Hockey's Zen Master
Sports Illustrated recently ran an article on the Philadelphia Flyers Stanley Cup teams of the 1970s without so much as mentioning the team’s coach. Granted, it’s difficult to describe Fred Shero, a man so elusive that his own players knew him as “Mr. X” and “The Phantom” and, mostly, “The Fog.” But discussing the Broad Street Bullies without Shero is like talking about Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark.
One writer characterized Shero’s style as “backwoods bullshit country Zen wisdom.” Which was it – bullshit or wisdom? Was he, as his supporters insist and his record (two Cups with the Flyers and the transformation of the Rangers into contenders) suggests, a master of both hockey and psychology? Or, as his detractors insist, always clueless and usually drunk?
Shero demanded ultra-aggressive play, quipping that “if you want pretty skating you can go to the Ice Capades,” but sincerely maintained that he never told his players to fight. He had ways of communicating things without saying them. Dave Schultz, the team’s most egregious goon, recounted how Shero called him into his office and said: “Hockey players can have three things: agility, skating, and strength. You haven’t got a lot of agility and you’re not a good skater.” Schultz got the message.
Other times, the message was less clear. Apart from calling out line changes, Shero said virtually nothing during games. He did some odd things in practice, like substituting tennis balls for pucks. On one occasion he had his Flyers skate around on one leg. When captain Bobby Clarke asked the reason for this exercise, Shero replied: “No reason at all. I’ve just been waiting for someone to come and tell me it was ridiculous.” Shero tested his players, trying to learn about them, but they and we never learned about him, the expressionless man behind the grey bi-focals. He rarely talked about himself except to let on a few quirks, such as his love of beer for breakfast. The latter ceased to amuse when the extent of his drinking became apparent.
Alcohol may have been involved in an incident that fueled his reputation as an oddball. One morning, during a 1974 playoff series between his Flyers and the Atlanta Flames, Shero awoke with bruises covering his body so severely that he had to miss a game. Neither the police nor anyone else ever figured out what happened. That apparently included Shero, who said this about the incident: “I don’t know if I had a fight in a bar, but if I did it wouldn’t be the first time. I remember the word ‘animal’ upset me.”
To the media, Shero routinely gave Zen-like responses. Staring out with a straight face from behind the forbidding glasses, he would provide neither insight nor the usual sports talk clichés. Was he happy? “I want to be miserable because that makes me happy.” Does the fact that the Boston Bruins swept his Flyers in four playoff games make them the better team? Long pause, then: “It doesn’t make them worse.”
Shero stories abound. There was the time, after a home game, he snuck off for a smoke and found himself locked out of the Philadelphia Spectrum. Later he explained that “I felt lost because I’d even forgotten what city we were in.” Like Socrates, he would become lost in thought and stop motionless on a public street or wherever he happened to be. He was known to dump cigarette ashes on tabletops, oblivious to the ashtray.
Yet he also introduced innovational techniques, such as playing offensively when shorthanded, and his offbeat motivational methods seemed to work. Consider what Phil Esposito had to say about Shero: “I’ve been playing 16 years, but when he puts his hand on my back and he sort of rubs it a little, it gives me a feeling like I want to go through the wall for him.”
In an autobiography of sorts, Shero explained that his approach to hockey derived from his days as a child tending to the family garden. “I soon realized that nature had a system. It I didn’t water or weed the garden, the results were dangerous.” Shades of Chauncy Gardiner, the mentally deficient character in Being There, whose banalities about gardening are mistaken for genius.
The temptation is to reconcile Freddie the Fog and Freddie the Genius by seeing the Zen business as an act designed to inspire his troops. The success was so great yet the methods so goofy, the intelligence so apparent yet the comments so off the wall, that the suspicion lurks that Shero’s wackiness was contrived.
But what about his well-documented interest in parapsychology, faith-healing, and other mind control devices? One reporter got his hands on Shero’s copy of a book about mind control. Shero had highlighted a passage about problem-solving through dreams and meditation and written in the margins: “power play.”
Late in his career, in an interview with Inside Sports, Shero discussed the application of mind control to hockey. He talked about guiding the puck into the net with his thoughts, and using his meditations about his players and their numbers to ensure that they scored a certain number of goals. The interview also included some classic Zen responses. Asked about his admission that his drinking had gotten out of hand “the previous year,” Shero objected. “No. It could be any year. What’s the difference?”
At another point, the interviewer confronted Shero with the claim by some of his players that he didn’t say two words to them all year.
“Sometimes you have to know where to draw the line,” he replied. “But I don’t think it’s true that I don’t talk to them. They can’t remember.”
The interviewer brought up his tendency to call for someone to go on the ice who was in the penalty box (and thus ineligible), and Shero explained: “That’s just a coaching ploy. Pretend that you don’t realize what you’re doing and see if they’re listening. Let them make fun of you because you make fun of them, right? Create a little atmosphere.”
Fred Shero created strange atmosphere wherever he went, without anyone figuring him out. That’s okay. The beauty of an enigma can be appreciated without being penetrated.