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Clark Gillies: Former Pat a big winner at every level
Tim Switzer, Leader-Post
Published: Friday, September 21, 2007
Clark Gillies never envisioned himself as a big-time hockey player. After winning four Stanley Cups, a Memorial Cup championship and being inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame, it's hard to imagine him as anything else.
And if he never thought he'd make it as a hockey player, the Moose Jaw product certainly never expected to begin his career in Regina.
"Growing up, we always had great rivalries," Gillies said with a laugh from his New York office. "We didn't really know the word 'Rivalry.' At that time it was just, 'We want to beat those guys from Regina because they're always trying to pick on the young kids from Moose Jaw.' "
Growing up in the Friendly City, Gillies played hockey all the time, but never thought of it as a possible career. But one day, then Regina Pats general manager Del Wilson and head coach Earl Ingarfield called Gillies up and offered him the chance to play in the Western Canada Hockey League.
"At that point I wasn't so sure I was ready to go to a major-junior hockey league," said Gillies, who was also drawing interest from the Houston Astros as a power hitter. "Up to that point I was just a big farm kid from Moose Jaw who played hockey. I didn't pay much attention to any of the other stuff."
For Wilson and Ingarfield, there was never any doubt about Gillies' skill.
"We only met with him the one evening and I guess we impressed the kid," Ingarfield said from his Lethbridge home. "We liked his enthusiasm and his size. I'd seen him play a game previously and he obviously had the skating ability, the hockey sense and he could shoot the puck. He was big and strong, but the biggest thing to me was that he really wanted to play the game."
"My dad and I went and watched a game and I said to him, 'That doesn't look like anything I can't handle,' " Gillies recalled.
Could he ever handle it.
"I came down and played the next game against Swift Current and I remember getting in three fights my first shift of the game and got thrown out," Gillies chuckled. "My jersey was torn off and my dad came into the dressing room and said, 'What do you think?' I said 'This is fun.' And I guess the rest is history."
A storied history at that.
In his first season with the Pats, the 6-foot-3, 210-pound power forward scored 31 goals and assisted on 48 more. Still, Gillies said it took several chats with Ingarfield over that 1971-72 season to convince the player that he could move on to the next level.
"He likes to say that," said Ingarfield. "I encouraged him without a doubt, but he was unbelievable, really."
More important than the pep talks that first season was the fact that Gillies was teamed with a number of other rookies -- including Dennis Sobchuk, Ed Staniowski and Mike Wanchuk -- who would go on to lead Regina to the Memorial Cup title in 1974.
"We did things a little differently (in the 1973-74 season)," said Gillies. "Most teams take two weeks off at Christmas but we went to Sweden and played some teams there. We came back in better shape than before we left from playing in the big, Olympic-size arenas. We just breezed through the second half of the season. Not to say that the Memorial Cup is easy, but other than a bit of a scare against Quebec in the final game, we didn't have too many problems."
"They were young kids and they just wanted to play . . . the end result was there," said Ingarfield, who left the Pats after the 1971-72 season and was replaced by Bob Turner, who led the team to the national title.
Looking back on the accomplishment more than 33 years later, Gillies cannot understand why the '74 squad was the last Pats team to win the Canadian major junior hockey championship.
"It just goes to show it's not an easy feat," said Gillies. "It really is a source for bragging rights when you sit in an NHL locker room. When it gets around Memorial Cup time someone always asks, 'Did anyone in here actually win one of those?' "
By the time Regina beat the Quebec Remparts 7-4 in the Memorial Cup final, Gillies, who had been named a WCHL first-team all-star that season, no longer had doubts he could make a career out of professional hockey.
He knew he was going to the Atlanta Flames with the third overall pick of the NHL entry draft or the New York Islanders at No. 4.
"I wasn't totally disappointed I didn't go to Atlanta because I really liked the makeup of the Islanders," said Gillies. "Being only in their third year in existence, they had a rag-tag group of guys they had got through interleague drafts and things like that."
Quickly after Gillies went to the pro game, Ingarfield, who had a 27-year scouting career with the Islanders saw an even better player than the one he coached in junior, particularly during a playoff series with the Philadelphia Flyers in his rookie year.
"Philadelphia had Dave Schultz and a couple other guys like that and they tried to rough it up with the Islanders and found out it wasn't gong to work," said Ingarfield, who retired from scouting five years ago. "Gillies decked Schultz and (Bob) Nystrom hit someone else and it was all over. That was the real turning point of the series and the turning point of the Islanders."
The Isles took some time, but by adding players like Bryan Trottier (in the second round of the 1974 draft) and Mike Bossy (in the 1977 draft), they would build one of the greatest teams in NHL history. Led by Gillies, Bossy and Trottier (known collectively as the Trio Grande) the Islanders won the Stanley Cup every year from 1980 to 1983.
"The first one was by far the greatest," said Gillies. "If you look back at all four of them, we went through more in the way of blood, sweat and tears in the first one than we did in the other three. When you have to beat Boston and Philly to win the Stanley Cup, that's pretty tough. But when you're sitting in the locker room so tired you can barely drink a beer to celebrate, you know you've really accomplished something."
The Isles fell to the Edmonton Oilers in their attempt to make it five in a row in 1984.
"As much fun as winning was, losing was the absolute bottom," said Gillies. "It just ripped my heart out and I was saying, 'I don't know what I've got left now.' We had played so hard and had so much success that to lose was like, 'What am I going to do? I don't know if I can play anymore.' It was a terrible way to look at it, but it was like it sapped all the energy out of you."
A couple years later, some of the energy had been sapped out of the Islanders organization as the team went 39-29-12 and management decided it was time to make some changes.
Gillies was taken off waivers by Buffalo after a deal by Isles GM Bill Torrey and Sabres head coach Scotty Bowman, who had coached Gillies with Team Canada in previous years.
After accumulating just 34 points over 86 games in two seasons with the Sabres, Gillies walked away from the game for good. His NHL totals included 319 goals, 378 assists and 1,023 penalty minutes in 958 games.
He had the opportunity to become an assistant under Islanders head coach Al Arbour the next season, but with a wife and three daughters at home, wasn't about to go back to that lifestyle.
"I didn't want to subject them to all that stuff," said Gillies. "And for me, personally, I was just done with travel."
After the NHL, Gillies found a new calling as a registered financial representative, a job he now performs within his own corporation under the Raymond James Financial umbrella. His office is just minutes from the Coliseum where he played as an Islander.
Nystrom works just around the corner and Bossy and Trottier are now employed by the Islanders' front office.
"From an alumni standpoint, we've got a pretty good presence around here," said Gillies.
While he decided to stay away from further employment in the hockey world, Gillies still pops up on the scene every now and again. He still does promotional appearances for the Islanders when the team needs his services and he gets to a few games a year, largely to entertain business clients.
One of his biggest joys in hockey nowadays, though, is getting to Toronto and Hockey Hall of Fame events.
Not that he ever expected he'd been invited. He had his No. 9 retired by the Islanders in 1986 and the Pats in 2000, but he was starting to think those were the biggest honours he might receive post-hockey.
"I had been nominated a couple times before that," said Gillies. "I just totally forgot about it. There was no reason getting your hopes up and having them dashed like that."
Then came a call on June 19, 2002. Gillies and his family were at the Pearson International Airport in Toronto on their way back to Moose Jaw to celebrate his mother's birthday when he called his New York office to check messages.
His secretary, Ellen, gave him a Toronto-area number to dial. He placed the call while his wife, Pam, and three daughters -- Jocelyn, Brooke and Brianna -- were in the washroom.
When the women in his life returned to the terminal, Gillies had tears in his eyes.
"My wife came back and saw me crying and said, 'Oh my God, did something happen to your mom?' " said Gillies. "I said, 'No, these are happy tears.'"
Despite his greatest hockey success coming with the Islanders, Gillies still considers himself a Regina Pat.
"There's a certain camaraderie that never leaves," said Gillies. "My heart is still in Moose Jaw, but there was lots of fun in Regina too."
© The Leader-Post (Regina) 2007