Into the NHL at Last

Once we did the merger — or the expansion, as the lawyers will call it — there was no more WHA, and therefore no more interleague competition for players. So, in the 1980s, the pendulum would swing back to ownership’s side.

We had peace in the valley. I would describe the ’80s as the Prosperous Years.

It had been expensive to join the NHL. The expansion fee was $4.25 million for each of the four WHA teams, plus there was another $1.75 million needed for each of the four surviving teams to “clean up” the WHA.

Before the merger, my Hartford corporate partners expressed to me that, in anticipation of the merger, they would prefer to have me as the only individual to own part of the Whalers.

They gave me a reasonable bank of money to buy out the other individual owners. So I reached out to each partner to acquire their interest, and they were all pleased to receive a fair return for their contributions.

I never really owned a large piece of the team. I had varying amounts over the years, starting at 12 per cent when we made the original deal with Bob Schmertz. Then, as money had to be put in for the NHL acceptance, my percentage was obviously diluted. Yet even though I had only a small percentage, I was the only individual owner and therefore was the face of the franchise. The way the partnership was structured, I had control of all operations, as long as I adhered to an agreed-upon budget that was approved annually.

As had been the case with the WHA, we entered the NHL playing in an arena that was not going to be our permanent home. The two-year rebuilding of the Hartford Civic Center would keep us at the Springfield Civic Center until early February of 1980. At the same time, we had a name change. We were no longer the New England Whalers — we were the Hartford Whalers.

The corporations that owned the team, being Hartford businesses, were motivated to promote the city, and their investment had been made as a civic responsibility to the City of Hartford and the State of Connecticut.

When all the smoke had cleared from the expansion draft, we weren’t stripped of as many players as the other three WHA teams were. We’d made a gentleman’s agreement with Detroit that the Red Wings wouldn’t reclaim Gordie Howe and, overall, we really only lost Brad Selwood, George Lyle and Warren Miller to the NHL, and we ended up getting both Lyle and Miller back within a couple of years.

Our first year in the NHL, we did well. We were placed in the Norris Division with Montreal, Pittsburgh, L.A. and Detroit, and we finished fourth, 10 points ahead of the Red Wings, with 73 points in 80 games, the most of any of the four WHA teams. Both Hartford and Edmonton made the playoffs, which can’t be said about too many NHL “expansion” teams.

Mike Rogers, who’d spent the last five WHA years with us, finished fifth in scoring with 105 points and would go on to do something that nobody else but Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux and Peter Stastny would do — score 100 points in each of his first three NHL seasons. And he scored significantly more goals in each of those three NHL years than he did in any of his five WHA years. Meanwhile, there were four WHA grads in the top 11 scorers and Wayne Gretzky won the Hart and Lady Byng Trophies. So maybe our rebel league wasn’t as easy a place as many hockey people, especially in the NHL, had assumed.

For us, Blaine Stoughton also ended up with 100 points and Mark Howe had 80. Dave Keon put up 62 points and Gordie, who was 51 and in what would be his final season, still came through with 15 goals and 41 points. We hadn’t been sure Gordie would even play because he’d had dizzy spells near the end of the last WHA season and underwent a bunch of medical tests before he was declared healthy enough. But he was terrific.

We were a good team that year but we were also ridiculed by certain NHL teams, such as Toronto, because we had 51-year-old Gordie Howe and 40-year-old Davey Keon, and then late in the year we signed 41-year-old Bobby Hull.

Sometimes our coach, Don Blackburn, who had a good sense of humor, would throw all three out there on the same line. Harold Ballard thought we were jerks and made great fun of us and the WHA: “Gordie Howe and this league that has all these relics.” That kind of thing.

There was also bad blood between Ballard and Keon. Keon was a beloved Leaf captain in the early ’70s. I don’t know what went on with him in Toronto, but with us you could not have asked for more. I loved Dave Keon, a first-class quality guy. Harry Neale couldn’t say enough about him. Harry was a great guy and I trusted his judgment.

So we went into Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens on Halloween and beat the Leafs 4–2. Gordie got the game-winner and Keon got two goals. I had seats with Jack Kelley down in the corner of the stands, and Harold was located up the wall in the corner in something like a bunker, like the Germans used to have in the war. He and his older buddy King Clancy were sitting in there and they looked like a couple of bobblehead dolls. When we won that game, the fans in that section turned around and they really gave it to Harold. I got a lot of satisfaction from that game. Jack and I left the arena on cloud nine, not only for us but for Gordie and Keon as well.

In the middle of that season, Jack Kelley traded Alan Hangsleben to the Washington Capitals for Tom Rowe. Hangsleben had been with the Whalers since 1975 and my daughter really liked him. Rebecca was 13 at the time, and she was mad! She wouldn’t even talk to me after the trade. One day after she finally started to warm up to me again, we were watching practice and there’s poor Tommy Rowe standing there. And she said to him, as only Becka could, “My dad traded my favorite hockey player for you.” I cringed in embarrassment, but Tommy was a great sport about it.

My three kids literally grew up with the Whalers. They loved the players and the players loved them. I would pull the kids out of school — too much, I admit — to take them on hockey trips. I remember we went to Winnipeg for a big playoff game when Rebecca was eight. She got tired partway through the game, so I took her down to the dressing room and she went to sleep on the trainer’s table. We won the game and the players stormed into the locker room and were really whooping it up. But as soon as they realized Becka was sleeping, you could have heard a pin drop. They just shut right up. I came down all excited and nobody in the room is saying a word. I’m wondering, “Did somebody die here?” Then I looked in the training room and there was my daughter, sound asleep.

We played our first 22 NHL home games in Springfield, then opened the rebuilt Hartford Civic Center on February 6, 1980, two years and 19 days after the roof collapsed. The place was sold out. We beat the L.A. Kings 7–3. The night before, at the NHL All-Star Game in Detroit, Gordie Howe was our only representative. It was his final NHL All-Star Game and it was Wayne Gretzky’s first. The crowd at The Joe gave Gordie two standing ovations and he had to skate to the bench to make them sit back down.

Three weeks after that, we got Bobby Hull from Winnipeg in a trade for future considerations. He’d come out of retirement to play for the Jets just 20 games or so earlier. We’d had a shot at signing Bobby before the season, but when Jack and I met with him in Boston to see how he felt about playing for us, he was very negative toward Rick Ley, and Rick was our captain. In fact, Rick’s sweater now hangs from the rafters in Hartford. I’ll never forget Bobby’s comment: “Rick Ley? I wouldn’t piss in his ear if his brain was on fire!” I’m thinking, “I don’t think this will work.” I usually just start to laugh at things like that, but Jack was horrified, so we didn’t sign him then.

But when we did get Hull, it went great. He got seven points in the nine regular-season games he played. We lost in three straight to Montreal in the preliminary round of the playoffs, and when Bobby and Gordie skated off the ice at the Hartford Civic Center, it was the last game for both of them.

Off the ice and in the boardroom, there was a bit of what-goes-around-comes-around to our inaugural NHL season.

One of the very first NHL issues I had to vote on as Whalers governor was the sale of the Los Angeles Kings from Jack Kent Cooke to Jerry Buss. That made me pause for a moment, because it was Mr. Cooke who first offered me an interview away back in 1965, when I had to turn him down because I was on crutches. And now I was voting on his successor. It was a complicated transaction, but Jerry bought the whole shooting match: the Forum, the Kings, the Lakers and Mr. Cooke’s huge ranch in California too. Jerry turned out to be a good owner, and people don’t give him enough credit for creating things like club seats, which every arena in the world now has. He took that lower level of the L.A. Forum and said, “You’re not getting a seat between the goal lines there unless you buy everything.” Meaning NHL, NBA, concerts, everything. And it was big money back then, something like $15,000. He was a very smart guy. And he loved the girls. Before the boxes were put in he had those seats in the end zone that I called a Fornicatorum.

And, of course, there was the Halloween-night visit to Toronto. The first year I was in the NHL was really fun because we’d go to all these buildings that we had heard and read so much about, and Maple Leaf Gardens was one of them. At the start of the WHA, we hurt the Leafs more than anybody else when we took Jim Dorey, Ricky Ley and Brad Selwood off their defence, and Ballard always had issues with me because of that. We targeted teams that were incompetent, and Harold was set in his ways and living in a cave, metaphorically speaking, so the Leafs were easy for the WHA to compete against.

And we were competing well in the NHL. With the new building and a playoff team, you’d have to say that our first year in the league was a good one.

Then it all went downhill.

The Whalers’ Dark Ages

After we made the playoffs in our first season in the NHL, we then had five years of on-ice futility. The seasons from 1980 to 1985 were what I call the Dark Ages.

We played one more year in the Norris Division and then moved into the Adams Division with Montreal, Quebec, Boston and Buffalo. It was a really tough division but it didn’t matter who we were playing, we were just losing. We finished last the first four years we were in the division, and in 1982–83 we won only 19 games.

Two days after Christmas in our second NHL season, Mark Howe had a horrifying accident when he slid into the net and virtually impaled himself on the pointed piece of metal that balanced the back of the net. He had a deep cut on his thigh, lost 35 pounds and nearly lost not only his career but his life.

During the Whalers’ first couple of years in the NHL, Anne and I had separated and were going through the pain of that separation as we started a divorce process. This caused additional pressure on me that I was never expecting and, as a result, I was impulsive and made decisions for the hockey club that were not well thought-out, instead of methodically talking to people and thinking things through.

One of the decisions I most regret was the parting of ways with Jack Kelley as our GM. Sadly, there were people working for Jack who weren’t as loyal to him as he was to them. And I listened to the wrong people. I went along with changes that ended up being detrimental to our growth process on the ice. Subsequently, Jack and I worked together again in Pittsburgh, and we remain close to this day.

Jack and I have so much history together. One of the stories that is rarely told in Whalers history is that Jack left the team in 1976 to return to coach Colby College. I was really disappointed and didn’t want him to go. Ron Ryan became the GM and Don Blackburn the coach, but I brought Jack back to Hartford in 1978 as the GM. I admire Jack’s whole family. Karen and I have worked on two film projects with Jack’s son David, and Jack’s other son Mark has won two Stanley Cups as a well-regarded scout for the Chicago Blackhawks.

Overall, there were just too many changes in the Whalers hockey department. Larry Pleau, who had taken over as coach and GM when we fired Don Blackburn, was only 34 years old. We had three different coaches in 1982–83 alone. And Larry then traded away some of our biggest stars to try to get some depth and get a little younger — Mark Howe and Mike Rogers, who were the first Whalers voted into the NHL All-Star Game. Those were two trades that didn’t work out well for us.

As bad as we were on the ice for the first five years of the ’80s, those were the years that defined Hartford as a great hockey market. I say that because even though we were struggling on the ice, we never dropped below 72 per cent paid attendance.

The definition of a solid market is one which supports its team during losing streaks as well as it does during winning streaks. It’s easy to support a winner, but it’s not so easy to support a team that is consistently losing games.

“The Cat” Emile Francis used to say this all the time: Hartford was the Green Bay of hockey.

We did all the things a team should do off the ice, immersing ourselves in the culture of the community. The players did more events than any other team, and we won league awards for that. The players were beloved in our market. It’s very hard to root against a team whose players would come to your local school and read to your kids in the classroom or spend their free time encouraging sick kids in the local hospital. Hartford is different than other places because the Whalers were the only show in town — we were the only professional team the city had ever had. We became a fixture in the marketplace, and despite all the losing, we still would never draw a crowd of less than 7,000 or 8,000.

I was fortunate to have had the experience I’d picked up in Philadelphia. We had just over 15,000 seats in Hartford, which was the smallest capacity in the league, but the key is not so much the number of seats as the gross dollars you generate from them. It is critical that you scale the house in such a way that you generate a gross gate that allows you to compete with teams in bigger markets. At the same time, you have to be very cognizant of having a low price for those fans who are more economically challenged.

Quite frankly, when you get into the upper price tiers, the cost itself isn’t that big a deal. Back then it would have been $15 to $20 for the top seat. Today, the difference between a corporation paying $100 or $150 isn’t that big a consideration. So we worked hard at trying to price it in such a way that we touched all the bases. What we ended up doing in Hartford was making the lower level seats all one price.

We worked at it constantly, and one of the things I’m most proud of is that when I left in 1988, we had the third-highest gross gate in the league in the smallest building, in the smallest market. Hartford had become a cult team. And even though the team no longer plays in Hartford, sales of the old Hartford Whalers merchandise still rank among the top in the NHL.

Francis and Francis and Co.:
The Renaissance Begins

They always say that a winning streak begins while the team’s still losing, and that can be true of a franchise’s fortunes too. Our two biggest moves — drafting Ron Francis and hiring Emile Francis — came while we were in the midst of five seasons out of the playoffs.

Ronnie wasn’t going to be our first choice in the draft of 1981. We thought we were going to get Bobby Carpenter. He was the best American player at the time, he had been on the cover of Sports Illustrated and he was a local boy from New England. But right at the draft, Max McNab leaped over us with a trade into the third slot and Washington selected Carpenter.

So Larry Pleau, who was GM, then picked Ron Francis from the Soo Greyhounds. I really think it was a credit to Billy Dineen’s advice that we made that choice and to Larry for having the courage to support it. I love going back in time and looking at the drafts because you see what an extraordinarily imprecise business it is. This draft was memorable in that it had two Hall of Famers in the top four: Dale Hawerchuk to Winnipeg first overall, then Ronnie at number four. And Bobby Carpenter became the first American to go from high school hockey directly to the NHL, and he eventually made the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame.

Pleau had a philosophy that a player had to serve time in the minors. So when we started the 1981–82 season, Francis was back with his junior hockey team and we started off October and November losing many more games than we were winning. It was not good.

In early December Ron was called up for a game because of Whaler injuries and he scored a couple of points. Everyone in the building could see that he was something special, and it was like a dark cloud had lifted when he got on the ice.

We won the game and it seemed clear to me that this was a turning point for the franchise. For the first time that year, we got some positive local press. But I arrived in the office the next morning and Larry informed me that he was going to send Ron back to junior hockey.

I was totally dumbfounded and said, “Larry, we finally get something to hang our hats on and you’re going to send him down? That is ridiculous, we need to keep him here!”

Larry stubbornly said, “Well, I’m the GM.”

My reply: “Well, you’re the GM, but that can change too. We have tickets to sell and sponsorships to sell, and just when we finally get a young player that people can hang their hats on, you are going to send him back? That makes no sense.”

I believe that Larry felt that Ron was so young at 18, that it was too much too soon. And he was trying to stand up for what he was doing as GM.

Bottom line: Ron Francis ended up staying — for a decade. To this day, he is the most beloved Whaler of them all.

It was risky for me to take that stand, because when you become part of the GM’s decision-making, then you become part of the crime. And it is hard to tell a GM he is fired when you are responsible for many of the decisions he has been making.

That said, Ron ended up with 68 points in just 59 games that year, so he was by no means out of place in the NHL.

The next year, we drafted Ulfie Samuelsson, Ray Ferraro and Kevin Dineen, all in the third round or later. That’s what made the franchise. Those guys all came together at the same time. Those kind of back-to-back drafts are what made all the good teams of that era, the Oilers and Islanders particularly.

If you said to me, “Of all the players who played for you, who were your favorites?” Ronnie would have to be at the top of the food chain. The closest comparison I can make is Derek Jeter. Totally professional, never going to say the wrong thing. They have the highest level of professionalism . . . and they’re good. Ronnie’s a great guy and was like a treasury bond. Every year you knew you were going to get 80 to 100 points from Ronnie Francis. And quietly, at the end of 20 years, he accumulated enough to be fourth in all-time scoring. Of course, I loved Gordie too, but in a different way. It was such an honor just to have him on our team.

When you’re building a team, how could you do better than to have a Ron Francis as your leader on and off the ice? He was captain of the Whalers franchise twice, and was captain of Pittsburgh twice, the only NHL player ever to do that. I don’t think Ron ever got enough recognition until he joined the Penguins. As soon as he came to the Penguins, they won two Stanley Cups.

In the spring of 1983, as we were about to miss the playoffs for the third straight year, my partners and I sat down and decided we’d have to get a real strong person in to run the hockey organization.

So we hired Emile “the Cat” Francis as general manager, to take over from Larry Pleau. The Cat had just spent eight years as GM in St. Louis, helped them find a new owner and went behind the bench twice to coach. Elected into the Hockey Hall of Fame only the year before, the Cat was a guy who knew how to take control and run things.

The Cat had been a professional goaltender, mostly in the AHL and the Western Hockey League, but he also played for the Blackhawks and Rangers in the late ’40s and early ’50s. He got his nickname because he was small and fast in the net. Even as a player he was known as a leader, and it had been his idea to change the goalie’s catching glove to resemble a baseball first baseman’s mitt — easier for catching the puck, and not so hard on the goalie’s arm.

The Cat coached the New York Rangers to the Stanley Cup final in 1972 and spent 16 years in that organization, including 11 as the general manager. Then he became coach, general manager and vice-president of the St. Louis Blues, and they set a franchise record of 107 points just two years before we hired him.

When the Cat was formally introduced, Larry wanted to resign. So I called him up and asked him to meet me for a private breakfast meeting. I said, “Larry, you can’t quit. You are a young man. Blame me for putting you in a position you weren’t ready for. You’ve got to suck it up. Go to Binghamton to coach, or do whatever the Cat wants you to do. You’re learning from a guy who’s had a thousand years of experience, and you’ll come back. Don’t quit.”

I’m proud that Larry didn’t quit. He went to Binghamton and coached for four years. He then made it back to coach the Whalers and was still in Hartford when I left in 1988. Larry has gone on to have a great career. He worked for the Rangers and then became GM of St. Louis. He swallowed his pride and became a top-notch hockey guy.

So, with Emile Francis and Ron Francis both joining the organization, things were getting better.

A Taste of Hollywood

Not long after this, Bill Minot sent me a movie script called Flight of the Navigator. Bill was one of my best friends, another guy that I knew well growing up in the summers in Massachusetts.

Bill had been a very successful investment banker but decided to leave the business and go out to Hollywood to work in marketing. He was one of the pioneers in product placement. It was a simple, yet new, concept. You’re making a movie that’s going to be seen by millions of people, and if there’s a scene where a guy’s drinking a beer, you go to Coors and ask if they’ll pay to have the actor drink their product. If they won’t . . . the guy’s drinking Schlitz.

Bill had a Whaler connection from more than a decade earlier. It was just before Christmas in our first year in the WHA and we needed a Santa Claus for the home game over the holidays. Bill is a big boy — think John Candy — yet a gifted athlete despite his size. Bill never played hockey, but he felt he could handle skating around that rink with ease. After the first period, he was meant to skate around the ice surface in his Santa suit with a sack full of candy and throw the goodies into the crowd.

There was no separate place for him to change, so he had to do it with the players in their dressing room. Teddy Green and the guys all got a huge kick out of Minot’s humor and spirit. He was the funniest person I knew, very smart and very quick-witted.

When Bill came out in the Santa suit, I was sitting right in the seats by the vomitory. Bill looked nervous, and his knees were wobbling. I asked him if he was all right, and he replied, as he eyed the crowd of 12,000 fans, “How did I ever get into this?” Then he gets out there, and realizes it’s hard to skate, especially in a Santa suit with a sack of candy over your back. But he did it, to the joy of all the fans and the players who actually made the effort to come out and watch him.

Like everyone else in Hollywood, Bill really wanted to be a producer, and had once said to me that if he ever came across a script which he felt was good, would I help finance the development of it? I said sure I would.

Bill then sent me Flight of the Navigator, to this day one of the best scripts I’ve ever read. It was a clever science fiction piece about a young boy who is abducted by aliens and becomes a pilot for their spacecraft.

Bill needed $50K for the option on the script and a rewrite. I made the investment and we doubled our money. We got a presentation credit for the movie, but if I knew then what I know now, I would have asked for a producing credit.

So now I had a taste of the movie business, yet I was still fully immersed in the hockey business. The careers I’ve chosen to pursue are difficult. That doesn’t mean that other careers aren’t difficult as well, but my business-life choices are incredibly visible, and since they seem like “fun,” everyone thinks they are easy and they “could do that too.” Everybody thinks they can put a sports team together, and everybody thinks they can do a movie. The problem is that everybody wants to do it, so both of these businesses become very competitive.

There would be significant crossovers between my hockey life and movie life. For instance, after my taste of film with Minot, I then acquired two additional film projects with my friend John Bassett. Later on, it was via hockey that I met Phil Anschutz, who owned the L.A. Kings and several MLS soccer teams. Phil, Karen and I became partners in a company called Crusader Entertainment. When we were cleaning up a multitude of legal issues as part of the NHL merger, our lawyer in California, Stuart Benjamin, and I developed a great friendship and partnered a few film deals of our own together. We did Billy Galvin, we were part of the development of Hoosiers, and later on we’d do more films together.

And Billy Galvin was very helpful in bringing Karen Mulvihill into my life.

Karen

Karen Mulvihill came into my life in the summer of 1985, when she was working for the NHL as a local marketer for the next year’s All-Star Game. Two years earlier, I’d bid to bring the 1986 NHL All-Star Game to Hartford, and we landed the game for February 4, 1986, a Tuesday. (It wasn’t on the weekends back then, because weekends were too valuable to lose from the regular-season schedule.)

Hartford had hosted the WHA All-Star Game in 1977, but the NHL game was a much bigger event and planning had to start about 10 months in advance. Technically, it was an NHL event hosted by the league as well as the local team. Therefore the NHL hired some local staff to work on the project, and Karen was hired to work out of our offices as the assistant to the NHL coordinator, George Ducharme. Today, it is dramatically different — the NHL has a full-time staff to organize their events.

Karen’s Mom and Dad, Mary Jane Mulvihill and Jim Mulvihill, grew up in Connecticut. Jim was head of the UConn Health Center, a huge local hospital, and the Children’s Cancer Fund at the hospital was the Whalers’ designated charity. So we also made it the charity for the All-Star Game.

Karen was young, 21, and I was 42 at the time. Twice her age. But as my good friend Bill Minot would joke, I was immature and she was mature, so it evened things out.

It was really kind of strange the way we started dating.

Jim Mulvihill said to me, “Karen’s so glad to be working at the Whalers, but did you know that she loves the theater and would probably enjoy learning more about what you’re doing in the movies,” or something to that effect.

That gave me my opening to get to know Karen. When I first met her at the Whalers office, I just had this feeling that she would become a permanent part of my life, so I saw my opening and took it. I offered to bring her up to Boston, where we happened to be filming Billy Galvin.

I told Jim, “If Karen would like, I have to go up there a few times and she could go up with me and spend a day on the set.” So that’s what happened, and one thing led to another and we became a couple. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Karen’s family are really devout Catholics, and here their older daughter is going out with a guy who’s twice her age and divorced with three children. Scotty was 19, Becka would have been 16, and Howdy Jr. would have been 13. So it was an adjustment for all of us.

Karen and I knew instinctively that we were meant for each other. So even though it might have been awkward at times, we were adamant that we wouldn’t hide the relationship. We needed to get people as comfortable with it as we were.

We have many bonds, but the strongest is our friendship with each other. We genuinely enjoy being together. We met via the office, so it is natural for us to work together.

After the All-Star Game was done, we got engaged and started to go to L.A. more and more frequently. Karen was able to get a manager and an agent out there, and over time she has had 10 or 11 roles in movies and TV. In some of the movies she had the second female lead. In Sudden Death — a movie that Karen wrote the treatment for and we shot in Pittsburgh — she opens the movie as an ESPN producer directing the telecast.

I marvel at the ease with which Karen was able to do the acting roles. It’s not easy. When you watch a movie as a fan, all you see is what is put on the screen, but when the film is being made there are hundreds of people around behind the camera. Karen had some terrific training — she was in classes with Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp and some other young actors who became stars. It’s important to realize, though, that not everyone can just walk in and sign up for that kind of training. You have to audition and show talent; it is very competitive. Then Karen worked with the Groundlings, a famous improv group.

We were married on October 17th, 1987, in a true family wedding. Karen’s sister Kristen was her maid of honor, her brother Jason was the ring bearer and my son, Howard Jr., was my best man. My other son, Scott, was an usher. That hockey season, we spent more time in Los Angeles, as Karen was acting and I was producing films.

We bought a house in the Hollywood Hills, on Blue Jay Way. We bought it from Frank Valli of the Four Seasons, and it was also the house that the Beatles rented when they did their song “Blue Jay Way.” It was a great house with a drop-dead view. We were going back and forth from the west to the east. I was still the president and managing general partner of the Whalers, but I was really starting to put my foot into the film business, and I knew I was getting a bit bored back in Hartford.

Moving On

It was the 1985–86 Whalers team that turned around our string of missing the playoffs. That was a great team, with Dave Tippett, Kevin Dineen, Joel Quenneville, Johnny Anderson, Ronnie Francis, Sylvain Turgeon, the tandem of Mike Liut and Stevie Weeks in net and a really good, solid coach in Jack Evans. That was an exceptional group of guys on and off the ice. Emile Francis had hired Jack when he came to Hartford. Jack was a quiet, soft-spoken fellow, but when he played he was a classic NHL tough guy.

On the Sunday two days before the All-Star Game, we played at home against Washington, and NHL people had started flocking into town that day, so we had a lot of them at the game. We went ahead 4–1 but wound up losing 5–4 when Washington scored four goals toward the end of the third period. It was our fourth loss in a row, and it was a devastating one. Of course, many of the early arrivals for the All-Star Game witnessed it, and I’m thinking, “There is no hockey god.”

Thankfully, the All-Star Game was a great success. And shortly thereafter we started a 14–7–2 run to the end of the season that put us into fourth place, just three points out of second, and into the playoffs. It was during this streak, when I was in the locker room congratulating the players after a win, that John Anderson noticed my Gucci loafers and asked where he could get a pair. I foolishly said that if the team made the playoffs, I would buy every one of the guys a pair — not really thinking that that was something I would have to “make good on.” Suffice it to say I was out several grand — but the guys had new shoes for the playoffs.

Quebec, Edmonton and Winnipeg also got in. It was the last time for the next 13 years that all the WHA franchises would make the NHL playoffs.

We beat Quebec in three straight games in the preliminary round, which turned out to be, amazingly, the only NHL playoff series ever won by the Whalers. In the next round we played the Canadiens, who had decided to use the rookie Patrick Roy in goal. Wise choice, but we beat them 1–0 in game six in Hartford to force a seventh and deciding game in Montreal two nights later. At this point, hockey support in Hartford was at a fever pitch. The whole city and state were passionately behind our team. Unfortunately, in a great seventh game, Claude Lemieux scored for Montreal in the sixth minute of overtime to eliminate us 2–1, and the Canadiens went on to win a surprise Stanley Cup.

We finished first in the Adams Division the next year but lost to Quebec in the first round, part of a seven-year run in which the Whalers made the playoffs every spring.

But I wasn’t in Hartford for the last four of those.

As I mentioned, the ’80s were hockey’s Renaissance Years. We had solved the war between the two leagues and many teams were now profitable. The corporate partners felt that now that the team was making money, it was time to sell. For them, their investment had been a civic gesture to revitalize the city. Now that had finally happened, and they felt their “job” was done. Downtown Hartford was booming. It was great fun to see it and to be an integral part of it.

I was instructed to find a buyer, or buyers, and to generate the maximum possible return for the partners.

As I’ve previously articulated, Don Conrad, the CFO of the Aetna, was instrumental in the Whalers coming to and staying in Hartford, and in helping me effectuate the merger. Therefore Don felt some sort of entitlement to an inside track on the acquisition of the team when it came time to sell it. This, coupled with the fact that he wanted to leave the Aetna, put me in a very difficult position.

Don actually came to me to see if I wanted to be part of his bid. But if I did, he would assume my role as managing general partner, and I would have a secondary role. Since I was the person who gave birth to the franchise (granted, with the help of others), it would have been difficult for me — and frankly not too good for Don — to agree to his plan. I also felt that my first responsibility was to all the partners, including the Aetna, which owned 35 per cent of the team. It was my job to represent them all and to do my very best to see that they received a fair return for all of the money they had invested into the team over time.

I made it clear to Don that I was in a tough situation, and that while he had done a lot for me and the franchise, it was my duty to represent all the partners.

Don then found a money partner in a local real estate investor named Richard Gordon. They came in with an offer of $19 million, which I took to my executive committee, but with the recommendation that they not accept it because I felt it was too low. It was not a fair price. The partners told me that I had their support and to keep working to get us an offer that reflected fair market value and the investment they’d made.

That was the point where Don and I had a serious rift, because I would not support his bid. I was then able to find another bidder to compete with him, generating what ended up being a very fair price of $33 million. That was the largest purchase price, ever, for an NHL team at that point in time. And in the end the buyer was Don Conrad and his new partner, Richard Gordon (although shortly thereafter, Gordon and Conrad had a partner dispute and Gordon bought Conrad out).

My Whaler experience was now at an end. We had taken the dream of a new team in a new league that we acquired for $25,000, and we had sold it for $33 million as a profitable NHL franchise. We had been instrumental in the resurgence and revitalization of a city and community that desperately needed something. We made an impact on and off the ice, and to this day the Hartford Whaler brand lives on.

My children grew up there, and Karen and I met there, so I was sad to leave but at the same time I was ready to leave. I was prepared for new challenges and new adventures.

I feel great pride when I look back on the Whaler experience. I would be the first to acknowledge that there were certain decisions I made that were impulsive, yet overall I was pleased with the job I had done. When the sale was officially approved by the NHL in the summer of 1988 and the power was transferred from my hands and the hands of the corporate partners to the Gordon/Conrad interests, I felt they were taking over a team that was poised for great success in the ’90s.

John Ziegler would frequently use the expression, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” but sadly, the new ownership of the Whalers did not heed that concept. Within a very few years they undid everything we had worked so hard to achieve in the ’70s and ’80s. On the hockey end, they fired Emile Francis and traded Ron Francis, Ulf Samuelsson, Dave Tippett and others. On the business end of the franchise, they eliminated Bill Barnes, Phil Langan and Mark Willand and almost the entire ticketing staff. They even eliminated the Whaler Store, which had become a gathering point not unlike a community’s general store. They turned the store over to an outside firm, thereby getting rid of Mike Reddy and Joan Hayes, who had been with the organization since day one. “Brass Bonanza,” the song played after every Whaler goal, was eliminated.

The new group completely missed the point of what the Whalers stood for. The team started to lose its heart and soul, and therefore the solid fan base built up over the decades began to erode. Ironically, when the team was in corporate hands it was not run like a corporate team, but when the team transferred ownership to two individuals, it became more like a corporate team. A few people, who should have known better, did not advise Gordon well, and all the good which was done in the ’70s and ’80s was undone in a short period of time. The franchise would then be allowed to move to Carolina, which was a great crime.

Richard Gordon was the one who ended up selling the franchise to Pete Karmanos, who then moved the franchise to North Carolina in 1997. I don’t think it was Karmanos’s original intention to move the team, but I also don’t think that Hartford was where he wanted to be. He had intense negotiations with the City and with the State of Connecticut, and both sides stubbornly dug in their heels. So when Carolina made Karmanos a better offer, he moved the team there. Over the years, I have grown to really respect Pete Karmanos. He has given a tremendous amount to minor hockey and junior hockey, and he has invested a fortune in the Carolina Hurricanes.

I would like to jump ahead a few years for a moment, to April 13th, 1997, and say that it was incredibly sad for Karen and me to watch that final game played on Hartford Civic Center ice with the players, led by Kevin Dineen, raising their sticks to salute the Hartford fans. This team should never have been allowed to leave. In the best of times, it is extraordinarily hard to bring a major-league sports franchise to a city, but even harder to bring it to a small city like Hartford. It was truly the end of an era.

Since the departure of the team, Hartford has been on a steady decline, going from a lively and bustling place to a city that is deathly silent.

In 1988, when we left Hartford, the sport of hockey was thriving. The ’80s were very prosperous for the NHL. The Islanders and then the Oilers were ruling on the ice, and teams were making money.

Looking back on the Hartford Whalers, I take great pride in the fact that we achieved so much success on and off the ice. Merchandise sales were through the roof, and the logo won many awards for creativity and design. The Whaler Booster Club is still active and vibrant. Hartford hosted not only a WHA All-Star Game, but also an NHL All-Star Game as well as a Whaler-CCCP game and Canada Cup games. We also hosted the Hollywood celebrity team on several occasions, the most memorable of which was the game in which actor Alan Thicke broke his nose.

The 1985–86 group of Whaler players was extraordinary. Joel Quenneville has won two Stanley Cups as a coach and is one of the all-time winningest coaches in the NHL. Kevin Dineen has coached in the AHL and the NHL, and most recently coached the gold-medal-winning Canadian women’s hockey team in Sochi. Dave Tippett is a top NHL coach and is moving up on the all-time wins list as well. Ron Francis is a key executive with the Carolina Hurricanes. Other players, such as Ulf Samuelsson, Paul Fenton, Ray Ferraro, Steve Weeks, Dean Evason — seriously too many to reference quickly here — have gone on to play an important role in the world of professional hockey.

But those same storm clouds that were hovering over the skies in the early 1970s were about to re-gather in the 1990s. Little did I know at the time that I would have a very active NHL decade ahead of me.