Mike Keenan, 'Iron Mike: My Life Behind the Bench' | SportsLit S8E15

In his coaching memoir, Keenan explains his methodology honed over a half-century behind the bench. Just don't choose the same words.

Host-executive producer: Neil Acharya; tech’l producer: Michael Ella; cocreator: Nathan Sager.

Guest: Mike Keenan, Iron Mike: My Life Behind The Bench (with Scott Morrison, Penguin Random House Canada, October 2024)

Topics: Hockey, Coaching, Cross-sports theory, modern NHL history

more info: sportslit.ca.

Mike Keenan is checking — confessing to — his blind spots before he gets on the I-75.

I is for Iron Mike; 75 for the milestone birthday the championship coach will mark in October. Iron Mike is a coaching memoir that is also a coaching clinic, pebbled with how-not-tos. He was a reformist coach who put together specialty assistants — E.J. McGuire, one of the greats — when other NHL teams had a boat mechanic working as a team trainer, or had ashtrays at each dressing room stall.

Soon enough, those coaches get the Reputation Precedes Them stage, and have to resist the urge to settle.

“You don’t believe your own con,” Keenan tells a flying-solo Neil Acharya near the end of their discussion, with a trust-me laugh. “Some guys do, but I never did.”

Please feel free with the some guys do guessing game

And everyone knows the coach’s cryptic when a player walks up to ask if something said in front of the room was meant specifically for them. “If you have to ask, you must have a question.” Keenan asked questions players needed to be asked if they wanted to improve.

A health emergency forced me to scratch from this episode, and Neil without hesitation pressed on. (I am feeling much better now.)

Since I was in the press box for this one, I can sprinkle in what I get from these texts. It is travel writing with HockeyDB and Elite Prospects as guides. Basically, you get to do the Jonathon Jackson Connector Game, connecting people, places, and teams that are long gone.

In youth hockey in Canada, everything starts with birth year and location. For Keenan, those are 1949, and Bowmanville, Ont., the bedroom community next to the automaker hub of Oshawa. At the time, birth year and place mean a lot. Toss out a few other Boomer-vintage NHLers date/place, it will become evident. With a bit of knowledge of the 1970s NHL, you can probably go 5-for-5 identifying the notable hockey player.

Jan. 22, 1946; Montréal, Qué.
June 16, 1946; Niagara Falls, Ont.
March 20, 1948; Parry Sound, Ont.
Aug. 13, 1949; Flin Flon, Man.
Nov. 13, 1950; Victoriaville, Qué.¹

That post-war baby boomer reached their Prospect stage when hockey was looking creaky. One could belabour, but until the early 1960s the NHL was an antitrust case on skates. There was no apparent limit to how many promise rings, aka the C-form, a team could give to a boy as young as 10 as long as his parents and guardians signed. Recruiting for a league with a north of 95 percent Canada/Québec talent pool was monopolized by Les Canadiens, and the Ontario-out west, of the Leafs and Red Wings. It was a big three and three fillers.

• Stanley Cup competitions in the six-team era (1942-67): 25

• Cup wins by either Montréal, Toronto, or Detroit: 24

• The other teams: 1 (Chicago, 1961)

A lot of other tumults changed hockey during the teens of Mike Keenan. Expansion would further full-time professionalism. The Americans also got some results at the Olympics, and began to believe this “BaskIceBall” might suit a technical university in snowy place better than football. The promise ring method had to be equalized for the teams, if not the players, so the NHL became a draft league.

It should not be.

Cawledge Hockey drives some disruption. It shows there is more than one clinical path: completing high school, bo to university. And, like in football, the NCAA version of the game is probably the labwork for what the pros will look like in 20 years.

Player Keenan has a characteristic arc. Three years D1 at a border-state school, some “get it out of your system” senior and minor pro, and then he starts coaching and teaching. He turned down GM to teach high school for about US$36,500 in 2024 currency.

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Keenan was an innovator with the Philadephia Flyers. He and collaborator Scott Morrison are always careful to say Keenan teams were “one of” the first to use a new knowledge or skill-building tool.

There is also good detail of why the Flyers, his first organization, bought in to what Keenan wanted to do. There is also a claim that dressing room stalls at the old Chicago Stadium still had waist-level astrays when Keenan took over the ’Hawks in 1989.

Anyway, this is a good character assessment offered for someone who, like Keenan, “believe(s) in my principles, but, with the benefit of hindsight, I might have adjusted my methodology … I don’t know why I was so driven to succeed and win, at times irrationally. But I was. Winning requires abnormal behaviour.”²

Up to you to decide whether you want that in your life. Some generational context might be needed. The big one is the cultural effect of the Canada Cup.

So what was the Canada Cup?

The book cover depicts Keenan lifting the Stanley Cup with the 1994 Rangers. That is fair. Everyone knows what the Stanley Cup looks like. His signature coaching moment, though, was 6¾ seasons earlier, in the climax to hockey’s cold war between Canada and the Soviet Union. He had all the scenarios practised to dial up the right combo for an unforgettable winning goal.

Sept. 15, 1987, at Hamilton. Gretzky to Lemieux, for the 6-5 Canada win over the Soviet Union to win the Canada Cup. That put Canada over in the sequel to the Summit Series, just before the Cold War ended.

Keenan risked reputation. For a D-zone faceoff, with two teams strained by playing the equivalent of 3½ games in five days on the softer summer ice, he rolled the dice. He slapped the Russians across the face with a 3CODP. Three centres out at once, with two offensive defencemen.

I already had Gretz and Mario on the ice, and rather than put out a winger, I selected Dale Hawerchuk. He was winning a lot of faceoffs, and I had coached him in junior. I just had a feeling he could win that faceoff. That line had never played together. On defence I had Murph and Coffey, two offensive defencemen in the defensive zone. I ran the bench, both the forwards and defence. Putting out all that offensive talent in the defensive zone isn’t something a lot of coaches would do, but I was coaching to win, not survive that shift and make it into overtime. (Soviet head coach Viktor) Tikhonov rode four lines and they had their fourth line out. (Iron Mike, pg. 124)

Where would you see that in hockey now? Not sure. You would see it in college football. That is something the late great Mike Leach calls. Tie game with under two minutes left, a desire to avoid overtime. Put two quarterbacks on the field, and four receivers take off on 4 Verticals.

That is a beautiful memory of what hockey looked like to Xennials. Frantic, hair-on-fire, last-goal-wins, the West and the East resolving differences through competition. That was what it felt like then to a 10-year-old. Flags flew forever, print the legend…

There was a reckoning, and we know where to read about that…

• Cruise, David; Griffiths, Alison. Net Worth: Exploding the Myths of Pro Hockey by David; Griffiths Cruise (Viking, 1991).

• Conway, Russ. Game Misconduct: Alan Eagleson and the Corruption of Hockey (MacFarlane, Walter, and Ross, 1994)

It is a fun interview betwen Neil and Keenan. Keenan won everywhere he went, outside of the Bettmanified NHL. He has won in every league. Some notes and related texts.

1980: OHL Peterborough Petes, J. Ross Robertson Cup

Different times: Keenan’s only Petes team were considered stingy for the era by yielding only 3½ goals per game. Two OHL teams scored 400 goals that season.

Everyone has a take on whether the Petes eased up in a Memorial Cup game to knock out the western Canada team. The current four-team, host-city format came in two seasons later.

1983: AHL Rochester Americans, Calder Cup

That Rochester crew included Val James, the first Black American to play in the NHL. James has a good autobiography, Black Ice: The Val James Story (ECW Press, 2020).

For arena experiences, the War Memorial in Rochester must be experienced.

1984: U of Toronto Varsity Blues, University Cup

Some homework: look up the schedule of OUA, AUS, Canada West, or RSEQ (which is just a women’s league). Get out to a game. You will have fun. Several SportsLit episodes have touched on this level of hockey, including Justin Davis’s appearance for Conflicted Scars.

Downtown Toronto has good viewing options. Varsity Arena is a bandbox barn. It is where hockey hall of famer Jayna Hefford pursed hockey before there even was a Canadian women’s championship. Toronto Metro, alma mater of broadcast great John Saunders, plays in the refurbed Maple Leaf Gardens at the corner of Church and Carlton streets. The old Gardens room is still there.

1987: Team Canada, Canada Cup

Be empathetic if any American fans have not heard of this tournament. If memory serves, USA Network had the rights, but cut away for coverage of NFL labor negotiations.

1991: Chicago, NHL Presidents’ Trophy

Hundreds of hockey pools were ruined when the North Stars, who finished 38 points behind the ’Hawks, upset them in six games. The North Stars buried 15 power-play goals. Who were the three who each scored three man-up markers? Brian Bellows and Brian Propp, of course. But Mark Tinordi also twined thrice from the point.

1991: Team Canada, Canada Cup

Question: who would be the historical figure-narrator in “a fiction based on a fact” David Peace-style novel that summarizes the Eric Lindros-Québec saga?

Understandably, Joe Sakic, to illustrate the politics.³ Honestly, it has to be from the vantage of Joe Sakic. That bus ride out of Swift Current is why it cannot be done in the right sensitivity.⁴

Sakic was the sixth-leading scorer in the 1991 NHL season, and joint-No. 3 scorer at the world championship where Canada won the silver medal, a notch higher than the Soviet Union. And yet he went in the first cuts and Lindros made it?

1994: Rangers, Stanley Cup (and Presidents’ Trophy)

One personification of the ’94 Rangers depth. Eddie Olczyk, who hadn’t played in two months, drew in for the do-or-done Game 6 against New Jersey, the Mark Messier Guarantee Game. That seemed to work out for everybody.

2014: KHL Magnitogorsk Metallurg, KHL Garagin Cup

Keenan/Morrison’s passage about his Magnitogorsk days is blunt: “coaching in Russia with the language issues made me think about all the foreign players I’d coached in the NHL. I was embarrassed that I’d never thrown them a lifeline, never told them how to bank, or find an apartment. I’d missed the boat. Most of us probably did that back then.”⁵

A good look-in-the-mirror question!

Reminder: this episode is available on all pod platforms. Further info is on sportslit.ca.

That is more than enough for now. Please be kind, especially to yourself.

1. Serge Savard, Derek Sanderson, Bobby Orr, Bobby Clarke, Gilbert Perreault.

2. Ibid., pg. 317.

3. UPI Archives, “Team Canada makes 15 cuts,” Aug. 20, 1991.

4. It took Sakic 21 years to speak on the record about the Swift Current Broncos bus crash.

5. Ibid., P. 300