BILL HUNTER REMEMBERED.
SASKATOON — Nearly 30 years later, Don Cherry still wonders how his life’s path would have changed had he moved to the Canadian prairies to coach Bill Hunter’s Saskatchewan Blues.
That gig was a sure thing, if only Hunter’s ownership group had succeeded in buying the St. Louis Blues and moving them to Saskatoon in time for the 1983-84 NHL season. They did buy the team, but the NHL’s board of governors squashed the move in a 15-3 vote, crushing Saskatchewan residents and ending Cherry’s brief flirtation with Saskatoon.
“Oh, boy — can you imagine Bill and I?” says Cherry. “We’d go into New York or something, we’d have the cowboy hats on . . . we’d have had that league going for sure.”
The ebullient Hunter, who also saw action as a Second World War fighter pilot, was 82 when he died of cancer 10 years ago this past Sunday. Cherry says he still can’t figure out why the man they called “Wild Bill” isn’t in the Hockey Hall of Fame. Hunter, who always had something on the go, was a founding member of both the Western Hockey League and World Hockey Association, and he formed the Edmonton Oilers and led them through their formative years in the WHA. Without his influence, Edmonton’s Rexall Place and Saskatoon’s Credit Union Centre wouldn’t have been built when they were.
“I don’t know what else he could do,” Cherry said. “He was a hockey guy through and through his whole life, and all he did his whole life was build hockey. I shake my head that he’s not in as a builder.”
The why, Cherry said, eludes him.
“I don’t know,” Cherry said. “I have never heard the reason why, or anything. I just shake my head. If you ever want to think of a builder, he’d be the guy.”
Hunter’s son Bart was a backup goaltender for the Salt Lake Golden Eagles, a Blues farm club, during those wild days when the Saskatoon group bought the NHL team and tried to move it. Bart Hunter says now that his father’s key role in the founding of the rival WHA, along with his attempt to move the Blues, didn’t endear him to many in the NHL boardrooms.
But he says he has no idea if that history played any role in keeping Hunter out of the Hall.
“In hindsight, the old guard of the NHL hated him, because they had somebody coming in and raiding their territory,” says Bart Hunter, who was the Regina Pats’ No. 1 goalie when they won the WHL title in the spring of 1980.
“If you look at some of the people who are (in the Hall), you’d have to question why he isn’t. He was certainly a pioneer.”
A spirited attempt in 1999 and 2000 to land Hunter in the Hockey Hall of Fame ultimately failed. Letters of support streamed in from across the hockey world, with the likes of Wayne Gretzky, Gordie Howe, Glen Sather, Frank Mahovlich and Bobby Clarke endorsing the attempt. Cherry submitted a two-page, handwritten plea for Hunter to be inducted.
“I firmly believe there has never been a person who has loved hockey more than Bill,” Cherry wrote then, “and I also believe there has been nobody who has dedicated his life to the game of hockey as Bill.”
He echoes that sentiment today.
“He was the one general manager I think I could have got along with. He contacted me (about coaching the Saskatchewan Blues), and I was ready to go,” Cherry said.
“I just admired the way he carried himself with people, how he could talk to people and get things done. The guy was a human dynamo. He never slowed down. You’d be exhausted at the end of the day being with him, because he never slowed down.”
Cherry travelled the banquet circuit with Hunter during the heady days of Saskatoon’s NHL pursuit, and he says now that you never wanted to follow the bombastic promoter on to the podium. Hunter was known for his electric speeches and his ability to make big dreams spread fast.
That fist-pumping, highflying Hunter the public watched at banquets and in his legendary press conferences, says Cherry, was the same Hunter he saw in private moments.
“I know a few guys who when you see them on TV, then you see them in person, you’re so disappointed,” Cherry said. “(Hunter) was the same guy at breakfast, when you’re having lunch, or when he’s promoting. There was nothing phony about him. That was him — what you saw at the banquet, that was him.”
Bart, who currently works as a financial planner in Saskatoon, says he draws a lot of queries from people when they find out he’s Hunter’s son — particularly from those who lived through the pursuit of the Blues.
“It’s interesting. Anybody who’s 40 or under, they don’t know who he is — well, some do,” Hunter said. “And probably the most-asked question is, ‘What was it like to have Bill Hunter as your father?’ My answer is, ‘No different than having your dad as your father, because he was just my dad.’ The way we grew up was the way we knew, the same as you. But I certainly learned a lot from him. I’ve never seen anybody better at treating people equally and treating people with respect, no matter what anybody did. People come up to me and say, ‘I met your dad, and he was the nicest guy in the world to me.’ Those are the stories I hear — he was a genuine, old-school gentleman, and there’s not many of those types of people around anymore.”
Bart Hunter says he’s doesn’t think the NHL could work in Saskatoon today. But with talk this year of an ownership group interested in bringing a team to Saskatoon, Bart says his father — if we were still alive — would “love sitting around talking about it, that’s for sure.”
Cherry, meanwhile, continues to boost Saskatoon as a potentially successful NHL site. And he likes to think there would be room in today’s NHL for a Bill Hunter.
“He’d be dynamite,” Cherry said. “You still have to have promotion. You have to have somebody who knows how to handle the press and the players. That was his whole life, marketing and hockey.
“And the big thing I liked about him? He was fun to be around.”