Salt Lake City's first pro hockey team made its debut in the Western Hockey League this week in 1969.
Dylan Guenther made history on Tuesday night at the Delta Center in Salt Lake City when he scored the Utah Hockey Club’s first regular season goal.
Fifty-five years ago this week, Ted Hodgson was the hero as he inaugurated pro hockey in Salt Lake City with a hat trick.
Hodgson was a member of the Salt Lake Golden Eagles, an expansion franchise in the minor-pro Western Hockey League. The Golden Eagles made their debut on Oct. 10, 1969, earning a 4-2 victory on home ice over the San Diego Gulls.
The 24-year-old native of Hobbema, Alta., opened the scoring with the first goal in franchise history at the 17:50 mark of the first period. He tallied again in the second period to snap a 1-1 tie, and completed the scoring with an empty-net goal with 37 seconds left in the game.
It was an unexpected burst of offense for Hodgson, who came to Salt Lake City after three seasons with the Oklahoma City Bruins of the Central Hockey League and four NHL games with the Boston Bruins in 1966-67. When the fledgling Eagles signed him in August 1969, coach and general manager Ray Kinasewich noted that he had been an enforcer and would probably continue to play that role.
“Ted is a big, tough guy who likes to play the game for keeps,” Kinasewich told the Salt Lake Tribune. “He’s the team ‘policeman’ who sees to it that the opposition doesn’t push around the smaller guys on the club.”
Hodgson had scored big goals before, though, like the Memorial Cup-winning goal for the Edmonton Oil Kings in 1966. He scored 15 more times for the Eagles in 1969-70, and by the end of the 1971-72 season he was the last original Eagle still with the club. He later played in the WHA with the Cleveland Crusaders and the Los Angeles Sharks.
The Eagles were the brainchild, and the pride and joy, of Dan Meyer, a Salt Lake City mining and oil executive who worked tirelessly to build and promote the club. He was the driving force behind the bid to put a hockey team in Salt Lake City’s new arena, the Salt Lake County Civic Auditorium – popularly known as the Salt Palace – and he convinced the other WHL teams to unanimously approve the franchise in June 1968.
Meyer announced the team’s nickname after a contest in September 1968, more than a year before it took to the ice. “The Golden Eagle is the fiercest of all birds,” he told the Deseret News. “It kills its prey, is strong and victorious and is indigenous to our high mountain country.”
Prior to the Golden Eagles, hockey was a niche sport in Utah. It did have a history in Salt Lake City dating back to 1930, when the first local league was formed and games were played on a frozen pond. There was later a thriving hockey scene for amateurs, adults and youths, at the Hygeia Iceland rink, which was built in 1949 and was the only artificial ice surface in town until the Salt Palace opened.
Meyer continued to operate the team until he died under bizarre circumstances in January 1972 while he was in Bloomington, Minn. for the NHL All-Star Game. Reportedly, he climbed out of a smashed window in his room on the 19th floor of a hotel, crawled out onto a beam, and plunged to his death, to the horror of witnesses who included NHL players Bobby Hull, Paul Henderson, and Pit Martin.
The Golden Eagles survived Meyer and thrived even after the demise of the WHL in 1974. Transferring to the CHL, they won three playoff championships and ended up outlasting that circuit as well, making their final switch to the International Hockey League in 1984. After winning two more championships and opening up the Delta Center in 1991, the franchise was sold in 1994 and moved to Detroit, where it became the Vipers.
But the Eagles established Salt Lake City as a hockey hotbed, and the city has been represented in high-level pro hockey almost non-stop since they were established. One year after their departure, they were replaced in the IHL by the Utah Grizzlies, who moved to the AHL in 2001 after the I collapsed. (Trivia: How many pro hockey leagues have Salt Lake City’s teams survived? Three.) That team, which also won two IHL playoff titles, ended up moving to Cleveland, but was almost immediately replaced by another Utah Grizzlies team that plays in the ECHL.
The current Grizzlies, a popular team based in the Salt Lake City suburb of West Valley City, are run by coach/general manager Ryan Kinasewich, a former Grizzly player and the grand-nephew of Ray Kinasewich, the Golden Eagles’ first coach/GM. The Grizzlies are affiliated with the Colorado Avalanche and have no plans to leave the area even with an NHL team having moved into the marketplace.
And why not stay? Utah proved a long time ago that hockey belongs there. The Utah Hockey Club, who won their first regular season game 5-2 over the Chicago Blackhawks, are just the most recent proof of that.