For one year short of a half century Joe Watson reported to Ed Snider, the Philadelphia Flyers owner who died on Monday. Back in 1967, Watson became one of the original Flyers, which was a long way from fulfilling his hockey dream.
“I had played for the Bruins the season before but they didn’t protect me in the expansion draft,” Watson says. “I was working as a flag man on a road crew in B.C. with the provincial government works that summer. I wasn’t making enough with Boston to take summers off. Then in the middle of the shift I got word that I had been drafted by Philadelphia and I asked the boss for the rest of the day off. I got so drunk that I had to take the next day off as well. I thought, ‘What the hell am I getting into?'”
Watson’s fears weren’t assuaged when he arrived in the expansion franchise’s training camp in Quebec City that fall.
“First day we’re in the dressing room and there are three little kids running around,” Watson says. “I’m saying, ‘What the hell is going on?’ Then someone told me that they’re the owner’s kids. I didn’t even think about who owned the team until then and one of the guys points out Mr. Snider, who was just 33 back then. Sure wasn’t what I imagined any NHL owner looking like.”
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And now it’s hard to imagine the Flyers with their founding owner gone. He was the executive at the helm of a pro franchise for almost as long as Ralph Wilson, the Buffalo Bills founder who made it into his 90s.
Through those 49 years, Snider was a driving force behind the team’s operation and image, more so really than any Johnny-come-lately owner in the NHL. We still talk about the Original Six as the the league’s Tiffany franchises but the Philadelphia Flyers are the nearest thing, far closer than any of the other five franchises that entered the league back in ’67.
Part of it was the fact that the Flyers were the first expansion team to break through and win the Stanley Cup. More important, Watson says, was that Snider created a culture about the franchise: “With Ed it was about loyalty. It was about loyalty even though back in the 60s and 70s you couldn’t say that we had a lot of history. Ed remembered who had been there for him. He gave respect to us and we gave him tons in return.”
Watson maintains that the M.O. of the Broad Street Bullies traces back to Snider, not the Stanley Cup winning coach coach Fred Shero, not general manager Keith Allen, not any single player. Not that Snider took any special delight in seeing a bench-clearing brawl and all manner of goonery. As Watson has it, Snider demanded that his front office assemble hockey’s most intimidating team when he felt he had let a player down.
Watson: “We played St. Louis in the first round of the playoffs that first season in Philly. It went seven games and the Blues had a really tough team and they beat us. They had the Plager brothers who were real tough customers. They ran us and took liberties. Too many. The worst of it was in the fourth game of that series. The Blues had Noel Picard who was a big tough defenceman, really mean. In Game 4, Picard suckered Claude Laforge, a guy who was five inches shorter and 50 pounds lighter than him. Just sucker-punched him. Claude didn’t see it coming. Picard wound up breaking Claude’s jaw in 13 places. It was awful to see him carried off the ice.”
Laforge came back the next season and played two games. Those were the last games he ever played. Picard effectively ended Laforge’s career with a sucker punch, the cheapest of cheap shots. The Flyers were bullied out of the playoffs back in ’68.
“Mr. Snider felt personally responsible for what happened to Claude and said that was never going to happen again,” Watson says. “His players were going to be protected out there.”
To an amazing extent that ethos has prevailed in Philadelphia ever since. To this day scouts will talk about a “Flyers draft,” shorthand for a big, tough prospect. That this was orders handed out of the owner’s office is pretty much unprecedented in the NHL.
Watson says Snider’s loyalty and the loyalty given to him was the reason that the Flyers rose to the top of the NHL in the 70s.
“The WHA was coming in and signing guys on all the other teams, but not us,” Watson says. “Cincinnati wanted to sign me and my brother Jimmy and offered us $35,000 more, but (Flyers captain) Bob Clarke kept us together. He told us, ‘You don’t know what’s happening (in the WHA) and you have a great chance to win here. We’re treated well by the owner — unlike other guys in the league. In Chicago, guys bailed out because of Bill Wirtz, in Toronto because of (Harold) Ballard. But Ed did all kinds of little things for us.”
Before it became standard practice, Snider flew in and put up players’ fathers for a stretch during the season. Other teams had rooms set aside at games for players’ wives, but Snider’s wife actually acted as the hostess and social co-ordinator there.
“With Ed it was always a personal touch,” Watson says.
Terminally ill, Snider didn’t make it out to see the Flyers this season, staying in Los Angeles throughout. In October and November, the team couldn’t see a playoff berth with a 100-inch telescope. But between Christmas and New Years, the Flyers made their swing through California and, on a day off, the team went to Snider’s home and visited him.
“It was pretty difficult for some of the young guys who’ve been here for a while, someone like Claude Giroux, (whom) Ed really liked,” Watson says.
Thereafter, the Flyers went on a tear and were one of the league’s hottest teams through the last three months on the schedule. Watson says it’s not coincidence.
“They were playing for Ed,” he says. “We were always playing for him.”
