Game Over 
Ice Guys Finish First
How the Dallas Stars—yes, the Dallas Stars—got to be the most successful, most exciting sports team in Texas.
(Page 2 of 3)
The Stars’ on-ice development has been just as important. They came to Dallas intact, a winning rather than rebuilding club the first year, with a respected coach and general manager in Bob Gainey. Gainey, who is still the general manager, is a former captain of the Montreal Canadiens and a Hall of Famer, not for his numbers but because of his unrelentingly physical style. He is one of the greatest defensive forwards of all time, and it’s fair to say that the Stars have been created in his image. An old-fashioned hockey guy who works out of an office overlooking the practice rink, he keeps sheaves of statistics and scouting reports on a shelf behind him. Largely because of him, the Stars are respected by old-timers (i.e., Canadians) who might otherwise view them as tradition-trashers ripped from the north and catapulted to success by the almighty dollar.
The almighty dollar, however, doesn’t hurt. History and savvy got the Stars to a certain point, but owner Thomas O. Hicks’s deep pockets have taken them one step further. “He’s a guy who wants to be the best at everything he does, in either business or sports,” Modano says of the takeover ace, who bought the team in 1995. His open checkbook, for instance, made it possible for the Stars to acquire Hull and goaltender Ed Belfour. But being the best isn’t all he cares about. Down the road, when the pertinent broadcast contracts expire, Hicks—who owns a large number of TV and radio stations—would like to start his own regional sports network, showcasing the Stars, the Texas Rangers (which he also owns), and the Mavericks (it could be just a matter of time on that one).
The Boss
Ken hitchcock is the best possible confirmation of the old expression “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” The man known to many as Hitch is a career coach. He never played the game professionally, and although he is an avid golfer, he was anything but an athlete for a good portion of his adult life, tipping the scales at more than four hundred pounds.
What Hitchcock does is teach and win, parlaying his phenomenal success coaching teenagers into his current status in the NHL. Back in Edmonton, Hitchcock spent more than a decade working as a hockey equipment salesman while coaching midget hockey on the side. The latter is serious business in Canada; though it involves thirteen- to sixteen-year-olds, in terms of pressure, attention, and the role it plays in shaping a career, Triple-A Midget is tantamount to Texas high school football.
After Hitchcock’s Sherwood Park team went an astounding 575—69 in ten years, he finally quit the sporting goods store and made the move to major junior hockey in Kamloops, British Columbia. That level is the equivalent of college football, a stepping stone to the pros for both players and coaches. Hitchcock next worked for the Philadelphia Flyers as an assistant before signing on as head coach of the Stars’ minor league affiliate in Kalamazoo, Michigan. In Michigan he took off the weight (career coach or not, players had trouble taking him seriously), and soon after, halfway through the ’95-’96 season, when Gainey decided it would be best to concentrate on being general manager, he got the top job.
The locker room at the Stars’ practice facility has a sign over the exit door with six principles, among them “Never let yourselves get outworked” and “Pay the price necessary to win.” Most teams give only lip service to such mantras, but the Stars take them seriously. When they lose, it’s usually because they get outplayed or run into truly superior opposition; it’s almost never because of stupid mistakes or simply not showing up. Credit Hitchcock. That’s coaching.
In conversation, or even at the press conferences, it is difficult to imagine him raising his voice. Maybe it’s just that Canadian geniality: the easy pace of his sentences and the way he says “been” with that firm e sound (like “bean”). But this season the hockey world was abuzz about trouble in the Stars locker room, about Hitchcock and his players supposedly butting heads. Such stories would be more intriguing if the team wasn’t doing well. Hitchcock’s deadpan comment about it some months later was, “There’s times when there’s been some adversity, some of it coach-created”—but reports of an actual insurrection, he said, are “a bunch of crap.”
Coaches are tacticians, shrinks, and motivators, but in this day and age they are mostly CEOs, bringing all the parts of the machine together. The Stars are a study in contrasts, with a lot of variety among the players in terms of age, experience, and ego. Seven of the older veterans have been captains of other teams; the actual titular leaders are younger guns like Modano and defenseman Derian Hatcher, and there’s a group of younger players who are not yet established either on or off the ice. “There’s no coaching clinic for working with so many people with so many strong opinions,” Hitchcock says. “‘My way or the highway’ doesn’t work anymore. These people are set in their ways. If you go to a player every day and say, ‘Do you have any complaints today?’ you’re going to hear a lot.”
But even that has its value. Coaches may not be dictators anymore, but Hitchcock, a Civil War buff who participates in reenactments during the off-season, knows that sometimes a battle-ready unit needs something to fight for, and sometimes they need something to fight against. During one hellish stretch of consecutive games, he robbed the players of a much-anticipated off day. “They all were bitchin’, so we practiced. We needed them together, and we got them together—all complaining.”
The Boys
MIKE MODANO HAS TAKEN SO MUCH guff for it that you’d think it would have been expunged from the official record. But there it is on page 52 of the Dallas Stars media guide: “Has participated in photo shoots for Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, and Mademoiselle.” Somehow they left out the “At Home With . . .” feature in People.
Yes, he’s young (age 28), he’s charismatic, he drives a Range Rover and a BMW, and he’s regarded as one of Dallas’ most eligible bachelors (by everyone but his girlfriend). But in a transformation that has been tirelessly documented in sports pages from Minneapolis to Dallas to his hometown of Detroit, Modano didn’t get famous until he started doing things that actually made him less noticeable. Once a goal scorer, he’s at least a partial convert to the church of defensive hockey. And he’s not the only one. This year, there’s a new guy in the midst of his own transformation, and he describes it in his own unique way: “A few years ago if you told me to come back and play defense, I’d tell you to go f— yourself.” Brett Hull, come on down!
Famed as both a loudmouth and a guy who cared only about putting the puck in the net, no matter what happened to his team, Hull was the last guy anyone expected to see in a Dallas Stars uniform. But while he did manage to take part in one flare-up over playing time early in the season, the 34-year-old—who like Roger Clemens has taken on the role of aging star chasing after a championship—has been a model citizen. Now he talks about how he’s more interested in his plus-minus (a statistic that factors in how many goals your team gave up when you were on the ice as well as how many it scored) than the fact that he has 554 goals and will likely pass his father’s career total next year. “I want to score,” he says evenly, “but the game has changed.” Recently Hull was injured for a few weeks, and the team won five games out of six without him. “Not very good for my ego,” he joked to ESPN.
My Library
