I believe hockey cards have supernatural powers.

This is why, in the winter of 1975, I starting arranging my Los Angeles Kings cards like players on a hockey rink on the top of my mammoth hand-me-down stereo console. And then challenged the NHL All Stars—or at least the cards I was able to collect—to a game of pickup hockey on top of the console. My “rink” was oblong and the perfect length for a fantasy game. There were even miniature nets I cobbled together from old metal tubing and bakery string from the pink boxes from the store around the corner.

This was my pre-game ritual before road games and it made the post-homework, pre-parent evening arrivals go faster. Just before the games would face-off usually on the radio (there were few televised road games back in the mid-70s), I would set the the cards out. Starters on the hardwood ice and reserves side-by-side in a makeshift bench constructed out of old quart-sized milk cartons. Then I would walk behind the bench and shift out the players as Bob Miller and Rich Marotta let me know who was on the ice and on the bench.

The cards were voodoo to me, every bit as powerful as the Six Million Dollar Man and on par with the Millennium Falcon’s holographic chess players. I knew, laid out on the stereo, with their energy unbridled, and with my calm benchside manner utilizing my Carrie-like telekinetic powers, that all of this would make a difference, make all the difference, in the outcome of the game.

I used to put hexes on Bobby Orr. I (wrongfully) took credit for his bad knees when I read about them in The Hockey News (sorry Bob). I tore up my extra Gerry Cheevers card and tossed it in the freezer before the game six of the 1976 quarter finals went into overtime. Sure enough, Butch Goring solved Cheevers late in overtime forcing a game seven. Maybe if I had a second Cheevers card for game seven things might have turned out different that year.

These days, hockey cards aren’t distributed like they used to be. You could get them at any convenience store or supermarket. You could even buy them at the Fabulous Forum souvenir stands. The full-sized hockey sticks were $7, pucks were $1, and a wax pack of Topps hockey cards were $1.25. Now, the only place I can find them are on eBay or enclosed in authenticated plastic and up for auction.*

When I was first collecting, hockey cards were about memories. You held Gil Perraeult’s card in your hand and you pictured his smooth, effortless skating and the flight of his laser-infused puck spinning towards the back of the net. You saw in the close-up shot of Bobby Clarke the steely eyes you’d gotten a glimpse of on TV weeks before, peeking out from under his shaggy locs as he racked up another 12 minutes in penalties and two more goals. The 1976-77 cards featured cartoons with fun facts. I mean how would I every know that Rogie Vachon was very superstitious and Guy LaFleur’s last name meant “flower.”

Many cards featured bad haircuts and goofy smiles. These players could be your favorite uncle who came to visit only at Thanksgiving. These guys might get you that slice of pie or extra piece of white meat. Those feelings never leave you. It’s about the way a card, for whatever reason, lingers with you, loiters in the imagination, as does some kind of magic.

I was an only child, and my parents were divorced. My dad was an old baseball guy, so the hockey fascination wasn’t something he understood too much. My hockey card addiction wasn’t inherited, nor was it influenced by dad or other family members. The great thing about dad is that he married well. His second wife worked in the Fabulous Forum’s ticket office, so we would get tickets to any Kings game that wasn’t a sellout (meaning lots of home games). When I was eight, I regularly went to games by myself (don’t worry, in 1976 this was good parenting). At the games, I knew every usher, every concessions person, and every ticket seller. I traded cards with some of them. I got a perspective of the adult world that served me well.

I’ll know former Kings winger Bob Nevin’s stats until I die. Nevin scored 64 goals, had 113 assists, and amassed 45 penalty minutes in 235 games in a Kings’ uniform. Why the obsession with a run-of-the-mill winger on his fourth NHL team? Seems he was dating a friend of dad’s second wife whom I had a crush on. It seemed like every pack of cards I opened after that discovery had his face in it. He was clean cut with a perfect jaw and wore the expression of an engineer launching spaceships into outer space. I analyzed those numbers to death wondering how Bob Nevin could land someone like her. Back then, though, all my eight-year-old self knew was that he was a somebody, and I seemed to have a shoe box stuffed to the gills with his nobody cards.

Over time, as we get older, the cards—the collecting, the sorting, the trading, the hours spent in their company and in the company of friends and family who let me think they felt their magic, too—became memories themselves.

So this year where my father passed away at 70, it wasn’t the stories at his funeral, the old photographs or the memories from his friends and colleagues that made it possible to wrap my mind around him being gone. It was a card. Back at dad’s place after the services, I stood in his spare bedroom and looked at the frames and the books on his shelves, and then I saw it, the Gerry Cheevers torn card, fused back together with that cheap, yellowed tape, perched on the shelf in front of his cigar boxes, sitting there like some sacred object on an altar. Like Dad, Cheevers looked like he was the cat who ate the canary, like he was having a last laugh, like he was giving me the business and up to something.

I took the card down off the shelf and carved up a milk carton and placed him on the bench this time. And then I paced around the bedroom listening to the Kings game in somewhat of a trance. Missing dad. Feeling good and bad at once. Knowing everything was different. Feeling somehow, just for a moment, as if it were all the same.

* – Here are some beauties up for auction this month. But please, don’t bid against me!

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Jack Kent Cooke (second from the left) at the Forum Groundbreaking.

Hockey meant more to me than a fan pulling for his team while time passed before my eyes over countless chill-inducing goals, bone crunching fights, and milk-curdling screams. Hockey was family, starting straight at the top of the organizational chart: Jack Kent Cooke.

Many of you might not know Jack Kent Cooke. Cooke was the visionary owner of the Los Angeles Lakers and starting on February 9, 1966, he was the owner of the Kings as well. Lucky me, my dad’s second wife worked for Cook’s Fabulous Forum in Inglewood, California. At some point, she imploded and gave back her title as “dad’s wife”, exchanging it for her new moniker as “Carina, the Mystic Psychic.” I’m not sure what others thought, but to me she was definitely more psychotic than psychic. Yet I digress..

As Stan Kroenke brings the Rams back to St. Louis with grand dreams of Inglewood, let is be known that Cooke was the original King of Inglewood. The Fabulous Forum was regarded as one of the best arena in the United States, a great place to watch a game before corporate suites, stadium sushi, and $35 parking took over the fan experience.

WARNING: Shameless self-promotion coming. In my forthcoming book (When? Don’t ask!), loosely titled “Behind The Mike: Mostly True Stories from the Media Guy” chronicles my time working for the great Jack Kent Cooke. (Did I mention before this is my fifth book in print? There I go digressing again!). Well, enough patting myself on the back because I think I’ve pocketed enough change from these four tomes to pay a month or two of car insurance premiums. Sounds good on paper, but unless you’re J.K. Rowling, George R. R. Martin, or E. L. James, don’t quit your day jobs boys and girls.

Perhaps I need to add some initials to my name. Maybe that’s the ticket.

Regardless, here’s an excerpt from the book:

Spending hours learning the intrinsic points of astrology with Carina night after night convinced me she was more psychotic than psychic. Nonetheless, she worked in the ticket office of the Fabulous Forum. What did this mean? It meant that tickets for any Los Angeles Lakers and Kings games or the best concerts in the Southland that weren’t sold out, would be ours for the asking. Although Inglewood is eyesore now, in the mid-seventies, the area had not yet been overrun with urban blight and crime. A five-year-old could still walk four blocks to save three cents on a gallon of fifty-three cent milk and attend professional hockey games, alone. 

And attend I did, to the tune of 200 Lakers and Kings games in three years. We could barely make rent, but I had seats just as good as Dyan Cannon and Jack Nicholson, and I knew more about offsides and rebounding than any six-year-old on Earth. But that wasn’t the best thing about Carina’s job.  

When there was a sold out event in town—something like the circus or the Harlem Globetrotters or Led Zeppelin—I earned my admission by working for a few days in her office. No adult in the office could touch my speed and accuracy stuffing season tickets into envelopes, matching them to the correct address label, affixing postage and getting the mail out by 4:00 P.M. Screw OSHA and whatever child labor laws existed back then, I was the king of direct mail (even at six years old). 

Can you imagine the late Dr. Jerry Buss entrusting a five- or seven-year-old with $5000-a-seat season tickets today? Yeah, I don’t think so. 

The immortal Jack Kent Cooke was a whole different story. 

The 1974 Lakers, Kings and Fabulous Forum were owned by the colorful and eccentric Cooke. He loved sports, also owning the Washington Redskins and a stable of race horses at one point. He was married five times with the last lady being a former Bolivian drug runner forty years younger than him.  

Cooke was the reason everything worked at the Fabulous Forum. He was more than an idea man. He was a doer. Everybody talks about you have to have an idea. Whenever one of his advisors would come to him with a bright idea, the first thing Cooke used to tell his advisors was: “IDEAS ARE OVER-RATED UNLESS YOU HAVE A GUY WHO CAN EXECUTE IT.” 

His people would always come up to him with these ideas. Getting the Beatles back together was brought up a few times while I was around. He would say you have to come up with an entertainment plan that you’re smart enough to execute it. And, he wouldn’t stop there.  

“You don’t have to be brilliant to come up with an idea,” he bellowed in his graveled, yet pitchy voice. “But you DO have to brilliant to come up with an idea and then execute it for fifteen years. There are a million people who open restaurants with great ideas. Sixty percent are closed in two years. So you have to be able to execute.” 

Then he would take a breath before instructing his idea people to “come back to me when you have a plan; not an idea.” 

Cooke was always nice to me. The ladies in his office loved it when he would talk to me and give life lessons. Essentially I was his puppy; a chick magnet if you will. He introduced me to F. Scott Fitzgerald saying that his life was “better than any of that guy’s crappy novel.” He let me turn on the arena lights a time or two. He showed me the preliminary artwork for media guides and the pocket schedules. Jack Kent Cooke gave me my first taste of the media. 

I loved this guy because he was a very hands-on owner; at least with the female staff. As a matter of fact, I can’t recall seeing anyone on his direct staff than was a man. Never saw a guy around him who wasn’t a reporter, player or public relations-type person. 

Controlling the message was key for Cooke; at the office, with reporters, around the media. He wasn’t about to be played by them. It was so important, that he once paid $176 million for the Los Angeles Daily News newspaper.

A couple of times he let me stuff those aforementioned envelopes in his office while being interviewed by the newspapers. He commanded the room with his humor. His colossal entrepreneurial acumen blended effortlessly with his no-nonsense business sense. Cooke handled everything his way. 

And, when the media was around, he owned them quite simply. In this respect, I wanted to be just like him. (I’m still working on that part.)

Excerpted from Behind The Mike: Mostly True Stories from the Media Guy by Michael Lloyd.

Copyright © 2016 by Michael Lloyd.

Excerpted by permission of me, Michael Lloyd. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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