"Then Perreault Said to Rico. . .": The Best Buffalo Sabres Stories Ever Told

by Paul Wieland

Overview

Written for every sports fan who follows the Buffalo Sabres, this account goes behind the scenes to peek into the private world of the players, coaches, and decision makers—all while eavesdropping on their personal conversations. From the locker room to the rink, the book includes stories about Scotty Bowman, Lindy Ruff, and Taro Tsujimoto, among others, allowing readers to relive the highlights and the celebrations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781617492020
Publisher:	Triumph Books
Publication date:	10/15/2008
Series:	Best Sports Stories Ever Told
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Paul Wieland has worked for the Buffalo Sabres for more than 25 years as public relations director, communications director, and executive producer of television sports for the Sabres cable network and for a TV station owned by the team. He also served as a practice goalie for many years. He is a professor in the Jandoli School of Journalism at St. Bonaventure University in upstate New York. Scotty Bowman is a record-holding former NHL head coach with 1,244 wins in the regular season and 223 in the Stanley Cup playoffs. He was the coach and general manager of the Buffalo Sabres for the 1979–1980 season and continued as the team's general manager until 1987. He lives in East Amherst, New York.

Read an Excerpt

"Then Perreault Said to Rico ..."

The Best Buffalo Sabres Stories Ever Told

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By Paul Wieland, Joe Funk

Triumph Books

Copyright © 2008 Paul Wieland
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61749-202-0

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CHAPTER 1

The Beginning

"My first goal ... everyone remembers their first goal. I can't remember the play, but I remember that it was the game winner."

–Gilbert Perreault

The First Training Camp

In 1970, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada, hadn't yet caught the first population wave that has changed the southern edge of the province. Peterborough was a sleepy city of 35,000 in an enclave of lakes and woods. Today it's an exurbia to the 4.5 million living in metropolitan Toronto just 83 miles to the west. The 1970 model Peterborough was a world away from having a big-city feel. It was tidy, almost quaint, and decidedly Anglo-Canadian, except for a Chinese restaurant or two.

The Empress Hotel was the place to stay, the best place to eat. The hotel personality? Upper Canada doughty, stiff-upper-lip rectitude, except when the Toronto Maple Leafs came to stay in early September. Then the Empress was the center of the universe for most young men and boys in town, a place where there was a chance to see and hear Teeder Kennedy, or Eddie Shack, or even Johnny Bower for two weeks or so — get an autograph at the hotel and maybe even as the Leafs left the ice at the Memorial Centre a few blocks away.

But the late summer heat in 1970 was as unusual as the team skating two-a-days in the arena, a team wearing red, white, and blue with an emblem like a Pepsi cap instead of the Leafs' blue and white. Buffalo's NHL sweater emblem was blue, gold, white, and a touch of red, but that first training camp saw the players practice in the uniforms of the Buffalo Bisons, their predecessor in the American Hockey League.

The Leafs were gone, and instead their Stanley Cup–winning coach of just three years before was blowing his whistle at another bunch of players, the spanking-new Buffalo Sabres, who'd joined as the NHL's 13th team coincidentally with the 14th, the Vancouver Canucks.

The Sabres were like expansion teams in pro sports before and since, a roster full of culls, castoffs, close to has-beens, and closer to never-weres, plus a bunch of kids locked onto a bigleague dream.

Those first days in the Peterborough arena were hell for some. Elmer "Moose" Vasko, who'd been a regular on the good Chicago teams of the early 1960s, was 30 pounds overweight and trying for a comeback. To say that Moose labored in the skating drills would be kind. And he knew it within a week, quietly packing up and heading home one warm evening.

Those who remained included a shy French-Canadian with the hint of a cowlick and as deft a pair of hands as any young player available in the world that summer. Gilbert Perreault had been the first overall draft choice by the Sabres that June in Montreal's Queen Elizabeth Hotel, and now he was in the Empress in Peterborough, 250 miles west, a language away from home. "I could understand English, but couldn't speak it very well," said Perreault from his home in his native Victoriaville, Quebec. "But I had a lot of help from my teammates at that first training camp. Especially Gerry Meehan, and Jean Guy Talbot. They took good care of me." That included explaining breakfast menus in the Empress coffee shop to Bert, who at first would just order the "same thing" as the guy sitting next to him, rather than struggle with the language.

"That's true," he said, "but the Junior Canadiens were in the OHL [Ontario Hockey League], so I was around English all the time, and I could get by." Perreault got by, but he was known in his career for some of the most pithy dressing-room quotes in history. Once, after an end-to-end highlight film rush for a goal in Buffalo, a reporter asked Bert to describe his play. His reply: "Puck on stick ... I shoot."

Lucky Number 11

George "Punch" Imlach always said he would "rather be lucky than good." He was both in the summer of 1970, a few months after he was hired as general manager and coach of the new Buffalo Sabres. His last success had been winning a Stanley Cup in Toronto in the spring of 1967, a feat not matched by the vaunted and haunted Maple Leafs to this day. Punch's abrasive ways had crossed the Leafs' owners, Stafford Smythe and Harold Ballard, once too often, and he was out the door after a bad follow-up season to the magic Cup run. The Sabres' young owners, Seymour and Northrup Knox, sons of a scion in New York state's art community and an old-school millionaire, had formed an investors group two years before in an attempt to bring the NHL to Buffalo.

They and several of their richest friends put up the bucks the NHL required, but it was another bundle of cash that got the Knoxes the franchise.

The year before, the Oakland Seals were in desperate financial shape and would fold unless someone bailed the franchise out. That someone was a plural; the brothers Knox provided the cash. The tightly knit Brahmins of the NHL came up with a quid pro quo: allowing Buffalo in the league. Canada's politicians had been clamoring for a Vancouver franchise after the first NHL expansion of six teams took in only American cities. Put Vancouver in with Buffalo and get one and a half Canadian teams. It was a given that Buffalo would serve Canadian fans with its border location. That's the only way Buffalo could survive; so went the common thread in Canada's newspapers.

The Sabres were born, with the team's nickname coming from a contest, ironically won by Toronto documentary film maker Harry Cole. His suggestion was chosen by the Knoxes, and the Wilkinson Sword people rushed to make commemorative sabers with Imlach's signature on the blade. Imlach thus was cast in steel (actually sterling silver) before he even had a Buffalo hockey team to coach.

The Wheel Spins

Imlach's lack of a team to coach was resolved over two days in a flocked wallpaper ballroom of the Queen Elizabeth, converted to hold the NHL's 14 team tables and a curious media contingent.

The first pick in the amateur draft would go to either Buffalo or Vancouver. That first pick would be a consensus one: Gilbert Perreault of the Montreal Junior Canadiens. Perreault was a smooth, strong, and deft center who was head and shoulders above the rest of those draft eligible. He was a "franchise player." The league's scouts were nearly unanimous.

The NHL's president at the time, and for what seemed to his critics like an eternity, was Clarence Campbell, a dour stiff-necked lawyer who had been on the prosecution team at the Nuremburg trials after World War II. Campbell's pursed-lip speaking style and his courtroom dark suits made him appear more like a stern judge than a sports league major domo. But he fit the mold of the owners of the Original Six franchises, who had agreed to expansion so they could reap the financial rewards of millions in fees for the right to be in the league and to start with a team composed of the unwanted.

Buffalo's and Vancouver's hopes to get respectable soon were based on the amateur draft, the cattle call for the best players at 20 years of age in Canada. (No others were available then, with just a smattering of undrafted Americans in the league. There were no Russians, Swedes, or Czechs.)

Someone on the NHL staff came up with a carnival wheel to settle the selection order. Vancouver would get the single digits up to and including number 9. Buffalo would get 10 to 18. Campbell stepped to the microphone in the smoke-filled ballroom and spun the wheel that sat on a table for all to see.

It slowed to a stop and Campbell called out: "One!" The Vancouver table erupted in cheers. They had won the right to pick Perreault. An assistant whispered to Campbell and pointed to the wheel. The numbers were stacked above each other; it was two number 1s, meaning an 11. "Correction," said Campbell, "the number is 11."

Imlach, the Knoxes, and the table full of Buffalo scouts roared their approval. Imlach put his hand over his heart and smiled. He had been lucky once again, and Gilbert Perreault would be the heart of the franchise for the next 17 seasons. "I was 19 years old," Perreault recalled, "and of course I was nervous, being that I was the first pick overall. I had a lot to prove."

To this day the story goes around that Perreault wore No. 11 in the NHL because of the spin of the wheel, that Imlach asked him to wear it after the Buffalo team came up with the number in the carnival wheel gamble for the first draft choice. "That's not true," Perreault said in December of 2007. "I wore No. 11 my last three years in junior hockey with Montreal, and when I went to camp in Buffalo that's the number I asked for. I don't know if Punch wanted to give it to me anyway, but that's the number I hoped to wear all along."

The Pewter Mug

Another center on that first Buffalo team, Billy Inglis, was no Gilbert Perreault. But he did something no other player could ever claim. He scored the first Buffalo goal in the team's first exhibition game, a 4–4 tie with the New York Rangers on September 17, 1970, in the chilly and damp Peterborough arena. Inglis had been a minor leaguer in the Canadiens organization and was drafted by the Los Angeles Kings in the first NHL expansion in 1967. He played a total of 36 games in the league, 14 with Buffalo late in the first season, with one regular-season goal and three assists. At 5'8" and 157 pounds (soaking wet), Inglis was small, smooth, and the dreaded third "s" — slow. That doomed him to a career in the minors. Ironically, he was nearly as smooth a stickhandler as Perreault, though at three-quarters speed. That night in Peterborough he tapped a rebound past New York's Gilles Villemure to open the Buffalo scoring. The Sabres lurched ahead (it was preseason) by a 4–0 score, but were tied late in the final period by the stronger Rangers.

The Inglis goal is probably only a dim memory to Billy, a soft-spoken cheerful sort who was kind as well as small, not exactly a perfect design for a big-league hockey player. There's just one thing, a mistake that made his goal the object of a collector's passion for all things Sabres. John Boutet, a Grand Island, New York, school teacher, has been assembling Sabres memorabilia since he was a child and now holds a pewter mug that almost went to Inglis at the Sabres' year-end banquet following their first season. The team's management had decided to have mugs engraved with suitable milestones ("first goal," "most goals," "most assists," and so on). The one for Inglis was engraved "First Sabres Goal, Sept. 17, 1971, vs. New York Rangers." A Sabres staffer caught the mistake in time. The date should have been 1970. A new mug was engraved and the mistake ended up in the hands of the club's public relations man, who used it for beer until he passed it on to Boutet for his help in refreshing an aging hockey memory.

Inglis never played much in the NHL, but he later ended up coaching the Sabres in their most tumultuous season of all, when Imlach was fired for defying the ownership.

The Gang That Could Drink Straight

It was widely accepted that professional hockey was fueled by beer in the 1960s and 1970s. General managers and coaches seldom talked about it publicly, but that was largely because they drank the same sudsy stuff when they played. One of the first things a team would settle on in the fall after camp was the location of the postpractice pub in their home city, and they would pass that information on to new team members and rookies. There is a sense of camaraderie that builds among drinkers, hockey players or not. That sense does result in team building as long as the drinking doesn't go too far and turn into drunkenness.

The Boston Bruins of the early 1970s were a swaggering lot, particularly after the team's first Stanley Cup in decades. It didn't hurt that the Bruins had the brilliant Bobby Orr. One year Boston went to training camp in Fitchburg, an old mill town in north central Massachusetts, and worked long and hard at trashing every bar in the city limits. Thirty years later, surviving bartenders and locals still marveled at the Bruins' near-magical ability to make bar stools fly and tables levitate by late afternoon. The initiation rite for Bruins rookies included an informal but effective round of beer swilling that would get both the initiates and the initiators loaded to the gills. Whereupon the flying stool tricks would begin.

It was no different on any other team in professional hockey. The big-leaguers usually gathered in nicer bars and didn't resort to six-pack parties, the drinking mode of choice in the lowest minors, where pay hardly topped double figures a week.

In the early '70s many NHL players still had summer jobs because they needed the money. Two players on the first Buffalo Sabres roster had contracts for $17,500 a year, albeit heavily loaded with performance options that would boost the bucks. However, even in 1970, that wasn't a pay scale on which one could raise a family. So players often had summer jobs, and some of those jobs back in northern Ontario or southern Manitoba were with beer companies.

Players would travel from town to town and hang out with the locals in taverns. Across Canada, the pubs were separate from the dining rooms, and only men were allowed in the pub portions of drinking establishments. Many didn't even have doors on the entrance to men's rooms, which meant drinkers could get to relief points more quickly. An NHL player would walk in the door of the local hotel or tavern and buy a few rounds of the beer he was shilling for the house. This meant happy times for the tavern-keeper and happy customers drinking freely of Molsons, Labatts, or O'Keefe.

A pro hockey player would sometimes come to camp with a beer belly, thanks to his summer job, or thanks to a beer-drinking hobby that began when he was a teenage player humping long bus trips and sneaking from a six-pack while the coach up front pretended not to notice.

Thus were begat the beery Sabres of 1970–71. Punch Imlach's first roster was loaded with NHL veterans who had been made available in the league's expansion draft. It included Phil Goyette from St. Louis, Donnie Marshall from the Rangers, Reggie Fleming from Philadelphia, and Allan Hamilton from New York. Floyd Smith was purchased from Toronto and Dickie Duff was obtained from Los Angeles early in the season. Each had played a decade or more in the league, and without exception they were members of the clan that used beer as a staple beverage, often in place of water. A few of those first Sabres dabbled in the hard stuff, but beer was the staff of life after practice, in the evening, and occasionally into the early morning.

Members of the team had gravitated to one downtown Buffalo bar like filings to a magnet. The joint was on a street adjacent to the hotel where Imlach had a suite of his own. It was an old Statler hotel, and its room windows could be opened. Imlach would leave some of them that way on pleasant nights, as downtown traffic was not a noise problem, unlike the cacophony of Manhattan. His players would eventually pay because Punch liked some fresh air.

By the spring of 1971, the Sabres had lost a good chance to make the Stanley Cup playoffs in their first season. That is not to say the team wasn't decent. Perreault and Roger Crozier, the acrobatic and illness-tortured goalie, led the team to what turned out to be the best record of any team outside the playoffs, despite being stuck in a division with five of the original six teams — Montreal, Boston, the Rangers, Detroit, and Toronto.

Come the end of that first season, Imlach had added and subtracted. Many of his original expansion draftees were moved to the minors, and his veterans were running out of gas. He added Eddie Shack from the Los Angeles Kings, a hell-raiser a level above most hell-raisers in the league, who totaled 465 points and 1,437 penalty minutes in his colorful career.

The Musk Ox

Air travel in 1970 was much different for all, even more so for professional athletes. Today's big-leaguers fly in chartered jets, hardly ever mingling with airport crowds or sitting next to a crying baby on a transcontinental flight. In 1970, there seldom were charters, so the Sabres flew with the rest of the citizenry and experienced the same service (or lack thereof) that a regular passenger received. Hockey players in those days tended not to stand out in size the way professional basketball teams or the hulking wide-bodies of pro football did. The first Sabres roster had only three players legitimately over six feet tall (though game program weights and sizes were exaggerated), so they wouldn't have been that noticeable on a flight with the rest of us, except that they were all young and athletic.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from "Then Perreault Said to Rico ..." by Paul Wieland, Joe Funk. Copyright © 2008 Paul Wieland. Excerpted by permission of Triumph Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Foreword,
Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
1. The Beginning,
2. Building a Team, Rebuilding an Arena,
3. "All Like Dogs ...",
4. Take Another Step,
5. A Time for Sadness,
6. Wrestling With the Game,
7. The Man Who Never Was,
8. Taro Lives and Other Conceits,
9. A Cup Final in Five Seasons,
10. The Dressing Room,
11. Too Much Time on Their Hands,
12. Hired to Be Fired,
13. The Call of the Game,
14. A Stanley Cup Dream Revisited,
15. Drafts and Trades Change the Team,
Photo Gallery,