You don’t have to be a hockey fan to love “Broad Street Bullies” or the team that inspired this hilarious, hell-raising hockey doc.
And loving a sports documentary — about hockey, yet — well, that’s going some coming from me. Hell, I don’t even understand why anyone wants to watch other people play a game. It’s like watching someone else type.
So, clearly, I am not the audience and yet, I couldn’t stop watching it, couldn’t stop laughing and couldn’t stop rooting for the most ill-mannered, unsportsmanlike, toothless and ruthless team ever to take the ice.
I’m talking about the original NHL expansion team, the Philadelphia Flyers, who were such a bruising, brawling, out-of-control bunch that — after a few seasons — the league had to create an entire new rulebook.
The show begins in 1967 when the NHL, then just six elite teams, decided to expand. And the Flyers were born on a wing, a prayer and a loan.
The team, made up of losers who were let go by other teams, somehow rose to win two, count ’em two, Stanley Cups.
Of course, they fought as hard as they played and took the game from graceful strength-on-ice to brute blood-filled-ice. And the fans loved it.
Like the game, Philadelphia in the early 1970s had gone from a city born of white wigs to a town dominated by blue collars.
Says one sports writer, “Things were so bad, they liked harness racing here.”
It wasn’t just the players who were strange. The team’s coach, Fred “The Fog” Shero was — are you ready? — a former philosopher.
He basically disliked his players, so he’d write them little notes with sayings like, “Satisfaction is death,” and “If you don’t want to get criticized, say nothing, do nothing and be nothing.”
The team of losers that became winners included Bobby Clarke (“He’d get stitched up between periods”), Bernie Parent (“We all looked like porn stars with the long hair and Fu Manchus”) and Dave “The Hammer” Schultz, who joined the team and then beat up every player on every other team who had ever hit a Flyer in the past.
Some say these lunatics ruined the game, others say they saved not just the sport, but the city.
In the immortal and elegant words of The Hammer: “We don’t have to apologize to nobody.”