Orr Page 18

  I would soon discover I had lost more than that.

  Nine

  ABOUT ALAN EAGLESON

  To this point, I have not mentioned Alan Eagleson by name, and there is a reason for that. I didn’t want his name strung through the fabric of this book. If I had the choice, I wouldn’t write another word about the man for exactly the same reason I rarely talk about him. That is, Alan Eagleson is no longer a part of my life—he is just a bad memory. But the truth is, at one point he was a part of my life, a very important part, and at a critically important time as well. And so, it is only appropriate that I include my thoughts about him.

  Nevertheless, this will not be easy to write. I am both angered and embarrassed by my memories of Eagleson: angered by what he did to so many people, and embarrassed that I was one of them. The fact that two courts of law in two countries convicted him, and that he was sent to jail for embezzlement and fraud, should say all that has to be said about Eagleson. But it doesn’t come close. The reality is that none of our dealings ever entered into the charges that eventually resulted in his convictions and imprisonment. I was betrayed by someone I had trusted from the time I was just a kid. Though he has paid a heavy price for many of his crimes, he has never had to answer for that.

  Anyone can commit a crime and be convicted of it. There is nothing special about that. But to be stripped of honors like the Order of Canada and membership in the Hockey Hall of Fame is a punishment reserved for a particular kind of criminal. It means you have done great things in your life—and it means your misdeeds are bad enough to overshadow those great accomplishments.

  No one can deny that Alan Eagleson did some great things. He almost singlehandedly changed the game by empowering players and developing international hockey. He engineered what may be the landmark sporting event of the twentieth century in the Summit Series. He brought the Canada Cup into existence. Without him, Foster Hewitt would never have shouted, “Henderson has scored for Canada!” and there would have been no magic from Mario Lemieux to beat the Soviets in 1987.

  I mention this not to make the case that Eagleson was a hero. Far from it. The only reason to remember any of this now is to show just how dark his crimes had to be to overshadow accomplishments like these. In the end, many of the very best things he managed to do were corrupted. The memory of everything he ever did to earn the respect and gratitude of the people around him has soured. He has had to watch everything he was proud of turn into a monument to his greed.

  The same is true of my relationship with him. When he came into my life, I thought I had a friend. More than a friend. I trusted him with everything. Imagine having a friend you would entrust all of your financial dealings to without question. Trust doesn’t get much more complete than that. It is a rare and precious thing. Like everything good he did over the course of his career, though, Alan Eagleson turned even trust as great and rare as that into something foul and regrettable.

  • • •

  The first time I met Alan Eagleson was during the summer of 1964. I was all of sixteen years old and had been a member of a championship baseball team. At the end-of-season banquet and awards presentation in the tiny town of MacTier, not far from Parry Sound, Eagleson stood up and spoke to the players and parents in the crowd. He was an impressive man and very self-assured. He knew how to speak to a room and sway people to his way of seeing things. In fact, that was his job as a lawyer and as a member of Parliament.

  Our first contact with Eagleson was after the festivities in MacTier. That’s where the relationship began. It didn’t take long for all of us to be impressed by the man. It was Mom and Dad who were making the call on this matter, and both of them felt very comfortable with Alan Eagleson. The truth is, so did I. Love him or hate him, Eagleson could sell—and he could especially sell himself. It was my mother who would ask him the toughest question: What would he be charging for his services? He responded with a look of great sincerity and answered, “Mrs. Orr, I’ll make money only if your son makes money.” And that was true.

  If there were other agents back then, we didn’t know about them. Pro sports during the 1950s and ’60s were run with an iron fist by the men who owned the various franchises. Regardless of whether the sport was hockey, basketball, baseball, or football, the conditions were basically the same for most players. Management made all the rules and set the salaries, and players were forced to accept whatever offer was put on the table. The pensions were very small, and medical coverage was there only when you were playing for the team. Many players worked blue-collar jobs in the off-season to pay the bills. And once they retired or were forced out of the game, they were on their own.

  In a six-team league, in which the teams had players’ rights contractually stitched up, and the owners held all the cards, there seemed to be nothing any player could do about it. There are stories about players trying to stick up for themselves, or squeeze a small raise out of an owner or a GM, and just as many stories about guys getting buried in the minors or traded to a rival team. A player might even have found the courage to step up and talk about becoming a part of a players’ association—such as Ted Lindsay did in the late 1950s—only to find that the league wouldn’t even allow players to look at the books of their own pension fund. Lindsay and fellow organizers Gus Mortson and Ferny Flaman were promptly traded for their efforts.

  It was an environment where players didn’t know much about what others were making, and very few dared to rock the boat. No one wanted to end up being the guy who got shipped out of town. I was a small-town kid who hadn’t played a game in the league and was dreaming of getting into the NHL. I wasn’t very interested in negotiations or that part of the game. Still, it was obvious to my parents and me that we would need help if we were going to deal with the men who ran the NHL. Eagleson may very well have been the only agent in our sport as I was getting ready to sign a professional contract. He already had a few clients by the time we met up, including people such as Bob Baun, Carl Brewer, and Bob Pulford. But he was just getting started.

  Timing and circumstance all seemed to point in one direction for me, and that direction was clearly toward Alan Eagleson. It appeared to be a great match. The Bruins had made no secret of the fact that they wanted my name on a contract, but they were not accustomed to negotiating. They were in the habit of dictating terms to hockey players, and my parents just didn’t have the kind of boardroom skills it took to sit across the table from a bunch of veteran hockey guys and team owners and force them to see things their way.

  One thing you could tell about Eagleson when you met him—he would not be intimidated by anyone. He was an impressive personality, especially to people such as the Orrs, who frankly did not have a lot of experience with these types of matters. And it should be noted that he more than delivered on his promise. When I signed my first contract with the Bruins, it was for several times more than what Hap Emms had initially offered. There seemed no way to deny that Eagleson was doing something right.

  • • •

  It was not long before Eagleson’s career and mine were tightly bound. He was on the rise, smooth and confident with the media, able to go toe-to-toe with the owners in the boardrooms of the league. As the most recognizable agent in the game, he was soon handling dozens of clients. And in 1967, the National Hockey League Players’ Association (NHLPA) was launched. By 1972, he was a household name, and possibly the most powerful man in hockey.

  That is the big picture. On the smaller scale, Alan Eagleson came to play a role in every aspect of my life, and in none more so than my finances. I was not especially gifted when it came to numbers and found the whole process around finances to be rather boring and time-consuming. The money side of things just wasn’t all that important to me, in part because I’d never had any. Financial matters were a distraction in my life, and in Eagleson I had what I considered to be the top of the heap as a financial advisor. His job was to handle all of those distract
ions.

  From the moment I signed my first NHL contract as an eighteen-year-old, right through most of my time as a pro player, Alan Eagleson was there by my side. He handled all of the details related to my finances. And as our time together in those early years unfolded, he did his job as I expected he would. I played hockey and he put contracts in front of me to sign from time to time. Endorsements rolled in. And the more successful Eagleson was, the more confident I became that he knew what he was doing—and the happier I was to have a guy like that in my corner. I had more than I needed, and every assurance from someone I trusted that my future was well safeguarded.

  It was about as tight a working relationship as any player and representative could have, and there was no reason to doubt his counsel. We were business associates, yes, but it went much deeper than that. We were close friends. When your close friend is shrewd and powerful and gets things done, if he says something is taken care of, it’s easy to assume it’s taken care of. The fact is, I wasn’t going to tell the biggest deal-maker in the game how to handle money. I figured he would do what he was good at, and so would I.

  But there were some signs he was not the most scrupulous of businessmen. Eagleson owned a cottage near Orillia, which is not too far south of Parry Sound. He decided in 1969 that we could do a tremendous business in the summers in the Muskoka area north of Toronto if we put some time and money into developing a sport camp.

  Exactly whose time and money it was emerged only later. My partner Mike Walton and I took the whole thing very seriously, because, after all, our names were on the marquee. We never cut corners and worked many of the on-ice sessions—we wanted things done right. Eventually, several members of Eagleson’s family were on the payroll. His father-in-law was hired to build the facilities. (In fact, the same guy was contracted by Eagleson to build the new house I wanted to provide for my parents in Parry Sound once I’d turned pro and had some money in my pocket. I’m guessing there wasn’t a competitive bidding process for that job.) In addition, he suggested certain people come in and act as instructors, for which they would receive a fee. Of course, they were always Eagleson clients or players he was courting. He was distributing perks to all these people, and Mike and I were helping to pay all of his bills.

  That’s not to say the camp was a disaster. Most of the players he brought in were pretty good guys and were willing to put in a solid day’s work at the camp. But if I had seen things a bit more clearly, I would have noticed that Eagleson leveraged the camp and many of our other business ventures as a means of compensating family or friends—and the best part for him was that he never had to foot the bill.

  After a while, I began to believe that Eagleson wanted to control not only the purse strings attached to his clients, he wanted to control their relationships as well. He wanted to run the show, and he worked to diminish everyone else’s influence. He seemed to want total loyalty on all levels, and would insert himself into other friendships.

  For instance, he started playing a kind of psychological game with me with respect to other people in my life, among them family friends such as Bill Watters. He would say things to me about Bill in the hope of creating some sort of tension between us. Eagleson told me that Bill really didn’t want my father involved in any aspect of the hockey school operation or any other businesses we were engaged in. The story was a complete lie, but Eagleson used those types of tactics to keep people on edge and cause them to lose trust in others. He wanted me totally dependent on his advice and his friendship, and that left little room for others. The moment he suspected someone was getting close to me, such as Bill, the stories would start.

  One of my great regrets is that it worked. There were friends and teammates over the years who didn’t like or trust Eagleson. But I was his friend, so I defended him, even against people who were looking out for me. I would pay dearly for this friendship.

  As he grew more powerful, he became harder to take. I grew to dislike the way he treated people in public. I will never forget a lunch meeting Eagleson and I had with Paul Fireman, who today is one of the richest men in the world but back then was an up-and-coming businessman from the Boston area. He wanted to talk about a potential sponsorship deal with his new sporting goods company. The three of us met at a nice restaurant, and we had barely sat down before Eagleson started ranting to the point where I could see poor Paul was quite taken aback. Eagleson wasn’t just aggressive—his language was rude and totally vulgar. I suppose he was trying to intimidate Paul, but all he managed to do was offend him, along with everyone else in the restaurant. Perhaps to further insult Fireman, Eagleson marched out of the restaurant to make a call from a pay phone in the lobby, leaving Fireman in stunned silence. I’d had enough. I called over the manager, apologized for the bad language and disruption Eagleson had caused, and shortly thereafter the meeting was over.

  Paul would tell me years later Eagleson’s behavior was about the worst he had ever seen. The company he went on to found was Reebok, and Fireman maintains that after that first meeting with Alan Eagleson, he decided he would never work with him or his clients. As it turned out, Paul and I became good friends many years later, but that meeting could have burned a very important bridge for me and certainly cost me an opportunity at the time.

  Eventually, I couldn’t go out to a restaurant with Eagleson, because he often became rude and belligerent. For a long time, I didn’t have the nerve to say anything. I couldn’t find a way to get myself out of his clutches, because so much of my life was tied up in him and his company. I was in a situation over which I had very little control, and the relationship left me feeling helpless. I had allowed him to dominate to a point where getting out from under his shadow would be a difficult thing to do. He controlled my money, he controlled my schedule, and in my mind he was in control of my life. I was afraid to make a move.

  In spite of all the problems, in spite of the many warning signs, a lot of people, including me, chose to turn a blind eye when it came to Alan Eagleson. You have to consider that I was riding pretty high as an athlete at the time, and the future looked very bright. I believed that because of where I was as an athlete, my financial world had to be in good shape as well. The two went hand in hand, as far as I was concerned, and that was especially true because of the man I had at the helm of my business dealings.

  There is no way to deny that Eagleson knew how to negotiate a contract. From the time I first laced up in the league, I was among the very best-paid players. That is because most guys, especially early on, were underpaid. But as salaries rose, mine rose along with them. My second contract was the first million-dollar deal in the game. Eagleson could be ruthless and was not afraid to tangle with anyone. So, even though Alan Eagleson’s personal shortcomings became obvious to me over the years, it was reassuring to know I had a guy like that looking out for me.

  • • •

  For me, the whole thing with Eagleson primarily began to unravel during my time in Chicago. Eventually, I just couldn’t stand to be in his presence. It got to the point where I simply had to get away from him, and it didn’t matter to me what the cost would be, financial or otherwise.

  The fact is, I wouldn’t have been in Chicago if I hadn’t trusted Eagleson completely. My heart was in Boston. I didn’t go to Chicago for the money. I went there because that was the advice I was getting.

  As the world knows now, it was terrible advice. Not because I have any complaints about the Black Hawks—rather, because I never got the truth about Boston’s offer. What I kept hearing from Eagleson was that the Bruins had given up on me, that they were ready to discard me. I was offended that the team I cared about so much figured my value was going down.

  But I wasn’t getting the whole story. Eagleson conveniently forgot to disclose to me what exactly the Bruins new owner, Jeremy Jacobs, was offering. The truth is that Eagleson never even discussed the Bruins’ offer with me in detail. Rumors began to circulate, and
when I started hearing some things, I asked him about it. He told me that the Chicago offer was simply the best one. Period. No point talking about it. In hindsight, I should have pushed him on the details, but I thought I had no reason to. He knew how to negotiate a contract and get the biggest bang for the buck that he could. And when he became the head of the NHLPA, he became the man responsible not just for my well-being, but the well-being of every player in the league. It would have been difficult for anyone to believe in those days that Eagleson was not to be trusted.

  The final irony is that the information Eagleson was withholding came looking for me—but I wouldn’t listen. I remember being on a bike in the Bruins dressing room one day rehabbing my knee, and Paul Mooney, the president of the team at the time, came in and asked to chat with me. I brushed him off. He asked me if I knew the substance of the offer the team had made. I told him that he was trying to drive a wedge between Alan and me and that it wouldn’t work. That was the end of the discussion. When I found out what he had wanted to tell me, it was too late.

  Jeremy Jacobs had been prepared to offer me a part of the team to ensure I remained a Bruin for life. They had plenty of money on the table, but much more importantly they were offering me an ownership position. The kind of stake they were talking about represented a huge investment back then, and an exponentially bigger one thirty-five years later. It would have been big money.

  The offer from Chicago amounted to roughly $500,000 a year for five years, certainly nothing to sneeze at. I was honored to sign that contract. But even someone with my limited financial skills would have known which offer would have been the most lucrative in the long haul. If I had ever been presented with the choice, that is.