Terror in the City of Champions (38 page)

With a tie in Montreal, the Wings increased their lead to two points. Adams was still bothered. On the ride to Detroit, he singled out Bucko McDonald, a hard-hitting defenseman with a serious appetite for steak. Adams felt McDonald’s eating habits were slowing him and he ordered him to either eat normally or exercise more: ten miles on a stationary bike or additional skating every day.

“You can eat yourself out of the National Hockey League,” Adams warned.

“But I gotta eat, Jack,” replied McDonald, who at twenty-one years old was the youngest regular on the team—and the weightiest, listed at 205 pounds (and five-foot-ten).

“Well, what will you do to keep down that bulging stomach?”

McDonald vowed to skate two extra hours daily.

The Wings lost that evening at Olympia, but retained their lead. They clinched the division title four days later before raucous hometown fans, defeating their rival Blackhawks. In the dressing room John Carmichael of the
Chicago Daily News
congratulated Adams: “Jack, you’ve got a great team here and the boys played liked champions. It looks as though they’ll do their part to give Detroit a cleanup. You’ve got the Tigers, the Detroit Lions, Joe Louis . . . Go to it, old boy.”

The pressure was mounting on the Wings to continue the city’s winning ways. S
PIRIT OF
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EAL
C
HAMPIONS—
T
HE
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ED
W
INGS
H
AVE
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W
HEN THE
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RESSURE
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S
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ARDEST
, offered one hopeful headline. Papers filled with optimistic stories. Wings players were pictured with their families: Larry Aurie and his wife sipping tea from delicate china, Ebbie Goodfellow and the missus playing cribbage, the Lewises with toddler Jerry, Mr. and Mrs. Doug Young with their boys, Doug Jr. and Bobbie. “Emulating the example of the Tigers on the diamond and the Lions on the gridiron, the Wings met the demands of competition when the chips were down,” said a writer reviewing the regular season.

The playoffs began on March 24 with the winners of the American and Canadian divisions—the Red Wings and defending champion Montreal Maroons—facing off for the right to advance to the Stanley Cup. Meanwhile the two teams in second and the two in third played each other. The winner of those series would battle for the right to play Detroit or Montreal. This quirky system, designed to keep more fans interested, meant that one of the game’s division champions would not emerge from the first round.

In Montreal, before the series opened, Adams issued special playoff rules for his men: Be in bed by midnight, eat breakfast by ten and follow it with a walk, eat dinner by three, walk again, take a nap, head to the Forum afterward, and be ready to “play like hell.” Above all else do not go to the movie theater on game day. “Shows make the players loggy and, besides, they still retain the flicker in their eyes for several hours after leaving a motion-picture house,” he said. Adams also called out Bucko McDonald again. “Remember, Bucko. One steak and no more on Tuesday afternoon.”

Goalie Normie Smith, who often wore a ball cap when he played, was thought to be the weakest of the Red Wings starters—“just an earnest, everyday workman,” in his coach’s words. But in the first game he did the unthinkable. The game began at eight-thirty and went scoreless through regulation play. It continued into six overtime periods, concluding around two-thirty in the morning. Excluding breaks, the teams played for 176 minutes with Smith in the net for every one. Playing without a mask, as was typical, Smith stopped all ninety-two Montreal shots, occasionally executing acrobatic moves. He set an NHL record. Wings rookie Mud Bruneteau scored the winning goal. It was the longest game in league history. By the end all the players were exhausted. But the Detroiters could at least take consolation in their triumph.

“My boys are just like kids because they won,” said Adams. “I know how terribly the Maroons must feel after playing as brilliantly and as courageously as they did—only to lose. I know how we would have felt.” Montreal coach Tommy Gorman added: “It was a crime for either team to lose.” The victory demoralized the Maroons and rallied the Wings, who swept the series. Smith allowed one goal in three games. The Wings carried the momentum into the Stanley Cup series against the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Approaching age forty-one, Maple Leafs goalie George Hainsworth was the oldest man on the ice. A popular figure in Montreal and Toronto, where he starred on championship teams, Hainsworth had already had a brilliant, Hall of Fame career. In his best season, 1928–29, he won twenty-two games by shutout, a milestone. But here in the second game of the Stanley Cup finals he looked almost feeble.

The Red Wings scored their first goal less than two minutes into the game. The second came minutes later. Two more followed before the first period ended. The onslaught continued in the final periods. The Red Wings added five more goals. Hainsworth, wrote reporter Doc Holst, “stood there a helpless little old man with a broom trying to sweep away the action.” Detroit won 9–4 and took a 2–0 series lead. In Toronto officials considered replacing Hainsworth. But a group of fans appealed to General Manager Conn Smythe to stick with him. “We’d rather lose with the old guy in there than see him benched in the midst of the playoff,” said the spokesman.

Coach Dick Irvin went with Hainsworth and he rebounded in game three. Toronto prevailed 4–3 at Maple Leaf Gardens. In the fourth contest, the Leafs scored first, but Ebbie Goodfellow and Marty Barry answered in the second, putting Detroit ahead. Pete Kelly gave the Wings a 3–1 advantage in the third. The Leafs quickly closed it to 3–2 and spent the final moments firing shots at Normie Smith. He stopped all of them, bringing Detroit its first Stanley Cup. The Red Wings achieved what the Tigers and Lions had done months earlier—winning the city’s first world championships in their sports. Detroit could truly claim to be the City of Champions. Congratulatory telegrams flooded into Toronto. Champagne flowed in owner James Norris’s hotel suite. “Go to it, boys,” said Adams. “It’s our night.”

Two thousand fans cheered the Wings when they arrived at Michigan Central on Easter Sunday. They crowded the platforms and clogged the lobby. Women came bearing bouquets. Fathers held children atop their shoulders. The sound was deafening. Outside a long line of private cars awaited the heroes, ready to sweep each one home. “Upon what meat does our city feed but that it has grown so great?” asked writer Harry LeDuc. The city was heralded for its “unduplicated distinction of supremacy in all major sports.” It was “The Sports Capital of the World.” W
HOLE
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ATION
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HEERS
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ITY’S
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HAMPIONS
, noted one headline. “It is swell to be home in the City of Champions,” wrote columnist Bud Shaver. “A citizen of Rome, howling for Caesar when Julius was fighting at his best weight, couldn’t feel a fiercer pride in his hometown.” The momentum beat like a heart. In an editorial the
Detroit News
urged, “Keep it up, Tigers.” Around the corner Hearst’s
Times
was planning a big celebration, a Champions Day Dinner.

Two days after winning the Stanley Cup several Red Wings drove to Cleveland to see the Tigers open their season against the Indians. An alliance existed between the Tigers, Lions, Red Wings, and Joe Louis. Detroit’s champions—uncrowned in Louis’s case—all went to one another’s games and matches, the Wings and Tigers especially. Jack Adams was probably the most visible of anyone, showing up regularly throughout the town. It was good public relations and a way to enhance fans’ sense of camaraderie, but it also reflected a sincere mutual appreciation. Adams made a point of seeing every major league baseball team—American and National—at least once each season. Tigers Billy Rogell and Charlie Gehringer, who spent their winters in Michigan, loved hockey and frequented games at Olympia. Through mid-January Gehringer had been to twenty-two of twenty-three home games.

“I’ve been watching hockey for nine years, but I’ve seen only one play-off game,” he said. It was one of his regrets. Spring training pulled him away before the post-season began. Gehringer played hockey throughout the winter at his cottage on Cooley Lake. Adams supplied him with hockey equipment. (Gehringer gave him baseball bats in return.)

Ebbie Goodfellow, Herbie Lewis, Scott Bowman, Johnny Sorrell, and Adams were among the Wings who drove to Cleveland. (Harry Bennett was there as well, with Ford cohorts Russell Gnau and boxer Kid McCoy.) Most of the Wings predicted the Tigers would have another grand season. “Providing Charlie Gehringer or Billy Rogell or some other key man isn’t injured,” added Lewis.

In Cleveland (and at ballparks throughout the league) the flag flew at half-staff in honor of Frank Navin. And who happened to be throwing out the ceremonial first pitch at League Park? Joe Louis. He tossed the ball to radio jokester Jack Benny. It was just one of many honors that had come to Louis in the past year. He had been on Rudy Vallee’s show. He had met President Roosevelt. He had cavorted with anyone he cared to meet. He went nowhere without drawing crowds. Louis was one of the best-known people in America, certainly the most famous black man. One Sunday morning he and his brother Deleon Barrow traveled to a park in Trenton, south of Detroit. Louis joined a pickup softball team and played an inning before other folks began to recognize him. Soon they were yelling to people on the Detroit River and Lake Erie. Word spread quicker than the Spanish Flu of 1918. “Good God,” said Deleon Barrow, “we had to get all the police out there in Trenton to get us out of there. . . . There seemed to be thousands of people surrounding us.”

In the Cleveland game Cochrane vibrated with energy. He wanted to set a good tone for the season. No complacency was allowed. When Earl Averill popped a foul in the seventh, Cochrane went full force after it, hurdling over the rolled tarpaulin along the third base line. He flung himself headfirst into the stands, emerging with the ball and the out. The Tigers won 3–0. Gehringer got three hits, Greenberg—his contract settled—drove in two runs, and Schoolboy Rowe pitched a four-hit shutout. One game into the season and all was well so far as the public could tell.

Henry Ford would not be attending the Champions Day Dinner. He and Clara had been out late Friday night dancing at an old-fashioned ball at Washington and Jefferson University in Pennsylvania. When he returned on Saturday, reporters besieged him.