Chairman of the Hockey Hall of Fame Bill Hay about to contact the 2012 Inductees Pavel Bure, Joe Sakic, Mats Sundin and Adam Oates on June 26, 2012. Mr. Hay died on Oct. 25 at the age of 88.Steve Poirier/Hockey Hall of Fame
On and off the ice, Bill (Red) Hay was a force in hockey.
As a player, he won the Calder Trophy as the National Hockey League’s rookie of the year in 1960. The following season, playing on Chicago’s Million Dollar Line, he won the Stanley Cup.
As an executive, he was president of the Calgary Flames, the president of Hockey Canada and the chief executive officer of the Hockey Hall of Fame.
Mr. Hay, who has died at 88, was a rare Canadian player of his era to have been formally educated. He is regarded as a trailblazer for having delayed the start of his professional hockey career to earn a degree from a U.S. college while playing for the varsity team.
The left-handed centre retired as a player at the age of 31 in 1967, though he likely had left several productive seasons.
“It wasn’t easy to leave hockey,” he said six years later. “At that time, league expansion had just begun. There was a great shortage of players and the money offered was good. The greatest difficulty was resisting the temptation to carry on for a few more years and make extra money.”
Mr. Hay was chief executive officer of the Hockey Hall of Fame.Steve Poirier/Hockey Hall of Fame
Mr. Hay left hockey for the oil patch. A decade earlier, his inability to find a job out of college had led him to sign a hockey contract.
William Charles Hay was born in Saskatoon on Dec. 9, 1935, the youngest of three children by the former Florence Miller and Charles Cecil Hay. Both parents were notable athletes and graduates of the University of Saskatchewan.
His mother, nicknamed String, was a goaltender for the women’s varsity hockey team. String Miller also played basketball and competed in track. She hailed from an athletic family, as a younger brother, Earl Miller, played left wing for parts of five NHL seasons with the Chicago Blackhawks and Toronto Maple Leafs.
The elder Mr. Hay was also a goaltender for the university, which he led to a Western Canadian senior hockey title in 1923, before losing the Allan Cup national championship to the Toronto Granites by 11-2 in a two-game, total-goals series. The Granites went on to win the Olympic gold medal the following year.
Young Bill played hockey before he started school in Lumsden, Sask. By the age of 15, he was skating for the junior Regina Pats. A giant of his era, at 6 foot 3 (190.5 centimetres) and 190 pounds (86 kilograms), Mr. Hay was neither a bully nor a bulldozer, showing skill as a smooth skater and playmaker, as well as an opportunistic goal scorer.
In the 1955 postseason, he scored 12 goals in 15 games, though his Pats lost the Memorial Cup to the Toronto Marlboros. The Marlies, featuring several future NHL players including Bob Pulford, Bobby Baun and Billy Harris, defeated the Pats four games to one in a series played in Regina. The lanky Mr. Hay scored a hat-trick in the desperate final game, only to lose, 8-5.
The Montreal Canadiens, who owned his rights, urged the promising centreman to attend McGill University while playing for one of the club’s farm teams. Instead, he hitchhiked south to talk his way into a scholarship with Colorado College.
Mr. Hay scored 60 goals in 60 games over two seasons with the Tigers. He was a two-time All-American. In 1957, the Tigers defeated Michigan 13-6 to claim the National Collegiate Athletic Association championship. Mr. Hay was named the all-star centre of the Frozen Four tournament held at Colorado Springs.
After graduating with a geology degree in 1958, Mr. Hay unsuccessfully sought employment in his field in Calgary.
That fall, he was one of 56 players invited to training camp with the Montreal Canadiens. He survived coach Toe Blake’s first cut of 30 skaters before being optioned to the Calgary Stampeders of the old Western Hockey League.
He scored his first pro goal in a 3-2 victory at home against the Spokane Flyers (soon to be renamed Spokes). His victim was former NHL netminder Emile (The Cat) Francis.
After a slow start, blamed by hockey writers on the higher calibre of play than that found at the collegiate level, the tall centre wound up with 54 points (24 goals, 30 assists) in 53 games.
The Canadiens, who were overloaded with young centres, including Jean Béliveau and Henri Richard, sold the prospect’s rights to Chicago for US$20,000 in April, 1959.
The tall, angular rookie, aged 23, was placed between right winger Murray Balfour, 23, who was another Montreal castoff from Saskatchewan, and Bobby Hull, 20, the flashy left winger dubbed the Golden Jet. The trio clicked immediately.
“There’s not much to this game when you have a guy like Bobby there,” Mr. Hay said. “All you have to do is get [the puck] to him and he scores.”
Mr. Hay won the Stanley Cup playing on Chicago’s Million Dollar Line in 1961. Former Chicago Blackhawk players, from left, Eric Nesterenko, Bill 'Red' Hay, Stan Mikita and Glenn Hall sing the national anthem after being honored for the 50th anniversary of the 1961 Stanley Cup champions, on Jan. 9, 2011.Charles Cherney/The Canadian Press
Chicago coach Rudy Pilous called the trio his Million Dollar Line. (The sobriquet is also attributed to the team’s owner, who was alleged to have said he would not part with them for that sum.) The centre skated in all 70 games in his inaugural campaign, scoring 18 goals with 37 assists.
At the end of the season, Mr. Hay was voted as the league’s top rookie by hockey writers. He outpolled Murray Oliver of Detroit by 139-101, followed by Ken Schinkel of New York, Chicago teammate Stan Mikita and linemate Mr. Balfour. The Calder Trophy came with a $1,000 prize.
In his sophomore campaign, the Blackhawks eliminated Montreal in the semi-finals before defeating Gordie Howe and the Detroit Red Wings by four games to two to claim the Stanley Cup. Mr. Hay scored a goal and added three assists in the finals.
“Nobody really relied on anybody in 1961,” he told the Calgary Albertan a decade later. “Everybody worked hard, especially at checking.”
Married and with three young children at home, Mr. Hay shocked the Blackhawks by retiring at the end of the 1965-66 season to become an executive with an oil exploration company.
Mr. Hay (left) shows his 1961 Stanley Cup ring to Anaheim Ducks General Manager Brian Burke during a ceremony at the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto on Jan. 25, 2008.Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press
“I wanted to settle down in Calgary and get into business,” he told Louis Cauz of The Globe and Mail. “It was pretty hard moving the family back and forth.”
He was lured back midway through the season, before retiring as a player for good in 1967, just as the NHL was about to double in size from six to 12 franchises. In eight seasons with Chicago, the centre skated in 506 games, scoring 113 goals with 274 assists. He had another 15 goals and 21 assists in 67 playoff games.
Oddly, his early retirement did not prevent other teams from selecting him in drafts. The new St. Louis Blues picked him in the 11th round, No. 66 overall, in the 1967 NHL expansion draft. A year later, Chicago claimed him back. He had not played competitive hockey for five years when the Calgary Broncos selected him in the 74th round of the World Hockey Association’s draft. As it turned out, the Calgary franchise folded before the start of the season, and Mr. Hay’s rights transferred to the Cleveland Crusaders.
Through his summers as a player, Mr. Hay drew maps and studied exploration research for Imperial Oil. He later reported on drilling operations in Alberta and Montana for Sedco Explorations, owned by the Saskatchewan-born brothers Donald, Daryl (Doc) and Byron (BJ) Seaman. As an executive with their Bow Valley Resource Services Ltd., Mr. Hay helped broker a meeting between Doc Seaman and NHL president John Ziegler about transferring the faltering Atlanta Flames franchise to Calgary, which happened in 1980.
Hockey Canada agrees to send a team to the 1978 World Championships, on Feb. 25, 1978. Clockwise from bottom, chief negotiator Alan Eagleson, Eric Morse, former National Hockey League president, Clarence Campbell, Ron Roberts, Torrance Wyllie, ex-national team coach Father David Bauer, Bill Watters, Chris Lang, Bill Hay, George Cariviere, Larry Gordon, Derek Holmes and chairman Douglas Fisher.Edward Regan/The Globe and Mail
Eleven years later, Mr. Hay became president of the club.
“I’ve got to throw all that [Blackhawks] stuff out,” he told Monte Stewart of the Calgary Herald. “Even my grandkids aren’t allowed to wear them now.”
By then, he was also president of Hockey Canada, the sport’s national governing body, a position once held by his father, who was responsible for organizing the famed 1972 Summit Series between the Soviet Union’s national team and Canadian NHL professionals.
Mr. Hay has been inducted into the Saskatchewan Sports Hall of Fame (1992), the Colorado College Athletic Hall of Fame (1995), the Colorado Springs Hall of Fame (1998), Saskatchewan Hockey Hall of Fame (2013) and the Alberta Hockey Hall of Fame (2017). He was elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame as a builder in 2015, again matching his father, who had been enshrined as a builder in 1974, a year after his death at the age of 71.
The hockey administrator was also honoured for his work as a geologist and executive by being named to the Saskatchewan Oil and Gas Hall of Fame in 1999.
Mr. Hay died on Oct. 25. He leaves the former Nancy Anne Livingstone Woodman, his wife of 67 years, as well as two daughters, five grandchildren, three great-grandchildren and a brother. He was predeceased by a sister. A son, Donald James Hay, died three days after his father, aged 62.
For his part, Mr. Hay was amused when his coach came up with the memorable nickname for his line.
“Million Dollar Line, that was a laugh,” he once said. “Bobby got $950,000 and Murray and I each got $25,000.”
You can find more obituaries from The Globe and Mail here.
To submit a memory about someone we have recently profiled on the Obituaries page, e-mail us at obit@globeandmail.com.