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| Dance Marathon: Terriers-Gophers 1976 Semis |
The infamous NCAA semifinal brawl of 1976 was a proverbial thorn in the side of fiery young coach Jack Parker. It was a crucial factor in BU's loss to eventual champion Minnesota, and it gnawed at him constantly. That agonizing loss motivated Parker, Jack O'Callahan and the rest of the Terriers until they won their own title two years later. This ugly chapter in college hockey history was carefully dissected in the new book, Jack Parker's Wiseguys, excerpted below.
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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 warmup laps in Providence, the hyper-competitive 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, “Mother(p)ucker!” 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.”
“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, “Mother(p)ucker!” 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 included 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 Brook’s chalkboard all week, was now eyeball-to-eyeball with the enemy. Angry jeering ensued. “You F***ing 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 Gary Smith. Despite not wearing skates, Smith was one of Brooks' most intense soldiers. He went ballistic, firing a punch at the BU captain. Meagher, normally a peaceful man with a minuscule 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.
Brooks’ primary attack dog was six-foot-two slugger Russ Anderson, whose stat line that year included 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 Brook’s chalkboard all week, was now eyeball-to-eyeball with the enemy. Angry jeering ensued. “You F***ing 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 Gary Smith. Despite not wearing skates, Smith was one of Brooks' most intense soldiers. He went ballistic, firing a punch at the BU captain. Meagher, normally a peaceful man with a minuscule 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.
“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 nearly 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 semi, 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.
“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 nearly 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 semi, 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 brawlers 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 inter- view 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 Meagher 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.
“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 inter- view 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 Meagher 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 unbear- able 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.
Jack Parker's Wiseguys, on sale now.
http://www.upne.com/1512601558.html
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 unbear- able 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.
Jack Parker's Wiseguys, on sale now.
http://www.upne.com/1512601558.html
