Continued from Part 1 by Bruce Berlet
Stoughton’s arrival in Hartford also made him the first player to ever play with Gretzky and Howe, a uniqueness he would later have to share with Steve Carlson of “Slap Shot” fame who also is coming to town this weekend with his brothers, the fictional Hanson brothers. Stoughton had been with Gretzky in Indianapolis before The Great One was sold to the Edmonton Oilers with goalie Ed Mio and wing Peter Driscoll for $700,000. Years later, Stoughton learned from Oilers general manager Larry Driscoll that he had tried to get Stoughton in the trade instead of Driscoll.
“Oh, my God, can you imagine?” Stoughton said. “I couldn’t believe it.”
It’s difficult to believe Stoughton reached such lofty status after growing up in such a small prairie town that didn’t even have a traffic light until he was 14. He played baseball and hockey growing up in Gilbert Plains and skated a lot on an outdoor rink near his house.
“It was great and where I learned a lot because there were no rules,” he said. “You go there when you were 10 and play against guys 16 or 17 nearly every day. We just chose up sides, but you can’t do that nowadays.”
Stoughton advanced through the local programs but quicker than most youngsters because of his skill level. But Stoughton never went to the hockey finals in his province of Manitoba, but his team twice won the Western Canadian championship in baseball for the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia as he pitched and played first base.
Stoughton played baseball until he was 16, which was two years after he left home to play for the Dauphin Kings in the Manitoba Junior Hockey League. In his first season, Stoughton and the Kings got within a goal of going to the Memorial Cup, the Canadian junior championship. If the Kings had won, the country boys would have played the city slickers from Montreal who included future NHL stars such as Rejean Houle and Marc Tardiff.
“We would have got friggin’ smoked,” Stoughton said.
After two seasons with the Kings, Stoughton joined the Flin Flon Bombers in the Western Hockey League, where his goal-scoring prowess really surfaced after a slow start of 19 goals and 20 assists in 59 games, though his 181 penalty minutes showed he wouldn’t back down from anyone.
“The WHL was a very, very physical league,” Stoughton said, “and I knew if I didn’t show my physicality early that when I started to develop my scoring skills I wouldn’t have the room. So I just went out and played tough the first couple of years. Then as my skills evolved and I got pushed up to the second and first line, I had lots of room to operate because I had been an idiot for two years.”
Stoughton started strong in his second season in Flin Flon (1970-71), but he accidentally speared Don Dirk of Medicine Hat in the eye. Dirk escaped serious injury, but Stoughton was suspended for 29 games. He still finished the season with 26 goals and 24 assists in 35 games and then really took off in the playoffs with 13 goals and 13 assists in 17 games.
In 1971-72, Stoughton led the WHL in goals with 60 goals and finished third in scoring with 126 points. In his draft year of 1972-73, he scored 58 goals and was selected seventh overall by the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins and 14th (second round) by the WHA’s Quebec Nordiques in 1973.
But Stoughton was never happy while with the Penguins, believing he deserved to play in the NHL. After getting only five goals and six assists in the first 34 games of his rookie season, Stoughton was sent to the AHL’s Hershey Bears, where he had 23 goals and 17 assists in 47 games. The Bears won the Calder Cup championship but did it without Stoughton, who asked to be traded.
Stoughton got his wish on Sept. 13, 1974, when Pittsburgh sent Stoughton to the Maple Leafs for Kehoe, who spent the remainder of his career becoming one of the best players in Penguins history. He finished with 371 goals and 396 assists in 906 NHL games, retiring in 1985 as the Penguins’ career scoring leader and is now third behind Mario Lemieux and Jaromir Jagr.
Meanwhile, Stoughton had two so-so seasons with the Maple Leafs while not seeing eye-to-eye with coach Red Kelly, and after finishing 1975-76 in the minors, he jumped to the WHA, signing with the Stingers. He finally blossomed into a 52-goal, 104-point scorer, much to the chagrin of Leafs fans. But that didn’t last long, as Stoughton’s play became inconsistent again over the next two seasons, when he had only 38 goals.
Much of that could be traced to the free-wheeling Stoughton playing for defensive-minded coach Jacques Demers, and the Stingers traded him to Indianapolis. When the Racers folded, he was picked by the Whalers, who reclaimed his rights from the Maple Leafs. They had regained him in the NHL-WHA merger but then left him unprotected in the 1979 expansion draft.
Stoughton finally reached his projected potential in the Whalers’ first season in the NHL, getting 56 goals and 100 points. He and Rogers became the first two Whalers players to reach 100 points, making the Whalers the first expansion team to achieve that feat. Stoughton also joined future Hall of Famer Bobby Hull as the only players to score 50 goals in both the WHA and NHL.
After missing a month of the 1980-81 season over the contract dispute, Stoughton still had 43 goals and followed that with 52 and 45. He played in the 1982 NHL All-Star Game and got the 45 goals despite being suspended the first eight games of the season for a high-sticking match penalty against the Penguins’ Paul Baxter in a preseason game in Johnstown, Pa., on Oct. 2, 1982. He had been tossed from the preseason finale for hitting Baxter above the right eye with his stick and opening a cut that needed six stitches.
Stoughton scored the first penalty-shot goal in franchise history when he beat Buffalo’s Bob Sauve on March, 29, 1983. That ultimately cost the Whalers the first overall pick because they won that game and tied for the worst record with the Minnesota North Stars, who got No. 1 because they had one fewer win.
After slowing down in 1983-84, Stoughton was traded to the Rangers on Feb. 27, 1984, leaving as the Whalers career goal-scoring leader. The Rangers hoped being reunited with Rogers would help revive Stoughton, but it didn’t as Stoughton didn’t get along with Rangers coach Herb Brooks.
“He and I were apples and oranges,” Stoughton said.
But Stoughton was part of one of the legendary stories during Brooks’ reign on Broadway. He used to drive back and forth from Hartford to New York every day, and one morning he was sitting in the driveway reading the paper when Brooks arrived about 8:30 a.m. Stoughton and Brooks hadn’t had an one-on-one chats, so Stoughton got into Brooks’ car and two started talking.
Ten minutes later, a limousine pulls up, the door opens, loud music blares, marijuana smoke fills the air and out steps Cher, Cheryl Tiegs and Carol Alt.
“You should have seen the look on Herb’s face,” Stoughton said.
Then came the clincher. The next three people out of the car are Rangers stars Barry Beck, Ron Duguay and Ron Greschner.
“Herb’s face was just white,” Stoughton said, howling. “He was used to coaching junior kids and telling them what to do, and these guys are loaded. They hadn’t been to bed yet. They had been to Studio 54 all night and came right from there to the rink in a limo. That was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. Herbie didn’t know what the heck to do.”
Stoughton failed to make the Rangers out of training camp, went unclaimed in the waiver draft and was sent to the Nighthawks, never to play in the NHL again. But he was named the right wing on the All-Whalers team selected by the fans in 1992.
Stoughton retired in the summer of 1986 and then got his mortgage license and worked while living in Boca Raton, Fla.
“I went two years never having a pair of pants on,” Stoughton said. “Just shorts for two years straight.”
Then Gary Davidson, a longtime friend from Brandon, Manitoba, got Stoughton to come to play for Asiago HC in northern Italy that Davidson coached when his one import player was injured a week before the season started.
“Cindy and I had a great time over there,” said Stoughton, who had 10 goals and 16 assists in 15 games. “My buddy just wanted me to play until they could find someone else, but I told him I hadn’t played in two years. But I’d played a lot of tennis, so I was only about five pounds overweight and played about half of the season.”
After the brief stay in Italy, Stoughton and his family returned to Boca Raton, where he owned and operated a sports bar, and then moved on to Cincinnati to start his coaching career as a part-time assistant with the Cyclones of the East Coast Hockey League in 1990-91. He then was an assistant for one season and remained with the team the following season when it moved to the International Hockey League, where one of Stoughton’s players was former Whalers left wing/teammate Paul Lawless, who had been playing with Graz EC in Austria.
After one season with the IHL Cyclones, Stoughton became an assistant to former Whalers defenseman/teammate Joel Quenneville with the Springfield Indians. But after two seasons in Springfield, Stoughton and Lawless reunited as partners off the ice, pooling their resources to purchase the Austin (Texas) Ice Bats in the Western Professional Hockey League, named himself general manager and remained in that position until June 1999. Meanwhile, Lawless played 30 games at the end of the 1996-97 season and three games the next two seasons, getting three goals and an assist.
“It was great,” Stoughton said. “We were drawing 5,000 a game in a really good city.”
But there were two major downers.
“We built our rink by putting ice in a rodeo barn,” Stoughton said.
Then there was the matter of trying to administrate a team.
“We had no idea what goes on up in the offices,” Stoughton said. “They were talking about hiring all these people for the front office, and I said, ‘Lawlie, all they do up there is play cards, don’t they? They don’t do anything.’ We didn’t know anything about season tickets and group sales, but we learned pretty quickly. If they don’t do anything in the offseason, you’ve got nothing during the season.”
Whalers Sports and Entertainment officials experienced that last summer when negotiations with Northland, AEG and Madison Square dragged on until 21/2 weeks before the season started. The delays prevented early season ticket sales, which were only about 450 as the Hartford Wolf Pack, and the rebranding of the team to the Connecticut Whale had to be put off until Nov. 27.
After three seasons with the Ice Bats, Cindy’s mother died, so the Stoughton moved back to Cincinnati, where he began coaching the Bearcats in 2007. Stoughton said he hadn’t heard of UC women’s basketball coach Jamelle Elliott, the former UConn standout forward and assistant coach, but planned to seek her out once he learned all that Elliott had accomplished.
Stoughton, who still holds the franchise record for goals in a season (56) and points by a right wing (100), was elected to the Manitoba Hockey Hall of Fame and later joined by close friend Douglas in 2005.
Stoughton is scheduled to arrive at Bradley International Airport with 31-year-old son Chance late Thursday morning, and they’ll be meeting former Whalers defenseman/captain Russ Anderson, one of Stoughton’s closest friends on the team along with Larouche, Lawless and Chris Kotsopoulos.
“Russ will pick us up, and we’ll go right over to the OTB (near the airport),” Stoughton said with a final laugh. “I’ll probably have an exacta by 1 o’clock.”
You’ll probably be hard-pressed to find anyone who enjoys himself more this weekend than Stash.
Then again, that’s nothing new for one of the franchise’s all-time greats – on and off the ice.
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