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

Wieland, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1600780954 ISBN 13: 9781600780950

Verlag: Triumph Books, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

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"Then Perreault Said to Rico ..."

The Best Buffalo Sabres Stories Ever Told

By Paul Wieland, Joe Funk

Triumph Books

Copyright © 2008 Paul Wieland
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60078-095-0

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, 

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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Triumph Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1600780954
• ISBN 13: 9781600780950
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 206
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Triumph Books; https://www.triumphbooks.com; ; 814 North Franklin Street; CHICAGO; IL; 60610; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar