Helluva Life In Hockey

Brian Mcfarlane

Description

'A captivating memoir from Canada s foremost hockey historian and a beloved NHL commentator It s been 85 years since Brian McFarlane first laced a pair of skates and tested the black ice on a tiny pond. And then he discovered the joy of hockey. Ultimately, there would be grade school hockey, high school hockey, junior hockey, college hockey, and, miraculously, two decades with the NHL Oldtimers anchoring his life. He was the rank amateur playing on a line with the Big M and Norm Ullman, facing off against icons like Gordie Howe and Ted Lindsay at Maple Leaf Gardens even scoring a goal. He suited up at the Montreal Forum, elbow-to-elbow against John Ferguson, before thousands of fans. (There was even a stint with the Flying Fathers who ordained him a Bishop after a hat trick.) Off the ice, in 1960, McFarlane was the first Canadian to be a commentator on CBS s coverage of the NHL. He also survived 25 years of Hockey Night in Canada despite confrontations w

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 12 octobre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781773056784
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

A Helluva Life in Hockey A Memoir
Brian McFarlane






Contents Dedication Introduction Chapter 1: Now and Then Chapter 2: Skating with Snowbirds Chapter 3: Gone from the Gondola Chapter 4: Why Write About Hockey? Chapter 5: A Kid in Haileybury Chapter 6: Haileybury: A Hundred Years Later Chapter 7: The Pioneer Broadcaster Chapter 8: Happy Days in Whitby Chapter 9: The War Years Chapter 10: A Father’s Advice Chapter 11: Small Town, Big Dreams Chapter 12: Living Over a Barbershop Chapter 13: To Stratford and Back Chapter 14: Battling Brophy and Beliveau Chapter 15: You? Going to College? Chapter 16: On to Schenectady Chapter 17: Bad Luck, Good Luck Chapter 18: Bring Your Skates Chapter 19: Interviews on CBS Chapter 20: Montreal, Here I Come Chapter 21: Toronto Again Chapter 22: MacLaren Chapter 23: The Hewitts: Calling the Shots Chapter 24: The Leafs of the ’60s Chapter 25: All Aboard Chapter 26: Success at Scotiabank Chapter 27: An Amateur Among Ex-Pros Chapter 28: The Perils of Publishing Chapter 29: Question Period Chapter 30: Shack and Ballard Chapter 31: My Biggest Hockey Story Never Aired Chapter 32: Dinner in New York Chapter 33: All About Grapes Chapter 34: Bower the Best Chapter 35: Orr on the Line Chapter 36: The Perilous Adventures of Peter Puck Chapter 37: Mellanby and Me Chapter 38: The Hockey Museum Chapter 39: Our Speaker Tonight Chapter 40: Conversations Recalled Chapter 41: Cole and Gallivan Chapter 42: Scotty Bowman: Born to Coach Chapter 43: Small World Stories Chapter 44: Country Living Chapter 45: Summing Up Photographs Acknowledgements About the Author Copyright


Dedication
To Joan, my partner in this long parade:
Seventy years after we met, 65 since we married, she still has boundless energy. Seven years ago, at 81, she joined our daughter Brenda and her husband Kevin at Burning Man in the Nevada desert, where 60,000 people gather each year for a monster festival. She braved frigid nights and fierce dust storms, sleeping in a pup tent. But she rose each morning to teach fitness classes to “kids” in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. Not bad for a great-grandmother of three, one who can still drive a golf ball, has popped a hole-in-one, has garden plants taller than Jack who grows beanstalks, and who plans to live until she’s at least 116.
In memoriam—Ted Lindsay:
Like millions of others, I miss you, Ted. We worked together on the NBC telecasts with Tim Ryan for three seasons in the ’70s, and they were the best years of my career. Tim’s, too. Such an honour for both of us to be in your company. You had a million friends, and you chose to become special friends to us. Lifelong friends. You led us on the ice, too, as captain of our NBC hockey team, which played media clubs all around the NHL before our Game of the Week . What a thrill it was to be your linemate and watch you toy with some of the eager media wannabes who scrambled over the boards to face you, desperately hoping to stop you—and failing. But they are able to brag, “I played against Ted Lindsay!”
Ted, you had all the class of a Jean Beliveau—a man you greatly admired. And for the kindness and generosity you displayed to one and all throughout your life, you are revered. Sometimes the path you followed to achieve hockey greatness was daunting, but you never faltered. You stood up to the vilification of greedy, self-interested managers and owners, because the game you loved needed change. You moved the game forward—at great personal cost. You are my hero and my friend. You are the only former NHLer I know who still had a locker in the Detroit dressing room when you were 90. It may be difficult for a restless rebel like yourself to grant my wish, but please: if you are in hockey heaven somewhere, be friends with old opponents, be forgiving of referees, managers, and owners who made you bristle. Ted, my friend, please rest in well-earned peace


Introduction
When I joined Hockey Night in Canada as a colour commentator in the mid-1960s—beginning a 25-year association with the famous telecast—the National Hockey League (NHL) was a six-team league. Everywhere across the land, Saturday night was reserved for watching hockey. The Hockey Night in Canada theme song was as familiar to most of us as the national anthem.
When I started working high up in the famous gondola at Maple Leaf Gardens, with legendary play-by-play men Foster and Bill Hewitt, colour television was a highly anticipated marvel a year or two in the future. Each NHL club carried just one goalie on its roster, which meant the seventh-best goalie in the world toiled in some minor league. A Hall of Famer like Johnny Bower spent 10 years away from the show. If a regular goalie was injured or ill, the team trainer or a junior netminder was hurriedly recruited to take his place. I found it farcical. A porous substitute in a single game could mean the difference between a team making the playoffs and losing out. It could bring a player a scoring title he didn’t really deserve, because he’d collected four or five points against a floundering amateur. But nobody seemed to care. The team owners were frugal. Why hire a full-time backup if nobody complained, if nobody ordered them to? The Chicago Blackhawks once put a stuffed dummy in goal for practice sessions. How would the fans have reacted if they’d propped him up in goal in a real game? Or called for volunteers from the stands to don the pads in an emergency? That’s an ideal segue to Moe Roberts’s story. Roberts was a Blackhawks trainer in the early ’50s, following a long pro career as a goalie, mostly in the American Hockey League (AHL), but with a handful of NHL starts.
Then on November 25, 1951, Roberts had to finish an NHL game for the injured Harry Lumley, the Blackhawks’ starter. Although Roberts didn’t yield a goal, his Hawks still fell to Detroit by a 5–2 score. At 45, Roberts, in his final game, became the oldest player ever to play in an NHL game, a record he held until broken by Gordie Howe in 1979 and also passed by Chris Chelios. He remains the oldest goaltender—and perhaps the most obscure goalie—to ply his trade in an NHL tilt. Johnny Bower, at 45, a few months younger than Roberts, is the oldest full-time goalie to play in the NHL.
No goalie masks, one or two helmets back then. Well, maybe one or two. No names on jerseys. No player agents. No million-dollar salaries. No Europeans or college players. I recall only one American, Tommy Williams from the U. S Olympic champs at Squaw Valley, California, in 1960. Olympians were all lowly amateurs—hardly worth a scout’s time.
There was talk of NHL expansion, but it was mostly talk.
A proposal to start a new league, one to rival the NHL? Laughable. Who would dare? President Clarence Campbell pooh-poohed that idea. “It’ll never happen,” he stated.
The Russians? Forget the Russians.
Saturday night was hockey night. It was a tradition that began with Foster Hewitt on radio in the ’30s. Then, from 1952 on, all across Canada families gathered in their living rooms to watch the games on television—on the CBC. But not all of the game. They were deprived of most—if not all—of the first period. Showing the full game might hurt ticket sales, the big shots wrongly figured.
Youngsters were seldom allowed to watch a complete game before being ushered off to bed. Many would sneak to the head of the stairwell and listen to Foster Hewitt’s voice from there. Wives made trips to the kitchen, where they gossiped with other wives and prepared snacks for the male fans, who smoked their cigars and cigarettes—and drank their beer or their rye and gingers close to their black-and-white TV sets. Small sets, many with rabbit ears. You don’t know about rabbit ears? Ask Grampa. No, better not. He’s a kidder. He’ll tell you they were real rabbit ears.
Most of my telecast teammates—Foster and Bill Hewitt, Jack Dennett, Ward Cornell, and Danny Gallivan—were already household names, as familiar as the powder-blue jackets we all began to wear on TV. Foster’s three-star selections were as eagerly awaited as the national news.
Some viewers thought Murray Westgate, the actor who pitched commercials for Imperial Oil while wearing a cap and an Esso patch on his uniform, actually owned a service station.
Westgate and I were there when the NHL doubled in size in 1967, the year the Leafs won their last Stanley Cup. My wife and I crashed the victory party at Stafford Smythe’s house. Drank from the Stanley Cup for the first and only time. I wonder how many others who were at the game that night are still around? Not many, I’ll bet. If my wife and I live long enough, we may be the only two people who actually saw the Leafs win the Cup. Bill Hewitt and I called that game, not thinking for a second it would be the Leafs’ final Cup win in the century. And they haven’t come close in this century.
I was among a group of broadcasting pioneers in a televised world of skill on skates, bench-clearing brawls, one-man coaching staffs, iron-fisted owners, and a mere two playoff rounds to decide the Stanley Cup champions.
And if we thought ourselves to be the luckiest broadcasters in the world, to be part of the season-long frenzy and the exhilarating playoff action, it’s because we were. We brought the drama, the excitement, the crunch of body contact, culminating in a rousing spectacle of skill on ice to a huge audience on the most popular show in the nation— Hockey Night in Canada .


Chapter 1 Now and Then
In writing this rambling memoir