Current Biography Excerpts: Hockey

To view an excerpt from the Current Biography profile, choose from the list of names.

HUIZENGA, H. WAYNE
HULL, BRETT
KEENAN, MIKE (with photograph)
LEMIEUX, MARIO
MESSIER, MARK
POTVIN, DENIS
TROTTIER, BRYAN

HUIZENGA, H. WAYNE
(HY-zeng-uh)
Dec. 29, 1939- Corporation executive; entrepreneur.

"I enjoy building something good and having a successful product and making money," the entrepreneur H. Wayne Huizenga has said. The hero of a real-life Horatio Alger story, in his early twenties Huizenga worked as a garbage-truck driver. Striking out on his own, he started a one-man trash-collection operation that, within a decade, had grown into a highly profitable enterprise providing employment for several dozen people. In 1968, combining his business with three other companies, he created Waste Management, Inc., which, when he resigned as president and chief operating officer in 1984, having decided to retire, ranked as the largest trash haulage and disposal business in the world. Bored with inactivity, he began buying properties in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, his adopted hometown, and soon became a major player in the city's economy.

In 1987 Huizenga and two partners acquired a nineteen-store chain called Blockbuster Video. As chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Blockbuster Entertainment Corp., he used his skills as a master deal maker to help transform the business into the world's largest video-rental chain and, in the words of one reporter, into "the company that is to videos what McDonald's is to hamburgers." With revenues of more than $2 billion in 1993, its share of the market has reached 20 percent, and it has reportedly grown larger than the next 550 video-rental chains combined. After Blockbuster's merger with the media giant Viacom, in 1994, Huizenga was named vice-chairman of Viacom and chairman of a new entity called the Blockbuster Entertainment Group. In 1995 he left Blockbuster to become the chairman and chief executive officer of Republic Waste Industries, a relatively small solid-waste collection business. As the owner of the Miami Dolphins football team, the Florida Marlins baseball team, and the Florida Panthers hockey team, Huizenga is the only person in the United States whose holdings include three professional sports clubs.

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1995 Current Biography Yearbook.

Search for another athlete

HULL, BRETT
Aug. 9, 1964- Hockey player.

The man most feared by National Hockey League goaltenders is the St. Louis Blues' right wing Brett Hull, whose lightning-quick, deadly accurate shot produced the most goals of any NHL player in each of the past three seasons. His eighty-six goals during the 1990-91 campaign, for which he received the Hart Trophy as the league's most valuable player, were the most ever scored in a season by any player except Wayne Gretzky. Brett Hull forms half of hockey's most famous father-son combination. His father, the legendary Bobby Hull, who scored 913 goals during a twenty-three-year career with the Chicago Blackhawks, Winnipeg Jets, and Hartford Whalers, is regarded by most hockey experts as the best left wing ever to play the game.

Like his father, Brett Hull is easily recognizable by his blond hair, blue eyes, and wide grin, but his playing style is markedly different. In Bobby Hull's heyday during the 1960s, his trademark play was to carry the puck up his side of the ice, bull his way by defenders, and suddenly unleash a blistering left-handed slap shot at the enemy goalie. More of a finesse player, Brett Hull tends to lurk away from the action until he spots an opening in the defense, and then he unleashes hard right-handed wrist or slap shots a split second after the puck reaches him. Elaborating on the way his father's style of play contrasted to his own, Brett Hull told Austin Murphy of Sports Illustrated (March 18, 1991), "He was Mr. Physical, Mr. Aggressive, real flamboyant. Me, I just hang in the weeds, biding my time, nice...and...passive."

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1992 Current Biography Yearbook.

Search for another athlete

KEENAN, MIKE*
Oct. 21, 1949- Hockey coach.

The "coaching messiah" of the National Hockey League, according to more than one sportswriter, is Mike Keenan, a no-nonsense disciplinarian who turned around floundering franchises in Philadelphia and Chicago before leading the 1994 New York Rangers to the Stanley Cup after 54 years without an NHL title. A complex, contradictory figure, Keenan is intelligent, introspective, and an acknowledged master at transforming marginal athletes into overachievers, but his despotic methods and occasional use of fear as a motivational tool earned him the enmity of his players and the disapprobation of his club management in both Philadelphia and Chicago. Although he emerged as a more mature and nurturing presence during his one season in New York, he squabbled continually with the Rangers' general manager for control of the club, and after he finally won a championship in his fourth trip to the Stanley Cup finals (he had led Philadelphia to the play-offs twice and Chicago once), he abruptly turned his back on New York to become the coach and general manager of the St. Louis Blues. Writing in the New York Times (October 29, 1993), Robert Lipsyte observed that Keenan "may be hockey's premier example of the new-breed sports coach, still basically hierarchical and conservative but trying to upholster the old authoritarianism with plush and cozy New Age motivational techniques. Keenan is capable of breaking a hockey stick for effect ('This is a physical game, and sometimes you have to send a physical message.') while allowing players to make mistakes so they will come off the ice with a 'Dad, you were right' attitude."

The complete article can be found in the March 1996 issue of Current Biography. An updated version of the article will appear on the 1983-1996 Current Biography CD-ROM (to be released in January 1997) and in the 1996 Current Biography Yearbook (to be published in December 1996).

* Photo courtesy of the St. Louis Blues.

Search for another athlete

LEMIEUX, MARIO
(luh-MYOO)
1965- Hockey player.

When Mario Lemieux, the towering center of the Pittsburgh Penguins, won the National Hockey League scoring championship with 168 points in 1987-88, he became the first player in thirty-nine years to achieve that honor on a team that failed to qualify for the NHL playoffs. Probably no other franchise in hockey history has depended more on one man than the lowly Penguins have on Lemieux, a rangy puck wizard with a loping stride, long reach, and uncanny sense of anticipation, most lethal in breakaways.

In their twenty-one-year history, the Penguins have reached the playoffs nine times, the last in 1981-82, without ever surviving the Stanley Cup semifinals. As the worst team in the NHL in 1983-84, with a pathetic standing of thirty-eight points, they had first choice overall in the 1984 league entry draft and thus the opportunity to acquire Lemieux, the most coveted Quebec junior prospect since Guy LaFleur. Lemieux was the NHL Rookie of the Year in 1984-85, and during his first three seasons with Pittsburgh he established himself as the second-best player in pro hockey, surpassed only by the Edmonton Oilers' Wayne Gretzky, the reigning NHL scoring champion since 1980-81. Over the same period, while continuing to lose more games than they won, the Penguins improved their point standing to seventy-two. When Lemieux unseated Gretzky in 1987-88, the team, while again missing the playoffs, finished in the black, with a 36-35-9 record, their best since 1978-79. Lemieux was involved in more than half of the Penguins' goals in that winning season. Having shed his early reputation for an easy-go-lucky attitude, especially on defense, and for on-and-off performances, especially on the road, Pittsburgh's "Magnificent One" is, as he enters the 1988-89 season, widely viewed as the most feared competitor in the NHL.

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1988 Current Biography Yearbook.

Search for another athlete

MESSIER, MARK
(MES-ee-yay)
Jan. 18, 1961- Hockey player.

The best all-around player in hockey may be Mark Messier, a sturdy center with a baleful glare, rough-hewn features, and square jaw who won five Stanley Cups with his hometown Edmonton Oilers and led the long-suffering New York Rangers to their first National Hockey League championship in fifty-four years. A remarkable combination of speed and strength, Messier is a missile on skates--lethal on the power play and a dangerous penalty killer as well--but it is the intangibles that set him apart from other hockey superstars. Energetic and tough, he body checks with authority, projects an intimidating on-ice aura, and plays through injuries that would sideline less dedicated athletes. He is also an accomplished playmaker, and with his consuming will to win, he is an inspirational figure both on the ice, where he leads by example, and in the locker room, where he asserts himself through the force of his personality. The consummate team player, Messier has described himself as a blue-collar athlete who would "rather be remembered as being on a great team than as a great individual player." In an interview with Leigh Montville for Sports Illustrated (March 16, 1992), Adam Graves, who has played with Messier in Edmonton and in New York, said, "Just his presence in the locker room, the intangibles he brings, make us a better team.. . .I'd say he has to be the premier leader in professional sports right now. Any team. Any game. Who'd be better?"

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1995 Current Biography Yearbook.

Search for another athlete

POTVIN, DENIS
Oct. 29, 1953- Hockey player.

Denis Potvin, the captain of the New York Islanders and the most productive defenseman in the history of hockey, has earned his numerous berths in the record books with blistering, tour-de-force stick work, an ability to check anything that moves--and to score afterwards--and an indispensable, voluble self-confidence that has sometimes bruised the egos of teammates. Potvin overtook the National Hockey League's all-time one-man defensive scoring machine, Boston Bruin Bobby Orr, on December 20, 1985 when he scored his 916th career point, and on January 28, 1986, when he scored his 271st goal. In October 1986 he set another record for defensemen by making his 684th career assist. Having mastered hockey's fundamentals before he was ten, Potvin was a teen-age phenomenon in the Ontario Hockey League. He was the NHL's Rookie of the Year (1973), the Islanders' first All-Star (1975), an All-Star six times subsequently, and a three-time recipient of the James Norris Trophy as the league's outstanding defenseman (1975-76, 1977-78,1978-79). Nicknamed by some the "Navigator," Potvin ran the relentless power plays that netted the Long Island franchise four straight Stanley Cup championships (1980-83). Equally important, he provided the Islanders with what seemed to be, according to Pat Celebre of News day (January 31, 1982), "a bottomless well of poise."

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1986 Current Biography Yearbook.

Search for another athlete

TROTTIER, BRYAN
(TROT-yay)
July 17, 1956- Hockey player.

While the flashy and freewheeling Wayne Gretzky of the Edmonton Oilers excels him in brute scoring, the left-shooting Bryan Trottier of the New York Islanders is the most complete center in recent hockey history, a two-way threat as clever as he is hard-working and hard-hitting. A smart, deft puck handler and passer more concerned with feeding his wings than registering goals himself, Trottier leads the Islanders in career points, with 1,018, and assists, with 638. In addition to controlling the team's offense, especially in power plays, he is on defense a rampant and dogged forward, ferociously body-checking (without resorting to Neanderthal use of the stick), going into corners, covering the net when the defenseman is drawn away, and anticipating opportunities to intercept. Exceptionally strong for his size (five feet eleven, 200 pounds) and intensely proud and determined, he seems invulnerable to pain as well as fatigue, often remaining in action, sometimes rashly, when injured. He skates deceptively, with back straight and head up, so as not to alert opponents to the direction in which he plans to move, and his ability to maintain both his balance and his imperturbability under violent contact is uncanny.

As Trottier goes, so go the Islanders, at least in the perception of the New York management, players, and fans. That is especially true in the Stanley Cup playoffs, in which the Isles have created a legend with their comebacks and overtime rallies. Defenseman Denis Potvin and others contributed to the four consecutive Cup championships won by the Islanders between 1980 and 1983, but Trottier increasingly became the key element, the "transmission" to Potvin's petrol, as one close observer analogized. Through 1984, Trottier had ninety-eight career playoff assists, second only to Potvin's ninety-nine in the NHL record books, and 148 points, second to Potvin's team-leading 149.

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1985 Current Biography Yearbook.

Search for another athlete

If you have any questions or comments about Current Biography please e-mail Gray Young at cbmail@hwwilson.com.

Current Biography
H. W. Wilson Co.
950 University Ave.
Bronx, NY 10452