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.”

Bourque's Baltimore Beginnings (Part 2)

By: John Sparenberg 

Entering the 1986-87 season, Bourque's fourth in the Pens' fold, Ubriaco had an important job that he needed to be filled on his squad, and the qualifications for the job were; a mature young man, and one who was a sincere worker and also showed leadership qualities. 

When one ponders those qualifications and thinks back to his earlier days in the organization when Bourque was still learning about himself and making some mistakes on the ice like any other young player, in addition to his off-ice issues that he admitted to, it was somewhat of a surprise to the general public and press that "Ubi" filled the position, the captaincy of the Skipjacks, with Bourque. However, while everyone else who dissected the move strictly by game performances, Ubriaco had the benefit of three full years of coaching Bourque and seeing him every day in practice, on the long bus rides that are a part of life in the AHL, and interacting with his teammates. 

Being bestowed with the honor wearing the captain's "C", which was actually a co-captaincy that Bourque shared with defenseman Chris Dahlquist, was an obvious source of inner pride for him and a telltale outward sign of how the Pens' organization now viewed him.

However, another unofficial title that Bourque needed to shed was of "tweener", a player who is good enough to play in the NHL, but for one reason or another is unable to stick when called up to the NHL for one reason or another, and he took a huge step towards doing so late in the 1986-87 season when with the Skipjacks playoff hopes just about sunk, Ubriaco changed the course of his career and tried him as a forward on an experimental basis. 

"Gene was the head coach and another coach that I had who was like a father figure to me. I came in as a defenseman and after a bunch of trips through Breezewood, Pennsylvania going back and forth to Pittsburgh; Gene called me into his office one day and said this isn't working out too well for you. You should be getting a little more traction up in the NHL and it's not happening. I want to try you at forward; you can skate like the wind. At that time Mario's brother, Alain was playing for the Skipjacks and Gene said I want to put you on the left wing with him and see what happens the last 15 games of the regular season. We had a special chemistry and just caught fire."

Bourque, who originally wore number seven with the Skipjacks, but switched to number explaining that it was because he was a numbers guy and Ray Bourque wore number seven and Bobby Orr was his favorite player (7x4), continued. "Then Gene got the job in Pittsburgh and I went to that training camp as a forward and ended up making the team. So I owe a lot to Gene, but the backstory to that is growing up and playing youth hockey in Boston, I was always going back and forth between forward and defenseman. My dad always pushed me to play both and it ended up really serving me well finding my little niche and getting through the little crack in the door to get to the NHL and stay there for a while."

The number seven, as in lucky number seven, turned out to be the one that Bourque finally jettisoned the tweener tag and became an NHL regular. In that campaign, he victimized opponents' nets with vulcanized rubber 17 times to help the parent Penguins, under the leadership of Coach Ubriaco, make the playoffs for the first time in the Mario Lemieux era. The Pens stumbled out of the gate the following season winning only 10 of their first 26-games, and that sluggish start ending up costing Ubriaco his job but through the tumultuous season the Penguins endured, Bourque continued to refine his goal-scoring touch, "tickling the twine" on 22 occasions.  

Craig Patrick, the Pens' General Manager who was an assistant coach and also the assistant general manager of the gold medal-winning 1980 U.S. Olympic Team, took over behind the Pittsburgh bench after relieving Ubriaco of his duties, but the club never fully recovered from their rough start and failed to make the post-season.

Realizing that the window of opportunity was slowly closing on the clubs' chances to capture a Stanley Cup with Lemieux, Patrick had a plan, and that was to surround his superstar with champions, and he then quickly went about that task in the off-season, starting with the early June hiring of head coach "Badger" Bob Johnson from the University of Wisconsin, where he had won three NCAA titles. Within a week of Johnson's appointment, two players with Stanley Cup's in their past were acquired when Joe Mullen was obtained via trade and Bryan Trottier, who had previously collected three titles with the New York Islanders was inked to a free-agent deal and those transactions along with a couple more in-season "Craig's capers" resulted in both the first Stanley Cup for the Penguins organization after they disposed of the Minnesota North Stars and their goalie, former Skipjacks teammate Jon Casey in the finals.

Tragically, Johnson suffered a brain aneurysm only three months after the championship and never again coached the club, succumbing to brain cancer in November of 1991. Scotty Bowman, who was already on staff and had previously won five Stanely Cup's as the head coach of the Montreal Canadiens took over the coaching reigns after Johnson's passing, and with Bourque playing a pivotal role, which included tallying the clubs' first goal in the Stanley Cup finals matchup with the Chicago Blackhawks, a netting that started a comeback win from a 3-0 deficit, the Pen's cruised to a second consecutive championship, downing the Hawks and Bourque's former Skipjack teammate Rod Buskas in the finals. 

Reaching the pinnacle of his profession was obviously the highlight of Bourque's career and a nice payoff, literally and figuratively, for all of the long bus rides and ups and downs of the franchise both in the minors and in the NHL that he endured on his way to the top.  

"Early on, I was just happy to be in the NHL and getting an NHL paycheck. To be quite honest with you I was just trying to carve out some kind of a career for a guy who wasn't drafted. You think about winning but you knew back then that we were not good enough to win. This may sound a little selfish and as I look back, I think it was, but sometimes you just have to look out for yourself because nobody else will. You just want to play in the league."

"As we start to get better and Mario started to be surrounded by better players, that's when you start thinking about winning. First, you start thinking playoffs, then, win one round. Then, once you get that taste in your mouth and you see all the pieces that have been brought in. Guys like Paul Coffey, Ron Francis, Larry Murphy, and Kevin Stevens; these are all Hall of Fame type players. At that point, expectations certainly start changing in the locker room, and thinking about getting into the playoffs and winning one round is not good enough. No, we're built to win a Stanley Cup, now, let's go out and do it."

After a short period of celebrating the history that he had helped obtain for the Pens' in capturing the back-to-back championships, it was then on summer and the reality of the business side of hockey where both the player and management are looking for their own best interests, and through this sometimes painful process, loyalties are tested and feelings are often hurt. 

The first sign that Bourque's ten-year tenure in the organization would not stretch to an 11th was when he was left exposed in the expansion draft that stocked the Tampa Bay Lightning and the Ottawa Senators, who would be entering the league in the fall. Having cleared the expansion obstacle, Bourque was now in a position that was not unique to him, an unrestricted free agent. 

In his first foray into free agency when he was a young defenseman with modest offensive numbers in junior hockey and little bargaining power, Bourque basically had to settle for whatever terms he could get. But this time around at only 30-years of age, seemingly in the prime of his career, and with back-to-back championships and consecutive 20-goal seasons as the latest entries on his resume, he was in the driver's seat and his services were sought after by at least a half dozen clubs, and in the end, he signed a lucrative multi-year deal with the New York Rangers, although he was loyal to the end with the Penguins and gave Patrick a last-minute chance to match the deal the Rangers presented. 

Big expectations came with the big money that the Rangers threw his way, but Bourque potted only six strikes in his first season in the "Big Apple", and his sophomore season saw him unable to get in the lineup on a regular basis. But yet he stayed the course and weathered the storm for the good of the team, even rejecting an idea from his agent to pursue a trade that his representative thought he could help facilitate, knowing that his client was still a wanted commodity. And what did that loyalty buy him, a trade to the Senators, who were assured of a last-place finish. Asked the reasoning for the trade, the Rangers' GM said simply that the Rangers had too many players. 

With his ego bruised by the combination of the trade and not being able to put up numbers that compared to his latter days in Pittsburgh, Bourque went into the off-season determined to regain his place as a top-tier power forward, trained with dogged determination in an effort to stop his freefall, but that same determination led to a freefall of another sort, and one that nearly cost him his life.   

"It was in August of 1994. I was in the best shape of my life and was about to go to the training camp with the Ottawa Senators," said Bourque, who like everyone else in the hockey world hoped that a lockout could be averted, but that was not to be the case and the truncated season started in January 1995 instead of October of 1994. "I had really been working out hard and was going to have one more free weekend at Lake Powell, which is on that Arizona Utah border. We were there at the house with five or six other couples and I said, hey, I'm going to go run some sandhills so I can have a guilt-free weekend and have some beers. They were like no just have a beer and sit down and I was like no, I'm going to run some sandhills."

"Running sandhills led to me doing some rock climbing, and I got up pretty high and lost my footing. I ended up falling four stories straight down, and on my way down, I hit my head on the back of a rock. That knocked me out cold, and by the time I landed, I did a face plant. I broke all my facial bones, my cheekbones, my nose, and I broke my neck in five places. When they finally came and found me, they knew they couldn’t transport me because of my condition, so they called in a helicopter, put me in a basket, and then flew me to Flagstaff, Arizona. That was the year of the lockout in the NHL, which was a blessing for me. The lockout allowed me to get into rehab, get back in the gym, and get back into some kind of shape to play again when the season started, which was in January. When the season started I was ready to go, and the doctor said the only reason I wasn’t paralyzed was that I was in the best shape of my life when the accident happened," finished Bourque, who amazingly played in 38 of the Sens' 48 contests.

Amazingly, Bourque went on to play an additional six seasons of professional hockey after the rock-climbing incident and retired in 2000, putting an end to his 18-year career. One that had enough twists and turns to make his former pet Burmese python Monty jealous. And while the compelling story of his career seems tailor-made for a Hollywood film with its trials, triumphs, and tragedy, even if his story never makes it to the big screen, "Bourquie" will always be remembered as a two-time Stanley Cup winner who "etched" his place in history. 

"The night before I was supposed to return the cup, I was sitting on the floor in the living room with a screwdriver, a bunch of beers in an Igloo cooler, and a screwdriver. I took the screwdriver, and about three hours later I had finished putting my name and enjoy it in quotation marks on the inside of the Cup. It's not there anymore because the Cup doesn't get any taller, so they take off the large bands. The top one comes off, and it gets flattened out and put into the hall of fame and a new one gets put on the bottom. But for many years, I was the only guy with my name on the inside and outside of the Cup."