A Legacy of Slapstick and Slap Shots Ed Willes. New York Times. New York, N.Y.: Nov 30, 1997.
The stories are legend in hockey circles. There is the time a fan in Winnipeg called Steve Durbano out of the Birmingham Bulls dressing room, took a swing at him, and a horde of naked Bulls players poured into the Winnipeg Arena's concourse to defend their teammate. And there is the time Durbano -- or was it Dave Hanson? -- pulled off Bobby Hull's toupee in a fight. And don't forget when the police came to arrest the colorful forward Frankie (Seldom) Beaton, and the Edmonton Oilers smuggled Beaton out of their dressing room in an equipment bag.
There was Gilles Gratton, the goalie who, among other things, firmly believed he had been a conquistador in a previous life.
This was the World Hockey Association. It began in 1972 as a moneymaking scheme by a couple of lawyers from California. It ended seven years later, sending the Edmonton Oilers, Hartford/New England Whalers, Winnipeg Jets and Quebec Nordiques -- to say nothing of Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier -- to the National Hockey League.
''When I hear World War II veterans talk about their years in prison camp, they always have funny stories,'' said Harry Neale, the television commentator who coached the W.H.A.'s Minnesota Fighting Saints and the New England Whalers. ''You'd think, 'What's funny about a prisoner-of-war camp? That must have been awful.' That's the way it is when you meet someone from the W.H.A.''
In this, the 25th anniversary of the league's creation, it is again time to celebrate the W.H.A. It is time to celebrate the 27 franchises -- and, yes, that includes the Miami Screaming Eagles -- to which this riotous assembly gave birth. It is time to celebrate the bounced checks, the missed payments, the battery of lawsuits and the folded teams. It is time to celebrate the crackpots and the crazies that are the league's bizarre legacy.
But it is also time to wonder at the W.H.A. and its impact on the modern-day N.H.L. Yes, the W.H.A. was a traveling circus, populated by the weird and the wonderful. But it was also the vanguard that drove hockey into the 20th century. The league broke down the N.H.L.'s monopoly and emancipated players from the reserve clause -- does anyone in today's game know that players like Bobby Hull and Johnny McKenzie are the Curt Floods of hockey? The W.H.A. was also the midwife of the 18-year-old draft. It moved into the Sun Belt 20 years before the N.H.L. was congratulating itself for the Phoenix Coyotes and the Florida Panthers. It made a wholesale commitment to European players when the N.H.L. believed they were far too soft to play in North America.
''Today's players should all be thankful for the W.H.A.,'' Neale said.
The Beginning Send Lawyers, Pucks and Money
It is appropriate that the league was founded by two lawyers, because it was the courts that brought the W.H.A. through the early years. The founding fathers were Gary Davidson and Dennis Murphy, both of whom had been involved in the management of American Basketball Association teams. Murphy has always maintained that the league was his brainchild. But the dream would not have come to life had Murphy and Davidson's promotional elan not been introduced to Wild Bill Hunter, a Canadian hockey businessman. Davidson and Murphy were the league's style. But Hunter, and a group of hard-core hockey men, were its substance. ''I was impressed with them only as promoters,'' Hunter said. ''They knew nothing about hockey. Absolutely zero. I took them to a Kings game in Los Angeles. When they dropped the puck, Davidson asked me, 'What are they doing?' '' Granted, Davidson, Murphy and another lawyer pal named Donald Regan did not know much about hockey. But they knew their way around a contract.
Davidson -- who wanted a fluorescent blue puck for the league -- asserts the W.H.A. survived because the N.H.L.'s standard players' contract was ''worthless.'' He proved it. Its first season, the W.H.A. succeeded in signing a number of established N.H.L. stars and one bona fide superstar in Hull. The N.H.L. sued. The W.H.A. countersued. And, in a landmark ruling, Judge Leon Higginbotham upheld the W.H.A.'s action.
''The N.H.L. is merely sustaining the fate which monopolists must face when they can no longer continue their prior total dominance of the market,'' Higginbotham wrote on an action initiated by McKenzie after he attempted to jump from the Boston Bruins Flyers to the Philadelphia Blazers.
That was the start. The first year, the 12-team league succeeded in luring Hull to Winnipeg. Gerry Cheevers ended up in Cleveland. Derek Sanderson, McKenzie and Bernie Parent went to Philadelphia.
At the Blazers' first home game, souvenir pucks were handed out. The ice, unfortunately, was deemed unfit for play that night, and Sanderson was elected to convey the message to the crowd. He went to center ice to make the announcement and was immediately pelted with the souvenir pucks. Funny story. Here is another one: The original franchises sold for $25,000. In 1996, Barry Shenkarow sold the Winnipeg Jets to a group in Phoenix for $67.5 million.
The Players: Hull Goes North; Howes Head South The Hull signing started as a dare. It ended up giving the league instant legitimacy. ''I kept telling them I didn't want to go to Winnipeg,'' Hull said of the negotiations that took him from the Chicago Blackhawks to the Jets. '' 'You got your free advertising out of the deal. Now take a hike.' ''Finally they wanted to know how much it would take to get me out of Chicago. I said I can get $250,000 a year out of Chicago,'' he said, referring to an offer that would have paid him that much annually for five years. ''If your league folds, I'm out a million bucks and I wouldn't be welcomed back by the N.H.L. If you want me, you come up with the million up front and you've got your guy.'' Feeling very pleased with himself, Hull thought he had heard the last from the upstarts.
But the Jets' owner, Ben Hatskin, passed the hat around the league and came up with a million dollars. Hull signed. And the W.H.A. had pulled off one of the biggest coups in sports history. ''Had I known at the time, I would have asked for $5 million or $10 million,'' Hull said. ''I said a million just to get rid of them.''
A couple of years after landing Hull, the W.H.A. succeeded in signing another face from hockey's Mount Rushmore. Gordie Howe had been retired from the Detroit Red Wings for two years when the Houston Aeros came calling. The Hall of Fame defenseman Doug Harvey made the initial contact for the Aeros. But he was inquiring about Howe's son Mark, who was then a junior star in Toronto. The senior Howe raised the question of making a comeback in Houston with his sons Mark and Marty. The deal was struck. The Howes went to Texas. And, together, they wrote an extraordinary chapter in hockey history.
Their first two years together, the Howes led the Aeros to the Avco Cup championship. Gordie was the league's most valuable player the first season. Mark was rookie of the year. The financially troubled Aeros -- in a common theme for the W.H.A. -- then sold the Howes en masse to New England, where Gordie, at 49, amassed 96 points in the 1977-78 season. ''The only time he's my dad is when he's hurt,'' Mark Howe said at the time. ''They called him Gordie at the rink and Dad away from the rink,'' Neale said. ''But every now and then Mark would forget and call, 'Dad,' for a pass. Dad would look up, hit his son right on the tape with a 50-foot pass and Mark would go in, shrug his shoulder and the puck would be in the net. I saw that about a dozen times, and no one in the rink knew it had happened. They were beautiful moments.''
Two years after Hull signed with the Jets, Winnipeg plundered the untapped European market for two of the league's brightest stars. Dr. Gerry Wilson, a Winnipegger and former junior star, was doing research at a sports institute in Stockholm. His research assistant was a young wing on the Swedish national team named Anders Hedberg. Bill Robinson, the Jets' head scout, asked Wilson to search around Sweden for players. Wilson eventually came up with Hedberg, a lanky center named Ulf Nilsson and a fire hydrant of a defenseman named Lars-Erik Sjoberg.
With Hull, the three Swedes would form the backbone of the best-ever W.H.A. teams. The Jets won league championships in two of the four years they played together before the Rangers signed Hedberg and Nilsson in a groundbreaking deal. ''It was like three great jazz musicians playing music together,'' Wilson said of Hull, Hedberg and Nilsson, who played on the same line. ''It was three completely different personalities and three completely different styles of play. But they just seemed to fit together. No one knows why. It just did.''
On Jan. 5, 1978, the Rangers' captain, Phil Esposito, and General Manager John Ferguson flew to Winnipeg to begin discussions with Hedberg and Nilsson. It was minus-30 degrees that day. ''I can't believe we're flying in here to talk people into leaving,'' Esposito said. That night the Jets beat the touring Russian national team, 5-3, becoming the first club team to defeat one of the greatest teams in hockey history. Playing against the Russians' top line of Boris Mikhailov, Vladimir Petrov and Valery Kharlamov, Hull scored three goals, Nilsson scored two and added two assists, and Hedberg had two assists. Hedberg and Nilsson left for the Rangers at the start of the '78-79 season.
But that summer, Nelson Skalbania, owner of the Indianapolis Racers, signed a skinny, pimpled 17-year-old from Brantford, Ontario, named Wayne Gretzky to a $1.7 million personal services contract. Gretzky's career in Indianapolis lasted but eight games before the cash-strapped Skalbania was forced to sell him to Edmonton. The Jets also had a shot at Gretzky, but the former N.H.L. coach Rudy Pilous felt he was too slow and too small to stand up to the pounding in the pros. Gretzky lived with Oilers Coach Glen Sather during his first three weeks in Edmonton. Sather, a journeyman forward who had come over from the N.H.L.'s Minnesota North Stars, had been named player-coach of the team two years earlier. Twenty-one years and five Stanley Cups later, Sather is still in Edmonton. You will find Gretzky in Manhattan these days. He has done all right for himself, too.
The End Game Sweet Dreams, Then Good Night Talk of a merger with the N.H.L. started after the W.H.A.'s first year. Of course, talk was always a strong suit of the W.H.A. In 1972, the Calgary franchise, which took a couple of years to get off the ground, talked about bringing over Russian players. The league talked about a European division. There was talk Bobby Orr was going to sign with the Minnesota Fighting Saints. But by the '78-79 season, the league was down to six teams. The Jets picked up the bulk of their last championship team from Houston. The Racers folded in midseason. Winnipeg, Quebec, New England and Edmonton were still marginally viable. Cincinnati and Birmingham barely had a pulse.
The league was not in the strongest position to negotiate with the N.H.L., and that showed in the final terms of surrender. The N.H.L. deigned to permit Winnipeg, Quebec City, Edmonton and New England in. The four teams were allowed to protect two players and a goalie. The four new teams then took part in a farcical expansion draft. ''I don't know why they didn't take Blue,'' Don Cherry, then the Boston coach, said, referring to his pet. ''They've picked up a lot of other dogs.'' Sixteen years later, Quebec's franchise was sold to Colorado.
A year after that, Winnipeg's was sold to Phoenix. Then Hartford's franchise went to Carolina. Edmonton's team is now being sold.
''Hockey was a very stagnant game,'' said Herb Pinder, the longtime player agent. ''Then along came competition from this new league. In many ways it was unsettling. In many ways, it was the most constructive thing that could have happened to the game.''
It is a fitting epitaph for the W.H.A.
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