PHILADELPHIA — It was the summer of 1994, but for a moment it may have felt like the winter of 1974. Forget that the players wore rollerblades, the puck was plastic, and the floor was turquoise. This was the Montreal Forum and Dave Schultz — then the head coach of the Philadelphia Bulldogs — was still “the Hammer.” He reached over the glass, grabbed Yvan Cournoyer by his tie, and lifted his old rival off the ground.
“They cheated,” Schultz said by phone nearly 30 years later. “They cheated. They did.”
It has become a thing in the last few months to refer to the Eagles as “the Philadelphia Bulldogs” after they added a cast of former University of Georgia Bulldogs in the last two offseasons. The Eagles drafted two Bulldogs in 2022, three more this April, and traded for former Georgia star D’Andre Swift. The Birds are the Dawgs.
But the most recent Philadelphia team to use that name was a roller hockey squad coached by Schultz, owned by Tony Danza, and comprised of minor leaguers who played their home games at the Spectrum. They made $180 a game, struggled to stop skating as most had never worn rollerblades before, played in front of cheerleaders and a mascot, and wore a quintessential early-1990s color scheme of teal and purple for a quintessential early-1990s professional sports league.
It all seems a bit wacky now — a professional roller hockey team owned by the star of Who’s the Boss? and coached by the toughest Broad Street Bully — but for the Bulldogs, Roller Hockey International was no joke.
“It was serious,” Schultz said.
That’s why Schultz had a fistful of Cournoyer’s tie. The Bulldogs claimed that Cournoyer — who coached the Montreal Roadrunners roller team and scored the tying goal in 1976 when the Montreal Canadiens topped Schultz’ Flyers for the Stanley Cup — had coated the floor of the visiting penalty box with oil.
A Bulldogs player skated in, had his wheels slicked, and couldn’t get out. The Hammer wasn’t having that.
“The tie was choking him. Schultzie wouldn’t let go,” said Perry Florio, the Bulldogs captain. “Finally, the Montreal trainer grabbed the scissors off his belt and cut the tie. Cournoyer fell and dropped like a rock.”
Better than an armored truck
Mark Bernard was a minor-league goaltender with NHL dreams, so he found a job every summer to pay his bills. He planned to spend the summer of 1994 as a security guard for an armored bank truck. And then the Hammer called.
“It’s Dave Schultz; do you know who I am? Yeah, I know you are,” Bernard said. “Growing up in Hamilton, I saw him beat up on my poor Toronto Maple Leafs too many times in the past.”
Schultz, who was also the Bulldogs’ general manager while fellow Broad Street Bully Bob Kelly handled the marketing, invited Bernard down to Philadelphia to play roller hockey.
“I said, ‘I don’t know how to roller skate,’” Bernard said. “He goes ‘Well, it’s rollerblading. I’m going to send you a plane ticket. Come down and try it for a weekend.’”
Roller Hockey International was launched a year earlier by one of the cofounders of the American Basketball Association. Street hockey was booming in the early ‘90s across the country and Dennis Murphy envisioned a professional version being a hit. The game moved fast — four skaters aside with no blue lines, so offsides was almost nonexistent — and included big hits and big score totals.
Bernard skated for 10 minutes at Penn’s Class of 1923 rink — they removed the ice and the Bulldogs practiced on concrete — and told Schultz — who coached in sneakers because he also didn’t know how to rollerblade — that he was in. The teams traveled during the season by plane and stayed in nice hotels, a decent change from the bus trips the players were used to in the minors. It beat driving an armored truck.
“You’re back with all the guys you played against in the ECHL and the camaraderie was great,” said Bernard, who played the previous winter for the Erie Panthers in the East Coast Hockey League. “It was hard. But it was so much fun because you’re playing with all the guys who you were playing against in the winter. We were all in our 20s and had aspirations of moving up the ranks in professional hockey.
“Our first game, we got a delayed penalty and I take off to the bench. I get like 10 feet from the bench and it clicks. ‘How am I going to stop?’ Wham, right into the boards.”
The Hammer
The Bulldogs were somewhere in Quebec when Schultz’s phone rang. He took his team on a preseason tour of Canada, busing from town to town as they played a series of games against the Roadrunners. At their hotel in Chicoutimi, a town north of Québec City, the same worker was tasked with manning the front desk and the bar across the lobby.
“If anybody was sitting in the bar, the guy would leave the front desk, make a drink, and go back to front desk,” Florio said. “We realized this pretty quickly.”
The Bulldogs hatched a plan. While the group sat at the bar, another player rang the bell at the front desk and asked for towels.
“As soon as he’d vacate the bar, someone would run behind the bar and steal a bottle of vodka and a 12-pack,” Florio said. “This went on for like two hours.”
And that’s why Schultz’s phone rang. The hotel told him the next day that the Bulldogs owed them cases of beer and bottles of liquor. The plan was foiled.
“He stood up on the bus and said ‘All right, who has the vodka?’” Florio said. “We had that poor lobby guy running crazy. We were all laughing. He didn’t care.”
Florio grew up with Islanders season tickets in the 1970s, providing him a glimpse of Schultz every time the Flyers barreled into town. So he was a bit nervous to talk to the Hammer the first time he called him. It didn’t take long for him and the Bulldogs to see a different side.
Schultz laughed with them on that bus, bought them track suits, gave Florio a gift on his first wedding anniversary, helped his players find a better place to live after the original lodging provided by the team was a dump, and invited them to his house in South Jersey for barbecues.
“The old Flyers would drive by and see all the cars,” Bernard said. “Here comes Larry Goodenough, Rick MacLeish, Bob Kelly, Bernie Parent. We’re in awe. And you know how it is in the summer, we’re having a few pops and then we’re like ‘Yeah, we can’t keep up with these guys.’ It was just so surreal. Of course, we’d then get dragged into the house to watch Schultzie’s fight tape.”
The league used mostly NHL arenas as the Bulldogs rolled into Pittsburgh’s Civic Arena, Buffalo’s Memorial Auditorium, Ottawa’s Civic Centre, and New Jersey’s Meadowlands Arena. For minor leaguers, every building was a treat. They dropped their bags as soon as they arrived at the Montreal Forum and headed to peek at the rink.
“Everything was dark with just spotlights on the banners,” Bernard said. “It was so cool. We’re all looking at that and all of a sudden Schultzie comes running down the tunnel with a hockey stick and he jumps onto the floor in his sneakers. ‘Yeah, I came down this wing and I sniped Kenny Dryden in the playoffs.’ Dave was so much fun. He made it so much fun.”
‘The time of my life’
Country music star Luke Bryan said last month during a tour stop in Camden that he must be an Eagles fan since they “pretty much drafted my whole Georgia football team.” The Philadelphia Bulldogs are now the Eagles. But for a group of minor-league hockey players, the Philadelphia Bulldogs will always be the team they rollerbladed with in the summer while they kept their hockey dreams churning in the winter.
Those Bulldogs played 30 years after the previous Philadelphia Bulldogs, a 1960s Continental Football League team coached by Wayne Hardin who won the championship with a quarterback who doubled as the team’s business manager.
(Hardin would become head coach at Temple, from 1970 to 1982. Before that, he coached Navy from 1959 to 1964, including when Joe Bellino and Roger Staubach each won the Heisman Trophy.).
The rollerblading Bulldogs lasted three seasons, met Danza before a show in Atlantic City, and disbanded five years before Roller Hockey International ceased operations.
Bernard never played in the NHL, but his name is on the Stanley Cup three times as an executive with the Blackhawks. Kent Hawley is a scout for the Stanley Cup champion Golden Knights. Bob Woods is an assistant coach for the Wild. Ted Dent was a minor-league coach in Chicago’s system when the Blackhawks won the Cup. Florio coached for a decade in the minors.
“That was the time of my life,” said Stéphane Charbonneau, who joined the Bulldogs for their second season, led the team in goals, and now manages the IceWorks rink in Aston. “We had such a great time.”
Schultz — who coached the Bulldogs for one season before coaching a minor-league team in Madison, Wis. — knew his team was cheated that night in Montreal because he had the towel used to clean the floor of the penalty box. He brought it back to Philadelphia and told the league office, but Schultz said they told him to let it go. It was just roller hockey, but don’t tell that to the Hammer. Cournoyer, Schultz said, was lucky he didn’t coat the Spectrum penalty box in oil.
“He wouldn’t have gotten out alive,” the Hammer said.
