Good Tuesday morning, Uni Watchers. I hope you guys had a good Monday (hopefully the last ever Spring Ahead Monday after we move to year-round DST!). Yeah, I went there.
It’s Tuesday, which means I’m back again this fine day with the one and only Leo Strawn, Jr. For the past three weeks, Leo turned his attention to Ice Hockey (Volume 1, Volume 2, and Volume 3) with a pair of awesome old time hockey posts, and then a newer (but still old time) article about the time the NHL doubled in size. This one is a also more recent, but still old. And it is all about the last the the NHL faced a competitive threat.
And now, here’s Leo with…
On Ice, Volume 4
by Leo Strawn, Jr.
I’m Leo…welcome to my world!
And the uniforms of the World Hockey Association!
The WHA had instant credibility with the names Dennis Murphy and Gary Davidson at the helm, founder and first president of the ABA, respectively. Davidson would later be the driving force behind the WFL.
Like the ABA with its red, white and blue ball, and later, the WFL’s mustard-colored football, the WHA had similar plans, using a red puck in the inaugural preseason.
The Oilers were originally known as the Alberta Oilers and wore orange during the first WHA season, as well as the following season when they became the Edmonton Oilers, according to the WHA Database. However, this photo shows Jacques Plante in his only season with the Oilers which would be his last season in hockey, not in a blue 1974-75 jersey, but in an orange sweater.
[The Oilers actually “threw back” to a very close version of that sweater in 2015 — PH]
Cleveland’s first foray into hockey at the top level came in the form of the purple/black Crusaders. They would fare about as well as the NHL Barons a few seasons later. Ironically, the Crusaders and Barons would both end up in Minnesota.
Those two teams won the first WHA games on October 11, 1972 against the Ottawa Nationals and Quebec Nordiques, respectively.
I’m sure you’ve all seen this, but it’s worth revisiting. The Philadelphia Blazers were originally to become the Miami Screaming Eagles with a prototype uniform as innovative as its name, as well as a stripey prototype sweater.
Finley didn’t own the Chicago Cougars, but they looked great in green and yellow, too. Aside from that 3-legged and/or tailless cougar, that is.
After moving out of the Canadian capital where they played the first season as the Nationals, Ottawa would move to Toronto and become the Toros, who later moved to Birmingham and became the Bulls while keeping the original Toros logo.
Here is a Marc Tardif poster for his lone season with the Los Angeles Sharks.
Their third season saw the Sharks swim east to another NHL city, Detroit, where they played as the Michigan Stags. But an innovative logo design (letter “M” in the legs of the stag) wasn’t enough to get the club through a whole season.
In January 1975, they moved to Baltimore and finished out the franchise’s three-year run as the Blades.
More WHA on the way.
Until then…
Cheers!
Thanks, Leo — this was another awesome one. I’m of that vintage where in my impressionable pre-teen years, there were — at least for some short periods of time — upstart/competing leagues in three of the four major sports (NFL/WFL, NBA/ABA, NHL/WHA), though the WFL wasn’t quite the same (their seasons did not completely overlap). But for about two years, when I was 8-9 years old — when I was really getting into all sports for the first time, there were competing leagues in three of the four major sports. So in most cases, my introduction to professional sports (and hence my earliest memories) was that competing (and roughly equivalent) leagues was the norm. That there was a WHA which had many great unknown (at the time) Canadian skaters as well as an NHL seemed perfectly natural. All three competing leagues would fail or have partial mergers within the next four years. Fun look back at the WHA today, and looking forward to the next half.
Readers? What say you?
Great stuff as always, Leo.
GTGFTS
30 April 2010
Tigers bat around in the 4th, with the highlighted Brennan Boesch capping the 8 run inning with a grand slam.
Boesch will end the pictured at bat with a pop foul to Brandon Wood and the final score is as seen, 10-6.
Such cool WHA team logos! Toros, Sharks, Stags, Saints, Blades. Awesome stuff, Leo!
So why was the circle for the logo so big on the Baltimore Blades jerseys? They were wearing AHL Baltimore Clippers jerseys and were covering the Clippers logo.
link
Golden nugget of information! Good to know!
That Michigan Stags logo is supreme! The colors aren’t terrible but I’d like to play around with different combos.
That’s my favorite logo of the bunch. I even like the colors.
All of these are very 70s-looking. Sometimes that’s good, other times… yikes.
The Ottawa logo looks less like a sports logo and more that of a cable network.
Leo you have scored again! Grew up with WHA in early ’70s in Southwest with no NHL to follow, natural to root for upstart underdog league. Never played ice hockey but did get a hockey table game one Christmas. It was NHL with Bruins and Canadiens. Quickly the Montreal Le Habs became Nordiques
The paint job was horrible. Looked as if someone just dipped the metal flat pieces in a bucket of model paint. Bur, the idea that NHL vs WHA made it a great winter.
Love those Screaming Eagles sweaters!
Great job, again, Leo. Thanks!
Love the WHA retrospective. Went to a Toros vs Wpg Jets game as a youngster in Toronto at the Gardens. The colours were very vibrant to a 6yr old. Cant wait for WHA part 2. is there a NASL review coming too?
Thanks, Drew. I did a piece on NASL in November, linked here: link
Cheers!
The 70’s-80’s Tampa Bay Rowdies belong on the Mt. Rushmore of NASL jerseys. Cheers!
As a detroiter I have to rave about this scoreboard, the tigers on top are supposedly from tiger stadium and there is a flagpole from tiger stadium that originally was in play in center field. I loved the analog clock, but unfortunately they’ve transitioned to an overstimulating big hd screen.
Question about the WHL, growing up I never heard people reminisce about the league. Does anyone know how well it did competing with the NHL? Does anyone from Michigan know how stags attendance compared with red wings? I always assumed it was similar to lions and panthers. thank you
I grew up in Detroit in the late 60’s, early 70’s. The Stags played their home games at Cobo Arena, not Olympia Stadium. The first couple of crowds were decent but they soon tapered off and steadily averaged about 3,200 or so. All their games were on radio and their very first game at Indianapolis was even televised. But, by January they were losing tons of money, sold, and were relocated to Baltimore. The Red Wings pretty much had nothing to do with the impact on their home games. As a matter of fact, the Wings back in those days were terrible. The failure of the Stags had more to do with the economy and the fact that many people stayed away from downtown Detroit at night because back then, it wasn’t considered very safe. This eventually led to the creation of the Renaissance Center and also a very large emphasis by mayor Coleman Young to revitalize the entire downtown area. I hope this helps.
Echoing Mike’s take on the Stags. Don’t know why they couldn’t make a go of it; the Wings were God-awful (only the expansion Scouts and Capitals kept them out of the cellar), and Olympia was an old building in a terrible neighborhood. Cobo was only 14 years old, with no posts to block your view, but the arrangement was not great; 80-85% of the seating was on one half of the ice, and if you were sitting directly behind the goal, your view of the goal may have been blocked because of how they had to wedge the rink into the floor. Relatively few seats on the other half, and had no seating behind the goal line at all.
Just another example that Detroit as “Hockeytown” was just a marketing slogan; the Wings couldn’t draw flies and they still pulled more fans in one game than the Stags would in six.
Paul amd Mike this was amazing , thank you thank you. Your explanations really helped me with the timeline of Detroit. I was born in the 90s so forgot about the dead wings era and also appreciate reminding me of stags time period being in the aftershocks of Detroit 1967.
I am jealous you got to go to Cobo, Ive always wanted to because of its cool location on the water and history of multiple sports, concerts, and MLK speech. Thanks again guys
1974-1975
Red Wings – 12,463
Stags/Blades – 3,258
Please read “The Rebel League” by Ed Willis if you are interested in the WHA. Excellent read if you were around for that era.
Interesting comment about three of the four major sports having competing leagues in that era, Phil.
To stretch the point, while baseball operated under the MLB umbrella in that period, there was real animus between the NL and the AL (and their fanbases). No inter-league play, very different brands of baseball based on the DH rule and bandbox stadiums in the AL and the speed and preponderance of artificial turf field in the NL, league presidents, league-specific ump crews who had the reputation for differing strike zones. etc. There were even limits placed on when players could be traded from one league to another.
It wasn’t unusual for fans to cheer for a hated division rival in a World Series simply because they were representing “their” league.
I don’t have a whole lot of knowledge about the WHA but I had no clue about the Miami Screaming Eagles. Would have made for a great sweater! And did the Toros really have a wordmark on their elbows or is that padding of some sort? Just googled it and yes, the wordmark is on their elbows!
Lots of uniform quirks regarding the WHA. Another was two incarnations of the Minnesota Fighting Saints taking the ice in consecutive seasons with the same name and logo but different colour schemes.
Maybe the oddest thing about the Screaming Eagles was the plan for their arena, which Miami didn’t have at the time. They were going to build a roof attached to four closely-spaced skyscrapers with the seating going underneath.
Unfortunately, the Toros wordmark was replaced by plain striping in Birmingham.
The big deal for the Miami Screaming Eagles was signing Boston center Derek Sanderson for what was considered big money at that time…but after six games in Philadelphia he jumped ship and actually ended up back in Boston later in the season, although his career had already started it’s downhill spiral.
Despite the NHL expansion from 6 teams to 14 by the time the WHA started, there was still a lot of good hockey players around – plus WHA teams were a lot more interested in bringing in European players than the old league. But the real thing that helped the WHA was offering big money, even if they didn’t really have it – players in the old NHL and made very little and had no options to go elsewhere until the WHA came along.
The WHA sort of went thru two eras.
In the first era they threw money at dumb Canadian teenagers in junior hockey and then corraled them into their own minor league, the NAHL. Which led to the chaos celebrated in the movie Slap Shot. It was the golden age of violence in North American hockey anyway, and the WHA was right in there.
Then the hunt for new talent led to Europe and a wildly different style. Though I understand that BIrmingham just kept brawling.
Another oddity about the first-year WHA was that three out of 12 teams had ORANGE as their primary uniform color. Consider how prominent blue and red are across the NHL, and the NHL having only one orange team (Flyers) until the Ducks changed their colors…