By JOHN ALLEMANG
Saturday, September 14, 2002 – Print Edition, Page F1
The passage of time holds an almost mystical grip on Alan Eagleson.
He can quote the day in 1963 he was defeated in a federal election by revered hockey good-guy Red Kelly, which just happens to be the same date six years later when he first cracked the Russian hockey bureaucracy and set in motion the legendary Canada-Soviet Summit Series.
He remembers angrily the moment in February, 1998, when he was "screwed" by Canadian prison officials and not given early release from Toronto's Mimico Correctional Centre, where he had been incarcerated for stealing funds from the National Hockey League Players Association.
And he recalls with equal clarity, but much greater calm, the worrying Toronto night of July 16, 1992, when, prompted by his wife and chief civilizing influence Nancy, the self-described shit disturber, who could personally start a riot in a Soviet police state, found his way to God.
"Everybody said, 'Oh, he's found religion because of all his trouble.' I found religion because of my grandson. He was born with transposition of the great vessels of the heart, and they told us he was going to die by midnight. Nancy was driving from the hospital past St. James Cathedral, where I'd never been except for state funerals, and she went in and said a little prayer, and he survived. She considers to this day that that prayer was a large part of it, and since 1992 she goes to church almost every Sunday, and I haven't missed a Sunday."
We're talking -- or rather, the square-jawed, broad-shouldered 69-year-old in the elegant blue suit and the discreet Summit Series ring is talking and half the café is listening -- in a little coffee shop just steps from the cathedral where it all began. On that night 10 years ago, Alan Eagleson took a vow of silence, at least the kind of vow and the kind of silence that a frequently profane raconteur is capable of taking. In the midst of the legal threats and media hostilities and angry attacks from Hall of Fame players such as Bobby Orr that were so different from the adulation he'd once known as Canada's hockey hero, the Eagle decided that the time was right to shut his mouth.
The events of that night, as he tells it, "put all the other crap into a different perspective." His anxieties about being pursued by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation for racketeering and mail fraud in his various conflicting hockey roles all seemed to dissolve into a tranquil silence.
"I'm not worried about where I'm going," he sums up in a decidedly odd statement of faith from a man who wants to distance himself from his years of disgrace. "I'm thankful for where I've been."
But it's the uneasiness he feels about the rewriting of his past that has brought him to this place, and this conversation. The prodigal Alan Eagleson is back in the land of the garrulous, and the reason he has decided to make his voice heard again returns to that same old obsession: time. It has been five years since he gave up his last fight and went to jail, ending one of the great rise-and-fall stories in Canadian history. And more important, both for him and for the interpreters of Canadian history that he keeps close watch on, it's 30 years since one of the great fall-and-rise stories of our national mythology, Team Canada's come-from-behind victory in the titanic eight-game series against the mighty Russians in September, 1972.
He isn't getting his due, he says. He was not invited to the Canadian team's 30th anniversary celebrations, prompting one leading player of the time -- Bobby Clarke, Mr. Eagleson's most fervent loyalist and best known for dashing Russian hopes by deliberately breaking their star player's leg -- to noisily boycott the party.
With Mr. Eagleson and his big mouth safely out of the way in reticent exile -- he divides his time, and whatever remains of his assets after the U.S. courts made him part with $1-million, between a spacious farmhouse in Thornbury, Ont., and a rented flat in London, England -- other people he has barely heard of are getting credit for the Team Canada achievement. "When I die," he says jovially, for with his keen sense of time he fully intends to live into his nineties, "maybe they'll say I had nothing to do with it."
In one of those deliberate acts of historical forgetting that obsess police states and sports bureaucracies (compare Ben Johnson and Pete Rose), he has already been whited-out of hockey history, losing his place in the Hockey Hall of Fame around the same time he was expelled from the Order of Canada. Too many of his opponents are taking shots at him, he believes.
"I don't run from anything," he says, the tough-as-nails lacrosse instincts of his university days resurfacing (he majored in French -- can you believe it?). ". . . It's hard, 10 years of sitting in the corner, watching them drop bombs on my life."
At some hearing or other, an interviewer stuck a microphone in his face and asked what kept him going every day. "And it just came to me like that, simple," he remembers. "The three Fs kept me alive: family, friends and faith."
Shortly after the clip of the more-or-less born-again Mr. Eagleson aired, he was at the 40th-wedding anniversary party of his late friend John Sopinka, a Supreme Court of Canada judge, and the criminal remembers the judge telling him, "Eagle, I thought that was terrific. I'm not family, but I'm sure your friend. But I have to tell you, when I heard you say the three Fs, I thought you were going to say, 'Fuck 'em, fuck 'em, and fuck 'em.' "
Which in a sense has always been Mr. Eagleson's operating principle. And even in times of doubt, the advice given to him by his great friend John Turner keeps coming back: "He just said, 'You've got to be yourself, keep your head high and keep your big chin stuck forward, you've got nothing to be ashamed of. You've got a choice,' he said. 'A lot of people turn into turtles, and hide till the dust all settles. But you couldn't live that way.' "
Many people in the hockey world say, contrary to the former prime minister's expert opinion, that Mr. Eagleson has much to be ashamed of, that he should hide in his thick shell along Lake Huron or the Thames until the end of his days. But for all the rage that has been vented about his appropriating funds left and right while colluding with hockey's tight-fisted owners to keep salaries down, the FBI and the RCMP could not quite pin him down as a villain on an epic scale. He managed to escape extradition to the United States, which caused another late friend, Willard Estey, a Ontario Supreme Court judge, to quip, "Alan, You were the first person in history to get away from the Russians and now get away from the Americans."
Mr. Eagleson was found guilty of three counts of fraud involving players' insurance premiums in the United States, for which he gave up properties in Florida, New York City and London to pay off the $1-million fine. "The best line," a never-contrite Mr. Eagleson says with his usual bravado, "came from Jerry O'Sullivan, a lawyer in Boston: 'Al, when this started, they said you've been paid $5-million for the World Hockey Association, you've stolen $20-million from the pension fund, you got $5-million for this. . . . You know what they've come up with? A million items of a dollar each.' "
In Canada, he was found guilty of three more fraud charges connected with skimming hockey tournament revenue, for which he served six months alongside the drug dealers in Mimico's medium-security jail, not far from the working-class neighbourhood where he grew up. One of his great treasures is the drawing of a stately eagle that the boys in his dormitory block presented to him as a 65th-birthday gift. He was the oldest guy in the joint, but that didn't stop him from trying to show up the young studs on the baseball diamond or using his undeniable charm to win whatever popularity prizes were going.
In one of the reports done on him during his time in Mimico (and handed over to him when his six months were up), it was said, "He could probably run for mayor of Mimico and win the majority votes of inmates and guards." He got into trouble for signing autographs, not the sort of thing that would bother him, and he loves to tell the story of being recognized in his local mall by a fellow inmate, who insisted on introducing the famed Eagle to his parents.
No, he won't be organizing a turtles union any time soon. Even after a Globe and Mail column denouncing him earlier this week (" 'Why are you talking to The Globe?' my son said. 'They just carved you a new asshole' "), he's happy to get a few licks in, to give credit to those who stuck by him, gab about the London stage with unexpected sophistication, and sometimes, in a rare display of Eaglesonian braggadocio, do all three at the same time.
"Last time we were in London," he says, leaning conspiratorially over his iced cappuccino, "we saw Julius Caesar with the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican. I saw Caesar, and I said to Nancy, 'This guy's having the same problems I had for a while.' I can laugh at it, it doesn't bother me to make the comparison. Of course my hero's Mark Antony, who's Bobby Clarke. As for Brutus, you can fill in the names."
Well, Bobby Orr, for a start. His former prize client was the moving force behind the U.S. investigation and the side of Mr. Eagleson that is supposed to have learned something from his grandson's miracle survival just can't hold back when the great Orr's name is mentioned. "I know Bobby Orr," he says in a well-practised attack. "Bobby Orr knows Bobby Orr. And a few other people know Bobby Orr. Find the other people. I make no more comments than that."
But he can't help himself. "I know Bobby Orr. Go search. I'm not going to point you to your pot of gold. 'There's no question,' my wife said, 'you created the Frankenstein.' "
In Mr. Eagleson's mind, he is guilty of nothing, not even the relatively minor charges for which he was convicted. His brand of religion has nothing to do with confessing sins. He couldn't bring himself to acknowledge any wrongdoings in his parole hearing, and when asked why he ended up in jail, the best he could do was, "Things were done differently in my day."
Could he have landed the historic '72 Series if everything had been done above board? "It wouldn't have happened," he says. "I had to get Bunny Ahearne [then president of the International Ice Hockey Federation] on side, and what was the best way of doing that? Give him a first-class seat." He recites a catalogue of his sins in mock contrition. "I'm not going to suggest because I pleaded guilty that I did wrong. . . . I tell you, I used to pay the Russians $100,000 in cash, and you know why? Because they wouldn't play otherwise."
He always worked airlines for upgrades and hotels for discounts, proud of his wheeler-dealer touch. "I never bought at first-class ticket in my life. I could talk myself into an upgrade any time. What was the tradeoff, a couple of seats at the game? Now was that right or wrong? . . . Christ, I traded some of our meat or some of our beer on the travels to get better rooms or to get the players gifts."
He pleaded guilty, again on John Turner's advice, to protect his wife from further suffering and to keep the family fortunes from disappearing into lawyers' pockets. He is clearly uncomfortable with the aura of guilt that surrounds him, and the sense of disgrace he is expected to feel, and he still thrusts that big chin forward as though he were a functioning power broker. When he walks by the business-breakfast café in Toronto's swank King Edward Hotel, he can't resist explaining why he is anxious to avoid it: "Too many people will want to talk to me."
But at the same time, he jokes about being an old fart who whiles away his mornings over coffee at Thornbury's Wild Orchid café, sniffing around local real-estate deals -- "I don't want to be working" -- and he calls his Toronto lunch club of former cabinet ministers and prime ministers "the old retreads." He hasn't been hiding out or living a disbarred lawyer's life of exile, he maintains, just behaving in a manner appropriate to his advanced age. "My wife said, while we were sitting in a Florence square, 'The good thing about all this is, we're enjoying life. If we were at home, if all this hadn't happened, you'd still be working.' And she's probably right."
He does a little work still, turning his wife's family real-estate holdings near Thornbury into lucrative golf-course properties, and earning a few thousand here and there in London "consulting for a company over in the States that needs somebody to filter people out for them."
The threat of lawsuits is always in the air, but yet again he has time working for him: The U.S. Supreme Court recently threw out a racketeering suit brought by NHL players because they waited too long before proceeding. Being old has its benefits, at least when it comes to the statute of limitations.
Still, the days of staying at the opulent Danielli Hotel in his favourite city, Venice, are long gone. His European base is now a 750-square-foot apartment near London's Paddington Station, and the continental life he describes himself leading consists of senior-citizen bargain bus rates, £15 obstructed-view seats at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, daily visits to the Venetian rooms at the National Gallery (he cherishes the Canaletto and Tintoretto paintings) and stargazing at Le Caprice restaurant while eating the cheapest item on the menu, the £12 poached eggs.
He won't answer to the description "bargain-hunter" but, he says proudly, "I'm budget-conscious. You never saw me driving a big fast car. I never believed in that stuff, still don't. I drive a Jeep, my wife drives a PT Cruiser. I defy anybody to show how I wasted money on myself."
He and his wife love music -- the man who is best remembered for his patriotic attack on a Russian goal judge is now besotted by opera singers Cecilia Bartoli and Barbara Bonney, and watches out for concerts by Canadian performers such as Louis Lortie or Michael Schade at London's Wigmore Hall.
Every Friday at 5 p.m. when he's in London, he makes a point of attending the evensong service at St. Paul's Cathedral and listening to the ravishing boys choir. And yet, Eagle being eternally, unapologetically, irredeemably Eagle, he can't help but turn the service of worship into a scene of schmooze. "They know us so well now, we sit in the choir. We've got to know all the choristers, their parents, their grandparents . . ."
Talking of music the way he used to talk about a Bobby Orr rush, he recites the list of performers who grace his Jeep's CD player on the two-hour drive to Toronto. "The only non-classical CD, the kids gave it to me for Christmas before I went into Mimico, is Chumbawamba. I go to my son's Christmas morning, 'Okay, Grandpa, you open the first gift.' Chumbawamba. I just love this crap . . . is this a joke? 'Play it!' I put it on the CD player, and it's the Manchester United song."
And there, in the little café near the cathedral, he starts to sing in a light, sweet chorister's voice. "We'll be singing, when we're winning, we'll be singing, boom, boom, boom, I get knocked down, but I get up again, you're never going to keep me down."
They try. A few blocks away at the Hockey Hall of Fame, he is officially a non-person. "They won't give me my stuff back," he complains, stunned at the patent unfairness of it all. "I said I thought it would be nice if I'm no longer welcome on their walls, if they sent it back. I said I don't need it all back, I'm not going to have a raffle sale of high-priced junk, just give the stuff that would be important to my family." Top of the list is his former prized possession, the stick Bobby Orr scored his first goal with.
But with Chumbawamba pointing the way, the irritation doesn't last. He jokes about his waning skills in dealing with the Hall ("These are very tough negotiations, I'm not accustomed to this") and prefers to remember that special day before his expulsion when his son took a picture of him there with his grandson.
"I'm not worried about where I'm going," he had said earlier, "I'm thankful for where I've been," and now it begins to make sense. In the parallel, chin-thrusting Eagleson universe of supreme self-confidence and periodic self-delusion, the past is more flexible than the future, just another item on the agenda that remains open for negotiation. Was he a criminal mastermind? Well, where are the big charges? Didn't he do time? Yes, but not because he was guilty. Doesn't Bobby Orr hate him? But John Turner et al love him. And wasn't his grandson supposed to die at midnight?
Alan Eagleson looks at his watch, a souvenir from one of his wild hockey adventures that eluded the Hall of Fame. He has talked non-stop for almost two hours, setting the record straight. Now, he really has to go. Got to get over to the cathedral. Time to pay back God for his loyalty.
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