HOF Induction Brings Arbour Back Where He Belongs
Al Arbour (left), Blues executive vice-president Sid Salomon III (middle) and general manager Scotty Bowman were photographed together when Arbour was named to succeed Bowman as the head coach of the Blues in June, 1970.
The way Scotty Bowman sees it, three components turned the St. Louis Blues into Stanley Cup finalists during their first three seasons.
One was goaltender Glenn Hall. One was a trade to acquire Red Berenson and Barclay Plager. And one was Al Arbour.
“He was the toughest competitor, most courageous player I ever coached,” Bowman said. “He was the guy all the young players looked up to.”
Alger Arbour leaned on every bit of that resilience and fortitude late in his life. He struggled with Parkinson’s disease and dementia, and was treated near his home in Sarasota, Fla. He had difficulty with balance, with his memory and with his ability to speak. When he died on Aug. 28, 2015, he was in hospice care.
But you can count on one thing. Arbour battled, as he did as a defenseman for the Blues, as he did throughout a career in which he was a member of teams that won eight Stanley Cups, representing four different cities.
The fact one of those cities wasn’t St. Louis is a pockmark on a franchise that went 52 years without a championship until breaking the seal in 2019.
At one time, the Blues had Bowman as their general manager and Arbour as their coach. Those two men account for a staggering 21 Stanley Cups and 2,026 wins worth of hockey acumen and ingenuity - that got away.
When he left the Blues bench to become its GM, Bowman turned the coaching duties over to Arbour at the start of the 1970-71 season. When the team faltered — in part because of the absence of its former captain and defensive rudder — Arbour put the skates back on and Bowman returned to the bench.
But the magic of the first three seasons had dissipated. Overzealous owner Sid Salomon III had pushed the trade of the team’s offensive powertrain Red Berenson, and misjudged the understated personality of Arbour.
A Blues team that was 21-15-14 under Arbour went 13-10-5 under Bowman. That is, Arbour’s Blues averaged 1.2 points per game, while Bowman’s team averaged 1.1 points. The problem was not Arbour.
Stanley Cup finalists during their initial three seasons, the Blues went marching out, losing to Minnesota in the first round of the playoffs. Frustrated by the meddling of SS III, Bowman departed in a dismissal/resignation charade that left hard feelings. Arbour was restored as head coach on Christmas morning 1971. At the time, new general manager Sid Abel said, “Al has the experience, technique and the respect of the players to do a good job. We hope he will be our coach for a long time.”
Abel must have been talking in terms of dog years. Arbour was replaced by Jean Guy Talbot less than 11 moths later, or 13 games into the 1972-73 season.
Truth of the matter is, ownership never believed in Arbour.
“They said Al is a good sergeant, but he’s not a general,” Bowman explained. “That’s exactly what they told me.”
The Blues had no time for “sergeants,” but the New York Islanders did. After finishing 12-60-6 in their inaugural season - that’s not a misprint, the 1972-73 Islanders lost 60 of their 78 games - the shipwrecked Islanders hired Arbour to dig them out.
ON TO THE ISLAND
Under Arbour, the misfits became NHL monsters. Arbour’s teams exceeded 100 points seven times, went to five consecutive Stanley Cup Finals and won four Cups in succession (1980-83). Along with executive Bill Torrey, Arbour transformed the Islanders of the early 1980s into one of the great teams in sports history. Over 20 seasons, the so-called sergeant became a Hall of Fame general.
Former Islanders goaltender Glenn Healy laughs when he hears the “sergeant” story.
“That was smart,” he said, referring to Blues management at the time. “How’d that work out for them?”
Healy was among numerous former players, coaches and associates that visited the 82-year-old Arbour during his illness, hoping to pick up his spirits, making sure he knew what he meant to their careers, their lives.
Seeing the indestructible man they knew in his diminished state was a heartbreaking, sobering experience … and a rewarding one, as well.
“It’s tough,” Healy said. “You know, you’re talking about the greatest coach ever … wow. You know, he was almost like a dad to everybody. He had a great ability, when things weren’t going well, to put his arm around you and just kind of get you out of whatever that funk was.
“He also had that great ability that, when things were going well and you were a bit full of yourself, he’d have you flossing your teeth with his shoelace. He just knew how to get players to buy into a team concept.”
Healy was not part of the dominant Arbour teams of the early ’80s. But he played for New York from 1988-89 to 1992-93 and he saw Arbour’s innate ability to elevate men. When the 1992-93 Islanders advanced to the second round of the playoffs, they did so without 58-goal scorer Pierre Turgeon, who was ambushed by Washington’s Dale Hunter in the previous series.
And they did so to face Bowman’s powerhouse Pittsburgh Penguins, two-time reigning Stanley Cup champs, who went undefeated in their last 18 regular-season games. The Penguins opened the ’93 playoffs by dispatching New Jersey in five games.
Healy recalled, “We’re looking at this Pittsburgh team going, ‘OK, how the hell are we going to win this series? Our best player is out and it’s Pittsburgh — they’ve got Martin Straka playing on their fourth line, for crying out loud.’”
Trepidation was palpable. But before the series opened, Arbour pulled a chair to the middle of a quiet dressing room and sat. After a pause, he looked at forward Pat Flatley: “Can you tie one shift against Mario Lemieux? Just tie it, we don’t need you to win anything.”
“Yeah, I can tie one shift, sure,” Flatley said.
Arbour then looked at Ray Ferraro.
“Can you tie one shift?”
“Of course,” Ferraro answered.
Arbour worked his way around the room, asking the same of each player, reducing the formidable challenge ahead to a more manageable interpretation.
Then he calmly concluded, “There you go, first period’s done. Now for the second period ...”
He went around the room again, then again. And when he was finished, Arbour stood up, and looked his players in the eyes.
“If that’s our philosophy,” he said, “it’ll come down to Game 7. And we only have to win one shift.”
The series went seven games, and the Islanders won the one shift they needed most. David Volek scored in overtime to stun the Penguins. Just weeks earlier, Arbour had stood up to ownership when they wanted to put Volek on waivers.
“That type of getting you to believe that you have a chance, that you can win, and here’s how we do it, follow my lead ... If that’s the actions of a sergeant, I can’t wait to see what the general looks like,” Healy said.
Ferraro had a distinguished NHL career that ended with the Blues in 2001-02. He scored 408 goals and collected 898 points. The best seasons of his career, the best experiences, came playing for Arbour.
“My dad was everything to me,” Ferraro said. “There aren’t many people I would hold in respect in that category. But I hold Al in that regard. To me, he was like that. I could argue with him, and I often did. And he would give it to me, like a father figure would.
“People ask me all the time who’s the best coach you ever played for — it’s not even close for me. It was Al.”
BIRTH OF THE BLUES
Arbour’s remarkable post-Blues coaching career, which produced 740 of his 782 wins, overshadows what he meant to the birth of the Blues. But it shouldn’t, not in St. Louis.
He was approaching age 35 in 1967 when the franchise took him in the expansion draft. He had won Cups in Chicago, Detroit and Toronto. He was an assistant coach/player for Rochester of the American Hockey League, where he had spent most of the previous five seasons.
At that time, NHL players didn’t get more than one year on a contract. To change his retirement plans and come to St. Louis, Arbour held out for a three-year commitment. He got it, paying him $27,000 a season.
He became the first Blues player to wear the captain’s “C.” There has not been one since to wear it with more dignity and respect.
“He was everything you wanted on a young team, a new team,” Bowman said. “Players looked up to him. Because of his work ethic, because of the way he played. They knew about Al Arbour.”
Today, people marvel that NHL goalies used to play without wearing masks. Arbour was the last NHLer to play while wearing glasses, a fact that never deterred him from harm’s way. He spent nearly as much time prone on the ice blocking shots as he did erect.
His threshold for pain, and willingness to endure it, made an undeniable impression on those with whom he played. He received more than 300 stitches in his career. And while his lenses never shattered, a puck once broke his eye wear and drove a piece of the frame into an eye.
TEAM LEADER
The fledgling Blues needed an identity - their fearless captain gave it to them.
“We’d come in at the end of games and his body was black and blue from head to toe, welts and bruises everywhere,” said former teammate Bob Plager. “It wasn’t just that teams couldn’t score on our goaltender, they couldn’t score on Al Arbour.”
The shut-down talents were invaluable to Bowman’s low-scoring teams of the late ’60s. In 1968-69, with one goal and six assists, Arbour finished fifth in the Norris Trophy voting. None of those who finished ahead of him had fewer than 25 points. The winner, Bobby Orr, had 21 goals and 43 assists.
When Bob’s brother Barclay came in the aforementioned trade with the Rangers, Bowman paired him with Arbour. The two became a top defensive tandem, going head to head with the opposition’s best each night.
Barclay Plager, who died in 1988, once explained Arbour’s impact: “He was such an inspiration to everyone on our team. How could you not go out there and give it everything you had when you look over at this guy who seemed to have to struggle just to skate, wearing glasses, going down to block shots?”
As his health was failing, I had the occasion to speak on the phone with Arbour, as well as his wife, Claire. Claire Arbour spoke at length of how much her husband cherished his days with the Blues, and how they loved their time in St. Louis.
It does the heart good to know there are more days ahead for Arbour. The Blues recently announced he will be among those they induct into their Hall of Fame in January.
He so richly belongs, with contemporaries like Bowman, Berenson, Bob and Barclay Plager, Jimmy Roberts, Glenn Hall, Dan Kelly.
They established a hockey love affair here, claimed the ground. Al Arbour was their captain, after all, not their sergeant.