Post by jet4life on May 29, 2011 7:22:20 GMT -5
Long story, but one of the best recounts of Jets history I've ever read! Enjoy!
www.calgaryherald.com/sports/night+stubborn+coach+grounded+Golden/4858240/story.html
It remains the greatest yarn in the annals of the Winnipeg Jets:
The night Robert Marvin Hull was scheduled to make a comeback because the Jets had been upgraded to the NHL.
As told by Tom McVie, using that voice sounding like a foghorn in the dark crying out to ships at sea in distress, it's among the greatest hockey tales you're ever likely to hear.
This was, naturally, big, big news across the hockey spectrum. Sports Illustrated flew in a writer for the occasion. Hockey Night in Canada cancelled their regional offerings so the Jets-Montreal Canadiens game that Saturday could be telecast coast-to-coast.
Winnipeg Arena had been sold out for months.
"The greatest left winger to ever play hockey is Bobby Hull, as far as I'm concerned,'' says McVie, the Jets' coach at that time, from his home in Vancouver, Wash. "So he's making this comeback. Someone had called the Winnipeg people a bunch of farmers, so they decided to have Tuxedo Night. Remember Tuxedo Night? Everybody in the building, the 15,000 fans, the coaches, trainers, were all in tuxedos.
"It was also Hall of Fame Night. Billy Mosienko, the Hextall brothers, other people were being honoured. There were spotlights in front of the arena, going back and forth. A real occasion, right?
"Montreal had also won four Cups in a row. They had the Lafleurs and the Shutts and the Savards . . . they had everybody. I mean, I'm looking at my lineup and I'm looking at (Montreal's) lineup and I'm thinking 'Wow!'
"Anyway, the team is ready to go out for the pregame skate. I'm sitting in my little coach's office and so I say to Billy (Sutherland) 'Holy crap, Bobby's not here, what are we going to do?' The rules are you've got to be in the room an hour and a half before the game starts. Those are the rules. For everyone.
"At last, in comes Bobby Hull. He's taking off his tie, and I go over and say to him 'Sorry, Bobby, you can't play.' He was late because the time had been changed with the game being broadcast from Newfoundland to Victoria. He'd forgotten, I guess.
"Anyway, he was really POed. But he was real professional about it. I told him: 'I can't go in that room now and tell a kid who's been dreaming about playing the Montreal Canadiens all his life that he can't play because we're bending the rules for you.' I thought he might start swingin'. But no, he just quietly went out the dressing room door, to the exit, and he was gone.
"I didn't go out to the ice with the players. I was in my office watching on a monitor. Well, the crowd's going crazy and then . . . just dead silence. No Number 9.
"Anyway, now here he comes -Big Ferg. John Ferguson. My lifelong friend and my boss, our general manager. He's got a cigar but it's not lit. He comes in, I'm sitting there by myself, and he says, real casual, 'Where's Hull?'
"So I tell him 'He came in late. Rules are rules. I told him he can't play.'
"So he says, real quiet: 'Quit (bleep)ing around, where is he?'
"I told him 'Maybe out in the alley. How the hell should I know? Anyway, he's gone.'
"He starts yelling now. 'Are you crazy? Are you NUTS?! This is Bobby Hull Night!'
"I said 'I know, but he came in late.'
"'Do you know this game is going right across Canada!?'
"I said -and I'm getting hot here -'I don't care if it's going clear around the world, he came in late!'
"He says 'No, no, no, you don't understand.' He leaves, then he comes back and all of a sudden boots the door so hard -it's a hollow door -that his foot goes right through and comes out the other side. And now he's hopping around on one foot, the other one's still stuck in the door, and he is (bleep)in' FURIOUS.
"He says, kind of losing it at this point, 'Do you know it's Tuxedo Night?! Do you know it's Hall of Fame night?!' And I said 'I don't care if I'm going in the Hall of Fame, the guy came in late.'
"So he goes out again, and he comes back again, and he's beet-red. He quiets down a bit, and then he says 'I'm goin' to ask you one more thing and then I'm going to leave you on your own. OK?' And I said: 'OK.
"And he says, voice rising: 'Do you know he's one of the (BLEEP)ING OWNERS OF THIS TEAM?!'
That instantly recognizable trumpet blast of laughter, always from deep in the diaphragm, booms over the long-distance telephone line, stripping away the years. Tom McVie is 75 now, pro-scouting for Boston, and that indefatigable spirit (his voice recording on the phone goes like this: "Tom McVie here. The playoffs are on. The Boston Bruins' are still in 'em. So I'm busier than a one-legged man in a kick-Go Jets Go contest. Leave a message') remains happily intact.
Fergie's gone now, of course, but maybe as early as Tuesday, after the Memorial Day holiday in the United States and before the Stanley Cup final opens in Vancouver, Winnipeg looks all but certain to have an NHL team -not its team, but an NHL team -back again.
Tom McVie could not be happier.
"I am thrilled,'' he says. "Absolutely thrilled. How could I not love Winnipeg? Five months before Fergie hired me to coach the Jets I'm standing on my front porch, yelling at the mailman because I don't have a job. I can't even get arrested, right? Then, there I am, five months later, riding in a convertible, hugging the Avco Cup, the whole city's out celebrating at Portage and Main.
"I mean . . . imagine.''
Could very well be, as many critics are complaining, that Winnipeg offers nothing more than a best immediate alternative, not a long-term solution, to the financial drag that is the Atlanta Thrashers.
Maybe the market isn't big enough. The rink isn't big enough. That ticket prices will be too high. There isn't enough corporate clout in town.
Don't try convincing Tom McVie.
"I don't care,'' he says flatly.
For those of us who grew up there, lived Jets, those who even coached them for a spell, practicality be damned.
This hits a deep emotional chord.
We remember the dulcet tones of the late Ken (Friar) Nicolson and sidekick Curt Keilback calling the game. Fergie, of course, with hands the size of concrete blocks, ruling the roost. An 18-year-old Dale Hawerchuk, looking for all the world like Huck Finn waiting to go down a river on a raft, alighting from a Brink's truck to sign his first pro contract in front of 2,000 curious onlookers at the corner of Portage and Main. The aforementioned Tuxedo Night. The playoff White-Out.
There's also the enduring image of bulldog-faced McVie, his '80-81 Jets deep in the throes of what would turn out to be a record 30-game winless plummet that would ultimately cost him his job, shaking his head softly at his rotten luck in choice of teams:
"I'm like the fighter,'' McVie droned back then, "who has dropped his 100th in a row and has been dragged into the dressing room. The old trainer -the Burgess Meredith guy -looks down at me and says 'Son, why don't you give up?'
"I look up at him, sweetly, and say 'Because it's the only thing I'm good at . . .'"
Priceless, that Tommy McVie.
As are so many moments from the big-league hockey days in the 'Peg.
Media conferences in the Golden Jet Lounge. Housley to Selanne, as cool as you please. Burton Cummings wearing a Jets jersey when the Guess Who played Wolfman Jack's ultracool Midnight Special. Thomas Steen, the longest serving Jet, wiping away a tear when the franchise was shifted to Phoenix (Steen is currently a city councillor for the Elmwood-East Kildonan ward).
"Sure I got fired there,'' says Tom McVie. "I got fired a lot of times. I was fired more often than Al Capone's machine gun -but what the hell. The time I spent in Winnipeg . . . I loved it there. I loved the hockey. I loved being a part of a Canadian city. And the city was great to me.
"If I'd run for mayor there, honestly, I think I could've won.''
He certainly would've on that infamous Bobby Hull Night with no Bobby Hull, as things turned out.
"We beat Montreal 6-2!'' chortles McVie. "Can you believe that? With all those Hall of Famers, all those Cups, we still beat 'em 6-2. And we outshot 'em -I'm pretty sure this is the number -46-18.
"So I'm down with the reporters after the game and in strides Fergie. He'd got his foot out of the door by then.
"He just looked at me -remember, Montreal was his team -and said 'When we were growing up, I knew you had big balls, but I didn't think you carted 'em around in a wheelbarrow!'
"And,'' adds 75-year-old Tom McVie, that booming voice stripping away the years, "he had this big, beautiful smile on his face. A smile that I will never forget. Ever. If I live to be a hundred.''
www.calgaryherald.com/sports/night+stubborn+coach+grounded+Golden/4858240/story.html
It remains the greatest yarn in the annals of the Winnipeg Jets:
The night Robert Marvin Hull was scheduled to make a comeback because the Jets had been upgraded to the NHL.
As told by Tom McVie, using that voice sounding like a foghorn in the dark crying out to ships at sea in distress, it's among the greatest hockey tales you're ever likely to hear.
This was, naturally, big, big news across the hockey spectrum. Sports Illustrated flew in a writer for the occasion. Hockey Night in Canada cancelled their regional offerings so the Jets-Montreal Canadiens game that Saturday could be telecast coast-to-coast.
Winnipeg Arena had been sold out for months.
"The greatest left winger to ever play hockey is Bobby Hull, as far as I'm concerned,'' says McVie, the Jets' coach at that time, from his home in Vancouver, Wash. "So he's making this comeback. Someone had called the Winnipeg people a bunch of farmers, so they decided to have Tuxedo Night. Remember Tuxedo Night? Everybody in the building, the 15,000 fans, the coaches, trainers, were all in tuxedos.
"It was also Hall of Fame Night. Billy Mosienko, the Hextall brothers, other people were being honoured. There were spotlights in front of the arena, going back and forth. A real occasion, right?
"Montreal had also won four Cups in a row. They had the Lafleurs and the Shutts and the Savards . . . they had everybody. I mean, I'm looking at my lineup and I'm looking at (Montreal's) lineup and I'm thinking 'Wow!'
"Anyway, the team is ready to go out for the pregame skate. I'm sitting in my little coach's office and so I say to Billy (Sutherland) 'Holy crap, Bobby's not here, what are we going to do?' The rules are you've got to be in the room an hour and a half before the game starts. Those are the rules. For everyone.
"At last, in comes Bobby Hull. He's taking off his tie, and I go over and say to him 'Sorry, Bobby, you can't play.' He was late because the time had been changed with the game being broadcast from Newfoundland to Victoria. He'd forgotten, I guess.
"Anyway, he was really POed. But he was real professional about it. I told him: 'I can't go in that room now and tell a kid who's been dreaming about playing the Montreal Canadiens all his life that he can't play because we're bending the rules for you.' I thought he might start swingin'. But no, he just quietly went out the dressing room door, to the exit, and he was gone.
"I didn't go out to the ice with the players. I was in my office watching on a monitor. Well, the crowd's going crazy and then . . . just dead silence. No Number 9.
"Anyway, now here he comes -Big Ferg. John Ferguson. My lifelong friend and my boss, our general manager. He's got a cigar but it's not lit. He comes in, I'm sitting there by myself, and he says, real casual, 'Where's Hull?'
"So I tell him 'He came in late. Rules are rules. I told him he can't play.'
"So he says, real quiet: 'Quit (bleep)ing around, where is he?'
"I told him 'Maybe out in the alley. How the hell should I know? Anyway, he's gone.'
"He starts yelling now. 'Are you crazy? Are you NUTS?! This is Bobby Hull Night!'
"I said 'I know, but he came in late.'
"'Do you know this game is going right across Canada!?'
"I said -and I'm getting hot here -'I don't care if it's going clear around the world, he came in late!'
"He says 'No, no, no, you don't understand.' He leaves, then he comes back and all of a sudden boots the door so hard -it's a hollow door -that his foot goes right through and comes out the other side. And now he's hopping around on one foot, the other one's still stuck in the door, and he is (bleep)in' FURIOUS.
"He says, kind of losing it at this point, 'Do you know it's Tuxedo Night?! Do you know it's Hall of Fame night?!' And I said 'I don't care if I'm going in the Hall of Fame, the guy came in late.'
"So he goes out again, and he comes back again, and he's beet-red. He quiets down a bit, and then he says 'I'm goin' to ask you one more thing and then I'm going to leave you on your own. OK?' And I said: 'OK.
"And he says, voice rising: 'Do you know he's one of the (BLEEP)ING OWNERS OF THIS TEAM?!'
That instantly recognizable trumpet blast of laughter, always from deep in the diaphragm, booms over the long-distance telephone line, stripping away the years. Tom McVie is 75 now, pro-scouting for Boston, and that indefatigable spirit (his voice recording on the phone goes like this: "Tom McVie here. The playoffs are on. The Boston Bruins' are still in 'em. So I'm busier than a one-legged man in a kick-Go Jets Go contest. Leave a message') remains happily intact.
Fergie's gone now, of course, but maybe as early as Tuesday, after the Memorial Day holiday in the United States and before the Stanley Cup final opens in Vancouver, Winnipeg looks all but certain to have an NHL team -not its team, but an NHL team -back again.
Tom McVie could not be happier.
"I am thrilled,'' he says. "Absolutely thrilled. How could I not love Winnipeg? Five months before Fergie hired me to coach the Jets I'm standing on my front porch, yelling at the mailman because I don't have a job. I can't even get arrested, right? Then, there I am, five months later, riding in a convertible, hugging the Avco Cup, the whole city's out celebrating at Portage and Main.
"I mean . . . imagine.''
Could very well be, as many critics are complaining, that Winnipeg offers nothing more than a best immediate alternative, not a long-term solution, to the financial drag that is the Atlanta Thrashers.
Maybe the market isn't big enough. The rink isn't big enough. That ticket prices will be too high. There isn't enough corporate clout in town.
Don't try convincing Tom McVie.
"I don't care,'' he says flatly.
For those of us who grew up there, lived Jets, those who even coached them for a spell, practicality be damned.
This hits a deep emotional chord.
We remember the dulcet tones of the late Ken (Friar) Nicolson and sidekick Curt Keilback calling the game. Fergie, of course, with hands the size of concrete blocks, ruling the roost. An 18-year-old Dale Hawerchuk, looking for all the world like Huck Finn waiting to go down a river on a raft, alighting from a Brink's truck to sign his first pro contract in front of 2,000 curious onlookers at the corner of Portage and Main. The aforementioned Tuxedo Night. The playoff White-Out.
There's also the enduring image of bulldog-faced McVie, his '80-81 Jets deep in the throes of what would turn out to be a record 30-game winless plummet that would ultimately cost him his job, shaking his head softly at his rotten luck in choice of teams:
"I'm like the fighter,'' McVie droned back then, "who has dropped his 100th in a row and has been dragged into the dressing room. The old trainer -the Burgess Meredith guy -looks down at me and says 'Son, why don't you give up?'
"I look up at him, sweetly, and say 'Because it's the only thing I'm good at . . .'"
Priceless, that Tommy McVie.
As are so many moments from the big-league hockey days in the 'Peg.
Media conferences in the Golden Jet Lounge. Housley to Selanne, as cool as you please. Burton Cummings wearing a Jets jersey when the Guess Who played Wolfman Jack's ultracool Midnight Special. Thomas Steen, the longest serving Jet, wiping away a tear when the franchise was shifted to Phoenix (Steen is currently a city councillor for the Elmwood-East Kildonan ward).
"Sure I got fired there,'' says Tom McVie. "I got fired a lot of times. I was fired more often than Al Capone's machine gun -but what the hell. The time I spent in Winnipeg . . . I loved it there. I loved the hockey. I loved being a part of a Canadian city. And the city was great to me.
"If I'd run for mayor there, honestly, I think I could've won.''
He certainly would've on that infamous Bobby Hull Night with no Bobby Hull, as things turned out.
"We beat Montreal 6-2!'' chortles McVie. "Can you believe that? With all those Hall of Famers, all those Cups, we still beat 'em 6-2. And we outshot 'em -I'm pretty sure this is the number -46-18.
"So I'm down with the reporters after the game and in strides Fergie. He'd got his foot out of the door by then.
"He just looked at me -remember, Montreal was his team -and said 'When we were growing up, I knew you had big balls, but I didn't think you carted 'em around in a wheelbarrow!'
"And,'' adds 75-year-old Tom McVie, that booming voice stripping away the years, "he had this big, beautiful smile on his face. A smile that I will never forget. Ever. If I live to be a hundred.''
What a great story!!! I hadn't heard that story - very nice!!! I remember Tom McVie was always so funny - he always had a great line in every situation! 
