stadium. On February 9, 1977, Watson and the Washington Capitals came to Chicago, and as Maggie looked on from high above, one of his teammates would once again illustrate that there was no statute of limitations in handing out hockey justice.
With four minutes left in the second period, Mulvey finally got his first shift of the night. Immediately after hopping over the boards, he dashed all the way across the ice from his right wing position to Watson’s spot on right defense for the Capitals. Mulvey then proceeded to bombard Watson with a wave of punches, taking the Washington player down to the surface of the Stadium. Mulvey was promptly ejected for launching the attack, but to him, the price was well worth it. The location of the fight was only a few strides away from the gate that led down the stairs to the Chicago locker room, and hearty cheers from the partisan crowd carried him off.
Upon seeing what Mulvey had done, Magnuson sprang up from his seat and was seen bolting out of the press box. And even before Mulvey had made the short trip out the gate and down the 21 stairs to the Hawks clubhouse, Maggie was already there waiting for him, “teeth clenched and wired shut,” according to Mulvey. Grateful for what “Granny” had done, Keith gave him “the biggest hug and welcomed me into his inner circle. That was our bonding moment,” Mulvey would say years later.
Watson, meanwhile, did not think that Mulvey’s assault was in retaliation for what he had done to Magnuson. “Naw, I don’t think that,” Watson was quoted by the Tribune after the game. “Mulvey is a pretty straight shooter and it was his first shift on the ice, so he probably was just letting out his frustration.”
The captaincy that White had granted to Magnuson—and which was fully endorsed by the players—actually would be short-lived. Magnuson was forced to give up the title for the remainder of the year when he encountered yet one more devastating injury, a ruptured Achilles’ tendon later in February which would cause him to miss the last three months of the schedule. Martin donned the C on his sweater in his place.
* * *
If ever a lame-duck finish to a season was visited upon the Chicago Black Hawks, it came about in the spring of 1977. They nudged their way into the playoffs, but once again suffered a quick exit.
As part of the bizarre chain of events witnessed over the past few months, one of the Hawks’ home playoffs games against the New York Islanders actually had to be played on the road. On April 7, the Chicago Stadium had been previously booked for a Led Zeppelin rock concert, which the management of the band and the building were unwilling to cancel or reschedule.
It had been alleged that Chicago’s front office had the option of buying out the concert and moving it to another date, but instead decided to allow the Hawks to play the entire series on the road—which infuriated the players.
“It’s almost as though the people upstairs decided to write us off completely,” second-year defenseman Bob Murray bluntly said, in doing so “summing up the sentiments of 17 other players,” according to Neil Milbert. Much of the players’ anger stemmed largely from the fact that the Islanders had been in nearly the same predicament, but that the New York ownership had found negotiating room. The Bugs Bunny Easter Show was set for the Nassau County Coliseum during the playoff series dates; and while it was perhaps not the same task as rearranging a Led Zeppelin tour, the Islanders nonetheless worked out an agreement with the show’s organizers to postpone the famous rabbit’s performance for another time.
So, while Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, and the rest of the band played on in Chicago, the Islanders won the transported playoff game on their own ice and then swept the opening-round, best-of-three series.
It was the end of a nightmarish few months that Magnuson, like mo
st of the Hawks, was happy to have behind him.
“One afternoon, following a typically dull Hawk effort,” Verdi had noted, “the ailing Magnuson, complete with crutches, drove from his suburban domicile and talked to his teammates. His message, delivered behind closed doors, was a call to arms, and appeal to pride.” It was a task Maggie felt compelled to do. “It was my role as captain to say something,” he stated, even though the on-ice duties of the captaincy had been transferred to Martin. “I know not everybody appreciated it. Everything was said for one reason—to get people thinking about winning.”
In addition to recovering from his latest round of injuries, Magnuson had lumbered through his only “negative” season to date in terms of the plus-minus statistic, logging a -11. And while Orr, Mikita, and White had top-shelf hockey acumen, the “tri-coaches” system (as Mikita mockingly called it) essentially failed, as some compared it to the infamous “College of Coaches” experiment of the Chicago Cubs from the early 1960s, in which Cubs owner Phil Wrigley decided to use a collection of men who took turns managing the team.
A true fresh start was needed. The Wirtz family looked to the outside, and found the man they wanted.
* * *
Considered a rising star behind the bench, Bob Pulford—a former player for Reay in Toronto—was indeed the organization’s choice, as had been rumored. He would fill both titles of head coach and general manager once the 1977 playoffs had reached its conclusion, with Ivan moving into a new role as a team vice president.
A fervent disciple of the defensive aspects of hockey, Pulford was a rarity in the modern era of professional sports, having leapt straight from his last season as a player (1971–72) directly into a head coaching job (1972–73). After hovering around the .500 mark in his first two seasons in Los Angeles, Pulford’s Kings exploded in 1975 with 105 points—still the highest total in franchise history, even with the modern advent of the “overtime loss” point in today’s standings. Pulford directed a balanced offensive attack (11 players with double-digit goal totals) and enjoyed stellar goaltender play from Rogatien “Rogie” Vachon as Pulford was named the NHL Coach of the Year. Vachon, a former starter in the nets for Montreal, would also be an impregnable wall in 1976 for Team Canada in the Canada Cup, posting two shutouts and a 1.39 goals-against average in challenging Orr for the MVP honors for the tournament. Interestingly, it was also a young Vachon whom Pulford, while the latter was playing for the Maple Leafs, had beaten with an overtime goal in Game 3 of the 1967 Stanley Cup Finals.
The hiring of Pulford in Chicago raised few impressed eyebrows across the sport and drew little praise, despite the coach’s relatively quick success in elevating the Kings. “Pulford’s defensive style should be as big a bore as Billy Reay’s used to be,” wrote Stan Fischler, “which figures to keep fans away from Chicago Stadium once more.”
However, with the Stadium rink still smaller (188' x 85') than other NHL arenas, some thought that the hiring of a defensive-minded coach was the correct path to take until the Stadium was replaced with a new, standard-sized facility.
“I’m really excited about our new coach,” Magnuson said in support of Pulford. “I think some of our pride is returning, and that’s what we’ve lacked more than anything in the last few years. He has a great mind for detail. Very organized.”
Mikita, like Orr, would thus relinquish his short-lived role as a player-coach and return to being a player only. (By December 1977, the 29-year-old Orr was a front office man for Hawks without any official title; after his sixth knee operation in the preceding summer, doctors advised him to take a full year of rest before seeing if he could play again.) Mikita admitted that an animosity had existed between him and Pulford during their playing days, and he wondered if he would be next to follow Reay out of Chicago.
“One night in the [Los Angeles/Inglewood] Forum,” Mikita recalled about a particular encounter with Pulford, “we got into it in the penalty box. We were both thrown out of the game, so we went toward our dressing rooms. Before we reached our destinations, we crossed paths and had a stick fight in the hallway… I didn’t think our rivalry would continue, but it did. At least it did from his point of view.”
Once Pulford’s hiring was made public, Mikita figured that his days as a member of the Hawks were numbered, and he was, at least in part, correct. For Mikita soon got his own note under the door: a contract renewal offer from Pulford—one of his first actions while wearing the general manager’s hat—with a 75 percent pay cut, which, not unlike Reay’s firing, did not arrive to Mikita in person but through a secondary party.
“I learned of that through my agent,” Mikita revealed, “whom I didn’t talk to for three weeks because he said he was too embarrassed to call.”
In the end, however, Mikita struck a deal that maintained his 1976–77 salary after getting Bill Wirtz involved in the discussion with Pulford about the contract.
It appeared that Pulford was seeking to immediately reshape the roster in his own image. No one on the team was safe—not even Esposito, one of the game’s all-time great goaltenders. Pulford, not sold on backup Mike Veisor as a long-term solution, looked to install the team’s future goalie—whomever it may be—between the pipes. Pulford was perhaps focused on Esposito’s downturn in play during the 1976–77 season, in which his goals-against average skyrocketed to 3.45, the likes of which he had never reached before. His teammates, however—especially those who had been around him the longest—had not had their faith shaken in their netminder.
“I was never worried,” Magnuson reflected on Esposito’s struggles during that period. “Tony didn’t sulk when things were going bad. He just worked harder. A real man, I tell you. Tony is a winner.”
Veisor, serving as Esposito’s understudy for the previous three years, had learned many things from his mentor. Included among these lessons was one that came at a team practice session in November 1977, when Veisor witnessed Esposito being struck in the eye with a slap shot that shattered the old-fashioned, form-fitting mask that Esposito and most goalies of the era still wore. In seeing the limited protection those masks actually offered, Veisor chose to become one of the first North American goaltenders to wear a cage-style mask, which would become popular in the NHL in the 1980s and which had been already donned by many European goalies. “You’d never get me to wear one of them, with all that weight and padding around the head,” a defiant, old-school Esposito said of the new style that Veisor soon was wearing. Esposito did agree to compromise, however, as the serious injury prompted him to install small bars near the eyeholes of his old mask for more protection in the final years of his career.
One of Pulford’s first targets to acquire from the outside was J. Bob Kelly, an effort to add more toughness to the forward lines along with the feisty existing collection of Mulvey, Darcy Rota, Koroll, Ivan Boldirev, and Ted Bulley. Kelly was the man who was involved in the “taped hand” controversy in his fight with Magnuson three years earlier, and did help the team start the fall of ’77 with more spirit; unfortunately, the end result was much of the same. With Magnuson again missing time early in the season by reinjuring the bad elbow in training camp, the Hawks once more limped to first place in a weak Smythe Division with a record barely over .500 (32–29–19), and were also once again whipped in the first round of the playoffs—this time at the hands of the Bruins in a four-game sweep.
The Hawks had perhaps been psychologically damaged by the Bruins after a 7–0 thrashing at the Boston Garden in late March, a game which Magnuson and Russell both missed with knee problems and in which talented rookie defenseman Doug Wilson would be limited to the first period only with a badly sprained ankle. In the team’s previous meeting at the Stadium in February, Magnuson was injured four minutes into the game when Boston’s John Wensink nearly knocked him out cold with a blindsiding hit. When the playoffs were over in late April, Magnuson would have a second surgery on his battered right knee.
/> The Hawks carried over their listless performance into the fall of 1978. Orr had to hang up his skates for good, with his final point coming on October 28 on a goal against the Red Wings in Detroit. Four days later, on November 1, the Vancouver Canucks—after many years of struggling in games in the Stadium—walked into town and left with their fifth victory in their last seven games in Chicago. Boos were heard all evening long from the small crowd that gathered.
Magnuson and Mikita, two of the veteran leaders left on the club, did their best to provide instances of inspiration. One such moment came on December 9 in St. Louis (in the Checkerdome, the newly named facility that for decades had been known as the St. Louis Arena before its purchase by the Ralston-Purina Company) when Magnuson notched his first goal of the season on a beautifully won faceoff from Mikita, the latter’s 900th assist in his glorious career.
Magnuson was finding the daily physical pain to be less and less bearable, and he was still going down to the ice to block shots, still shoving players out from in front of Esposito, and still going after the other team’s toughest players in the corners. But at the behest of his wife, Cindy, Magnuson had starting wearing a helmet to protect himself against more blows to the head in fights that were sure to come—and as always, Keith honored her wishes. Her fears were well founded; after playing in every game on the schedule his rookie season of 1969–70, Magnuson would never play an entire Hawks schedule again.
“He would still take a puck to the face,” Verdi had written the past autumn, “even if it meant another fracture of the jaw. And he would still drop his gloves to fight for another mate, even if it meant a fat lip, a roamin’ nose, or a trip to the dentist. Literally, he bleeds for his team.”
Exactly two weeks after Magnuson recorded the goal in St. Louis, the Flyers came to the Stadium once again, two days before Christmas, in what promised to be another physical, holiday-season battle between the two platoons. Magnuson, with all his aches and pains, knew he would be called upon to do the policing yet again. But in this matchup, many of the familiar faces wearing the Philadelphia logo would not be present.
Keith Magnuson Page 20