Mr. Hockey My Story (18 page)

T
he host of a TV show once asked me if I was scared of anything. I thought for a second and then told him that lightning really put the fear of God in me. It was just an expression, but for some reason it brought out the altar boy in him and he interrupted to explain that I had it wrong because the Good Lord doesn’t put fear into anybody. It felt to me like he was splitting hairs, so I said, “Wait a minute, he controls that lightning, and that scares the hell out of me.” I felt the same way about the amount of control Jack Adams had over the Red Wings. He used to say, “I may not be right all the time, but I do sign the checks and that makes me right.” It was tough luck for his players that, all too often, the checkbook was mightier than the hockey stick. If Mr. Adams thought you were a bad influence on the club, he’d ship you out the door, either down to the minors or to another team entirely. It
didn’t matter how good of a player you were or whether his paranoia had any basis in reality.

Mr. Adams was a divisive figure, to say the least. Even on the day of his funeral, when people are inclined to be charitable about the guest of honor, I remember swapping stories on the drive over to the cemetery about how he could be a mean old bugger. It went on like that for a while until someone piped up and began talking about the values Mr. Adams had instilled in his teams and how Jack’s words had helped him in his post-hockey career. As true as that might have been, another former Red Wing in the car wasn’t having any of it. He interrupted to offer a less generous assessment: “He was a miserable SOB and today he’s a dead miserable SOB.” That’s what you got with Mr. Adams.

Over the years, Mr. Adams and I spent our fair share of time together. Away from the arena he had a different side than the one he showed to most of his players. At the end of each season, we used to drive up to northern Michigan on a publicity tour for Stroh Brewery. For a couple of weeks each year, Mr. Adams, myself, and Fred Huber, the club’s head of public relations, would tour around the state showing a highlight reel of our season. Sometimes we’d do five showings in a day. At $25 a pop, the money added up in a hurry. At that time, any chance I had to supplement my family’s income in the off-season felt like a real gift.

The teams kept a tight rein on what you could do to make money after the six-month hockey season ended. Your options for outside work were really hamstrung by the standard player’s contract of the time. Making a few extra dollars by playing another sport, for instance, was against the rules, as I found out with baseball. Some of the luckier guys had family businesses they could return to, while others were relegated to picking up seasonal manual labor
jobs where they could. For me, touring around with Mr. Adams and Fred and getting paid for my mileage by the brewery was a sweet deal. To put the money in perspective, consider how much we pulled down for winning a Stanley Cup. A first-round playoff win meant an extra $20,000 for the team. After the coaches, trainers, and scouts took their cut, it worked out to around $700 per player. If you went on to win the Cup, players would theoretically get another $2000 (the losing team got $1000 a man), but that was before agreeing to the split. All told, a successful playoff run would put around $2000 in your pocket before taxes. In a good year, playoff money could account for a significant chunk of your annual income, given that the average salary was around $6000 or $7000 at the time. In comparison, I could rack up nearly $1250 for a couple of weeks’ work on the Stroh tour. And all I had to do was show movies; I didn’t have to get hit. In light of today’s salaries it may seem hard to fathom, but that was the state of the league at the time. The owners, with their business savvy, knew how to hang on to a dollar. Most players, in contrast, were happy just to get paid to play hockey, which doesn’t exactly put you in a position of strength at contract time.

On the road in the spring, Mr. Adams could be a decent enough guy, but his bullying nature would reemerge once he returned to his desk at the Olympia. He chose to rule his team with an iron fist, which was just fine with the team’s owner. Since taking over the club in the 1930s, James Norris, who was known as Pops, had solidified himself as the league’s most influential owner. His authority was backed by his great wealth, as well as by the direct or indirect stakes he held in three of the league’s six clubs: the Wings, the Rangers, and the Black Hawks. Such a conflict of interest wouldn’t pass muster these days, but at the time the league’s dealings often happened in
the shadows. When it came to matters of hockey, Norris trusted Mr. Adams, which gave Jack free rein with the club. In return for the owner’s faith and deep pockets, Mr. Adams managed to put a winning team on the ice more often than not.

When Pops died in late 1952, few people took it harder than Mr. Adams, who saw him as something of a father figure. They’d talked on the phone after every game, with Mr. Adams either reporting the good news of a victory or breaking the bad news if we’d lost. With Norris gone, control of the Red Wings passed to his daughter, Marguerite. Her role with the team has been relegated to a footnote in sports history, but I think she was the first woman to ever run a professional team. I don’t know how Mr. Adams felt about his new team president, but I’m sure he wasn’t thrilled about a woman in her twenties handing down his marching orders. Regardless, since her brothers Jimmy and Bruce owned shares in the Black Hawks, the family needed to put someone in the role and the job fell to her. In the time I spent around Marguerite, I found her to be both smart and capable. Others I talked to felt the same way. She was good for the club, but unfortunately she didn’t stick around for as long as anyone would have liked. A few years into the job, she was ousted by her older brother, Bruce. She became the club’s executive vice president, but her involvement didn’t last much longer. In retrospect, it’s easy to see how bad the family infighting was for the team. Marguerite was a much more thoughtful owner than her brother, who could be something of a bully.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Marguerite’s time in charge coincided with some of the greatest years in franchise history. As president, she had enough juice to check Trader Jack’s instincts to upset the apple cart. It’s hard to say how many Stanley Cups we might have won if she had stuck around longer. In my mind, the
ingredients were in place to form one of the greatest dynasties in hockey history. Sadly, we weren’t left alone for long enough to find out what might have been. Bruce’s hockey acumen was no match for his sister’s, which was good for Mr. Adams but bad for the rest of us. Despite winning seven consecutive league championships and two straight Stanley Cups, Trader Jack decided to spend the 1955 off-season dismantling the team.

To this day, his reasons for blowing up our championship squad defy explanation. First, he sent Tony Leswick, Johnny Wilson, Glen Skov, and Benny Woit to the Black Hawks for Bucky Hollingworth, Dave Creighton, Jerry Toppazzini, and John McCormack. The deal was a real Norris brothers special. Bruce gift-wrapped four top-tier players and sent them to his brother Jimmy’s team in Chicago. What’s worse, Mr. Adams wasn’t done. A week later he dealt Terry Sawchuk, Vic Stasiuk, Marcel Bonin, and Lorne Davis to the Bruins for Warren Godfrey, Ed Sandford, Réal Chevrefils, and a couple of rookies. In the newspapers, Mr. Adams said he needed to make room on the roster for young players like Johnny Bucyk and Norm Ullman. He also had Glenn Hall parked in Edmonton waiting to take over in net. Hall was a terrific goaltender, no question, but trading Sawchuk, who was coming off another Vezina Trophy, was hard to swallow. Most general managers spent their entire career waiting for a goalie like Sawchuk, who they could build a team around, to come along. Not Mr. Adams. When Terry was on his game, it’s hard to think of anyone better. He also always seemed to save his best for when the stakes were the highest. An NHL team can’t ask for much more than having a goalie who heats up every spring.

By the time the smoke cleared, Trader Jack had dealt away half of our team. Only nine of us remained from a squad that had
raised the Stanley Cup a few short months earlier. Looking back, I’d say the ball started rolling downhill when we lost Sid Abel and Tommy Ivan. It picked up speed when Bruce Norris pushed out Marguerite, which paved the way for Trader Jack’s maniacal 1955 off-season. Those trades turned out to be the final straw. I have a hard time thinking about what might have been. I think a lot of my old teammates feel the same way. For the rest of the league, the opposite is probably true. The upheaval in our roster was good news for everyone else. No one took more advantage of the new power vacuum on top of the league than the Canadiens. The dismantling of the Red Wings juggernaut cleared the way for Montreal, who went on to win five Cups in a row. Without the trades, would we have beaten them in any of those years? No one can say for sure, but our track record until that point suggests we would have at least given them a run for their money. We were still competitive, but it’s easy now to see how those trades sapped us of the firepower we needed to win another championship.

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S
ome sports fans are turned off by the multimillion-dollar contracts signed by today’s athletes. The sharp escalation in salaries certainly has put many players out of touch with the average Joe, but—be that as it may—I’m here to tell you that the good old days weren’t as good as you might think. Fans may see the rise of so-called super agents and management companies as being bad for the game, but before they showed up, players didn’t have anyone looking out for their best interests. The playing field was tilted, and that’s exactly the way the league liked it. Most of us had quit high school to play junior hockey, which turned us into good players but didn’t do much for us at the negotiating table. And the
owners didn’t miss a trick when it came to maintaining the status quo. Players were kept in the dark about the business side of the game, which allowed clubs to peddle whatever story they wanted about their financial situation. Most of them claimed they were just scraping by and that we were all lucky to have jobs. Of course, they never showed us any proof, and even if they had cracked open the books, the numbers wouldn’t have made much sense to most of us. It wasn’t until years later that we learned how much money the league was really making, but by then it was too late to do much about it.

When it came time to negotiate a new contract, players didn’t have much of a frame of reference. Contractually, we were obliged to stay quiet about our salaries, even when talking to our teammates. This gave the owners a big leg up and they knew it. They turned it into such an ingrained part of the league’s culture that players just accepted the idea that discussing salaries was off-limits. I probably have less to complain about than most. Since I was one of the better players in the game, Mr. Adams had a vested interest in keeping me happy. I wish I’d made it harder for him, but at my core, I was still just grateful to be playing hockey for a living. Talking about money is also uncomfortable for a lot of people, and I was no exception. I think Mr. Adams was aware of that little piece of social psychology and used it to his advantage. If I was happy to get out of his office as quickly as possible, he wasn’t going to stop me.

The owners, unlike their players, understood the power of information. When I sat down at the table with Mr. Adams, he had all of it and I had none. When he assured me I’d be the best-paid player on the Red Wings and probably the highest-paid player in the NHL, I didn’t have any reason not to believe him. He didn’t know exactly what other teams paid their players, he claimed, but
he promised he would always do his best to ensure that my salary reflected my stature in the league. It seemed fair to me. Multiyear contracts didn’t exist at that point, so at the end of training camp every year I’d sit down in his office and we’d come up with a new one-year deal. Most seasons, he’d offer me $1000 more than my previous salary and I’d sign. He also included bonus incentives, which made sense to my way of thinking. I figured that if I had a good season, it meant the team would succeed as well. One year—I think it was 1952—I basically doubled my salary through bonuses. I took home the Hart Trophy and the scoring title, I was named to the All-Star Team, and we won the Stanley Cup. The total haul came to an additional $9000 or so.

To my dismay, I’ve since realized that I was far too trusting of management in those days. When Mr. Adams assured me I was the league’s highest-paid player, I was inclined to believe him. If I was naive, then management certainly did its part to keep me that way. The clubs did everything they could to keep salaries in check. If they didn’t like the cut of your jib, there was always another farm boy from the Prairies just waiting for the call to the big leagues. Even for the top guys in the game, it felt like you were never more than one loose comment or one unlucky injury away from being out of the league. In retrospect, I should have been more of a hard case, but if I’m being completely honest with myself, I know that being an agitator isn’t in my nature. I guess I also bought into all of the talk of the Red Wings being a family. If I put in an honest day’s work, I thought Mr. Adams could be trusted to pay an honest day’s wage. That’s what he promised, anyway. Other players, like Ted Lindsay, were much less willing to take his word at face value.

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I
n professional sports today, collective bargaining agreements and players’ unions are par for the course. The world was entirely different in the 1950s. It was a time of McCarthyism, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and the Hollywood blacklist. Among the general public, the mere mention of the word “union” wasn’t going to win you many friends. Although few players realized it, the owners were taking such great advantage of us that a union was exactly what we needed. Whether we were ready to join one was another matter. Ted Lindsay’s first taste of league business came in 1955, when he and Doug Harvey were selected to represent the players on the board of the National Hockey League Pension Society. Regardless of how many times they asked, the league wouldn’t furnish any information about the size of the pension fund or how its investments were performing. The league assured the players that its pension plan was the gold standard in professional sports, which we were counting on, since the $900 a year we paid into it represented a significant portion of our take-home pay. Getting stonewalled when he tried to verify those claims didn’t sit well with Lindsay. He developed a suspicion about the owners that wouldn’t go away.