by Ron MacLean
Dick Jr., who graduated from McGill University in 1953, played for the varsity team, the Redmen. Their home rink was the Forum, and they practised each day at noon, which meant his dad’s team would skate off and his team would skate on.
He got to watch all the Canadiens games for free because he worked in the press box, keeping statistics for his dad. Dick Sr. was one of the first coaches to use them. He’d have his son watch for different things on different nights—from faceoffs to body checks to hits—and Dick Jr. would always keep track of who was on the ice when the goals were scored.
On April 16, 1953, the Canadiens beat the Boston Bruins to win the Stanley Cup. Elmer Lach, who died at the age of ninety-seven in April 2015, scored the overtime winner in Game Five. The only tears Dick Jr. shed this time were tears of joy.
The next year, 1954, Montreal played Detroit in the finals, and the Red Wings won Game Seven in overtime. This time, the winning goal was scored on goaltender Gerry McNeil by Doug Harvey—he punched at the puck in the air to try to knock it down, and it deflected into the net. Years later, when Dick Jr. was writing his book The Habs, Gerry told him, “You guys [the media] call it the Leswick goal, after Tony Leswick, the Wings forward who got credit for it. I call it the Harvey goal.”
The next year was Dick Sr.’s last in Montreal. It was the year of the Richard Riot. Maurice Richard was hockey’s top goal scorer. Dick Sr. told his son that Richard not only scored his way to the top, but he fought his way to the top too. So it rocked the hockey world when NHL president Clarence Campbell suspended the Rocket for the last three games of the season in addition to the entire playoffs for hitting linesman Cliff Thompson. The official story was that Hal Laycoe, a Boston defenceman, hit the Rocket with a hard check late in the third period, cutting him in the face with a high stick. So Rocket went after Laycoe, cross-checking him in the mouth. And when Thompson tried to pull Richard away from the fracas, Richard threw a left hook and got him in the jaw.
Richard, Dick Sr. and Canadiens executive Ken Reardon—who would be inducted into the Hall of Fame ten years later—went to the hearing together. In his book The Habs, Dick Jr. says Reardon defended the Rocket, and when he came out of the meeting his shirt and suit coat were soaking wet with sweat. Richard didn’t lie and say it was a mistake, that he’d lost his balance or anything like that. He admitted that he had gone after Laycoe, but said he was mad because Thompson kept grabbing him from behind and jumping on him while Laycoe delivered some retaliatory punches. Dick Sr. stuck up for the Rocket too, but Campbell sided with the official. Laycoe later told Dick Jr. that there were no hard feelings between him and the Rocket. “Hell,” he said, “we used to play tennis in the summertime.”
The Canadiens played the Detroit Red Wings at the Montreal Forum four nights later, and Richard was in the stands. Clarence Campbell sat in a box seat a few feet from him. Campbell had been advised not to go to the game that night, but he said there was no way he was going to be bulldozed or intimidated into staying away. Between periods, there was a lot of unrest. Fans pelted Campbell with tomatoes, eggs and programs. A guy ran up to Campbell, pretending he was going to shake hands, and instead he threw a sucker punch. Jimmy Orlando, a tough guy who had played for the Red Wings, had followed the guy up the stairs. Dick Jr. says that as soon as he saw Mr. Campbell slapped, Jimmy grabbed the attacker “and just drilled him. There were teeth flying in all directions.”
At the end of the first period, with Detroit up 4–1, someone threw a tear gas canister into the crowd and it landed right in front of Dick Jr. His eyes wouldn’t stop tearing and his lungs were on fire, so he joined 15,000 other fans who made their way outside for fresh air. After a few minutes, Dick Jr. stopped choking and his eyes started to clear. The fans were upset, but aside from shouting and protesting with signs, everything seemed under control. And then the taverns and bars began to empty onto the street and the real trouble started. Rioters picked up bottles and huge chunks of ice and started breaking windows. They overturned cars and started looting shops. Eight policemen and twenty-five fans were injured and sixteen people were arrested. The game was forfeited to Detroit. Dick Jr. says that Kenny Reardon always insisted that the bomb had been set by the police to clear the building.
Losing to Detroit meant Dick Sr. had a tough job ahead of him. But as much as he was a terrible loser, he kept calm that night, before and after the loss. The Canadiens wound up in the finals against Detroit, who took the series, but even without Richard the series went all the way to Game Seven.
Dick Sr. had had a tough season. Some days he didn’t feel so hot, and he took it out on the players. At the end of the year, he was offered a chance to stay with the Canadiens, but not as coach. He had just accepted an offer from Jim Norris with the Blackhawks, who were in last place, when he was diagnosed with bone cancer. He took some pills—he called them his “blockbusters”—which enabled him to live a pretty normal life for another year as coach of the 1955–56 Chicago Blackhawks. The only thing that was different for Dick Sr. was that he couldn’t skate. His legs were too weak.
The Hawks improved a bit, but they ended the season in last place again. About a week into training camp the following September, he called the players together. Years later, in 2012, Forbes Kennedy—a small, tough checker who was in the dressing room at the time—met up with Dick Jr. and me in Charlottetown when we were shooting Hockey Day in Canada. He told us what Dick Sr. said to the team that day. “I’ve always asked you guys to give me 100 per cent, and now I can’t give you 100 per cent, so I am going to have to leave.” Forbes said players in the room were crying. It was a scene he’ll never forget. Dick Sr. died at home in the spring of 1957. He was sixty-four years old.
Dick Sr.’s death wasn’t the end of hockey for the Irvin family. In 1961, Dick Jr. quit his job at Shell Oil and got into the broadcasting business. He was always fascinated when he watched his dad interviewed. Dick Sr. had been involved in a couple of broadcasting milestones. He played in the first hockey game ever broadcast on radio—March 15, 1923, when he was a centre for the Regina Capitals of the Western Canada Hockey League. They were up against the Edmonton Eskimos that night. And on October 11, 1952, he coached and won in the first game ever televised in Canada, a 2–1 win for Montreal against Detroit.
After he left Shell, Dick Jr. says Frank Selke Sr., the Canadiens’ general manager, made him the official scorer at the games at the Forum. But the job wasn’t quite panning out, so Dick had lined up a job as a teacher in the Montreal school system.
The owners of CFCF radio in Montreal had just been granted the city’s first private television licence, and they’d hired a broadcaster named Brian McFarlane to become the station’s sports director. But Brian was by himself and feeling overwhelmed. During one Saturday night broadcast, Dick was invited on as part of a hockey panel. The station was looking for on-air talent, and they were impressed with what he said on the show, so they asked him to come back for an audition, but later changed their minds and let him know they wanted somebody with experience instead. Thinking he was going to have a crack at going into the business had convinced Dick he wanted to be a broadcaster. Now, all he needed was a chance to audition.
Doug Smith, a successful broadcaster from Calgary, was Danny Gallivan’s predecessor in Montreal. In the early ’40s, Doug had written Dick Sr., whom he’d never met, wondering if he, as a fellow westerner, could help Doug land an audition with the Montreal Canadiens broadcasting team. Dick Sr. did that, and Smith got the job.
So now Dick Jr. went to see Doug, who told him that Brian McFarlane owed him a favour. “He’s really struggling in this market right now and you are just the guy they need. You leave it with me.”
By the time Dick walked through his front door that night, the phone was ringing. It was Brian who said, “You know, Dick, we’ve been discussing this, and maybe we’ll give you the audition after all.”
Dick wrote out a sportscast in longhand, bought a humongous tape recorder, and sat in h
is basement and practised. When he arrived at the studio and they started recording, he noticed a guy holding up three fingers. Dick wasn’t sure what was going on, so he just kept reading. Soon after, the guy held up two fingers, and Dick still didn’t have a clue what the fellow was up to. A minute later, the guy held up one finger, and suddenly Dick realized it was about timing! So he wrapped up. Brian came in, gave him a quick interview, slapped his knees and said, “You’re just the guy I want.” Dick was offered the job at $75 per week.
Dick consulted with a family friend, Lyman Potts, who was an experienced executive at CJAD radio in Montreal. Dick said, “I’m not sure I should get into the business. My voice is too squeaky.” And Lyman replied, “You can whistle sports and nobody will care.”
Dick was supposed to observe at CFCF for six weeks, but they were short-staffed, so he was put on the air after nine days. On his way to work on August 8, the day of his three-month review, he was convinced he was going to be told, “Thanks, but no thanks. It’s not working out.” But that didn’t happen. In fact, nobody said a word. He started to breathe a bit easier when his next paycheque reflected a $7.50 per week raise.
The CTV network, of which CFCF was part, carried Hockey Night in Canada’s Wednesday games. Dan Kelly, a CBC employee in Ottawa, was Danny Gallivan’s colour man in Montreal, but the CBC wouldn’t let Kelly appear on CTV, so there was an opening. Dick got the job. He started on as a part-timer in the fall of 1965. The next year, Dick did play-by-play on a Montreal Junior Canadiens game. Scotty Bowman was the coach and Jacques Lemaire scored a hat trick.
Today, announcers may be assigned to work a game anywhere—Toronto tonight, Montreal tomorrow, New York the next day. But in those days, Montreal and Toronto had their own distinct broadcast teams. So Danny Gallivan and Dick were never allowed to do a game from Maple Leaf Gardens, while Leaf broadcasters Brian McFarlane and Bill Hewitt never covered games from the Montreal Forum. That was the way it went. The people in Toronto had to suffer through Dick and Danny, and the people in Montreal had to listen to what they perceived as Bill and Brian’s home team–loving broadcast.
Dick eventually got to work the Saturday games carried by CBC, making him the only guy who ever worked full time for CTV and CBC at the same time, and it was because his boss in Montreal, a fellow named Bud Hayward, saw the value of having one of his on-air personalities on a national show. So Dick would provide colour for Danny Gallivan at the games, jump into a taxicab and go back up the hill to the north end of town to appear on the CFCF late news that same night.
In 1970, Dick and Danny were on the air for Game Four of the Stanley Cup final between the Boston Bruins and St. Louis Blues, which ended with Bobby Orr’s overtime goal. The broadcast booth in Boston Garden was the only one in the league where they risked being hit by a puck. Dick remembers that, as soon as Bobby’s goal went in, somebody from above threw a beer and both he and Danny were covered in spray. Orr had won the scoring championship that year, so Dick called out, “It’s now officially the year of Bobby Orr in the NHL!”
Today, all the videotape clips of that goal feature Dan Kelly’s call for the CBS network in the States. Dick loved the way Danny Gallivan called that goal, so he asked his producers, “How come whenever I hear that Bobby Orr goal on our show, it’s Dan Kelly and not Danny Gallivan?” He was told that the CBC, lacking storage space on the shelves for videotape, erased their tape. All that’s left is Dick’s memory of Danny’s call.
Dick travelled for thirty-three years with the Montreal Canadiens, doing radio and television, and never had a battle with anybody. To this day, he credits his dad for helping him sound like he knew hockey better than he did. “Some of the smarter things I said, it wasn’t me at all—I was remembering things that he taught me.” Dick was the original media renaissance man. He could do it all—hosting, play-by-play and colour commentary. Today, he says he has trouble with iPhones and iPads, but he doesn’t need one. He’s a living hockey library.
When he retired from CFCF in 1991, they threw a little dinner for him. He got up and thanked everyone, and then said, “You know, no one ever officially told me I got the job here. So for the past thirty years, I’ve been working here on probation.”
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Night Train
I play in a Tuesday night beer league, and my right winger is former NHLer Brad Dalgarno. When Bob Probert was traded to the Soo, he fought Brad Dalgarno, the kid who took over for him as the team tough guy on the Hamilton Steelhawks. Brad did a good job of holding his own in the fight, which took him from a projected second- or third-round draft pick to a first-rounder—sixth overall.
But he was never that guy. He really struggled with a lot of aspects of NHL life, so at twenty-two years of age, he retired. It was an unprecedented move. He stepped away, but after a year of independence, he got the itch to go back. In 1993, he wound up playing with Glenn Healy on a team that upset Mario Lemieux’s Pittsburgh Penguins. Mario’s two-time Stanley Cup champions had won seventeen straight games to end the regular season. They rolled through the first round and then they ran into Brad’s Islanders, coached by Al Arbour. Winning against the Penguins was Brad’s crowning achievement before playing beer-league hockey with me on Tuesday nights. But he’s a dear friend, and a good musician and a really interesting guy.
Brad Dalgarno’s family moved around when he was young. To get ahead in the printing business, his dad accepted opportunities in different cities—Vancouver and, when Brad was five, London, Ontario. His parents wanted Brad to make friends, so they took him down to the Oakridge Arena and signed him up for hockey. He was big for his age but a terrible skater, so he fell on the other kids a lot. In order to stop him from inflicting pain on his new friends, his parents put him in skating school.
He got bigger and more skilled, making better and better teams, but he never had professional hockey in his sights, even when he was a teenager and drafted thirteenth overall by the Brantford Alexanders, the team that moved to Hamilton and became the Steelhawks in 1984.
The Hamilton Steelhawks were full of tough, well-known guys like Bob Probert, Shayne Corson and Jeff Jackson, and Brad was their first-round pick. That meant he got special treatment, which is not a good thing for a rookie.
He was sent to an August camp in Hamilton and was staying at the Royal Connaught Hotel with a veteran roommate. The first afternoon, guys started dropping in. Brad didn’t think anything of it until, after a few pops, one of the guys turned to him said, “All right, time to strip down, Big Guy.” It was time for his rookie initiation.
This took Brad by surprise. “What? No.” But when a few of them grabbed his legs and started hauling off his pants, he said, “Whoa! Whoa! I’ll do it myself.” He was ordered to sit in a little wood-frame chair where his feet and hands were bound and a skate lace was tied around his neck with his room key on one end—the other end was looped around his penis. It took a few guys to pick him up and carry him down the hallway and into the elevator. Someone threw a bucket of ice in his lap and then they ran away after pushing every button, so he stopped at every floor.
Thankfully, the hotel was relatively empty, but each time the door opened, Brad could hear the guys laughing in the stairwell, and when the door would start to close he could hear their feet storming down the cement fire stairs to the next floor.
On one of the last floors, a businessman, all decked out in a suit and tie and holding a briefcase, was ready to get in, but when he saw Brad he stepped back and looked at him, expressionless. As the door slid shut, Brad lifted his head and asked sheepishly whether the guy needed any ice.
Brad continued to travel down to the lobby, where the door slowly opened and there stood a young family. The parents grabbed their kids in a panic and tried to cover their eyes. Brad felt bad for them, and as they ran toward the front desk, he called out, “I’m really sorry about this!” The door began to close when a hand reached i
n and pushed another button. He was on his way back up. It opened on the mezzanine level, where a female security guard was waiting, arms akimbo. She shook her head and said, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
She rode with him to Coach Dave Draper’s floor, where he untied Brad, gave him a towel and escorted him back to his room.
The rookie party was a couple of weeks later, in the preseason. It was held in a big barn in Brantford, between the Massey-Ferguson plants just off the highway. Probert hadn’t been traded yet, and so he was the ringleader. The rookies were instructed to line up at a folding table full of booze, and each guy took turns drinking a tall-boy beer, one of those big red plastic beer cups full of tequila and then just a regular beer. Brad was supposed to shoot the tall boy, chug the tequila and then chug the regular beer. Bang. Bang. Bang. He somehow managed to get through it and pumped his fist in victory! And then he was told to line up again. Later that night, he passed out in a farmer’s field and woke up on his landlady’s doorstep in Hamilton. Half his hair was gone and his eyebrows were shaved off.
Barb, his billet, was a lovely lady. She got him into the house and rustled up some food and looked after him. Finally, he stumbled into the bathroom to take a shower, looked in the mirror and thought, “Oh no.” On his forehead, written in marker, was “Barb sucks.”
Coach Dave Draper and Bob Probert didn’t mesh. Dave had a different way of communicating, and it didn’t work with all of the guys. Instead of saying, “Come on, boys, let’s see some guts out there,” Draper might say, “Come on, fellas, we need some intestinal fortitude today.” He couldn’t handle Probert, who was mercurial. Probie could go from being the sweetest guy in the world to someone in a very dark place. In any case, as Probert says in his book, Tough Guy, Dave Draper had enough and sent him packing.