The California Seals, later to become the Oakland Seals and then the California Golden Seals, entered the National Hockey League along with the Los Angeles Kings and four other teams in the expansion of 1967. They played their games in the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Arena, which was located in the Coliseum industrial area.
It is a circular building built with a steel frame with glass surrounding the entire structure. The building was built in 1966 at a cost of $25 million, which would be $179 million in 2012 dollars. It was elevated so that when you entered the building you were about 50 rows up looking down at the ice surface. The building still stands, and the interior was completely rebuilt in 1996-97 at a cost of $121 million, but the external walls, roof and foundation remained intact. It is now known as Oracle Arena.
The Kings first game in the arena was on October 18, 1967, and it ended in a 2-2 tie. What I remember most about playing the Seals is that many of our games would be on a Sunday afternoon around 2 p.m. The Kings would usually have a home game the night before and Western Airlines would hold their midnight flight until the Kings could get to LAX for the short flight to Oakland. The Kings would head right back home after the Sunday game and be back in L.A. by 7 p.m. with a road trip out of the way. Some of you may remember a group that called themselves “The White Hats,” and I believe most of them were Western Airlines employees. They would sit at one end of the Forum, then they would march around the inner concourse, leading cheers for the Kings, while wearing a variety of white hats. Some of them would always join us on the flight to Oakland.
Something else that stood out in Oakland was the Seals mascot called “Crazy George.” He looked a little crazy, and would roam the arena with a small drum that he would incessantly pound on to inspire the crowd and intimidate the opposing players. Many times he would almost hang over the glass and players would be startled if they weren’t aware that he was right over their shoulder.
Hockey was a tough sell in the Bay Area in those years, and in their first season, the Seals won only 15 of 74 games and finished last in the Western Division. They were the lowest scoring team in the NHL with only 153 goals, and the crowds were usually small. In fact, only 3,419 fans showed up for the Kings first game in the arena.
In 1969, the Kings and Seals met in the opening round of the playoffs with the Kings winning the seven-game series, 4-to-3. That was the only time the teams met each other in the playoffs. My first broadcast in the arena was on January 2, 1974, when the Seals beat the Kings, 5-2, in front of a paltry crowd of 2,860.
The Seals had several owners, the most famous of whom was Charles O. Finley, the flamboyant owner of baseball’s Oakland Athletics. One of his marketing gimmicks was to change the team’s colors to Kelly Green and California Gold, and have the team wear white skates, which the players hated. At the end of the 1970 season, the Seals traded their number one pick in the first round of the 1971 draft to Montreal. Due to the Seals finishing last in the NHL in 1970-71, Montreal had the number one pick and took future Hall of Famer, Guy LaFleur, so the deal was one of the most lopsided in NHL history.
After being frustrated by several losing seasons, Finley tried to sell the team but had no takers, so the NHL took over the team in February 1974, purchasing it from Finley for $6.5 million. In July of 1976, the NHL approved a relocation of the team to Cleveland, where they became the Barons. Thus, the Kings had lost their closest opponent geographically. Attendance was worse in Cleveland than it had been in Oakland, and after two years of losses, the Barons merged with the Minnesota North Stars.
The last Seals player to be active in any league was former King Charlie Simmer, who played with the San Diego Gulls of the International Hockey League until 1992.
The arena in Oakland still stands and is the current home of the Golden State Warriors of the NBA.
Thanks Bob
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Its a dump but in a good way…Old arenas are fun to watch a game. Been to concerts there and to see the Warriors.You can take Bart and get dropped off right there.
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Rather than sit with my parents in the Forum, I’d go sit and holler with the White Hats, joining them on the walk around between the 2nd and 3rd periods. I usually had no voice left after those games. Fun group of guys.
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Brings to mind the late Kings broadcaster Dan Avey, who one day mused: “if Oakland had a player who liked to stick around the locker room and help clean up….would he be known as the Good Housekeeping Seal” ?
RIP Dan, we miss you…..
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Forum Gold Reply:
December 23rd, 2012 at 10:08 am
@JKA, +1.
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Great recap Bob. Loving your series on all these great old arenas, which I grew up hearing about on the radio, before the advent of cable TV hockey. Your series fills in a lot of blanks my radio imagination could not. Before I moved to LA in 1976, I grew up a Seals fan. I have a few memories of my own to add to your recollections of the Oakland Alameda County Coliseum Arena (What a mouthful!)
I grew up in the Bay Area as a Seals fan in the early Seventies. In those days, crowds at he Oakland Coliseum Arena were indeed sparse, but for a young teenage hockey player who had just discovered the excitement of NHL hockey, it was a frozen Disneyland. You could buy a cheap seat in the rafters and by the 2nd period move down and watch the game rink side. It was an up-close hockey classroom for a young player and I saw all the 70′s greats from right next to the glass : Orr, Esposito, Hodge, Cashman, Sanderson, and Cheevers, and the big bad Bruins; the flying Frenchman with Henri Richard, Cournoyer, Lapperiere, Savard, and Dryden; the Ranger Blueshirts with Ratelle, Gilbert, Hadfield, Park and Giacomin; and the Broad Street Bullies with Clarke, MacLeish, Barber, Saleski, Battleship Kelly, the Watson brothers and Bernie Parent. I remember one night the entire Flyers team went into the Seals penalty box after one of the Seals players dared to stand up to them. The entire arena went silent in shock! They didn’t call them Bullies for nothing. But those were great days. The Oakland Arena was always sold out for those games.
One of the main problems with the Seals franchise was that the size and location of the Oakland Coliseum Arena. It was too small for an NHL team, even if they had drawn regular crowds, the seating capacity was only 12,000. It was also located in Oakland, which had a large black population, and scared off lots of white middle class hockey fans. (Oakland – Black Panthers – fear, but not this adventuress teen. I used to drive there by myself in our VW “hippie” bus – Unfortunately, I never saw a black person at the games, except outside scalping tickets, which even they probably couldn’t afford themselves.)
Loved your description of Crazy George. That’s exactly the way he was! Many nights, he was the only thing Seals fans had to cheer about. About half way through the first period, you would suddenly hear this frenetic drumbeat and you knew Crazy George was in the house. We loved it when he would incite the other team, running up and down the steps of the arena, banging his drum incessantly at the other teams players and coaches, getting right on top of them next to the glass, suddenly pounding his drum and scaring the hell out of them.
The Seals actually had some very good teams but every time they started to put it together, they had the rug pulled out from under them. The great forgotten Seals team was from the 1971-72 season, assembled by Garry Young, the brilliant former Bruins director of player development, who helped build the Boston dynasty. He cannily traded Seals veterans and cherry-picked the Bruins, Canadiens, Black Hawks, Red Wings and North Stars farm systems to assemble a fantastic collection of budding young stars: goalie Gilles Meloche, dmen Paul Shmyr, & Dick Redmond, fwds Reggie Leach, Tom Webster, Joey Johnston, Gerry Pinder, Ivan Boldirev, and maniac speedster Bobby Sheehan: All were age 25 and under. Had this team remained together, the Seals, not the Flyers, might have been the first expansion team to win the Stanley Cup. You heard me right! I was there.
Unfortunately, it was not the white skates or the ugly green and gold colors that cost the 71-72 Seals. It was Seals owner Charles O. Finley who was the team’s downfall. Without a doubt the cheapest owner in the NHL, Finley’s shortsightedness, bush league stunts and general Scrooge-ness cost Seals fans the dream team which Young had so astutely assembled. When the new rival league the WHA broke open the NHL’s archaic salary structure in the summer of 1972, Seals players were offered double by the WHA what skin-flint Charlie O. was paying. The Seals were decimated, with 10 of their best players jumping to the new league, more than any other NHL team. Most of these ex-Seals players became WHA All-Stars, helping legitimize the new league. The Seals never really recovered.
Finley quickly disposed of what was left, including Young, and so ruined the franchise that it became a joke. After the NHL bought Finley out in 1974, they were eventually purchased by former SF Seals owner Mel Swig, who should have been the original owner in ’67, were it not for the anti-antisemitism of the NHL’s then Neanderthal Board of Governors. (This is well documented in the Seals history “Shorthanded” by Brad Kurtzberg.) Swig immediately began lobbying to build a new bigger arena in downtown San Francisco, the city where the team had originally been projected to be located.
On the ice, the Seals finally began to build through the draft, with top picks Rick Hampton, Larry Patey, and the 3M line with Bob Murdoch, Al MacAdam and diminuitive rookie fireball Dennis Maruk, who became an instant fan favorite, scoring 30 goals in his rookie year. Whenever Maruk touched the puck the crowd chanted “Ma-rook-Mar-ook”, which sounded exactly like a chant s o familiar to Kings fans, “Luc-Luc”. By the end of the 1975-76 season the young Seals barely missed the playoffs and the faithful were finally beginning to see open ice at the end of the arena tunnel.
But in the summer of 1976, the city of SF voted down the proposed new Yerba Buena Center in the City. A disheartened Swig was convinced by minority owner George Gund III to abandon the Bay Area for the Gunds hometown of Cleveland. Gund would later help bring the NHL back to the Bay Area in the form of the Sharks, who had a little more bite than the Seals (heh-heh.) In the late summer of 76, while I was leaving the Bay Area myself and moving to LA, ironically my beloved Seals were moved to Cleveland, where they became the Barons, after the former storied AHL franchise. The WHA’s Cleveland Crusaders had just packed up and moved on due to weak fan support, which was a bad omen. Plus the Barons new home, the cavernous Richfield Coliseum, was located 20 miles outside town, halfway to Akron, so the team was doomed from the start.
Interestingly, the first LA Kings game I attended at the Fabulous Forum in the Fall of 1976 was an exhibition game between the Kings and the Barons, which included two young rookies who would soon have a major impact for the Kings: Charlie Simmer of the Barons and a hustling young 15th round Kings draft pick from Clarkson College named Dave Taylor.
Thanks for the memories Bob. So when are you doing the Richfield Coliseum?
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