9501220883
DETROIT FREE PRESS
950616
Friday, June 16, 1995
METRO FINAL
8H
Photo Color Detroit Free Press
MITCH ALBOM
SPECIAL SECTION; THE FINALS; ; SIDEBAR ATTACHED AT END OF TEXT
Copyright (c) 1995, Detroit Free Press
HE FINISHES WHAT HE STARTS
WINGS' SCOTTY BOWMAN IS DRIVEN
TO SUCCEED, DEVOTED TO HIS FAMILY
Scotty Bowman loses it. Not his temper, his ring. He had been playing with
it, rolling it around, and it flew out of his hand and rolled under an orange
seat in the Tiger Stadium mezzanine. Next thing you know, the 61-year-old
coach of the Red Wings -- the man some call a genius, others call a dictator,
but none, absolutely none, calls warm and fuzzy -- is poking under the seats
like a kid, amidst the peanut shells and hot dog wrappers, trying to get his
ring back.
"It went over here," he tells some fans, who quickly join the search. "You
see it? . . ."
The ring is from the Hockey Hall of Fame, where Bowman has his own
plaque. Most people with that honor are retired, or dead. Bowman, the serious
son of a Scottish blacksmith, is neither. He has won more games than any other
coach in the history of hockey, six Stanley Cup championships, about to try
for another, a virtual living legend -- who, at the moment, bending over the
seats in the fifth inning of a baseball game, hardly looks the part.
"You see it? . . . No? . . . How about over there? . . ."
Bowman has that short but powerful stature that goes well with tough
coaches, a frank face, thin lips, jutting chin, straight brown hair that has
vanished up front. He wears muted colors, even in casual dress, and on his
barrel-chested body, clothes fit as if ordered to stand at attention.
Nothing sags on Bowman. He is a straight-line guy. He sees point B from
point A and figures how to get there. He will not share his angst, nor spill
his beans, he will not call a radio talk-show psychiatrist for advice. His
dream relationship with the media is summed up by a coach he knew years ago,
who used to write the press releases himself.
"He would write, 'So and so is hurt today,' or 'Such and such's father is
visiting from out West, they're going fishing,' " Bowman recalls. "Then he
handed the reporters the news, and he was done with it."
Oh, if it were only that easy! Then Scotty Bowman could control
everything!
But it is never that easy. People talk about Bowman -- especially this
week, with the Red Wings in the Stanley Cup finals against New Jersey -- and
you hear the same old Bowman folklore, tales of rigid discipline, explosive
temper, a devious mind that used to ask players for matches -- even though he
didn't smoke -- so he could read the matchbook covers and see where the team
was hanging out after hours.
And yet Bowman, like most serious, private people, has reasons for what he
does, and incidents that provided those reasons. He is a paradox. This is a
man who seeks maturity in his players, yet loves model trains and collects
trading cards. A guy they call old-fashioned, who used videotape before other
coaches knew what it was. A guy who takes heat for still living in Buffalo,
yet who never talks about the handicapped son he doesn't want to uproot.
This is also the man, you might recall, who began his career in Detroit by
benching popular forward Shawn Burr -- and now Burr is one of Bowman's
biggest supporters.
"Scotty gets your attention," Burr says.
That he does. As the search for the ring continues, a vendor slides over,
points to Bowman's back, and whispers, "You think he can win the Cup? You
think he can get it done?"
Bowman? He finishes what he starts -- no matter how long it takes.
The incident
He was lying on the ice at the Montreal Forum, a piece of his skull lying
next to him. The crowd was pointing in hushed disbelief. A defenseman named
Jean-Guy Talbot -- who had already committed four penalties in this Junior A
playoff game -- now stood over young Scotty Bowman. Seconds earlier, Talbot,
frustrated at his team's imminent defeat, had chased Bowman on a breakaway and
clubbed him from behind, smacking him on the cranium, slicing his head open.
This was 1951. No one wore helmets. Bowman was unconscious. Talbot had
blood on his stick.
"There were only 30 seconds left in the game," Bowman says now. "I think
about that sometimes. What if the game had been 30 seconds shorter?"
Instead, Bowman was rushed to a hospital. They stitched his skull back
together and inserted a metal plate that is still there. He spent three weeks
in the hospital and the whole off- season fighting headaches. He tried a
comeback. It didn't take.
He had been a promising forward, with a dream of making it big.
At 18, his playing career was over.
Yet it is the mark of Bowman's life that years later, as a coach, he hired
Talbot to play for him in St. Louis. No grudges. No revenge. Finish that
chapter. Close the book.
"Jean just lost control," Bowman says, shrugging. "He wrote me a long
letter explaining it, pouring his heart out. I figure he just started me on my
career 15 years earlier than planned."
Does this sound like a man who believes in fate? Well. Consider this:
When he was a child, Bowman's mother took him and his siblings back to
Scotland for a visit. They were supposed to stay a month, but, because of
illnesses, wound up staying a year. Finally, they returned to Canada on a
boat called the Athena. On its return to England, the Athena was blown up
by German torpedoes.
"I timed that out pretty well, eh?" Bowman says.
The coaching
With his playing days gone, Bowman -- whose father never missed a day of
work in 31 years of pounding sheet metal -- was training to be a paint
salesman when his first real coaching chance came along with the Junior
Canadiens. "I was learning all the numbers of paints, all the combinations. It
wasn't bad, a steady job."
Instead, he began to dot the hockey canvas, moving up the ranks from kids
to juniors to assistant in the NHL with the expansion Blues. Bowman had an eye
for detail and a feel for the bench. One night, he suggested that St. Louis
coach Lynn Patrick not use a certain defenseman on a shift. Patrick used him
anyhow, and the opposing team scored.
The following morning, Patrick called Bowman and said, "I think this
coaching business has passed me by."
Bowman took over the next game and led the previously dismal Blues to the
Stanley Cup finals -- not in five years, not in three years. That year. The
finals? In his first try?
So began an amazing pro career in which Bowman soared to the top, making
three straight finals appearances in St. Louis, winning five Stanley Cups as
coach of the Montreal Canadiens -- finishing what he started at the Forum all
those years ago -- winning another as coach of the Pittsburgh Penguins, and
now, bringing the Wings to a place they haven't been in 29 years. It would
take all day to list Bowman's accomplishments in the NHL -- or the number of
times he took himself out from behind the bench, only to return again.
Ironically, it was 10 years ago this week that Bowman stepped down as coach of
the Buffalo Sabres and told the press corps: "As a coach, I've reached the
level I wanted to reach."
Yet here he is, back again.
The most interesting part of Bowman's coaching career, however, isn't the
statistics, or the five-year absence to be a TV analyst, or the unpredictable
moves he has made during games, or the combative relationship he has had with
the press. It's the touch. He seems to swing a hammer, yet the effects are
very subtle. He took a Wings team known for high-powered offense, and molded
it into a defensive jewel. Like a serious potter, he doesn't stop until the
clay is shaped.
He finishes what he starts.
"When I come in, I'm trying to get a team to believe in one another," he
says. "That's what matters. It's OK if they don't like the coach. They can not
like the coach or the general manager -- but if they like one another, they
got a chance."
Bowman doesn't seem worried whether they like the coach. Ken Dryden, the
former Montreal goalie, once wrote of him: "He is not someone who is easy to
like. He has no coach's con about him. He does not slap backs, punch arms or
grab elbows. He is shy and not very friendly. . . . He is complex, confusing
and unclear in every way but one. He is a brilliant coach, the best of his
time."
Bowman probably liked that praise because it goes in several directions
and then hits you with the point -- much like his coaching.
For example, Bowman once thought his players were getting too
self-bloated, so he scheduled practices around rush-hour traffic, "just to
remind them what life is like for regular people." He frequently made forwards
play defense in practice, and defensemen play forward, just to give them a
better understanding of each other. Bowman had his guys keeping their own
plus-minus statistics in little notebooks, long before the NHL did it on
computers. And he admires the coach who once was so frustrated with his team's
inability to score that he brought the net into the middle of the locker room
and put a puck on top of it, to remind them of how small one was compared to
the other.
Legend also has it Bowman once got so mad at a player that he told him to
go to the airport and then call him because "by that point I'll know who I
traded you to."
He laughs at that, says he doesn't remember it at all.
The home life
An evening breeze blows through the stadium seats, where a couple of kids
have joined the search for the ring. Bowman goes to Tiger Stadium now and
then, on his own, just as he goes to his regular restaurants and coffee stops.
He is a loner, but in typical complex fashion, he is a loner because he is a
family man.
Many people don't know this. They see a gruff old coach whose family and
house are in Buffalo and who commuted to his job in Pittsburgh and who now
rents a home in Bloomfield Hills during the season. They see this and they
say, "The guy is not committed. He's a mercenary."
Actually, it's quite the opposite. Bowman, who is married and has four
healthy children, also has a 23-year-old handicapped son named David, who was
born with hydrocephalus, better known as water on the brain.
"He was 7 weeks old when we found out," Bowman says. "Today, they'd pick
it up while the baby was still in the womb."
Instead, the operation to relieve the pressure -- "it was probably two
days too late," Bowman said -- also cost David his eyesight. His life has been
a difficult series of treatments and special schools. Bowman remembers one
night during the playoffs when David had to undergo an operation.
"Here I was, worried about this hockey game, and then I thought about
what he had to go through. I said to myself right then, this game is not about
life and death."
Over the years, with David in a special New York school for the blind,
Bowman did not want to uproot the family. So he commuted during his years as
a TV analyst with "Hockey Night in Canada" and he commuted when he got the job
in Pittsburgh and, yes, he goes home when he can with this job in Detroit.
But when he is here, he leads a somewhat nomadic life, often leaving his
rented house in the morning and not returning until late at night. "I stay at
the arena all day sometimes, eat there, watch the out-of-town games." At
other times, he has a late dinner by himself at Big Daddy's Parthenon, a Greek
restaurant in West Bloomfield, where the owners set him up with a private
table near a TV set. He has a regular cup of coffee at Art Moran's car
dealership, and he lunches every day with a Birmingham investment guy named
Lenny -- just out of habit. Bowman believes in streaks and omens and luck, so
when he finds a restaurant -- and company -- that coincides with a winning
streak, he keeps going back.
"Beau Jacks has worked for us, and so has this place called Boodles."
How about that? Six Stanley Cups, and he thinks a restaurant has
something to do it.
The future
Bowman says this is his last coaching job. "No more after this. Mr. Ilitch
told me when he hired me: 'When you're done coaching, I'd like to have you in
the organization.' That would interest me."
So, of course, would one more Cup. When asked how a private man like
himself would celebrate another championship, he shrugs. Says he plans to go
to Scotland this summer, but then, he's doing that regardless.
Down on the field, the Tigers end an inning. The crowd rises to stretch.
And finally, Bowman suddenly pops up, too, holding the missing ring.
"There it is," he says.
The kids lean in, and he shows it to them. They coo. As he slides it on,
the man who, in 61 years, has left in his rearview mirror a doomed boat, a
split head, six Stanley Cups and a litany of hockey influence from Guy Lafleur
to Mario Lemieux to Jacques Lemaire, holds out his hand and smiles.
"This was a good omen," Bowman says, looking at the ring. "It means we're
gonna get another one."
Uh-oh.
St. Louis, 1967-71
Scotty Bowman replaced general manager Lynn Patrick as coach 16 games into
the 1967-68 season and led the expansion St. Louis Blues to three Stanley Cup
finals. Bowman was named GM in his third season and handed the coaching reins
to Al Arbour in his fourth. Disputes with owners over trades and hiring and
firing coaches led to Bowman's departure.
Montreal, 1971-79
Bowman's legend was cemented in his hometown of Montreal, where he led the
Canadiens to five Stanley Cups (1973, 1976-79) and five regular-season titles.
He jumped ship after eight seasons because he wanted to be a general manager.
Buffalo, 1979-87
The legend was tarnished during his years in Buffalo, where Bowman, as
coach and general manager, built a respectable team that flopped in the
playoffs. He was fired early in his seventh season and ended up on "Hockey
Night in Canada" as an analyst.
Pittsburgh, 1991-93
Replacing ailing Bob Johnson, Bowman won the Cup as interim coach in
1991-92. He returned as a commuter coach the next season and won the
Presidents' Trophy for best regular-season record, but the Penguins were
upset in the second round. When Bowman and the Penguins couldn't come to
contract terms after the season, he ended up in Detroit.
Detroit, 1993-present
The Red Wings, looking for a coach with tough and winning ways, signed
Bowman to replace Bryan Murray as coach. The marriage was less than
harmonious, and Murray was fired after last year's first-round upset by San
Jose. This year, Bowman directed the Wings to the regular-season title, his
seventh overall.
DREDWINGS; HOCKEY; STANLEY CUP; BIOGRAPHY; SCOTTY BOWMAN; AGE;
COACH;Red Wings