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The former Montreal GM- one of the greats in the game. Here are the articles on him from the Montreal Gazette....
**************
GM built Habs dynasties
No job was too small or too large as he collected nine Stanley Cups
RED FISHER
The Gazette
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Jean Béliveau was on the telephone to my home yesterday as the light was leaving this sun-splashed day.
"Did you hear about Sam?" he asked.
And then the day turned black.
Sam Pollock, the greatest of all National Hockey League general managers: dead at 81 in Toronto following a lengthy battle with cancer.
Pollock joined the Canadiens in 1947 and within three years was appointed the director of player personnel. He oversaw the Canadiens' junior and minor-pro affiliates, winning the Memorial Cup with the Montreal Junior Canad-iens (1950) and the Ottawa-Hull Junior Canadiens (1958). He also led the Ottawa-Hull Canad-iens to the Eastern Professional League crown in 1962 and the Omaha Knights to the Central Hockey League championship in 1964.
He put the pieces together and held them together, as he was to do when he succeeded Frank Selke Sr. as GM in 1964 en route to building Canadiens dynasties in the 1960s and '70s.
During his 14 years in the general manager's chair (nine Stanley Cups and eight reg-ular-season titles) with the Canadiens, no job was too small or too large for him. Everything passed across his desk.
How much did he bring to the game? On many occasions, he was invited to make difficult decisions involving the NHL. No general manager in any sport was called upon more often to help in league matters.
Problems in Chicago?
Ask Sam.
A strong, high-profile person was needed to organize the first Canada Cup?
Ask Sam.
What was the best way to double the number of the Original Six for the 1967-68 season?
Ask Sam.
Always Sam.
"When great general managers are mentioned," the late NHL president Clarence Campbell once told me, "you think of names such as Jack Adams, Lester Patrick, Art Ross, Frank Selke - and Pollock. What Sam always had going for him is that he knew what was needed to win. He was as shrewd as anyone in the judgment of players and I don't know of anyone who was more knowledgeable as to the workings of the bylaws.
"There was an element of suspicion in Sam all the time," Campbell added, "but despite the enormous input he had into the creation of what were deemed to be improvements, I'm not aware of a single situation where he designed it for his own benefit. He was very resourceful in the ways he went about some of the things, but none was off-colour, nor could you say they were the product of a scheme."
Campbell was only partly right.
What made Sammy run was that he was always several rink-lengths ahead of his peers in terms of making the Canadiens better ... always planning ... always scheming how to make his team better.
What made Pollock so successful? Why was he so much smarter and more successful than any general manager of his or any other time? Somehow, he was always able to maintain his composure. He could be hurt, angered, disappointed and feel cheated, but in any struggle between these emotions and the need to win, he always put winning above everything else.
How else would you explain some of his deals, such as getting Guy Lafleur as the No. 1 overall choice in the 1971 draft.
How was he allowed to draft Réjean Houle and Marc Tardif before other teams had their first pick in 1969?
Somehow, he had managed to convince his partners that it would be beneficial to the entire league if the Canadiens were allowed to draft the two best French-Canadian juniors. His argument? It was important to the entire league to keep alive the organization's reputation as the Flying Frenchmen.
(That astonishing arrangement lasted only one season. If it had been extended to a second, the Canadiens would have landed Gilbert Perreault. Imagine how this Flying Frenchman would have looked in a Canadiens sweater!)
Pollock was always several steps ahead of everybody. He always had to get the last word in.
I knew him when he was a teenager, and even then he was developing a mystique for winning. He was only 17 when he managed a fastball team comprised largely of Canadiens players. Goaltender Bill Durnan was his pitcher, the best in Canada. Doug Harvey was his third baseman. Toe Blake and Elmer Lach were on the team. So was Ken Reardon. They were among hockey's grandest names, but teenager Pollock was in charge.
Unlike most general managers, he didn't travel as much as he would have liked because of his fear for flying, which stayed with him for many of his years in the general manager's chair. During the Original Six years, he would be chauffeured to most of the games, but in the early years of the 12-team league he opted out of most of his team's visits to Los Angeles and Oakland, and to others such as Minnesota and St. Louis. But woe to the coach who wasn't on the telephone to Pollock within minutes after a road game. He had to be told everything: Who had played well and who hadn't. And why hadn't they?
I remember one Canadiens head coach yelling into an arena telephone only moments after the Canadiens had lost to the Minnesota North Stars.
"Sam ... Sam ... you have to come down. The players aren't listening to me!"
Eventually, however, Sam found a way to overcome his fear of flying ... or so it seemed. One day, there he was sitting across the aisle from me on a Canadiens flight to St. Louis. His Montreal Star was opened to the sports page. Several hours later, with the plane about to land, I sneaked a peek at his newspaper. He was still "reading" the same page.
Control was what Pollock was all about during his matchless career. "Team" was what it was about.
He was angered when Houle and Tardif jumped to the World Hockey Association in 1973, irate when Ken Dryden decided to retire only a few days before training camp opened in 1973. Dryden had wanted to renegotiate his contract and Pollock refused to consider the idea, but when the opportunity arose to get Dryden back the following season, Pollock didn't hesitate.
It was the same with Houle.
"Exactly one minute ago," Pollock told me on the telephone in 1976, "I signed Réjean Houle to a contract."
"Is that the same guy that had you screaming when he jumped to the Quebec Nordiques? What made you change your mind?" he was asked.
"He can help our team," Pollock said. "Is that a good enough reason?"
*************
Ex-Habs GM was always a step ahead
Wily trader. 'He didn't have to say anything. Just his look was enough'
DAVE STUBBS
The Gazette
Thursday, August 16, 2007
He built his hockey club shrewdly, with crafty selections, sleight of hand, a little smoke, a few mirrors. He could pull the wool over the eyes of a prospective customer like the best used-car salesman, throwing an extra body or draft pick into a deal like so many floor mats.
And he possessed an uncommonly keen eye, sitting patiently on raw talent he knew might still be a few years from blossoming into something truly great.
Yesterday's passing of former Canadiens general manager Sam Pollock rekindled memories of how he regularly pulled rabbits out of his hat at the draft or trading table, leading his franchise to nine Stanley Cups and eight NHL regular-season championships during his 14 years at Montreal's helm.
Last night, Hall of Fame captain Yvan Cournoyer remembered his own path through the Canadiens organization matching Pollock's almost step for step.
"We arrived the same year (1964), and we finished the same year (1978)," said Cournoyer, who played 15 games in the 1978-79 season to earn his 10th Stanley Cup.
"Sam was his own man, with his own personality. He was a character. But he didn't have to say anything. Just his look was enough."
Cournoyer was a teenager from Drummondville when he was called into Pollock's Forum office to sign a standard player's contract.
"A $1,500 bonus and $7,500 for the season," he recalled, laughing. "You could make more in two or three weeks winning the Stanley Cup than in the entire season, can you believe it? But here I was, playing for my dream team and winning the Cup.
"Sam gave me a good five-year contract when expansion came (in 1967-68). He liked the guys who won for him. He respected his players, and we had great respect for him, too."
As did other GMs around the league, grudging though it was.
Lou Nanne was boss of the Minnesota North Stars when Pollock left the Canadiens. In the 1981 book Lions in Winter by Chrys Goyens and Allen Turowetz, Nanne summed up the feelings of most everyone else in an NHL front office of the day.
"(Pollock) was so successful because he was just a few steps ahead of everyone else at all times," he said.
A chapter in the book might be the definitive study of Pollock and his methods - of how he didn't allow himself to get too close to players he might have to trade, of how he still suffered the hard emotions of a bad, if rare, stretch of games by his team.
"I once saw Sam on a TV show saying that running a hockey team was like running a chicken farm," said Canadiens legend Dickie Moore. "He said it was all business, forget emotion. I just think that a lot of this was a front put on by a very astute man who saw the necessity of keeping his distance."
Pollock's players could read between the furrowed brows, of that there was no doubt.
"You always knew things were happening when Sam would get to nervously wringing his handkerchief in his hands," said Guy Lafleur, the GM's famous and most celebrated draft pick, No. 1 overall in 1971.
"The veterans who knew better would be checking his coat pockets to see if an airline ticket to someplace like Oakland was sticking out."
hat view was shared by future great Steve Shutt, Pollock's No. 1 choice in 1972.
"Our joke was, 'How do you spell relief?' " Shutt said. " 'A-I-R C-A-N-A-D-A.' Over and out. It wasn't hard to stay motivated with Sam running the show, emotion or no emotion."
It was Pollock's thorough business skills, which would serve him well beyond his life in hockey, that put him head and shoulders above his so-called management peers, and the understanding that hockey was a business.
"When I started, front-office management might have been 50 per cent hockey acumen and 50 per cent business skills," he said. "By the 1970s, it was 25 and 75 per cent. Now, I think it's 15 per cent hockey sense and 85 per cent business skills.
"If you want to be successful in this business, you have to follow sound business principles. That means keep expenses low and profits high."
(Pollock raised more than one eyebrow in 1971 when he signed the freshly drafted Lafleur to a two-year, $105,000 contract, the richest ever for a Canadiens rookie, one bolstered by a variety of bonuses.)
For all of his success, Pollock had his methods boiled down to a simple formula, one that didn't do justice to the dynasty he built on his unique talent and special instincts.
"People have asked me many times how someone goes about building the kind of tradition the Canadiens have enjoyed for so long," he said.
"It is really quite simple. You build a top-notch organization manned by the best people at all levels. You get each man doing his job on and off the ice and all of a sudden, you're a winner."
***************
'His legacy won't be topped'
Spotlight Story: Habs GM Bob Gainey fondly remembers how his hockey destiny was shaped for him when late Canadiens mastermind Sam Pollock drafted him in 1973
DAVE STUBBS
The Gazette
As general manager of the Canadiens from 1964-78, the late Sam Pollock was known to have a superb poker face. This was a man who played his cards tight to his vest and wagered only after a study of the other players convinced him that the odds favoured his holding the winning hand.
Some would suggest those also are the qualities of current Canadiens GM Bob Gainey.
Just don't ask Gainey to shuffle any similarities into a comparison.
"I wouldn't try to make that bridge in any way," he said yesterday, remembering the man who drafted him into the NHL 34 years ago. "Mr. Pollock was a shrewd and wise operator in his era, and he's left a legacy that won't be topped."
Gainey's career path was largely charted by a man he'd never met. Pollock used the Canadiens' first-round choice in the 1973 amateur draft, No. 8 overall, to select a rugged 19-year-old winger from small-town Ontario.
He believes it was the work of Canadiens scouts Ron Caron and Claude Ruel that caught Pollock's eye. Yet there were no pre-draft talks between the team and its future Hall of Fame forward.
Gainey doesn't even recall exactly how he learned that Pollock had called his name that May 15 at Montreal's Mount Royal Hotel. He had been in town a week earlier to watch the Memorial Cup tournament, but players did not attend the NHL draft to tug on the jersey of their new NHL club, as is done today.
Maybe the news came by telephone, if not right away.
"I didn't have my cellphone with me," Gainey joked of a time when a cell was only something you studied in biology. "It's all kind of fuzzy."
But Gainey does recall a flurry of activity in the following couple of weeks, flying to Montreal to meet his new general manager, sign his first professional contract and be introduced to the media at a Windsor Hotel reception.
"For a 19-year-old from Peterborough, meeting Mr. Pollock in his Forum office was quite a leap," he said.
Gainey went to the Forum with his Boston-based agent, Bob Woolf, and remembers sitting starry-eyed outside Pollock's office, "probably wearing a tie somebody had tied for me," his nerves not exactly soothed by the well-meaning banter of two team executives - 1950s star Floyd Curry and legendary former captain Jean Béliveau.
"They kept me occupied while Bob was in Mr. Pollock's office," Gainey said. "Finally, I went in and met Mr. Pollock, and I think contracts probably were signed at that time. And that was it. Sometime later that day, I got myself back home to Peterborough and got on with the rest of the summer.
"I was at such a level of overall astonishment that all of this was going on, I don't know if I absorbed my meeting with Mr. Pollock as much as I tried to survive it, and all the different things that were happening to me. I know I wasn't the first greenhorn he'd had in his office."
It was a good time to be a young player, with the fledgling World Hockey Association courting many. Gainey was drafted by the WHA's Minnesota Fighting Saints, but didn't consider them, told by Woolf: "If you're drafted by the (New York) Yankees or (Boston) Celtics or the Canadiens, you don't even think about other things."
Gainey vaguely remembers playing his first few NHL seasons for an annual salary between $25,000 and $40,000, "really quite good numbers. I'm pretty sure that, at 19, I was earning more playing hockey than my
father was making."
There was no special talk with Pollock, just a message to all hopefuls on the eve of the 1973 training camp that here were the other players with whom they'd contest any roster spot available.
Gainey and Pollock would talk more in the five years they were GM and hardrock forward, especially when Gainey was the team's players' association representative.
"Mr. Pollock wasn't a blanket on the team all the time, because Scotty (coach Bowman) had all of that well under control," he said. "Sam's job encompassed more than recruitment of players in the hockey department, which is most of my responsibility now. He also took care of ticket sales and the booking of the arena (now largely handled by president Pierre Boivin)."
While Gainey said he didn't actively seek Pollock's advice later in life, he did call upon him for counsel near the end of his playing days, a decade after Pollock's 1978 departure from the Canadiens, "to use him as a resource to discuss where and how I might go next."
That would be coaching in France, then coaching and managing in Minnesota and over-seeing the North Stars' move to Dallas.
Soon would come Dallas's 1999 Stanley Cup championship and managerial responsibility with Olympic and World Cup teams, before Gainey arrived in Montreal as executive vice-president and GM in 2003, nine years after he was elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame.
Yesterday, in a release from the Canadiens, Gainey referred to more than a dozen Pollock-era players who moved into NHL coaching or management.
"That has a lot to do with the model that we had to work with, Mr. Pollock the manager and Scotty Bowman the coach," he said. "The opportunities rolled right into our cycle of life, when the NHL expanded again just as most of the guys in my age group were ready to go into another career path.
"Over the years Mr. Pollock and I were on the same teams, the one-to-one time we spent was pretty minimal. But if you're around anybody even for a short period of time, there are things you can learn. You find out why some things are done one way and not another, things that are filed into your bank of experience, perhaps to be used again later.
"Mr. Pollock went through periods of enormous change," Gainey said. "He started in the early 1960s when the NHL was very stable and things had been done a certain way for more than a decade.
"But not too long after, there was a period of another league forming (the WHA), the expansion of the NHL, a draft was implemented and international hockey was introduced in North America, with Soviets and other teams coming here and those players becoming available.
"Even through those huge transitions, Mr. Pollock was able to find a way to be the best at what he did."
It is not lost on Gainey that, figuratively at least, he now occupies the desk of a front-office legend, and the man who started him on his life in the NHL.
"If I happen to have picked up a couple of nuggets from Mr. Pollock along the way, lucky for me," he said. "He was a very private person and, to a degree, I am. I'm just going about my responsibilities today with my own personality, trying to be successful for our organization and our fans."
**************
GM built Habs dynasties
No job was too small or too large as he collected nine Stanley Cups
RED FISHER
The Gazette
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Jean Béliveau was on the telephone to my home yesterday as the light was leaving this sun-splashed day.
"Did you hear about Sam?" he asked.
And then the day turned black.
Sam Pollock, the greatest of all National Hockey League general managers: dead at 81 in Toronto following a lengthy battle with cancer.
Pollock joined the Canadiens in 1947 and within three years was appointed the director of player personnel. He oversaw the Canadiens' junior and minor-pro affiliates, winning the Memorial Cup with the Montreal Junior Canad-iens (1950) and the Ottawa-Hull Junior Canadiens (1958). He also led the Ottawa-Hull Canad-iens to the Eastern Professional League crown in 1962 and the Omaha Knights to the Central Hockey League championship in 1964.
He put the pieces together and held them together, as he was to do when he succeeded Frank Selke Sr. as GM in 1964 en route to building Canadiens dynasties in the 1960s and '70s.
During his 14 years in the general manager's chair (nine Stanley Cups and eight reg-ular-season titles) with the Canadiens, no job was too small or too large for him. Everything passed across his desk.
How much did he bring to the game? On many occasions, he was invited to make difficult decisions involving the NHL. No general manager in any sport was called upon more often to help in league matters.
Problems in Chicago?
Ask Sam.
A strong, high-profile person was needed to organize the first Canada Cup?
Ask Sam.
What was the best way to double the number of the Original Six for the 1967-68 season?
Ask Sam.
Always Sam.
"When great general managers are mentioned," the late NHL president Clarence Campbell once told me, "you think of names such as Jack Adams, Lester Patrick, Art Ross, Frank Selke - and Pollock. What Sam always had going for him is that he knew what was needed to win. He was as shrewd as anyone in the judgment of players and I don't know of anyone who was more knowledgeable as to the workings of the bylaws.
"There was an element of suspicion in Sam all the time," Campbell added, "but despite the enormous input he had into the creation of what were deemed to be improvements, I'm not aware of a single situation where he designed it for his own benefit. He was very resourceful in the ways he went about some of the things, but none was off-colour, nor could you say they were the product of a scheme."
Campbell was only partly right.
What made Sammy run was that he was always several rink-lengths ahead of his peers in terms of making the Canadiens better ... always planning ... always scheming how to make his team better.
What made Pollock so successful? Why was he so much smarter and more successful than any general manager of his or any other time? Somehow, he was always able to maintain his composure. He could be hurt, angered, disappointed and feel cheated, but in any struggle between these emotions and the need to win, he always put winning above everything else.
How else would you explain some of his deals, such as getting Guy Lafleur as the No. 1 overall choice in the 1971 draft.
How was he allowed to draft Réjean Houle and Marc Tardif before other teams had their first pick in 1969?
Somehow, he had managed to convince his partners that it would be beneficial to the entire league if the Canadiens were allowed to draft the two best French-Canadian juniors. His argument? It was important to the entire league to keep alive the organization's reputation as the Flying Frenchmen.
(That astonishing arrangement lasted only one season. If it had been extended to a second, the Canadiens would have landed Gilbert Perreault. Imagine how this Flying Frenchman would have looked in a Canadiens sweater!)
Pollock was always several steps ahead of everybody. He always had to get the last word in.
I knew him when he was a teenager, and even then he was developing a mystique for winning. He was only 17 when he managed a fastball team comprised largely of Canadiens players. Goaltender Bill Durnan was his pitcher, the best in Canada. Doug Harvey was his third baseman. Toe Blake and Elmer Lach were on the team. So was Ken Reardon. They were among hockey's grandest names, but teenager Pollock was in charge.
Unlike most general managers, he didn't travel as much as he would have liked because of his fear for flying, which stayed with him for many of his years in the general manager's chair. During the Original Six years, he would be chauffeured to most of the games, but in the early years of the 12-team league he opted out of most of his team's visits to Los Angeles and Oakland, and to others such as Minnesota and St. Louis. But woe to the coach who wasn't on the telephone to Pollock within minutes after a road game. He had to be told everything: Who had played well and who hadn't. And why hadn't they?
I remember one Canadiens head coach yelling into an arena telephone only moments after the Canadiens had lost to the Minnesota North Stars.
"Sam ... Sam ... you have to come down. The players aren't listening to me!"
Eventually, however, Sam found a way to overcome his fear of flying ... or so it seemed. One day, there he was sitting across the aisle from me on a Canadiens flight to St. Louis. His Montreal Star was opened to the sports page. Several hours later, with the plane about to land, I sneaked a peek at his newspaper. He was still "reading" the same page.
Control was what Pollock was all about during his matchless career. "Team" was what it was about.
He was angered when Houle and Tardif jumped to the World Hockey Association in 1973, irate when Ken Dryden decided to retire only a few days before training camp opened in 1973. Dryden had wanted to renegotiate his contract and Pollock refused to consider the idea, but when the opportunity arose to get Dryden back the following season, Pollock didn't hesitate.
It was the same with Houle.
"Exactly one minute ago," Pollock told me on the telephone in 1976, "I signed Réjean Houle to a contract."
"Is that the same guy that had you screaming when he jumped to the Quebec Nordiques? What made you change your mind?" he was asked.
"He can help our team," Pollock said. "Is that a good enough reason?"
*************
Ex-Habs GM was always a step ahead
Wily trader. 'He didn't have to say anything. Just his look was enough'
DAVE STUBBS
The Gazette
Thursday, August 16, 2007
He built his hockey club shrewdly, with crafty selections, sleight of hand, a little smoke, a few mirrors. He could pull the wool over the eyes of a prospective customer like the best used-car salesman, throwing an extra body or draft pick into a deal like so many floor mats.
And he possessed an uncommonly keen eye, sitting patiently on raw talent he knew might still be a few years from blossoming into something truly great.
Yesterday's passing of former Canadiens general manager Sam Pollock rekindled memories of how he regularly pulled rabbits out of his hat at the draft or trading table, leading his franchise to nine Stanley Cups and eight NHL regular-season championships during his 14 years at Montreal's helm.
Last night, Hall of Fame captain Yvan Cournoyer remembered his own path through the Canadiens organization matching Pollock's almost step for step.
"We arrived the same year (1964), and we finished the same year (1978)," said Cournoyer, who played 15 games in the 1978-79 season to earn his 10th Stanley Cup.
"Sam was his own man, with his own personality. He was a character. But he didn't have to say anything. Just his look was enough."
Cournoyer was a teenager from Drummondville when he was called into Pollock's Forum office to sign a standard player's contract.
"A $1,500 bonus and $7,500 for the season," he recalled, laughing. "You could make more in two or three weeks winning the Stanley Cup than in the entire season, can you believe it? But here I was, playing for my dream team and winning the Cup.
"Sam gave me a good five-year contract when expansion came (in 1967-68). He liked the guys who won for him. He respected his players, and we had great respect for him, too."
As did other GMs around the league, grudging though it was.
Lou Nanne was boss of the Minnesota North Stars when Pollock left the Canadiens. In the 1981 book Lions in Winter by Chrys Goyens and Allen Turowetz, Nanne summed up the feelings of most everyone else in an NHL front office of the day.
"(Pollock) was so successful because he was just a few steps ahead of everyone else at all times," he said.
A chapter in the book might be the definitive study of Pollock and his methods - of how he didn't allow himself to get too close to players he might have to trade, of how he still suffered the hard emotions of a bad, if rare, stretch of games by his team.
"I once saw Sam on a TV show saying that running a hockey team was like running a chicken farm," said Canadiens legend Dickie Moore. "He said it was all business, forget emotion. I just think that a lot of this was a front put on by a very astute man who saw the necessity of keeping his distance."
Pollock's players could read between the furrowed brows, of that there was no doubt.
"You always knew things were happening when Sam would get to nervously wringing his handkerchief in his hands," said Guy Lafleur, the GM's famous and most celebrated draft pick, No. 1 overall in 1971.
"The veterans who knew better would be checking his coat pockets to see if an airline ticket to someplace like Oakland was sticking out."
hat view was shared by future great Steve Shutt, Pollock's No. 1 choice in 1972.
"Our joke was, 'How do you spell relief?' " Shutt said. " 'A-I-R C-A-N-A-D-A.' Over and out. It wasn't hard to stay motivated with Sam running the show, emotion or no emotion."
It was Pollock's thorough business skills, which would serve him well beyond his life in hockey, that put him head and shoulders above his so-called management peers, and the understanding that hockey was a business.
"When I started, front-office management might have been 50 per cent hockey acumen and 50 per cent business skills," he said. "By the 1970s, it was 25 and 75 per cent. Now, I think it's 15 per cent hockey sense and 85 per cent business skills.
"If you want to be successful in this business, you have to follow sound business principles. That means keep expenses low and profits high."
(Pollock raised more than one eyebrow in 1971 when he signed the freshly drafted Lafleur to a two-year, $105,000 contract, the richest ever for a Canadiens rookie, one bolstered by a variety of bonuses.)
For all of his success, Pollock had his methods boiled down to a simple formula, one that didn't do justice to the dynasty he built on his unique talent and special instincts.
"People have asked me many times how someone goes about building the kind of tradition the Canadiens have enjoyed for so long," he said.
"It is really quite simple. You build a top-notch organization manned by the best people at all levels. You get each man doing his job on and off the ice and all of a sudden, you're a winner."
***************
'His legacy won't be topped'
Spotlight Story: Habs GM Bob Gainey fondly remembers how his hockey destiny was shaped for him when late Canadiens mastermind Sam Pollock drafted him in 1973
DAVE STUBBS
The Gazette
As general manager of the Canadiens from 1964-78, the late Sam Pollock was known to have a superb poker face. This was a man who played his cards tight to his vest and wagered only after a study of the other players convinced him that the odds favoured his holding the winning hand.
Some would suggest those also are the qualities of current Canadiens GM Bob Gainey.
Just don't ask Gainey to shuffle any similarities into a comparison.
"I wouldn't try to make that bridge in any way," he said yesterday, remembering the man who drafted him into the NHL 34 years ago. "Mr. Pollock was a shrewd and wise operator in his era, and he's left a legacy that won't be topped."
Gainey's career path was largely charted by a man he'd never met. Pollock used the Canadiens' first-round choice in the 1973 amateur draft, No. 8 overall, to select a rugged 19-year-old winger from small-town Ontario.
He believes it was the work of Canadiens scouts Ron Caron and Claude Ruel that caught Pollock's eye. Yet there were no pre-draft talks between the team and its future Hall of Fame forward.
Gainey doesn't even recall exactly how he learned that Pollock had called his name that May 15 at Montreal's Mount Royal Hotel. He had been in town a week earlier to watch the Memorial Cup tournament, but players did not attend the NHL draft to tug on the jersey of their new NHL club, as is done today.
Maybe the news came by telephone, if not right away.
"I didn't have my cellphone with me," Gainey joked of a time when a cell was only something you studied in biology. "It's all kind of fuzzy."
But Gainey does recall a flurry of activity in the following couple of weeks, flying to Montreal to meet his new general manager, sign his first professional contract and be introduced to the media at a Windsor Hotel reception.
"For a 19-year-old from Peterborough, meeting Mr. Pollock in his Forum office was quite a leap," he said.
Gainey went to the Forum with his Boston-based agent, Bob Woolf, and remembers sitting starry-eyed outside Pollock's office, "probably wearing a tie somebody had tied for me," his nerves not exactly soothed by the well-meaning banter of two team executives - 1950s star Floyd Curry and legendary former captain Jean Béliveau.
"They kept me occupied while Bob was in Mr. Pollock's office," Gainey said. "Finally, I went in and met Mr. Pollock, and I think contracts probably were signed at that time. And that was it. Sometime later that day, I got myself back home to Peterborough and got on with the rest of the summer.
"I was at such a level of overall astonishment that all of this was going on, I don't know if I absorbed my meeting with Mr. Pollock as much as I tried to survive it, and all the different things that were happening to me. I know I wasn't the first greenhorn he'd had in his office."
It was a good time to be a young player, with the fledgling World Hockey Association courting many. Gainey was drafted by the WHA's Minnesota Fighting Saints, but didn't consider them, told by Woolf: "If you're drafted by the (New York) Yankees or (Boston) Celtics or the Canadiens, you don't even think about other things."
Gainey vaguely remembers playing his first few NHL seasons for an annual salary between $25,000 and $40,000, "really quite good numbers. I'm pretty sure that, at 19, I was earning more playing hockey than my
father was making."
There was no special talk with Pollock, just a message to all hopefuls on the eve of the 1973 training camp that here were the other players with whom they'd contest any roster spot available.
Gainey and Pollock would talk more in the five years they were GM and hardrock forward, especially when Gainey was the team's players' association representative.
"Mr. Pollock wasn't a blanket on the team all the time, because Scotty (coach Bowman) had all of that well under control," he said. "Sam's job encompassed more than recruitment of players in the hockey department, which is most of my responsibility now. He also took care of ticket sales and the booking of the arena (now largely handled by president Pierre Boivin)."
While Gainey said he didn't actively seek Pollock's advice later in life, he did call upon him for counsel near the end of his playing days, a decade after Pollock's 1978 departure from the Canadiens, "to use him as a resource to discuss where and how I might go next."
That would be coaching in France, then coaching and managing in Minnesota and over-seeing the North Stars' move to Dallas.
Soon would come Dallas's 1999 Stanley Cup championship and managerial responsibility with Olympic and World Cup teams, before Gainey arrived in Montreal as executive vice-president and GM in 2003, nine years after he was elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame.
Yesterday, in a release from the Canadiens, Gainey referred to more than a dozen Pollock-era players who moved into NHL coaching or management.
"That has a lot to do with the model that we had to work with, Mr. Pollock the manager and Scotty Bowman the coach," he said. "The opportunities rolled right into our cycle of life, when the NHL expanded again just as most of the guys in my age group were ready to go into another career path.
"Over the years Mr. Pollock and I were on the same teams, the one-to-one time we spent was pretty minimal. But if you're around anybody even for a short period of time, there are things you can learn. You find out why some things are done one way and not another, things that are filed into your bank of experience, perhaps to be used again later.
"Mr. Pollock went through periods of enormous change," Gainey said. "He started in the early 1960s when the NHL was very stable and things had been done a certain way for more than a decade.
"But not too long after, there was a period of another league forming (the WHA), the expansion of the NHL, a draft was implemented and international hockey was introduced in North America, with Soviets and other teams coming here and those players becoming available.
"Even through those huge transitions, Mr. Pollock was able to find a way to be the best at what he did."
It is not lost on Gainey that, figuratively at least, he now occupies the desk of a front-office legend, and the man who started him on his life in the NHL.
"If I happen to have picked up a couple of nuggets from Mr. Pollock along the way, lucky for me," he said. "He was a very private person and, to a degree, I am. I'm just going about my responsibilities today with my own personality, trying to be successful for our organization and our fans."