Keith Magnuson

by Doug Feldmann

  The Flyers were, like the Hawks, another club in renewal as the 1970s came to a close, attempting to climb back to prominence after their two Stanley Cup championships in 1974 and 1975. Schultz was long gone from the team, having spent the past three years in Los Angeles and Pittsburgh, with dwindling ice time in suiting up for those organizations. Instead, Philadelphia went in the same direction that the Hawks had gone in 1969—by turning to a rookie defenseman as their new enforcer. His name was Behn Wilson; and like Schultz, Garry Howatt, Tiger Williams, and other similar players early in their NHL careers, Wilson sought out Magnuson when playing the Hawks in an attempt to more quickly establish a league-wide reputation as a fighter.

  The fireworks began when the Flyers’ talented 21-year-old goalie, Pete Peeters, slashed Rota in front of the Philadelphia net. Wilson shoved Rota as a follow-up message, and then Mulvey came over and took a shot at Wilson—for which Mulvey was ejected, deemed as the third man in on a fight that had not really begun. Mulvey, a big, strong player with scoring ability, was taking a leadership role in providing the kind of player Pulford had wanted to integrate into the forward lines.

  “[Referee Bryan] Lewis told me later he made a bad call,” Magnuson revealed after the game about the Mulvey ejection, getting word from the official as he was once again the captain. “The original thing was between the goalie and Rota. If anything, Wilson was [the] third man in. Mulvey just came in after Wilson got Rota, and Wilson didn’t even get a penalty for that.”

  After Clarke and Marks tussled with each other after a whistle at 10:21 of the second period, Magnuson finally caught up with Wilson (as Wilson felt he now had to come to Clarke’s assistance, as Schultz had done for many years). The Chicago veteran grabbed a hold of Wilson’s jersey and “danced” with him for over a minute, giving Wilson an earful—likely an oral lesson for the rookie in learning about the NHL world. Lewis, shouting over the shoulders of his linesmen who were trying to separate Magnuson and Wilson, warned both players that each would get a 10-minute misconduct penalty if the dancing and jawing continued. Magnuson then let fly with a couple of rights that staggered the first-year player momentarily, but Wilson then capitalized on his larger size and downed Maggie with several hard shots.

  J. Bob Kelly—once a hated foe of Magnuson but now an ally—then got ejected in the same manner as Mulvey for being a third man in while trying to help Keith. “I was just sitting on the bench when Bob Murray next to me said, ‘Hey, we’re a man short out there,’” Kelly said. “I just hopped out in case we needed help.”

  It was yet another of the countless confrontations that Magnuson had endured to inspire his team. He may not have won the fight, but his mere courage in “showing up” for it goaded the Hawks on to victory once again. An appreciative crowd of 14,197 at the Stadium—one of the larger seen there in recent months—was on hand for the 5–2 Chicago triumph that snapped a seven-game winless streak. The fans left no doubt that Magnuson’s efforts had spurred them on, as the contest had lasted over three hours, the spectators’ loyalty and rage so often escalated that a carpet of trash littered the Stadium ice in protest of officials’ calls on three different occasions. The Hawks typically moribund offense, meanwhile, had jumped on Peeters early. The young goalie would become one of the NHL’s best in the 1980s, but nonetheless appeared lackadaisical in the opening stages of this contest according to reports from the Tribune, giving up two quick goals that put the Flyers in an early hole.

  Just as he had been in his jovial rookie season 10 years earlier, Magnuson was all smiles in the locker room, knowing that his enthusiasm had carried his team on the evening.

  But he did not know that it would be his last fight in an NHL regular season game.

  In the very next contest—on December 27, 1978, in the Stadium against the Blues—Magnuson and the Hawks were scrambling to protect a 4–3 lead in the last minute. As players for both sides jockeyed for position in front of the Chicago net, Magnuson collided with Harvey Bennett of St. Louis, and Bennett fell on top of him. The awkward toppling collapsed Magnuson’s right knee yet again, and he lay immobile on the ice as the rest of the Hawks proceeded to hold on in the remaining seconds for the win.

  After the horn sounded, cheers for the victory from the Stadium crowd waned as attention shifted to the player sprawled in the Hawks’ zone. As spectators were leaving the Stadium over the next few minutes, Magnuson would be carted off the surface and then to the hospital where, that very same night, he underwent his third operation on the knee and his second in the past eight months. Rookie defenseman Mike O’Connell would be promoted from New Brunswick of the American Hockey League to take his place on the roster, making him the first Chicago-born player ever to play for the Hawks (despite spending much of his childhood in the Boston area).

  With the latest blow to his knee, Magnuson seriously wrestled with the idea of retirement for the first time. The knee had been causing him further problems, even before the Bennett collision.

  “It bothered me this season that I couldn’t do some of the things I used to do, that I couldn’t play as physically tough as I want to,” he said. “And it bothered me that I felt I wasn’t contributing like I should. When we had back-to-back games, or four games in five nights, the knee got sore—even when we were playing with six defensemen. “I wouldn’t want to go through that again… I have some serious thinking to do.”

  The rest of the team was greatly troubled with the possibility of their leader being permanently sidelined.

  “There isn’t a player on this team who doesn’t completely respect him. Or in the league,” said Phil Russell. “The thought of him retiring…I don’t even want to think of it.”

  As for Pulford, he stated that Magnuson “was just starting to play as well as he ever had when he got hurt.”

  Without Magnuson for the rest of the season, the Hawks’ play continued to tail off as Mikita worked with Koroll (both in their final full seasons) to provide some sense of stability to the team. Pulford attempted to jump-start things by acquiring 34-year-old center Mike Walton in January—the same man who had squared off against Magnuson in the latter’s first NHL fight in Keith’s first exhibition game in Toronto in September 1969. Walton was able to help Chicago secure another lame-duck Smythe Division title—but this time it was even accomplished with a losing record (29–36–15)—and was followed by yet another sweep in the first round of the playoffs, an elimination again being served by Islanders (who, a year later, would end the Canadiens’ run of Stanley Cup championships and begin a string of their own).

  A gallant effort was turned in by Esposito in that series, who showed flashes of his old brilliant self. He would shut out the dangerous Islanders offense for three straight periods in Game 2 in New York—something that had not happened to the New York team in two and a half years—but yet Chicago fell to Al Arbour’s club in overtime. The Hawks had now lost an amazing 16 straight playoff games dating back to the spring of 1975, and Pulford now found himself just as befuddled for answers as Reay had been in his own final seasons.

  Magnuson knew he had some difficult decisions to make in the off-season—should he give the knee one more chance, or is the pain too much to endure? Does he call it quits on the game he loves and throw himself full-time into a new line of work?

  Pondering these things while driving through the city, Magnuson looked down from the steering wheel for a moment to write one of his famous personal “to-do” notes, reminding himself to send a birthday card to a friend. In doing so, he rear-ended another car and jolted his bad knee—itself a reminder of the painful road to recovery still ahead of him if he wished to play again.

  8. Coach Maggie

  “There have been many finer athletes in Chicago, but not one finer person.”

  —Bob Verdi on Keith Magnuson in the Chicago Tribune, November 1, 1979

  The new career offer outside of hockey Keith Magnuson had received was indeed
tantalizing. It was lucrative, stable, and far removed from the nightly bone-crushing hits of the NHL ice.

  For the past several off-seasons, he had been a spokesman and Chicago-area salesman for the 7-Up soft drink brand, a position obtained with the help of company vice president Bill O’Rourke and always held for him by the local Joyce Beverage distributorship when the summer months arrived. Always thinking ahead and a great planner, Maggie was happy put his degree in business administration he had earned from the University of Denver to use.

  “At first, it was just making appearances at food stores,” Magnuson explained. “Then, I took a sales training program and became an account executive.”

  “When a company such as ours takes on an athlete as an employee,” O’Rourke explained, “the first thing people think is that we’re doing it to showcase him, that we want him just as window dressing.” But it was clear from the start that Magnuson was different. “He handles some of our biggest accounts,” O’Rourke continued. “But he does the little things, too. He’s ridden the delivery trucks, and he’s made a point of getting to know the names of the men who drive the trucks, and the names of their kids. He cares, and the people whom he deals with like him and respect him for it.”

  In his very first year with the company, Magnuson was given the Chicago-area sales contracts for 7-Up for the chains of Walgreens and the old White Hen convenience stores.

  “Maggie has been challenged, and he has responded,” O’Rourke concluded. “He’s not only intelligent but dedicated. He has a future here for the rest of his life.”

  With growing knee pain from hockey and his simultaneously growing success with Joyce Beverages, Magnuson had much to ponder over the summer of 1979 regarding his future. “It bothers me that I seem to be getting brittle,” he had commented in the fall of 1977, reflecting upon the injuries that were lessening his time on the ice.

  More changes were coming to the Black Hawks, and the NHL as a whole, which made Magnuson’s future even cloudier.

  As the NBA had done with the American Basketball Association a few years earlier, the NHL agreed to absorb some of the teams from the WHA in the fall of 1979 as the latter circuit finally folded. This made many of the players currently on NHL teams vulnerable to the “expansion draft,” in which the rosters of the old WHA teams would be stocked, to a certain degree, with existing NHL talent.

  To ensure he remained a Hawk, Chicago placed Magnuson on the “protected” list, making him among those ineligible for the draft. The Wirtz family wanted to make certain he stayed with the team, regardless of Magnuson’s capacity to return from his knee problems. The Edmonton Oilers, located near Keith’s home area in western Canada, had expressed a strong interest in selecting him. But after Magnuson was placed on the protected list, the Oilers instead chose Hawks defenseman Doug Hicks, who had shown promise briefly in Chicago in coming from the Minnesota North Stars, where he had played in every game except one during his first three years in the league.

  In the final WHA season, 1978–79, the Oilers had been toppled for the league’s last championship by the Winnipeg Jets. The 40-year-old Bobby Hull appeared in only four games for the Jets that season (posting five points in those four games) before announcing his retirement. (Hull would return to hockey, however, once it was announced the team was joining the NHL.) A consolation prize for Edmonton was that one of its players had claimed the WHA’s final Rookie of the Year award—the gangly 18-year-old Wayne Gretzky, just acquired from Pat Stapleton’s Indianapolis club. Finishing close behind Gretzky in the voting was a 20-year-old defenseman for the Birmingham club named Rob Ramage, who joined Gretzky as the lone rookies named to the WHA’s final all-league team at season’s end, along with former Hawks defenseman Paul Shmyr.

  Edmonton owner Peter Pocklington planned to give the precocious Gretzky a 21-year contract through 1999—and thus have him don the jersey number “99.” The teenager’s influence was so profound, in fact, that Gretzky could have single-handedly held up the NHL/WHA merger. Pocklington had refused to allow Gretzky to be entered into the expansion (or “merger”) draft, which was typically required for all first-year players; not wanting any snags in completing the merger, the NHL relented and permitted the steadfast Pocklington to keep him.

  “He’s one of those rare individuals who seems to improve with every game,” Jets coach Tom McVie said after seeing Gretzky in his first pro season. “You wonder when he’s going to stop.”

  Oilers coach Glen Sather also knew he had something special on his hands. “One of the biggest things about him is his intense desire to be one of the greats,” Sather marveled. “Nothing seems to bother him. At 18, he’s already exceeded our wildest expectations.”

  Gretzky continued to take nothing for granted in the future. As his first NHL season approached in the fall of 1979, he would actually be competing for his fifth straight rookie-of-the-year award in five different leagues, including the WHA and the Juniors.

  “Each year I’ve had to prove myself,” Gretzky said in the summer of 1979. “Each year they’ve told me the checking would be tighter, I’d get hit more and wouldn’t score. Every year I’ve been told that I’m going to be run out of the rink. Next year, I’ll have to prove myself all over again.”

  Citing a desire to focus on his general manager duties, Bob Pulford made an exit from the position of head coach of the Black Hawks after a brief two-year tenure. Elevated into his place was Eddie Johnston, who had enjoyed a successful year with the New Brunswick team in attaining 41 wins and a second-place finish in the AHL.

  Magnuson felt positive about the change and decided to commit to training camp, going through the initial workouts to gauge the reaction of his knee to the stress. The joint ached with every movement, but Magnuson was able to labor his way through camp, helping a young defenseman named Keith Brown. The Hawks traveled to Montreal to take on the Canadiens in a preseason game on September 22. “I was mentored by him as a roommate, teammate, and a coach,” Brown would say of Maggie in 2012. “I was one of the fortunate few.”

  In Montreal, Magnuson encountered Gilles Lupien, a man whom he had fought the previous March at the Stadium and who at 6'6" was a half foot taller than Keith. In what would be Magnuson’s final bout on the ice, Lupien stunned him with several quick rights. By the time Magnuson regained his bearings the fight was already over, leaving him so angry at his failure to record a single punch that he shoved linesman Bob Luther in trying to get back at Lupien after the two were separated, thus receiving a game-misconduct penalty.

  Magnuson now knew he was not the same player he had been, but nonetheless went to work each day and gave the best he could.

  After the regular season began, the Bruins came to town a month later at the Stadium, on October 28. With Bobby Orr, Phil Esposito, and others from the talented Boston teams of the recent past then departed, new names were beginning to replace the old familiar ones on their roster. Among the fresh faces was a scrappy, 5'8" left wing named Stan Jonathan. The 24-year-old was a willing fighter, and had already proven himself to be a skilled craftsman with his stick as well, having led the NHL in shooting percentage (24 percent) in his rookie season three years earlier.

  Shortly into the game, Jonathan set out to test Magnuson, as many others had done in the past 10 years. Bracing himself for yet another round of NHL combat, Magnuson set himself upon the heels of his skates and gave his patented shoulder shrug, readying his body for a bout as he had done hundreds of time before. But then, suddenly and instinctively, he backed away from Jonathan; his body was telling him at that very moment the he had endured enough. Much to the surprise of the crowd, the fight never happened as Magnuson retreated.

  Forcing himself through the rest of the game in physical and mental anguish, Magnuson went straight to Pulford’s office afterward. And on November 1, 1979, the news of Magnuson’s retirement was made public.

  The damage to his knee had finally been
enough, and the team—for the first time in a decade—would be without its most spirited leader on skates. Though Magnuson was immediately named an assistant coach for Johnston, an era of Chicago hockey was coming to a close.

  “From the first night he came bursting through the Stadium runway back in 1969, he never stopped trying. In the end, what more can a fan ask?” questioned Bob Verdi upon hearing what had transpired.

  Twenty-five-year old center Terry Ruskowski, in his first season with Chicago but a veteran of five strong WHA seasons (after originally being drafted by the Hawks in 1974), was named the new captain in Magnuson’s place. Joining Ruskowski on a formidable new forward line were Grant Mulvey and Rich Preston—the latter having been Ruskowski’s teammate in Winnipeg and Houston in the WHA, and like Magnuson, yet another product from the University of Denver program. Soon, the three would become known as the “RPM Line,” scoring at a rate not seen from a regular Hawks trio since the glory days of the early 1970s.

  But Ruskowski wanted more than just goals. Crowds had continued to fall off at the Stadium, and the new captain wanted them back.

  “This is no good,” he said in pointing to the empty seats. “This is too good a hockey town, and hockey is too good a sport. I want to see this place full again. I’d like to see hockey back on the front pages of the newspapers and on the TV sports every night.”

  While the change in philosophy associated with Johnston’s style rubbed some of the players the wrong way (including young defenseman Dave Logan, who was traded to Vancouver after he and Johnston get into an argument in the locker room after a game in Edmonton), the team as a whole—with the help of Ruskowski’s and Magnuson’s new leadership roles—blossomed. The Hawks finished with a much-improved 87 points, their best total in six years. They would also finally break their 16-game playoff losing streak, an unfortunate NHL record, by sweeping the Blues in the first round. They were then knocked out by the Buffalo Sabres, as the RPM Line finished the regular season with 39, 31, and 15 goals respectively for Mulvey, Preston, and Ruskowski (in addition to 26 from gifted newcomer Tom Lysiak, who had come from Atlanta). The energized Ruskowski also finished fifth in the league in penalty minutes with 252, while feeding his linemates often, totaling 55 assists.