There is old school. And then there was John Brophy, who died this week at age 83.
Brophy is the man upon whom Paul Newman’s character in the iconic ice hockey movie Slap Shot is believed to have been partially based. An intimidator who accumulated roughly 4,000 penalty minutes and seemingly as many stitches during a 19-season minor league playing career that morphed into 32 years as a coach and the second-most professional victories ever earned behind the bench — 1,027.
The man atop that list? Scotty Bowman. That they’re not both in the Hockey Hall of Fame is outrageous.
You’ve likely heard of Bowman, who guided the NHL’s Montreal Canadiens, Pittsburgh Penguins and Detroit Red Wings to nine Stanley Cup championships. If Brophy’s name doesn’t ring a bell, let me tell you about a true legend, a man with snow-white hair, a reddened nose and, at times, bizarrely blue language during the season I covered his team in 1999-2000.
I began my sportswriting career with five years in Los Angeles, reporting mostly on high schools, and was in no way prepared for a master thespian and manipulator like Brophy. He was then 66 and in his last season with the Hampton Roads Admirals of the East Coast Hockey League (now simply the ECHL), two rungs down from the NHL. The franchise was being moved out of the Navy town of Norfolk, Va., to make way for one from the higher-level American Hockey League.
That second club, the top farm team for the Chicago Blackhawks, had no place for a dinosaur like Brophy. He was a coach with little use for complex Xs and Os, but who routinely exhausted his players during practice, reduced rookies to pudding and who courted controversy almost everywhere he went. His teams, however, were notoriously difficult to play against.
Brophy had been previously accused of head-butting an opposing coach, throwing a hacksaw blade at a fan and scuffling with police in an arena hallway, each during separate incidents during the late 1990s. He was arrested for disorderly conduct in the aftermath of an Admirals’ championship and once allegedly dropped a rodeo bull with a punch to the jaw.
But it wasn’t Brophy’s brawn that gave me the jitters. It was his ability to keep his players and most others in his daily orbit on constant edge. Would today be one where he’d have the entire locker room laughing? Or would it be one where he’d literally call you on the carpet in front of the seated players and demand that you interview him so he could pan their performance in front of them?
A loss or the refereeing might provoke cussing and stomping and shouting and finger-jabbing. You’d try to keep up a good front, but drops of sweat would trickle into the small of your back.
My first hint that the season wouldn’t be all chuckles came in seeing Brophy’s treatment of former Dartmouth College defenseman Shaun Peet, a chiseled, 6-foot-2 defenseman who attended the Admirals’ training camp. Peet was a Canadian kid, respectful and quiet. The problem was that despite his size, he wasn’t much into fighting. So when he failed to be a junkyard dog, Brophy told him after an exhibition game and in front of his teammates to take off his skates and throw them in the trash can.
“I felt about three inches tall,” Peet said at the time. He complied and was soon cut. He’d play seven minor league seasons and become a pit crew member in NASCAR racing.
Said Brophy: “Shaun Peet looks like Captain America, like he should be on Mount Rushmore with the presidents. Then he goes out and plays like he weighs 105 pounds. He’s the nicest guy in the world, but you have to take a guy out hard and get some respect on the ice.”
After one Admirals loss, Brophy was holding a stick and in the midst of a tirade when he swung the lumber in a sudden arc. The blade sliced less than a foot from my nose and neatly removed the locker room’s coffee pot from its holder, shattering it on the rug. Brophy flung the stick down and exited stage right, leaving me shaken and trying not to step on shards of glass.
In December, the Admirals began a road trip in Charleston, S.C. An ugly loss left Brophy in a shouting match with assistant coach and general manager Al MacIsaac. When I described their tiff in print, I was persona non grata the rest of the swing. Brophy tossed me out of the locker room in Charlotte, gave me the cold shoulder after games in Biloxi, Miss., and New Orleans and ate across from me in stony, pregame silence at the Louisiana IceGators’ hospitality room in their Lafayette arena.
It could have been worse. Brophy wasn’t talking to MacIsaac. either, and the two had bunks across the aisle from each other on the team’s sleeper bus.
Back from the road, the coach lifted his embargo of me with gusto, using 38 profanities during one short interview. I know because I tape-recorded it and counted up the bad words. There was apparent precedent for such density: Brophy reportedly used 72 obscenities during a two-minute interview after a loss while coaching the NHL’s Toronto Maple Leafs, as described in a book by Toronto Globe and Mail writer David Shoalts.
“MacIsaac, who spent nine years as a player, assistant coach and general manager with the Admirals, said Brophy loved to groom his image as a Neanderthal,” wrote Harry Minium, my former colleague and predecessor on the Admirals beat, in a retrospective on the late coach this week.
Why is anyone’s guess. But wearing the figurative black hat clearly appealed to the man. That’s not to say, however, that he wasn’t keenly aware of what he was doing and how he came across.
This was a man who detested second place so much he once punched a hole in the front window of the team bus after a tough setback in Johnstown, Pa. Speaking to me one-on-one after a playoff loss, he was cursing and spitting on the floor between answers. Then, over my shoulder bloomed the light of a handheld television camera and without pausing or losing his train of thought, Brophy dropped the profanity and kept his saliva to himself.
There were times, however, when the old warrior was truly enraged. One such moment occurred at Norfolk’s Scope Arena during a game against the Roanoke (Va.) Express. Attendance that night was nearly 8,000 and the visitors were down two goals before Scott Gordon, the Express coach and a future NHL bench boss, successfully appealed for illegal stick penalties on two Admirals.
The calls helped Roanoke rally for victory and Brophy was enraged, attempting to scale the glass partition between the team benches so he could attack Gordon. The Admirals’ majority owner was so incensed he climbed through the stands to press row and struck me in the chest after brandishing a Xeroxed copy of my recent article on sticks and how they’re sometimes doctored beyond the rules. The days-long uproar that followed was both dizzying and regrettable. Brophy loved it.
“Up to yer arse in it again, aren’t ye, Tris me boy,” he said with a grin the next day and in an exaggerated brogue that harked back to his native Antigonish, Nova Scotia.
It was after a hardscrabble childhood in Antigonish, about 100 miles northwest of Halifax, that Brophy became what Tim Wharnsby of CBC Sports described this week as “maybe the most barbarous minor-league hockey player ever.” From Baltimore to Charlotte, N.C., to Long Island, N.Y., the crew-cut defenseman used his fists, stick and ferocity to deter Eastern Hockey League opponents from pursuing or possessing the puck.
“I liked hitting people,” Brophy told TheNew York Times in 2006. “I liked hurting people. No question about that.”
Stints as a player-coach led Brophy to full-time work with a whistle and he finally reached the big time with the Toronto Maple Leafs from 1986-88. His firing allowed him to be scooped up by the Admirals, whose championships in 1991 and 1992 were accomplished with the help of blue-collar crowds that loved to watch the showman behind the home bench. They captured another crown in 1998.
Brophy survived a 2000 car crash that nearly killed him and marked the second time in his life he’d been flung through a windshield. He coached two more ECHL seasons with the Wheeling (W.Va.) Nailers and ended his career with the Richmond (Va.) Renegades of the Southern Hockey League in 2007. By that time, he wore sneakers on the ice because of a broken back suffered in that second auto wreck. It was caused when he tried driving too soon after taking a sleeping pill.
During Admirals season, Brophy lived in a motel in nearby Virginia Beach before returning to his then-second wife, LPGA golfer Nancy White, and their home near Roanoke. He was physically fit and a snappy dresser, sometimes combining a suit with a bolo tie and cowboy boots. Several times, I watched him eat apples from one end to the other, core and all. In a brutally honest article on the coach, one of my coworkers noted that he had so little contact with his daughter from his first marriage that he couldn’t quickly summon his grandchildren’s names.
But here’s the obscured detail about John Brophy: he could be a genuine sweetheart. When his team was winning and he was feeling chipper, he’d sling an arm around your shoulder and make you feel, unlike Shaun Peet, like you were 30 feet tall. His courtliness with older fans and his instant connection with kids often shocked those who knew him only as the maniac on the television highlights. He used to let his dogs, Mud Duck and Scotia, romp on the ice after practice.
One afternoon I was chatting with an arena worker while waiting for Admirals practice to conclude. The team was about to leave on a road trip and the circus had arrived the night before, parking its gear and some animals in the adjacent exhibition hall. The elephants, herded into the echoing concrete space with sticks topped by iron hooks, were agitated and trumpeting. They stamped their feet and rattled their chains long after their keepers had departed.
Brophy emerged from the Admirals offices on the arena’s lower concourse and carried a chair and a large bag of peanuts over to the beasts. He fed them and calmed them by stroking their trunks. He talked to them soothingly for hours, the arena worker said.
It’s the image I like to think about most when it comes to John Brophy. A giant in his field comforting enormous animals in their time of need.