With the passing of Tommy McVie in late January, the National Hockey League lost its most entertaining character, a man like no other with so many stories, so many people he touched along the way..
“And you know, pretty much all of them are true,” former Edmonton Oilers coach Ron Low said with a laugh.
Low had played goal for McVie on a woeful expansion teams in Washington and later in New Jersey, and loved his time with McVie.
McVie literally was a hockey lifer. And, maybe, he should rate consideration for the Hockey Hall of Fame.
Nobody spent more time in hockey rinks before he died at 89 and, if you were around Tommy McVie, you were fortunate to be in his company. It was always a better day. He was a player for 18 years, a coach for 25 and a scout into his 80s after leaving the ice and the bench.
Archie Henderson, the former Oilers head of pro scouting and one of the toughest fighters in hockey history, played several years for McVie, mostly in the minors, and knew him for years as a scout.
He agreed there will never be anybody quite like McVie. He took the hirings and firings of coaching with equanimity.
“Been fired more often than Clint Eastwood’s Magnum,” he said.
“The stories of people like Tommy, they’re disappearing. A lot of people now have no frickin’ idea who Tommy was and it’s too bad,” Henderson said. “I still remember somebody saying to Tommy ‘you’ve been fired from this team and that team, why do you keep coaching?’ And Tommy looks at the guy and says ‘whaddya mean? it’s the only thing I’m any good at,” Henderson said with a laugh.
While Low was one of McVie’s favourite players in Washington, it didn’t get off to a running start between the two with McVie putting the goalie’s feet to the fire after he was late for a meeting.
“The night before we see him at the rink for the first time (as a coach), he calls us and says there’s a meeting at 8:30 the next morning. So I’m up at 7 and in my Datsun and I get a flat tire. I’m trying to thumb a ride. Nothing. There’s no cell-phones then so I can’t call anybody, so I start running and I’m about five miles away,” Low said.
“I get to the rink at I dunno, 8:34. I get to the door (dressing room) and it’s locked. I’m banging on it and nothing. So I stand outside for 45 minutes listening until he finally opens up and he’s yelling at me, ‘you’re late.’
“I tell him I had a flat and I was running to the rink. He says ‘run faster.’
“He says he’s fining me … I think it was $200 and I’m not going on the ice. I’m thinking, ‘this is a great start.’ But we got along fine after that.”
McVie was a stickler for the clock. Famously he scratched Bobby Hull when he was Jets coach on a night they were honouring The Golden Jet because Hull was late to McVie’s imposed arrival time. GM John Ferguson was so upset when he saw Hull wasn’t playing, he kicked a hole in the door to McVie’s office, but McVie wouldn’t budge.
“Not playing,” said McVie, who died at 89, after a life full of love and laughs.
He started his hockey life as an excellent minor-league forward through sundry stops, once a teammate of Mark Messier’s dad Doug with the Portland Buckaroos in the Western Hockey League.
He could score. He was feisty, but he was small and the NHL only had six teams then and he couldn’t crack open the door.
But, after his first pro game in 1956 and his last in 1974, he took to coaching and never looked back. He coached in Washington, in Winnipeg, in New Jersey as a head man and was an assistant to Brent Sutter in Boston. On his vagabond journey, he also coached the Caps farm team in Maine where Henderson played, and with Jersey’s farm squad in Utica.
“The guys who played for him loved him, but there were some who didn’t like him. They were usually the softer, not tough mentally players,” said Henderson, who never recalled McVie being soft, even as a scout. “He used to travel with Jan Ludvig (a former Oiler whose son John plays in the Colorado organization).
“When they would drive to Calgary they wouldn’t stay in a hotel, they would go to Olympic Park and stay in the athletes’ dorm rather than a hotel so they could work out in the gyms they had. They would train with the skiers and bobsledders. He loved it.”
He moved, a lot, often living in a hotel as a coach. Like Room 200 for two plus years at the Viscount Gort Motor Hotel about five minutes from the old Winnipeg Arena.
“Twenty minutes to leave town, 30 if I have to stop to pick up some clothes at the cleaners,” he said, when asked what it was like to be out of work.
When he was in Winnipeg, the NHL took back Rich Preston, Terry Ruskowski, Ulf Nilsson, Barry Long and Kim Clackson from the strongest WHA team when the leagues merged, leaving the Jets a shell of the McVie-coached Avco Cup championship (1979) squad.
“There’s enough talent here to win the Allan Cup (senior hockey). It might go seven games though but, you know, if we get home ice in the seventh game, we’d win,” said McVie, only half in jest, as he prepared for the first NHL season.
The Jets won 20 games that year. In McVie’s first time with Washington, in 1975-76 they won eight of 44 games after he replaced Milt Schmidt. In his first full season with the Devils, where Low was one of the many goalies there, after McVie had run their AHL farm team in Utica, he actually had New Jersey over .500 in 1991-92.
He proved with better talent, he could win. In Jersey, when Low was there, he says McVie had all the time in the world with young players like Pat Verbeek and John MacLean and coached them up. But he always seemed be coaching from the ledge, in his mind.
“I went into Tommy’s office one day,” said Sherry Bassin, Connor McDavid’s GM in junior in Erie, “and he says ‘two weeks ago they were ready to name the Washington Bridge after me (winning so much) … now they just want me to jump.”
In the minors, he was very successful, but he got a lot of kids sent to him who weren’t happy and he listened to their tale of woe.
“Young man, before we go on the ice, come into my office. Let’s get something out of the way. Sit down and tell me who screwed you up in the NHL and why you don’t belong here. OK, now that I’ve heard that, here’s how it’s going to be here,” McVie said.
There wasn’t much winning in the NHL, though, especially in Washington where the late Ace Bailey, who later played and scouted for the Oilers, was on the expansion squad with Low.
“Tommy was in better shape than a lot of the players. He would have these bag skates and towards the end, he would be flying past Ace. Ace used to get so mad,” said Low, who knew McVie was also big on practising.
“One night we played a really good game and won in Vancouver and we’re playing next in Los Angeles with a flight at 2 in the afternoon. But Tommy calls a practice for 6:45 in the morning, out in Burnaby,” Low recalled.
Ace somehow had the number of the bus company, so he gets on the phone and in that voice of Tommy’s says ‘cancel that bus in the morning. Just pick us up at 12 noon.’ The rest of the players are in the hotel lobby early in the morning, Tommy comes down and there’s no bus. Tommy looks over at Ace and says ’you did this.’
As Henderson warmed to the Tales of Tommy, who is posthumously going into the Western Canada Pro Scouts Wall of Honour this summer in Okotoks, he thought of an exhibition game between a Russian touring team and the Maine Mariners.
“The game is on TV up and down the Eastern seaboard. I’m playing pretty regularly and, with 10 minutes left in the third period, tie game, up in the corner of the arena I hear this voice yelling ‘We Want Archie.’ Then the whole frickin’ arena’s stamping their feet,” Henderson said.
“Tommy looks at me at the end of the bench so I jump up, put my leg over the boards and he says effing no. Just go up into the seats and ask your wife what she wants (starting the chant),” Henderson said.
“Another day Tommy is running a power-play drill and he puts out four huge cones as the penalty killers so the power-play guys would work around the cones. Tommy has to take a phone call in his office and says ‘OK, Archie you run the drill.’ I’m never out for the power play. When he comes back onto the ice he says ‘how did it go?’ I say ‘not very good. The frickin cones are leading 2-1.’” Henderson said.
Henderson was drafted by Washington, which is where he first encountered McVie.
“I was working at a bakery in Calgary, the night shift because you made 25 cents more. Of course, you got all the donuts you could eat and when I got drafted … I didn’t even know it was on, and I was about 240 pounds,” Henderson said.
“I come home from work and my mum in her housecoat and hair curls, me all covered in flour in my baker’s uniform and she says ‘you just got a call from a general (Max) McNab in Washington D.C. and you just got drafted.’ I said ‘they can’t draft me, I’m Canadian.’ He keeps calling back. I finally pick up the phone on the fourth day, I say ‘sir, I’m not fighting in the Vietnam War.’
“He says, ‘no, no, we’re the Washington Capitals, a new team in the NHL. We drafted you in the 10th round. I go, like a smart guy, ‘what pick in the 10th round?’
“Max says I have to be in Ottawa in three weeks for physical testing. He then says Tom McVie’s our coach. Tom meets me at the airport, and he’s got on these plaid pants and checkered jacket and patent-leather shoes and I’m looking at him funny. Then he looks at my belly and next morning he’s got us doing sit-ups, chin-ups,” he said.
“He writes me a letter and it says for training camp in Hershey in six weeks I want you at 207 pounds. And you have to run a mile in 5:40. I have a Honda Civic and my girlfriend then, now my wife Alice, times out a track exactly a mile and I start running behind the car and I’m soaking up exhaust,” Henderson said.
“But I show up at camp at exactly 207, get on the track to run and time exactly 5:40. Tommy’s watching and I say ‘huh, nothing to this game.’”