by Mark Spector
“Any other decisions that were forced upon you?” I asked Sather.
“Gretzky’s situation was out of my hands. But it still wasn’t a trade,” he said, looking sour at the memory of having to be the general manager who dealt away Wayne Gretzky. “Even trading Mark—someday I may tell all these stories that everyone wants to know. But I’m not ready to do all that.”
And with that, the interview was over. Sather trusts that you enjoyed it.
4
Bob Johnson Fuels the Flames’ Rise
“Beat the drums, boys! Beat the drums!”
Bob Johnson had dropped into the Battle of Alberta from the University of Wisconsin, as if out of the future. “It’s a great day for hockey!” was his mantra, and all you had to do if you wanted to hear his trademark slogan was to greet him with a “How ya doin’ today, Bob?”
He was serial happy—no, perpetually pumped —about the game. He’d come from the Wisconsin Badgers in 1966, made seven trips to the NCAA tournament (winning three), and left as a legend, bringing the whole U.S. college experience with him to Calgary. He was a Korean War vet, a former head coach of the U.S. Olympic team, and, when it came to the game he loved, a human pep rally.
“There were a lot of old-guard guys on that team, like Lanny, and John Tonelli, who kind of looked at Bob and thought, ‘What is all this college bull?’ ” observed Calgary scribe Al Maki. “I remember one time, we were talking with Lanny, Steve Simmons, and I. And Steve put it to him: ‘What is it? Why is there this unspoken dislike or distaste for this guy?
“ ‘Is he too high school?’ Lanny says, ‘Naw.’ Steve says, ‘Does he mix his lines around too much?’ Lanny goes, ‘No, that’s not it.’
“So finally I say, ‘What is it, Lanny? What’s the problem?’ And Lanny thinks for a while, then he says, ‘He’s too positive!’ ”
To describe Badger Bob’s attitude as merely sunny is to say that Sofia Vergara isn’t bad-looking. The guy was not only eternally optimistic, but it also took him only minutes to figure out that, as the head coach of the Flames, job 1-A was to get everyone else feeling the same way. Especially when it came to playing the Oilers, who, when Johnson arrived in the summer of 1982, enjoyed likely the biggest advantage on the Flames in the history of the Battle.
Any coach walking into that assignment was going to have to have a psychology degree to go with his practice planner. As such, Badger Bob Johnson was general manager Cliff Fletcher’s perfect hire.
“You have to understand people, and what makes them tick. That was Bob’s M.O.,” said McDonald, who had 674 NHL games under his belt before Johnson had even signed his first pro deal in Calgary. “Whether it was an hour before practice, or in the evening when you ran across him in the hotel lobby on the road, he was always [McDonald evokes the squeaky voice of his Bob Johnson impression], ‘Hey, I’ve been thinking about this … Do you think this’ll work …?’
“You’d say, ‘Well, let’s talk about it, Bob …’ Career coaches. When they love what they do, what’s wrong with that?”
Al Coates, assistant to the president in Calgary, recalls being approached by two veteran Flames. One of them said, “Coatesy, we have a big favour to ask of you.” And the other one says, nodding toward the coach’s office, “Whatever he’s on, can we have some of it?”
“They couldn’t get over it. Every day was non-stop enthusiasm,” Coates said. “It was something that veteran NHL players just weren’t used to because that wasn’t normal coaching. Bob was just a total deviation from that norm. And really a breath of fresh air. And his wife, Martha, was exactly the same way. He was just someone you wanted to be around all the time.
“Drive you nuts once in a while? Sure. But still, his enthusiasm for winning, and to get better and better on a daily basis.… ” It was off the charts.
In the early-1980s NHL, coaching staffs held as many meetings in the bar the night before the game as they did at the rink the next morning during a road trip. As for players, they had their fun as well. It was a time before physical fitness, when players showed up at camp to get in shape, and the teams obliged them by scheduling eleven or twelve preseason games. There was no riding bikes after a game in those days, and in a time before charter flights, a morning commercial flight meant a post-game beer or two for the boys.
Why do you think the two traditions of a morning skate and an afternoon nap were developed for grown men in their twenties and thirties? The skate was to get them out of bed and sweat out the booze. And the nap was, well, what do you do on a Sunday afternoon after a Saturday night on the town?
The year before Johnson arrived, the Flames dressing room inside the old Stampede Corral was still inhabited by veteran Atlanta holdovers like Ken Houston, Willi Plett, Don Lever, and Eric Vail. Between the young, fast team up the road in Edmonton and general manager Cliff Fletcher’s intent on handing the project over to his new John Wooden prototype, the Flames’ front office knew it had to begin to turn the roster over even before, and after, Johnson was hired.
“There was some movement of players going out who, well, they just weren’t going to get it, for Bob,” said Coates. “But it was hard for guys because practices were different. He had this playbook, and he believed in building from one day to the next. There would be something he was trying to build in a week’s time. So you’d start on Day 1, do something else on Day 2, and hopefully you were there at the end of the week. And the next week, it was something else. It was a year-round thing with him. It never ended.”
Players didn’t always like to think that much in those days. It was the same backlash that video pioneer Roger Neilson had faced—and not unlike the analytics scene today—in that changing a player’s routine was met with opposition by a percentage of the roster.
Ironically, they had tried the same thing in Edmonton a decade before, in the early years of the old WHA. There, Clare Drake, the legendary coach from the University of Alberta, had been hired to coach the 1975–76 Oilers.
Now, Drake was Johnson before Johnson was Johnson and, like Badger, had already forgotten more about the game than many NHL coaches in those days would ever know. Today, such prominent NHL coaches as Mike Babcock, Ken Hitchcock, Barry Trotz, and Willie Desjardins proudly claim to be from “The Clare Drake School” of coaching, a collective of hockey knowledge that has been passed down by Drake to ensuing generations of Canadian coaches. In the mid-1970s WHA, however, the stigma surrounding these “college guys” was even stronger.
If the coach hadn’t played pro, and he did things a little differently, then there was always going to a big enough faction in any professional dressing room that would push back. It only takes a few hard-headed players to render a coach’s system useless if they are not willing to execute it—or, more so, pay attention long enough to learn how to execute it. That attitude neutered Drake, whose absence from the Hockey Hall of Fame today is truly an act of blaspheme, in my opinion. He posted an 18–28–2 record and was fired in Edmonton after forty-eight WHA games.
So, Johnson was Alberta’s second coming of Drake, in many ways, whom Fletcher was in awe of as soon as he watched Badger run a practice.
“He was one of the big guys in U.S. college hockey. I just watched him run a couple of practices and I thought, ‘I’ve never seen anyone run practices like this guy,’ ” Fletcher said. “It was tremendous how he documented what he did, every drill, every practice, in his notebooks. How he prepared his team. I’m sure there were better bench coaches than him once the game started, but in preparing teams and improving players on the team, he’s the best I’ve come across in my years in the game.”
It was the perfect union of the right coach for an ongoing organizational build. Fletcher, with U.S. scout Jack Ferreira, had decided that the best way to reload the Flames was by raiding the NCAA of undrafted graduates who would show up at twenty-one or twenty-two years of age and be far more ready to play than the traditional eighteen-year-old NHL draft pick. Each of those incoming young player
s—guys like Joel Otto, Jamie Macoun, Colin Patterson, Neil Sheehy, Gary Suter, Eddy Beers, and Gino Cavallini—walked in the door knowing exactly who Bob Johnson was, revering him in many cases. And as each showed up, with help from Ferreira, the Flames had a better chance of unearthing the next graduating NCAA player who could join their “program.”
“Coming out of Wisconsin, he knew players and he knew people,” Coates said. “You’d walk into his office and he’d have newspaper after newspaper on his desk. College this, college that … He’d be looking at some alumni messaging—anything where he might find one snippet of information, where we might find a player attached to the end of that line. Somebody who we could go chase down.
“There wasn’t a day that went by, and I am serious about this, where Bob Johnson wouldn’t say to you, ‘What are you doing today to make the Flames better? What are we going to do today to get to the top of that mountain?’ ”
Climbing the mountain: those three words would become synonymous with the Calgary Flames’ quest to catch, then knock off, their northern foes in Edmonton. Johnson hadn’t been in town for five minutes when he started talking about “climbing that mountain,” and the mountain was, figuratively, the team up the road that was about to have five or six of the best players in the world.
The analogy was positively accurate, as the Oilers and Wayne Gretzky loomed like Mount Everest. Meanwhile, the Flames—with a bunch of college kids, a college coach, an old goalie out of the Slap Shot movie named Reggie Lemelin, and a few legit NHLers like Kent Nilsson, Doug Risebrough, Mel Bridgman, and Lanny McDonald—were truly in need of a Sherpa and a compass to find their way out of the Smythe Division.
In his first season behind the Flames bench, Johnson’s teams went 2–4–2 against Edmonton, matching the Oilers with thirty-seven goals apiece. Not bad, right? It’s something to build on.
Well, in season number 2 for Badger Bob, Edmonton won seven of eight games. The teams tied the other one.
“I still remember playing one game in Edmonton, we’re down about 4–0, and it’s early,” said assistant coach Bob Murdoch. “Bob Johnson walks by the guys and down to me, and he says, ‘Bob, we might lose by 20!’ ”
The Oilers won every game in Calgary that season, outscoring the Flames two to one, and at that point the mountain couldn’t have looked any larger from a Calgary perspective.
It’s not that the Oilers had won more than the Flames at that point. It was, in fact, worse than that. They had lost, and lost some heartbreaking series to some very good teams. Edmonton had already gone through that process of learning in defeat and were poised now to use that experience to reach the Stanley Cup finals in Johnson’s second and third years in Calgary.
So imagine being the Flames. The team up the highway has a guy who averaged over 200 points per season for the period from 1981–86, and behind him were three more 100-point players. To put that in perspective, the entire National Hockey League has not had four 100-point players in the same season since the 2009–10 campaign.
Johnson’s team, to the eye of any realistic thinking person, couldn’t have been in a more wrong place at a more improper time. His players would go out and play against the Oilers, and they would get crushed. Then Johnson would gather them up the next day and you know what he’d do?
“He’d see you in the morning and he’d ask you, ‘What did you have for breakfast?’ ‘How many pushups did you do?’ ‘Are you ready to play tonight?’ ” said defenceman Jamie Macoun. “He gave the impression, and it was a truthful one, that he really cared. He cared about you as a person, and he cared about you as a hockey player. That was a more unique attitude in the NHL.”
The fact that Johnson actually hauled his team to the top of that mountain in 1986 was, as most folks would say, his greatest accomplishment as the Flames’ coach. But spend some time around the game and watch a few coaches come and go. For me, the most amazing thing that Badger Bob accomplished was, he got the same buy-in from professional players that he used to get from those kids back at Wisconsin.
He convinced those men that he had a plan, he believed in that plan, and he was willing to live that plan. And they should too. I mean, really live it. Wear it, eat it, sleep with it. Dream about it.
“The guy used to live and breathe hockey. Twenty-four hours a day he was into hockey,” said Murdoch. “We’d go on the road, and his workout would be that we’d go and have a sauna. You’d sit there, and you’d be going over plays in the sauna. Then you’d go for dinner, and the salt-and-pepper shakers, and the water glasses, they became our rotation on our penalty kill. It was twenty-four hours a day.
“Most players enjoyed playing for him,” Murdoch said. “Some guys didn’t like him, but the key guys bought into him. And you need the key guys.”
That took innovation. For generations, coaches have written on the whiteboard (or chalkboard) on the dressing room wall while their players sit in their stalls, eyes darting from the floor to the ongoing lesson. Johnson had already figured out that he would do his coaching in a more convenient spot.
He would have a hockey rink taped out on the dressing room floor, and then he could move the pucks around with a hockey stick—right there in front of the players. Then he garnered some buy-in by charging different players with the responsibility of making the hockey tape rink on that dressing room carpet, a duty in which some players took much pride.
“He had pucks for our team, with numbers on the pucks,” said Patterson. “Then he had blue pucks. They were the Oilers. So we would have someone tape the hockey rink on the floor. If you did a good job, you were doing it again [in the next town]. If you did a bad job, you weren’t doing it again.”
Well, wait a second there. If you did a bad job and the Flames won, you might just get the roll of white tape again in the next town. Because one thing that defined Johnson was his superstitions. He had his own brand of hockey voodoo for everything and was steadfast to his superstitious routines until they ceased to provide Ws. Then he’d change them.
“The most superstitious man I’ve ever been around,” said Peter Maher, the play-by-play voice of the Flames, who learned of this Johnson trait while taping the daily coach’s show for his game broadcast.
We’ve all heard of the coach who wouldn’t change his tie during a winning streak or a player who bought the same coffee at the same time at the same coffee shop on the way to the rink during good times —then switched routines when he found himself in a scoring slump. Well, Johnson’s thing—or one of his things—was to re-enact the Coach’s Show with Maher.
“We’d do it in the morning, before or after the morning skate,” Maher recalled. “Whenever the team was on a winning streak, the interview had to be conducted where it was the last game. One time, he went up and sat on the Zamboni, and I had to climb up to do the interview with him. Because we’d won the last game, with the Zamboni.”
When the Flames were losing, Johnson felt like he needed to explore the realms of the Saddledome to find that obscure, never-before-used spot that could change his team’s luck. Once he found it, Maher knew he was stuck with the routine at least until the Flames posted an L.
“The boiler room was the most successful one in the Saddledome, overall. There would be a streak, then we’d lose a few, and it would be, ‘Let’s go back to the boiler room.’ Then there would be another few games.
“Then there was one time, we had to go sit in the row number of the win the team was looking for. They were looking for win number thirty? We had to sit in the thirtieth row.”
Seriously?
“Seriously,” said Maher. “But the worst of all was in Vancouver. The winning streak was in the penalty box.
“I’ve just been in the league a few years, but Bob had all these things that had to be done. So we’re doing it the night of the game—must have been back-to-back games. No skate. And Bob says, ‘Okay, we’ve got to get to the penalty box.’ We’re in the old building in Vancouver (the Pacific Coliseum), and the only
way to get there was to walk across the ice. Well, we get there, and the door is locked. So Johnson gets up on the top of the boards, and the glass was lower then, fortunately, and he climbs over the glass, goes down, and opens the door. We do the coach’s show.
“I go up into the booth afterwards, to do the game, and [Vancouver play-by-play man] Jim Robson comes over and says, ‘Why was Johnson climbing over the glass to get to the penalty box?’ I say, ‘You really don’t want to know …’ ”
It didn’t take long for Johnson to become accepted in Calgary, a citizenry that—because of the oil business—was receptive to having Americans living among them. As in any town, Flames fans wanted to buy into the new program, and Johnson was as convincing as they came in those lean years before the team’s performance could do the talking for him. At the same time, he and his wife, Martha, became honorary Calgarians. They would return to the States shortly after his tenure in Calgary came to a close, but while Johnson loved among Calgarians, damn it, he would be one of them.
“He would come walking into the rink and say, ‘What a great town! Everybody recognizes you! And they’ll come up and talk about the game last night, and talk hockey! What a great hockey town!’ ” Murdoch laughs. “Well, he’s wearing Calgary Flames–coloured running shoes. Calgary Flames socks. He’s got a Calgary Flames sweatsuit. He’s wearing a Calgary Flames hat. He’d be walking down the street and be surprised when somebody recognized him. Well, he practically had a neon sign that read: ‘I’m Bob Johnson, coach of the Calgary Flames.’ ”
Johnson had been galvanized in that college football atmosphere, and when the scribes would gather on the day before a visit by Edmonton —or a visit to Edmonton—Johnson would always stop for a little pep talk just to make sure they had what they needed to properly stoke the fires of the Battle. Some believed him to be a little too camera-hungry, and if that was true, you could chalk it up to a man who had been the face of a program at Wisconsin for most of two decades and simply took that role up to Calgary.
