As the season concluded, the spring of 1980 also brought the end for the playing days of Cliff Koroll, Magnuson’s longtime friend, roommate, and confidant. Koroll joined the Hawks coaching staff as well. In fact, when their playing careers ended, Koroll and Magnuson had donned the Chicago sweater for the exact same span of years (1969 to 1980).
While Magnuson appreciated the opportunity to remain around the ice as a coach, he was torn between professional loyalties; he felt he could no longer split his attention between his two employers. Therefore, as the playoffs came to an end for the team in May, he announced that he was leaving hockey completely behind and resigned from his coaching position.
“I felt my work with Joyce Beverages was suffering because of the time I was putting in with the team, and vice versa,” Magnuson said of the decision. “Being a coach takes a lot more time than being a player, and I got more involved than I thought I would. I felt I owed it to everyone to make a commitment either to Joyce Beverages or the Hawks.”
The decision was not only career-based; there was a more important factor at stake. “My family life was another consideration,” he added. “If I stayed in hockey as an assistant coach, I’d be missing a lot of family activities at night and on the weekend. My wife, Cindy, and our two children [Kevin, now age three and Molly, an infant] are the most important people in my life.”
With the announcement of his departure from the Hawks, the Chicago members of the Professional Hockey Writers’ Association immediately forwarded Magnuson’s name as their nomination for the Bill Masterton Trophy in recognition of his dedication to the sport.
What Magnuson could not foresee, however, was the stunning chain of events that would occur during the next few weeks involving Johnston, Pulford, and the Wirtz family.
Rumors were circulating in the Chicago press that Pulford and Johnston could not come to an agreement on the coach’s contract, with the general manager refusing to raise the compensation by an extra $5,000. Then Johnston, after one successful year, suddenly announced he had been fired by the Black Hawks, and he pulled no punches in referring to Pulford upon his departure.
“He’s incompetent, has no business being a general manager, and the rest of the general managers in the league just laugh at him,” Johnston assessed plainly. He added that he was never told directly by Pulford, Wirtz, or anyone else in the front office that he had been removed—instead receiving the information secondhand (which, if true, appeared to be a continuing pattern in the organization). “I have no respect for that man. It was my conflict with Pulford, not any money disagreements, that led to my dismissal. When it happened to Billy Reay, at least they slipped a Christmas card under his door to let him know,” he continued.
When the paperwork for the dismissal was finalized, Johnston let loose even further in summarizing the past year, claiming that Pulford never listened to him on personnel matters, nor did he once promote a player from the minors whom Johnston suggested. Believing such actions were typical of the administrative side of the team, Verdi wrote in the wake of the move that “the Black Hawks have all the class of a ham sandwich. Public relations to them is not a lost art only because they have never had it.”
The firing, however, must not have been a complete surprise to Johnston; for just three weeks earlier, on May 22, he had been given permission by Wirtz and Pulford to negotiate with other clubs that had openings for a head coach—specifically, the Quebec Nordiques, Pittsburgh Penguins, and Boston Bruins—the last being the club with which Johnston had spent the majority of his playing career.
Johnston also tried to assert that there had been some conflict between him and Magnuson behind the bench, claiming this as another reason he was dismissed, and even suggested that Magnuson went for the assistant coaching position as a way to ultimately lobby for the head coaching spot.
“That’s not true,” Bill Wirtz refuted. “The only reason Eddie is no longer the coach is because he wouldn’t accept our offer [for a new contract].”
As for his own relationship with Johnston, Magnuson was straightforward in his description. “I can look Eddie in the eye,” he said. “The Black Hawks came to me. I didn’t come to them soliciting the [assistant’s] job.”
In fact, Magnuson had been away from the team for several weeks when contacted by Pulford about the position of assistant coach. Furthermore, Johnston’s agent, Bill Watters, confirmed that they had rejected Pulford’s most recent contract offer. Pulford also pointed out that if Johnston had accepted the deal, only three other coaches in the league would have been making more money—Al Arbour with the Islanders (which had just won its first Stanley Cup), Al MacNeil with the Atlanta Flames (a team that was on its way to Calgary), and Roger Neilson with the Buffalo Sabres (Neilson had taken over for Scotty Bowman, who also had been general manager of the Sabres after departing from Montreal with four straight Cups; Fred Shero also had the dual role of head coach and general manager with the New York Rangers. Both Bowman and Shero would have had higher salaries than Johnston as well).
The bottom line was that Johnston was out, and Pulford and the Wirtz family knew that the position needed stability. They decided that the man for the job was Keith Magnuson, and the phone rang at his house at 3:00 in the morning.
“You won’t believe this,” Magnuson said to Cindy as he hung up the phone and rolled over in bed.
“What?” she responded.
“They’d like to know if I want to be coach.”
And as Cindy later described the moment, “We both woke up real quick.”
Just a month after leaving the team as an assistant to work full-time for Joyce Beverages, Magnuson—at age 33—was introduced on June 13, 1980, as the Black Hawks head coach, the team’s fifth in five years. He would be the second-youngest head coach in the league, next to Gary Green of Washington.
“I never thought I’d be a [head] coach in the NHL,” Magnuson told the writers in his first press conference as the top man. “A year ago, or even a month ago, if you told me it would happen, I’d have said ‘Impossible.’ When the job was offered, I talked the decision over with my wife, but we never really considered not taking it. It’s an opportunity that if you passed it up, you’d regret it for the rest of your life.”
In his Tribune column two days after the announcement, Neil Milbert resounded the feeling among the media that Magnuson deserved the opportunity. “The changing of the guard behind the Hawks’ bench was accomplished with very little grace and a great deal of gall,” Milbert decided about the tumultuous turn of events over the past few seasons in Chicago’s leadership. “But Magnuson doesn’t deserve to be made into a scapegoat. For more than a decade, he gave it all he had as a player. Anybody who knows him knows he’s going to be the same kind of coach… [He] is an upstanding individual with immense loyalty and a ravenous appetite for hard work.”
Koroll, standing by his side, joined Magnuson behind the bench as his assistant. Reactions among the coast-to-coast media—both in the United States and Canada—were favorable to the hiring as well.
“Magnuson, whose 10-year career as a Chicago player was characterized by reckless abandon, has given every indication that his coaching style will be rational and relatively relaxed,” reported The Hockey News after Maggie’s first few weeks on the job the following fall. “The stereo still blares after practice. The suds still flow after games. There are many new motivational slogans but no new rules.”
Established NHL coaches were equally impressed with the choice. “Keith is going to be successful,” said Arbour. “He’s very intense, he’s a hard worker, and he applies himself completely to whatever he does.”
Magnuson knew, however, that the position would not come without pitfalls. “It was a tough transition for both Maggie and me,” Koroll admitted. “One year you are playing and partying with your teammates and the next year you are the disciplinarian.”
One such difficult
y was his relationship with Tony Esposito, a rapport which appeared to have recently become strained—and one which Johnston, on his way out the door, predicted would worsen. According to Johnston, word had gotten to Esposito that Magnuson, Pulford, and Jack Davison (the Black Hawks director of player personnel) had berated the goaltender in the early morning hours following a 1980 playoff loss in Buffalo—which Johnston claimed, if true, was a prime example of Magnuson being too “pro-Pulford” in most disagreements the men would have with each other. Verdi, in his June 15 column which attempted to sort out the situation, suggested that the best move for Johnston would have been to sign the contract renewal for 1981 and hire a different assistant coach—pointing to a previous story reporting that Johnston had originally asked Lou Angotti to be his top assistant, but Pulford encouraged him to choose Magnuson instead.
The allegations that Magnuson was anti-Esposito proved to be unfounded. Just days after Magnuson was introduced as head coach, goalie Murray Bannerman was summoned from the minors as the new backup to Esposito and Mike Veisor was traded to Hartford—affirming that Maggie had every intention of Esposito remaining as his full-time man in the nets for at least one more season. Indeed, Esposito would lead the league in games played among goalies in Magnuson’s first year as head coach in 1980–81, with 66, as well as 52 more in his second year.
“Magnuson had said he would break his neck for the Wirtzes, and several times he came close,” Verdi had written back in November 1979 about Keith’s unrelenting style when his retirement from playing was announced. “But that’s the moral of the story. He kept coming. The greatest talent of all, after all, is the talent to work.”
Johnston, meanwhile, was quickly scooped up by Pittsburgh, filling the Penguins’ vacancy at the head coaching position.
* * *
As everyone expected, Magnuson attacked his new role with the same vigor and dedication with which he pursued everything else in his life. “I think we’re going into this season well prepared,” Lysiak, in his second full year with the Hawks, said during training camp. Lysiak had arrived in a blockbuster trade with Atlanta in March 1979 that saw Ivan Boldirev, Phil Russell, and Darcy Rota depart. “Maggie has brought us along gradually—a little harder, a little harder, a little harder. Everything is very organized. Maggie and Cliff go over what we have to work on and then at practice we apply what we’ve learned. Everybody knows what’s expected. The atmosphere is good. I know I’m happy.”
In addition to Koroll, Magnuson knew there were others to whom he could turn in the early stages of his tenure, including his captain Ruskowski and the quickly improving Mulvey. “Whenever I need something I know I can count on Granny,” Magnuson would say in his first month directing the team. “He and Terry are always there to help.”
Back in 1974, as a 17-year-old, Mulvey had been picked up at O’Hare Airport by Magnuson upon arriving in Chicago, and he could sense Maggie’s enthusiasm for the Hawks from the moment he got into the car. Keith immediately took an interest in mentoring Mulvey, even asking about his plans for a post-hockey career. In the fall of 1980, newly acquired forward Peter Marsh was the latest arrival to be greeted near O’Hare by Magnuson—with Keith’s toddlers Kevin and Molly in tow in the backseat.
The impressions that Magnuson as a coach—and earlier as a veteran teammate—made upon Mulvey made a lasting impact. Mulvey recalled a game in Montreal in which Magnuson got hit from the side, flew into the boards awkwardly, and actually broke his back. Magnuson returned to the lineup much quicker than anyone would ever have expected—wearing a back brace as he labored his way around the ice at practice, while suiting up for games when he could do so. At that point, Mulvey had yet to experience a significant injury during his time in hockey, but would ultimately deal with many later in his career. Magnuson’s example had shown Mulvey the courage that was needed to keep playing in the NHL. “I saw that and I told myself, ‘I have to give more,’” Mulvey said.
But as cerebral and prepared as Magnuson was in his approach to the game as a player, he found the new learning curve as a head coach even steeper. “There’s so much to learn back there,” Magnuson said of being behind the bench. “The most important thing is to be aware of the situation and be under control. If you’re not under control, the players will sense it and they’ll go out of control.”
His openness with Cindy permitted him to accept her advice regularly, even on hockey matters—which included the idea of offering the players an occasional Monday off from practice if they worked hard in a Sunday night game—and which usually turned out to be the right move.
The hard work through which Maggie put the team in training camp paid off. The Hawks lost only one of their first six games, capped by an 8–4 shellacking of the Washington Capitals at the Stadium on October 19, the night Stan Mikita’s jersey No. 21 was retired. Mikita, unable to return from the back surgery he had endured in November 1979, had retired after playing in only 17 games during the previous season. He left hockey owning essentially every scoring record in Black Hawks team history except goals, though his 541 in that category is still second only to Bobby Hull’s 604.
Like the Hawks teams of the past years, however, the team would fall into a dreadful slump after their quick start, dropping to a 12–21–6 record by January 1.
“He began questioning himself and his own abilities,” wrote Tribune columnist Skip Myslenski about Magnuson’s first stiff test at the controls. “Frequently he spent full nights in his office watching endless reels of film and searching for a formula that would right the situation.”
Often Koroll joined him for the marathon film sessions, and they watched tapes of the Canadiens, Islanders, Bruins, and even successful international teams, such as the Soviet and Czechoslovakian national teams, looking for patterns in their play. Once, while the coach of the Czechoslovakian team was in Chicago, Magnuson took him out to breakfast five straight mornings in an effort to get him to talk hockey strategy. At other times, players would knock on Magnuson’s office door in looking to have a word with him—only to find the coach asleep on the sofa in front of a television, worn out from his work. “You kind of felt sorry for him,” Ruskowski said. “You could see the red eyes from sleepless nights.”
A spark was found, however, in the play of 19-year-old rookie center Denis Savard and the budding defenseman Doug Wilson, and a new winning streak soon began. By January 21, the Hawks had won seven in a row when the Montreal Canadiens came to town. Even though it was a Wednesday night in the dead of the Chicago winter, one of the few sold-out crowds of the year filled the Stadium. Maggie’s boys beat the Habs 4–2 for their eighth straight victory. In Magnuson’s tenure as a head coach, he would never be prouder of his young team.
“From the first shifts I could see that our players were up,” Keith said that evening, “that they were confident, that they were in control, all the things I had been hoping for. And the crowd was solidly behind them. A lot of people may not realize how much that helps.”
“They are growing into wanting to win and hating to lose,” he would add later, “and that’s something you can’t teach them as a coach. They’ve got to experience it for themselves.”
The team battled to reach the .500 mark by season’s end in April 1981 but fell just short, finishing at 31–33–16. In spite of the impressive sprint at the end, the Hawks reverted to their old ways, again suffering yet another first-round sweep in the playoffs. This time it was the Calgary Flames eliminating them in three straight, despite taking the Flames to a knockdown, drag-out, Maggie-style game in the last contest in the Stadium, claimed by Calgary in two overtime periods by a 5–4 final score.
His first season as the head coach concluded, Magnuson immediately began his work again, insisting on building a long-lasting program—and staying positive for his charges. “As a player, I got down on myself after a loss,” he admitted. “That’s the way I prepared myself for the next game. But here, I
have to pick everyone up and say, ‘Hey, let’s forget it.’”
In overseeing the Hawks draft a few weeks after the end of the playoffs, he approved the choice of Tony Tanti, a high-scoring forward who had posted 81 goals in his first season with the Oshawa Generals in the Juniors system, as a 17-year-old. As time went along, Magnuson was learning further about the proper balance that a head coach needed to find between admonishment and encouragement.
“The thing about coaching,” he said, “your own character has to come out, but it can’t come out so strong that you’re forcing it on other people. They’re all individuals, and to get the best out of everybody, you have to approach them on their own level.”
A frustrating aspect of coaching for Magnuson was some players’ lack of self-motivation necessary for success. “As a performer, he eternally played and practiced with fire in his soul,” Myslenski had written in the midst of a troubling period for the team. “As a coach, he must accept that the fire doesn’t burn so brightly in the souls of all his players.” It was an element ever-present in his own play whenever he stepped onto the ice. “He’s in a very tough situation,” added Bob Murray early in the 1981–82 season. “He’s used to experienced teams, which he played on, and this is an inexperienced team.”
Every loss gnawed at him, as he was no longer able to jump on the ice a provide a hip check, a poke check, or a punch to jump-start his team. “Everybody feels the pressure,” he said in an exasperated tone to Neil Milbert. “If anybody doesn’t feel the pressure in this situation, he’s not worth his salt. If you like your job and want to do well at it, you have to feel the pressure.”
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