On March 2, 1980, New Westminster Bruins coach Ernie (Punch) McLean became incensed when referee Ken Wheler missed a tripping call. In protest, he tossed a large metal garbage can onto the ice at Queen's Park Arena in New Westminster, B.C.Craig Hodge/Supplied
Ernie (Punch) McLean, a coal miner’s son and a hard-nosed junior hockey coach whose loyal players followed his disciplinarian lead, died on May 8.
His car had crashed down an embankment in a single-vehicle accident near Dease Lake in the Northern Interior of British Columbia. A resident of Coquitlam, B.C., he was 93 and had lived the kind of colourful life that would be expected of a man called Punch.
In 2009, he had long retired from coaching and was toiling as a gold prospector not far from Dease Lake when he tumbled more than 20 metres down a crevasse. Though uninjured, the 77-year-old got lost trying to find his way back to camp and wandered around the dense woods for four days, surviving on nothing but water.
“Whenever I got to a point where I felt hungry or my stomach started rumbling, I got a good drink of water and that sufficed me,” Mr. McLean told The Globe and Mail after he was rescued by a helicopter search party. He said the water was “beautiful,” adding, “I’ll sell it to anybody in Vancouver.”
In his heyday, he sold hockey. As coach and part-owner of the New Westminster Bruins of what is now known as the Western Hockey League, he led the team to four consecutive Presidents Cup league titles from 1975 to 1978 and a pair of Memorial Cup championships (representative of the best junior team in Canada) in 1977 and 1978.
Fans flocked to Queen’s Park Arena in suburban Vancouver for an entertaining, rough-and-tumble brand of hockey in vogue at the time. In the wild days of the Broad Street Bullies in the NHL and the irreverent hockey film Slap Shot, some called New Westminster’s intimidating home ice the Queen’s Park Zoo.
“When you walked toward the arena on a Friday night, you’d hear the rumbling energy coming out of the building,” said Coquitlam city councillor Craig Hodge. “On a cold night you’d see the steam rising off the roof.”
McLean, seen celebrating his 83rd birthday at the rink, coached the New Westminster Bruins to back-to-back Memorial Cup championships in the 1970s.HO/The Canadian Press
During Mr. McLean’s time as a coach of the Bruins, Mr. Hodge was a photographer with the now-defunct local newspaper, The Columbian. The games at Queen’s Park Arena were often brawl-filled.
“As a photographer, you had to be ready for anything,” Mr. Hodge said. “At a face-off, you didn’t know what was going to drop, the puck or the gloves.”
Fighting was common, but one night in 1975 the fur literally flew. Mr. McLean was so incensed over a missed offside call that he reached over the bench and snatched the linesman’s toupee off his head. The official picked up the rug and placed it on his scalp backward.
Mr. McLean later received a $300 bill from the linesman and an accompanying note: “This was funny at the time.”
His head coaching career began in the 1960s with his Saskatchewan hometown team, the Estevan Bruins. That franchise won a league title in 1968. He was co-owner of the Bruins with general manager Bill Shinske when the team moved to New Westminster in 1971. The man whose nickname was inspired by legendary NHL coach George (Punch) Imlach was behind the bench for 1,067 regular-season WHL games, compiling a record of 548-429-90.
He was awarded the WHL’s Governors Award in 2005 and was inducted into the BC Hockey Hall of Fame one year later.
Beyond the accolades and trophies, Mr. McLean took pride in preparing several young men to graduate to the National Hockey League, including Dallas Smith, Gregg Sheppard, Greg Polis, Ron Greschner, Lorne Henning, Jimmy Harrison, Ross Lonsberry, Brad Maxwell and John Ogrodnick.
“What he was most proud of was that he was able to get his players to believe in themselves and to believe in their teammates,” said friend Patrick Singh, who wrote the song The Ballad of Punch McLean.
One player who particularly benefited from Mr. McLean’s mentorship was Barry Beck, a strapping Vancouverite who as a 17-year-old in 1974 was traded from the Kamloops Chiefs to the New Westminster Bruins. He was a kid who stole things with his friends and was caught doing it enough times that his future in hockey was in jeopardy.
“One day, Punch invited me out to his boat, and we did some real soul searching about my problem,” Mr. Beck said in a 1981 interview with The New York Times. “He asked me what I wanted to be, broke me down into tears, then built me back up again. When I left that boat, I wanted to play hockey.”
Mr. Beck went on to play three seasons for Mr. McLean and 10 more in the NHL. In a Facebook message after the coach’s death, the former member of the Colorado Rockies, New York Rangers and Los Angeles Kings paid tribute to Mr. McLean, saying that every member of the New Westminster Bruins who played for him “would have died for him,” and that the coach was the reason he made it to the NHL.
“He was bigger than life itself. More than a legend with an aura about him that was unmatchable. His key to success was how he managed to get the utmost from every player. Made them the best they could be. I think of all my teammates and the numerous other Bruin players. Success wasn’t defined if you made it to the NHL. Ernie was prouder on what kind of young man you were.”
McLean coached future NHLers on his way to BC Hockey Hall of Fame induction.HO/The Canadian Press
Mr. McLean coached a Canadian team to a disappointing bronze medal at the 1978 world junior championships in Montreal. The star-studded squad, considered one of the best Canadian junior teams not to win gold, was led in scoring by a skinny 16-year-old Wayne Gretzky.
Initially, Mr. McLean didn’t think such a young player could compete at an international level. Only at the urging of the phenom’s coach in Sault Ste. Marie, his old friend Muzz MacPherson, did the kid get a tryout. Mr. McLean later recalled their phone call: “I said, ‘Okay, Muzz, on your word I’ll bring him in.’ So, I brought him in and of course right away he just shone.”
Later that year, Mr. McLean lived up to his nickname when he popped referee John Fitzgerald when the official skated by him during a game in Portland, Ore. He was suspended for 25 games on account of the outrageous cuff.
The lowest moment in Mr. McLean’s career happened on March 22, 1979, when he was suspended after some of his Bruins attacked members of the Portland Winter Hawks in a mean-nothing game at the end of the season in New Westminster.
Seven of his players pleaded guilty to charges of common assault following the one-sided, on-ice melee. They were granted conditional discharges in provincial court but barred from organized hockey for the first half of the following season.
The brutality of the incident shook the sport’s mentality, and the city of New Westminster considered terminating its lease with the team. Mr. McLean apologized for the brawl and said he was pondering retirement.
“Maybe the game has gone by me. I’m an old horse who’s been at it 25 years. It’s tough to change your thinking. The game is changing, maybe I haven’t changed with it.”
After the Bruins missed the playoffs in 1980, Mr. McLean left coaching when he and Mr. Shinske sold the team to flamboyant Vancouver businessman Nelson Skalbania for $325,000. The franchise would later move to Kamloops, B.C.
Mr. McLean briefly returned to a position behind the bench in the mid-1980s as coach of a short-lived second incarnation of the New Westminster Bruins. He led the team to just 18 wins in the 72 games of the 1986-87 season, his last.
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Ernest John Vincent McLean came into the world on Nov. 3, 1932, in Estevan, Sask., the second of four boys born to coal miner Thomas McLean and Emily McLean. He told The Globe his birth took place in a mine shaft because the mining shacks were too cold. “It’s warm in a mine,” he explained.
His first pair of ice skates came to him at age 12. Five years later he was agile enough on the blades to earn an invitation to the New York Rangers’ training camp. At 19, he wore the colours of the Humboldt Indians of the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League. During the 1952-53 season he tallied 50 points in 45 games, with an acceptable 36 penalty minutes compiled.
He eventually became an assistant coach with the Humboldt Indians, who in 1957 moved to Estevan as the Bruins.
Mr. McLean was coach and co-owner in 1970 when misfortune struck. He was flying a single-engine airplane alone above northern Saskatchewan while working for his family’s heavy construction business when the plane iced up and crashed into a stand of pine trees.
“My jaw was nearly pulled off, and my eye was hanging on my cheek,” he told The Canadian Press in 1975. “I packed snow around my eye and tied it up with a T-shirt and yellow shorts and started off the next afternoon.”
The guy described by Globe sportswriter Richard Proctor as “tougher than whalebone” crawled his way to civilization and had dozens of wood splinters removed from his head and face at a Regina hospital. Two years of surgeries left him with a reconstructed jaw and a glass left eye.
Despite the severe mishap, he never lost his adventurous spirit. In 1991, the gold-prospecting Mr. McLean was featured in National Geographic magazine.
Two days before his death, he was celebrated in New Westminster as part of a campaign to erect a statue of him in the city. “Punch McLean put New Westminster on the map when it comes to hockey,” city councillor Daniel Fontaine told CBC News.
Mr. McLean was predeceased by his wife, Francis Grace McLean. He leaves his sons, Brian McLean and Brent McLean, three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
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