The Rebel League: The Short and Unruly Life of the World Hockey Association

Ian A. Andrews is editor of the New Brunswick Teachers’ Association’s Focus and co-author of Becoming a Teacher.

The expansion of hockey in the 1960s encouraged entrepreneurs like
Dennis Murphy, Harold Baldwin, and Nelson Skalbania to form their own
league in the 1970s. With promises of higher salaries and better
treatment, they sought to lure players away from the National Hockey
League. However, their ultimate goal was to merge their teams with the
NHL and make a considerable profit from these mergers.

This is the thesis of Ed Willes, a journalist who chronicled the
exploits of the fledgling World Hockey Association as it attempted to
acquire credibility and respectability from what it perceived as an
expanding North American marketplace for hockey. Unfair treatment that
bound a player to a team for life, a salary structure not commensurate
with revenues, and an obvious conflict of interest by NHL Players’
Association head Alan Eagleson were among the issues that prompted the
defection of players to the new WHA. When superstar Bobby Hull signed a
million-dollar contract to play for the Winnipeg Jets, others soon
followed.

Even though the courts ruled in favour of the WHA by declaring that the
NHL restricted free trade by acting as a monopoly, the new league was
not able to survive. Many of the team owners and executives were not
hockey men; many survived from paycheque to paycheque, lacking the
capital required to run a successful franchise. Over seven years, the
WHA expanded to 14 teams, but it shrank to six teams in its last year;
four of these were accepted into the NHL.

There were notable successes. An 18-year-old Wayne Gretzky was
introduced to professional hockey. Gordie Howe played on the same team
as his two sons. Flamboyant coaches like Jacques Demers and Hockey Night
in Canada analyst Harry Neale began their careers in the WHA. And the
Hanson brothers provided material for the cult movie classic Slapshot.

Willes tells an eminently readable tale of greed, speculation, and
gullibility in a venture that forced change on a reluctant hockey elite.