Bowman remains connected to NHL on 90th birthday

Scotty Bowman, the winningest coach in NHL history, will celebrate his 90th birthday Monday exactly where and how you’d expect: He’ll be in the stands of Buffalo’s LECOM Harborcenter, watching two afternoon games on the final day of the three-day Prospects Challenge rookie tournament.

“I’ll see two games on Friday, then two more on Monday,” Bowman said happily a few days before his milestone birthday. 

“And then my wife and I will go for a nice dinner.”

Six teams are taking part in the tournament: the host Buffalo Sabres, Montreal Canadiens, Pittsburgh Penguins, Boston Bruins, New Jersey Devils and Ottawa Senators. Bowman is quick to point out that he coached the NHL teams of the first three on the list.

Scotty Bowman with longtime friend and fellow coach Barry Smith (left) in the stands at LECOM Harborcenter in Buffalo on Sept. 15, 2023, attending the Prospects Challenge tournament.

Officially, Bowman has been an unrestricted free agent since July 1, 2022, when after 62 years on the payroll of an NHL team he stepped down as the Chicago Blackhawks senior advisor of hockey operations, a post he had held for 14 years.

But to say that he has been away from the game is far from the truth. Last season, Bowman figures he attended three-quarters of the Tampa Bay Lightning’s home games, driving to Amalie Arena from his winter home in Sarasota, Florida, watching the action from his media gallery seat and relishing a sport that has been his lifeblood since his youth in the Montreal district of Verdun.

This legend has 14 Stanley Cup titles to his name, including an NHL-record nine as a coach. He won five with the Canadiens, in 1973 and 1976-79, then in 1992 with the Penguins, and in 1997, 1998 and 2002 with the Detroit Red Wings. 

He’s added five more titles in various front-office capacities with the Penguins (1991), Red Wings (2008) and Blackhawks (2010, 2013, 2015).

Scotty Bowman at home in East Amherst, New York, with the Stanley Cup and behind the bench of the 1970s Montreal Canadiens.

His own playing career cut short by injury, Bowman turned in the mid-1950s to scouting, then coaching. He would become the most successful coach in NHL history, winning a record 1,244 times in 2,141 regular-season games between 1967-68 and 2001-02, with 223 victories in 353 Stanley Cup Playoff games.

Inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1991 as a Builder, and decorated with the Order of Hockey in Canada in 2017, Bowman had been in or around the NHL for 65 years when he “retired” -- 18 years with the Canadiens organization, 15 with the Red Wings, 14 with the Blackhawks, eight with the Sabres, four with the St. Louis Blues, three with the Penguins and three more in broadcast booths as an analyst.

Still today, he’s most comfortable in an arena or being in the company of hockey people. 

In early October, Bowman and his wife of 54 years, Suella, will fly from their summer home near Buffalo down to Sarasota, their car driven south by a friend. And almost immediately, he’ll be driving up to Tampa -- “Door to door 69 miles, all interstate, an easy drive, no stopping,” he said -- to watch Lightning games and shoot the breeze with the great many who will be delighted to rub shoulders with him.

Scotty Bowman, Pittsburgh Penguins director of player development, hoists the Stanley Cup in 1991 following the Penguins’ championship win against the Minnesota North Stars.

“Julien BriseBois is a wonderful man,” Bowman said, deeply appreciative of the red carpet the Lightning GM rolls out for him. “Julien looks after me. A couple of years ago, he’d buttonhole me to talk about what Sam Pollock was like when he was GM with the Canadiens (winning nine Stanley Cup championships from 1965-78).”

The quiet birthday dinner on Monday follows the real celebration: a grand five-day cruise that his family organized, from Port Canaveral, Florida, on July 31 down to Nassau, Bahamas, with a stop at Castaway Cay, a private port-of-call island for Disney Cruise Line ships.

In fact, it was an ocean-going family hat trick: a celebration of Bowman’s upcoming 90th; the 50th birthday of his son, Stan, who hit the half-century mark June 28; and the 21st birthday of Stan’s son, Will (William Scott Bowman, named for his grandfather), who also was born Sept. 18.

The clan totaled 21: Bowman and Suella, children Alicia, Nancy, Stan and Bob and their spouses, and 11 grandchildren, ages 4 to 24.

“There were activities for all ages,” Bowman said. “And three pretty big milestones.”

Scotty and Suella Bowman with children Alicia, Nancy, Stan and Bob, their spouses and 11 grandchildren on Pirate Night aboard Disney Wish during a cruise July 31-Aug. 4, 2023, to celebrate Bowman’s upcoming 90th birthday.

He’s already excited about four shows that he and Suella will attend this fall and winter at Sarasota’s Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall: Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons in November, a Neil Diamond tribute and the Salute to Vienna, both in December, and perhaps best of all, Paul Anka in March.

It should come as no surprise that Bowman has a history with Anka that predates by a year the Ottawa native’s 1957 chart-topping smash “Diana.”

Arriving in Ottawa in the fall of 1956 as Pollock’s assistant coach and manager with the junior Hull-Ottawa Canadiens, Bowman would regularly have breakfast at a small downtown restaurant called The Locanda. It was co-owned by Andy Anka, whose 15-year-old son, Paul, was a part-time dishwasher as he tried to forge a career in music.

“I only knew that Paul was Andy’s son,” Bowman said.

A year later, Anka put “Diana” into orbit, at age 16 a global superstar. The 82-year-old’s remarkable career is still going strong nearly seven decades later.

Scotty and Suella Bowman with their 11 grandchildren during a Disney Wish cruise July 31-Aug. 4, 2023 to celebrate Bowman’s upcoming 90th birthday.

About 30 years ago, Bowman and his wife were in Las Vegas with tickets to Anka’s show. The singer, who for a very brief time in the early 1990s held a small ownership piece of the Senators, learned of the couple’s presence and invited them backstage following the concert.

“Paul was quite the professional,” Bowman recalled. “He invited us into his dressing room then said, ‘Have a drink, I need about 20 minutes. I have to go over the show,’ then he came back and told us he’d discussed with his producers certain things he needed to correct the following night.”

A few days before his 90th birthday, Bowman steered a conversation to the Boston Bruins’ Historic 100, the team’s just-announced centennial-season list of the 100 most legendary players for a franchise that is just 10 years older than himself. And then, to the much lesser-known Alcide Hebert.

He rattled off a dozen names, all from the misty past of the Bruins. Top of mind were the late Frank Brimsek, Milt Schmidt, Eddie Shore, Dit Clapper and his first hockey hero, Bill Cowley, every one of them on the Historic 100 list he’d not yet seen.

Boston Bruins center Bill Cowley (left), Scotty Bowman’s first boyhood hockey idol, and captain Aubrey “Dit” Clapper with the latter’s milestone 200th NHL regular-season goal scored against Toronto at Maple Leaf Gardens on Jan. 18, 1941. Cowley assisted on the goal.

On Christmas Day 1941, Bowman was the first kid on his Verdun block -- the only kid on his Verdun block -- wearing a Bruins sweater, the thick wool adorned with the No. 10 worn by Hall of Fame-bound center Cowley, winner the previous season of the Stanley Cup and Hart Trophy as the NHL’s most valuable player.

Jane Bowman worked at the Eaton’s department store and ordered the sweater from the mail-order catalog; she knew that her 8-year-old son loved the Bruins, the schoolboy listening to their games on the strong nighttime signal of Boston radio. 

So it was that she ordered Scotty a Cowley sweater, not the red, white and blue of the Canadiens that was virtually the only choice of every kid in the neighborhood.

Decades later in Ottawa, Bowman met Cowley at a hockey function and told him how much he’d meant to a young fan.

Thoughts of Cowley, players from his youth and so many legends he coached during his illustrious career are washing over Bowman now as he arrives at this milestone birthday.

So too are memories of Hebert, a quiet man who lived upstairs from the Bowman family during the 1940s. 

The New York Rangers’ primary scout for Quebec, Hebert was hired in 1948 as manager of the Verdun Auditorium while coaching the junior Verdun Cyclones in that building. He would recommend Gump Worsley, one of his promising goalies, to the Rangers, paving the Hall of Famer’s path to his first NHL team in 1952. 

In 2021, the main rink of the historic Auditorium was named for Bowman, whose father, John, had helped with construction in the late 1930s.

Scotty Bowman’s 1974-75 Topps rookie card as coach of the Montreal Canadiens, No. 261 in a set of 264 cards.

Forty years ago, coaching the 1982-83 Sabres back at the Montreal Forum, he held court with reporters.

“After the workout, we clustered around him like students around an eminent professor on the lecture circuit,” wrote Montreal Gazette columnist Tim Burke, “fueling him with a random question now and then just to bring him out, then sit back and enjoy the hopscotch through the hickory.

“Scotty Bowman of Verdun is hockey’s liveliest mind. Maybe the most inquisitive, most retentive, most searching -- and surely the most mathematical -- intellect in all of sports.

“In a bull session with Bowman, you don’t only get a rundown on teams, you are taken on an exotic tour through the whole realm of hockey as he darts from international junior tournaments in Camrose, Alberta, to prospects in the outer reaches of Finland.”

Four decades later, it’s clear that only the arenas have changed, Bowman’s hockey blood as thick as ever. 

“I’d go to the last game on Monday,” he said wistfully of the Prospects Challenge finale. “It’s the Sabres against the Penguins, two of my teams. But it starts at 5 o’clock and we’ve got plans for dinner.”

Expect Bowman’s waiter to deliver the final score with the meal.

Top Photo: Scotty Bowman, age 7 in 1940, and photographed in 2021 with his 2019 biography written by Ken Dryden, Bowman’s No. 1 goalie with the 1970s Montreal Canadiens dynasty.