Keith Magnuson

by Doug Feldmann

  Meanwhile, across the room, Bobby Hull broke out in a Frank Sinatra song.

  “When I was 21, it was a very good year…”

  Hull was referring to being a 21-year-old in 1961–62, the season in which the Hawks won their last Stanley Cup.

  “Maggie,” Hull halted his singing and yelled to the rookie defenseman, “this could be a very good year.”

  After his 15th shutout, Esposito had allowed only one goal in his last 260 minutes of play. With the playoffs ahead, Ted Damata wrote in the Chicago Tribune that “the battle for the Cup returns to Chicago after a one-year absence; a year in which ‘the best team that ever finished last’ is emerging swanlike from the ugly-duckling status.… Big Tony now has a 14-goal cushion in the quest for the Vezina Trophy. He has a stranglehold on the Calder Trophy [for league rookie of the year]; and, if the Hawks succeed in finishing in first place, the Hart Cup [the most valuable player trophy] has to be stolen from him. It would be an unprecedented sweep in the annals of hockey.”

  Yet despite Esposito’s unmatched number of shutouts, there was talk of Magnuson being more deserving of the Calder Trophy, in consideration of the physical pounding Keith was taking in front of the net on a nightly basis.

  Magnuson had been able to find respite from the brutality of the NHL thanks in part to having a comfortable place to live. During the season, Keith shared an apartment with Koroll, his former roommate at Denver. Cliff was seen by Bob Verdi to be “the perfect cerebral and grounded half to this odd couple arrangement.”

  “We’d never yell at each other,” Magnuson said of his living situation with Koroll, one which would last another three and a half years—until Koroll got married. “Not that we never had differences. It’s just that we’re so competitive most of the time that if there’s anything bothering us we try to settle it on the ice. So sometimes during practice we’d really belt each other, usually over some stupid little thing that had started back at the apartment.”

  Keith claimed to do all the cleaning, while Cliff handled the cooking. And when Koroll finally did get married, he permitted Magnuson to live with the newlywed couple for another three months “until I finally kicked him out,” Cliff said with a laugh.

  Koroll also noticed that Magnuson continued to write short notes to himself, just as he had done in Denver and much to the amusement of his friend. “If you looked around, you’d see those lists,” Koroll said. “When we roomed together in college, we [Wiste and other roommates] used to mess with him all the time and shuffle his notes. We used to get a kick out of reading his notes, which were as simple as ‘Wake up,’ ‘Wash face,’ ‘Comb hair,’ and ‘Brush teeth.’”

  One time, Magnuson wrote “Phone Bill” as reminder to make a payment—but then misplaced the piece of paper, and soon it was forgotten. Upon finding it months later, Keith agonized in straining to remember just who “Bill” was.

  * * *

  By April it was clear that one of the most exciting finishes in NHL history would take place in the stretch run to the playoffs. The Hawks, Canadiens, Rangers, Red Wings, and Bruins all had a shot at first place in the Eastern Division going into the schedule’s final week. As Magnuson remembered, “It was as if we had to win every night just to keep pace.” Ultimately, it came down to Orr’s Bruins against Magnuson’s Black Hawks for the top spot in the standings on the last day of the season.

  While hockey had not yet reached widespread popularity in the United States as the 1960s closed, the race for the 1970 Stanley Cup had captured the interest of the nation, seeking a fresh sports story after the “Miracle Mets” had overtaken the Cubs on their way to baseball’s World Series in the past October. In recognition of the riveting sprint for the championship, the new face of Chicago hockey was displayed for the whole world to see on the cover of Sports Illustrated during the first week of April. The cover showed a sweaty, red-haired, grinning battler with one missing tooth, clutching his stick defensively but seemingly without a care in the world. It was Keith Magnuson, posing next to a caption that read, “Chicago and Boston in Hockey’s Hottest Race.” In the coming years, Magnuson would also appear on the cover of The Sporting News, Hockey Illustrated, and Hockey Digest, as well as Weekend magazine, one of the top publications in Canada, as his celebrity status grew. But this was the first true national exposure for the new tough guy in Chicago.

  On the final day of the season, the Hawks completed their “worst to first” resurgence by drubbing Montreal 10–2 at the Stadium. The lopsided score was made possible when the Canadiens pulled their goalie midway through the third period, as Montreal needed to score a certain number of goals to overtake the Rangers for fourth place in the East, and thus claim the final playoff spot. (With a loss to Chicago, Montreal finished with the exact same record as New York at 38–22–16. The tiebreaker at the time deferred to total goals scored, and the Canadiens would have to muster at least five in the game against Esposito.) The Canadiens did not score at all during their nine minutes with the extra attacker—and thus missed the playoffs for the only time in a 47-year period from 1948 until 1995.

  With the Hawks firmly in control of the game and having fun firing at an empty net in the last half of the final stanza, Magnuson realized his teammates were trying to get him his first NHL goal, as he was passed the puck as often as possible. It was not meant to be, but Magnuson and the Hawks celebrated the victory with their acceptance of the Prince of Wales Trophy for the best record in the NHL regular season. Chicago and Boston actually wound up tied in the standings with 99 total points (during those days in the NHL, two points were given for a win and one for a tie), but the Eastern Division title was given to Chicago by virtue of the Hawks’ 45 wins to the Bruins’ 40.

  After the cheers simmered down in the Chicago locker room, there was silence as Mikita suggested a moment of prayer. During the reflection, Magnuson admitted to shedding a tear in the midst of the powerful scene, knowing that he had played a large part in the team’s turnaround.

  Red Wings coach Sid Abel had recently absorbed much criticism from the local and national media—and from the Bruins—after resting several of his best players on the April 4 regular season finale against the Rangers. The Wings’ postseason spot had already been assured, but many of the playoff seedings for the other teams were still to be determined.

  The playoffs opened with the Hawks taking two straight from the Red Wings in the Stadium before the series shifted to Detroit. That city—like Chicago—had been primed for a return to success on the ice.

  “Fans, starved for hockey as they used to know it in the glory days of the 1950s, snapped up all the standing-room tickets by early afternoon,” reported Mark Mulvoy outside the Olympia before the game and shortly after the first drop of the puck. “And not even the oldest Howe-Lindsay-Abel worshippers could remember the last time that happened…traffic on Grand River Avenue was so jammed, many fans missed the first 10 minutes.”

  Before the team boarded the bus at the hotel for the trip to the arena, Magnuson and Koroll had attempted to pass the time—as well as the jitters about their first NHL playoff game on the road—by going shopping. Keith soon put his nervousness to rest, helping to direct the Hawks to victory twice more in Detroit for a sweep of the Red Wings. Detroit dropped all four games by the same 4–2 score.

  “Magnuson was playing spirited, flawless hockey,” continued Mulvoy, “the kind that in just one season has made him the Hawks’ chief fire-lighter.”

  With the Red Wings out of the way, it was on to the semifinals and a more formidable opponent—the vaunted Bruins.

  * * *

  Despite nearly matching the Hawks’ regular season record, skeptics believed the Bruins might not get past New York in the first round. Until March 25 of that year, Boston had not beaten an Eastern Division team on the road. Like many teams in the East, they had fattened up on the expansion teams in the West, and therefore, many doubted they could hand
le the Rangers in a seven-game series.

  While Orr was generally regarded as the best fighter on the Bruins, a case for the team’s chief antagonist on the road could easily have been made for Sanderson, who was an overwhelming fan favorite at home in the Boston Garden.

  “It is interesting that in a hockey town like Boston, where Bobby Orr is both prime minister and chairman of the board,” observed Phil Elderkin of The Sporting News, “there is no shortage of fans for Derek. You would need an applause meter to measure his popularity.”

  Always looking to drum up publicity, Sanderson suffered no shortage of self-promotion. His license plate read Bruins16; he liked to hang out with Joe Namath (he was reputed to be part-owner of a nightclub with the football star, and like Namath’s famous shoes, Sanderson once tried to order a pair of white skates for further showmanship); and he also liked to keep a wide assortment of girls around.

  After the regular season had concluded, Bruins coach Harry Sinden scheduled a practice session at Watson Rink on the campus of Harvard University. Sinden told his players after the workout that they would be flying out of Boston that night instead of in the morning to avert an impending strike by air traffic controllers. Sanderson was annoyed by the change of travel plans, as it meant that he would have to rearrange his social calendar—or at least, that is what he wanted his teammates to believe.

  “I had a date with Jackie tonight,” Sports Illustrated reported him as saying. “No, with Susan; I forgot, Jackie was the backup.”

  While certainly unwelcome with the fans in Chicago, Sanderson was so despised in New York that extra police officers were dispatched to the area of the penalty box when Sanderson received an infraction in Madison Square Garden.

  Dave Schultz, the Philadelphia fighter who had about as many battles with Sanderson as he did with Magnuson, sounded as if he felt sorry for Sanderson.

  “Sanderson was a classic example of a professional athlete who became a victim of his overnight wealth,” Schultz wrote in his autobiography. “Derek was a troubled personality…the distractions of big money disturbed his concentration. He became fat—both literally and figuratively—and he was never the same quality hockey player after that.”

  Cheevers, however, believed that there were many misconceptions about Sanderson. “You have to know Derek,” the Boston goaltender suggested. “There are only 18 or 19 guys in hockey who really know him, and they’re all Bruins.”

  After Boston took a 2–0 lead at home in their series against the Rangers, the games shifted to Madison Square Garden. There, the arrival of Sinden’s men on the ice resembled the moments seen in the movie Slap Shot after the Hanson brothers joined the Charlestown Chiefs. From the moment they emerged from the locker room, the Bruins were subjected to numerous missiles such as batteries, eggs, and rubber balls being hurled their way, as well as a steady stream of insults. To some witnesses, the tension between two NHL teams had never seemed so high.

  After dropping the next two games in New York, Sinden’s men took care of business and dispatched the Rangers in six. Next, they would look to exact revenge upon the Hawks for sneaking past them in the regular season standings.

  The series began in front of a raucous crowd at the Stadium on April 19, with some expecting to see more fireworks from Magnuson, Sanderson, and Orr in a carryover from the fight back in November. Given the importance of the series, however, all three showed restraint, with no major fighting penalties being issued in any of the games.

  Unfortunately, the 6–3 decision for Boston in the opener was a harbinger of things to come. The Bruins’ high-octane offense blitzed Esposito, scoring an average of five goals per game in achieving a four-game sweep. Magnuson broke up a 2–0 Bruins lead in Game 4 at Boston with his first NHL goal, but the onslaught continued thereafter. Boston had become so hockey crazy, in fact, that when Game 2 was sent via television back to the city on WSBK, the station got the highest-ever rating for any show on the old UHF band.

  “Every day the Bruins are Page One stuff,” said Leo Monahan of The Sporting News. “Politicians angle for seats…autograph hounds surround players…practice sessions have to be put off-limits because of the humanity crush.”

  Thus, the 1969–70 regular season and the playoffs had become Orr’s first, and what would be his brightest personal showcase—the first time in many years that Bobby Hull, after returning to the Chicago lineup after his early-season holdout, took a backseat to someone else in the sport.

  “The Golden Jet has seemed to have lost his zip and fire,” opined hockey writer Stan Fischler. “It could be a result of Chicago’s new defensive style or it could be Hull’s age—or both. But Orr is hockey’s king of the ’70s.”

  Orr swept the major individual awards by winning the Hart, Norris (top defenseman), Conn Smythe (playoff MVP), and Art Ross (scoring title) trophies, the last the first ever claimed by a defenseman. And as a finishing touch, Orr ended the postseason with perhaps the most dramatic goal in hockey history. In front of the home fans in Boston against the St. Louis Blues in Game 4 of the Finals, he launched a beautiful give-and-go play with Sanderson. Charging to the front of the goal mouth, he positioned himself to easily tap-in the game-winner as Sanderson centered the puck from behind the net. A Blues player tripped Orr the moment he scored, sending him flying parallel to the ice in his famous celebratory pose. (Despite the dramatics and Orr’s general dominance during the season, it could be argued that Cheevers equally carried the Bruins to the Finals, logging at least twice as many minutes as any other goalie in the 1970 playoffs.)

  In addition to being Orr’s breakout season (and the first in his four initial NHL years in which he was able to stave off injuries and play in every game), the 1969–70 schedule was also the last outstanding season for Gordie Howe. For a record 21st time, he finished in the top 10 in the league in scoring.

  * * *

  With rushes into the offensive zone rarely seen by a defenseman in the game’s history, Orr was singlehandedly changing the way hockey was played—much the way Babe Ruth helped change baseball with his unprecedented home-run hitting in the 1920s. While Magnuson was well aware of his role with the Hawks and was not looking to become a “puck-moving” defenseman, he nonetheless was impressed enough by Orr to continue working on his own game, not taking his successful first year in the NHL for granted.

  Seeking to gain any advantage he could find, Magnuson looked to new resources and techniques in the summer of 1970—in particular, the boxing ring. Having gotten his first basic boxing lessons as a boy from his father back in Saskatoon and later from Ottenbreit while in college, Magnuson would now be coached in the sweet science by Johnny Coulon. Born in Canada but raised in Chicago, Coulon—81 years old in 1970—had been the bantamweight champion of the world from 1910 to 1914 and had spent his whole life in the sport, even serving as a pallbearer at the funeral of former heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. In his eighties, he continued to run his gym on Chicago’s south side, where Magnuson would train—a place at which such notable figures from Ernest Hemingway to Muhammad Ali were said to have practiced as well. And no one, including Keith, pitied Coulon’s advanced age when they saw his level of fitness; he could still leap over the top rope of a boxing ring from a standing position and walk across an entire gym floor on his hands.

  While the team’s performance against the high-powered Bruins in the playoffs was a disappointment, the Hawks had served notice to the NHL that they were back. And with youngsters Magnuson, Koroll, and others having gained valuable experience, Chicago boasted a lineup which figured to soar to great heights in the coming years—particularly with the team’s move to the Western Division for the 1970–71 schedule, one of a few switches made by the league to provide a better mixture of competitive balance between divisions. Verdi, from his desk at the Tribune, expected the Hawks to begin a powerful run through the league. “If you were lucky enough to be a rookie writer for the big newspaper in
town,” Verdi would pen in 2003, “you figured it always would be like this.”

  2 The following season, the team changed its name to the “California Seals,” and then soon to the “California Golden Seals.”

  4. One Win Away

  “If you’re going to play in this league—and that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do—you just have to be able to take care of yourself. If you can’t, the established players will run you out.”

  —Keith Magnuson, 1970

  While Keith Magnuson felt that his league-leading 213 penalty minutes in his rookie year helped establish him as the team’s enforcer, coach Billy Reay felt that some of those penalty minutes, in addition to some of those fights, were unnecessary. The coach did not hold this against Keith, trusting that it was simply the result of a lack of experience and that he would learn to better choose his battles in later seasons.

  After a brief rest in Canada following his training at Johnny Coulon’s gym, Magnuson returned to Chicago for his second camp with the Black Hawks in September 1970. Whether it was from witnessing Bobby Orr’s spectacular rushes with the puck or some other reason, Keith was suddenly worried that other parts of his game were beginning to suffer. He thought he needed to be more of an offensive-minded player instead of relying on brute force all the time. When he experimented in displaying this new persona at the team’s first few workouts, one of his veteran teammates on defense had a different and simpler idea for him.

  “Pat Stapleton came up to me and said, ‘Maggie, we need you to hit,’” Keith recalled. Magnuson never looked back from this directive, now finally convinced of not only what his role should be, but that his teammates had confidence in him to fulfill it.

  And as the 1970–71 season began, it did not take long for Magnuson to author a signature statement in his fighting career, announcing in no uncertain terms that he was the policeman for the team in the Indian-head sweater.