Remembering the Big Bad Bruins

1998

Life was measured then not in years, not in academic seasons, not in one week to the next. To grow up around Boston in the late '60s and early '70s, specifically to grow up a Bruins fan, was to measure life from one game to the next, shift by shift.

On the heels of the Red Sox winning the American League pennant in 1967, the Bruins owned Boston for the better part of five years, monopolizing the sports consciousness like no other team in town. Ice rinks sprouted up in every neighborhood. Street hockey was played at every corner. Children dressed in black-and-gold sweaters that laced at the neck, and boarded yellow school buses at every third or fourth street sign with the numbers of Cheevers (30), Orr (4), Bucyk (9), Sanderson (16), and Hodge (8) stitched on their backs.

Your family car just wasn't worthy of the road unless both polished chrome bumpers carried the requisite bumpersticker, "Jesus saves . . . but Esposito scores on the rebound." You dreamed of owning a goalie's mask -- if not to stop pucks, just to use a black felt-tipped pen to draw stitch marks all over forehead, cheek, and chin the way Cheevers did.

The Hub was Hockeytown. There was room for little else.

Now entering their 75th season, the Bruins open the 1998-99 campaign tomorrow night against the Blues, the distant sons of the St. Louis club they rubbed out, four straight, to win the 1970 Stanley Cup.

It was May 10, a hot and sticky Mother's Day, when Bobby Orr fed Derek Sanderson, galloped to the net, and tapped Sanderson's return pass behind defenseless Blues goalie Glenn Hall for the overtime winner. The Bruins had their first Cup in 29 years. Celebration ruled the day, the night, and well into the morning.

Almost 29 years later, the famous picture of Orr, suspended in air, is afixed to barroom walls across New England and throughout Canada. He had been sent flying by defenseman Noel Picard's pitchfork to his leather skates and steel blades. And Orr was in full-scale celebration even before he hit the ice. Quintessential Orr -- forever anticipating, always a split second ahead of everyone else's move.

It was a time of Stanley Cup parades and devilish deeds. To wit: Johnny "Pie" McKenzie dousing Kevin White with a beer when hizzoner stood cheek to jowl and buddy-buddy in a frenzied City Hall celebration. A true Bostonian, when White talked he could make "Orr" a three-syllable word.

It was a club that drank freely and openly, in a time when alcohol was easily accepted as a way to amplify, even honor, heroics. They were the Big Bad Bruins. They smoked cigars, clutched pints, and walked with a swagger. Today they'd be chastised as heathens, social pariahs, brutes. But this was just before Archie Bunker began to lift America's consciousness and decades ahead of Oprah turning America into a nation that revels in its guilts.

The Bruins won, and they enjoyed it. No one was asking for explanations or apologies. Had they been better about taking care of themselves, been more mindful of their bodies and what they put in them, there might have been a string of Cups. But that, too, is hindsight.

They were comets, burning brilliantly and quickly, their dynasty smashed to smithereens when Orr's knees gave out, when the World Hockey Association moved in, when Ken Dryden walked from Ivy campus to hallowed Forum.

The NHL soon will be 30 teams wide, exactly five times bigger than it was when Orr signed his first contract with the Bruins, a deal that included a paint job for his family home in Parry Sound, Ontario. The game didn't warm up to US-born players until well into the '70s and not in earnest until the Yanks won the Olympic gold medal at Lake Placid in 1980. Now on the verge of opening shops in Nashville, Atlanta, Columbus, and Minneapolis/St. Paul, the NHL accepts job applications from every corner of the world. Nationality? Who'd want to know?

To replicate the period of the Big Bad Bruins today would be impossible, at almost every level. With twentysomething teams to stock, one team couldn't amass such talent, and if it could, market dynamics (i.e. free agency and exorbitant salaries) would bleed it dry within months after its first championship. One city couldn't be so enraptured. There are just too many options, too many teams, too many games. Fans see these athletes as heroes one minute, then see them dragged through the court systems the next, hauled in for their use of drugs, abuse of women, callousness toward tax laws. Heroes can be huggable, but they're more likely to be held at arm's distance.

Jimmy Young, a former staff member and now part-time contributor at New England Cable News, was a sixth-grader at the Angier School in Newton during the height of the Bruins craze. He and his pals kept faithful track of the points scored by Messrs. Orr and Esposito on a bulletin board in Mr. Atwood's English class. The day after a Bruins game, the goals and assists for Orr and Esposito were duly posted.

"If you didn't see the Bruins game on TV the night before, forget it," recalled Young. "You just didn't have anything to talk about."

It was hockey's gold rush in our town. Unlike the great Bruins teams of the late 1930s and early '40s, which won Cups in '39 and '41, television made the Bruins that much bigger and spread them out there for the masses. Zealots in the viewing crowd had to attach UHF tuners to their black-and-white TVs to pull in Ch. 38's broadcast. The crowning touch was a well-placed piece of aluminum foil draped on the rabbit ears or loop antenna, crystallizing the picture as it was beamed in from Boston Garden, the Montreal Forum, the Olympia in Detroit.

For three-quarters of a century now, from Arena to Garden to FleetCenter, the Bruins have worked the corners, skated their wing, proudly carried the black-and-orange NHL flag. But never did they do it so vividly or as boldly or as well as in the days of Orr and Esposito, Bucyk and Sanderson, Hodge and Cheevers, et al.

They were gifted and they were great, and we enjoyed it, without reservation or fear or care of what tomorrow would bring. In a sports world that today is so complex, so difficult for anyone to win (athlete, team, or fan), all that seems too simple to believe.