Manitoba Moose

Every week a Sun staffer gets to know a prominent local sports figure in Up Close. This week, hockey writer Ken Wiebe steps beyond the bench with new Manitoba Moose head coach Claude Noel, who officially became the sixth bench boss in franchise history late last month. 

THE SUN: Where does your passion for hockey come from?

CLAUDE NOEL: Growing up in northern Ontario in a small mining town (Virginiatown), I don’t ever remember not playing hockey or not wanting to play hockey. It was always the thing to do, but it was seasonal. I don’t know where it got ingrained or how it started, but it’s always just been there. In Grade 7, the teacher asked everyone individually what they wanted to be when they grew up and I said I wanted to be a professional hockey player. It was kind of odd, but it was what I wanted to do. It was always in me.

TS: What NHL team did you root for as a youngster?

CN: The Montreal Canadiens. I was born in 1955 and in the ’60s I remember sitting in front of the TV, with my dad and my brother. I had a Montreal Canadiens bobblehead and every Saturday night, we watched the Habs play on Hockey Night in Canada and listened to the guy broadcasting in French. I always looked forward to Saturday nights.

TS: You played seven NHL games for the Washington Capitals during the 1979-80 season, what stands out most from that experience?

CN: It was unbelievable. It was my fifth year in the American Hockey League with the Hershey Bears and I was really surprised to get the call-up. It was quite a world tour I was on. I played against Wayne Gretzky and the Edmonton Oilers in Washington. We also played against Gordie Howe and his sons, who were with the Hartford Whalers. Those were great memories and I’ve often thought that I couldn’t have picked a better seven games. You would have liked it to be longer, but it didn’t work out that way.

TS: Another one of those games was at the fabled Montreal Forum. What was it like for a Habs fan to play against his favourite childhood team?

CN: My father was a big Habs fan and he came down with Lynda, who was my girlfriend at the time and became my wife. They took the train in to Montreal to watch me play. You talk about being surreal, being in the Montreal Forum and playing against the greats, like Guy Lafleur and Larry Robinson and all those guys. The funny thing was that I had a chance to win the game. It was below the hashmarks, right in front of the net. I came off the bench on a line change and I received a backhand pass from Paul Mulvey. Bunny Larocque was playing goal for the Canadiens. I redirected the pass and it was headed for the far corner, but I missed it by six inches. To this day, I can’t seem get that vision out of my head. I wish I would have at least got a goal because if you look at my stats, it was bagels across the board.

TS: Another game came against the Jets at the Winnipeg Arena. Were there any highlights from that one?

CN: Bobby Hull was on his last days of playing. I remember taking a series of offensive zone faceoffs and all of them resulted in shots on net. I won like five or six in a row and I couldn’t believe it. I was no faceoff expert, but I remember thinking ‘this is pretty good.’ It never resulted in a goal, but I thought it was great.

TS: Looking at your playing record, how did you become a member of the Buffalo Norsemen?

CN: I played my last year of junior with the Kitchener Rangers and my agent told me that I had a tryout with the Buffalo Sabres, so I had packed my apartment and was ready to go. The next day, I got a call from the agent around 8 o’clock telling me something went wrong and I wasn’t going to be attending their training camp. I was searching for a place to play and Willie Marshall, a long-time AHL great, was starting this team in the North American Hockey League. When I came back in the summer and people asked where I played, I would roll the A right out of that thing and it would be N-H-L.

TS: That year you made the NAHL final and faced the Johnstown Jets. What happened in the final game of that series?

CN: They were a tough team and we weren’t. When we went out for the warm-up, they had dressed 23 guys and we had 19. You could skate around the whole ice and I’ll never forget, I was skating and all of a sudden all of these guys were sprinting by going down to the other end. I was thinking ‘what is going on?’ I looked back and there were five guys piled on (teammate) Greg Neeld and they were pounding on him. I don’t know how we ever survived that brawl in warm-up and I don’t know how it got broken up. We hobbled our way back to the locker room and sat there and tried to regroup. The veteran players got together and the vote was that we would forfeit the game for fear of our health. We made our way to the bus and they were throwing stuff, yelling and spitting at us. People were throwing rocks at the bus and one broke a window. It was a real hostile crowd and situation. I’ll never forget being on the bus and thinking, what are you going to do if you have to come back to this league?

TS: But you didn’t have to go back, did you?

CN: I remember going back to the rink and the coach and GM told me I had been put on the Buffalo Sabres negotiating list. I went to training camp in Hershey. They said if I made the team, they would sign me to a contract. I signed a three-year contract and that was a great time in my life. I got a $10,000 signing bonus and bought a beautiful car for 5,900 bucks. A yellow Buick Century that I had for 13 years. I sold the car in 1990 or something like that and it had a lot of miles on it.

TS: Did you have any memorable moments with Punch Imlach, who was the Sabres GM at the time?

CN: He came down to Hershey and I was just nervous. I remember him offering me a contract and I was thinking I better give it some thought. I wanted to grab the pen out of his hand and sign it, but I thought I better play it cool. I talked to an older player, Bill Inglis, and he thought it was fair. The next day I walked in and was hoping they wouldn’t change their minds. Punch was a legendary guy and I remember him coaching the Maple Leafs. To sit across the desk from him in Hershey and have this guy offer you a contract was pretty awesome.

TS: How did you know it was time to retire from playing?

CN: I just knew. When I was 27, I had a chance to be a player/coach in Salzburg, Austria and that was a really good experience for me. I ended up playing another five years, but in my last year in Milwaukee of the IHL, I just knew I couldn’t do the things that I was able to do when I was younger. It was just time. A month before the season ended, we were playing Denver and I got hit crossing the offensive blue-line and I was out for five minutes on the ice. I woke up in an ambulance and I didn’t know where I was. I was out for the rest of the season and for the rest of that summer, I was just a mess. I had known way before that, that it was going to be my last year.