When Clark Gillies pummeled Dave Schultz, he lifted Islanders' championship hopes

EDITOR’S NOTE: Pat Calabria covered the Islanders for Newsday from 1975-85. The following are excerpts from a story he wrote that was published in Newsday on Oct.12, 1986, a few days after Clark Gillies was left unprotected in the NHL waiver draft and claimed by the Buffalo Sabres.

The Islanders came of age May 9, 1975. Clark Gillies made sure of that. He did it with his bare hands.

Gillies fought and bloodied Dave Schultz, the NHL villain of his time, in a playoff game the Islanders had to win. Gillies would go on to spend 12 productive seasons with the team, become an all-star twice and a Stanley Cup champion four times, and he once said that when he died he wanted to be buried in his home white jersey.

Even when the Buffalo Sabres claimed him on waivers last Monday, Gillies, 32, knew he would be linked forever with the Islanders. In fact, he will be linked forever with Schultz.

"When we think of Clarkie," former Islander Gerry Hart said, "we all think of Schultz."

Gillies was just finishing his rookie season that night 11 years ago. He was 6-3, 220 pounds, a raw-boned left wing tagged with the nickname "Jethro," after the Max Baer Jr. character on "The Beverly Hillbillies." It fit.

Gillies, remember, was the pride of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. When asked where Moose Jaw was, he'd always identify it: "Six feet from the moose's behind," and laugh.

SEE PHOTOSIsles' Clark Gillies through the years

"I can still see him that first year, following the veterans around," Glenn Resch said. "There he'd be, sitting like a big kid in the back seat of a car with Eddie Westfall and Craig Cameron, that big, old head sticking out the window. He just looked like Jethro."

His Bunyonesque size and enormous strength had an immediate impact on a team that had lost 101 games in two years and driven two coaches to retirement. It wasn't simply that the Islanders usually were beaten. Too often, they also were beaten up.

It was the era of the brawling Flyers — the Broad Street Bullies — with Moose Dupont and Don Saleski and, most of all, Schultz. The year before Gillies arrived, the Flyers were routing the Islanders when Schultz skated by their bench, shook his fist and dared the whole team to climb over the boards to fight. No one did.

"There were 20 guys looking for a hole to crawl into," Lorne Henning said.

But in 1975, the Islanders had an authentic star in Denis Potvin and an iron-willed coach in Al Arbour, and they had Gillies, who protected them.

The Islanders lost the first three games to the Flyers in the [1975] semifinals before winning Game 4. The Flyers had won the Cup the year before, and they were big and mean. They wore black helmets.

They were wrapping up a 5-1 victory at the Spectrum in Game 5 to avoid elimination again when Flyers coach Fred Shero sent Schultz out for the final shift. Years later, Schultz acknowledged in a biography that he was ordered to start a fight.

"You could sense that," Resch said.

There were 22 seconds left in the game when Gillies and Schultz turned up ice, past Resch in the goalmouth, and skated along the boards until reaching the top of the faceoff circle in front of the Islanders bench. There were words and suddenly both players stopped and shook their gloves off. The others rushed to form a circle around them.

Gillies hit Schultz hard, grabbed him by the neck of his uniform, and hit him again and again, until Schultz crumpled to the ice. The fight was over in seconds.

"I remember the power of those punches," Resch said. "Clark just engulfed him."

Schultz had to be helped off the ice. "I told the referee, `Don't let him hit me anymore,' " he said by telephone recently from his home in Cherry Hill, N.J. "It was the only time in my career I ever had to do that."

The Spectrum was silent. On the Flyers bench, faces dropped in disbelief. Gillies didn't like to fight and, in fact, later in his career was criticized for not fighting enough. But when he stood up to Schultz, the event changed him and the rest of the Islanders. It changed Schultz, too.

"It wasn't just that two guys had squared off and our guy had won," Hart said. "It was the way it happened. It was so one-sided. Schultz just cowered. It changed the course of the way we began to think about ourselves."