The Way The Hockey World Was: An Excerpt from “Revival”
CHAPTER ONE: A State of Distemper
“Violence in hockey. Violence in hockey. I’m going to kill the next person who asks me about violence in hockey.” Keith Allen, general manager of the Philadelphia Flyers (1967–83)
The Leafs weren’t tough compared to the teams around them, a fact demonstrated vividly in the rather comical, rather embarrassing Eddie Shack incident of January 12, 1974. Shack was almost a vaudeville-type character for much of hiscareer. He was born in Sudbury, grew up illiterate, starred for the Guelph Biltmores juniors and signed with the Rangers. He was nearly traded to Detroit in 1960 in a deal for Red Kelly, but Kelly wouldn’t report to Manhattan. Shack was then traded that fall to the Leafs for Pat Hannigan and Johnny Wilson, the first of six trades in his career. He stayed with the Leafs for four Cups and had one 26-goal season playing with Ron Ellis and Bob Pulford that inspired the song “Clear the Track, Here Comes Shack,” performed by Douglas Rankine and The Secrets. In late February 1966, the song landed at the top of the CHUM Chart, the flagship radio station’s ranking of record sales in the Toronto market. The single managed to briefly beat out songs by, among others, Petula Clark, Herman’s Hermits, the Beach Boys, the Supremes and the Beatles. “The Entertainer” was born.
Shack bounced from Toronto to Boston, then to Los Angeles, then to Buffalo, then to Pittsburgh. Teams still liked him, but for short periods of time. He was sold again to the Leafs by the Penguins in the summer of 1973. By then he was 36 years old, not the effective player he’d once been, but now even more energetically motivated to sell his personal brand. He was overjoyed to be back with the Leafs and returned wearing, in the words of a photo cutline in the Star, a “gay 90s handlebar moustache.”
Shack had fought plenty of times over the years, and teammatessaid he had been tough. But he was at the end of his career. The closest thing the Leafs had to policemen were Mike Pelyk and Brian Glennie, plus a young Bob Neely. None were heavyweight enforcers. When the Blues came to town that January night, they had Steve Durbano, the Plager brothers, Bob Gassoff and J. Bob Kelly, one of the most feared fighters in the sport. The pack mentality was the new way of the NHL, and the Blues had it. The Leafs did not.
Shack played only two shifts the entire game. In the first period, while Sittler was involved in an altercation with Barclay Plager, Shack gave Plager a poke, enraging Durbano, who had gained a reputation as a dangerous player on the ice. Durbano was tossed for being third man in on a fight, while Shack got a minor and a major but stayed in the game. “[The referee] told me I was out for being the third man in a fight, but there’s no question that Shack was the third man,” said Durbano. “I just got involved to even things up, but apparently the referee counts one-two-four. I tried to get at Shack in the penalty box to take him with me, but they closed the door before I got to him.”
The Blues’ anger over the apparent injustice simmered for the rest of the night. In the third period, responding to “We Want Shack” chants, the veteran winger was sent out for a second shift. Play hadn’t even started before Shack, wearing a white turtleneck shirt underneath his uniform, was backpedalling around the ice with Bob Kelly, Bob Plager, Phil Roberto and Pierre Plante all in pursuit. Shack glided all the way into the Leaf zone, behind the Toronto net, then back up ice towards the red line. It was a bizarre, silly scene. “Depending on one’s viewpoint, Shack’s performance was either cute, amusing or absurd,” wrote Frank Orr. Kelly and Roberto got game misconducts, as did Garry Unger for trying to restrain Kelly. “I went after him because he’s an idiot, that’s all,” said Kelly. “Did you ever see anybody turn his tail and run that way? There isn’t another player in the league who wouldn’t at least try to fight a little in that situation.” The Blues mocked Shack. “I found out one thing—Eddie can skate backwards faster than I can skate forward because I couldn’t catch him,” said Bob Plager. “There will come a time when Shackie has to stand and fight, although I doubt I’ll live long enough to see it. The Leafs only use him when they’re well ahead and that might not happen again.”
The Leafs had a different take. “I’d say Shack played it very smart,” said coach Red Kelly, defending his old Toronto teammate. “He would have taken them on one at a time, but what chance did he have against four of them?” Hockey had long been a sport where players were expected to stand up for themselves. The pack mentality had, however, altered the equation. Darryl Sittler remembers sitting on the bench as an impressionable young player watching Shack’s antics. “It ticked us off, because [Shack] was an agitator and then didn’t stay to fight his battle,” says Sittler. “It made us look bad.”
All of this either annoyed Leafs owner Harold Ballard or it inspired him. He’d been out of jail for only a few months, having served a sentence for fraud, and his background as a promoter saw opportunity. Ballard certainly didn’t mind a sideshow if it meant selling more tickets. “We’ve got to mold a lineup that can take on a bunch of goons,” he said. “I’m looking for guys you toss raw meat to and they will go wild.”
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As always, most hockey folks defended the game. “The only thing violent about hockey is the language,” said (NHL president Clarence ) Campbell. He also stated, “If violence ceases to exist, it will not be the same game.” Bobby Clarke, captain of the Flyers, said aloud what many quietly feared. “If they cut down on violence, people won’t come out to watch,” he declared. “Let’s face it, more people come out to watch Dave Schultz than Bobby Orr. It’s a reflection of our society. People want to see violence.”
For the Leafs, the objective was to be able to go toe-to-toe with the feared Flyers. On April 17, 1976, after a Leafs–Flyers playoff game in Toronto, police charged Don Saleski, Joe Watson and Mel Bridgman after a penalty-box incident in which a police officer was struck with a stick. Fans were screaming at Saleski and Dave Schultz in the box, which was much less of a safe haven and more exposed than it is today. Schultz threw ice at the fans and one stepped forward to challenge Saleski, who stood up and waved his stick in retaliation, until it was grabbed by policeman Art Malloy. Flyer reinforcements arrived, including Watson, who allegedly hit Malloy with his stick. Bridgman, meanwhile, had attacked Borje Salming earlier in the game, at one point delivering 11 uncontested punches as he knelt over the Leaf defenceman. “I can’t see where a game like this will do hockey much good,” bemoaned Leaf forward Scott Garland. “This looked like the damned roller derby with a fight every two or three minutes. I thought playoff hockey was supposed to represent the best of our game, not the worst it has to offer.”
Fred Shero, the Flyers coach, blamed the fans. “Of the 17,000 people in this place, I bet 1,000 of them aren’t all there,” he said. “They let their emotions get to them. They spit on players, curse at them, throw things at them. Some night a guy is going to come in Some night a guy is going to come in here with a loaded gun.”
In the midst of all this pandemonium, a movie destined to become a sports classic was being filmed in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Slap Shot, written by screenwriter Nancy Dowd and starring matinee idol Paul Newman, was loosely based on the 1974–75 Johnstown Jets, a team in the North American Hockey League. Dowd’s brother, Ned, had been part of the Johnstown team and used his tape recorder to capture the daily banter of locker-room life, providing his sister with priceless insider information on how hockey players thought, talked and behaved. “Ned would call me from these various towns—Utica, Syracuse, New Haven—and tell me how he was being beaten up and having his teeth knocked out,” she said. “It sort of fascinated me.”The movie debuted on February 25, 1977. The night before, the Los Angeles Kings (now with the notorious Schultz on their roster) had engaged in a violent game with Vancouver that included nine fights and a bench-clearing brawl. The movie, then, was art imitating life in real time. The Slap Shot trailer called it the “story of one man trying to hang on in a world gone absurd.” It was the story of a minor-league player-coach named Reg Dunlop, played by Newman, who sees adding goons to his lineup as a way to sell tickets and save the franchise from being sold and moved out of the blue-collar town. “The film almost never got made,” said Newman. “George Roy Hill, who had directed The Sting and Butch Cassidy [and the Sundance Kid] sent me the script and I read it on a Tuesday night, or a Wednesday. I called him on Thursday and I said, ‘It’s foul-mouthed, but boy, it’s real and beautiful and let’s do it,’ and he said, ‘I was afraid you’d say that.’” In the movie, the main team is fictionalized as the Johnstown Chiefs, a team in the so-called Federal League. One of the characters, Ogie Oglethorpe, was based on minor-league goon Bill “Goldie” Goldthorpe, who in one season had 25 fights in 29 games before Christmas. Ned Dowd played Oglethorpe in the movie. In fact, a number of professional players were involved, including Bruce Boudreau, future NHL coach and a 1975 draft pick of the Leafs. Boudreau had decided to play in the WHA with the Minnesota Fighting Saints instead of signing with the Leafs, and when the Saints folded halfway through the 1975–76 season, he had landed with the Johnstown Jets.
For two weeks in March 1976, the film was shot in Johnstown. The location used as Reggie Dunlop’s home in the movie was actually Boudreau’s $25 a month apartment, chosen because it was so messy. “The Jets would have to practice somewhere else and then would return to the arena in the afternoon to be in shoots for the movie,” recalls Boudreau. “Paul Newman was a great, down-to-earth guy. He carried a bag that looked like an archery bag to carry arrows in. But it was filled with Coors Light cans and Newman would drink them all day. He would have beers at the rink with the players and cast. Just shooting the breeze. He had just turned 50 and would skate the odd time, but he wasn’t a good skater.” One day, Boudreau was invited back to the hotel to watch the “dailies,” footage that had been shot that day. “For whatever reason it ended up being just me, Dave Hanson, Paul Newman and the director, George Roy Hill,” recalls Boudreau. Looking back, he admits he thought it was more of a lark than a film destined to become a hit. “But Newman said, ‘I did my last movie, [The Life and Times of] Judge Roy Bean, just for the money. This movie is going to be a big hit,’” adds Boudreau.
In fact, the movie was destined to become a cult classic, but it did not paint a flattering picture of professional hockey. It was both an exposé and a cartoon at the same time, including various racist and misogynistic scenes and even a bus driver wearing a swastika on his hat. The final scene was eerily reminiscent of Shack’s weird antics that night in Toronto. Both teams are brawling when one of Dunlop’s pacifist teammates, Ned Braden (played by Michael Ontkean), hops on the ice and begins an elaborate striptease while slowly skating around the ice, accompanied by music. One by one, the players stop fighting to watch. The absurdity is punctuated when the character Tim “Dr. Hook” McCracken (Paul stops brawling long enough to protest that Braden’s exhibition is “disgusting.” “This is a serious game, not a freak show!” screams McCracken, his face and jersey covered in blood. The referee responds by shouting, “A serious game? What are you talking about, huh? This is hockey!” McCracken hauls off and slugs the referee. The championship is then awarded to the Jets, and Braden carries it around the rink wearing only skates and a jockstrap.
In the New York Daily News, Rex Reed wrote that Slap Shot was “violent, bloody and thoroughly revolting.” Newsweek’s review was more encouraging, suggesting the film was “tough, smart, cynical and sentimental—the key ingredients in our new pop populism.” More than four decades later, it’s now described on iTunes as a “swaggering celebration of testosterone.” On the film’s 40th anniversary in 2017, Rolling Stone magazine said it was “Rowdy, raunchy, hilarious, absurd, deeply depressing and profoundly human. . . There’s no jerking of tears or pulling of heartstrings, no big lessons to be learned beyond the harsh reminder that sports is a business; the passion of its fans and the heroics of its players are ultimately less important than the clang of the cash register.”
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This was hockey’s landscape in 1978 when the Leafs and Islanders met in the quarter-finals of the playoffs. One violent incident after another; little action from the league bosses; enough evidence to lay criminal charges, but rarely enough to convict hockey players. So, what model would other teams follow? Go full “Slap Shot,” or develop and emphasize skill at the risk of getting mugged every night?
The Leafs had been in business for 61 years, the Islanders for seven. Toronto couldn’t really call upon the memories of its last Cup win in 1967 for guidance, as the sport had changed so radically. It was a brand-new game and an entirely different industry. Jim Gregory, who had learned at the feet of Punch Imlach, managed to put together a group of talented young players, but with Roger Neilson in charge as coach, the team had exchanged some of that skill for muscle. They were not going to be a team that allowed four players from an opposing squad to chase one of theirs around the ice.They were determined to be the hammer, not the nail.
The Islanders, established as an NHL expansion franchise along with Atlanta in 1972, largely in an attempt to keep the WHA out of those markets, had used the draft to gradually build a talented team, piece by piece. In the spring of 1978, the Islanders won the Patrick Division for the first time, beating out the Flyers. “They were feeling so good about themselves. They really had enjoyed nothing but success,” recalls Larry Brooks, then a rookie beat writer with the New York Post. “That season, they’d finished on such a high, winning the division. I wouldn’t say they overlooked the Leafs, but they certainly weren’t ready for what the Leafs threw at them.” As the series wore on, the Leafs taunted the Islanders, on and off the ice. Tiger Williams called the Islanders “a bunch of fairies,” adding, “If they can’t take it then they shouldn’t be in the game.” Roger Neilson, the supposedly educated, progressive coach, orchestrated it all. “We’re going to play as rough as they’ll letus,” said Neilson.
In 1978, the era of Slap Shot, that was as far as you were willing to go.