Creating a Hockey Culture

HOW HOCKEY BECAME AN INTEGRAL PART OF BUFFALO LIFE & CULTURE

By Paul Wieland

Photos by Matt Brown

In the decade after World War II, those U. S. citizens who played hockey in Western New York would have fit into the seats of a pair of school buses, with plenty of room for referees and linesmen. There were but two hockey rinks in the entire region, one at Memorial Auditorium and the other at the private Nichols School. If a kid growing up was to learn how to play hockey, by and large he had to do it on natural ice in winter.

     Western New York liked its brand of pro hockey. There wasn’t the mass affection shown towards football’s Buffalo Bills. But thousands regularly supported a professional franchise in the American Hockey League. The Buffalo Bisons were locally owned  and a farm club of the Montreal Canadiens—a franchise rich in success. Buffalo benefited from the Montreal success and the fact that the Canadiens were able to lock down nearly every quality French-Canadian player in the Dominion. “The Flying Frenchmen” were just that, so the Bisons flew themselves on the legs of Paulie Meger, Murdo McKay, Freddie Hunt, Art Lessard, and the goaltending of Connie Dion.

     In 1947, the Bisons battled the Cleveland Barons for the AHL title, with standing-room-only crowds for every playoff game in the Aud, at that time with a capacity of about 10,000 when stuffed to the portals.

     Outside  of the Aud ice and pond hockey, it was almost impossible for a kid in the Buffalo area to learn how to play, unless he went to Nichols. There was a senior amateur hockey league that played its games mostly on Sunday afternoons in the city auditorium, but most of its players were Canadians either living and working in Buffalo or sliding across the Peace Bridge from nearby Fort Erie, Ontario.

     In the early 1950’s, high school hockey developed among three Catholic boys schools-- Canisius, St. Joe’s and Timon, --and Nichols threw in its reserve squad to make a four-team league. This league had no place to play regularly and crossed the Peace Bridge to rent ice time in the Fort Erie Arena, a barn of a structure that had dim lighting and boards that angled away like that leaning tower in Pisa.

     Because there was no culture of youth or schoolboy hockey, even those four schools that fielded teams did so as an aside. They were schools with rich athletic programs. However, hockey was a poor relative when it came to doling out dollars.

Two new rinks were built in the ‘60’s in the Town of Tonawanda. That community’s recreation department placed outdoor artificial ice rinks in opposite ends of the sprawling suburban residential town, rinks that were undersized and caught every gust of wind that originated as far away as the plains of Manitoba, or so it seemed when playing a night game in February. There were cases of players getting frostbite until the town enclosed the rinks and roofed them.

     The rinks were for use of town residents only, but they enabled boys (and later girls) who lived in Tonawanda to learn to skate and play hockey from the time they were in pre-school. The town immediately began a recreational senior league, one that attracted a wide variety of talents, who lived in the town, from hardly-able-to-skaters to ex-college players who happened to have settled in the area, and even some Canadians working in the states and living in the town.

     Hockey was  the runt of the litter in youth and senior sports in the area. It was around, but it was being pushed away from the money trough when it came time to fund sports in the public school systems. Pushed away may be the kindest thing to say. It never even got into the room. While youngsters were able to go to the Aud and watch a very high level of professional play by the hometown Bisons, hardly any had a chance to learn to play the game. That was the situation in the first months of 1970 when the Knox brothers obtained an NHL franchise. They immediately realized that developing youth hockey and amateur hockey in the area was vital to the success of the Sabres.

      Every kid who learned to skate and to enjoy the game is a potential customer, dragging his parents and family to a Sabres game, and remains a potential customer and season ticket-holder for a lifetime.  In 1970, the question was how could the Sabres encourage and even fund youth hockey in the area as quickly and as economically as possible? The Knoxes couldn’t afford to pay the development costs for a community trying to get youth hockey underway. Even if they could afford to fund two or three programs, what about the rest of those towns and cities that didn’t get the financial support?

     The way it was done involved tying together the celebrity of Sabres players with the needs of kids to learn hockey skills and contribute to their own fund-raising projects. We devised a hockey clinic program that swung into operation late in the first season and hit its stride in 1971-72.

     Branding was paramount in the hockey clinic program and all the Sabres outreach activities for a decade. We didn’t share the Sabres brand with any commercial sponsors. Every community activity and every promotion was sponsored by the Sabres and paid for by the Sabres. The Knoxes agreed that the Sabres needed to establish a brand and identity that was solid and substantial, and not mixed up with the names and commercial aims of other brands. That’s hardly what happens in pro sports today. Everything has a commercial tie-in, and sometimes it can’t be determined where the sponsor leaves off and the sports product begins.

     The critical component of the hockey clinic program was player participation. Sabres GM and Coach Punch Imlach made it a policy that every player on the roster owed at least two public appearances during the season. These couldn’t be deals where a player is paid, instead meant a visit to a sick child in a hospital, a sports night banquet or, in this case, working as an instructor at a hockey clinic.

     His rookie standout, Gilbert Perreault, was shy and spoke little English when he came to training camp straight from junior hockey in Montreal. Perreault would beg off every request to do a sports night event that first year, but agreed to do hockey clinics, where he could show and tell his natural skills as a player to youngsters on a rink. The rink was a second home to Perreault, so the clinics worked perfectly for him and for several others who were not happy in front of a questioning banquet crowd. The clinics were limited to 25 or 30 young skaters a session. There were times the young players had one-on-one instruction from an NHL player at worst there were small group sessions.

     There was a feeling out process at first. Few of the players had done this kind of work though some of the veterans had worked in summer hockey schools back in their Canadian hometowns.

     I was given a large supply of tickets for the season to use as I saw fit in public relations activities, and I slotted most of them for use in hockey fundraisers or for other  community causes. Tickets are dead-on perfect prizes. They have a real value. They bring new people to the arena and expose them to an NHL game, and they can be used for raffle fund raising purposes. We also would give simple booklets containing instructional material covered in the clinic drills, plus team decals, schedules and the like.

     Brand frequency as displayed by the clinic program, would not be enough to establish our brand as a big league entity. We had entered the league at the same time that Buffalo was granted an NBA franchise, the Buffalo Braves. We shared Memorial Auditorium with that franchise, owned by Paul Snyder, a feisty Buffalo businessman and entrepreneur.

     The new Sabres had to compete with the  Braves and as well as the football Bills, and outstanding college basketball programs at St. Bonaventure, along with Canisius and Niagara. College basketball was king on Saturday nights in the Aud, often playing to packed houses.

     The Sabres won the battle for winter sports supremacy in Buffalo with a thrust to the Stanley Cup finals in the spring of 1975. Along the way, not only did the Braves decide to skip town, but college basketball took a blow from which it never recovered.

     Today’s NHL hockey players make millions of dollars a year as journeymen. In 1970, the year I started with the Sabres, I was paid more than one of the players’. I kid you not. One day I was complaining to Imlach about how much I made in comparison to a corporate PR job I had left to join the new franchise. “How much do you make?” Imlach asked. I told him the number, and he opened a file drawer and pulled out a folder. He wouldn’t show me the name on the contract, but sure enough, there it was: one Sabre was getting $500 less than I was for the year. “Of course, he has some performance bonuses, so there’s chance he will make more,” said Imlach. But I was shocked that a big league player could make so little.

     Now I am shocked that they make so much.!

Paul Wieland was the Sabres public relations man and communications director for 25 years. He is the author of “Then Perreault Said to Rico,” a 2008 book on the team’s early years. He is a journalism professor at St. Bonaventure       University.