the california golden seals

Reviewed by Dave Buchanan, MacEwan University

9 march 2018 archive

I'm just old enough, and hockey fan enough, to remember the California Golden Seals, who existed in the NHL from 1968-78 (first as the California Seals, then Oakland Seals, then California Golden Seals, and finally, for two seasons as the Cleveland Barons). In fact, I still have hockey cards of Seals players Gary Croteau, Len Frig, and Jim Neilson; they hold sentimental value if only because they attest to the existence of this strange, defunct team. When I think of the Seals now, I think of two things: how incredibly awful the team was and how incredibly cool their white skates were. (To an eastern Canadian boy like me, the white skates spoke of the magical possibilities of a faraway land called California. No man I knew could get away with wearing white skates, but, apparently, in California, such things could happen.)

Ottawa hockey historian Steve Currier's The California Golden Seals: A Tale of White Skates, Red Ink, and One of the NHL's Most Outlandish Teams tells the detailed story of this curious, sad sack franchise, chronicling both the legacy of losing and some colorful chapters in NHL history. If, like me, you're a sucker for losing teams (full disclosure: I'm a Leafs fan), you may well appreciate this well-researched account of what Currier aptly calls "hockey's most infamous losing team."

The mid-60s marked the beginning of the great age of expansion in the NHL. The Seals were one of six teams admitted to the league in 1967, with two more added in each of 1970, 1972, and 1974. Back then, expansion teams were expected to be awful, and the league generally made sure of it, offering a sorry pool of players in the expansion draft. (The Las Vegas Golden Knights have no idea how lucky they are.) Some expansion teams survived and prospered (Flyers, Islanders) while other foundered, folded or moved (Kansas City Scouts, Atlanta Flames).

But the Seals were remarkable for their awfulness in an era of mediocrity. They never posted a winning record; they made the playoffs only twice, never winning a series; and their home attendance was abysmal. The mismanagement of the team was colossal, with a series of bad owners, ineffectual GMs, wrong coaches, and bone-headed decisions, from where to play their games (choosing Oakland over San Francisco), to trading away promising young players (Reggie Leach, Charlie Simmer) and draft picks (one turned into Guy Lafleur). As Currier makes plain, the story of the California Golden Seals is pretty much a textbook on how not to run a professional sports team.

The most interesting chapters in the book and the Seals' history are those of the era of Charles O. Finley, who owned the team from 1970 to 1975. Prior to reading Currier's book, my knowledge of Finley was mostly limited to baseball, where he was an eccentric, stingy flake—but one who knew the game well and put together winning teams. But Finley didn't know hockey and didn't seem to care about its traditions. He relished the role of outsider in the old-boys' club of NHL owners. As Currier puts it, Finley was an embarrassing "Rodney Dangerfield-type invading the respectable, buttoned down country club." The Seals were a toy for Finley, the NHL a sideline. He rarely even went to the games.

As bad as he was for the Seals (and he really did destroy the team), Finley injects some vitality into the story of the sorry franchise. He famously introduced the idea of colored skates during the 1970/71 season, breaking what Currier cheekily refers to as hockey's other color barrier, first with green and gold skates, and then, in January, 1972, the white ones. (Finley had a thing for colors. In baseball, he once suggested using orange balls; in hockey, he proposed painting the ice green.) He'd already introduced white shoes in baseball, with the Athletics, but white skates in hockey was a tougher sell with the players, most of whom associated white skates with figure skating. Currier reports how Seals players were teased by players on the other teams and even reporters. Plus the skates required constant polishing to remove puck marks and scuffs; Finley ordered trainers to paint them with latex house paint before each game. Eventually, the multiple layers of paint made the skates so heavy that the players complained.

Flashes of color aside, these were some of the darkest years for the Seals. But Currier's account of them is the best part of the book. Finley makes the perfect villain in a story that badly needs one. Despite Finley's occasional flourishes of generosity when it came to player uniforms and even travel expenses, he was notoriously cheap with his players' salaries. In fact, his refusal to take the threat of the World Hockey Association seriously and match the higher salaries the new league was offering was the crushing blow to the franchise. So many good players jumped ship, proportionally more than any other team in the league, and the franchise never really recovered. In these fascinating chapters, Currier's voice, which is objective elsewhere, can't hide its exasperation. By the mid-70s, he concludes, "both fans and media were getting sick and tired of his [Finley's] bullshit" (199). Finley had that effect on people.

Currier is to be commended for doing his research—both archival and in person, interviewing players, fans, and reporters. The attention to detail is impressive, though not being a dedicated Seals fan so much as just a hockey fan, I found the level of detail a bit overwhelming, at times, even for a loser-lover like me.

Also, I found the book a little short on the "outlandish" aspects promised in the subtitle. The Finley sections era has this in spades, sure—oddball promotions and wacky uniform ideas. But aside from a couple of amusing anecdotes about flaky goalie extraordinaire, Gary "Suitcase" Smith (whose sock obsession led him to wear nine pairs inside his skates, not to mention six pairs of underwear), I found a lot of the book, especially the final chapters about the Cleveland fiasco, mostly just sad.

The timing of Currier's book is interesting. In a year when an expansion team, the Las Vegas Golden Knights, sits atop the NHL standings, and looks to be one of the most successful expansion stories in NHL history, it's hard not to contrast their success with the opposite extreme of the California Golden Seals.

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