Fights, fiascos and mayhem: How the Golden Eagles first made Salt Lake love hockey

Chris Biotti took a left out of the old Golden Eagles locker room and sauntered onto the Salt Palace’s floor.

John Stockton. Jerry Sloan. Karl Malone. All of them were standing there before a mid-morning shootaround. So Biotti did what most 20-year-olds could only dream of doing: started hoisting up shots with the future NBA Hall of Famers.

A few months before, Biotte was in Cambridge, Mass., playing hockey at Harvard. Now, the Calgary Flames first-round draft pick was in Salt Lake City rubbing elbows with some of the NBA’s biggest names.

“How could life get any better than this?” he thought.

“We had a great relationship with Jazz players back then,” Biotte said.

“We’d go to Jazz games, and I’m sure they became fans of ours,” former Eagles center Rick Barkovich said.

That was 1988, when the Jazz and the Golden Eagles shared one roof. That winter the city was captivated by what went on at the Salt Palace. The Jazz went to the NBA playoffs. The Golden Eagles won the International Hockey League. The Palace was in a full-throated uproar every night, as the teams traded days packing the place to the gills.

“Salt Lake was magical,” Biotte remembered.

Almost 40 years later, hockey and basketball will once again share a roof in Utah, with the Arizona Coyotes’ impending move to Salt Lake City — and the Golden Eagles want you to know that Utah’s hockey legacy started with them. Their story is littered with drunken fights, travel woes and even murder. But on the ice, they won big. And for that 1988 season, the Jazz and the Golden Eagles were the hottest tickets in town.

“We were outdrawing the basketball team,” former owner Bill Acord said. “I’m telling you, we broke the fire code. We’d add seats to the concourse just so people could get in.”

The backstory

The Golden Eagles waited to take off and return home from a grueling 17-day road trip, but their plane taxied on the Kansas City runaway for what felt like ages.

Sitting in the front of the plane, team owners, Bill Acord and Art Teece, didn’t know the cause for the delay until a manager came up to him with an unusual request.

“Here comes one of our guys who ... had this look on his face, like ‘Oh God,’” Acord remembered. “And he says, ‘I hate to even ask you this, but would you mind having just a half a sandwich?’”

Acord stared blankly. “What are you asking me?”

The manager proceeded to explain the unfortunate situation. Before they left for the airport, he’d made sandwiches and put them in boxes. Somehow on the way over, the bus ran over the boxes. The players in the back were threatening to mutiny if they didn’t get food quickly. A ration had become necessary.

Acord gave up his meal to the ravenous players. The manager promised it wouldn’t happen again, but everyone knew it would (at least in some fashion). Dysfunction was the law of minor league hockey at the time, particularly for the Eagles who had a more checkered, and mysterious, history than most.

The Golden Eagles started in the 1960s, when Dan Meyer bought the team and moved it to Salt Lake. They were the only professional show in town. The Jazz wouldn’t arrive from New Orleans until 1979.

Things were rocky financially from the beginning. The misfortunes came to a dramatic conclusion when Meyer attended an NHL and WHL meeting in Minnesota in 1972. He told his assistant general manager and coach, Al Robbins, he was headed up to his room. Fifteen minutes later, he was dead on the ground below the 19th-story window in the Radisson South Hotel.

It was originally ruled a suicide, but police investigated and said they weren’t so sure. A police statement noted there was an “open wallet, empty of money, glasses with the lens broken on the bathroom floor, key in the lock, blood on the floor and wall.”

Years later, the Golden Eagles players and coaches would still tell stories about that day.

“They saw him go flying out the window,” Acord said. “And the windows were fixed, you couldn’t open them... He was borrowing [money] from the wrong people.”

The team nearly went under after Meyer’s death until Charlie Finley, who owned the NHL’s California Golden Seals and the Oakland A’s, kept it afloat for a bit. Thayne Acord and Teece bought it from him.

The Acords had owned teams in Utah before. The Utah Stars, the local ABA basketball team, was theirs. But the world of sports ownership was still new.

Acord remembered the first time he pulled up to an owners’ meeting. He used his old pickup truck. One of the other minority owners rented out a limo and suggested that when the starters got announced, the owners would get announced right after with a spotlight.

“I remember sitting there like, ‘Are you sh---ing me?” he said. “I guess I’ll be late for that game.”

But there were bigger problems.

Thayne Acord was killed in a burglary in 1980. An 18-year-old named John Calhoun forced Acord to pull $800 from his bank account and then tied him and his wife, Lorraine, up in the basement of their own home. He shot both of them at point-blank range.

The Salt Palace was renamed Acord Arena. The governor spoke at a vigil.

“I couldn’t deal with it,” Bill Acord, their son, said. “... I had to take over everything.”

Doug Palazzari, a player in 1980 and future NHL center, said “We all know what we know. It [wasn’t] a secret. But it was never an issue [on the team]. The sons took over, did a great job.”

The franchise teetered on the edge for years, but a move to the International Hockey League brought a second life.

The making of a championship

The 1988 championship season started at an Air Force base, with players clad in jumpsuits and staring up at a fighter jet.

The team’s pre-season poster was Top Gun-themed, and the group of minor league warriors and NHL hopefuls bought in.

“It was so cool,” Biotte said. “They’d put it up in bars around town.”

This team was different from years past. The Golden Eagles became the main affiliate for the Calgary Flames, meaning all the players were either drafted or sent down from the NHL squad.

Before, the Golden Eagles players were a collection of varied talent as the team bounced between affiliations. Now, Salt Lake was a high-level NHL feeder system.

Their coach, Paul Baxter, played for the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Flames. The players got old Suburbans from local boosters. A steam room was put into the Salt Palace for recovery.

“The Flames affiliation, you’re talking top-notch,” Barkovich said.

Early on, though, the team’s performances didn’t match expectations. Then, after a sub .500 start, Baxter sat down in the locker room before a game with the children’s book “The Little Engine that Could” in hand.

He read every page, deadly serious, to the professional hockey players in front of him.

“I think I can, I know I can,” Boitte said, reenacting lines from the book. “Then he stood up and said, ‘Gentleman, I know we f---ing can.”

They proceeded to rattle off 40 regular-season wins and fans loved it.

Before, the players could sneak away at 1 p.m. to ski at Snowbird and Brighton for $9. As the team got better, and more fans filled the Salt Palace, people recognized them.

“One owner came to us and said, ‘Hey, you guys were seen skiing. That’s against your contract,’” Boitte remembered. “We never did it again.”

Instead, they started trading tickets for free rounds of golf at Park City courses.

The Golden Eagles had become a nightly attraction. On the ice, they had players hit so hard that the opponents literally went flying into the stands.

“The boards were really forgiving,” said Stu Grimson, who eventually played in the NHL.

With players almost falling into fans’ laps, it became common for spectators to pour beer onto opposing players. There was no plexiglass between the ice and seats. One player chased a fan up cement stands 10 rows with skates because he was so frustrated, play-by-play man Mike Barack remembered.

Off the ice, the antics of the players and fans became a spectacle.

During period breaks, the Golden Eagles hosted bikini competitions for men and women. Media members voted on a winner.

The personality of the players shined throughout the season. There was one player, future St. Louis Blues defenseman Barclay Plager, who often got kicked out of games for hard hits. He used the downtime to take players’ fake teeth out of their lockers and put them in mailing packages back to Salt Lake. By the time the game was finished, they were gone.

“We had players trying to get thrown out with him so he wouldn’t be alone in the locker room,” Brian Acord said. “Players would eat soup the rest of the road trip because they didn’t have teeth.”

By the end of that season, the team was so good it barely practiced. Baxter made a game of it. He’d pick a specific number of minutes the team would practice and the team made $12 side bets on what he’d say.

“He’d say, ‘We are practicing 41 minutes today,’” Boitte said. “And we’d all cheer. I don’t think he knew about the bets.”

Playoffs were challenging as the weather warmed up. One series in Dallas, the box of a rink kept fogging up due to the Texas heat. The game was delayed several times. The radio call was made from a wooden platform above the goal, with a spiral staircase just to get to it.

“That’s just minor league hockey,” Brian Acord said.

But the Golden Eagles eased through the playoffs that year after an early seven-game scare from the Peoria Riverman. They knocked off Colorado’s team in six games and scored nine goals in the Turner Cup final against the Flint Spirts.

Thousands greeted them at the airport gate with the trophy.

Hockey returns

The Golden Eagles were eventually sold to Jazz owner Larry H. Miller, and then bought off by owners in Detroit. The team is now defunct. But former goalie Paul Skidmore still gets envelopes in the mail every year with his hockey card in them.

It will usually be from a Salt Lake fan trying to round up autographs of all the players.

After all this time, the legacy of the Golden Eagles still holds weight.

And now fans in Utah are preparing for a new team to rally around.

This NHL team won’t have the same drama. It won’t stay in Red Roof Inns in Flint, Mich. They won’t get grounded in Peoria, Ill. because the wheels of the plane literally froze to the tarmac (all true stories).

But it’ll be big-time hockey.

And nobody should forget who broke the ice in Salt Lake City.