Get to know the men who fulfilled their childhood dream
From the beer league to the minor league, hockey players from coast to coast often say they’d give anything to play just one game in the NHL. One Night Only brings you the stories of 39 men who lived the dream — only to see it fade away almost as quickly as it arrived. Ken Reid talks to players who had one game, and one game only, in the National Hockey League — including the most famous single-gamer of them all: the coach himself, Don Cherry.
Was it a dream come true or was it heartbreak? What did they learn from their hockey journey and how does it define them today? From the satisfied to the bitter, Ken Reid unearths the stories from hockey’s equivalent to one-hit wonders in the follow-up to his bestselling Hockey Card Stories.
Get to know the men who fulfilled their childhood dream
From the beer league to the minor league, hockey players from coast to coast often say they’d give anything to play just one game in the NHL. One Night Only brings you the stories of 39 men who lived the dream — only to see it fade away almost as quickly as it arrived. Ken Reid talks to players who had one game, and one game only, in the National Hockey League — including the most famous single-gamer of them all: the coach himself, Don Cherry.
Was it a dream come true or was it heartbreak? What did they learn from their hockey journey and how does it define them today? From the satisfied to the bitter, Ken Reid unearths the stories from hockey’s equivalent to one-hit wonders in the follow-up to his bestselling Hockey Card Stories.
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Overview
Get to know the men who fulfilled their childhood dream
From the beer league to the minor league, hockey players from coast to coast often say they’d give anything to play just one game in the NHL. One Night Only brings you the stories of 39 men who lived the dream — only to see it fade away almost as quickly as it arrived. Ken Reid talks to players who had one game, and one game only, in the National Hockey League — including the most famous single-gamer of them all: the coach himself, Don Cherry.
Was it a dream come true or was it heartbreak? What did they learn from their hockey journey and how does it define them today? From the satisfied to the bitter, Ken Reid unearths the stories from hockey’s equivalent to one-hit wonders in the follow-up to his bestselling Hockey Card Stories.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781770909113 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ECW Press |
| Publication date: | 10/11/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Lexile: | 870L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 9 MB |
About the Author
Ken Reid co-anchors the weeknight prime-time edition of Sportsnet Central alongside Evanka Osmak. He is also a co-host of Prime Time Sports with Bob McCown on Sportsnet 590 The FAN. He lives in Toronto with his wife, Ash, and his two boys, Jacoby and Langdon. He still dreams of playing just a single shift in the NHL, but that ain’t gonna happen. Jeff Marek hosts Sportsnet’s Thursday Night Hockey and co-hosts Hockey Central Saturday. He is also co-host of the Marek vs. Wyshynski podcast with Greg Wyshynski.
Read an Excerpt
One Night Only
Conversations With The NHL's One-Game Wonders
By Ken Reid
ECW PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Ken ReidAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77090-911-3
CHAPTER 1
SCHOOL TIES
BOB RING
A Saving Grace
The Boston Bruins, Acadia University and the Vietnam War. Those three things are part of Bob Ring's amazing hockey journey. His hockey story is unlike any I've ever heard. And it goes like this ...
Bob Ring graduated from high school in Wakefield, Massachusetts, in 1964. Growing up, he used to watch the Bruins at the Boston Garden. Ring and his high school buddies would sit in some cheap seats right down by the ice, and on most nights, they'd watch the Bruins struggle. Then, in the summer of 1964, Bob Ring signed with the team as a goalie and became a part of the Bruins organization. His first assignment took him to the Ontario Hockey League to play junior with the Niagara Falls Flyers. They, along with the Oshawa Generals, were one of two Bruins-controlled teams.
Boston was retooling. Actually, that's putting things lightly. The team hadn't won a Stanley Cup since 1941 and had finished sixth in the six-team NHL four seasons in a row. When Ring joined the organization, their junior system was ripe with future NHL stars like Jean Pronovost, Derek Sanderson and Bernie Parent on the Niagara Falls Flyers and Bobby Orr and Wayne Cashman on the Oshawa Generals. Ring spent the 1964–65 season playing mostly Junior A and Junior B in the Niagara Falls area. The next year, he was with the big club. But while the rest of Ring's teammates, all Canadians, were just going about their business, something else was hanging over Bob Ring's head: the Vietnam draft. "I had a slightly different situation going, because we had the draft in the U.S. at that time. Vietnam was going on so you really had to be in the top of your class in college to have a student deferment. So that sort of sets the stage."
In October 1965, Ring was in Niagara Falls when the team's general manager, Hap Emms, called the young American into his office. "He said that they were sending me to Boston." When Ring heard those words, he immediately thought the Flyers were sending him home and that his time with the team was over. No, when Emms said Boston, he meant the Bruins. A goalie was down with an injury, and Ring was on his way to the NHL. "So a year out of high school I was playing in the Garden, which was just a tremendous thrill."
Ring headed for home with a plan to surprise his parents with the big news. Unfortunately, the Boston papers got word of the local-boy-makes-good story first, and the Wakefield kid's arrival in his hometown was already making headlines by the time he returned. Apparently the news didn't make its way to the Garden's security though: when the youthful-looking Ring arrived for his first NHL practice, he had a little trouble getting into the building. "I went into the Garden through the main gate and I had my equipment with me. And the guard at the gate informed me that the high school practice was not until four o'clock and that the Bruins were practising. And of course, I'm trying to convince him that I'm going to practise with them." Security was having none of it but, luckily for Ring, along came a familiar face. It was Bruins centre Ron Schock, who Ring was more than familiar with from his time in the organization. "[Ronnie] sort of brushed me aside and said, 'Excuse me, kid, high school doesn't start until four.' He threw me under the bus," laughs Ring. "But I finally managed to talk my way in."
The Bruins' plan was to go with their veteran goalie Eddie Johnston in the crease with Ring on the bench until Cheevers came back to play, but plans don't always work out. On October 30, 1965, Johnston got the start against the New York Rangers. With the Bruins down, Ring got the word from Bruins head coach Milt Schmidt that he was going in. In those days, if you replaced a goaltender during the game the backup got a chance for a little warm-up. Ring loosened up. When the referee blew his whistle for the game to resume, Ring's old buddy Ron Schock showed up again. "Shocker had three pucks about 15 feet out in front of the net, so he skates over and he shoots one into the lower corner and one into the upper corner and another to the other side. Boom, boom, boom and they're in the net. He taps me on the pads and he says, 'Good luck, rookie.'" A really nice guy, that Ron Schock.
As play resumed, Bob Ring found himself in a surreal world. He was on the ice at the Gardens playing for the Bruins. He was now the guy that just a couple of years ago he had paid to watch. "I can remember it was like an out-of-body experience. You're looking out into the stands and you're seeing your old high school buddies that you used to sit with the year before. They're watching the game and you're sort of saying, 'This is weird.'"
It was Ring's first NHL game and it was the first NHL game for the Rangers goalie as well. Future Hall of Famer Eddie Giacomin was at the other end of the ice. Before Ring knew it, another future member of the Hall came barrelling in on him. "Leo Boivin was a defenceman who used to throw some big hip checks in those days. The first goal that was scored on me was from Jean Ratelle. He came up the right wing and Boivin threw a hip check at him at the blue line and Ratelle sort of jumped over him, danced over him, skipped over him, and then came in on a breakaway and went to the upper-right-hand corner."
Bob Ring ended up making nine saves on 13 Rangers shots that night in an 8–2 home loss for the Bruins. The next day Ring was back at the Garden and was getting ready to join the Bruins for his first NHL road trip. That's when Bob Ring got his first official NHL lecture. And it was from an unlikely source. "I had packed my bag to get ready for the trip, and the trainer went berserk. Because it was his responsibility to make sure that all of the equipment arrived at the city. It was his job to pack the bags. But you know, as a kid you always pack your own bag. You had no idea that somebody was supposed to pack it for you. You didn't realize just where you were." Bob Ring was in the NHL now — he didn't need to pack his own gear; someone else would do it for him. And someone packed Ring's bag for a while. He didn't see any more action, but he practised with team for another month. The Bruins eventually made a move with Ring, but they didn't send him back to Niagara Falls. Instead, he was off to hockey's version of Siberia. Bob Ring was on his way to Springfield, Massachusetts, to play for Eddie Shore's Springfield Indians. Needless to say, he picked up his fair share of stories while playing for the legendary Shore. Shore owned the team and he owned the players. And if you didn't like his penny-pinching ways or the way he ran his team then it was too bad for you. "He basically gave you a contract and you either signed for what they were offering or you didn't play."
As an example, Ring points to Bill Sweeney. Sweeney led the American Hockey League in scoring for three straight seasons in the early 1960s. "The year that I was there, he went to Shore, who was in his mid-'80s [actually 60s but it may have seemed like he was in his 80s] at that time and was really getting whacked. Sweeney was making $10,000 at the time and he wanted a $2,000 increase in his contract. Shore wouldn't give it to him and he held out for two weeks at camp. Shore finally called him in and relented and gave him the $2,000 increase. So Sweeney went and started camp and then Shore fined him $1,000 a week for the next two consecutive weeks for lack of hustle in practice."
I'm sure you're familiar with the hockey term "Black Aces." It is always thrown around at playoff time. Teams load up on extra players in the postseason. These players practise with the team but rarely get into games. You can thank Shore for the term, says Ring. "He had to carry eight players that were known as the Black Aces on their team because there was no player in the American Hockey League that would want to jeopardize their career by going on loan to Shore to fill in and backfill for fear that Shore might make a deal for them. So he had to carry a group by the name of the Black Aces who did nothing but practise and fill in for spots."
Ring continues, "If Shore decided to reprimand a player and suspend him for lack of performance or hustle, in order for a player to collect his paycheque, and players in those days were starved, he was relegated to go into the stands to sell concessions. I mean, those days are just unbelievable. I was there for three months."
Once the season was over, Bob Ring had to think about the next stop on his hockey journey. It was a summer of indecision. And he had a monumental choice to make. This wasn't simply about hockey. This was about his life. The Vietnam War raged and the draft beckoned. And we're not talking about the hockey draft — Ring was worried about military conscription. Top college students might get a deferment, but a 19-year-old hockey player was out of luck. "There were no options for me," Ring says. "I had to take advantage of going back to university. Which of course meant you had to walk away from the professional career and hope that in four years the opportunity to come back to the league would still be there for you." It was pro hockey and the Vietnam draft or college and possibly an end to his professional hockey career. That's pressure for a 19-year-old kid.
Bob Ring started writing to big American schools like Boston University and the University of Michigan. He soon found out that he was out of luck: he was not considered to be an amateur under NCAA rules. He then focused on Canadian universities. He wrote to Acadia University, wondering if he was eligible to play in Canada. "I was very naive and I was hoping that maybe my background, not my scholastic achievement in high school by any means, would get me into Acadia."
September came, and Ring had a choice to make: he had received his draft notice and he had got the call from Acadia — he was accepted into the small Nova Scotia university. He had thought about this moment for the entire summer; now it was decision time. "It was really tough. In those days the war was just horrific."
Ring chose to go to school and not to war, even though it likely meant his chances for another crack at the NHL were slim. "Given the limited opportunity that you had in the league, you really suspected that after being out for four years, you wouldn't get another opportunity."
Less than a year after playing for the Bruins, Bob Ring showed up at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, three weeks after classes had begun. He did not get off to a good start. "I'm walking down the hall on the Monday I registered, and I needed to enroll into a business school or whatever. I had just met with head of the school of commerce, who had looked at my transcripts from high school and had told me that the best advice he could give me is to pack my bags and go home — because I'd never be able to get through his school of business. So now I'm thinking, 'Draft Board. I'm totally screwed.'" But as one door closed, another opened for Ring, literally, just a few steps away.
"There is a fellow down there by the name of Ralph Winters. He was the head of the school of economics. Like most of the faculty, he was a hockey fan. I was about to go pack my bags when he called me into this office. And I met him for the first time and he asked me how I was doing and I told him, 'Not so well.' And he said, 'What's the problem?' I said, 'I'm not going to be accepted into the school of business and I really don't know what I should do.' He said, 'Well, have you ever considered the school of economics?' And I'm thinking, 'Hmm ... economics. Home economics. I can cook. Sure, why not.'"
Just like that, Ring was in Acadia's school of economics, but there wasn't a lot of cooking going on. He studied and he played hockey. He was surprised to learn that Maritime universities were loaded with a lot of former junior and pro players. The play was top-notch. "The hockey was great and it was really very natural, and one of the best things about being in Canada is that the Canadian system allows you to get your amateur status back. And I was able to take advantage of that."
In his freshman year, Ring was named his conference's All-Star netminder and Acadia's MVP. The books were another story. "The first summer after my freshman year I had to stay and take two courses to make up for what I had failed."
The word "failed" would not sit well with the American military. Luckily for Ring, that particular word never came up when the Draft Board called Acadia or any other Canadian school to check up on American students. "The Draft Board was always going to the universities to determine whether you were in the top half of your class. And if you weren't you'd lose your deferment. The Canadian universities would tell the Draft Boards only that you were a student in good standing. They really were supportive of their students — they helped me out tremendously. Without the support of the faculty I never would have made it."
By the end of his senior year at Acadia, the freshman student who had to take summer classes was on the dean's list. Bob Ring graduated in 1970 with a degree in economics. "One of the most memorable experiences that I've ever had was when I had the opportunity to go back to Acadia some six or seven years later to be inducted into their Hall of Fame, and I was able to thank the people in the audience who had changed my life, who had done everything for me. Acadia had just 1,200 students at the time and if I had been accepted into a major university I would have just been a number and there would have been no one there to act as my support system. The faculty gave me such tremendous support and basically gave me the opportunity to catch up on all the education I didn't get in high school. And it made all the difference in the world."
After graduation, Bob moved back to New England. He worked for a telephone company and played senior hockey in Concord, New Hampshire. The senior team paid $100 a game — in those days that was good money for a young guy in the working world. After a few years, he hung up the blades. He now lives in South Carolina and he still has a hint of a New England accent, but it's been over 50 years since he played that one night at the Boston Garden for his hometown Bruins. "A lot of it happens so fast that you don't have an opportunity to truly appreciate the moment. But it gets to be more important to you as time goes on. Looking back, it is obviously one of the wonderful things in my hockey career, but at the time it was just a natural progression. You don't think that it's the end of it. You think that it's going to continue."
But then other things occur — things you'd never expect. Like playing for Eddie Shore and the Vietnam draft, and having to make a decision that no 19-year-old kid should ever have to make.
Bob Ring chose to give up a professional career and head to a small Canadian school to pursue an education and avoid a war. "It changed my life," he says, "and it was probably the best thing that I ever did."
SID VEYSEY
Mr. Comeback
In the summer of 1978, Sid Veysey was back at home in New Brunswick. One day he found himself on first base in a New Brunswick Intermediate A baseball game. But Veysey didn't want to stay on first base, he wanted to get to second base. He quickly made up his mind; he was going on a 90-foot trip to second. Veysey didn't think of his plan to steal the second bag on the diamond as any sort of gamble. After all, Veysey, a pro hockey player in the winter, didn't have anything in his contract about not playing baseball in the summer. "The only stipulation back then was no motorcycles. You weren't supposed to drive motorcycles. But there wasn't anything about baseball."
That's too bad, because Veysey's decision to steal second went horribly wrong for a guy who had missed the second half of the previous hockey season with a dislocated shoulder. "The second baseman was standing in front of the bag. It wasn't very smart of me. I thought I would slide and take him out of the play. Well it didn't work out so well — caught right above my ankle and snapped the bone back." Veysey's foot was dangling from his leg. His leg was broken in two places. "It was a pretty traumatic experience."
The timing could not have been any worse. The previous winter, Sid Veysey played in 54 games for the Tulsa Oilers and one game for their parent club, the Vancouver Canucks. But now, here he was, lying on his back on a baseball field in New Brunswick, with a broken leg and no contract. Veysey was a free agent that summer; he had yet to sign a deal with the Canucks when his leg snapped. "I did have the opportunity to keep playing, but I knew I couldn't play so I had to let my agent know that I broke my leg," Veysey remembers. "A broken leg — of course Vancouver wouldn't re-sign me."
Just a few months before it all went wrong on the diamond, it was all going right on the ice. He started the 1977–78 season with the Vancouver Canucks. Veysey spent the first two years of his pro career averaging over a point per game with the Fort Wayne Komets and the Tulsa Oilers. The NHL was his for the taking. "The regular season started and we went on a three-game road trip. The first night I sat out — I think it was New York. The second game was in Colorado and I played. I remember I had a good chance to score. Missed a couple of passes — I'm normally a pretty good playmaker. I remember I missed my winger. I fed him a little too far and we got a couple of icing calls. It was a little faster paced than the exhibition games. Maybe I felt a little more pressure than in the exhibition games."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from One Night Only by Ken Reid. Copyright © 2016 Ken Reid. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword by JEFF MAREK,Introduction,
Chapter One SCHOOL TIES,
Chapter Two OLD SCHOOL,
Chapter Three LET'S GO, PRETTY BOY,
Chapter Four THE WHA CONNECTION,
Chapter Five ALL IN THE FAMILY,
Chapter Six MAKE YOUR MARK,
Chapter Seven JUNIOR STARS,
Chapter Eight SKATING WITH THE STARS,
Chapter Nine LIFERS,
Chapter Ten THE KING OF THE ONE-GAMERS DON CHERRY A Night at the Forum and So Much More,
Acknowledgements,
About the Author,
Copyright,