Shero's System

Mike Bossy is flying. The National Hockey League's leading goal scorer is effortlessly gliding down the right side of the rink. Everything is in harmony--his legs are pumping with rhythmic precision, his skates are barely scratching the frozen surface, the puck is gently caressing the blade of his stick.

At center ice, he slides the rubber disk over to his Islander teammate, center Bryan Trottier. Then, unburdened, he bursts toward the Rangers' blue line, down an open lane near the boards. The 17,500 fans packed into Madison Square Garden breathe as one when Trottier slaps the puck into the corner.

Bossy lowers his helmeted head and starts in pursuit of the projectile. If he beats the defenseman to the puck, his wicked slap shot can find its way into the net from almost any angle. In goal, John Davidson tenses up for the imminent encounter.

Boom. Mike Bossy is flying. Only this time, he's got help. Thanks to Don Maloney, the Ranger rookie left wing, who precisely drives the Islander into the boards, placing Bossy's face in harmony with the crystal-clear tempered glass that spares the front-row fans from such indignities as a puck in the mouth or a stick behind the ear. (continued on page 206)

Shero's Systemcontinued from page 201)

A roar envelops the ice. Behind the Ranger bench, a smallish, bespectacled man interrupts his pacing to watch the collision on the other side of the rink. "That's the way to do it, kid," Fred Shero, the Rangers' coach, softly tells Maloney, as if his words had wings. "Rub the winger. Good one." But on the bench, it's like the E. F. Hutton commercial, everyone leaning in toward the coach. When Shero talks, everybody listens. With good reason. It might just be the most he'll say to them all year.

"I used to come in and say, 'Good morning, Freddie,' " Phil Esposito, the Rangers' star center, remembers. "Nothing. So I walk out and say, 'Nice talking to you.' " After a year under the Shero regime, the players have grown accustomed to their coach's little idiosyncrasies. Like sitting out someone who's scored a flurry of goals because he might have been lucky. Or sending out onto the ice someone who's already in the penalty box. Or walking up, firing an enigmatic one-liner, then drifting away like smoke.

But no one's complaining. For 39 years, the Rangers understood their coaches perfectly and never won a Stanley Cup. Last year, the Shero team, which includes assistants Mike Nykoluk and Mickey Keating, brought New York three games from upsetting the Montreal dynasty and lugging that legendary hockey hardware home to Manhattan--where the Rangers have become instant heroes. Bar owners fall over one another for their patronage, young models and actresses vie for their attention, celebs like Joni Mitchell, country singer Kinky Friedman, Glenn Frey (of the Eagles) and Andy Warhol invite them to parties. Even the red-velvet ropes at Studio 54 yield obediently at their approach. "We may not make a lot of money," says $650,000-a-year man Ulf Nilsson, "but we sure have a lot of fun."

•

In sports, it's easy to have fun when you're winning. And when the Rangers wooed Shero from Philadelphia with a five-year pact worth a reported $1,250,000, they knew they were getting a winner. Six play-off championships as a coach in the minors. Two Stanley Cups and four division titles in seven years with the Philadelphia Flyers, an expansion team known more for its tactics of intimidation than for its finesse.

New York was also getting hockey's 206 leading iconoclast. A coach who shunned pep talks, and talk in general, preferring to communicate to his players through memos and inspirational aphorisms left furtively on dressing-room blackboards. A coach who believed curfews were for children and who supplied his players with beer in the dressing room after a game, a heresy in the conservative hockey world. But, above all, a man whose enigmatic ways left him a virtual stranger to his players. And his family, too. He dedicated his hockey memoirs to his children, two sons who "don't know me." His wife has said, "If you had to open his brain, you would see a little hockey rink there. That's all he thinks about."

Which accounts for the legendary stories that led the Philadelphia hockey media to dub Shero Freddie the Fog. Stories like the time the coach was so deep in thought planning strategy before a road game that he walked right out of the rink and into the parking lot, where he patiently remained, locked out, until he was discovered just minutes before the game. But the most famous episode happened in Atlanta, where, before a play-off game, Shero turned up dazed, the victim of a mugging. Naturally, he offered no explanation for his bruises and broken glasses, but the next day the blackboard read, "Temptation rarely comes in working hours. It is in their leisure men are made or marred."

The following day, someone responded: "God must love muggers, He made so many of them."

"He's the only person I know it's polite to ignore in a hotel lobby," a Flyer official once said--a freedom that leads one to believe that much of the Fog facade may be consciously manipulated demystification. "I don't want them [the players] to think I'm God," Shero once told a reporter. "I want them to humor me, to kid me, even if it's very embarrassing at times. I want them to know it's not like Russia, that they're allowed to assert themselves. I don't want robots. Championships are won by those not afraid to dare."

While Shero remains synonymous with Fog, he's also known for his famed "system," an approach to hockey that blends the tactical advances of Soviet coach Anatoli Tarasov with the latest motivational techniques culled from everything from Zen Roshis to post-est fad therapies. Shero claims the system was born back in Winnipeg, Manitoba, when, as a child during the Depression, he was responsible for weeding and watering his family's vegetable garden. "I soon realized that nature had a system," he wrote. "If I didn't water or weed the garden, the results were disastrous."

If nature taught him the importance of approaching things orderly and systematically, he learned another great lesson his first year of coaching with the Shawinigan Falls Cataracts of the Quebec Hockey League. The team had played about as well as its name implied, but when Shero took over in 1957, he tried a new tack. He refused to threaten the players or point out their obvious weaknesses. Instead, he appealed to them at their first meeting, asking them for their help, since he was a novice at coaching. Miraculously, it worked. The Cataracts finished second in the play-offs. And Shero had a better idea. Not only would he refine his system but lie would extend his psychological strategy. Next time, he wouldn't ask his players for help. He'd have them coach themselves.

•

Some guys are getting over a hundred grand a year. Surely they've got enough brains to do some thinking.--Coach Shero

Pat Hickey, for one. After a season of playing for Freddie, the left wing is still not sure about him. "I think he's in the game, but there are times I don't know. A lot of times I think he's just testing us. Like, he says, 'Forty-three seconds left in the penalty.' So you say, 'Freddie, don't bother us, there's a minute and 43 left in the penalty. Let me get back to my job, the game, OK?'

"Like, if it's a penalty or a tight situation, he says, 'What's going on?' or 'Who's up?' and everyone throws in his two cents. I feel like we're little cheat sheets for him, like a guy who's on TV and they're whispering in his ear. It keeps us in the game. Because we know every game he needs our help, so there's 20 guys on the bench thinking that. It's not that he's out of it or into it, it's that we're all a part of it."

Which means that you take care of yourself. No Supreme Authority around to crack the whip or snoop through keyholes. No curfews, no bed checks. The key is self-discipline. Which accounts for practices that last barely an hour, consisting mainly of strange drills or playful scrimmages.

The Rangers always had a problem with body checking, a reputation for not taking the body during an enemy attack. So Shero had a five-on-three situation in practice in which the three defenders were forced to play holding their sticks upside down--by the blade. "It was kind of strange when we first did it," Ranger captain Dave Maloney admits. "It turned (continued on page 257)Shero's System(continued from page 206) the game upside down. It threw my game off completely." That was the point. After eight months of such drills, the defensemen automatically took the body in a game. What's more, it helped the forwards, too. After all, it's bad enough if you don't score in a game, but if you get shut out in practice, too....

Shero understands how much of the game is mental, how a sagging spirit can contribute to poor effort on the ice. So he uses the slogans, he rewards good efforts with optional practices, he never criticizes without first praising a player's strong points. And often during a tense moment in a game, Shero will walk silently up and down the bench, gently massaging the small of his players' backs. "Have you seen that?" Esposito marvels. "Honest to God. when the puts his hands on my back and he sort of rubs it a little, it gives me a feeling like I want to go through the wall for him."

But he always insists that his players take responsibility for their play. And he often remains remote and unpredictable. Mike McEwen remembers the only time last season that he got up the nerve to go and talk to his coach. McEwen, an exciting rushing defenseman who in the past had often been criticized for his offensive-mindedness, sought advice from Shero on some techniques for rushing. But the encounter sounds more like an audience with a zen master.

"He was sitting there looking bored," McEwen recalls. "He said. 'I don't care what you do. Make sure you carry the puck all the way in and if you're gonna go in, stay there. Don't come racing out quick. Guys'll cover for you. If they don't cover for you, it's their fault, right?' I says. 'Yeah,' and he says, 'So do that.' And there was this fight on TV, he started watching that. I was still talking to him, but he didn't care, he'd said what he wanted to say. And that's the first time I ever had anybody say 'Do what you want' as far as rushing was concerned. It's always been 'What are you trying to be, another Bobby Orr? It's not gonna work, it's no good for the team to have a defenseman going all over the place.' But with him, it was do what you want, fuck, don't bother me."

In fact, McEwen can recall only two times last year when he saw his coach display emotion. "We were losing to Winnipeg five to two at the end of two periods of an exhibition game," McEwen says, "and we were brutal. We weren't even putting out. So he comes into the locker room and you could tell he was pissed and he says, 'In everything you do, there's feeling, there's emotion. Even when you're making love, you have an emotion. We have no emotion on that ice whatsoever.' He was, like, raising his voice, getting mad. So we went out there and blitzed them, scored four goals in the first eight minutes. We won eight to seven. That's the only time I saw him mad. Except for the time in 1 hilly when there was no beer on the bus after a game. He says, 'What do you mean no beer?' and he gets up and walks to the back of the bus. 'Where's the beer? No beer?' And then he just walked right out, talked to some people and we stopped for beer. He was pissed."

"When we got the big goals of the game, he had emotion," trainer Joey Bucchino argues. "His right arm goes up a little bit and his right foot kicks."

•

Always behave like a duck. Keep calm and unruffled on the surface, but paddle like the devil underneath.--From the blackboard of Coach Shero

Shero may keep his emotions in check, but his passion for hockey is legendary. In Philly, he would often drive to the rink at three A.M. to work on his system. There's a classic story of Shero's exchanging his theories on hockey with some visiting coaches, talking far into the night in their hotel room, on the carpeted floor on his hands and knees, using empty beer bottles to illustrate the system. He searches everywhere for inspiration and knowledge--even to pop psychologies such as José Silva's Mind Control Method, a mixture of alpha-wave technology, Eastern meditation and good old American pragmatism. In Shero's copy of Silva's book, the following passage is underlined:

During meditation before going to sleep, review a problem that can be solved with information or advice. Be sure that you really care about solving it; silly questions evoke silly answers. Now program yourself with these words: "I want to have a dream that will contain information to solve the problem I have in mind. I will have such a dream, remember it and understand it."

In the margin, Shero had written, "Power play."

"Maybe he's on the brink of being a genius or going nuts, I don't know," says Ranger defenseman Ron Greschner. Of course, it was Shero himself who once noted that the difference between sanity and insanity was an oyster jump. But he still walks the corridors, lost in his thoughts of perfecting the system. "I remember getting up real early one morning in Detroit," Hickey smiles at the memory, "and I opened the curtains of my room and Freddie was walking around in the snow in the parking lot, wiggling through the cars. There was this big shopping mall across the way. so I don't know if he was going to it, but he wasn't going as the crow flies, that's for sure."

"He doesn't seem to have any set of values as far as directing the team," McEwen theorizes. "He just lets the team personality come out and then he becomes part of it. He kind of joins along. But he always says you gotta have fun."

Fun. Another cornerstone of the Shero system. "Life has to be fun, if one can find it," he says. Cut to the Ranger practice-rink dressing room during the Stanley Cup semifinal play-off series last year, when all the pressure in the world is on the young athletes' shoulders.

Water fight! It begins in the showers. then spills out into the dressing area. There's Nick Fotiu, the toughest guy in the league. chasing Don Murdoch and Greschner, all of them scampering through the locker rooms nude. While this is going on. someone is filling Fotiu's loafers with shaving cream. All to the ear-shattering sounds of Donna Summer. blaring out of the locker-room stereo system. After the chase scene is finished, the guys settle down. To practice their latest disco steps in a nude circle.

On road trips, it's sort of like Animal House with wings. If you dare fall asleep on the plane, odds are you'll wake up with a lapful of coffee, a hand smeared with shaving cream or a tie neatly snipped in two. Murdoch once fell asleep with his brand-new $200 beige kid-leather boots propped up on the seat in front of him. When he woke up, everyone on the team had thoughtfully autographed them, in indelible ink. They now reside permanently in his closet. But at least he's got a souvenir. John Davidson once took his shoes off to nap and wound up walking off the plane, through the terminal and two blocks home in foot-high snow, barefoot.

•

I think every man deserves a second chance, third chance, whatever it is.--Coach Shero

Don Murdoch is a charming, cherubic 23-year-old. His long, almost feminine eyelashes frame his watery blue eyes and when lie rolls into one of his patented rollicking laughs, you can see why Esposito nicknamed him Chubby Cheeks. Murdoch is typical of many of the younger N.H.L. players who hail from western Canada, places like Cranbrook, British Columbia, and Goodsoil, Saskatchewan. Who come from the farms and the mill towns and find themselves in places like New York or Chicago or Los Angeles before their 20th birthday. And find themselves instant heroes in a world they were just still dreaming about.

"I came from a small town where you might get ten good-looking chicks out of the whole town," Murdoch recalls. "And remember--there's 500,000 guys going for them. I come to New York and I used to get sore necks from turning around looking at all these chicks. I used to walk around with a semiboner all the time. And all these nice-looking chicks were coming up to me. I didn't have nothing to do, didn't have to work up any lines. They'd come up, ask the questions, do all the answering and it was, like, no problem taking a chick back home. It was too easy. I used to say to myself, This isn't right, me taking home a beautiful chick and giving her a quick shot. It was too good to be true."

But it was real. Murdoch was a rookie sensation. so it was natural that the chic corps would be attracted to the one with the chubby cheeks. "Yeah, people were going out of their way, inviting me to parties, buying me drinks, wanting me to come to their house for dinner. 'C'mon, wanna meet some chicks?' I'm 20 years old. I guess I want to meet chicks. Everything was handed to me on a silver platter."

Including the cocaine. The summer after that first year, Murdoch was "routinely" searched going home and the customs officials at Toronto International Airport found 4.8 grams of cocaine in a sock. For the next year, as the court case dragged out, Murdoch lived in a public purgatory, branded a drug freak by hostile fans, a fallen hero by his home town.

Murdoch eventually sat out the first half of last season, suspended by the N.H.L. And during that time, there were the doubts, the apprehension that maybe they wouldn't take him back. Then he met his new coach.

"I knew things were going to be OK after the first press conference when I came back," Murdoch says, smiling. "Freddie took me aside and said that we'd get along fine, because he finally met someone who was as good a bullshitter as he was. He never said that lie would see if I could fit into his system, he said, 'Yeah, he'll play for us.' And when I hear him saying that, I say to myself, Well, Jesus, at least the guy's got confidence in me."

But the ice is still bumpy for the right winger. Two years after the bust, he's still trying to live down the image. For some, it's still "Don Murdoch, who was arrested for cocaine use, scored two goals tonight." Murdoch winces at those stories. "Why don't they leave me alone? You go through your years and you do realize that you don't need all the parties or the glamorous girls 24 hours a day. Those good times will always be there. You learn to pick your spots."

•

I know if I were 20 years old and just getting into pro hockey, I'd go for the bundle.--Coach Shero

"This is for Playboy?" Ulf Nilsson leans toward the recorder. "I get a hard-on when I score a goal." Nilsson is one half of the dynamic duo known as The Swedes, who were courted from the World Hockey Association and signed with the Rangers for an incredible sum of about $2,600,000 for two-year contracts. Nilsson is the Americanized one, the one known for his puckish humor and devil-may-care attitude. Anders Hedberg, the blond one, is more earnest. He could have been a sincere, stoic leading man in a Bergman film.

They're in Oren & Aretsky's, a hot celebrity hangout in the 80s on Third Avenue, lunching with their agent. Teammate Ron Greschner walks in.

"Hey, did you guys get paid today?" Greschner inquires. The Swedes look puzzled. "I thought I saw two Brinks trucks parked out front."

Over soup, the Shero stories start to fly. "He was the coach of a team that Jake Milford managed," the agent begins. "It was in St. Paul. One of the players there was driving Milford crazy, so he went to Shero and said, 'Freddie, you've got to do something about this guy's bloodshot eyes. They're driving me crazy. Would you speak to him?' The next day, the player showed up at practice with dark glasses on. Freddie had said to him that he'd better start wearing sunglasses because his eyes were driving Milford crazy."

"You know, we have seven captains," Nilsson says. "I'm the seventh, in charge of the foreigners. Freddie once said that. My goal is to get one language in the dressing room, but I'm having trouble with the French guys."

"Freddie gives all the players confidence," Hedberg says, getting serious, "and that's the best motivation. There are never any negative things said in our dressing room about anybody."

Another afternoon, Hickey is talking about Shero. "Somewhere in his life," he says, "Freddie has grabbed ahold of all he wants to be. And he's still educating himself, he doesn't feel he's complete, which always makes a strong man. Sometimes after a game, I'd look at him and almost be a little bit sad. Are you happy, Fred? I'd wonder. But after getting to know him; or not know him, he rejoices. He doesn't pat himself on the back, he just goes away happy that the boys are happy and that they worked hard and they deserve to be happy. Like, when he has to do those interviews after the game, it must be the most trying time of his life. Interviewing the coach of the team. He always says, 'Ask them. They did it.' "

The TV reporter sticks his microphone in Shero's face. About five reporters surround the coach in a dank exercise room in the bowels of Nassau Coliseum, where Shero's Rangers have just upset the New York Islanders, leaving them one game away from eliminating the best team in hockey from the Stanley Cup play-offs.

"Fred, people are talking about inspiration," says the TV man, squeezing the last word out. "That the Rangers are inspired. Where does all this inspiration come from?"

"I'm sorry it doesn't come from me," Shero shoots back, his eyes half closed behind his glasses. "I hardly talk to them. I think they're inspired because they're living in New York and they're having a good time. They've got a beautiful new rink and they're all living in the best areas. And they like each other; I guess that's it."

"So you're saying that it filters down." The TV man is hearing what he wants to hear. "How do you keep a team playing at the level of intensity that the Rangers are playing at?"

Shero shrugs. "I have no idea. If I knew, I'd tell you." A pause. "No, I wouldn't tell you. I'd bottle it." The coach chuckles to himself.

"Are you surprised?" The interviewer is groping for words now.

"Yes, I don't think any team has played for so long so well in the playoffs. Even Montreal has its bad nights."

"Where is the bad night for the Rangers?"

"Well, I hope when the series is over." The words seem to spurt out of Shero's mouth.

A buzz goes through the room. "Montreal, against Montreal?" another reporter asks, thinking ahead.

"No," Shero says patiently, "I mean they can have a bad night after the game. Some of them might not get anything."

•

In the pros, it's different. Boys become men. This is life. A coach has to go out and let them taste it--the bitter anti the sweet. That's how they learn.--Coach Shero

"The players don't know that Freddie's more intelligent than them," says Rod Gilbert. "They feel sorry for him because he's so inside. They don't want to be like him. It's like your father. At some point, you say that he doesn't understand you, that he's so fucking dumb. He's dumb like a fox, eh? He doesn't want to compete with you, so he lets you go your own way if he's a good parent. Well, that's what Shero does, he's a good parent."

The Rangers are 17 seconds away from one of the biggest upsets in hockey history. The mighty Islanders, possessors of the best record in the league, are about to be eliminated in this semifinal Stanley Cup series, four games to two, unless they can miraculously score in the next few seconds and tie the game. The face-off is deep in the Rangers end and the puck is dropped. Both teams battle for it along the boards as the seconds tick off. With two seconds to go, the puck suddenly floats toward the net ant' Ranger defenseman Carol Vadnais, who was almost booed out of New York last season, makes one more brilliant clear, and suddenly it's over. Pandemonium reigns--they'll play Montreal for the Stanley Cup. Everyone mobs goalie Davidson, Murdoch is leaping around like a kid and the traditional handshaking ceremonies begin.

A few minutes later, in the players' lounge, Esposito, Davidson, Dave Maloney anti Murdoch are being interviewed for TV.

"Those last 17 seconds." Murdoch says, still seeming to be gulping for breath, "Steve Vickers and I were on our hands and knees, going, 'Oh, God, please. I will never do another bad thing in my life.'"

Espo pats Murdoch on the back and they smile and say, in unison, "Wrong."

A half hour later, Greschner, who scored the winning goal, walks into Charley O's, a restaurant where the Rangers regroup after each game. He casts a wary eye over the room. "Not too many front runners here, eh?" Tonight, the scene is reminiscent of V-E Day. Hundreds of well-wishers have poured into the bar and, on the street, hundreds more stand with their noses pressed against the glass, looking like extras from The Dawn of the Dead. Outside the Garden, thousands of fans have spilled onto Seventh Avenue, stopping traffic, cursing at the Islanders' bus as it takes the losers for the long ride home.

By now the champagne is flowing as one Ranger after another hits the room, to resounding cheers. After basking here, they will move on to some of their other favorite spots, Studio 54, Oren & Aretsky's, and then a nightcap at Herlihy's.

The next day, at practice, someone has tacked up the New York Post's front page that features a picture of some Rangers dancing at Studio 54 in celebration. Before they hit the ice, Shero arrives.

"You guys wcnt to Studio 54 last night, eh? How come nobody invited the coaches?" he asks, then is gone.

Shero at the Studio. It, would have been historic. He could have brought along his own fog. And with the strains of Donna Summer filling the disco, at last we could have heard the sound of one hand clapping.

"'We may not make a lot of money,' says $650,000-a-year man Ulf Nilsson, 'but we sure have fun.' "

"'He just lets the team personality come out, then he becomes part of it. He kind of joins along.' "