Jack Parker’s Wiseguys, page 11
The Red Sox may have been summer religion to their nation of fans from Bangor to Brookline, but it was the Bruins who provided the juice over New England’s long, harsh winters. Boston’s sports stars comprised a who’s who of Hall of Famers, marquee names like Ted Williams, Bill Russell, Bob Cousy, John Havlicek, and Carl Yastrzemski. All of the aforementioned were demigods in Boston, but it was a hockey player who towered above them all.
“Bobby Orr, Number Four.” Those four words are still uttered today with a reverence cloaked in thick chowder accents. Orr single-handedly turned Boston into the best hockey town in the United States. Fans throughout New England fiddled with that funny circular UHF antenna on the back of their TV sets to tune in to Channel 38 to see Orr’s derring-do, rushing the length of the rink with the puck, horizontally across their screen. His accomplishments were unprecedented: a defenseman who repeatedly led the NHL in scoring, a handsome yet manly man who scored a Stanley Cup–winning goal while diving through the air in overtime. That championship happened to break a twenty-nine-year drought and brought tears to the eyes of all 13,909 crammed into venerable Boston Garden. And then Orr repeated the feat two years later, breaking scoring marks for himself, his teammates, and his club every step of the way.
In the early 1970s, Boston’s Metropolitan District Commission began building rinks throughout the Boston suburbs just in time to put a generation of Orr-inspired baby boomers onto blades. Every young boy openly yearned to be like Bobby Orr, and every parent urged him on. The NBA Celtics, who had just won their eleventh World Championship the year before Bobby took his iconic leap, were second-class citizens compared to the Bruins. The Celtics rebuilt after the retirement of Bill Russell and went on to capture titles 12 and 13 in the 1970s. But as Boston Garden tenants, they were redheaded stepchildren compared to Orr and the Bruins.
Demand for Bruins tickets was so high after the Bruins won that Stanley Cup in 1970 that the Globe published photos of fans spending the night on beach chairs in the Garden’s dingy lobby, for exhibition game tickets. Everyone knew the number, 13,909. That figure represented Boston Garden’s precious seat capacity for hockey, the lucky few that could witness the Big, Bad Bruins in person.
The foundation of that team remained largely intact from 1969 to 1972, and they were an NHL wrecking ball. The Bruins ripped through the recently expanded NHL, winning Stanley Cups in 1970 and ’72. The middle season in which they did not hoist the Cup, they shattered all the NHL team and individual offensive records for a regular season. It took Hall of Famer Ken Dryden and the Canadiens to temporarily derail the Bruins runaway train, as Cornell grad Dryden stoned the Bruins in his old ECAC stomping grounds, Boston Garden.
The hit movie of 1973, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, shot a lengthy scene in the Boston Garden third balcony known as “the Heavens,” where Robert Mitchum and his drunk gangster partners hero-worshipped Orr over their beers, repeatedly uttering the phrase, “Bobby Fucking Orr” on screen.
After Orr departed Boston in 1976, the Bruins reloaded and reached the finals in 1977 and ’78, fanning the passionate flames of this self-proclaimed Hub of Hockey. Boston College and Boston University were turning out a slew of new-wave sportswriters, including Mike Lupica and Lesley Visser from BC and Al Morganti and Kevin Paul Dupont from BU. Sports Illustrated hired Boston native Mark Mulvoy, who quickly scaled the rungs of S.I.’s editorial ladder. A hockey lover who worshipped at the shrine of Orr, Mulvoy soon became managing editor of the most powerful sports magazine in the world, and he placed Orr on the S.I. cover half a dozen times.
Boston was a professional sports town; its rivalries with its New York counterparts sold papers year round. Yet somehow, a college hockey team forced its way into the daily consciousness of readers throughout Boston, though these student athletes weren’t even celebrities on their own turf. “There’s none of that campus rah-rah, jock-worship stuff here,” said O’Callahan in a 1978 interview with Sports Illustrated. How was it possible, then, that this college hockey team became media darlings in Boston?
Three vital elements led to that aberration: (1) The Terriers were an Eastern college dynasty, having won four straight ECAC Championships under Jackie Parker; (2) Parker himself was great theater: a voracious smoker, a referee baiter, and a quick-witted quote machine; and (3) possibly the most important, the makeup of the team went from being predominantly Canadian to Bostonian in a single off-season. No fewer than six Boston area prep stars enrolled at BU in the fall of 1977, guys with followings like Mark Fidler and Bill Cotter of Charlestown, state champions who grew up a mile from Boston Garden. Paul Miller was a Division II state champion from Billerica, and Todd Johnson was a scoring sensation at Cambridge prep school Buckingham Browne & Nichols. BU hockey had become the city’s team seemingly overnight.
There was one hilarious media episode that was emblematic of Boston’s changing perceptions of BU hockey. Back in 1977, sports talk radio wasn’t the fixture it is today. In the twenty-first century, most major cities have twenty-four-hour drive time call-in sports shows, and for those without, ESPN pumps national sports blab to rural America. You can be in a rental car anywhere in the United States, hit the “scan” button on your radio, and within a few seconds you’ll find yourself listening to a so-called sports authority fielding calls from the common man.
A pioneer of two-way sports talk radio was BU alum Eddie Andelman, a rotund real estate broker with Ruthian appetites for Chinese food, dog tracks, and of course, talking sports. He created and hosted a radio institution in Boston, the infamous Sports Huddle, a four-hour call-in show every Sunday night. He was joined by his trusty sidekicks Mark Witkin and Jim McCarthy, all three of them amateur broadcasters. Witkin and McCarthy served primarily as foils for Andelman’s madcap genius, the man who could ignite Boston’s passionate fan base by teasing their sacred institutions. He also produced farcical parodies, contests, and off-key musical bits to supplement the weekly shows. Andelman’s humor did not translate to today’s sports talk genre of angry rants and the belittling second guess. Back in the 1970s, Sports Huddle was mostly good-natured fun. One of Andelman’s regular bits was his closing musical montage. Contained within it was a line where he poked fun at BU hockey, whose roster was filled with Canadians that Andelman presumed were French.
Junior John Melanson, a Boston guy who had grown up listening to the Huddle every Sunday, was tired of the weekly ribbing Andelman gave to the Terriers, and he hatched a plan. On the first Sunday in October, with his roommate Bill O’Neill and several other teammates crowded around, Melanson picked up the phone. His grandparents were actually French Canadians living in Nova Scotia, and his grandfather happened to be named Eddie. Young John had heard his grandmother call out the name Eddie! countless times with an accent that was pure Quebecois. Melanson was clearly the man for the job this Sunday evening.
Assistant coach Toot Cahoon was returning from a recruiting mission in Braintree that Sunday night, fighting his way onto Route 93 in his bright red Toyota Land Cruiser. Coach Parker sat next to him in the passenger seat, manager Ruvolo in the back. Cahoon punched one of the radio’s preset buttons to 590, WEEI. The three men sat spellbound when they heard this call.
Andelman: Hello, you’re next on Sports Huddle.
Melanson: Hey ed-DEE!
Andelman: Uh-oh, here we go.
Melanson: I’m that BU French-Canadian hockey player.
Andelman: Oh, geez, I’m in trouble now.
Melanson: We just started school here Eddie!
Andelman: You just started school? It’s October already. What did you do, walk?
Melanson: Ed-dee, I don’t have to go to school. This is Jean-Guy Doobwayyeah, I play hockey for BU.
Parker and Ruvolo shouted simultaneously, “Who is that guy?” as the red SUV took a dangerous swerve. Cahoon quickly regained control, both hands on the wheel, jaw dropped. They all began to laugh heartily and then alternated between trying to solve the identity of the mysterious caller before cracking up again.
Andelman played it straight throughout the call, and BU’s new media star, under the alias of Jean-Guy Douboisé, never left character, complaining that the BU hockey players were getting a bad rap from Andelman.
The inane banter continued for another two minutes before Melanson got in his final Francophile dig, hung up, and convulsed in laughter with mates O’Neill, Durocher, and Matt Marden. They were able to listen to the final moments due to WEEI radio’s seven-second delay, and Melanson’s star was born.
The scouting team of Cahoon, Parker, and Ruvolo never solved the mystery while riding home in the Land Cruiser, but Ruvolo hustled to the Dugout and learned Jean-Guy’s identity within seconds of walking into the bar. Although it was strictly a one-time-only broadcast appearance, the legend of Jean-Guy spread exponentially, bolstered by another performance at the team banquet. Thirty-eight years later, Arty Moher, BU’s radio play-by-play man from that era, remains convinced that Jean-Guy had a permanent Sunday night spot on Sports Huddle that season.
Thanks to Jean-Guy and the Hub’s hungry media corps, the swashbuckling BU Terriers morphed into Boston media stars, competing hard for space with the Big Bad Bruins in the heart of Red Sox Nation.
Making the emotional connection between college boys and the NHL pros was a struggle for fans back in the pre-Miracle era of American hockey. There were only a dozen or so U.S.–born players in the NHL during the 1970s, depending on that week’s call-ups from the minor leagues. Two members of BU’s remarkable freshmen class in 1977–78, Mark Fidler and Paul Miller, actually had older brothers playing in the big leagues that season: Mike Fidler of the Cleveland Barons and Bobby Miller of the first-place Bruins. This generated a story that transcended Boston media. When Fidler’s Barons came to Boston Garden to play Miller’s Bruins, a four-shot photo of the two pairs of brothers, posing in the Garden’s penalty box during pregame warm-ups, was splashed onto the NHL’s national magazine Hockey. Local papers, logically, followed suit.
Boston-born stars like O’Callahan and Silk were not shy and made great copy. Fledgling Sports Illustrated writer Eddie Swift, a former Division I goalie at Princeton, knew that the quotes generated by these Olympic hopefuls were worth their weight in gold.
“Silk was, and remains, one of the most approachable interviews in hockey you could ever find,” said Swift. “O’Callahan was smart, bright, and witty. Hockey is not easy to write about because the players tend to be self-effacing, not pound-your-chest. One of the reasons I had such fun and access with that Olympic team in 1980 was because of that core of Boston kids.”
The November 20, 1977, cover of the Boston Globe Sunday Sports magazine insert featured two Terriers on the cover. There was O’Callahan and his roommate John Bethel, standing in front of their own director’s chairs, filling the entire page in living color. “We were constantly in the newspaper,” said O’Callahan. “We were winning everything; after games we had press in our locker room, just like the NHL when I was playing for the Blackhawks. It was crazy.”
Bethel may not have been a U.S. citizen, but the Boston media embraced the handsome scorer in 1977–78. “We came out of the gate hot,” said Bethel, “and I was the leading scorer the first six or seven games. People said, ‘Geez, here’s a team ten and zero; they could go undefeated like the Miami Dolphins of the early ’70s.’ We had the hot hand.”
There was a strong BU media connection via the Dugout as well, harkening back to a previous generation when players and writers could share a drink without the specter of scandal. The eighteen-year-old drinking age accommodated the institution of BU Hockey captains tending bar at the Dugout, providing ample opportunity for discourse between writer and player. Peter Gammons, a pal of Silk’s from Boston’s South Shore, would often drop by for a beer. BU alum Morganti was also no stranger to the Dugout. But the Globe’s Joe Concannon was the most frequent media visitor to the cozy dive.
“Joe was famous for being at the Dugout, Mary Ann’s, and Punters [all frequented by Boston’s community of college hockey players] because he wanted to really feel what was going on in the college hockey world,” said part-time bartender Durocher. “He’d like to have a beer, but it was all about getting the flavor, to get a feel, maybe know what that kid looks like outside his helmet and uniform. You knew he was never there snooping on things, he was never trying to put something dirty in the paper.”
“Media guys, local guys, would hang out at the bar while I was bartending,” said O’Callahan, “come in and shoot the breeze. I’m a local guy, grew up the same way. It kind of snowballed. Joe Concannon, who covered college hockey, would come in. Al Morganti, he’s a BU guy, they’d all come in. You could always trust these guys, and you could actually tell them what you really thought, and it wouldn’t end up in the paper. It was like good old-school stuff.”
The team’s chummy relationship with Concannon, a BU alum and the Globe’s authority on college hockey, would later come into play when the team was mired in an explosive controversy at the season’s climax. Concannon’s choice whether or not to run the sensational story would have a dramatic impact on BU’s championship run that spring.
11
NORTH COUNTRY
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North Country in January: to the men of BU hockey, the term meant two things—frightful cold and hostile venues. This was the biannual trip to the two coldest hockey outposts in upstate New York—Saint Lawrence University in Canton and Clarkson University in Potsdam—American Siberia. The two schools are perched a few miles east off the St. Lawrence River and rest squarely on earth’s 45th parallel. A North Country road trip in January was an exercise in extremes: arctic winds, menacing fans in frozen barns, and hockey excellence. “That was an incredibly tough trip,” said assistant coach Cahoon. “One of the toughest in college hockey.”
Canton, the home of St. Lawrence, lies 350 road miles northwest of Boston. Regardless of the route driven, whether cutting through the Green Mountains of Vermont or the Adirondacks in upstate New York, a bus trip to North Country requires seven hours in perfect conditions, nine with the inevitable hazards of winter. Historically, visiting BU teams struggled in North Country. They would arrive with dead legs in a region eager to kick their butt. North Country is filled with rugged individuals who spend their endless winters packed in a rink, rooting hard for local teams. The Clarkson and St. Lawrence rosters were filled with Ontario hockey stalwarts from just across that frozen river, and they loved beating the Terriers. BU’s legendary coach Jack Kelley, the man with two NCAA rings, never had a squad that completed the North Country sweep.
Once Parker took over the Terriers, he convinced BU’s administration to fly the team up in an attempt to preserve their legs and keep them competitive. In 1976, that choice proved nearly catastrophic. As captains O’Callahan and Durocher boarded the prop plane in January of 1978, they tried to ignore the memory of their last flight attempt from Boston to North Country, the one that never made it.
Prior to the 1975–76 season, BU’s athletic department struck a deal with Air New England to charter a prop plane from Boston’s Logan International to Massena, New York. The department justified the flight expense because game-day flying would eliminate a night of hotel rooms. So on January 9, 1976, the BU team bussed to Air New England’s hangar at Logan, and the players all helped trainer Carl James (“C. B.”) shovel the bags into the storage area. It was an unimpressive craft, a Fairchild F-27 with aging rivets and a fading sherbet-colored paint scheme on its tail. It was below freezing as the team piled into the plane, followed by Parker and his eight-year-old daughter Allison. Parker grabbed an aisle seat toward the front of the plane, with his daughter in the window seat next to him. She had flown before but was still a tad fearful. Sitting next to her take-charge dad eased Allison’s discomfort.
The takeoff was uneventful. The prop engines were typically loud, the ride bumpier than modern jets. After getting airborne, they took a wide eastern sweep over the Atlantic before cutting northwest towards land. By the time the craft crossed into southern Vermont, Allison turned away from her dad and peered out the window, trying to acclimate to the new altitude. The plane shuddered, and the pitch changed slightly. Allison noticed something peculiar, and she was not afraid to tell her father. “Hey Dad, it looks like the engine has stopped.”
Parker looked past her shoulder and assessed the situation. Despite a nearly imperceptible tightening of his eyes, he didn’t miss a beat. “Oh, no, honey. I think it’s going so fast that it just looks like it stopped.” A split second later senior captain Peter Brown, a man terrified of flying, turned white and bellowed, “Oh my God, the propeller’s not turning, get the hell down!”
The Air New England pilot came on the loudspeaker. “We had a warning light and shut down the engine. We’ll be landing shortly.” The plane bucked through the atmosphere and crossed over the Green Mountains before finally touching down in Burlington, Vermont. Senior Jerry Gryp, another fearful flyer, kissed the tarmac as soon as he deplaned. The squad spent the next couple of hours roaming the single-level airport, filled with skiers psyched for a weekend on the Vermont slopes. Carl James made his way to the bar; this unexpected delay gave him time to enjoy a few Michelobs. The players did not imbibe because it was game day.
