Side note, during the 1970s, my father worked for a charter service at Logan Airport and they had a contract at the time with the Boston Bruins, who would charter their planes for road trips. As a result, my father got to know some of the Bruins personally and on occasion, he and his co-workers would get invited to have drinks with them in a local bar. For instance, they'd land at Logan early afternoon from a road game the night before and would head straight to the bar, telling my Dad to head over after his shift. So he had some wild stories.
For example, on one occasion, one of the players (Wayne Cashman) got so inebriated that he was locked up in the drunk tank and he used his one phone call to place a huge take-out order from a local Chinese restaurant, inviting all the officers in the jailhouse to share the food with him. He was then let out in the morning with no charges and no one the wiser. In those days, no sports writer would dare risk his career (and they were all men in those days) by putting these kind of stories in the paper. So the athletes got away with a lot as the sports beat reporters were part of the club.
Derek Sanderson wrote a good book on those days of the "Big Bad Bruins" by the way. He said if not for all the partying, the Bruins would have won at least three more Stanley Cups in that era (they won in '70 and '72)j as they had a pretty awesome team with the likes of Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito.
It's amazing to think about how much more some of these earlier athletes could have accomplished (i.e. Babe Ruth or Mickey Mantle) if not for all the excess. For example, look at Tom Brady who takes discipline, hard work and clean living to the extreme. As a result, he will likely go down as the greatest QB in NFL history. How much better would say, Joe Namath, have been if he had adopted a Tom Brady lifestyle and work ethic?
Joe Namath’s problem was that he had eggshells for knees. If Broadway Joe had adopted a clean lifestyle, he would have killed himself out of boredom by 1970.
Great post/stories 76! If there was a ‘cooler’, all around team/group of guys, (any team, in any sport), than the ‘68-’69, when they really hit their stride, through the ‘74-’75 Boston Bruins I never saw it! (And the heck with those Canadians and that freakin’ dirtbag Ferguson!) I loved those guys! Derek’s book was a fun but sad read.