Jack Parker's Wiseguys: The National Champion BU Terriers, the Blizzard of ’78, and the Road to the Miracle on Ice

By Tim Rappleye

Over the winter of 1977–78, anyone within shouting distance of a two-mile stretch of Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue—from Fenway Park to the trolley curve at Packard’s Corner—found themselves pulled into the orbit of college hockey. The hottest ticket in a sports-mad city was Boston University’s Terriers, a team so tough it was said they didn’t have fans—they took hostages. Eschewing the usual recruiting pools in Canada, Jack Parker and his coaching staff assembled a squad that included three stars from nearby Charlestown, then known as the “armed robbery capital of America.” Jack Parker’s Wiseguys is the story of a high-flying, headline-dominating, national championship squad led by three future stars of the Miracle on Ice, the medal-round game the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team won against the heavily favored Soviet Union. Now retired, Parker is a thoughtful statesman for the sport, a revered figure who held the longest tenure of any coach in Boston sports history. But during the 1977–78 season, he was just five years into his reign—and only a decade or so older than his players. Fiery, mercurial, as tough as any of his tough guys, Parker and his team were to face the pressure-cooker expectations of four previous also-ran seasons, further heightened by barroom brawls, off-the-ice shenanigans, and the citywide shutdown caused by one of the biggest blizzards to ever hit the Northeast. This season was to be Parker’s watershed, a roller-coaster ride of nail-biting victories and unimaginable tragedy, played out in increasingly strident headlines as his team opened the season with an unprecedented twenty-one straight wins. Only the second loss of the year eliminated the Terriers from their league playoffs and possibly from national contention; hours after the game Parker’s wife died from cancer. The story of how the team responded—coming back to win the national championship a week after Parker buried his wife—makes a compelling tale for Boston sports fans and everyone else who feels a thrill of pride at America’s unlikely win over the Soviet national team—a victory forged on Commonwealth Avenue in that bitter, beautiful winter of ’78.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of New England
• Release date: Dec 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781512601657

Book preview

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 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 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.

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