Orr in the air, the poster that changed the course of a life
For the life of me, I can’t remember how I got my hands on the poster. I do know it changed the course of my life.
What a fantastic claim, right? One look at a hockey player flying through the air and a 14-year-old kid has a blast-of-light, religious experience? OK, it’s not that dramatic, but stick with me, as Pierre McGuire would tell me 24 years later.
Baseball. Football. Basketball. That’s what I knew in Newport, R.I. in the Sixties. Hockey? Never played. Never went to a Bruins game, never saw one on TV until 1970. In my ninth grade Ancient History class, Mr. Burns hung a newspaper page of the Bruins on the rear chalkboard. Headshot. Name. Position. Between studying Archimedes and Aristotle, I began studying Don Awrey and Fred Stanfield.
The Bruins suddenly were the rage in New England, so big, so bad and so, so cool. Beatles on Skates. I got hooked. I started watching games on WSBK, Channel 38, a UHF station that necessitated a weird circular antenna and brought rock stars like Derek Sanderson, Phil Esposito and Gerry Cheevers into my young life. Bobby Orr wasn’t a rock star. He was a god.
Which brings us to Game 4 of the 1970 Stanley Cup Finals. Because I was born in St. Louis, I started following the Blues that spring, too. I was more awestruck by the game of hockey than any hockey team and Orr was different than everybody. Bruins coach Bruce Cassidy was talking the other day how he had the “Flying Orr,” the greatest photo in sports history, clipped from the Ottawa Citizen hanging in his bedroom.
Mine was a poster. I know I didn’t buy it. One of my older sisters may have brought it into the house. I prefer to think it magically appeared.
With the Bruins and Blues meeting for the Stanley Cup for the first time in 49 years, the spectacular photograph by Ray Lussier of the old Boston Record-American has been discussed plenty in recent days. St. Louis goalie Glenn Hall hanging on the crossbar with his glove, the Garden fans going nuts in the background, Blues defenseman Noel Picard stick raised, face in disgust after he had tripped Orr … and there was No. 4 flying horizontal to the ice celebrating the Cup-winning goal.
It is the only sports poster that ever hung in my bedroom. That’s the truth. For a kid who dreamed about sports and a career in sports writing, the poster came to represent all that is possible. It was there when I shut my eyes at night and when I opened them in the morning.
Hockey became my passion. And then it became a career. As I graduated from the University of Missouri School of Journalism, I saw that the expansion of the game throughout America could accelerate my growth. At 22, I took a job at the Port Huron Times Herald. There was an International Hockey League team there in Michigan, the Flags. Mike Emrick, the legendary play-by-play man, had just left as the team’s announcer when I arrived. In my first month, there was one of those legendary bench-clearing brawls that proved “Slapshot” wasn’t fiction. A Dayton player named Willie Trognitz, fatigued from fist-fighting, saw 6-6 Archie Henderson charging at him and brought his stick down on Henderson’s face. Archie’s nose and blood scattered halfway to Saginaw. I went into the Dayton locker room to interview Willie and was unceremoniously carried out — my feet dangling — by two players. Willie was suspended from the IHL for life and I was fielding calls from reporters around North America about the incident.
I was in deep now.
Two years later, I was covering the Flyers and a team that set the NHL record with a 35-game unbeaten streak. The first time I saw Phil Esposito he gave me grief. He mistook me for a writer from Sports Illustrated. One by one, after I moved to Hartford, the Courant and the Whalers, I would meet many of those Bruins. John Bucyk, captain of that 1970 team, did color for Bruins radio. I was often his guest after the first period and invariably he’d ask me, “Jeff, what do you think will happen in the second period?” The 14-year-old in me always wanted to blurt out, “Chief, I am unworthy!” Instead, I mumbled something about forechecking, Mike Liut and accepted my gift certificate.
Cheevers would become the TV analyst for the Whalers. As we sat together on a flight or shared a drink on the road, I’d occasionally stop and say, “Cheesy, the boys back home would never believe this.” He’d just keep talking about the horses or the Adams Division. Once, post-game at Chuck’s Steakhouse in the Civic Center Mall, I spotted a fracas and jumped in to break up a, ah, gentleman’s disagreement between one of the former Bruins and an inebriated fan. I looked at the fan and said, “Do you know that’s Ace Bailey?” Instead of trying to punch him, the fan suddenly started trying to hug him.
Tragically, Ace died on 9/11 in one of the hijacked planes. At some point, a youngster’s naivete is bound to collide with the realities of life. Eddie Johnston, who teamed with Cheevers as Bruin goalies,
became the general manager of the Whalers in 1989. EJ traded Ron Francis and Ulf Samuelsson in one of the worst trades in hockey history. I wasn’t kind in the analysis. Our relationship deteriorated.
I did meet Bobby Orr once. Owner Richard Gordon had an advisory committee that included Orr, Roger Staubach, Ivan Lendl. Orr had influence in Johnston’s hiring. Over two decades as a hockey writer, I came to know a number of Hall of Famers. Orr was different. He was a god from my youth. We all have gods of our youth. He was cordial. He was guarded. And that was it.
Sometimes they are less guarded. With 76 seconds left in Game 6 of the 2013 Finals at TD Garden, and the Bruins up, 2-1, Bryan Bickell scored on Tuukka Rask and Dave Bolland followed 17 seconds later to give Chicago the Stanley Cup in the most crushing fashion imaginable for Boston. For Blackhawks coach Joel Quenneville, who I’ve known since his Whalers days, it was stunning jubilance. He spotted me in the hallway as he walked toward the postgame press conference, and screamed, “Scoop! Can you f…..ing believe it?” I couldn’t.
You didn’t cover a major league team in a small city years ago without daily interactions. Some of it was great. Some of it wasn’t. Some fairly hilarious. Once when flying commercial, $20 bills started flying over my shoulder. It was defenseman Doug Houda, later a Bruins assistant coach for a decade, and he wanted to know, “How much will it cost for you to write one nice thing about me?” Goalie Frank Pietrangelo needled me to keep the money. I didn’t.
And then there’s Pierre McGuire. He took over as coach of the Whalers in November 1993. Some veterans immediately grew wary of the electric 32-year-old coach. Still, the team got off to one of the top records in the NHL over his first six weeks. On the start of a January road trip, I found myself in the lobby of the LAX Marriott when McGuire and broadcaster Chuck Kaiton spotted me. They invited me to a late dinner. Kaiton steered the rental car to the Palm Restaurant in West Hollywood and we’re not sure we can get in. Pierre says, “Wait here.” He jumps out, chats up the doorman and waves us in. Only the doorman was actor William Devane. It turns out Whoopi Goldberg and Billy Crystal were hosting a celebrity dinner/auction for Comic Relief and it had just ended. We took a seat, and who waits on us? Peri Gilpin. This was the first season of Frasier. Pierre didn’t know who she was, but I was already a fan of the show and blurted out “Roz!” She told us there were lobsters remaining and urged us to take them.
So there we are at the famous Palm, Roz getting our drinks and devouring these huge delicious lobsters. All free. These were the Gretzky days with the Kings, hockey was huge in Tinseltown and some people were fawning over McGuire.
It was at that moment I thought, man, maybe Pierre really does have this figured out.
“Stick with me, JJ!” McGuire said. The Whalers immediately went on a nine-game winless streak, limped home with an NHL-worst 10-26-6 record and Pierre was fired after a team mutiny.
Here’s the full-circle poster thing. McGuire is now the ice-level broadcaster for NBC. If Emrick calls the 2019 Cupclinching goal in overtime and the scorer goes flying through the air, Pierre will be there interviewing the guy.
Blows my 14-year-old mind.
Blows my 63-year-old mind.