Keith Magnuson

by Doug Feldmann

  Once Sunday obligations were over and the work week returned, hockey was a prime focus at the Magnuson home. There were only six teams in the National Hockey League at that time, and Joe’s favorite of those was the Chicago Black Hawks1. His favorite player on the Hawks was Reggie “the Ruffian” Fleming, a player in the true Canadian tradition who deftly combined athletic skill with a resilient toughness and a willingness to fight all comers. As in most homes fortunate enough to have televisions, all other attention stopped at the Magnuson house when the Hawks were televised nationally on Hockey Night in Canada, the fanatical equivalent to the show launched in the United States in 1970 known as Monday Night Football.

  Despite the outward displays of bravado with pond hockey and arm-wrestling matches, the family also valued the finer things in life. This included a great enjoyment of music, with household songs popping up just as often as challenges of physical prowess. And while Keith admitted an inability to carry a tune, he would do his best as a youngster to bellow along with his mother, father, and brother Dale, while his brother Wayne piped out notes on the trumpet and his sister, Meridel, joined in on the piano.

  Their house was a two-story structure near the center of Wadena, across the street from the church—making any excuses for not attending those Sunday services hard to come by. A variety of flowers surrounded the lot, and a large elm tree stood in the front yard and supported an old tire swing. With no indoor plumbing in the house, it soon became young Keith’s distasteful job to carry a bucket to the cesspool at the back edge of the family’s property “where the rats hung out,” as he remembered. “I hated facing those huge, well-fed, evil-looking animals that were always there.”

  This inconvenience was suggestive of the practicality and resourcefulness of the Magnusons and most people in the area, who did what was necessary to advance their well-being. Wayne was an excellent trapper and hunter, and helped provide meat in the wintertime when he would score a deer or two, or perhaps some mallards in the summer. He also liked to pick crows off the power lines and had a keen shooting eye. Once while riding in the back seat of the family car, Wayne spied a blackbird perched above the highway. Not wanting to first alert Joe or Birdie, he reached for his pump-action shotgun in the hope they would stop the car for a shot, but he mishandled the rifle. The safety off, the gun discharged and blew out the back window. Despite the surprise, the Magnusons were reported to have hardly flinched, and escaped the situation unscathed—just another raw episode from living in the country. “A person’s toughness must come from somewhere, and in my case I believe it came from where I was born,” Keith stated.

  For the sub-arctic Saskatchewan days that were simply too brutal for hockey on the ponds and lakes out in the open lands, Wadena (which actually fell within the official definition of “subarctic” at 51 degrees latitude) did offer a makeshift facility for hockey and public skating in town, as primitive as it may have been.

  “There was a potbellied stove in the middle of the dressing room and rough boards on the floor,” recalled Dale. “The ice was natural. The hits were cold. That’s where Keith got his start.”

  From the Magnuson home, Keith would sprint down a back alley as a shortcut to the rink—often with his skates already on, so that he would waste no time. (This would cause damage to his blades, of course; a local man would sharpen his skates for 50 cents, but Joe would permit only one sharpening per year. Keith would be careful to remember this, and made the annual repair count.)

  And thus, as he would do many years later with another group of friends, Keith would always be the first among his teammates to leap onto the ice.

  He sprung right into organized hockey in Wadena at the age of five, playing in the “Tom Thumb” level for beginners. For additional practice, he also regularly joined boys of all ages for pickup games at the rink and on the ponds. Whether it was a league game or a quickly assembled pickup contest, Keith would recall being in a bad mood—even to the point of tears—if his team lost.

  Always an admirer of his older siblings, Keith immediately began playing defenseman because that was the position Wayne played. Likewise, in the springtime, he would emulate Wayne as a catcher in baseball. Soon everyone noticed that, even at a young age, Keith was a perfectionist on the ice, carefully monitoring every detail in the advancement of his skills. He continued to jot down his practice routine on the church calendar during services.

  “Keith always had a checklist and was very systematic,” said Herb Pinder, a childhood acquaintance. “Every night when we didn’t play, or even sometimes on days when we practiced, he would write a list of what he needed to work on and then go out on the outdoor neighborhood rink and follow that list. He was very disciplined that way.”

  Developing his physical traits early, Keith later in life claimed that the only time he was naturally good at sports was in the first grade, when he was big for his age and the fastest runner in his class.

  At the age of seven, he received an autographed photo in the mail from one of his favorite players in the NHL, a young star with the Detroit Red Wings. The writing on the photo read:

  To my little friend, Keith… Best always, Gordie.

  Gordie Howe, at age 26 that year, had already won four league scoring titles, in the previous four seasons (1951–54), and was yet another player formed out of those rough Saskatchewan winters.

  And just as had happened to Gordie in his childhood, Keith’s father grabbed an opportunity to move the family to the province’s central city of Saskatoon for better fortunes. When Keith was eight years old, Joe got an offer to sell insurance and run a wholesale hardware business in the municipality of 100,000 people that lay 130 miles to the west—and it was too good to refuse. Keith had earlier told his dad that he never wanted to live in the city, but he understood why his father took the job.

  As the family was packing up to depart for Saskatoon, one thing the pensive Keith wanted to leave behind in Wadena was what he considered his reputation as a “bully” among other kids, despite his young age. “Because I was big when I was little, I’d usually beat up my peers,” he once wrote of his time in the early grades. “Of course, it didn’t get me anywhere. Sure, at the time I might win a point. But then I began to realize that kids didn’t want to play with me. This hurt.”

  Unfortunately, he was unable to avoid confrontation in his new surroundings. In his very first day at Churchill Elementary School in Saskatoon, he was taunted by another youngster who told him that “we don’t want any farm boys” when Keith tried to take part in a schoolyard game. While many joined in the jeering, one new friend who did stand up for Keith was Tim Gould, who ultimately would be by Keith’s side often—including on the ice—in the years to come.

  In spite of the kind gesture, Keith did not need Tim’s help. Instead, the young Magnuson felt compelled to at least momentarily go back to his physical ways. And after a thorough whipping, the main aggravator—along with the others at Churchill School—did not ever challenge the new red-haired kid again.

  Most elementary schools in Canada had their own hockey teams, and this was particularly true in larger cities like Saskatoon. And much to his own surprise, by the sixth grade, Keith’s demeanor had improved so much from those earlier “bullying” days in Wadena that he won the award for “Most Gentlemanly Player” that year (although the recognition would not necessarily forecast a Lady Byng Trophy for him in the future).

  On the other side of the city, the same award had been won by a seventh-grade student at Princess Alexandria School, Cliff Koroll. The two went head to head on the ice on several occasions. Years later, someone asked Magnuson what he remembered about Koroll from those childhood days; after thinking for a moment to summon a distinctive quality, he offered that Koroll’s “ears stuck way out from his helmet.”

  As for Cliff, he would later describe his own first impressions of Magnuson. “I remember this little redhead comes off the farm, skinny,
arms down below his knees, bowlegs,” Koroll said. The two would have many youth-league battles as opponents before joining forces on the same side years later. “He would always try to hit me in the corners,” Koroll added, “and [he] would always bounce off me, as I was much bigger than he was. He would get up and run at me again.”

  The two quickly became friends through other sports; some of their more notable meetings took place on the baseball diamond. “When our coach gave the signal to steal, it was not to steal second but to go to third because he [Magnuson] would end up throwing the ball into center field,” Koroll chuckled. “He was a small kid between [ages] 10 and 15 but he always had those long arms and huge hands.” And oftentimes it was Gould, playing third base, who would get the final throw on the play from the center fielder who had retrieved Keith’s errant throw to second.

  Magnuson and Koroll—like many of the most promising young Canadian players—had their hockey futures essentially mapped out for them by the time they reached their early teens. The youth hockey clubs in Saskatoon and most other places were, in effect, an extension of the Canadian Juniors system, the tradition-rich “minor leagues” of the sport from whence the vast majority of the players in the NHL had come, with few high school age players considering collegiate play as an option. Teams around the city such as the Saskatoon Blades and the Midget Red Wings were fully sponsored by NHL clubs—making the teenagers on their rosters de facto possessions of those teams.

  “I was the Blades’ [the Los Angeles forerunner of the Kings] property at 10 years old,” Magnuson recalled. “By the time I’d reached 16, however, Chicago and L.A. had worked a deal transferring Cliff Koroll and me to the Black Hawks… It’s like being a product on the exchange—a negotiable item among high-powered businessmen. Even at 12, I recall having to sign a professional sponsor’s form” (along with his parents).

  While only a teenager, Keith was nonetheless always looking for an edge to increase his strength and performance. Starting in junior high school, he began to spend a portion of his summers working at Boychuk Lumber Yard in Saskatoon, where he was paid $1.50 an hour.

  “I’d cut two-by-fours or load 80-pound cement bags, and go out on deliveries or work construction projects, such as building a granary,” he remembered.

  Despite the strenuous labor, he also dedicated himself to rigorous athletic training upon coming home at night, regardless of his level of fatigue from the lumber yard. Despite the hard work, Keith’s growth had slowed heading into high school, as he started his freshman year at only 5'6" and 140 pounds—not much bigger from when he was admittedly pushing kids around in his first grade class back in Wadena. However, with one more summer working at Boychuk after his first year in high school, he “zoomed up” to 160 as his efforts finally paid off. His sports skills now took off as well, as he twice won the Saskatchewan province title in the javelin throw as a track-and-field competitor and was a city champion in football while leading his team at quarterback.

  But hockey, of course, remained his true love. And naturally, Keith marveled at the idea of pursuing a regular spot in the prestigious-but-rugged Juniors system. However, he and his parents also recognized the challenging lifestyle of the Juniors for a teenager, and took this fact into careful consideration as he began his time with the Blades.

  Players in the Juniors roomed together all season long with teammates from their same communities. Most would never finish high school, dubbed “hockey dropouts” when they would wind up short of their NHL dream and with no education on which to fall back. A player named Dave Schultz, with whom Magnuson would have much contact down the road, revealed the off-the-books education that the system otherwise provided.

  “If nothing else,” Schultz said after his playing days were finished, “Juniors taught me the hard facts of life about hockey…up until then, hockey to me had been a pretty game of skating, shooting, stickhandling, and playmaking. When a stick was rammed into my stomach, a butt end massaged my ribs, and a thick leather gauntlet was pushed in my face, I got a different impression of what organized hockey was all about.”

  Keith acknowledged that, in his last year of high school while playing for the Blades, he was flunking half his courses because all his attention turned to hockey. Through the winter of 1963–64, he would play in 54 games for the Blades as a defenseman, scoring two goals and collecting nine assists, with two more assists in five playoff contests.

  At about this time, the University of Denver head hockey coach Murray Armstrong was on a recruiting trip to Saskatoon, which was one of his favorite places to mine talent and take it back to the States. Koroll was already at DU as a freshman after fighting off the temptation to go full-bore into the Juniors, and Armstrong now returned to offer new scholarships to six other city residents: Magnuson, Gould, Don Thiessen, Neil McQueen, Bob Sutcliffe, and Dale Zeman.

  Despite several familiar faces heading to Denver, Keith was reluctant to go, and it was a reluctance that was somewhat shared by his parents. He had never spent much time away from home. But Armstrong—frank, fair, and honest with the parents and guardians of the players whom he recruited—assured Joe and Birdie that he would take excellent care of their son. Keith would have the opportunity to further his education in addition to his hockey career.

  “There was no letter of intent or anything like that,” Denver player Jim Wiste said of Armstrong’s sales pitch. Wiste and Magnuson would soon become great friends as well as teammates. “Murray would come to your home and would tell your mom and dad, ‘I would want my own son to go to Denver.’ And when a player complained that there was no signed piece of paper that stated he had a scholarship, Murray would simply reply, ‘You have my word—that is better than a piece of paper.”

  Armstrong’s sincerity won over the Magnuson family, and Keith worked hard to improve his grades in the final months of his high school career. He also continued to fine-tune his hockey skills into the late hours of the night at a Saskatoon rink, where his siblings would help him.

  He was formally accepted into Denver a week before classes began in the fall of 1965. Right at that time, a couple of National Football League rookies named Butkus and Sayers were departing their first professional training camp to join the Bears in Chicago, and the sports scene in that city was about to enter a new era.

  1 Until 1986, the team was known as the “Black Hawks,” at which time the name was shortened to one word as “Blackhawks.” Thus, to correspond with the timeframe covered, “Black Hawks” will be used in this book.

  2. A Pioneer in America

  “I wanted to become a hockey player, and there’s no better place than Denver for that.”

  —Keith Magnuson, 1970

  Murray Armstrong was definitely part of the “old guard” of hockey, having played in the NHL for the Toronto Maple Leafs, the New York/Brooklyn Americans, and the Detroit Red Wings from 1938 to 1946, with a brief interruption for military service during World War II. After a few years of coaching in the top level of the Juniors system, he took on a new challenge in 1956 in what some might have considered the hockey coaches’ graveyard—becoming the head man at an American college.

  The University of Denver Pioneers had long been an exception in this regard, however—and Armstrong was a perfect fit to take over for departing coach Neil Celley. Armstrong quickly advanced the program to new heights, claiming the school’s first national championships in 1958, 1960, and 1961. And in 1965, Keith Magnuson and his friends from Saskatoon were being relied upon to carry the flag onward as the new batch of talent.

  On the first day he set foot on the ice at DU, Magnuson was paired on defense with Tim Gould—the one who had stood up for Keith on the playground on his first day of elementary school in Saskatoon. Both young men noticed immediately that Armstrong ran very creative practices that kept the players’ attention, interest, and conditioning at an optimal level. “A hockey game is won or lost in the corners!” the coach
would holler—if Magnuson heard Armstrong utter this phrase once, he heard it a thousand times.

  In addition to lengthy drills in physical training, Armstrong also utilized competitive games to motivate the players—such as one of Magnuson’s favorites, Oranges and Lemons. Occasionally at the end of a practice, Armstrong would have the players split into two teams and attempt breakaway shots on the goaltenders at each end of the ice. As this occurred, Armstrong could be seen shuffling along the edge of the rink, lining the top of the boards with one row of oranges and one row of lemons; the team that scored more goals was permitted to eat the oranges after practice, while the side with fewer goals had to suck the lemons.

  The coach also took a very professional approach during workouts with his players—in a literal sense.

  “Armstrong ran practices under NHL rules,” Magnuson said of the overarching environment. “We hit all over the ice…we got more experience with a hitting style than you might expect [from a typical college program].”

  In further preparing his players for the possibility of playing at the next level, Armstrong also had them match up at practice and “spar”—a simulation of a fight that, instead of throwing punches, involved learning the skills necessary to gain leverage on the opponent’s jersey, maintaining balance on one’s skates, and the multitude of other factors involved in hockey self-defense in addition to simply letting one’s fists fly.

  “We often practiced from 1:00 to 4:30 pm for several days at a time,” Jim Wiste recalled. “The amount of time we were on the ice might well be considered illegal today by the NCAA.”

  Armstrong had indeed been hardened through the tough ranks of the game in the raw, Canadian way. And with Magnuson, Gould, and the others from Saskatoon as examples, the coach made it clear that he preferred recruiting Canadian players almost exclusively—and Keith readily agreed that this approach led to DU’s relative dominance in American collegiate play.