By slik4
Boston Hockey Blog’s Belle Fraser has written an excellent article about how Jack Parker became BU’s head hockey coach 50 years ago last month following the firing of Leon Abbott.
There’s a small part of the story that Ms. Fraser didn’t know about.
In just over one season, Abbott’s BU teams won 26 of the 34 games with him behind the bench, but that record came with an asterisk. Eleven of those victories during the 1972-73 season became forfeits when the NCAA and ECAC found BU’s freshman forward Dick Decloe to have been ineligible to play in those games.
Decloe’s eligibility to play at BU was taken away due to his having received subsidies from his amateur club in Canada while he was playing junior hockey and living away from his home. Neither Decloe nor his family knew that his club had paid for those expenses, but the NCAA didn’t care. The NCAA considered those subsidies to have been an illegal impediment to playing college hockey at an NCAA school.
Decloe left BU after scoring 12 goals, eight assists and 20 points in the 14 games he played for the Terriers. He might’ve been on the way to setting scoring records and becoming an All-American at BU.
Abbott had recruited Decloe and two other Canadians to BU, Bill Buckton and Peter Marzo, both of whom faced a predicament similar to what Decloe faced. As Ms. Fraser describes, Buckton and Marzo, sophomores at BU who’d played for BU’s freshman team were declared ineligible to play for BU’s varsity during the 1973-74 season.
In the Spring of 1973 an announcement was posted in the elevator lobby of BU’s law school building. During that semester, BU and BC law students could take elective courses in each other’s schools at no extra cost. BC was offering a course in Sports Law, the first of its kind to be taught at an American law school.
BC’s Sports Law course appealed to one BU second-year law student. He was an avid sports fan. As a high school student in northern New Jersey, he’d been a soccer and tennis player and an editor of the sports page of his school’s student newspaper. He subscribed to Sports Illustrated and The Sporting News and always turned to the sports pages before reading the rest of the daily newspaper.
When he enrolled as an undergraduate at BU in the fall of 1967, he knew nothing about college hockey, but by January 1973 he’d already attended dozens of BU hockey games including the Beanpot and ECAC tournaments and the 1971 and 1972 NCAA tournaments won by the Terriers. During the 1970-71 season, he’d been the Sports Director of BU’s student radio station, WTBU where Howard Stern later would get his first taste of being a radio DJ. During his law school years, he’d also worked as the public address announcer for BU hockey games at Walter Brown Arena. He also enrolled in the Sports Law course being taught at the other end of the MTA Green Line in Chestnut Hill.
BC’s Sports Law class was taught by Professor Robert Berry and held one night a week in a somewhat informal setting – once at the professor’s home. There was no textbook. Berry had served as a consultant on salary arbitration issues with Major League Baseball and advisor to such big-name sports figures as Larry Bird.
Among the BC Law students was Joe Cavanagh who had been an All-American hockey player at Harvard for three seasons. Discussions were lively. There was no exam. Grades would be based on research papers for which students could choose the topic, subject to Professor Berry’s approval.
Because of his connections to the BU hockey program, the BU law student was thinking of how the NCAA’s actions against Decloe might have been unconstitutional discrimination against foreign athletes. After all, if American students who had chosen to play hockey at prep schools away from their homes while receiving some financial aid for the room, board and educational expenses would be eligible to play for NCAA schools, then why shouldn’t those Canadian players who, like Decloe, had received substantially less in aid than they might have received at an American prep school be eligible to play for NCAA schools?
The BU law student dove into his research more enthusiastically than for any other legal research he’d done for his other law courses. He delivered his paper to Professor Berry.
He also gave a copy of his research paper to Charlie Luce who was BU’s Assistant Director of Athletics. At the time, he didn’t know that BU was facing an eligibility issue with Buckton and Marzo.
Weeks later, he received a letter from a Boston civil rights lawyer who’d also received a copy of his research paper about the Decloe case. He was representing Buckton and Marzo who had been declared ineligible to play by the ECAC due to monies that their amateur clubs had paid for their expenses while living away from home to play Canadian junior hockey. He offered the BU law student the opportunity to work on the case.
Bill Buckton (left), Gordon Martin (middle) and Peter Marzo (right). Photo courtesy of Bill Buckton.
The lawyer was Gordon A. Martin, Jr., who, early in his career, worked for the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
For the BU law student, it was his first exposure to federal litigation beyond the case studies and lectures in his regular courses. He learned there’s much more to a trial than what plays out in court. Litigators often say that they can spend at least ten times as much time preparing for a trial as they spend during the trial. That was true of the Buckton-Marzo case.
One part of the trial preparation involved finding an expert witness who could testify for Buckton and Marzo about the disparity between how the NCAA and ECAC treated foreign athletes and American athletes. The BU law student thought of one person who might have the knowledge and credibility to help.
Art Kaminsky, a Cornell alum who graduated from Yale Law School in 1971, had written articles in a college hockey newsletter. Kaminsky covered collegiate hockey for The Yale Daily News when he was in law school and his articles about college hockey had been featured in The New York Times.
In 1972-73, Kaminsky helped his friend from undergraduate days, Ken Dryden, negotiate a contract with the Montreal Canadiens. His connections with Dryden led to his cultivating relationships with American college players who were top prospects for the National Hockey League. He knew as much about American college hockey as anyone, so the BU law student recommended Kaminsky to Martin.
Kaminsky agreed that that the NCAA’s policy concerning Buckton and Marzo discriminated against Canadian athletes who’d received modest stipends for playing away from their homes with junior hockey teams. He knew that the NCAA had no limit on the amount of funds that students could receive while playing hockey at American prep schools where tuition, room and board, books and materials vastly exceeded the amounts that Buckton and Marzo (and Decloe) had received.
Knowing that Cornell, Kaminsky’s alma mater, had been the school that reported questions about Decloe’s eligibility to the NCAA would lend Kaminsky an air of credibility to the court.
On November 27, 1973 federal district court Judge Joseph Tauro issued an injunction against BU from declaring Buckton and Marzo ineligible and against the NCAA from sanctioning BU for allowing Buckton and Marzo to play for BU’s hockey team.
Professor Robert Berry died in November 2011. Art Kaminsky who’d become a successful sports and entertainment lawyer died in December 2013. Gordon Martin died in November 2016. Judge Tauro, coincidentally a Cornell Law School alumnus, died in November 2018.
And that BU law student? I’m still around and lucky to still be able to attend BU hockey games and catch the Terriers on TV thanks to ESPN+.
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