Before becoming one of junior hockey's top coaches, Dale Hunter was a feared NHL star who relished the chance to impose his will on opponents of any size.
Vol. 36 Issue 21, March 4, 1983Before he became one of the best coaches in major junior hockey, Dale Hunter was a star NHLer who made opponents pay a price for getting in his way. And in this story from THN’s exclusive Archive, Hockey Hall of Fame writer Michael Farber spotlights Hunter’s early NHL days with the Quebec Nordiques.
In this story, from THN’s March 4, 1983 edition – Vol. 36 Issue 21 – Farber spoke with Hunter, who was just finishing up his third season with the Nords. Hunter was his typically frank self, telling Farber, “People don’t respect me for my fighting,” after amassing 498 penalty minutes his first two years. “I understand. Frankly, I’m not a very good fighter.”
Hunter also welcomed the jeers that followed him for his entire 19-year NHL career. Montreal, for example, had a special angry place in its collective heart for Hunter.
“I hear boos in Montreal, but that’s okay,” Hunter said. “If you’re booed in an opposing rink, it means you must be doing something right. You must be hurting the home side. I consider those boos something like a badge of honor.”
Hunter wound up playing 1,407 regular-season NHL games, generating 697 assists, 1,020 points, and 3,565 penalty minutes in that span. He never won a Stanley Cup, but he did have his No. 32 retired by the Washington Capitals in 2000, and he’s continued to make an impact on the game as the co-owner, president and coach of the OHL’s London Knights, an organization considered the gold standard of the Canadian Hockey League. And he never shied away from doing what he thought he had to do to put his team in the win column.
“I play mad,” Hunter told Farber. “When I’m losing, I get mad and I’ll go hit somebody. Sometimes a thing like that can get our whole team going…If I’m the guy who stirs things up, that’s okay.”
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DALE HUNTER
Vol. 36 Issue 21, March 4, 1983
By Michael Farber
Think of chalk screeching on a blackboard.
Think of the man in your office who constantly cracks his knuckles.
Think of the next-door neighbor who grinds his teeth.
Think of your mother-in-law.
Okay, now think of Dale Hunter.
This guy Hunter, the Quebec Nordiques’ center, is annoying. He isn’t necessarily a Rat—Ken Linseman, the unctuous Edmonton Oiler center who is trying to shed the image, has that title locked up—but he is a pain in multiple parts of the anatomy to every National Hockey League team but his own.
Like a full moon, Dale Hunter seems to bring out the worst in everyone.
“When things aren’t going well, I’ll go and stir things up,” said Hunter, one of three brothers in the NHL. “Or at least I’ll try my best.”
Such an overwhelming urge to be the straw that stirs the Nordiques’ boisson has earned the 22-year old Hunter the reputation of a bleep disturber in Canada, which translates as a bleep stirrer in the United States. He often hears these expressions applied to him, although rarely so euphemistically.
“Even my teammates sometimes will call me that at practice,” Hunter said. “They’re joking, of course.”
Hunter’s grit—he is a tireless worker in a league where more than union-scale effort tacitly is frowned upon—has left an impression on opposing players.
Sometimes, of course, they have left an impression on him-…like early this season when Jerry Korab of the Los Angeles Kings slashed Hunter in the face with his stick and earned a six-game suspension.
The incident was vintage Hunter. Conceding nothing to a 6-foot-3, 215-pound King Kong, the 5-9, 180-pound Hunter engaged the defenseman in a spirited shoving match in front of the Kings’ net. When the puck was cleared from the zone, Hunter turned to start up ice and Korab swung his stick. Hunter said the stick may have glanced off his shoulder before striking his chin.
“You accept it as part of the game,” said Hunter, who never has been suspended at any level of hockey despite his penchant for agitation. “I took four or five stitches. Those weren’t the first, and they won’t be the last. Everybody pays the price in this game, whether it’s stitches or bumps and bruises. That’s hockey.”
But Hunter’s most storied incidents have come against the Montreal Canadiens, who like the Nordiques about as much as an advanced case of herpes.
Hunter first made a vivid impression on his provincial rivals last season, his second in the NHL, when he tangled with Larry Robinson, the firm-but-fair Montreal defenseman, in a fight that Robinson won.
“People don’t respect me for my fighting,” said Hunter, who had 135 points and 498 penalty minutes his first two years. “I understand. Frankly, I’m not a very good fighter.”
He didn’t have to fight when Quebec played Montreal in the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs last spring; he merely mocked the Canadiens. He threw his person all over the ice in wanton disrespect of a team with superior talent and tradition, rubbing a Montreal nose at every opportunity. To add injury to insult, Hunter scored on the first shift of overtime in Game Five to eliminate the Canadiens.
Hunter continued his aggravating assault this season. At the teams’ first meeting at the Colisee, he scratched the cornea of Guy Lafleur’s right eye with a glove, thus goading the normally placid Gilbert Delorme into fisticuffs.
“I don’t know if I would call Hunter dirty as much as I would call him a cheap-shot player,” Lafleur said shortly after the incident. ‘There was no reason for him coming after me the way he did. Some day somebody is going to give it to him, and he’s going to wonder why. Nobody else will…”
But certainly Hunter doesn’t pick his spots. He accosted the 6-3, 210-pound Robinson in the same game and put him on the sidelines with an injured shoulder—an outgrowth of an elbow Robinson previously had directed at him.
In a return bout at the Forum, Hunter fought with Delorme in the final minutes of a game, a prelude—or perhaps the impetus—to an ensuing bit of ugliness as Wilf Paiement swung his stick at Robinson.
Not even brotherly love seems to affect Hunter. In yet another Dale-Hunter-as-wrecking-ball performance against the Canadiens, he collided with his brother Mark, who limped off the ice with a freakish, but serious, knee injury.
The Canadiens, much to Dale’s indifference, chose him as one of the 10 dirtiest players in the NHL.
“I hear boos in Montreal, but that’s okay,” Hunter said. “If you’re booed in an opposing rink, it means you must be doing something right. You must be hurting the home side. I consider those boos something like a badge of honor.
“My best games seem to have come against the Canadiens. There are certain teams that seem to fit your style. When we play a skating team like Los Angeles, then the Stastnys or Michel Goulet takes over. The Canadiens skate, but they also play good defensive hockey and grind. Whoever grinds it out better between us is going to win. That’s my kind of hockey.”
That kind of hockey player is far more valuable than his 12 goals and 35 assists—through the All-Star break—might suggest to the Nordiques, a team whose intensity waivers as often as a campaigning politician. The Nordiques are among the NHL enigmas, fiery one night and flat the next.
In last season’s Stanley Cup playoffs against the Boston Bruins, it was Hunter who sufficiently enraged Terry O’Reilly to take a swipe at referee Andy van Hellemond. Earlier in that game, it was O’Reilly who took a penalty while trying to run Hunter through the end boards. While O’Reilly was in the box, Quebec scored the deciding goal.
Hunter, who centers for Goulet and Real Cloutier, is the primary force that prevents this team from eternally running on automatic pilot.
“I play mad,” Hunter said. “When I’m losing, I get mad and I’ll go hit somebody. Sometimes a thing like that can get our whole team going.
“You see, no one likes to be hit. No one. If you do some hitting you may throw the other guy off his game. That’s part of my job. Every team has different guys with different styles, and my style is just going out and working hard.
“Everybody would like to be Wayne Gretzky and be able to score 60 goals. I know I would. But I realized in junior hockey (as a member of the Sudbury Wolves), I guess, that I wasn’t going to be that kind of player. For me to be effective, I’ve got to be a playmaker, a team man, a guy who makes things happen. If I’m the guy who stirs things up, that’s okay.”
For the Quebec Nordiques, Dale Hunter is the first straw.
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