Slim and None Read online

  Just as many of hockey’s legends eventually found themselves playing for Howard’s teams, so Academy Award winners have appeared in his films. Jamie Foxx was named Best Actor for Ray, and some of Howard’s other films have included Best Actor winners Geoffrey Rush, Russell Crowe and Matthew McConaughey, and Best Supporting Actress winner Penelope Cruz.

  Howard is a Renaissance Man of entertainment, and has chosen two of the businesses just about everybody thinks they could succeed at themselves: movies and sports.

  Howard is the first to tell you that he grew up in an affluent, deep-rooted Eastern family, and that that background had its advantages. They weren’t the advantages you’d immediately assume. For one thing, he chose a career path — more correctly, two of them — which veered dramatically from the traditional family blueprint. His family never provided, nor did he ask for, the capital to fund any of his hockey projects.

  However, his upbringing did imbue him with a strong work ethic, a rigorous sense of responsibility to those who have shown faith in him, a fierce loyalty and the social graces to ease his way through the most treacherous business situations. There can be no disputing that the large circle of successful people he, and his family, knew provided him with lots of initial contacts.

  Because he’s a people person, Howard maintains and nourishes those contacts. People from one era of his life keep popping up in others, the most notable example among many being the Kelley family: Howard tried out for Jack Kelley’s hockey team, later hired him to coach the Whalers and, even later, to be president of the Penguins; hired Jack’s son David as a Whalers stick boy and later combined with David to make the iconic hockey movie Mystery, Alaska; and had Jack’s other son, Mark, as a scout with the Penguins and general manager of the Red Army team. While we were writing this book, I used to joke that Howard’s life is a huge Venn Diagram, that if it were possible to have negative degrees of separation, he would.

  For a high achiever, Howard is very sensitive about other people’s feelings — sometimes to his own detriment, says his wife, Karen. He responds better when someone doesn’t raise their voice with him because yelling is too reminiscent of his days in the Marine Corps. When they were first married, Karen Baldwin had to remind Howard that she was only raising her voice because she was in the other room and wanted to be sure he heard her, not because she was mad. That helps explain the calmness with which Baldwin can approach bitter negotiations.

  “It’s hard not to like Howard, even if you’re on the other side of the table,” says Bob Caporale, a renowned sports-investment advisor who was a young lawyer when he met Howard during the very earliest days of his WHA adventure, and who has remained a close friend.

  “He never raises his voice. If things go bad, he doesn’t slink away. He’ll try to think of another way it’ll work for everyone. During the negotiations for the merger of the NHL and WHA, he had perseverance and commitment. I was involved over those couple of years, and it’s my view the merger would never have happened without Howard. The way he approached it was not adversarial.”

  Howard’s close friend John Coburn, with whom he founded the New England Whalers, also speaks highly of his business intuition. “He may not be a highly educated person,” Coburn recalls warmly, “but Howard has the most street smarts of anyone I know.”

  Because he had difficulty reading, Howard struggled academically, but his people and communication skills have always more than compensated. He loves to laugh and is a terrific storyteller, as you’ll see from the anecdotes in this book.

  No wonder he gravitated toward the ultimate storytelling neighborhood: Hollywood. Or, as we’ve often referred to it in his case, Hockey-wood. While Karen was a movie nut when she was growing up, Howard says he wasn’t. But in casual conversation he often compares people to film characters and situations to movie plots.

  Theirs is a hand-in-glove marriage: each has the perfect skill set to complement the other, and their combined output in a day is staggering. This is my 23rd book and their first, but they were the ones who really took the reins, so I’m not surprised that they’ve been able to successfully guide more than two dozen films onto the screen. The Baldwins are an impressive couple.

  Howard not only succeeds, he puts others in the position to succeed. When someone has failed him, Howard rarely sees it that way: he usually thinks he didn’t help that person enough. Some around him, for instance, complained that for their biggest-budget film, Sahara, he and Karen favored a director who’d never done anything quite that large before, but they insisted he get his chance. Just as, you might infer, someone once gave Howard his chance.

  During the early days of the WHA, Bob Caporale was talking to Bob Schmertz, whose investment had allowed the New England Whalers to become the best-financed WHA team from the first puck-drop. Caporale was surprised to learn that Schmertz had never even seen a hockey game before he met John Coburn and Howard Baldwin.

  “He said, ‘But I listened to Howard, and I was impressed with his enthusiasm and how it should be run,’” Caporale recalls. “To me what Bob was saying was, ‘I am investing in Howard Baldwin, not the team.’”

  Schmertz was a very smart man, so he knew that with Howard Baldwin, his chances of success were much better than “slim” or “none.”

  PART ONE

  FROM THE GROUND UP

  “Howdy”

  On a misty night in May of 1942, Howard “Howdy” Lapsley, one of my father’s closest friends from Harvard, took off in a two-seat observation plane to watch the rendezvous of some naval planes and a torpedo boat squadron.

  An errant plane dove down and struck Lapsley’s plane, completely destroying it and killing him instantly. My father was devastated.

  Two days later — May 14th, 1942 — I was born, and my parents named me Howard Lapsley Baldwin after my father’s deceased friend. From day one his nickname, “Howdy,” became mine too. My name has meant so much to me because its original “owner” meant so much to my father. I have worn it proudly because there is history and meaning to it.

  I am the third of four sons born to Rose and Ian (Mike) Baldwin. My brother Ian is the eldest, Michael came next, and Philip is almost five years younger than I am. We grew up in Mount Kisco, in Westchester County, New York, and had the privilege of spending all of our summers in a place called Wareham, Massachusetts, located on the gateway to Cape Cod. In the winter, we had the frozen ponds and rivers around home to skate and play hockey on. I can’t remember a point when I did not have hockey in my life. I’ll never forget putting on double-runner skates for the first time when I was two or three, and skating on the ice in the driveway ruts. I quickly became a good skater and a pretty good player.

  My dad had been a great hockey player at Harvard, and the five consecutive goals he scored against McGill in the first period of their 1933 game is still a school record for most goals in a single period. Nicknamed “Iron Mike,” he was extended an invitation to play in the 1936 Olympic Games and had an opportunity to try out with the Boston Bruins, but couldn’t because his father wanted him to join the American Dye Wood Company, the family business, as soon as he graduated. At that point in time, playing professional hockey was not a viable profession for a young man graduating at the top of his class from Harvard.

  My father was the youngest of nine children and had grown up in tremendous affluence. His father made a fortune in business, only to lose much of it in the Great Depression, but my dad was always proud of his father’s courage and integrity in trying to pay back every debt that was incurred. That has served me well, as honoring obligations was one of my early life lessons. My dad, an executive recruiter, may not have ever made the money my grandfather did, but he always provided well for my mother and their four sons. We always had everything we needed, and frankly, much more than most families.

  My mother was one of six children — five girls and a boy — of a well-to-do, old-line Boston family. She wa
s the product of a union of the Welds and the Saltonstalls, two very well-known Massachusetts dynasties. While my father was in the Marines and away at war, she did a remarkable job of raising us alone while she herself was still quite young. Later, while she was working during the day at the Harvey School, the boarding school my brothers and I attended, my mother completed her college degree in New York City at night, which I considered pretty extraordinary, and still do.

  My parents and siblings always loved and supported me. There were certain traditions in my family, though, that did create some pressure and expectations. We were meant to go to a prestigious New England prep school — St. Paul’s in New Hampshire—then to Harvard, then off into the business or banking worlds.

  I was not going to be able to follow that path, because I was not a great student. Today, the diagnosis might be dyslexia or ADHD, but back then I was just a slow reader and had difficulty concentrating for a length of time. I learned to adapt to the problem and not attempt to fight it when it happened. The times when I was able to read, I did have incredible retention. At the Harvey School they had a horrible weekly tradition of posting our grades for the whole school to see. It made me hate school even more to be publicly humiliated, as I often failed or just barely passed.

  After the Harvey School my two older brothers went to St. Paul’s, which was the crème de la crème of hockey prep schools, but St. Paul’s was not in the cards for me. Instead, my parents found Salisbury, an up-and-coming prep school in the northwest corner of Connecticut, and I was enrolled there in 1956. I loved Salisbury and I thank God for this experience. I made great friends and excelled in sports. I made the varsity hockey team in Grade 9, and it became clear that if I wanted to, I could play college hockey some day. While I continued to struggle academically and knew it would be hard to keep up at college, that served as my motivation. I even took a post-grad year at Salisbury to try to raise my marks, but that didn’t work out too well. My average went up only one point!

  I was aware that “What do we do about Howdy?” had become a common question in my family. I knew that if I didn’t start to make some decisions for myself, I would start to sink. It was time to establish my own path, whatever that might be, or my self-esteem would suffer. I was not fitting into the family career mold, and I knew that in order for me to make that mark, I had to do something distinctive.

  So I signed up for the Marine Corps.

  Parris Island: Basic Training

  In September of 1961, at the age of 19, I took a train out of Boston bound for Parris Island, South Carolina, where I would undergo 13 rigorous weeks of basic training for the Marine Corps.

  I chose the Marines because it was the hardest service branch that I was aware of, and my father and other family members had served in the Marine Corps. My parents had accepted and supported my decision because I had committed to something and was following through. For me, this was a way of achieving my own identity.

  My father and my first cousin Lou Preston, who was like a fifth son to my dad, had been in the Marines during World War II. Lou was at Iwo Jima and eventually became chairman of J.P. Morgan and later the World Bank, but sadly died far too young, in his early 60s.

  I wasn’t really sure how much the Marines meant to my father until after he died and I was going through his desk and found four or five thick files full of everything that had to do with him and the Marines. Since he had three children, my father wasn’t required to go to war, but he wanted to do his duty. He didn’t see action as such, but had gone to Officer Candidate School, served as a drill instructor at Parris Island, and served in Guam. One of my earliest memories is of my mother dressing me and my two brothers up to go to the train station to meet my dad.

  I had plenty of warnings prior to enlisting that Parris Island was going to be tough, so when the train pulled into Beaufort, South Carolina, I was ready for anything. I stepped off the train and the whole town was out there to greet us. It was a little town with dirt streets and as soon as we got off the train the drill instructors started screaming, and I mean screaming, at us.

  The instructors marched us down the street and into a restaurant for a meal. This was 1961, when segregation was still entrenched in the South, and running right down the middle of the restaurant was a chicken-wire fence. “No Colored” were allowed on the one side. It was not a nice place.

  It was about an hour-and-a-half bus ride from the town over a natural causeway to the island. On the way, they made it clear that there would be no going AWOL, because the water was full of nothing but alligators and water moccasins. I remember saying to myself that I might have made a mistake, but this would be the first one where I couldn’t call home. I would have to see it through.

  It was 13 weeks of harassment and living a Spartan life. We were yelled at for 13 weeks, and we soon realized that there was no talking back. I was six feet, 190 pounds, and in good shape, so I had no trouble with all the physical demands like some of the guys did. And once I got into the groove with the stuff they were doing to us mentally, I just said, “Okay, that’s the way it is.” But they really did bust our balls for the whole 13 weeks. The whole methodology of this kind of training is to absolutely break you down then build you back up the way they want you, so that when you’re told to do something, you don’t think about it. You just do it.

  When people ask about Parris Island, I say, “Imagine the worst . . . and double it.”

  They pushed us to the maximum, and every one of us had our individual tests we had to face. There had been some bad accidents at Parris Island in previous years, and even a couple of deaths. Times were a little different when I got there. Technically, they were no longer allowed to rouse us in the middle of the night on a whim and they weren’t supposed to touch us, although they still did both.

  I loved drill practice, but once I made a mistake during it and the sergeant hit me in the stomach and again in the jaw. I was so surprised that I actually started to laugh. But he never bothered me again: that was my test.

  By sheer coincidence a friend of my brother Ian’s, Ted Ross, was in our platoon, and so were some really promising major league baseball prospects. I had always loved baseball, and on Parris Island I got hooked on it again because Bob Meyer, Pete Mikkelsen and Gene Alley were all in my platoon.

  Meyer, a relief pitcher, was what was then referred to as a “bonus baby” for the big signing bonus he got from the Yankees. When he made the team in 1964, his very first strikeout victim would be Carl Yastrzemski. Mikkelsen would go on to pitch for the Yankees and four other teams in a 10-year big-league career, and Alley was the Pittsburgh Pirates’ starting shortstop for a decade, beginning less than two years after we took our basic training.

  Meyer made the mistake of complaining about the hard conditions in a letter he wrote home. The drill inspector opened it and read it, and after that they just rode Bob hard for three or four weeks. They’d call him a spoiled brat and they’d go to him at night and punch him repeatedly on his right arm and say, “You’ll never pitch for the Yankees!”

  Then he’d head to the shower, wink at me and say, “They still haven’t figured it out.”

  They didn’t realize that Bob was a southpaw.

  After I came out of Parris Island I was confident, and maybe a little arrogant, because I survived physically and mentally. People sometimes think I’m embellishing how tough it was, but I’m not.

  Although I never had any combat experience, Parris Island gave me an enormous respect for the military, what they do, how hard it is and how committed they are. I did things that I would never think of doing without being ordered to, and it gave me a sense that I could get through anything. It gave me great confidence to realize, “I can do it — there isn’t anything I can’t do.”

  So now it was time to pick what path I would follow in my adult life.

  Boston University, Jack Kelley

  and My Baseball Career
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  With the confidence and experience I’d gained from the Marines, I decided I would try to get my college education. In the fall of 1962 I enrolled at Boston University. I applied late and there wasn’t room for me at the dorms on the main campus, so I lived downtown on Beacon Hill in an apartment-like building that was the law school dorm.

  The Boston University Terriers had just hired Jack Kelley as coach to turn the hockey program around. The team had had some success in the late 1950s, but had only been to the NCAA final tournament once in nine years and was coming off two straight losing seasons. It was going to take Jack a couple of years, but he would develop BU into one of the great hockey schools in the NCAA. By 1964 the team was winning at least 20 games a year in a 30-game schedule, and in 1971 Jack’s Terriers won their first NCAA championship, and then repeated the next year.

  I tried out for the freshman hockey team because in those days, first-year students weren’t allowed to play varsity sports. Bob Crocker was the freshman coach and also the chief talent recruiter for Jack Kelley, finding the players who would form those championship teams.

  At prep school, I’d been an offensive defenceman with a good shot and stickhandling ability and would occasionally move up to play some left wing. After more than a year off skates, however, my skills were a bit rusty. I practiced with the team for a week but I realized that, after the Marines, I wasn’t up for another rigid fall of getting up at four in the morning for practice. I just wasn’t going to do it and Crocker knew it, and he cut me from the team.

  In my sophomore year I started tryouts again, but it was almost as if I’d grown out of playing hockey, and I also knew I wasn’t going to excel at it, so I went to see Jack to tell him that. He said he wasn’t going to cut me, but I knew I was finished with it.