The Down Goes Brown History of the NHL by Sean McIndoe

Author:Sean McIndoe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2018-10-29T16:00:00+00:00

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While Dutton’s exit wasn’t exactly on friendly terms, he did leave the league with a recommendation for a successor: his recently appointed assistant, Clarence Campbell. Campbell had broken into the league a decade earlier as a referee, a job he held for three seasons before departing to serve in the military.*1 When he returned to North America in 1946, he was offered a role at the league office as Dutton’s right-hand man. He’d been on the job less than a year when Dutton’s sudden resignation left the league scrambling, and he was in the right place at the right time to take control.

As it turned out, he’d be a near-perfect fit. Campbell would go on to serve as league president for more than thirty years, guiding the NHL from the early years of the Original Six all the way through the first decade of expansion. Today, he’s probably best remembered for his role in the Richard Riot, but he also oversaw the creation of the All-Star Game, the players’ pension fund and the amateur draft—not to mention hanging around for the emergence of direct competition in the form of the WHA.

By the time Campbell stepped down in June 1977, the NHL had tripled in size from a six-team operation to one that spanned most of North America. He’d already been inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame (in 1966) and had one of the league’s two conferences named after him. That latter honour was rescinded when Bettman arrived and decided that naming divisions and conferences after people was too confusing.*2 But to this day, the trophy that Western Conference champions make a big show of refusing to touch is called the Clarence S. Campbell Bowl.

Campbell was seventy-one when he retired after thirty-one years on the job, and he was in poor health and facing accusations of bribing a Canadian senator in what came to be known as the Sky Shops case.*3 To fill the shoes of a legend, the NHL turned to a forty-three-year-old lawyer from Detroit.

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