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    Birth of a Dynasty: The 1980 New York Islanders
    Birth of a Dynasty: The 1980 New York Islanders
    Birth of a Dynasty: The 1980 New York Islanders
    Ebook193 pages2 hours

    Birth of a Dynasty: The 1980 New York Islanders

    By Alan Hahn and Bob Nystrom

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    The National Hockey League saw the birth of a new dynasty in 1980. The New York Islanders had been an expansion franchise in 1972 in the New York City suburbs of Long Island. For years they played in the long shadow of the big-city New York Rangers and were considered the league’s laughingstock during their first season. Miraculously, eight years later, they were champions. Despite their mercurial rise in the 1970s’which included a first-place overall finish in the 1978-79 season’the Islanders were still considered chokers because of playoff failures. The most frustrating failure of all came at the hands of the rival Rangers, who beat them in 1979 to advance to the Stanley Cup Finals. A year later they stumbled through an injury-plagued and inconsistent regular season. When the playoffs arrived again, however, they were ready. Bolstered by the late-season addition of speedy center Butch Goring and the bitterness of the previous year’s defeat, the Islanders overcame their past failures and put together an exhausting and dramatic run to their first-ever appearance in the Stanley Cup Finals. In the Finals they met the still-dominant Philadelphia Flyers, two-time champions in the 1970s. The ensuing battle demonstrated not only the promise with which the Islanders had always teased their fans, but also the maddening struggles that seemed to hold them back every year. That is, until Game 6, when Bob Nystrom, an everyman’s everyman, scored the clinching goal at 7:11 of overtime to make history in both the NHL and on Long Island. It is a moment that, 25 years later, still lives in the hearts of Islanders fans and in the annals of Long Island, as a region and a community. It is a moment that spawned a run of four consecutive championships, the longest by any United States-based professional team and a run that has since gone unmatched. Birth of a Dynasty: The 1980 New York Islanders is the story of how it happened, how it came together, and what it felt like to be there.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSports Publishing
    Release dateAug 1, 2012
    ISBN9781613211632
    Author

    Alan Hahn

    An Adams Media author.

    Read more from Alan Hahn

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      Book preview

      Birth of a Dynasty - Alan Hahn

      Chapter One

      In the Beginning

      This wasn’t a parade, it was a block party. The streets were closed off and the biggest house in the neighborhood hosted a celebration that became an annual event to kick off summer here in Long Island, New York. They toasted each other while drinking from a gleaming silver chalice that in these parts had only been a mythical image. For a fledgling franchise such as the New York Islanders, which was just two years removed from near bankruptcy and less than a decade old, it seemed an impossible dream.

      And for the city folks to the west, longtime fans of the New York Rangers, it had long been a frustratingly elusive one. Forty years to the date without a Stanley Cup.

      But out in the ‘burbs, the Cup had come to party. It did not come to saunter down the Canyon of Heroes in downtown Manhattan, like sports champions and astronauts and others who had been showered in ticker tape and big-city lights. Instead, on this hot afternoon in May 1980, it proudly rode down the nondescript backstreets of the Hempstead Plains in an antique automobile, surrounded by its newest owners and gawked at by adoring locals, who at the time might not have fully understood the magnitude of the Cup’s presence.

      The further I get away from it, said Jean Nebiosini, a woman from the nearby south shore town of Valley Stream who lived through those halcyon days, the more I realize how great it was.

      Their escort was a few local police on horseback, as well as a host of youngsters giddily riding along on their bicycles.

      The street was not encased by skyscrapers of the New York City skyline, but instead stretched out lazily and haphazardly under a gigantic canopy of suburban sky. And it was lined with a hundred thousand screaming, waving and mostly delirious locals, some of which jumped in front of the parade to snap photos of the shiny icon as it approached.

      Long Island doesn’t really have a Main Street or a downtown, but for one afternoon, two side roads that once were a part of famed Mitchel Field became just that. It transformed from a dusty, desolate plain with a squat arena dropped in its midst to the heart of a sprawling suburbia that, until then, didn’t really know it had one.

      The New York Islanders were born on November 8, 1971, when the National Hockey League, eager to stay ahead of a newly formed rival league, the World Hockey Association, decided to expand for the third time in six years. In 1967 the league doubled from the Original Six teams to 12. In 1970 two more teams were added.

      New York had been owned by the Rangers since 1926 and, ironically, it was Rangers president Bill Jennings who helped the Long Island politicians—who were constructing a new arena on the otherwise empty plains in a town called Uniondale—land an NHL franchise.

      Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum, as it is still known today, was a dream of the political leaders of Nassau County, an affluent area 40 minutes West of Manhattan that bordered New York City’s fifth borough, Queens. Nassau laid claim to land left abandoned by the United States Air Force, which once used the site as an air base known as Mitchel Field. It was from this airstrip in 1927 that Charles Lindbergh took off for his historical flight across the Atlantic Ocean to France in his plane, The Spirit of St. Louis.

      The arena was already under construction in 1971 with only a basketball team, the New York Nets of the American Basketball Association, as an anticipated tenant. That team was owned by a Barnumesque entrepreneur named Roy L.M. Boe.

      Boe made his early success as a beverage company owner and the slick marketing of his wife’s invention, the wraparound skirt, and continued pursuing deals and other ventures. An avid sports lover and fan, he saw the spanking-new arena as a springboard for a potential merger of the ABA to the established National Basketball Association.

      Taking note of the busy nights at Madison Square Garden with both the NBAs New York Knicks and the Rangers, Nassau politicians began to woo the NHL, which had at first agreed to halt expansion after the 1970 growth to 14 teams. But after Jennings joined NHL president Clarence Campbell on a visit to the arena site, Jennings’s agreed expansion to Long Island was inevitable.

      So, too, was Boe’s involvement. Once the franchise was awarded, he rallied 19 partners to create the Islanders and completed the transaction on December 30, 1971. Several nicknames were considered for Long Island’s NHL team, including Ducks, after the beloved swashbuckling Eastern League team that played in Commack Arena. But Islanders would be the final choice. It was fitting because New York, not Long Island, would be in the title. The NHL still wanted the big-city name attached.

      Boe’s wife, Deon, designed the first Nets uniforms and originally planned to dress the Islanders in green and black. Eventually (and through much political involvement) it was decided to go with the colors of Nassau County: orange and blue.

      The logo was designed by a local advertising executive who put together the NY and hockey stick in a matter of days before the unveiling.

      All the while a man named William Torrey had been fed up with his job as an executive with the Oakland Seals, a team that joined the NHL in 1967. Born in the shadow of the old Montreal Forum, Torrey was a hockey lifer who saw his hockey life going nowhere fast with the Seals under the cantankerous and contentious ownership of Charles O. Finley.

      One of the highlights of my career, Torrey recalls with a laugh, is that I lasted nine months with Charlie Finley.

      But that relationship came to an end during the 1970-71 season when Finley tried to trade Carol Vadnais to the Rangers for cash. Torrey had a clause in his contract that said he had final approval on all trades and he disapproved of this deal.

      Finley was livid and tried to get Torrey to renegotiate his contract, with the clause taken out. Torrey refused. Eventually, he quit and returned to Pittsburgh, where he started in professional hockey working for the Hornets of the American Hockey League. Torrey ran an arena-event promotion company he had purchased just before he left Pittsburgh for Oakland.

      The NHL was expanding in the 1972-73 season, and Torrey’s name came up as a candidate for two jobs. The Atlanta Flames were very interested. But one of the potential investors in the Islanders, publishing mogul Nelson Doubleday, had been an investor in the Seals. He knew of Torrey and called him about coming to Long Island.

      Doubleday then told Boe he’d invest in the Islanders if Torrey was given consideration to run the franchise.

      So Torrey now had a choice of two teams, two places to go. He sought some advice from a friend, Art Rooney, who owned the Pittsburgh Steelers. Rooney was a hockey fan who even rode the bus with the Hornets to a few games.

      Rooney even once considered buying the Penguins when the new NHL franchise met early financial troubles. But his five sons were already involved either in the Steelers or one of his family’s three racetracks.

      If I had one more son, Torrey recalls Rooney telling him once regarding the Penguins, I’d buy that team.

      The local papers were mentioning Torrey as a candidate for the openings in Atlanta and Long Island and Rooney spoke up.

      I know Atlanta and it’s a great city, he said, but there’s only one New York. The difference is this: You go to New York and all you have to do is put together a successful team. In Atlanta, you’d have to teach them about the sport. It would be like in Oakland.

      Torrey agreed and also felt more comfortable knowing Doubleday, a familiar face, would be involved in the Long Island franchise. So he got himself an interview with Boe, who hired him on the spot at Doubleday’s suggestion. Torrey was the Islanders’ first employee.

      He wasn’t even on my list, Boe admitted to Newsdays Mark Herrmann some 30 years later. But I talked to him for an hour and a half and I offered him the job.

      Torrey’s trademark is his ubiquitous bowties. But he was no used car salesman. The 38-year-old general manager coveted his draft picks and decided to build the team in this manner rather than by trading them away. And despite the existence of the WHA, which threw money around in an attempt to lure players from the NHL, timing was on his side. The drafts for 1973 to 1975 were some of the richest prospect crops ever to come in successive seasons. And Torrey scoured the amateur ranks alongside his trusted scout, Jim Devellano.

      Torrey set a foundation through the expansion draft by taking players such as forward Eddie Westfall (Boston Bruins), defenseman Gerry Hart (Detroit Red Wings) and goaltender Billy Smith (Los Angeles Kings). He drafted high-scoring Billy Harris first overall in the amateur draft in 1972 and added Lome Henning (second round), Thore Robert Nystrom (third) and tough-as-nails winger Garry Howatt (10th).

      Nystrom, known to all as Bobby, didn’t even attend the draft. He spent the day working for a construction company framing houses in Kamloops, British Columbia. His father called him that night to tell him he had been drafted by the New York Islanders.

      Who are the New York Islanders? he replied.

      They didn’t have much of an identity in their inaugural season, but they did have one household name in Brian Spinner Spencer, who had a short-lived and unheralded stay on Long Island. Overall, the new team attracted crowds of 12,908 fans per game in the 14,000-plus seat Coliseum, and the Islanders won just 12 times in 78 games. But, at least, 10 of the wins were at home. They were an entertaining team, but not a very good one. Hockey fans, many of whom were Rangers fans who opted for the Coliseum instead of the schlep into Manhattan, were just there to catch a

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