The Legacy of the Hartford Whalers
Could it be that the National Hockey League’s Hartford Whalers paved the road for big-time UConn athletics? Timing says that may be the case. There were other professional teams in Connecticut through the years. The Hartford Dark Blues of Major League Baseball and the Hartford Blues of the National Football League are two early professional franchises that called Connecticut home. Those were during the era when Hartford was the richest city in the USA, between the Civil War and the Great Depression. Apart from Yale, there was a long period of time between the Hartford Blues and the Hartford Whalers when Connecticut had no top-tier athletics. Approximately 50 years. Yale has been the only truly dominative athletic power in the state since large scale spectator sports events began.
The New England Whalers of the World Hockey Association moved to Hartford for the 1974-75 season. Four years before Yale joined the I-AA designation for football. Yale was determined to remove itself from the national elite athletics stage. New Haven was a hockey hotbed through minor league hockey and high school hockey.
Meanwhile, UConn basketball was playing in the puny Field House that seated 4,604. The football team played in Memorial Stadium that seated 16,200. The hockey team was Division III and played in a rink that resembled a primitive hut. UConn was not on the international stage. It was not even on the national stage. It was a regional university. Prior to the arrival of the Whalers, UConn only won one national championship, men’s soccer in 1948. Gordie Howe and his sons were playing in the Hartford Civic Center (HCC) before UConn was in the Big East.
The HCC had 10,507 seats between 1975 and 1979. By the time the Whalers were to be absorbed into the NHL for the 1979-80 season, the HCC had been expanded to 14,460 due to the building’s famous collapse in 1978. On January 17, 1978, a Tuesday evening, 4,746 basketball fans watched the UConn men’s team upset UMass 56-49 at the Hartford Civic Center. About six hours later, in the early morning of January 18, the roof of the sports coliseum collapsed onto 10,000 empty stadium seats. No one was in the building and no one was injured.
Construction of the HCC had begun in 1972. It was one of four major urban renewal projects in Hartford begun in the 1960s, including Constitution Plaza, Windsor Street, and Bushnell Plaza. It was promised to bring new vitality to the city with restaurants, retail shops, a hotel, and a sports coliseum, which at first became the new home for a World Hockey Association franchise, the New England Whalers.
This may have provided a vision to Providence athletic director and future Big East commissioner Dave Gavitt that the Connecticut market would be served perfectly with big-time collegiate athletics. By this time, long-time rival Yale also left a void in the elite college athletics realm in the state, another contributing factor to UConn’s rise. UConn athletic director at the time and future school president John Toner shared in on the vision. No one else saw reasons to pluck UConn out of the Yankee Conference.
The primarily Catholic Big East invited UConn to join in 1979. Providence, St. John’s, Georgetown, and Syracuse invited Seton Hall Hall, UConn, Holy Cross, Rutgers and Boston College. Rutgers and Holy Cross declined. It is interesting to note all are private institutions except UConn and Rutgers. Back then, the public in the northeast generally had a disdain for public higher education although both schools were academically sound. And the legendary Big East began play. UConn basketball started playing much more regularly in the same arena as the Hartford Whalers starting in 1980. Boston native and Whalers’ former co-tenant. Northeastern basketball coach Jim Calhoun also shared a similar vision and arrived in Storrs in 1986, after spending 14 seasons in Matthews Arena, the first home of the Whalers, Celtics and Bruins. The New England Whalers and Jim Calhoun’s head coaching career began in the same year and same place. UConn ended up being the most successful athletic department and greatest developmental beneficiary of the Big East.
The Whalers’ goal celebration song, “Brass Bonanza”, is posthumously played throughout the hockey world and the Hartford Whalers are probably the most popular NHL team that no longer exists. The song and the team were heavily ridiculed when they co-existed. The Hartford Whalers left a mark that will last many, many years. The Hartford Failures? UConn has become an elite international academic institution. That has and was projected onto the national stage and then international stage through what is now a world-renown athletic department. UConn is now one of only 13 universities in the nation that plays FBS football and Division I men’s ice hockey.
It is also possible that UConn’s rise and success may help make way for the return of top-tier professional sports in the future. The New England Patriots considered the stadium deal governor John Rowland offered superior to what they were given if they were to stay in Foxboro. Some still clamor for the return of the now-legendary Whalers.
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