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HBO'S BROAD STREET BULLIES REVIEWED |
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April 13 has become a difficult day for Philly sports fans. After all, it was one year ago yesterday legendary Phillies announcer Harry Kalas collapsed and died before a game in Washington D.C.
Thankfully through the largess of HBO Sports and the Philadelphia Flyers, sports fans were given a salve of sorts to ease the sting: an advanced screening of the HBO documentary The Broad Street Bullies, scheduled to air on May 4.
Four themes seem to emerge immediately:
1. The team and the city were made for each other
2. Their thuggery was matched only by their skill
3. They were loved in one place; hated everywhere else
4. No player from the 1973-74; 74-75 Flyers will ever apologize for a single thing.
The early portion of the documentary recalls Ed Snider's travails in bringing hockey to Philadelphia, and shows year-by-year how the team became accepted by the community which heretofor had minimal exposure to the game.
Of course, the seminal event in Flyer history was a 1968 brawl with the St. Louis Blues, during which Noel Picard sucker punched Flyer Claude LaForge, leaving him face down on the ice.
LeForge was badly-injured; Snider was apoplectic with rage, and vowed his team would never be intimidated or brutalized again.
With Keith Allen on hand to handle the draft, the Flyers amassed a coterie of rambunctious types such as Dave Schultz, Bob Kelly, and Don Seleski. Meanwhile, the Flyer's brass also brought in potent offensive talents such as Bobby Clarke, Rick McLeish, and Bill Barber.
By time this bunch meshed after the 1972-73 season, The Flyers has a one-two punch, figuratively and literally, no team could handle. As commentator after commentator points out in the documentary, it was exactly that combination of aggression and talent that made the Flyers so successful and so hated around the league.
More importantly, they were hated by The League, which saw their exploits as a black eye on the game. However, then-commissioner Clearance Campbell was cautious about how to reign in the Bullies. After all, they were a good box-office draw. Fans in cities all over North America packed arenas for the chance to boo the villains in Orange and Black.
In one of the documentary's funnier passages, Dave Schultz asks in voice over, "Do you think Campbell was happy about giving those Cups to us?" as footage of a visibly disgusted Cambpell presenting the Cup to Bobby Clarke rolls.
Another theme woven throughout the film is the sense of unity among the members of those teams. Former defenseman Ed Van Impe readily admits that once Schultz got going the rest of the team played with "bigger balls." The Bullies were friends and family on the ice and off.
This sense of family was no doubt fostered by coach Freddy "The Fog" Shero. Known for his inspirational messages, Shero knew how to push his players' buttons. "I got a team that loves to fight, so I let them fight," summing up his thoughts on The Bullies approach.
Also covered in The Broad Street Bullies is the classic 1976 game against The Soviet team, during which Van Impe's physicality caused the Soviet team to leave the ice mid-way through the first period until Snider's threat to withhold the Soviet team's pay induced an about face. Goalie Bobby Taylor quipped, "It looks like the communists were bigger capitalists than anybody thought."
Bottom line on The Broad Street Bullies: It's a nostalgic tour de force for Flyers fans, and fans of so-called old-time hockey. For everybody else, it's a reminder that the Flyers teams of that era changed the way the game was played and officiated, and was incredibly successful because of it.
The only glitch to this documentary is that while HBO gives ample time to Flyers supporters and critics, the treatment of the 1976 Stanley Cup Finals versus The Montreal Canadians is made to seem as if The Habs kicked off their dynasty by out-bullying The Bullies ...as if The Habs gave the Bullies the comeuppance the rest of the NHL wanted so baldly to see, but never did.
What the sequence really amounts to is revisionist history from a bitter Bruins fan posing as a journalist who is till pissed off after three decades that his beloved Bruins got outhit, outworked, outfought, and outscored by the toughest team that ever took to the ice. Period.
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