Madsen Makes His Way To The "A"

By: John Sparenberg 

There were many players who came through Baltimore donning the colors of the Baltimore Skipjacks as they arrived in "Charm City" as fresh-faced youngsters striving to reach the pinnacle of professional hockey, the National Hockey League. Among those names were Phil Bourque, Mitch Lamoureaux, and Jon Casey, to name only a few.

Then, there were the talented veterans looking to regain a regular spot on an NHL roster, with Paul Gardner, Mike Gillis, and Mark Hunter, standing out on that list. But, there was another man, one who never donned a Jacks jersey, but one who logged many miles and took to the ice in many of the clubs’ clashes on his quest to reach the Big Show and was an integral part of the happenings and history of the club, and he is linesman, Gary Madsen.

Madsen, who grew up in the Loch Raven Village area, first took to the ice at the age of 10 when his dad, who grew up in Highlandtown and had been involved with skating for years in rinks like the old Carlin’s Iceland in Baltimore City, took him to the Orchard Ice Rink on a Wednesday night. Those Wednesday night outings soon became a regular occurrence, and that led to regular Saturday visits as well, and before long, Madsen, who hadn’t been involved in many other sports up to that time, had caught the skating bug but had not yet been infected with hockey fever. However, that most pleasant of ailments would soon be running through the course of his veins, thanks to one fateful night at Orchard. 

“I don't remember the guy’s name, but he was always recruiting for Baltimore Youth Hockey, and he asked me if I had ever thought about playing ice hockey. I said sure, and I ended up going the next season and just played in-house and that was my evolution from ice skating to ice hockey. It became like, just the biggest thing I want to do. I'd go up to the tennis courts, just taking it taking a stick and a ball and going and shooting at the fence of the tennis courts. And then I would come home and play in the backyard or sometimes we'd play in the street.”

"Then, when I was about 16, I started playing some travel. Back then, you had to play house (first) and then you got to play travel. So, you had that responsibility of playing house (first). With travel, I started to get a lot better, Madsen said, briefly pausing to carefully choose his words before continuing. I don't want to say I was a really good hockey player, but I got to be pretty good.”

Madsen, continued, “Then I started working at the ice rink, and I was a rink guard all of the way from grade school through high school. I went to Calvert Hall (located about a mile from the Orchard Ice Rink) and graduated in 1975, so I was at the rink pretty much every single day. When it was when in the fall and they were making ice, that's what I was doing, sometimes in the middle of the night I was at the rink spraying water to make the ice.” 

Playing at Orchard with the Mercurys of the Chesapeake League where he played against the likes of another local boy, Steve Wirth, and AHL Hall of Fame member, Jim Bartlett, Madsen continued to refine his playing skills, catching the eye of his younger cousin, Mike Madsen, who said, “I didn’t have his skating skills, or his overall hockey abilities, but watching him play at a very young age inspired me and encouraged me to keep paying. Great memories!.” 

By virtue of being at the rink so much, Madsen found a calling for his services one evening for a game on the sheet, but he wouldn’t be playing on this occasion, instead, he’d pull on the zebra stripes and be an official. 

“I had never done it before, but I gave it a try. It was just a house game, and I had no training as a referee, but I mean I knew what to do essentially just through osmosis. I just got out there and said you know it's just a kid’s game and the guys said we just need somebody out to help, and I liked it. So, I joined the local Baltimore officiating group, which back then was run by Mr. Doug Lauf (who was a longtime off-ice official at the Baltimore Civic Center/Arena). I then continued to officiate, and I started getting better at it.”

Who knows why anybody, particularly a well-educated graduate of the esteemed Calvert Hall, would want to continue to pursue a career in officiating, particularly at the professional level, where in addition to the constant critique of their work from their bosses, one must constantly be subjected to the continuous catcalls from fans, who have been known to you know, on occasion, have a biased opinion favoring the club they fervently root for on every call an on-ice official makes. In Madsen’s case, it may have been the notorious Baltimore summer weather, where the humidity has been known to alter one's thinking. 

“One summer I decided that I really liked being an official, and I started researching how to how to get better, and I found a refereeing school in Milton, Ontario that was run by Bruce Hood (then a veteran NHL referee, but now deceased), and a lot of future NHL referees went to that school.” 

“I found out the school was for a week, so I saved my money and then booked a flight to Canada, arriving on a Sunday to start the daily schooling the next day, and then flying back home on Friday, said Madsen, noting that while he supported himself financially in this venture, his parents were very supportive of his pursuit, but with this caveat.

..."As long as you continue to do it, and don't stop caring, if you stop is when I'll mimic your stop. As long as you continue, we'll support you."

Madsen continued, switching gears back to the hockey school “They had great teaching and I had a great time. All totaled there had to be over 100 people at the school that week, ranging from kids as young as eight to men in their 50's. There were classroom sessions, in addition to on-ice sessions, and of course, there were games too. In the games, you would go out for 10-minute stints, and then your crew would come off and another three-man crew would go on, with the purpose of everybody getting a chance to fit in.”

That year at the Hood school led to another, and then finally, a third, and by that time the school's instructors,  having witnessed his talents firsthand for three years, had started to work him harder, and that hard work paid off, with Madsen landing his first professional job as a linesman in the Eastern Hockey League, where he would be primarily stationed in Baltimore, an appointment that he modestly called, "just being lucky.”  

Toiling in the minors, particularly the low minors like the EHL was, is not your typical career path in professional hockey. Usually, with a few notable exceptions such as the Clippers’ Warren Young, who would eventually go on to the NHL and earn a million-dollar salary thanks to riding shotgun with the legendary Mario Lemieux in Pittsburgh, the loop was the highest level they would scale on the hockey ladder.

Many of the games in the EHL were played in small cities, with Baltimore being the exception, with sparse crowds in attendance, Baltimore not being the exception, played in dimly lit arenas, with less than ideal conditions for the players and officials. Also, rarely would be the occasion when I scout was on hand to take in a game and take a close look at a prospect, but Madsen had shown enough in his work at the school to warrant the decision-makers at the institution to keep closer tabs on his development.

“You have to have talent, but it's also political and being in the right spot at the right time. There are so many factors that figure into making it. It's a fact that there aren't a lot of openings because it's a finite group of people, and generally you only get in because somebody got fired, hurt, or retired.”

“They knew who was in the league and the scouts came around a few times that season. Then the next season Bob Hodges and John D'Amico (both former veteran NHL linesmen) came up to me and said, you know, you’ve got a really good shot at getting into the AHL based on where you are right now (skill-wise and geographically), and we'll do what we can to help you.”

For whatever reason, Madsen’s body of work, along with the influence of Hodges and D’Amico was not enough to secure him a coveted spot in the AHL, which only consisted of 11 teams at that point in time. However, all hope was not lost in Madsen’s pursuit to continue his career growth at a higher level, as Hodges and D’Amico were about to put him in touch with a contact in the Central Hockey League, Bud Poile, commissioner of the CHL, and the father of former Washington Capitals GM, David Poile. The younger Poile would go on to become the GM of the Caps, including the time when they were affiliated with the Skipjacks.

Despite having already earned his accounting degree and having a good job in the Baltimore area, Madsen decided it was time to leave behind some of that stability and hit the road, taking a huge leap of faith and venturing to Music City USA to become a CHL official, as he inched ever so slowly to the ultimate of goal of earning an NHL contract. 

“I didn't even have an apartment lined up yet, but I put a U-Haul behind my car, hitched it up, and drove to Nashville, where I would be based. I still had to work because you don't make a lot of money. But I ended up getting into a partnership with the firm that I worked for, and they got me a job doing accounting in Nashville, and fortunately, I was able to find an apartment after I got down there.” 

Because of budget constraints, linesmen in the minors tend to be locally based, and Madsen estimates that around 70% of the games that he did were in Nashville, but he put plenty of miles on the odometer, making other stops around the loop, and although he didn’t go everywhere as the Johnny Cash “I’ve Been Everywhere” says if you use your imagination while reciting the following stops you might feel like he did; Wichita, Nashville, Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Fort Worth, Dallas, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis. 

“They got me out of my usual zone (Nashville) every once in a while, but mostly you stayed in your own territory. Which is good, but, it's also problematic because you get one team all of the time instead of seeing multiple teams, and that can be tough on an official. On the good side of that coin, being local guaranteed a lot of work, but it also creates a bit of an issue with you being over-exposed. Granted, I was looking at this from a lineman's perspective and not a referee, because it's a non-issue with them because they are always traveling.”

Again, showing enough development to warrant another promotion of sorts, Madsen saw his first professional post-season action in the CHL 1982 playoffs, working alongside the referee who also worked with him in his first regular-season game in the “C”, Don Koharski, who started his professional career as a linesman. 

"Before that first game, which was Wichita at Nashville, we were in the locker room and Koho looked over at me and asked me if I was nervous, and I said yeah. He said I can tell and then he proceeded to tell me not to worry about it because these guys love him. That's just what he was out on the ice, a presence, and a personality. So, we go out on the ice and we're skating around and I took a peek over. There were four or five Wichita guys chasing after him just trying to say hello. That's the relationship that he had with players. He was well-liked by the players which was a credit to him.”