Jack Parker’s Wiseguys Read online

  “We cleared our benches to protect Terry,” said O’Callahan. “Everybody on the ice paired up beating the crap out of each other; it was like the movie Slapshot.” BU’s sophomore scoring star Mike Fidler, who along with O’Callahan hailed from the hardscrabble streets of Charlestown, endeared himself to all the pro scouts with his incessant brawling.

  “It was a free-for-all,” said Eruzione. “Mike Fidler was just pounding people. Even our seventy-year-old trainer Tony Dougal was being challenged by a Minnesota kid—they almost went to blows. It was just insane.”

  “Mike Fidler walked over and challenged the entire bench,” said BU goalie Brian Durocher, a sophomore at the time. “I’m sure they had great tough players on the Minnesota team, but that was part and parcel for Mike, the Charlestown edge and all that. A minute and eight seconds into the semifinal game, it didn’t make a lot of sense.”

  Chaos reigned, and a half hour of unmitigated brawling raged on. Finally the NCAA officials shut off the lights. With the combatants unable to see their counterparts, the melee finally petered out. But the controversy was far from over.

  NCAA rules dictate that a player guilty of fighting is automatically ejected from that contest, and the ensuing game. That put the whole 1976 tournament in jeopardy, because there would be no one left to finish this last semifinal, barely a minute old. Michigan Tech had already beaten Brown in the other semifinal, and enforcing the rules would have given Tech a championship by default. A meeting was hastily called.

  According to tournament reports from the Denver Post, game officials Dino Paniccia and Frank Kelley were joined by the on-ice officials from the first NCAA semifinal—Medo Martinello and Bill Riley, along with NCAA Hockey committee men: Dennis Poppe, Harvard coach Bill Cleary, former Boston College coach Snooks Kelley, WCHA head of officials Bob Gilray, and NCAA ice hockey committee chair Burt Smith. The meeting’s final two members included the embroiled coaches—Brooks and the seething Jackie Parker.

  An estimated half hour later they emerged with a solution—a flawed one according to many, but something that would allow the championships to continue: game misconducts to the original combatants only, Terry Meagher and Anderson. The remaining combatants could play on. O’Callahan remains outraged, if not objective, to this day.

  “So they’re WCHA refs, they throw our leading scorer and captain out of the game, who did nothing, who was the most kind guy, he maybe had ten minutes in penalties all year, but this guy spits in his face. He throws Terry and some fourth line guy out of the game. So we lose our best player, and they lose nobody, and we kind of got screwed in the penalty distribution of it all because we cleared our bench first.”

  BU lost its way and the game, 4–2, in an episode that no one involved from BU can ever reconcile. The 1976 assistant coach Toot Cahoon, two-time national champion as a player for the Terriers, has a thoughtful assessment of what went down. “When I step back from it and really analyze it,” said Cahoon a generation later, “whether or not it was ethical, it was a brilliant ploy by Brooks and his staff. The thing evolved into a perfect storm for them in that it took what I think is the best BU team of all time, and took them right out of their game.”

  Parker was understandably furious, ripping Brooks during an interview with the Boston Globe: “No question they came out with the intent of running at us. It obviously is the coach’s philosophy. He not only tolerates it, he condones it. Herb Brooks is known as Herb Bush in the WCHA and now I know why.”

  The victim of the attack, Terry Meagher, is reticent when it comes to the topic of the Denver debacle. “It was gasoline ready to explode, and it did,” said Terry from his office at Bowdoin College. “I just wish it didn’t happen.” He left it at that.

  Eruzione acknowledges what a bitter pill it remains. “That’s a game you don’t talk about. Maybe it’s like how the Russians don’t talk about our game against them,” said Eruzione, in a reference to the Lake Placid Winter Games.

  The Denver brawl fueled a four-year cycle of anger and violence that manifested in Olympic Festival scraps and a scene in the movie Miracle, in which the O’Callahan character fought the actor portraying Gopher Rob McClanahan (who incidentally was not yet on the Minnesota club that mugged BU). Eruzione found levity in that. “McClanahan never would have fought O’Callahan,” said the former Team USA Captain. “They should have picked [Phil] Verchota, pick a tough kid. Robby never would have fought Jack. We kind of laugh about that.”

  It took decades for Parker to get over the Denver episode, even after winning his own championship ring. Harvard legend Bill Cleary has been one of Parker’s closest friends for half a century, despite their in-town rivalry. Cleary recalled how long it took Parker to recover from that game. “He was upset for years over that Minnesota game.”

  Here in Providence, two years after that bitter NCAA loss to Minnesota, Parker was once again facing the WCHA’s best, the lauded Badgers of Wisconsin. The reigning national champs featured the most star-studded lineup in the country. Parker prided himself on preparation, yet he entered this game woefully underprepared, coming off a three-day week in which he had to deal with the aftershocks of his wife’s death and the ruptured lives of his five- and ten-year-old daughters. He took one last drag from his cigarette while he surveyed the players exiting as the Zamboni took the ice. The Civic Center was a sea of red from both Wisconsin and BU fans.

  Enveloped by excruciating pressure and the prospects of an unbearable fifth consecutive NCAA semifinal loss, Parker crushed out the smoldering butt and strutted with defiant confidence toward the BU locker room. He had a message that was certain to jack up his Terriers. His professional fate lay in their hands, their skates, and their sticks. They would have to find a way.

  1

  JACKIE PARKER

  •

  It seems that there has never been a time when the sporting folk of Boston did not know Jackie Parker. Even in the 1970s, the hockey lifer had already been around forever, from his playing days in the 1960s when he was a Catholic school star, then BU captain, to his more familiar role as BU’s high-profile coach. In the fall of 1977 he was every sportswriter’s favorite caricature: the hard-driven, ultracompetitive bench boss that spilled his emotional bucket in full view, every game. He chain-smoked, wore a signature red plaid sport coat, and berated refs to no end. “He was trying to be a young Vince Lombardi,” said his former star Mike Eruzione to Sports Illustrated, “an absolute lunatic.”

  Crazy like a fox, Parker’s winning percentage his first five years at BU cleared the unimaginable .800 level. His initial Terrier teams not only repeated as ECAC tournament champions, but they did it twice, creating a four-year ECAC dynasty. Parker’s famed predecessor at BU, Jack Kelley, never defended his lone ECAC tournament title. Despite BU’s national championships of 1971 and 1972, the Kelley era of the late ’60s and early ’70s was actually dominated by Cornell due to the unparalleled recruiting of Big Red coach Ned Harkness.

  Once Kelley and Harkness moved on to new challenges, Parker got busy carving out his own legend, beginning with the 1974 ECAC crown and a near miss in his first shot at the NCAAs. Entering the 1977–78 season, Parker had never lost an ECAC tournament game, a perfect twelve-for-twelve. Under the short-fused Parker, there were only two states of being: winning and misery. “His intensity quotient was off the Richter scale,” said his longtime assistant Toot Cahoon. “Three packs of cigarettes and a lot of focus.”

  On game days, the BU bench became Parker’s virtual cellblock, a walled-in space where he was constantly on the verge of combusting. Parker spewed hellfire onto everyone within shouting distance, often exploding in full view of fans, media, and officials. A veteran coach at age thirty-two, Jackie Parker tormented refs both on the ice and down the runway, shrieking in moral indignation over every malfeasance, real or imagined, by the men in stripes. He was a hazard to his own team as well.

  “He was quite the wild man back then,” said team trainer Nick Passaretti. “We’d have water bottles behind the bench, on the floor. If he got a bad call from the ref, or if the other team scored a goal, he’d get so aggravated that he’d kick the water bottles, usually flying in our direction. He must have busted half a dozen water bottles when he booted them. They were coming out of my budget, not his.”

  There was no stigma on public smoking in the 1970s, something Parker constantly exploited, even while coaching. He would power through an entire Marlboro with just a few fierce puffs. Peter Gammons reported in Sports Illustrated that Parker was a four-pack-a-day smoker. Harvard coach Bill Cleary said, “He doesn’t just smoke them, he eats them.” Mark Fidler got an unpleasant taste of Parker’s smoking early in his career.

  “He would smoke on the bench!” said Mark Fidler in disbelief. In reality Parker smoked ten steps away under the stands. After an ill-timed penalty, Fidler got a faceful during the intermission. “He smoked the whole cigarette while he yelled at me, blew it in my face for two straight minutes. I couldn’t stand the smell of smoke.”

  Parker’s loyalty to his alma mater was just as intense. It was no cliché that Parker bled Terrier red. Not only had he turned the ECAC Championship trophy hoist at Boston Garden into a rite of spring for BU hockey, but as a player he had a perfect 6–0 career record in the Beanpot Tournament, captaining the Terriers in 1967–68. He was an assistant coach for Kelley, including BU’s two national championship squads, and he also spent half a year coaching BU’s B-Team. There was nothing he wouldn’t and couldn’t do for BU hockey. When he got thrown into the head coaching hot seat after the 1973 Christmas break, he institutionalized internal competition throughout the program, returning BU to its winning ways after a down season in 1972–73.

  “When I first took over the job, I didn’t know everybody on t
he team,” said Parker. “So I just walked in and said we’re going to play everybody until we see who separates themselves. I decided to play all four lines, which was unheard of in those days.”

  Players got no preferential treatment under Parker; they would earn their ice time and power play minutes every day during often-violent practices. He was the new sheriff in town, a stubborn on-ice dictator. “There was only one way to do things,” said Parker, “and that was the way we did them.”

  Parker’s bristling demeanor was a result of growing up in the rough-and-tumble Boston suburb of Somerville. One of three brothers, Parker and his twin Robert spent most of their childhood in fierce sports combat. “He and his brother Bob are quite a package,” said longtime friend Ben Smith. “Their competitiveness, the one-upsmanship has gone on ad nauseam.”

  The Parker boys’ sport of choice early on? Basketball. “Sure I played basketball as a kid,” said Parker to the Boston Herald’s veteran columnist D. Leo Monahan. “How can you be raised in Somerville and not play basketball? But very early I discovered I wasn’t going to be six-foot something. So I shifted to hockey.” Parker developed into an elite hockey player in Boston’s rugged Catholic league, where he was named MVP of heralded Catholic Memorial his senior year in 1964. Twin brother Bob starred at their staunchest rival.

  “Bob was a great high school hockey player at Malden Catholic,” said Smith. “He liked to say Jack couldn’t make it at Malden Catholic.” Parker’s classic comeback was that he was twenty minutes older than his twin brother. Bob matriculated to Boston College, Jackie to Boston University. It is little wonder that Jackie Parker lived to beat BC.

  Parker was the wrong person to engage in an argument. His rapid-fire mental processing gave him a permanent edge over any verbal opponent. Parker’s acerbic wit traveled from his brain to his vocal chords nearly instantaneously, making him the arbiter of everything he chose to decree. Whether it was choosing up sides in a pickup game or arguing about curfew with his parents, Parker had the answers before his opponent could finish the question. “Jack would have been a great courtroom lawyer,” said Parker’s former assistant Toot Cahoon. “The sharpest tack in the drawer, always.”

  Parker made a point of letting everyone within eyesight know that he had shed his blue-collar wardrobe, starting with his ubiquitous red plaid sport coat. Smith, who has known Parker for nearly forty years, eagerly weighed in. “To quote my old dear friend Dave Murphy, dresswise, ‘he was always a bit of a dandy,’ and I think he still is,” said Smith. “I think it probably comes from the competitiveness with his twin brother Bob. The styles may have changed, but I don’t think his care for appearances has wavered. I think he’s always been very conscious of his wardrobe, and yours, and his assistants. ‘You wearing those socks? Where’d you get that tie?’ Never a moment went by when an article of clothing wasn’t questioned.”

  Parker himself defers to his father’s description of his personality. “My dad used to say, ‘You know what your problem is Jack? You may not always be right, but you’re never wrong.’ And that was a problem all my life.” Hundreds of college hockey referees from several generations agree with the elder Parker.

  Like its urban neighbor Charlestown, the primary alternative to sports for kids growing up in Somerville was crime. Parker was raised only blocks from Winter Hill, home to Irish mob boss Howie Winter. Parker’s childhood bridged the years of Boston’s bloody Irish Gang War between Somerville and Charlestown. Gangsters and hoodlums were part of Somerville’s culture, impossible to ignore. Staying on the straight and narrow in that town required living a deliberate life, and the Parker boys chose sports. That choice not only kept Parker out of trouble, it allowed him to cross paths with his future wife.

  As a teen, Jackie couldn’t help noticing the tall and graceful Phyllis Meehan from the neighborhood. “She was the better athlete than my father,” said their daughter Allison. “She grew up in Somerville, played baseball, played basketball; even my dad admitted it, she was just an unbelievable athlete.”

  Never one to hesitate, Jack married the striking brunette before graduating from BU and started a young family with Phyllis in Somerville, surrounded by their Irish and Roman Catholic relatives. Eager to support his family at the age of twenty-three, Jack began his coaching career at nearby Medford High for meager pay. Within a year he was snatched up by his former coach Jack Kelley, hired to be a full-time assistant at BU. He never left the Commonwealth Avenue campus. His hiring in the fall of 1969 began the longest coaching tenure between one man and one institution, as Parker put in nearly half a century of service in several roles at BU, an astounding forty seasons as head coach of his alma mater.

  One of Parker’s signature stories of loyalty pertains to his drive down to New Haven to interview Yale athletic director Carm Cozza for the hockey job. Unhappy with his salary at BU early in his career, Parker was on the short list to replace Paul Lufkin at Yale in the mid-1970s. He got into his car for the 150-mile drive down to New Haven. Ninety minutes into the trip, he had a change of heart and pulled off Route 84. He plunked some change into a pay phone and got Cozza on the line. Parker apologized for wasting his time and admitted that he was only looking for an offer to gain leverage with BU. Less than a minute later, he hung up, spun around, and drove home.

  Much later in his career, he was given not one but two offers to coach the NHL Bruins, the dream of any Boston hockey product. Both times he declined. Parker’s internal debate always ended on the same note. “I could never leave BU.”

  Although he was legally wed to Phyllis, during hockey seasons Jackie Parker was married to his job. He likes to quote the coaching philosophy of his former star Terry Meagher, who went on to record his own remarkable streak of thirty-three years as head coach of Bowdoin College in Maine. “Terry says September comes around and you go into a submarine and you go underwater,” said Parker. “You’re underwater, roasting in the sub. You might raise the periscope for a day and a half at Christmas, to see what’s going on, and then you’re back down again. You don’t surface again until late March, early April.”

  Having resurfaced in the spring of 1977, Jackie and Phyllis finally decided they needed a larger home for their growing family, daughters Allison (nine) and Jacqueline (four). The couple spent a weekend packing up a U-Haul for the twenty-minute drive north on Route 93 to Melrose; this would be a new beginning of sorts, the first time either one had lived outside of Somerville. They found a two-story yellow house at the top of Prescott Street, complete with a swimming pool in the back. This was a fitting home for a star coach at a major program.

  They needed someone to drive the truck, so Parker enlisted his leading returning scorer. “It was a very close team,” said David Silk. “I remember moving Jack and Phyllis into that house in Melrose. There was a real close bond.” Silk and his mates all knew and liked Phyllis; she was around a lot and was never shy with the troops. “She used to call me ‘Smooth As,’ although not very often,” said Silk, who remembered Phyllis on moving day being in good health, her typical vibrant self. “That was my freshman year, and she was fine.” No one could have possibly imagined that this spirited young woman was in the final year of her life.

  After the Red Sox fell short in a spirited 1977 pennant race with the hated Yankees, frost curled the crops in New England and the sports media shifted its focus to hockey once again. There was the usual speculation on how the new ECAC hockey season would unfold, and Parker’s Terriers garnered much of the newsprint. Massachusetts loved politics almost as much as sports, and the conservative Boston Herald viewed Parker’s coaching career like a successful presidential quadrennial. “Four more years,” said Parker, sparking a cigarette in his own fireside chat with the Hub’s newspapermen. “Wasn’t that a Nixon slogan?”

  Any president would envy Parker’s initial four-year term at the helm of Terrier nation: an ECAC championship trophy in each of those years. With Parker behind the bench, BU was once again the consensus pick to repeat in the East. But internally, Parker had his doubts. His team had lost to graduation college hockey’s “gold dust twins”—Rick Meagher and Mike Eruzione, BU’s two all-time leading scorers. Despite an impressive crop of incoming freshmen, Parker could not count on his newcomers to contribute until acclimating to Division I hockey, maybe after the New Year. Parker would search for answers in the exhibition season, though what he discovered was no cause for optimism.