Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Shoots and Scores by Bathroom Readers’ Institute Page A

had helped major league baseball players negotiate their first collective agreement. “I didn’t want to start a union; I just wanted a few answers on the financial status of the league in regards to pension and benefits,” Lindsay said. “We only went ahead when we were told that it was none of our business.” The players’ association formation was announced in New York in February, 1957, with Lindsay as president and Harvey, Fern Flaman, Bill Gadsby, Gus Mortson, and Jimmy Thomson on the executive.
    CAPTAIN COMMUNIST
    But the NHL reacted quickly and harshly, led by Campbell, Smythe and Red Wings general manager Jack Adams. Smythe, who had fought in both world wars and had the rank of major, treated the players and team coach Hap Day, who suggested the association be allowed, as traitors. In a meeting with Thomson,Smythe called his team captain a communist. “If Conn Smythe had fought the Germans as hard as he fought the players, World War II would have been over in about a week,” Harvey said years later. Adams was vehement in his opposition to the association. Years later, it was revealed that Adams was given a set amount of operating capital each season by the owners, the Norris family, and what he did not spend was his salary. One year, when several members of a Red Wing team that won the Stanley Cup signed contracts for the next season, their salaries were cut.
    WHAT A COINCIDENCE
    Within a year, most of the players involved in the association had been traded, several to the sad-sack Chicago Black Hawks. In the middle of a streak of five consecutive Stanley Cup wins, the Canadiens kept the great Harvey until the string was snapped in 1961, then traded him. Adams traded Lindsay, who had just finished his best NHL season (30 goals, 85 points) and sensational young goalie Glenn Hall, a Lindsay supporter, to Chicago. Adams’ efforts led to the Wing players, minus Lindsay’s leadership and determination, pulling out of the association and other teams, under extreme pressure from owners, buckled and the association folded, giving full control back to the owners. “Our effort was not a failure despite what happened because we did make some small gains in benefits and we paved the way for Eagleson and his bunch to form the union a few years down the road,” Lindsay said.
    THE EAGLE LANDS
    Eagleson had played lacrosse against Bob Pulford of the Maple Leafs, then their paths crossed again at the University of Toronto in the early 1960s, where Eagleson was a law school student and Pulford was working on a degree. Eagleson became involved in hockey when Bobby Orr’s family asked him to look after the junior-hockey superstar’s affairs. Then Pulford sought Eagleson’s advice on a contract and other young Leaf stars of the 1960s such as Bob Baun and Carl Brewer consulted him, too. When Brewer left the NHL in 1965, Eagleson aided in the defenceman’s successful fight to be reinstated as an amateur to join the Canadian national team. In 1966, Eagleson helped the players on the Springfield Indians of the American League gain some concessions against thecruel and unusual working conditions of team owner Eddie Shore. “A few of us had talked with Eagleson and his law partners for hours on forming a union,” Baun said. “We talked about it with friends on other teams and there was positive response to the idea.”
    CAN’T SAY NO TO A ROOM FULL OF BRUINS
    Eagleson negotiated the largest contract in NHL history for Orr when he joined the Bruins out of junior hockey in 1966. In Montreal to see his client, Eagleson was invited to a hotel room by several Bruins and when he arrived, the whole team was present. They suggested that a union was needed and Eagleson was the man to explore the idea. With the Leaf players encouraging him, Eagleson quietly talked with all NHL teams and set down the groundwork for the players’ association. Pulford was the first NHLPA