A 53-year-old Detroit native, I’m a graduate of Detroit St. Andrew H.S. (1974) and the University of Detroit (1979). Yes, I was at U-D during the “Dick Vitale” heyday, and it was quite an experience, as was playing varsity baseball four years under school Hall of Fame coach Bob Miller, a 1950 Philadelphia Phillies “Whiz Kid” and receiving a BS degree in business administration (BS means “bachelor of science”, not “bullsh—”!) after completing my five-year plan in May 1979.

My dad (Walter) and mom (Helen) were my first and all-time largest heroes, exposing me to the Catholic church, music (clarinet lessons) and sports (any I ever fancied), all on the very modest means provided by Dad’s letter carrier salary. My mom spent countless winter night-time hours watering our snow-covered backyard lawn for our yearly ice pond, which was the hit of the neighborhood, with rubberband-attached plastic bread bags covering her hands and feet to protect from freezing water splashes. My dad got me started in baseball by soft-tossing balls to me against our garage door when I was around five. Older brothers Tom and Dan were also against the garage waiting for their tosses. Dad got me into the Red Wings by listening to games in our kitchen on an old brown Zenith bakelite radio - I can still hear the names Bruce Martyn was quickly rattling off “Sawchuk, Pronovost, Pilote, Howe, Hall, Hull, Mikita, Marotte, Tremblay, Beliveau…”. During Tigers telecasts, Dad would go into the kitchen, close the door, dial the phone and pretend he was calling manager Charlie Dressen and telling him to make a pitching change or a pinch-hitter. He once successfully “talked” Dressen into pinch-hitter Gates Brown, who got a game-winning hit. Dad was very pleased, and we were totally convinced.

My three-sport (baseball, football, basketball) high school coach Bob Shoemaker was also a large positive influence in my athletic and academic endeavors. He remains one of the most successful, respected and prolific high school basketball coaches in Michigan as well as a very dear friend.

I’ve been with the Free Press since March 1980, and have written several articles for them, many of which pertaining to the Detroit Red Wings and their history. It was at U-D, however, that I was able to launch my Red Wing journalistic experience as a writer for the school newspaper, The Varsity News. I spent two-and-a-half years in the paper’s employ, first as a writer and later a sports columnist.

For my first assigment, I talked the paper’s assignment editor into allowing me to cover the “Dale McCourt vs. California Sports” anti-trust trial in downtown Detroit during the summer of 1978. The Wings had signed goalie Rogie Vachon away from the Kings after the 1977-78 season, and the Kings subsequently received Dale McCourt in return as compensation as a result of NHL arbitration. McCourt was suing California Sports Inc. to be returned to the Red Wings, where he had just finished a marvelous rookie 1977-78 season, leading the Wings to its first playoff berth since 1970.

There, at age 22, I sat near the back of Judge Robert DiMascio’s courtroom next to NHL arbitrator Ed Houston and his wife, soon to be in the midst of true hockey history in the making. McCourt arrived with witness Sid Abel, Red Wings legal counsel Brian Smith and his associates, followed soon by Kings atttorney Roger Timm. John Ziegler arrived 20 minutes later.  Then came Joseph Sullivan of Shay, Garner and Associates, representing the NHL Players Association, Jim Hind - McCourt’s personal attorney and lastly Kenneth McConnell, McCourt’s attorney through the Detroit Hockey Club. That day, I listened to testimony from bost sides. In all, McCourt, Abel, NHL player reps Arthur Kaminsky and Lawrence Roush (Vachon’s agent), Hind, Ned Harkness, economics expert James Koch and Wings owner Bruce Norris among others took the stand. During court recess, I met Vachon in the back, gave him a copy of an unpublished article supporting him as a “victim” of the case. He read it and smiled, and I gave him my dorm-room address in case he would ever consider a future interview. (Two weeks later, I received a thoughtful “thank you” note from Vachon, with his phone number included.)

In one day, I went from being simply a die-hard Wings fan sitting in the Olympia Stadium arena section steps to a legal expert in NHL arbitration law as well as a notebook-writing wizard. I now could be classified as a true journalist. And to boot, I was being allowed to cover my favorite team in my favorite sport! Wow… 

In Oct. 1978, I began working at Wings games for a communications company called “Sports Comm” - who supplied wire equipment to visiting journalists which allowed them to send their game stories to their newspaper offices. Gerry Opalinski, a boss of my U-D work-study job at the Registrar’s office, arranged the job for me as his assistant.

A few games into the season, on Oct. 28, I witnessed from the Olympia Stadium press box one of the prettiest goals I had ever seen in person, by Wings rookie center Roland Cloutier against the Chicago Black Hawks (yes, the team nickname was two words back then). Cloutier, 5-9 and a bony 160 pounds, picked up a loose puck at center ice and skated in alone on defenseman Bobby Orr, who had been signed by Chicago during the off-season. Cloutier skated swiftly right at Orr, dropped his left shoulder, neatly tucked the puck through a “frozen” Orr’s legs and headed between the circles at goalie Tony Esposito. Esposito decided to come out of the net to cut Cloutier’s angle, but as he began his move forward, Cloutier dropped his right shoulder and sent a rocket wrist shot over Espo’s right shoulder in the upper left corner of the net. Olympia Stadium erupted in hysterical spine-tingling cheers as rookie Cloutier had just “undressed” two of hockey’s finest defenders in one swift play. The goal propelled a Wings eventual 7-2 win, but not before Orr scored the game’s final goal on a neat close-in shot on Wings goalie Vachon. The goal, Orr’s second of the season in five games as a Black Hawk, would prove to be his last NHL goal, as he retired after one more game that season. Cloutier’s goal could very well have been the deciding factor in Orr’s retirement decision, for he and his bad knees were truly turned inside-out by Cloutier’s breath-taking move - and I had been a witness to yet another chapter in true NHL history. 

Totally fired up after that game, I was granted my first NHL game press pass by Kathy Best of the Wings PR office, to cover the next game - Nov. 1 against the Montreal Canadiens for the “VN”. Best granted me the wonderful opportunity to walk into Detroit’s hockey shrine, Olympia Stadium, armed with the single-game paper press pass waiting for me at a side gate and my trusty notebook and pen, and head to the sky-high press box to witness a 4-1 Canadiens triumph.

Afterwards, I headed into a post-game press conference with Wings coach Bobby Kromm in his office. There, he sat at his desk, surrounded by all of the day’s professional journalists and this one raw college guy. After listening to many questions I later discovered to be termed “softball”, I meekly asked Kromm why the Wings were making so many blind passes in their own zone, citing a particular one Nick Libett had made resulting in a turnover and Canadiens’ scoring chance. The room went silent…and all eyes were on this unknown “rube” who had just challenged Kromm without really realizing it. A red-faced Kromm answered politely that it was not a trend and that the team would work to eliminate such early-season turnovers, and I soon exited the room without further incident.

After that baptism under fire, I proceeded to the Red Wings dressing room, where I stood in awe of the red-and-white space in which every single Red Wings hockey hero had suited up for every single home game since 1927. There I stood - afraid and excited and apprehensive and star-struck. I looked around for a friendly face, and found a smiling Terry Harper standing alone. I decided to approach the defenseman and couldn’t have chosen a better “first” one-on-one interview. I asked Harper a battery of off-the-top questions and, all the while, he smiled and nodded and responded as if he were a buddy meeting me post-game at some pub. Yes, interviewing Harper helped tie my story together, but he was so accomodating and genuinely nice that he successfully extinguished any future fears I may have had approaching NHL players for post-game interviews.

Over the years for the Free Press as a visiting-player interviewer, I’ve interrogated a young Wayne Gretzky, a retired Tony Esposito in the Chicago Stadium press box and stickhandling wizard Denis Savard in the stadium’s famous basement locker room, Hartford Whalers named Dave Keon, Bobby Hull and Gordie Howe, a Canadien named Guy LaFleur who had just scored his 30th goal for the final time at the end of Steve Yzerman’s rookie season (1983-84), an angry Marcel Dionne (Kings) after being severely cut by a Brad Park (Wings) high stick, a somber Larry Robinson lamenting the fact that he decided to start wearing a helmet (“you can replace many body parts, but the head’s not one of them”), and a Flames goalie named Reggie Lemelin - who had just given up 12 goals to Detroit one night and had the grace to discuss it with me afterwards (a friend of his had cautioned me that I was wasting my time waiting for Lemelin to return from the training room; after the successful interview, as I left the room, his friend gave me a sheepish glance and I returned a wink and a smile).

At the “Freep”, I was very proud of the fact that I helped break the story of the horrible Wings’ trade with the Blues in 1989 (Oates and McLean for Federko and McKegney) by contacted Jacques Caron in his hotel room at the NHL meetings (Me to hotel operator: “May I have Jacques Caron’s room, please?”. Pause…“Caron: Hello?” Me: “Hello Jacques, my name’s Bernie Czarniecki, and I work for the Detroit Free Press. Is it true that you have completed a trade with the Detroit Red Wings?” Caron: “I really can’t say anything at this time”. Me: “Can you at least tell me if the players involved are Oates and McLean for Federko and McKegney?” Caron: “That sounds about right.” Me: “Thanks for your time, Jacques.”)

One of my favorite stories was written in 1986, regarding an event which went totally unpublicized by the Wings that season - the 50th anniversary of its first-ever Stanley Cup. Ilitch had 60th anniversary patches made up for player jerseys that season, by there was never a mention by the Ilitches of the 1936 first-ever Stanley Cup team (an Ilitch omissive hint of Aurie-related things to come, perhaps?). So I was able to scoop the entire city’s media of this historical occurrance with a one-third page story on the eve of the NHL playoffs that season. For the piece, I phone-interviewed Pete Kelly, who scored the Cup-winning goal and had remarkable recall of his Detroit hockey teammates and experiences; Normie Smith, who talked about all the weight he sweated out during his NHL-record six-overtime 1-0 shutout of the Montreal Maroons in the 1936 Stanley Cup semifinals and afterwards being figuratively knocked on his butt after one ale at Montreal’s Lumberjack Club; and Bucko McDonald, a happy-go-lucky defenseman who was simply a joy to talk to. Eventually, I regrettably but honorably wrote the obits for Smith, McDonald, Herbie Lewis, Harry Lumley and Bill Quackenbush.
 
I’ve also written several times for the Red Wings Magazine in the early 1980’s, including one based on a wonderful interview with Bob Goldham in 1981 (“Once you’re a Red Wing, you’re always a Red Wing”).

I have spent several years researching the franchise, and possess quite a volumn of Red Wings historical information, including numerous Red Wings programs. No. 1 on the list is from the 1936 Stanley Cup semifinals against the Montreal Maroons - signed on the cover in pencil by Kelly, James Norris, McDonald and Marty Barry.

Being a career Red Wings fan (my mom was carrying me in April 1955 while the Wings were carrying their last 1950’s Stanley Cup), I have been intrigued for some time by the Larry Aurie dilemma. I have spent many hours over the last 13 years researching the subject by interviewing scores of former teammates and family members and old-time fans who had the pleasure to actually saw Aurie play, and collecting hard documented proof of the No. 6 jersey’s retirement. 

I also have a life outside of the Free Press, but they try not to let it happen too often.