They put baseball on ice
Before stellar careers in the NHL, two Canadians started out as Astros farmhands
Before winning NHL titles, Gillies and Bourne were Astros farmhands.
Clark Gillies and Bob Bourne never lacked success in hockey.
They were linchpins on the New York Islanders’ Stanley Cupwinning teams from 1980-83 — the last time an MLB, NFL, NBA or NHL team won four consecutive championships — and also represented their native Canada in international competition.
Their individual accolades included the Islanders’ retiring Gillies’ No. 9 and his 2002 induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame. Bourne was feted by Sports Illustrated as one of the magazine’s Sportsmen of the Year in 1987 for his work with disabled children and later was inducted into the Islanders Hall of Fame.
But while they remain inextricably linked by hockey decades into their retirement, the duo’s entry into pro sports came not on the ice but on the diamond in the Astros’ farm system during the early 1970s.
“It’s a funny story,” Gillies said. “People say, ‘Did you play football when you were younger?’ I say, ‘Yeah, I played football and baseball. As a matter of fact, I signed a contract with the Houston Astros.’ And the reaction is ‘You did what?’ I always have that little claim to fame as far as being a three-sport guy. It’s kind of fun.”
Bourne, who says baseball still is his favorite sport, speaks wistfully of his multi-sport days.
“Those were some of the best years of my life,” he said.
Looking for good athletes
If you want to find a hockey player, head to Saskatchewan. Per a 2018 study by CTV News, Saskatchewan produces more NHL players per capita than any other Canadian province, with 2.15 per 100,000 people.
Baseball, however, is another story. In 150 years, only nine major leaguers have hailed from Saskatchewan. But Pat Gillick, the future Hall of Fame executive who was the Astros’ scouting director in the early 1970s, was familiar with Western Canada, having played three summers there from 1956-58 while pitching collegiately at USC.
“In the summertime, we used to hold tryout camps across Western Canada looking for players,” Gillick said. “I knew there were a lot of good players there. We were just looking for guys who were good athletes. Usually, good athletes are able to adapt to another sport.”
The Astros eventually landed a big Saskatchewan catch in Melville’s Terry Puhl a few years later, but Gillies was the first to fall onto Houston’s radar during the summer of 1970.
He was a 16-year-old catcher playing for the Regals, the senior team in his hometown of Moose
Jaw, while spending his days working at a Canadian Air Force base in the south-central Saskatchewan town. One weekend, Gillies opted to stay behind and work while the senior team played in a tournament in Lacombe, Alberta, that drew clubs from all over Western Canada.
Gillick was at the tournament, and Ned Andreoni, a player/coach for the Regals, mentioned his 6-3 catcher Gillies as a prospect worth considering. After the tournament, Gillick and an Astros scout came to Moose Jaw to put Gillies through a tryout, which he dubbed “a pretty good showing.”
Then came a meeting between the Astros contingent and Gillies’ family. His expectations weren’t too high, but the Astros offered him a $5,000 signing bonus and $500 a month to play for their Appalachian League affiliate in Covington, Va.
“I looked at my dad, and I was just sort of flabbergasted,” Gillies said. “That was a hell of a lot of money in those days. The big kicker was they were going to pay me $500 a month (in U.S. dollars). You don’t even have to give me the $5,000. Just give me the $500 a month.”
Bourne landed on the Astros’ radar two years later in somewhat similar fashion. He was 17 and playing for the Klippers, the senior team in his hometown of Kindersley, not far from the Saskatchewan/Alberta border.
“(Bourne) was very athletic and very fast,” said Wayne Morgan, a player/coach for the Klippers who later joined the Astros as a scout and signed Puhl. “He had amazing speed and a good glove. He had all the tools.”
Bourne worked out for the Astros, but nothing immediately came of it. But once his hockey season ended in the spring of 1972, Gillick returned to Saskatchewan and signed Bourne.
Five days later, he was in Cocoa Beach, Fla., then the site of the Astros’ spring training headquarters.
“I just felt so lucky,” Bourne said. “I was in way over my head. I grew up on a farm and was green as grass.”
Bad glove and rotten eggs
Gillies made it down to Covington for the final month of the 1970 Appalachian League season. He appeared in just five games and struck out 10 times in 13 at-bats.
“I’ll never forget my first night there,” said Gillies, who wasn’t used to playing under lights. “The coach told me to grab my glove and go warm up the reliever, which just happened to be our ace pitcher who was getting some extra work. This guy threw the ball like I had never experienced before.
“He threw a ball to me, and one, I could barely see him, and these fastballs I think are 95 to 100 miles per hour, and I’ve got a (crummy) glove. I brought my own glove from home, and all I remember is going back to the dugout after I warmed him up and the index finger on my right hand was swollen and red.”
Battling homesickness in his first time away from Western Canada, Gillies literally could smell the difference in his new surroundings.
“Covington, Va., was a little town, and there was a pulp mill there,” Gillies said. “The place smelled like rotten eggs all the time. I had a fan in my window blowing the air out, not blowing cool air in. I was trying to get the smell out.”
On the field, Year 2 in Covington went better for Gillies. His average rose from .077 to a modest .239, although he acknowledged having “a tremendous problem with the curveball — it totally bamboozled me.”
“I had way more fun the second year,” he said. “I really did feel like a veteran. I caught most of the time, and I started getting bigger, and the umpire would tell me when I was catching, ‘Son, you’ve got to stay down. You’re so big, if you lift up at all, I can’t see the plate and call balls and strikes.’ ”
Eye-opening experience
In 1972, Gillies was joined by Bourne. They’d been on opposite sides of one of junior hockey’s fiercest rivalries pitting Gillies’ Regina Pats against Bourne’s Saskatoon Blades in the rough-andtumble Western Hockey League.
But no bad blood lingered from the ice.
“We got to talking, and he’s been my best friend ever since,” Bourne said.
Bourne, also far from home for the first time, acknowledged experiencing culture shock. His time in Covington introduced him to people of different ethnic backgrounds for the first time.
“Don’t take this wrong, but I never met a black person until I was 17 years old. I’m dead serious,” he said. “And then I’m around all these Puerto Ricans and black guys, and certainly no offense, because some of them became my best friends (in Covington). I loved them all.
“(My teammates) were great guys. It doesn’t really matter where you come from — they just love baseball. I loved to play baseball. I couldn’t wait to go to the ballpark and play.”
Another eye-opener for Bourne was the upgrade in competition. A memory that stands out was facing Pulaski’s Larry Christenson, the third overall pick in the 1972 draft by the Phillies.
“The first time I faced him, he threw it 100 miles per hour, and all I remember is I didn’t see the ball — I just heard it,” Bourne said with a chuckle. “That’s how hard he threw it. It just plopped in the catcher’s mitt.”
For Bourne, a first baseman/ outfielder, the speed that was his trademark in the NHL was his calling card in baseball. He said he was once timed going from home plate to first base in 3.8 seconds in Saskatchewan.
“I could bunt like crazy, and I had speed,” Bourne said. “If a pitcher was really bothering me, I’d just drop a bunt and go to first base.”
In 37 games with Covington, Bourne hit .257 and drove in 15 runs, with six stolen bases in seven tries. He ended up platooning at first base with Gillies, who started at 190 pounds and grew to 220, likely assisted by the local greasy spoons he and Bourne frequented that summer.
Gillies, a righthanded hitter, played against lefthanded pitchers, while the lefty Bourne started against righties.
“You’d think some guys would be upset with that, but I just looked at Bob and said, ‘Let’s have some fun,’ ” said Gillies, who hit .256 with two homers and 20 RBIs in his final minor league season.
Gillick, who watched both players in Covington, said he saw promise.
“I thought they were prospects,” he said. “I think if they had concentrated (on baseball) and stuck with it, they could’ve gone up the ladder and had a chance to go to the big leagues. Both of them had talent. Both were good athletes, good people and hard workers.
“That’s the one thing I liked about hockey players — they’re both very aggressive in how they played the game. They didn’t sit back and let the game come to them. They didn’t wait to attack — they were the attackers. They were aggressive, hard-nosed guys who basically got that in their experiences playing junior hockey.”
Eventually, however, Gillies and Bourne had to choose between sports. While both enjoyed baseball, it was obvious hockey offered a quicker path to the major league ranks.
“I was certain I was going to play professional hockey,” Bourne said. “Baseball was going to take me another four or five years, a long time in the minors. Even though baseball is my favorite sport, I said, ‘No, I’m going to stick to hockey.’”
More than teammates
Bourne’s friendship with Gillies had its benefits once they returned to junior hockey. Gillies, who loved to play a physical game in Regina’s matchups against Saskatoon, took it easy on his baseball buddy Bourne, which netted the latter grief from his teammates.
Gillies was drafted fourth overall by the Islanders in 1974, while
Kansas City (now New Jersey) took Bourne in the third round. But before Bourne played a game for the Scouts, he was traded to the Islanders and reunited with Gillies.
They played key roles for the Islanders in their rise from 1972 expansion team to dynasty.
Gillies patrolled left wing on the famed “Trio Grande” line with two other Hockey Hall of Famers, center Bryan Trottier and right wing Mike Bossy, providing muscle and a deft scoring touch with six 30-goal seasons. The speedy Bourne, meanwhile, scored 30 goals three times and was a valuable penalty killer. He led the Islanders in playoff scoring in 1983, with a memorable end-to-end rush and goal against the rival New York Rangers.
Each played 12 seasons in New York before finishing up with two seasons in strange uniforms, Gillies in Buffalo and Bourne in Los Angeles.
Their families lived near each other on Long Island and spent a lot of time together, but the connection grew even deeper a couple decades after they retired.
When Bourne was being inducted into the Islanders Hall of Fame in November 2006, his youngest son Justin, then playing college hockey at Alaska-Anchorage, stayed at Gillies’ Long Island home. Justin Bourne and Brianna Gillies, the youngest of Clark’s three daughters, were childhood playmates before the families went their own ways.
Justin and Brianna reconnected as adults the weekend of the elder Bourne’s induction and married in 2011. They now have two children, deepening the GilliesBourne bond.
“We’ve got pictures of them when they were just 3 or 4 years old playing together, so it’s quite a story,” Gillies said. “Bob and I, we joke about it. I don’t even know what to call him. You used to be my friend, but now you’re closer than my friend.”
Astros on their minds
Four-plus decades have passed since Gillies and Bourne were Astros farmhands, but they still have fond memories of those summers.
Both say those years gave them a deeper appreciation of baseball. Bourne, now living in Kelowna, British Columbia, misses watching Toronto Blue Jays games during the MLB shutdown and says he’s kept tabs on the Astros through the years.
“That was huge to me,” he said of the 2017 World Series championship, “because I’ve always been a big fan of theirs. They were my No. 1 team until Toronto came along. I was just so happy for the people in Houston — the old dome that they used to play in, and now they’ve got that beautiful park. It was fun to watch.”
While Bourne never made it with the Astros, hockey did bring him to Texas. He spent most of the 1975-76 season with the Fort Worth Texans, the Islanders’ Central Hockey League farm team. Then in 1996-97, he coached the
Belton-based Central Texas Stampede during the inaugural season of the Western Professional Hockey League.
“When I first moved there, I was scared to death,” said Bourne, who turns 66 on June 21. “It wasn’t really fun, but then it became really fun. I love Texas people. They’re so outgoing, and they really stepped up and made me feel like part of the community, and I ended up just loving it there.”
Gillies, meanwhile, gets yearly reminders of his time with the Astros. He said that on his birthday and Christmas, he gets an email from Tal Smith, the longtime Astros executive who was in the front office when Gillies was in the Houston system.
When Gillies turned 66 on April 7, Smith wrote, “Happy Birthday, Clark. We hope your loved ones are coping the best you can with this crisis.”
“It’s so nice of him to remember and do that,” Gillies said.
“I still think about those days. When people ask if I think I made the right decision, I say, ‘Well, I don’t think I would’ve won four World Series in a row if I was playing with the Houston Astros back in those days.’ I guess I made the right decision.”