Jack Parker’s Wiseguys Read online

  TIM RAPPLEYE

  JACK PARKER’S

  WISEGUYS

  THE

  NATIONAL CHAMPION

  BUT ERRIERS,

  THE BLIZZARD OF ’78,

  AND THE ROAD TO

  THE MIRACLE

  ON ICE

  •

  UNIVERSITY PRESS OF

  NEW ENGLAND

  •

  HANOVER AND

  LONDON

  University Press of New England

  www.upne.com

  © 2018 Tim Rappleye

  All rights reserved

  For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit www.upne.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-5126-0155-8

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5126-0165-7

  CONTENTS

  Foreword by Mike Eruzione

  Introduction

  Prologue The Debacle in Denver

  1 Jackie Parker

  2 Brian and Jimmy

  3 The Education of Mark Fidler

  4 The Dugout

  5 Finding Themselves

  6 Wiseguys

  7 Road Trip!

  8 The Town

  9 Dog

  10 Media Darlings

  11 North Country

  12 The Battle of Commonwealth Avenue

  13 The Worcester Heist

  14 L’Affaire de Silk

  15 The Blizzard of ’78

  16 A Fidler Returns to Chestnut Hill

  17 Miracle at the Whale

  18 Beanpot Brawlers

  19 Black Friday

  20 Terriers Reboot

  21 Slaying the Badger

  22 Best of Enemies: The 1978 NCAA Championship Game

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Boston University 1977–78 Scoring Leaders

  Illustrations

  FOREWORD

  I would never have played Division I hockey if it weren’t for Jack Parker. The summer after I graduated prep school I was set to go to Merrimack, which was Division II at the time. Parker was reffing a summer league game, saw me play, and told me that Boston University had an opening. He was promoted to head coach in the middle of my freshman year, and we went to the Frozen Four every year during my four years at BU.

  When BU won it all in 1978, I was playing out in Toledo. I was happy for the players; I played with most of them, but it was kind of bittersweet. You go to four Frozen Fours, you graduate, and then they win it. It was frustrating, but it was good to see the Terriers win.

  I saw Jack that summer and obviously congratulated him; it was outstanding. I was proud for him, proud for the program. But damn, I come to BU, play four years, play in four Frozen Fours, and don’t win it. I leave, and then they win it. I always joke, “I guess I wasn’t that good.”

  I’ve always said that Jack O’Callahan is one of the best leaders—as a teammate—that I’ve ever played with. Jack’s freshman year he came here from Charlestown, a tough section of Boston. Jack was always a cocky kid but was little bit quiet his freshman year. Later you could see him grow as a player and grow as a leader in the locker room. I was not in that locker room in 1978, but I guarantee you Jack O’Callahan had a huge impact on the leadership of that team. I remember our final game against Finland in 1980, going for the gold medal. We’re losing 2–1 going into the third period. Jack must have said it a hundred times: “No way a bunch of Finns are keeping us from a gold medal!” It was a very demanding, very confident statement, and that was Jack.

  David Silk—“Silky”—was a goal scorer. I played on Dave’s line just a little my senior year; Silky was a wing for Ricky Meagher. When that puck was on his stick, he knew exactly where it was going. People always questioned Silky’s skating, but his hands and his shooting ability made him an exceptional player. I was amazed at how quickly the puck was on his stick and off. You could see, as a freshman, that this kid could put the puck in the net.

  Back in the 1977 NCAAs, I thought Silky was going to lead us to the Promised Land. He put on a display, scoring three straight goals. In a game like that, you thought maybe Ricky Meagher was going to take over, and we’re going to tie that game up and win it, and get a shot at the national championship. After falling behind early, we turned the jets on. We thought it was going to turn out differently, but it didn’t.

  Jimmy Craig was in goal that day. Jimmy didn’t say much in the locker room at all. He just had a quiet confidence about him, kind of kept to himself. But you could see the confidence he had. When he was on a roll, boy, he was on a roll. I think that year they won the national title he made a decision that he was going to take his game to another level, and he did. He carried that right over to us during the Olympic year of 1980. There’s nobody better in big games than Jimmy.

  Jimmy Craig developed under Parker. In my senior year he replaced Brian Durocher as the number one starter in goal. If you played under Jack Parker, it didn’t matter if you were an All-American or a fourth liner, you were a Terrier and he treated you the same. There was no bending of rules: you stepped out of line, you’d get the same treatment whether you were a star or a sub. Yeah, I got called on the carpet. He’d bring me in to the office and talk about how I wasn’t playing well and how I needed to do this, this, and this.

  Parker was intense; that’s how coaches coached in that era. If you made a mistake, he might grab you by the side of your helmet, he might take you down the runway, he might kick you in the butt; his tantrums were amazing. But as he matured and he developed, he kind of changed. Jack’s always had a passion to coach and teach. Though his philosophy never changed, his mannerisms changed, he became a little more player friendly than he was early on, but he always had a great love for his players.

  In dealing with the death of his wife Phyllis in 1978, maybe that’s why he has such a passion for members of the BU hockey family who have been victims of tragedy. Players that have lost children, a player paralyzed like Travis Roy, the family of Mark Bavis after 9/11—Jack has always been there in time of need. I think Jack relates to them because of what happened in his life. That’s the one great attribute about Jack: he’s there for you no matter what happens. I’ve said many times that if something ever happened to me in my life, that if I needed some help, Jack Parker would be the first guy I would go see.

  •

  MIKE ERUZIONE

  JANUARY 2017

  INTRODUCTION

  College hockey in the 1970s was a different animal than today’s game. First thing you would notice is that you could actually see the players’ faces. The full masks and shields were not screwed into helmets until the 1979–80 season. Skates still had steel posts attached to their boots; the plastic Tuuk base was not adopted until the 1978–79 season. Sticks were made of real lumber; aluminum and then composite shafts were still a decade away. The ancient technology created a slower, more personal game. Fans could relate to the players more.

  Back in 1977, all seventeen Division I schools in the East were bundled into one massive team conference, the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC). Only eight teams made the playoffs, heightening the intensity of the regular-season games. Because of the crowded schedules, BU’s trips to distant outposts like St. Lawrence occurred only once every two years. Despite a core of traditional hockey schools in and around Boston, the ECAC’s balance of power often tilted west; upstate New York schools Clarkson, RPI, and Cornell would often wreak havoc on Eastern schools. Cornell was a singular powerhouse, having won five ECAC championships and two national titles in the seven years prior to Jackie Parker taking
the helm of BU.

  In the 1970s, most American Division I talent came from high school, not Midwest junior leagues or national team programs; they were guys from the neighborhood. The players at BU, by and large, did not treat college hockey as a stepping-stone to the pros.

  Joe Bertagna, the longtime college hockey commissioner and former star goaltender at Harvard, has a theory. “Back in those days, there wasn’t as big a difference between the players inside the glass and outside the glass.”

  Bertagna is referring to the guys in the stands who played high school or youth hockey against the guys on the ice. There was not as huge a gap as there is today. “Now, playing college hockey is a profession,” says Bertagna, with mandatory year-round training and obligatory “gap years”—junior hockey finishing schools—required to play Division I hockey. Compare that to the circumstances of BU’s prized recruit Mark Fidler, who didn’t step on the ice from the time he played his last game at Matignon High until his first practice with BU in October of 1977. Such a gap is unthinkable today.

  David Silk, the erudite scoring star of BU in the late 1970s, does a good job putting his 1977–78 championship season into perspective. “We were a real gashouse gang,” said Silk to the BU Free Press. “Times were different, the drinking age was only 18; there was no training regimen. The team liked to have fun.”

  That is what made that group so entertaining, that “fun” component. It was a team with an abundance of high-energy cutups, like Marc “Dog” Hetnik and John Melanson. The 1977–78 Terriers were dominated by Boston-area recruits, including three street-smart Charlestown natives who knew all the inner workings of The Hub. Throw in a wildcard like Dick Lamby, and you had the most engaging gang of in-town wise guys since Slip Mahoney’s Bowery Boys of the 1960s.

  College players of the 1970s were men: they drank, they fought, and many were candidates for Selective Service. Technically, fighting wasn’t permitted in the games, but there was much more leniency toward awarding double-minors for “roughing.” A week didn’t go by without a skirmish at the Terrier practices.

  BU’s majordomo Jackie Parker kept them all under wraps, because he had a graduate degree’s worth of street credibility from a childhood growing up in Somerville’s notorious Winter Hill neighborhood.

  Fifty firsthand interviews went into the research for this book. Chronicling this group makes one nostalgic for the days when fans and media alike could share a beer with their favorite players down at the Dugout Cafe. If any of the readers want a taste of that championship era, take the seven steps below Commonwealth Avenue across from Marsh Chapel, and try to imagine team captain Jack O’Callahan behind the bar pouring you a pint. Caricatures of all the old gang still hang on the wall, the cockiest and most hilarious players in college hockey, Jack Parker’s Wiseguys.

  PROLOGUE

  THE DEBACLE IN DENVER

  •

  Thirty-three-year-old Jackie Parker walked through the Providence Civic Center tunnel to watch the warmups of a hockey game that would forever define his professional life.

  It was the 1978 NCAA semifinals, today known as the Frozen Four, down in Providence, Rhode Island, an hour’s drive from his Boston home. Parker’s Terriers were facing off against the top-seeded Wisconsin Badgers, the reigning national champions. Two weeks after his thirty-third birthday, Parker was coaching his fifth consecutive team to the NCAA’s Frozen Four, an event he had never missed as a head coach. It was a string of success unfathomable today, and it created an untouchable sports record, like his hero Ted Williams’ .406 batting title.

  But the flip side of that mind-blowing success for such a young coach was the raw frustration of four consecutive failures in those national tournaments, each to a Western school. Those losses were the equivalent of the NFL Buffalo Bills’ record of futility in the 1990s: both teams were champions of their conference, and both suffered four consecutive losses on the biggest stage in their sport. Boston University’s conquerors read like a who’s who of Western Collegiate Hockey Association (WCHA) powerhouses: one loss apiece to Michigan and Michigan Tech, and two to the dreaded Golden Gophers from the University of Minnesota. As Parker watched the current WCHA champion Wisconsin Badgers take their warm-up laps in Providence, the hypercompetitive coach once again felt that bitter angst from those four NCAA losses. His mantra, spoken publicly and privately, was how “sick and tired” he was over the dominance of WCHA schools. Teams from that powerhouse conference had owned the NCAA tournament the previous five years. Over that span, not a single school from the East had even advanced to the championship game.

  Two years prior, Parker’s best team by far had been ambushed out west by Herb Brooks’ Minnesota Gophers in the ugliest NCAA game of all time. The acrid taste of that awful defeat never left Parker’s mouth, a game so violent—and in the opinion of BU fans, so despicable—that it threatened the sanctity of the national tournament. Parker’s current captain, the irascible Jack O’Callahan, was at Denver Arena for that NCAA debacle in 1976. He was a freshman who dressed, played, and fought like a warrior. Thirty-eight years later he remained spitting mad, literally.

  “In Denver in 1976 we played Minnesota,” said O’Callahan, “Terry Meagher was our captain and leading scorer. A little scrum by their bench, and their trainer spit in Terry Meagher’s face. So Terry was kind of like, ‘Motherfucker!’ So now they start punching Terry and we all jump off our bench; it was a bench-clearing brawl.”

  A fact check of the story reveals that a spitting incident did ignite the unraveling of the game at the seventy-second mark of the 1976 NCAA semifinal, but there is some controversy as to who spit on whom. There were two major reasons as to why the situation erupted: (1) the Gophers’ nationalistic fervor instilled by Brooks and (2) ancient construction of the penalty boxes in Denver.

  The Terriers came into the 1976 NCAAs with the nation’s best record at 25–3, having just swarmed through the Eastern College Championships with five-goal victories in both the semis and finals. This was a team that, although it did not win a ring, still remains a source of pride within the annals of Terrier hockey. If BU hockey had a Mount Rushmore for excellence, two of the legends, juniors Mike Eruzione and Rick Meagher, Terry’s younger brother, were playing together in their prime on that ’76 club. Close observers call that squad the most talented BU team of all time.

  “Jack Parker always said, you measure teams by winning national championships,” said Eruzione from his home in Winthrop, Massachusetts. “But we didn’t. We were a wagon; we were awfully good. Of all my four years at BU, that was the best team.” This coming from a man who won Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC) championships each year he played. “I might say we were the best team ever to play at BU that didn’t win a national championship.”

  None of BU’s excellence in 1976 was a mystery to Minnesota coach Brooks, who had a controversial record in the WCHA for tactics that flirted with the dark side. His Gophers teams were known for flagrant physicality, politely referred to as “chippiness” in this often-brutal sport. Brooks, who four years later played the jingoism card to tear down the aura of the dynastic Soviet Red Army hockey legends, took careful note of the BU roster. It revealed that eight of the nine Terrier seniors were Canadian, and two of BU’s best were named Meagher, with the French pronunciation “ma-HARR.”

  Brooks’ Gophers prided themselves on being not only 100 percent American but also being raised in the state of hockey itself, Minnesota. Brooks had seen film of BU’s run to the NCAAs: their speed, their stick skills, their sheer offensive brilliance. But as all hockey people know, their sport is a two-headed coin: ballet on one side and brawn on the other. Brooks might not have had the players to compete in a footrace with the Meagher brothers, but he had the muscle to drag them into a ditch, to turn a finesse game into a nasty slugfest. It is known euphemistically in hockey circles as “will over skill.”

  Brooks’ primary attack dog was six-foot-two slugger Russ Anderson, whose stat line that year inc
luded two goals and an astounding 111 penalty minutes. Rick Meagher’s older brother Terry wore the red “C” on the front of his jersey and the proverbial bull’s-eye on his back. He led the Terriers with thirty goals that season and sparked their vaunted power play. If Brooks’ troops were to prevail in this NCAA semifinal, they had to neutralize BU’s captain. The Gophers’ dutiful Anderson was sent off for cross-checking Meagher just forty seconds into that infamous game.

  Violence resumed in the ensuing faceoff scrum. Opponents always share the hash marks at the faceoff circle, frequently jostling as they wait for the puck to drop: shoulder-to-shoulder, hip-to-hip, sticks crossing and uncrossing. Seventy seconds into this contest, push came to shove, lumber pounded on lumber—or in this case, a leg. In an effort to stifle the brewing storm, the refs whistled Meagher for slashing, which evened up the manpower. This is where Denver Arena’s aging architecture became part of the story.

  Not only did the penalty boxes have no side glass, but BU’s box abutted the Minnesota bench. Terry Meagher, the man who had been targeted on Brooks’ chalkboard all week, was now eyeball-to-eyeball with the enemy. Angry jeering ensued. “You fucking Frog!” was the chorus, alluding to the supposed ancestry of the English-speaking native of Ontario. The maroon and gold Gophers were but a few feet away, howling epithets at their boxed-in enemy. Then came the tipping point: an enraged Minnesota player spat into Meagher’s exposed face, and spark hit powder. Meagher spat back, hitting Minnesota’s trainer Al Smith. Despite not wearing skates, Smith was one of Brooks’ most intense soldiers. He went ballistic, firing punches at the BU captain. Meagher, normally a peaceful man with a miniscule career penalty mark, answered in kind. The Gophers surrounded Meagher and began pummeling, which prompted the BU players to catapult their bench and Meagher to flee the penalty box. One stride out of the box, Meagher met up with Gopher enforcer Anderson. They attempted to settle their affair with bare knuckles. The old Denver barn became a stage for an old-fashioned donnybrook.