Well, for some reason, I seem to be the only person that has this article
in their issue of SI. Has anyone else seen it? I had a few
unnumbered pages in my Scorecard section with four or five extra articles,
including the Mayasich article. I'll forward the article, any typos are
mine, all credit goes to Mr. Swift and Sports Illustrated. Since I have
been quick to criticize SI in the past for their lack of hockey coverage,
I sent them a letter thanking them for the article. To my knowledge, there
is not an online version of the article (much less a paper version in most
issues, it seems).
 
 
 
 
The Quiet American
John Mayasich was a wizard on ice but never got a shot to
prove it in the NHL
by E.M. Swift
Sports Illustrated, Dec 13, 1999
 
Last Friday, at the annual U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame
induction dinner in Minneapolis, the Wayne Gretzky Award,
which honors an individual for his or her contributions to
U.S. hockey, was introduced.  The first recipient, fittingly,
was the award's namesake.  Among those who joined in
applauding Gretzky was a broad-shouldered, soft-spoken
Minnesotan: 66-year old John Mayasich, who in his playing
days could have laid claim to being the Great One of U.S.
hockey.
That Mayasich is little known outside his home state is an
accident of time and place rather than the result of any
limitation in his skills.  "I don't care who you name, John
could have played with them," says former Harvard coach
Billy Cleary, who starred with Mayasich on the victorious
1960 U.S. Olympic team in Squaw Valley.  :"If you were to
name an all time American team, he'd be on it, either as a
forward or a defenseman."
 
"Like a lot of great American players of his era, John came
along at the wrong time," says Herb Brooks, a former
national teammate of Mayasich, who coached the 1980 U.S.
Olympic team to the gold medal, and later, the NHL's New
York Rangers, New Jersey Devils and Minnesota North
Stars.  "He had a great shot and was a tremendous
playmaker and skater," Brooks says, "but what set him apart
was that he was the smartest hockey player I've been
around.  He was subtle, like a great chess master, and he
made players around him better.  It was like he saw the
game in slow motion."
Funny, that's the same thing people said about Number 99.
Mayasich, born in the mining town of Eveleth in 1933, grew
up to be a rangy, rawboned kid (six feet, 180 pounds) who
was a natural at every sport he tried.  His parents, Frank and
Mary, had emigrated from what is now Croatia, and his
father worked in the iron mines.  John was the 10th of 11
children: six boys, five girls.  He came of age before
television, so he spent all his free time outside playing
sports: baseball, football, hockey, swimming, tennis.  In the
winter he played hockey on frozen ponds all day Saturday,
even skating home for lunch, then played street hockey after
dark under the streetlights.
"We didn't know it, but we were developing skills,"
Mayasich says.  "We didn't have hockey nets.  We just used
a pair of boots as the goal.  If you shot the puck, you'd have
to spend the next 10 minutes looking for it in the snowbank.
So we always deked the goalies, and I became a pretty good
stickhandler.  I learned to shoot backhand from playing
street hockey, where the goals weren't opposite one another
because we didn't have enough room.  You were always
coming at them from an angle."
Mayasich, who played center, never lost a game in his high
school career, leading tiny Eveleth High to 69 straight wins
and four state titles in a row, from 1948 to '51.  No other
team has done that.  The Minnesota State High School
Hockey Tournament is the most prestigious of its kind in
the country, and Mayasich's name is still all over the record
books.  He still owns 10 tournament scoring records,
including most goals in one game (seven); most goals,
career (36 in 12 games); most hat tricks (seven in 12
games); and most points, one tournament (18 in three
games).
Because hockey scholarships were not given then,
Mayasich, who had been a quarterback and a running back
at Eveleth, went to Minnesota in a football scholarship,
although he never played football. He starred on the ice
there, too, leading the Gophers to the NCAA finals his
sophomore and junior years, losing to Michigan and RPI,
respectively.  "If there was one, that was the biggest
disappointment in my career", he says of the overtime RPI
loss, in 1954.  Mayasich still holds the record for most
points in a Final Four game -- seven, against Boston College
in '54.
During college he developed the weapon that was to
become his offensive trademark: the slap shot.  He learned
about it while working in, of all places, Eveleth's open-pit
mines during the summer with his friend and teammate
Willard Ikola.  Ikola had been the goalie on Eveleth's state
championship teams.  He went to college at Michigan, and
every year the Wolverines played an exhibition game against
the Detroit Red Wings.  Some of the Wings were
experimenting with the slap shot -- a little-used novelty
young players like Boom Boom Geoffrion of the Montreal
Canadiens had introduced.  Ikola described the shot to
Mayasich, who'd never seen it.
 
This was before the innovation of the curved stick, and few
players had the strength and coordination to master the slap
shot. "I worked on it quite a bit," Mayasich says.  "I had
strong wrists from baseball and tennis, and got to where I
could really let go.  If I was aiming at the right pipe, I'd
come within six inches most of the time.  I'd use it when I
came down three on two, waiting till the defense backed in
enough to let me get across the blue line.  Then I'd slap it,
and if the goalie stopped it there was usually a rebound.  If
the defense held the blue line, I'd pass off to a wing."
Mayasich became a scoring machine.  His career scoring
records at Minnesota still stand: 144 goals, 298 points in
101 games between 1951 and '55, a staggering average of
2.68 points per game (Gretzky averaged 2.62 points per
game in his best four season stretch in the NHL, 1982-86).
The Gophers' coach was John Mariucci, who had played
defense for the Chicago Blackhawks, and he set up an
exhibition game between the Hawks and the Gophers,
which Chicago won, 5-3.  "John scored two goals, and I
thought he was the best player on the ice," recalls Jack
McCartan, who played goalie for the 1960 U.S. Olympic
team and made it to the NHL for a few games with the
Rangers. "There's no doubt he could have played in the
NHL.  He was the best American hockey player I've ever
seen."
But Mayasich got no offers to pursue an NHL career after
college.  The league was made up of only six teams, all with
Canadian general managers.  College players -- especially
U.S. college players -- were not considered NHL material.
Mayasich, who was in ROTC, also faced a two-year military
obligation.  "It wasn't a source of bitterness, since no
college players were being given a chance," Mayasich says
now.  "But there's still regret, even to this day, not knowing
if I could have done. it."
Instead, Mayasich set his sights on the Olympics.  The 1956
Games were held in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, and
Mayasich helped lead the U.S. to the silver medal.  The
teams' biggest win came against Canada, which the U.S. had
never beaten in an Olympic competition.  "It was the best I'd
ever played," Mayasich remembers of the 4-1 victory.  He
had a hat trick, and in the closing minutes, he had a
breakaway attempt for a fourth goal, but his backhand
clanged off both posts before bouncing out.  The lone U.S.
loss was to the Soviet Union, 4-0, though it was 1-0 with
just five minutes left.  "But I got my revenge, " Mayasich
says.
That, of course, came in 1960.  Mayasich was 26 then, the
father of four (a fifth child would soon follow), working in
sales for a Green Bay television station.  He was playing
defense for a topflight amateur team called the Green Bay
Bobcats, and he told Jack Riley, the U.S. Olympic coach,
that he would join Riley's squad in Squaw Valley after the
Bobcats' season ended.  Mayasich had only one practice
with the U.S. team before the tournament, but he had a hat
trick in the first game, against Czechoslovakia, on three
unassisted slap shots.  The team went on to upset the
powerful Soviets, 3-2, in the championship round, the first
time the U.S. had ever beaten the Soviet Union in
international play.
The 1960 Olympic team went 7-0 in Squaw Valley, winning
America's first hockey gold medal.  It would be nice to
write that the victory opened doors for the U.S. hockey
players of Mayasich's caliber into the closed world of the
NHL, but it was another 20 years and several expansions
before it became a reality.  Hours after receiving his gold
medal, Mayasich flew home to Green Bay and the following
morning showed up for work at the television station.  He
continued to play for love with the Bobcats until 1970.
The U.S. Olympic win was passed off as a historical oddity:
a blip of achievement brought about by a unique
combination of great goaltending and home-ice advantage.,
Perhaps some skill, too.  That such blips of achievement
followed Mayasich his entire hockey career was not
acknowledged at the highest level of the game until 1998,
when, correcting a long-overdue omission, the finest
American hockey player of his time received the NHL's
Lester Patrick Trophy for outstanding service to hockey in
the U.S.
Not that Mayasich particularly minded the delay.  Greatness
is its own reward.
 
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