The winds of change are blowing through the Portland Winter Hawks’ organization. . . . Dean (Scooter) Vrooman, who left the Winter Hawks more than a year ago after a lengthy stint as the team’s much-loved play-by-play voice, remembers the legendary Brian Shaw in a story that was prepared a couple of years ago as part of a book project that never got off the ground . . .
PART 5:
My first season with the Winter Hawks was 1982-83. I did not understand the magnitude, then, of what Shaw had done in order to woo the Memorial Cup tournament to Portland in May 1983.
The tournament had a glorious 65-year history, all of it in Canada. When the Winter Hawks won the WHL championship in 1982 and played in the Memorial Cup tournament in Hull, Que., Shaw stewed. The tournament was held in a small, old arena with crowds numbering 2,000 or less. The Winter Hawks had beaten the Regina Pats in the last game of the WHL championship series in front of a sold out crowd of more than 10,000 in Portland’s Memorial Coliseum. Shaw got on his soapbox in Hull and started asking the right people some pointed questions.
If this truly was major junior hockey’s showcase, shouldn’t the games be played in front of big crowds and a national television audience?
After all, the Canadian Hockey League was developing a vast majority of high-impact future NHL stars. The Memorial Cup, Shaw thought, should be an event worthy of special distinction. He started to dangle the then-radical idea of a host team to energize the community in which the event would be staged. The Hull tournament was a perfect time for Shaw to start his sales pitch. The Memorial Cup was starting to spend more money on team travel and putting on the event than it was receiving in gate receipts.
In other words, the climate was right for change, but this still had to be the penultimate sales job of Shaw’s life.
Imagine this. How do you convince hockey leaders from three different leagues scattered across Canada and the northwestern United States to consider allowing a team to participate in the Memorial Cup without “earning” its way into the tournament?
Money was certainly part of the plan. Shaw figured if he could prove that the host team format, in a decent-sized building, could actually produce a profit – a decent profit – that would be shared equally by every team in the host league, his plan would make more sense to more key people. And where else would he feel more comfortable doing that than in the 10,000-seat Memorial Coliseum with his very own Winter Hawks?
Everyone knew Portland would have a strong team that season, one worthy of challenging for a spot in the Memorial Cup field anyway. If it could be promoted, in advance, that the Winter Hawks would definitely be in the tournament, ticket packages could be sold well before the tournament in May.
Imagine this. How do you ask all of major junior hockey to not only change the format of its hallowed national championship, but also convince the powers to hold the championship in the United States?
Even then, Canadians were at least slightly hostile towards Americans when it came to their national sport. Some Canadians could see the writing on the wall, though. More money in the United States. The exchange rate. The ability to woo players south from Canadian teams. And more players from the United States were becoming elite players, capable of challenging Canada for international recognition. The Memorial Cup, which honours Canadians killed in the First World War, held on U.S. soil? Blasphemy!
But Shaw did it.
And he did it in classic Shaw fashion. He went one-on-one in order to convince the important people that had to support him and he sold them first. Once convinced, they would help him get the votes he needed at the CHL level. Boy, there was a lot of grumbling, too, but the bottom line is that the 1983 Memorial Cup in Portland attracted more than 56,000 fans. At the time, it was the most successful Memorial Cup. Ever.
Shaw came through on his promise. Every WHL team got a nice cheque as its guaranteed share of the proceeds. It turned out to be the format used to this day, and the event has gained a higher and higher profile since that 1983 tournament in Portland.
But all was not rosy. The Winter Hawks won the tournament even though the Lethbridge Broncos had beaten them in five games in the 1983 WHL championship series.
And there was the whole ‘extra goalie’ incident. Every year prior to 1983, each team in the tournament was allowed to add to its Memorial Cup roster a goaltender from another team in its league. Things really came to a head regarding this rule when Ken Wregget, Lethbridge’s No. 1 goalie, was hurt and couldn’t play in the 1983 Memorial Cup. The Winter Hawks wanted to add the best goalie in the league, Mike Vernon of the Calgary Wranglers, and so did Lethbridge. The league allowed Vernon to choose and he picked Portland, figuring Wregget would recover from his injury, which was thought to be minor at the time, and be able to play for Lethbridge. Vernon knew he could play for Portland because their regular goaltenders, Bruno Campese and Ian Wood, were injured and unable to play in the Memorial Cup.
Well, as it turned out, Wregget couldn’t play either and Lethbridge was the first team eliminated. And then Vernon and the Hawks won it all.
As you might expect, all of this, on top of Shaw’s success in selling the host-team format and bringing a Canadian tradition to the United States, did not sit well with a lot of folks.
I still remember going into Lethbridge the next year for a regular-season game where some fans had hung a real toilet from the rafters of the Sportsplex with a sign on it that read, “Shaw, here is your Memorial Cup!”
There were some in hockey who thought the host-team format was doomed because the host team would win every year. If that happened, they said, it would really compromise the event when the other three teams in the tournament all had to win their league championships in order to qualify. Shaw always said that would simply not be the case. He reasoned that when you had three other teams that were of the highest calibre, the home crowd wouldn’t be a major factor in determining the Memorial Cup champion.
Apparently, Shaw was right. In the 26 years of the host-team format, only five host teams have won without also earning their way into the field by winning a league championship: Portland (1983), Sault Ste. Marie (1993), Ottawa (1999), Kelowna (2004) and Vancouver (2007).
Kamloops (1995), Hull (1997) and London (2005) have been host teams that also won their league championships and went on to win the Memorial Cup on home ice.
(Part 5 of 7)
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