Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Shoots and Scores (5 page)

After landing good marks in high school Latin, Garrett studied it at the college level. When he was questioned about the usefulness of a dead language, he replied, “It will be handy to have it if I ever meet an ancient Roman because we'll be able to have a great conversation.” Garrett also studied Hebrew briefly while playing with the Quebec Nordiques. His goaltending partner, Dan Bouchard, was a devout born-again Christian, which inspired Garrett to call them “the perfect tandem.”

“Dan can make contact with all those biblical characters up above, then I can translate what they say for him.”

AND THEIR FATHER WAS A BIT SQUIRRELLY

Then there were the Plager brothers, Barclay, Bob and Billy, three tough, hearty, self-deprecating defencemen from northern Ontario who were serious about everything on the ice, full-time laughers off it. The sons of longtime amateur hockey referee Gus Plager, Barc and Bob had long NHL careers with the St. Louis Blues, and Billy a shorter stint with three teams.

With Bob as the leading laugh-getter, the Plagers specialized in tales about growing up in hockey hotbed Kirkland Lake. “In Kirkland Lake, they called our father ‘Squirrel' because he raised three nuts,” Bob said. “If we had a disagreement, Gus would send us into the backyard to settle it. I would beat up Bob, Bob would beat up Bill, [and Bill] would go down the street and beat up our cousin, who never could quite figure out why he was always getting pummeled when he hadn't done anything.”

BEAM ME UP, SCOTTY

In junior hockey, Barclay (with Peterborough) had a fight with Bob (with Guelph) that is part of hockey folklore. They used
sticks, fists, and even tried a few kicks. They fought on the ice, in the arena corridors and the dressing rooms. Both were cut and bleeding at the finish. When they had a post-game meeting in a restaurant, everyone expected the furniture to fly. “Barc just wanted to borrow five bucks and tell me that our mom was complaining that I didn't write home enough,” Bob said.

Bob's specialty was jokes about Scotty Bowman, who coached the Blues to the Stanley Cup final in the first three years of their existence and brought the Plagers to the team. “Scotty once told me that the higher up you are to watch a game, the slower it looks,” Plager said, “and when I watch you, Plager, I figure I'm on the
Starship Enterprise
.” Barclay best defined the hockey fighter's credo when he said, “It's not how many fights you win; it's how many you show up for.”

COACH'S CHUCKLE

While not all coaches had Neale's wit, a few others overcame the tendency of the job to turn men dour. Another man who later found success in television was Don Cherry, who turned coaching the Boston Bruins into great fun in the 1970s. Cherry became a fixture on
Hockey Night in Canada
with his outspoken “Coach's Corner” segment. Cherry had an 18-season playing career, all in the minors except for one 1955 game with the Bruins. “When I was a kid, I prayed for enough talent to be a pro hockey player,” Cherry said. “I forgot to say NHL, though, because they only gave me enough to make the minor leagues.” Another coach who was always quick with the quip was Fred Shero, who guided the Philadelphia Flyers in their Broad Street Bully days. Once asked what it was like to live life in the fast lane, Shero replied, “I don't live in the fast lane; I live on the off-ramp.”

* * * * *

“Sometimes when I make a good save I yell out, ‘Woo-Hooo!' I'm not sure why, but it just feels good. I don't think I scare anyone or freak anyone out when I do it. I just like to holler when I make a tough stop.”

—Marc-Andre Fleury

Through history, many NHL team owners have been off-the-wall characters but few were as eccentric as Major Frederic McLaughlin.

C
onn Smythe, founder and longtime owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs, supplied a strong assessment of Major Frederic McLaughlin, owner of the Chicago Black Hawks for their first 18 NHL seasons: “Where hockey was concerned, McLaughlin was the strangest bird,” said Smythe, himself a unique personality. “In fact, he was the biggest nut I met in my entire life.”

SPELLING NOT A STRONG POINT AT HARVARD

Son of a wealthy coffee importer, McLaughlin was a Harvard grad and a top polo player who commanded the 33rd Machine Gun Battalion of the U.S. Army's 85th Blackhawk Division in World War I. Purchasing the Chicago franchise during the 1926 NHL expansion into the U.S., he picked the name Black Hawks for his team. The two-word spelling was used until research in the 1990s revealed that the army division employed the one-worded Blackhawks, and the official name was adjusted. Through his days as Hawk owner—and often as general manager—McLaughlin fought never-ending skirmishes against the other owners.

GOODNIGHT IRENE

A tall man of almost regal bearing, McLaughlin was a major figure in Chicago society in the Roaring Twenties. He had married Irene Castle, the widow of Vernon Castle, her partner in a popular dance team featured in Broadway shows and nightclubs. Irene designed the black and white uniforms worn by the hockey team, and the aboriginal head crest resembling Chief Black Hawk, a Sauk tribal leader in the Illinois region during the early 1800s. The uniform outlasted Irene. In a 1937 divorce action against McLaughlin, Irene claimed that their palatial suburban home was so chilly that her three dogs had to wear sweaters in the house.

THIS TEAM STINKS!

Tex Rickard, the legendary New York promoter behind Madison Square Garden and the NHL Rangers, sold McLaughlin on hockey as a good investment. McLaughlin bought the players, including stars Dick Irvin and Babe Dye, from the Portland Rosebuds and Vancouver Maroons of the defunct Western League for $125,000, making his Chicago club competitive quickly. Home arena for the Hawks was the 6,000 seat Chicago Coliseum that smelled of another big attraction—cattle shows. When the Norris family, an NHL ownership power for decades, applied for a second Chicago franchise, McLaughlin refused to share the market. That set off a long, bitter feud between two rich entities—the Major and the Norris clan.

BACK AT THE RANCH

When the $7 million Chicago Stadium was completed in 1929, James Norris founded the Chicago Shamrocks of the American Hockey Association for his new building. But when that league folded, McLaughlin moved the Black Hawks into the new house on a three-year lease. When the Stadium was deep in debt, Norris bought it plus another money-losing hockey house, the Detroit Olympia, and a big share of the Madison Square Garden Corporation. With his arch-enemy Norris owning the Stadium, McLaughlin took the Hawks back to the Coliseum to open the 1932–33 season. Despite small crowds, McLaughlin was adamant against threats from Norris that he honor his Stadium contract. Finally, the NHL ordered the Hawks to play in the Stadium.

FOUR OUT OF FIVE NHL PRESIDENTS SAY…

That season, Norris purchased the bankrupt Detroit Falcons, changed the name to Red Wings, and had a seat on the NHL Board of Governors. McLaughlin's boardroom scraps with Norris were legendary, but he also found time to clash with Art Ross of the Boston Bruins, the Rangers' Lester Patrick and Smythe of the Maple Leafs. “Instead of thinking of ways to make the league better, the governors' meetings were mostly the rest of us trying to straighten out the latest lunatic idea from that guy in Chicago,” Smythe said years later. “He didn't know a damned thing about hockey but still shot off his mouth.”

A TRAIN OF COACHES

The coaches of the team seemed among his favorite foes. In his 18 seasons as owner, McLaughlin changed coaches 18 times, involving 13 men. The Major was involved in what surely is the NHL's most unusual coach-hiring. In 1932, he was on a train from Minneapolis to Chicago and he chatted with seat-mate Godfrey Matheson, a Winnipeg native with assorted theories on hockey. Before the train arrived, McLaughlin had hired Matheson to coach the Black Hawks.

When the players arrived in Pittsburgh for training camp that fall, they found Matheson on the ice in his suit and tie, elbow pads over his coat, knee pads over his trousers. Instead of wearing skates, he was on all fours in the corner of the ice with a pail of pucks, sliding passes by hand for the players to shoot at the net. To keep the team's great goalie Charlie Gardiner from any risk of injury, Matheson had a stuffed figure in full goaltending equipment stationed in front of the net.

Matheson's coaching stint lasted for two games (both losses), then he was replaced by Emil Iverson, another unknown, who had the job for 23 games. Veteran NHL coach Tommy Gorman finished the season as Hawk coach, then guided the team to its first Stanley Cup victory in the 1933–34 season. Of course, McLaughlin's response was to fire Gorman.

MAJOR FRED WANTS
YOU
TO JOIN THE HAWKS

McLaughlin often sounded off about the domination of Canadian players in the NHL and wanted a full roster of U.S. talent. Late in the 1936–37 season, he added five Americans to the four already in the lineup, the team missed the playoffs, and the Major earned derision from rivals for not using the best possible talent at a time when league competition was tight. In the 1937–38 season McLaughlin had a new coach, Bill Stewart, who had been a hockey referee and a big-league baseball umpire in the offseason. The low-scoring team made the playoffs by two points, then eliminated the Montreal Canadiens, New York Americans and the Maple Leafs to win the Cup. Again extraordinary goaltending, this time by Mike Karakas, was a big factor in the victory. Not only did McLaughlin have the satisfaction of nosing out archrival Norris's team for the last playoff spot and claiming the Cup from
his strongest critic, the Leafs' Smythe, but the winning roster also contained eight U.S. players.

AS AN UMPIRE YOU HAVE THE LUNGS, OF COURSE…

Fired early the next season, Stewart had a long, distinguished career as a major league umpire. He later told of McLaughlin pressuring him to coach the Hawks from the balcony for a better view of the ice. “The Major wanted me to be like a puppet master, running the team from the balcony with strings, the way he wanted to run me as coach,” Stewart said. “It's not that nothing the Major said was a surprise because he had so many goofy ideas.”

When McLaughlin died in 1944, his son William, aged 16, inherited the club. The family finally sold it to the Major's long-time enemies, the Norris and Wirtz families, in 1952.

* * * * *

MORE MONEY IN BASEBALL

Tom Glavine, major league baseball pitcher. He was drafted in 1984 by the Los Angeles Kings with the 69th overall pick in the fourth round. That was 48 picks ahead of the 117th pick in the draft who turned out to be future Hall of Famer Brett Hull. It was also 102 picks ahead of another Kings draft pick that season, Luc Robitaille. The number one overall pick that season was Mario Lemieux by the Pittsburgh Penguins. Glavine was the 1995 World Series MVP with the Atlanta Braves and won the National League's Cy Young Award in 1991 and 1998. In 2005, he was set to make over $10 million in salary.

Kirk McCaskill, major league baseball pitcher. He was elected to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in 2003. Long before that, he was drafted in 1981 by the then-Winnipeg Jets with the 64th overall pick in the fourth round. This was eight picks ahead of John Vanbiesbrouck and 43 picks before Gerard Gallant. The Jets' first overall pick that year was franchise player Dale Hawerchuk. McCaskill was a runner-up for the Hobey Baker Award as top U.S. college hockey player in 1981.

In the early 1970s, the Vancouver Canucks were so desperate to win that they hired a hypnotist to break a key player out of a serious scoring slump.

I
WILL SCORE GOALS…I WILL SCORE GOALS!

Thirty years ago, NHL general managers still understood that a little Barnum and Bailey went a long way when it came to promoting their sport. Vancouver Canucks boss Bud Poile was crazy like a fox when he commissioned “The Man They Call Reveen” to snap “Cracklin” Rosaire Paiement out of a 35-game goal-less funk. Poile invited Vancouver's sports media to the Hotel Georgia in 1972 to watch the famed hypnotist attempt to induce the tough veteran's “superconscious” state—whatever that is.

Paiement had scored 34 goals in the Canucks' inaugural NHL season but was shooting blanks in the team's sophomore year. And Poile was willing to try anything to generate a little more offence, not to mention publicity, for his fledgling hockey team. In a scene straight out of
Slap Shot
, Poile called on the powers of the mysterious, bearded man who billed himself as “The Impossiblist.”

“You know, I told Reveen, ‘I don't believe in this stuff,'” Paiement recalled three decades later. “The funny thing is, just two games later, the puck bounces in front and I had an empty-net goal. That's how the slump ended.”

AND FOR MY NEXT TRICK

But Reveen couldn't work long-term miracles. Paiement never again reached the lofty scoring heights of the previous season and he finished with only 10 goals that winter, 24 fewer than in the 1970–71 campaign. He then skipped to the World Hockey Association where the goals came much easier, with or without his superconscious state.

Just a suggestion: Next time, the Canucks brass might want to take a different approach and think about hypnotizing opposing goaltenders instead.