The "Wild Hockey League"

As of late, I’ve begun reading The Rebel League: The Short and Unruly Life of the World Hockey Association. I have not yet completed it, so I can’t give a final assesment, but after 60-something pages I certainly find it fascinating.

As you will probably know, once the 1960′s turned into the 1970′s various things began to start to get really shaggy. One of those shaggy things was a new hockey league intended to compete with the NHL (National Hockey League).

At one point, Dave Hanson, who would later play a role in the infamous movie Slap Shot, participated in an infamous incident where his team left their changing room pursuing an inebriated fan, only to forget that they were stark naked, and gave their fans a nice surprise. As the author says, “If you were looking for a metaphor for the WHA, you could do worse than a story about a bunch of naked hockey players running around like madmen while the rest of the world wondered just what…they were doing”

The Globe and Mail’s assesment of this book is also an apt description of the WHL itself “fuelled by fumes of the WHA’s audacity, reckless hope, violence, and economic hilarity”. The league was truly chaotic and a financial failure. But the really surprising aspect is not how much of a flop it was, but rather how much it actually accomplished.

For instance:

• Many of the best players ever played in the WHA. Both legends and just solid workhorses down the line: Wayne Gretzky, Gordie Howe, Bernie Parent, Jaques Plante,  Frank Mahovlich, Michel Goulet, Bobby Hull, Mark Messier, Dave Keon, Rod Langway, Paul Henderson, Gerry Cheevers, Mike Gartner, Ulf Nilsson, J.C. Tremblay, and Mark Howe, Not to mention the development of non-players, such as coach/brodcaster Harry Neale, coach Glenn Sather, and coach Jacques Demers (who all along, we now find out, was illiterate, which didn’t stop him from coaching 4 different WHA teams and coaching the Montreal Canadians to a Stanley Cup).
• Out of the ashes of the league came a number of NHL teams, including the Quebec Nordiques (who would later become the Colorado Avelanche), the Hartford Whalers (who would later become Carolina), and the Winnipeg Jets (who would later become the Phoenix Coyotes).
• The unrest surrounding the the WHA influenced the NHL, pushing them towards being more open to the possibility of expansion, a movement which is probably responsible for the formation of the New York Islanders.  It brought hockey to some new and emerging markets, and it has been argued that the WHA opened up the NHL’s willingness to expand into Canada with the Calgary Flames and Ottawa Senators.
• It ultimately tipped the scales away from owners and towards players. As the author has suggested, it made a lot of owners poor and a lot of players rich. The league had a lot to do with bringing the earning potential of hockey players up to par with other sports.
• It freed players from stringent reserve clauses (aftering beating the NHl in a court battle over it) and brought about the eighteen year-old draft
• It is also said that the WHA introduced the concept of overtime in regular season games
• It introduced the european style and also introducing a number of great european players at a time when the NHL still remained almost exclusively North American.
• It also brought about some very interesting questions about who was elidgable to represent Canada in the 1972 Summit Series. The NHL was seen as hypocritical for giving an exception for foreign-born Stan Mikita (born in Europe) while forbidding Canadian-born Bobby Hull from being a part of the team just because he signed with the WHA instead of the NHL

The WHA gave it their all, and certainly did it with a lot of “oomph”. As the author states, “The WHA survived for seven riotous seasons, producing twenty-seven teams…and, in its time, stuck a bottle of sltzer down the pants of the staid, established National Hockey League even as it revolutionized the game”. In a way it’s too bad the league is so forgotten among hockey fans. Where would the NHL be without the WHA’s crazy stand? We don’t know, we can only wonder.