Salt Lake Golden Eagles captivated Utah before NHL hockey moved here

Chris Biotti left the Golden Eagles' old locker room on the left and strolled onto the floor of the Salt Palaces.

John Stockton. Jerry Sloan. Carl Malone. They were all standing there before a mid-morning shooting. So Biotti did what most 20-year-olds could only dream of: start hoisting shots into future NBA Hall of Famers.

A few months earlier, Biotte was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, playing hockey at Harvard. Now the Calgary Flames first-round draft pick was in Salt Lake City and interacting with some of the NBA's biggest names.

How can life get better than this? he thought.

We had a great relationship with jazz players at the time, Biotte said.

We went to Jazz games and I'm sure they became fans of us, said former Eagles center Rick Barkovich.

That was 1988, when the Jazz and Golden Eagles shared one roof. That winter the city was captivated by what happened in the Salt Palace. The Jazz went to the NBA playoffs. The Golden Eagles won the International Hockey League. The palace was in commotion every evening as the teams packed the place to the rafters for days.

Salt Lake was magical, Biotte recalled.

Nearly four decades later, hockey and basketball will once again share a roof in Utah as the Arizona Coyotes are poised to move to Salt Lake City and the Golden Eagles want you to know that Utah's hockey legacy began with them. Their story is littered with drunken fights, travel problems and even murder. But on the ice they won big. And for that 1988 season, the Jazz and Golden Eagles were the hottest tickets in town.

We were outdoing the basketball team, said former owner Bill Acord. I'm telling you, we broke the fire code. We would add chairs to the hall so people could come in.

The backstory

The Golden Eagles waited to take off and return home from a grueling seventeen-day road trip, but their plane taxied for the ages on the Kansas City runaway.

While sitting at the front of the plane, the team owners, Bill Acord and Art Teece, were unaware of the cause of the delay until a manager approached him with an unusual request.

Here comes one of our guys who… had this look on his face, like, 'Oh God,'” Acord recalled. And he says, I hate to even ask you this, but would you mind just eating half a sandwich?

Acord stared blankly. What are you asking me?

The manager then explained the unfortunate situation. Before they left for the airport, he had made sandwiches and boxed them up. Somehow the bus ran over the boxes on the way. The players at the back threatened mutiny if they did not get food quickly. Rations had become necessary.

Acord gave up his meal to the hungry players. The manager promised it wouldn't happen again, but everyone knew it would happen (at least somehow). Dysfunction was the law of minor league hockey at the time, especially for the Eagles, who had a more checkered and arcane history than most.

The Golden Eagles got their start in the 1960s, when Dan Meyer bought the team and moved it to Salt Lake. They were the only professional show in town. The Jazz would not arrive from New Orleans until 1979.

From the start, things were financially shaky. The setbacks came to a dramatic end when Meyer attended an NHL and WHL meeting in Minnesota in 1972. He told his assistant general manager and coach, Al Robbins, that he was going to his room. Fifteen minutes later, he lay dead on the floor beneath the 19th floor window of the Radisson South Hotel.

It was originally ruled a suicide, but police investigated and said they weren't so sure. A police affidavit revealed an open wallet with no money, glasses with a broken lens on the bathroom floor, a key in the lock, blood on the floor and wall.

Years later, Golden Eagles players and coaches still told stories about that day.

They saw him fly out the window, Acord said. And the windows were repaired, you couldn't open them… He borrowed [money] from the wrong people.

The team nearly folded after Meyer's death until Charlie Finley, owner of the California Golden Seals and the NHL's Oakland As, kept it afloat for a while. Thayne Acord and Teece bought it from him.

The Acords had previously owned teams in Utah. The Utah Stars, the local ABA basketball team, were theirs. But the world of sports ownership was still new.

Acord recalled the first time he came to an owners meeting. He used his old pickup. One of the other minority owners rented out a limousine and suggested that when the starters were announced, the owners would be announced right after with a spotlight.

I remember sitting there, like, 'Are you messing with me?' he said. I think I'm going to be late for that game.

But there were bigger problems.

Thayne Acord was killed in a burglary in 1980. An 18-year-old named John Calhoun forced Acord to withdraw $800 from his bank account and then tied him and his wife Lorraine up in the basement of their own home. He shot them both at close range.

The Salt Palace was renamed Acord Arena. The governor spoke at a vigil.

“I couldn't deal with it,” said Bill Acord, their son. …I had to take over everything.

Doug Palazzari, a player in 1980 and future NHL center, said: We all know what we know. It [wasnt] a secret. But it was never a problem [on the team]. The sons took over and did a great job.

The franchise teetered on the edge for years, but a move to the International Hockey League brought a new lease of life.

Making a championship

The 1988 championship season started at an Air Force base, with players dressed in jumpsuits and staring at a fighter jet.

The team's pre-season poster had a Top Gun theme and the group of minor league warriors and NHL hopefuls bought in.

It was so cool, Biotte said. They had it hanging in bars around town.

This team was different from years past. The Golden Eagles became the main affiliate of the Calgary Flames, which meant that all players were drafted or dismissed from the NHL squad.

Previously, the Golden Eagles players were a collection of varied talent as the team bounced back and forth between different clubs. Now Salt Lake was a high-level NHL feeder system.

Their coach, Paul Baxter, played for the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Flames. The players received old Suburbans from local boosters. A steam room was placed in the Salt Palace for recovery.

The Flames affiliate, you talk top notch, Barkovich said.

But in the beginning, the team's performance did not meet expectations. Then, after a sub-.500 start, Baxter sat down in the locker room for a game of the children's book The little engine that can do that in hand.

He read each page with deadly seriousness to the professional hockey players in front of him.

I think I can do it, I know I can do it, Boitte said, repeating lines from the book. Then he stood up and said, Gentlemen, I know we can do this.

They went on to rack up 40 wins in the regular season and the fans loved it.

Previously, players could sneak away at 1pm to ski at Snowbird and Brighton for $9. As the team got better and more fans filled the Salt Palace, people recognized them.

One owner came up to us and said, Hey, we saw you guys skiing. That's against your contract, Boitte remembered. We never did it again.

Instead, they started trading tickets for free rounds of golf at Park City courses.

The Golden Eagles had become a nighttime attraction. On the ice they let players hit so hard that the opponents literally flew into the stands.

The boards were really forgiving, said Stu Grimson, who eventually played in the NHL.

As players almost fell into the laps of fans, it became common for spectators to pour beer on the opponents. There was no plexiglass between the ice and the seats. One player chased a fan on 10-row cement bleachers with skates because he was so frustrated, play-by-play man Mike Barack recalled.

Off the ice, the antics of the players and fans became a spectacle.

During breaks, the Golden Eagles hosted bikini contests for men and women. Media members voted for a winner.

The players' personalities shone through throughout the season. There was one player, future St. Louis Blues defenseman Barclay Plager, who was often kicked out of games for hard hits. He used the free time to take players' fake teeth from their lockers and put them in mailing packages back to Salt Lake. By the time the game was over, they were gone.

“We had players trying to get thrown out with him so he wouldn't be alone in the locker room,” Brian Acord said. Players ate soup for the rest of the road trip because they had no teeth.

By the end of that season, the team was so good that there were hardly any practices. Baxter has turned it into a game. He chose a specific number of minutes the team would practice and the team made $12 side bets on what he would say.

He'd say, 'We're practicing for 41 minutes today,'” Boitte said. And we all get married. I don't think he was aware of the bets.

The playoffs were challenging as the weather warmed up. During a series in Dallas, a rink box kept fogging up due to the Texas heat. The match was postponed several times. The radio call was made from a wooden platform above the target, with a spiral staircase to get to it.

That's just minor league hockey, Brian Acord said.

But the Golden Eagles advanced to the playoffs that year after an early seven-game scare from the Peoria Riverman. They defeated the Colorado team in six games and scored nine goals in the Turner Cup final against the Flint Spirts.

Thousands greeted them at the airport gate with the trophy.

Hockey returns

The Golden Eagles were eventually sold to Jazz owner Larry H. Miller and subsequently purchased by owners in Detroit. The team has now been disbanded. But former goalie Paul Skidmore still gets envelopes in the mail every year with his hockey card inside.

Usually it will come from a Salt Lake fan trying to collect autographs from all the players.

After all this time, the Golden Eagles' legacy still holds great significance.

And now, fans in Utah are preparing for a new team to rally behind.

This NHL team won't have the same drama. It won't stay at Red Roof Inns in Flint, Michigan. They won't be grounded in Peoria, Illinois, because the plane's wheels literally froze to the tarmac (all true stories).

But it will be major hockey.

And no one should forget who broke the ice in Salt Lake City.