‘Super Coach’ was legit Hall of Famer
University of Alberta’s Clare Drake was a mentor to players, sportswriters and other coaches
When Hockey Hall of Famer Clare Drake died in his sleep Sunday at the age of 89, maybe there was just a little less sadness in his departure from a life well lived than there might have been.
To wife Dolly and daughters Debbie and Jamie, I’m sure it’s not that way because, as Debbie told me last year, her dad was never consumed with getting into the Hockey Hall like so many others were on his behalf.
There’s a long list of National Hockey League coaches and others around the game who testified to his life in the game in an attempt to get Drake his proper spot in the Hockey Hall before he died. They succeeded.
Drake being elected to the shrine as part of the class of 2017 was not only about time, it was in time. I wrote it at the time that I doubt if there was anybody as deserving that had to wait as long to get the call.
Those who knew him best will talk about his life away from the game, with Dolly, family and friends, but the fact is with almost everybody he touched in the game, especially his players, it was like they became family and friends. That‘s his true legacy.
The first time I saw Clare Drake, he was a Lacombe Rocket. I was a kid in Lacombe.
Drake was a player on the Central Alberta Hockey League team in a league with the Edmonton Oil Kings junior team and the senior Rockets, Red Deer Rustlers, Drumheller Miners, Olds Elks and Ponoka Stampeders. He was also a young coach with the University of Alberta Golden Bears at the time and brought a line of Dick Dunigan, Al LaPlante and Austin Smith down to play with the team, too.
Not many years later, I became a straight-out-of-high-school teenage sportswriter just hired by the Edmonton Journal and immediately found myself assigned the U of A beat, where Drake was in the process of winning national titles as head coach of both the hockey and football Golden Bears.
Coaches aren’t supposed to be mentors to sportswriters, but Drake was to me. He wasn’t trying to be. And I wasn’t asking him to be. It just worked out that way. It was like that with a few others, such as Cam Cole, Jim Matheson and Mark Spector, who followed me on the beat.
And it was like that with a lot of coaches such as Ken Hitchcock, who was a regular at Golden Bears practices learning everything he could absorb as a coach of the Sherwood Park Chain Gang AAA midget team.
Clare wasn’t healthy enough to make the trip to Toronto for his own induction, but the HHoF came here and presented him with his blazer, the U of A gave him his own Hall of Fame ceremony here with a host of his former players and his daughters were able to represent him at the event.
Drake will be remembered by the coaching fraternity of his era for not only being innovative but for sharing his knowledge. He was religious about that. He made everybody better. He made the game better.
So many have memories of Drake, but I’ve always felt privileged of the time and place most of my major memories took place.
Drake was on the cover of Time’s Canadian edition (I remember the title 'Super Coach’). Journal editor Andrew Snaddon decided during that season that we ought to be covering the football and the hockey Bears both home and away. And that meant me.
Drake on Saturday afternoon on the road liked to go to a movie and usually elected me as company. I enjoyed those Saturday afternoons, but it didn’t take me long to discover that Drake spent most of the movie trying to decide who to play in goal that night instead of enjoying the film. Once, in the middle of a movie, he even asked me.
The football Bears, the year after Drake took them to the national title, took a two-game pre-season road trip to Ontario and a bye week trip to Montana to play one half in Canadian rules and the other half in American rules. I remember Drake asking the bus driver to stop at a big mud puddle before the border, to muddy up a few dozen football cleats they’d bought. I doubt if that will keep him out of heaven.
In his coach’s office at the U of A, Drake’s desk was an organized mess. Or at least he seemed to be able to find stuff. Looking back, the main memories of sitting in there with him involved interviewing him about his pet project at the time.
Hockey was just coming out of the Original Six back then and Drake was trying to sell the concept of a coast-to-coast Super League. His idea was to have the University of British Columbia, the University of Alberta, the University of Saskatchewan, the University of Manitoba and sixth other major Ontario, Quebec and Maritime Universities in a 10-team national league.
He lived to be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame but Canadian university administrators didn’t have the vision or the passion for Clare Drake to have lived to see his Super League. I’m pretty sure if he had to pick between the two, he’d have picked the latter.