Clare Drake gets his due as a builder at the Hockey Hall of Fame after teaching so many NHL coaches all he knew about the game
When you ask Ken Hitchcock if he would ever have been an National Hockey League coach without Clare Drake, the answer is short and sweet, no beating around the bush.
“No, I wouldn’t,” said the third-winningest coach in NHL history after Scotty Bowman and Joel Quenneville, who got his coaching start with the midget AAA Sherwood Park Chain Gang 40 years ago while working at Edmonton’s United Cycle.
“All I was was a work, work, work coach, just work harder. I had no structure. I had no discipline in the way I taught the technical part of the game,” said Hitchcock. “Clare taught me you needed a plan. He spent years teaching it to me and I mean, years. After (U of Alberta) Bears’ games, we’d be in that little coach’s office for an hour and a half and I’m sure he wanted to go home but he didn’t. He’d also spend extra time with me at clinics.
“I can’t say thanks enough.”
Hitchcock is one of only 232 men who have ever been an NHL head coach and he has 789 wins, but if he hadn’t grown up in Edmonton and hadn’t found his way, day after day, to what was then Varsity Arena on the University of Alberta campus to watch Drake’s Golden Bears practise and play, Hitchcock absolutely knows he’d never be what he is today.
As Drake finally gets his due with a spot in the Hockey Hall of Fame as a builder, he has many coaching disciples: current NHL head knocks Hitchcock, Mike Babcock and Barry Trotz, former head coaches George Kingston, Dave King, Mike Johnston and Tom Watt, and long-time friend and Oilers assistant Billy Moores.
When Babcock’s name comes up, Drake laughs heartily.
“Maybe he should lose that moniker quickly. I don’t know if that (disciple) is a good thing to be hanging around your neck,” said Drake.
Ah, but Babcock does love it.
“I think it’s awesome,” said the Toronto Maple Leafs bench boss, who coached at the University of Lethbridge once upon a time and heard Drake speak at many coaching clinics.
“He’s a champion of a man, he made people better. Most of his players went on to be doctors and lawyers and businessmen rather than professional athletes. In saying that, he helped tons of coaches.”
Life lessons, coaching lessons. All given free of charge, no strings attached from coach Drake.
He won’t be in Toronto for the induction ceremony because he’s physically unable to travel, but he has his hand-delivered Hall of Fame blazer. His grandson Mike Gabinet, who coaches at U of Nebraska-Omaha, will speak on his behalf Monday night. Clare and wife Dolly will be watching it on TV.
Drake, 89, is proud of the long overdue honour, but if he hadn’t gotten it, it wouldn’t have bothered him. To this day, he shrugs when you bring up his mentorship of Hitchcock. Spending extra time to talk with coaches, not just Hitchcock but also Trotz, was never a hardship for Drake, who was such a good sports teacher he also won a Vanier Cup in 1967 as the Bears’ head football coach.
When you toss any names of former Bears players, Drake amazingly tells you what kind of player they were, 50 or 60 years after he coached them.
He laughs softly when told that he dispensed his knowledge freely but still beat the coaches he’d given the information to anyway. He’s never been a self-promoter.
“I learned from Clare that coaching was a lot bigger than wins and losses. You had an obligation to teach and to create an environment that was safe for kids to work in,” said Hitchcock. “We always thought hockey was just a competition, but he made it way bigger than that. He showed how important it was to build a team, and how it impacted guys lives for years and years after they finished playing.
“Every little word I hear at clinics now about how to coach the game, I start laughing. It’s all his words. He invented three parts of the game (power play, penalty-kill, pressure) that are structurally in every coach’s NHL handbook today.”
For sure, coaches throughout North America, pro or otherwise, took Drake’s pressure system and adapted it to their strategies. The days of stationary penalty-killers was over.
“It felt like they had three extra guys on the ice,” said Trotz, who played and coached at the University of Manitoba when Drake was coaching the Bears. “He made the game so fast. They were relentless.”
King, now working with Hockey Canada’s Olympic team, long ago learned a lot about coaching from Drake.
“We’d go to coaching clinics and Clare just gave it (his education) away,” recalled King, once head coach of the Calgary Flames and the Columbus Blue Jackets. “He’d tell us what he knew and not leave anything out because, well, he knew he could teach it better than all of us.’
“Over beers with coaches, Clare’s name would always come up because we felt he was the godfather of coaching education in Canada. You can talk about Roger Neilson and Clare Drake as real builders. They both made huge impacts on coaching.”
E-mail: jmatheson@postmedia.com
On Twitter: @NHLbyMatty
