My First Opening Night with the Stars – 1990

The beginning of the end of the Stars in Minnesota

Ralph in 1991 with Flock of Seagulls hair

Look Ma – I made it – but what have I got here??

I’ve always known I would be on TV. A sportscaster, a gameshow host, something. That was the easy part for me. Career clarity. I knew where I wanted to go.

How I got to the Stars booth was anything but easy and nothing close to a straight line. I’ll get into that more with future posts.

But on a crisp fall night, October 4, 1990, I drove to Met Center in Bloomington, Minnesota about 3:00 in the afternoon. I got there super early – I was excited. This was my first real NHL broadcast. I had an on-air audition during a pre-season game, and they hired me the next day.

Norm Green purchased the distressed franchise in the summer of 1990. The Gund brothers, George, and Gordon, had owned the team. They were absentee owners, living in another state (Ohio) and totally out of the picture. The previous year, they announced that unless 10,000 season tickets were sold for the following season, they would move the team. Met Center held 16,784 – I think. I’m doing that from memory. I attended tons of games as a fan, starting in 1967.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, goes that far back, and has worked with both the North Stars and the Dallas Stars. No one has my history with this franchise.

Oh, there’s plenty of Minnesotans in and out of the media who think they know what happened. The media was a big part of the problem. Let’s say the lack of media. I kept track. Nobody came that year. Not really. We had 2 beat writers and that was it. Every now and then a columnist would come to rip us. More regularly they wouldn’t come and rip us from their couches.

Minnesota Sports in those days

Now you gotta understand the people and circumstances in Minnesota, and especially in the Twin Cities and surrounding areas. I do. I grew up there. Northeast Minneapolis. Nordeast, we call it. A great place to grow up. And for a relatively small market – we’re a big sports town.

Revisionist history, and the media not wanting to look at their role in the failure but point fingers – were two factors contributing to everyone there HATING Norm Green and not getting why we left.

Was a time we had the Minneapolis Lakers of the NBA. They moved. It happens.

We got the Timberwolves much later. We had the Twins – they weren’t really around it much until the 90’s when they grabbed two World Series titles. Kirby Pucket and so on. We had the Vikings. Oh god. And in 1967 we got the Minnesota North Stars when the NHL expanded.

So, the people in Minnesota were fans of all of it. The Vikings always drew. The Twins had their moments, the Timberwolves were horrible and spottily attended, and the North Stars played on this island way way way out from the cities and the northern suburbs.

North Stars history – leading up to the sale to Norm Green

Bloomington, Minnesota was the wrong place. And the business was in the wrong hands.

Ownership there, hockey leadership there, business leadership in the organization in the decade prior to Norm buying the team was horrendous. I’ll cover this in later posts but just look at the draft and trade history from 1980 – 1990. Ridiculously, epically, bad. They hit on one pick – Mike Modano – by then it was too late.

The North Stars also did a very poor job of marketing. They never reached out to include the rest of the Minnesota hockey community. There was an old joke that the North Stars way of marketing was unlocking the doors at 6:00 on game nights.

And they and the building lost the prestigious Minnesota State High School hockey tournament. They were floundering and then they sank.

The Minnesota Wild is the franchise we should have had, and how they have opened their arms to everything and everyone hockey in Minnesota is how it should have been. More on that in later posts.

Fan support wasn’t there. The people in Minnesota, in winter, were extremely into hockey. I mean c’mon – it’s the state of hockey, right? Everyone played, everyone had practice, games, all those things, and Met Center was a long way from most people in those days. Tough to get fans to drive there on a Tuesday night to see Winnipeg in a snowstorm.

But they’ll tell you they were great fans. They watched the games on TV. The average fan went to a game or two a year. And it wasn’t nearly enough. They’ll also tell you – and they’re not alone here – that they were owed the North Stars regardless of dollars and cents. A local team as a public trust and so on.

When the team was up for sale – NO LOCAL OWNERSHIP EVEN SNIFFED IT. Nobody was interested. The Gunds made a deal with the league that if they sold the team to someone who would try it and make a go of it in Minnesota, they would get the next expansion franchise. They did. The San Jose Sharks.

I will write a post about the ONLY TIME IN NHL HISTORY that something called a dispersal draft took place. The Gunds and Sharks were given free rein to gut our farm system, and take players off our roster. Nice.

And so, it happened that an out of the country real estate developer named Norm Green from Calgary, with NO attachment to the team or the area stepped up to buy it. Hockey in Minnesota – it’s a no brainer, right???

On October 4 th , 1990, after Norm Green hired Bobby Clarke as our GM, and Bob Gainey as our head coach, and blanketed the airwaves with ads and appearances, we drew – ready – 4,500 fans for opening night against the St. Louis Blues.

I remember how little juice there was in the building that night. It reminded me of the previous few seasons there when I would go to games as a fan. But we were starting over and had much to do.

I’ll share with you in later posts, details of that season which was nuts. If I told you the Stars in 1990-91, with our young stud Mike Modano and lots of pretty good complimentary players, that we won – ready – in an 80 game season – and I’m not kidding – won 27 games and made it to the Stanley Cup Final – what would you say? Because it happened.

But on that night – we had no idea – how the hell could we.

YES YES YES???

The North Stars played the Blues in that shadowy tomb, and we got beat 3-1. Brett Hull (yes, that Brett Hull in the oddest case of foreshadowing in my history anyway…) scored twice and had the gamewinner. Tada.

Here’s how quiet the building was. I’ll never forget this.

The Stars Dave Gagner was on a 2-2 rush. The backchecking forward (honest to god) was Hullie. He’s a sneaky little shit and as he was pursing Dave, he tried to trick Gagner into dropping the puck for what he hoped Gagner believed was a trailing teammate.

“GAGS – GAGS – GAGS” I heard clear as a bell from the top of the building. Gags didn’t drop the puck to Hull, but I’ll never forget it.

WTF?

So, here’s another example of the mindset with that franchise.

The building was wonderful. The McNulty group designed it and Joe Louis arena. The buildings were very similar. Except the Met Center had an actual press box and the Joe’s was a dump. One bathroom to service the entire press box – men and women. I held it a lot…

But back to Bloomington. The building was dropped in a field. The seats in Met Center – I’m laughing as I type this – featured alternating color patterns (Gold, Green and Black) – and the reason stated by the original North Stars owners was – So the building would look full even when it wasn’t.

I’m not kidding.

lonely old Met Center

See what I mean

Response from Ownership

Well, we didn’t shut the doors or stop playing in the league after that night.  We got to work.  All of us.  

Norm would put a lot of his own money into building renovations.  He changed the seats to a deep green, put in one of the first video gondola scoreboards in the league, put ice in the urinals (that’s gonna get some play in future posts) and walked the concourses every home game.  He talked to fans.  He wanted input.  By the time we got to the second round of the playoffs, the building started filling up. 

And Norm, sitting in his suite in the upper deck adjacent to the fans, was getting saluted and applauded.  What a time it was.

Less than 2 years after that Stanley Cup final loss – we packed up the moving trucks and left for Texas.