Mr. Hockey My Story (14 page)

While we were rolling into the Stanley Cup finals in four games, the Canadiens and the Bruins were locked in a war in the other semifinal. The Rocket finally put Montreal over the top in game seven. Earlier in the game, he’d been knocked unconscious after being upended by Leo Labine. Say what you will about the Rocket, but he was a tough customer. He had to be helped off the ice and took some stitches to fix a cut over his eye, but late in the third period with the score tied 1–1, he reentered the game. No medical staff today would have let him sit on the bench, let alone get back on the ice, but that was a different era. With time running down, he collected the puck deep in his own zone, skated the length of the ice through the defense, cut to the front of the net, and made a move to beat Sugar Jim Henry for the game-winner. I wasn’t there, but I was told that the Forum erupted with one of the loudest roars you’ll ever hear. Habs fans count it as maybe the greatest of the Rocket’s 544 career goals and 82 playoff goals.

The victory earned the Canadiens the right to face us for the Stanley Cup. We couldn’t wait. By taking care of the Leafs in short order, we’d given our bumps and bruises time to heal. The Habs, on the other hand, were pretty banged up. However, just as I won’t make any excuses for us losing the year before, I won’t make any for them either. (Nor, I’m sure, would they ask me to.) The series opened with a first game that’s best remembered for how strangely it ended. Late in the third period we were up 2–1 when the Forum announcer signaled the last minute of play. Montreal’s coach, Dick Irvin, pulled his goalie, but the extra attacker didn’t help and Lindsay scored on the empty net to make it 3–1. After the goal, the Forum announcer told the building that another minute of play remained. Irvin was furious. He claimed that the timekeeper’s mistake led to the empty-net goal. It didn’t matter, though. No coach’s tantrum was going to change the final score. We followed up the win with another in Montreal and returned to the friendly confines of the Olympia with a two-game lead in the series. In game three we came through with a 3–0 shutout victory to put us one game away from the Cup. As it turned out, four games were all it took. In the season’s final game, Sawchuk delivered another shutout, backstopping us to a 3–0 win. Technically, it was my second Stanley Cup, but in my heart it’s the first one I feel like I had a hand in winning. When we won it all in 1950, I was in street clothes watching from the stands. This time I was out there sweating and bleeding with the boys. It was beautiful.

Our back-to-back sweeps made us the first team to ever go undefeated through both playoff rounds to win the Stanley Cup. As good as we were offensively, our defense was even better. As a team, we allowed only 5 goals in eight games and Sawchuk, who had four shutouts in the playoffs, didn’t allow a single goal on
home ice. Naturally, we didn’t spend an extra second feeling bad for Montreal. Not that they needed us to. As any Habs fan can tell you, they’d be back—plenty. The Canadiens have had their share of playoff heartaches, but that’s only because they were good enough to put themselves in a position to be disappointed in the first place. Between 1951 and 1960, they made it to the Stanley Cup finals ten years in a row. They won six times over those years, including five straight Cups to end the decade. As good as they would become, though, the first half of the 1950s belonged to us. It’s not my way to be cocky, but if the playoffs had lasted another couple of months, I feel like the team we had in 1952 could have played for the rest of the summer and still not lost a game. The way we clamped down on our opponents led some to say that we strangled them. As it turned out, a local fish vendor really took that phrase to heart. In the final game of the series, he packed an octopus with him and threw it on the ice at the Olympia as a strange symbol of how we treated the competition. Detroit fans have kept the tradition alive for more than sixty years.

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Y
ounger sports fans won’t remember the days of the player–coach, but for many years it wasn’t that unusual to see a coach also suit up as a player. Nowadays, the demands of professional sports wouldn’t leave enough time in the day to handle both jobs. The game planning and play calling, not to mention dealing with the media, has become more complex and time consuming. In the old days, though, paying one salary for two jobs was a way for a cash-strapped team to save money. Some of the more notable player–coaches include Bill Russell, who did both jobs for the Boston Celtics after Red Auerbach retired; Pete Rose in the 1980s
with the Cincinnati Reds; and Frank Robinson at the end of his playing career with the Cleveland Indians. In 1952, Sid Abel joined that list, but it wasn’t with the Red Wings. In the off-season after our Stanley Cup victory, Sid agreed to become the player–coach of the Chicago Black Hawks. They were perennially scuffling around near the bottom of the standings and the league wanted to see weaker teams become more competitive. With that in mind, Mr. Adams arranged a trade that made Sid a Black Hawk. It was a deal that marked the end of the original Production Line.

With Sid in Chicago, Alex Delvecchio took over as the first-line center. Much like Sid, he had a sixth sense that allowed him to deliver the puck to where you were going, not where you had just been. Like Ted, he grew up in northern Ontario. He was from Fort William, a town at the tip of Lake Superior that eventually became Thunder Bay. Like me, his time in the junior ranks didn’t last long. He was in Oshawa for a year playing for the Generals and then spent only six games in Indianapolis before being called up to the big club. Most Detroit fans probably remember Alex as a grizzled veteran of dozens of NHL campaigns. By the time he retired, he’d racked up enough seasons to count among the club’s all-time leaders in games played. That’s not how I remember him, though. I can still see him as a baby-faced rookie. Young or not, he was good enough to convince Mr. Adams that Sid was expendable. It was no small feat. Sid wasn’t that far removed from winning the Hart Trophy and he remained a large piece of the team’s heart and soul. He taught a lot of young players, including me, how to handle ourselves both on and off the ice. For Trader Jack, though, such softer considerations didn’t often register in his way of thinking. All he saw was a young player on the way up and one who might be past his best days. It didn’t matter to him that we had just won
the Cup a few months earlier. He was already looking ahead to the next season.

When it came to the Red Wings, the roster wasn’t the only thing Mr. Adams wanted to micromanage. No matter how big or small the matter, he had an opinion. Oftentimes he’d even venture into areas that any reasonable person would consider off-limits. On the road, he wanted us to behave like gentlemen. Shirts and ties were mandatory and he even wanted to be sure that we tipped properly. That was fine. His objections to drinking and smoking were also understandable. Less appropriate were his opinions on the opposite sex. If he’d had his way, players would have remained celibate for the entire hockey season. This extended even to married couples. Fooling around at home, he reasoned, diminished a player’s drive on the ice. I can’t say we paid him much heed on that one. As young as we were, we could still recognize what was in bounds and what was a bridge too far. That being said, many of us did respect his dictum about getting married in-season. He considered it a distraction and wanted wedding dates scheduled for the off-season. Even Ted, who wasn’t one to abide by other people’s rules, adhered to that one and waited until the season ended to marry Pat.

It’s hard to imagine a club’s general manager these days having anywhere near the power that Mr. Adams wielded back then. For someone who wanted to rule with an iron fist, though, the circumstances were nearly ideal. In the postwar years, the competition for jobs was fierce. Players who might otherwise never have risen out of the junior ranks were promoted to the big leagues to fill the spots vacated by players who left to serve in the military. When they returned, those veterans found that their replacements had developed into bona fide NHL players. A glut of quality talent chasing a finite number of jobs gave teams a lot of power.
For someone who wasn’t afraid to use it, like Mr. Adams, it was a perfect storm. With jobs at such a premium, you really had to watch your step when he was around. If you got on the wrong side of the boss, Lord only knows where you might have ended up. And he had a lot of bad sides.

Training camp was a time when Mr. Adams always seemed to be around. You had to keep your guard up, because you didn’t know when he might appear. After practice, a few of us would sometimes unwind by playing golf. When we’d finished, we might stop in at the clubhouse for a few beers. Sharing a post-round drink on the deck with your friends seems innocent enough, but when you played for Jack Adams, innocence was always in the eye of the beholder. On those days, I’d always be nervous about running into him with beer on my breath. We all were. It was a surefire way to get into his bad books. We were grown men, but sometimes it felt like we were kids sneaking around our parents. Wherever we stayed, I spent a lot of extra time taking the scenic route home to make sure I didn’t run into him.

One year, around 1954 or so, Colleen and I threw a party for the team at our house. Just to be proper, Colleen thought it would be best to invite the club’s brass. When we asked Tommy Ivan to attend, he said thanks but no thanks. In his mind, a team party wasn’t the right place for a coach. He did suggest that we invite Jack and Helen Adams, though. They definitely wouldn’t attend, he said, but it would be a nice gesture. Wouldn’t you know it: Not only did the old bugger show up, but he was the first person through the door. He also acted like the life of the party. He posed for pictures with all of the wives and generally had himself a pretty big time. As for the rest of us, having our teetotaler boss around kind of put a damper on things. I’d picked up a bunch of beer for the guys, but
we had to keep it under wraps. Just imagine how strange it would feel to hide booze at your own party in your own house. I stashed it in the basement in some laundry tubs filled with ice. When guys arrived, I’d quietly tell them that what they were looking for was in the basement. All night long, guys were slipping off downstairs to have a beer, because none of us dared to drink in front of the boss.

In Detroit, you could never be too sure how much Mr. Adams knew about what you were up to. He maintained a network of informants—which probably included Ma Shaw—to keep an eye on his players. I was pretty lucky in that regard. When it comes to booze, I’m not much of a drinker. A couple of beers in an evening are pretty much my maximum. Some of my teammates, on the other hand, would spill more in a night than I drank. They always tried to be smart about it, though. When they were out on the town, they didn’t often linger in one spot for more than a drink or two before moving to another location. They never wanted it reported to Mr. Adams that his players were out drinking all night long. Moving around allowed them to maintain some plausible deniability.

Despite the strategies we used to thwart his meddling, somehow the old coot was still able to keep an eye on darn near everything. He even knew what I was up to in the off-season. After hockey and fishing, my next great sporting love was baseball. Ever since I was a kid, every spring when hockey season ended I’d put away my skates and get out my ball glove. Even after I made the NHL, I’d still go back to Saskatoon in the summers to play baseball. At the time, there were several good semi-pro leagues throughout western Canada. I played for Saskatoon in the Northern Saskatchewan Baseball League. We went up against teams from towns like North Battleford, Prince Albert, and Delisle. Sometimes I’d also travel with other teams to play in cash tournaments. In my early days in
the NHL, I could make almost as much money playing baseball as I earned from hockey.

One year, I remember playing in a tournament in Indian Head, which is just east of Regina. The caliber of baseball was pretty good, especially for a small town in the middle of the Prairies. The tournament even attracted an All-Star team from the Negro leagues that made the trip up to Canada to play. A scout for the New York Yankees—I think his name was Roy Taylor—was also there watching. I was seeing the ball well that weekend and in one game I even hit for the cycle, which means a single, a double, a triple, and a home run. Overall, I went 8 for 11, and I think the Yankees were looking at me as a potential prospect. Their interest quickly faded once they found out I was already playing professional hockey, but I was still flattered for the look. I don’t know if I would have had the goods to make it to the big leagues, but it’s not like I spent much time over the years thinking about what-ifs. Hockey was so good to me I don’t have much room to harbor regrets about another sport. Suffice to say that baseball’s a wonderful game. I loved playing it right up until the day Mr. Adams put a stop to it.

In the summer of 1952, I was playing in a tournament in Regina when I received a telegram from Mr. Adams that read, “Who’s going to pay your bills if you get hurt? I suggest you quit playing.” It was a tough note to get. I didn’t want to entertain the thought of hanging up my cleats. At the same time, hockey was my livelihood and Mr. Adams was my boss, so I felt stuck. I had to respond, but I knew that once I did, my days on the diamond would be numbered. There was a tournament coming up in Kamsack, which is east of Saskatoon, that I wanted to play in, so I waited before getting back to Mr. Adams. I figured that, at the very least, some stalling could buy me a few more games. When I finally replied, my telegram
said, “Dear Jack Adams, are you serious?” I figured it would take him a while to track me down, but unfortunately that’s not how it played out. When his return telegram found me in Kamsack, it read simply, “I am serious.” Those three little words pretty much ended my semi-pro baseball career.

I might have played longer if not for an injury that drew some attention earlier in the summer. I was playing third base when I fielded a double-play ball, stepped on the bag, and fired it over to first for the out. As I made the play, the other team’s first baseman was charging in from second. Trying to break up the throw, he came in cleats up and spiked me. He probably learned it from watching Ty Cobb. His cleats broke through my skin and I ended up with blood poisoning. When the news reached Mr. Adams, that was all it took for him to snap into action. The really annoying part of the whole thing was how far the guy had to run off the base path to get me. By the time I finished my throw to first, I was about six feet off the bag. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m vindictive, but it was a dirty slide and I felt like there was a score that needed to be settled. In my next three at-bats I drag bunted each time until I flipped the script on him. It took three tries, but I finally put one squarely down the first base line. He charged in to field the ball and I ran straight up his leg with my cleats. Later, he told me that he should have just stood there and let me hit him the first time, because I was going to get him sooner or later. He was right about that. Tit for tat, I say.