Hartley loves lunch-pail lineup
Happy, but never satisfied: Bench boss can relate to his blue-collar Flames, who feel there is no such thing as ‘can’t’ once they lace up to face NHL rivals
You can take a hockey coach out of the glass plant, but you can’t take the factory worker out of the hockey coach.
Bob Hartley won a Stanley Cup with the Colorado Avalanche in 2001. With five future Hall-ofFamers supported by a handful of younger, emerging stars, the Avalanche played some of the flashiest, most glamorous hockey in a generation.
But it is with the Calgary Flames that Hartley’s blue-collar roots and work ethic seem more evident.
After going nearly 13 years between National Hockey League playoff wins before Calgary opened the Stanley Cup tournament against the Vancouver Canucks, Hartley sees himself in the relentless Flames. They are his team.
“Oh, yeah, I love this team,” Hartley, 54, said before the Flames took their 2-1 series lead into Game 4 on Tuesday. “This team is so unbelievable.
“I grew up in a little city in eastern Ontario and I worked eight years in the plant carrying a lunch pail. The first four years I was in a paper plant, finishing junior games on a Friday night and then going to shovel bark from midnight to 8 a.m. at minus-30 along the Ottawa River. Then the paper plant shut down and I went into a windshield plant. You get in a windshield plant on a hot, humid day and it gets way over (40) degrees (Celsius) in there. Talk about sweating and earning your paycheque. I have the utmost respect for those people. When things get tough, I go back to those days and draw lots of motivation from those days.”
Hartley needed some of that perspective between his head coaching jobs in Colorado and Calgary.
Fired by the Avalanche 16 months after their Stanley Cup victory, Hartley was out of work less than a month before the Atlanta Thrashers hired him.
He led what had been an awful expansion franchise to its best seasons and the Thrashers’ only playoff appearance before they were sold and moved to Winnipeg in 2011. Hartley’s 2007 Thrashers, built around Marian Hossa and Ilya Kovalchuk, were swept in four playoff games by the New York Rangers.
After an 0-6 start in 2007-08, Hartley was fired again and did not coach another NHL game until former Flames general manager Jay Feaster hired him in 2012.
In between, Hartley did French television work for RDS and TVA and ran a minor hockey program in Laval, Que., before going to Zurich for one season and winning a Swiss League championship in 2012 that was his springboard back to the NHL.
“I’m a very fortunate man,” Hartley said. “My teams gave me six championships — three in junior and three in the pros. You can’t do this without having good human beings. It’s not about one person, it’s about a group.
“I’m a guy that I’m never satisfied. I always tell my players: ‘We’re happy, but we’re never satisfied.’ They know that line by heart. We always want more. I believe if you don’t know the human being, you can’t motivate the player to perform.” The Flames are motivated. Players like Kris Russell, Brandon Bollig, Michael Ferland, Mikael Backlund, Joe Colborne and Deryk Engelland, as well as injured Flames Mark Giordano and Lance Bouma, exude Hartley’s blue-collar ideals. He is ingraining them also in highly skilled young players such as Sean Monahan and Johnny Gaudreau and now Sam Bennett.
Hartley was 17 and planning a university education when his father died. Instead of school, Hartley went to work in the paper mill in Hawkesbury, a largely francophone town on the Ontario side of the border with Quebec. Hartley volunteered as a goaltending coach for Hawkesbury’s Junior A team. He said he was “tricked” in 1987 by team president Jacques Tranchemontagne into becoming the Hawks’ head coach.
“He had asked me to be the head coach a few weeks before and I said: ‘No, I have a good job at the windshield plant, two baby kids. I have no interest in (head) coaching,’ ” Hartley explained. “So he kind of lied to me and said: ‘Bail us out for two weeks; we have a new coach coming.’ But there was no one else coming.”
For that 1987-88 season, Hartley received $500 and two new suits. To pay his mortgage and support his family, he continued to juggle factory shifts at PPG — the American-based auto glass maker. Hartley calls it the hardest year of his life. But it stoked a passion for coaching, and in 1988 he quit the plant to concentrate on hockey.
He won titles with Hawkesbury in 1990 and 1991, a Quebec League championship with Laval in ’93, then an American Hockey League title with the Avalanche’s farm team in Hershey in ’97. Colorado GM Pierre Lacroix promoted him to replace Marc Crawford in 1998, and in his third NHL season Hartley won the Stanley Cup. He should be a coach-of-the-year finalist for getting the Flames into the playoffs for the first time in six years.
Hartley remembers that when he told co-workers in Hawkesbury that he was quitting “the line” to become a full-time coach, they told him he was crazy to give up a $40,000-a-year job.
“I said: ‘Yeah, but I’ll bring back the Stanley Cup,’ ” he said. “I never had a drink in my life. But a few of my buddies the next morning went to my wife and they asked her if I had started drinking.
“They thought it was crazy that I told them I wasn’t interested in winning the junior league, I was interested in winning the Stanley Cup. But I honoured my promise. I brought the Stanley Cup back to the plant.”