Ron Oakes: San Diego Hockey Icon

San Diego
Gulls ProFile:

Ron Oakes
Broadcaster

Ron Oakes (left) interviews the legendary Bobby Hull prior to the Vancouver Blazers' first World Hockey Association home game in October 1973.

By Phillip Brents

    Ron Oakes might raise an eyebrow when reference is made to him as an icon in San Diego hockey circles. But history paints a different story.

    A native of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Oakes has links to every professional  hockey team that has called the San Diego Sports Arena home over the past 31 years. The play list includes five leagues and three separate teams nicknamed "Gulls."

    The veteran announcer currently calls games of the West Coast Hockey League San Diego Gulls. Oakes' partner on the radio broadcasts, which can be heard on KCBQ AM 1170, is Chris Ello. It is the third year both men have been paired, and Oakes' 13th overall as voice of a San Diego pro hockey club.

    "It's certainly been fun. I think we have some of the best hockey fans here in San Diego," Oakes readily offers.
    That he knows first-hand, having broadcast the first six seasons of games involving the original Gulls of the long-dead Western Hockey League. Oakes can recall the events just like they was yesterday. Those Gulls skated onto the ice at the then spanking brand new San Diego Sports Arena, christening the building with its very first hockey game.
    The date was November 17, 1966.
    "I joined the team in training camp in Chilliwack, British Columbia. We played our first 13 games on the road because they were still getting this new arena ready for hockey. We went something like 2-10-1," Oakes recalled with a well-intended smile. "I didn't know if anyone was listening. I'd never set foot in the town in my life. But opening night, the place was close to jammed. We beat Seattle that night. It (the large and vocal crowds) never let up from there for several years."
    Oakes had been more than familiar with the WHL, having previously called play-by-play for the Winnipeg Warriors, including one championship season for the Canadian club. But he was totally unprepared for the love affair that sun-drenched San Diegans would have for the Gulls and hockey, this strange new sport that had suddenly skated into their midst. No other hockey team to call the San Diego Sports Arena home has ever enjoyed the success those original Gulls did.
    In the course of their eight years in San Diego, the WHL Gulls averaged 9,300 fans. This came in an era when high-tech, video replay scoreboards and sophisticated sound systems were non-existent.
    "In the eight years, they never finished higher than third place and never got past the first round in the playoffs," Oakes recalled. "We outdrew the L.A. Kings the first five years of their existence. In fact, the Kings sent their people down here to find out just what we were doing right to get what we were getting."
    Oakes still confuses the WCHL Gulls' Darren Perkins with Ross Perkins, Darren's father, who played for the original Gulls. So deep are Oakes' memories of that first edition to wear San Diego colors.
    Though known primarily for his hockey work, Oakes' resume is as extensive and as it is varied. While based in Winnipeg, Oakes served as the radio voice of the Canadian Football League's Winnipeg Blue Bombers for five seasons. The team won four national titles in that span and was coached by Bud Grant, who would later earn fame with the Minnesota Vikings of the National Football League. He has also called baseball games and the Canadian national curling championships, a event, he said, that would challenge even the ability of a broadcaster with the storied airs of a Vin Scully.
    The advent of the upstart World Hockey Association, however, forever changed Oakes' career path.
    Oakes spent five years broadcasting games in the WHA, including the first nationally-televised game in league history. The broadcast team included Dick Stockton and Gerry Cheevers, one of many established players to jump from the NHL to the WHA when both rival leagues were hotly engaged in open warfare.
    Oakes was the radio voice of  the WHA Vancouver Blazers for two seasons, starting with the 1973-74 campaign. When that team later moved to Calgary, Oakes switched leagues, serving as television host for 25 NHL L.A. Kings games broadcast on Home Box Office before returning to once more to San Diego to serve as radio voice of the WHA Mariners, who had just been purchased by multi-millionaire Roy Kroc, then owner of the Major League Baseball San Diego Padres.
    Oakes' WHA stop in San Diego would last just that 1976-77 season.
    "Ray Kroc had just bought the team and I left an NHL job to come here. I thought Ray Kroc -- with all those millions behind him -- would be the right person to program San Diego for the NHL. But he kept it for one season as a favor to San Diego. In that instance, I zigged when I should have zagged," Oakes recounted.
    While the Mariners supplied San Diego fans with a higher caliber of hockey -- greats like Bobby Hull, Gordie Howe and the Winnipeg Jets' Swedish tandem of Ulf Nilsson and Anders Hedberg all put their wares on display at the Sports Arena -- there remained a certain degree of resentment among diehard WHL Gulls fans who wouldn't be seen at WHA Mariner games. Many of those "Gullnicks," as they were affectionately referred to, directly attributed the Mariners and the WHA to the demise of their beloved Gulls. Not so, according to Oakes.
    "The WHA was coming in and the WHL was folding," Oakes said. "That was the WHL's one mistake. It didn't declare itself a rival league to the NHL like the WHA did. It either wouldn't or couldn't because of a lack of funding or because of an agreement it had with the NHL."
    It took the better part of three seasons before a reconciliation started to occur between the factions. By then, however, it was too late. Kroc, the team's apparent savior, pulled the plug on the Mariners following the 1976-77 season. "I really thought we had started to turn the corner," Oakes recalled optimistically.
    Oakes nonetheless fondly recalls his WHA days.

    "It was a very good league, exciting times," Oakes extolled. "We had the Howes (father Gordie and sons Mark and Marty) in Houston (with the Aeros) and later in New England (with the Whalers). Andre Lacroix was the star, of course, in San Diego. It went very well for me personally. I was stoked. Here was a league with big-time stars.

I was interviewing a lot of star players."
    He said he remains disappointed in the that he feels the league never fully received the proper recognition it deserved.
    Had the WHA survived, this would have been its 25th anniversary season. In reality the league lasted seven years, from 1972 to 1979. But to its legion of fans, it proved its worth in the end when four surviving teams -- the Edmonton Oilers, New England Whalers, Quebec Nordiques and Winnipeg Jets -- were absorbed in what the NHL referred to as an act of "expansion." WHA fans, however, prefer to remember it as "the merger." Playing parity had been achieved and the NHL was quickly opened to a complete new game that has evolved today.

Gulls radio braodcaster Ron Oakes today as broadcaster for the San Diego Gulls of the West Coast Hockey League.

    Oakes' prize interview remains the legendary Bobby Hull, the ex-NHL Chicago Black Hawk superstar who quickly became known as the "Golden Jet" when he jumped leagues  to ink a then unheard of $2.5-million contract with Winnipeg. The WHA owners pooled the money in their pockets to give Hull a $1 million signing bonus.
    "When they signed him, it was like they were bringing in royalty," Oakes recounted with a gleam in his eyes. "That gave the league credibility."
    The two hooked up in the Hotel Vancouver the evening prior to the Blazers' first-ever home game.
    "It was a call-in show and we left it open-ended. It went on for three or four hours," Oakes recalled, the excitement after two and a half decades still evident in his voice.
    Oakes called Hull a phenomenal sales person for the game of hockey.
    "In his time, he was the best public relations salesman that any sport has ever had," Oakes recalled. "He had so much charisma. He was the last man to leave the locker room and stayed to sign autographs. He was the perfect hockey ambassador for kids. If it was in the media age of today, he might be compared to someone like Tony Gwynn (of the Padres). That's 25 years ago when we weren't nearly as sophisticated as today."
    Hull racked up 638 points on 303 goals and 335 assists in 411 WHA games, finishing as that league's second-highest goalscorer (next to Quebec's Marc Tardif). Hull led the Jets to two of their three Avco World Cup trophies and holds league records for most goals scored in one season with 77 (1974-75) and playoff goals with 43. Oakes still gets shivers when recalling Hull's exploits on the ice.
    "Whenever we ever played the Jets in the WHA, I used to feel a weird apprehension when he would shoot the puck, because a lot of goalies were still playing bare-faced. He shot so much and so hard, no one ever knew where it was going, not even himself sometimes. There were no regulations on the curvature of the stick in the WHA. He had a real banana. It was wicked."
    Oakes recalled with fondness the presence of Hull, at left wing, alongside "Swedish Express" line mates Ulf Nilsson, at center, and Anders Hedberg, at right wing. If that line wasn't the best in pro hockey in the mid-1970s, Oakes said he couldn't recall any that was.
    "That line was the equal of any in the NHL," said Oakes with an air of pride in his voice. Oakes knows what he's talking about. While he was with the L.A. Kings, he had the opportunity to witness the magic combination of the fabled "Triple Crown" line of Marcel Dionne, Charlie Simmer and Dave Taylor.
    But Hull remains the pinnacle and basking in his presence was an electrifying experience, Oakes noted.
    "I wasn't so overwhelmed that I didn't do my job but you could easily have been," Oakes related. "What I enjoy about my job as a broadcaster is the opportunity to get to know these star athletes. It's really interesting to get into them and see what makes them tick."
    While the WHA's brand of hockey was less appreciated in a U.S. sports marketplace too often obsessed with major league labels, Oakes said the league received a widely positive response north of the border.
    "In Canada, it was not regarded as a renegade league," Oakes professed. "They appreciate good hockey there."
    And good hockey the WHA was. Built on the foundation of superstar caliber players like Hull and Howe, the rival league also sought out rising young talent. Where the NHL feared to tread in signing underage junior players, the WHA went after that aspiring talent with a passion. The WHA also did not restrict itself to North American borders, either, scouring Europe for likewise exceptional overseas talent. It should be noted that Wayne Gretzky played his first professional game at the age of 17 with the WHA Indianapolis Racers.
    "It was an exciting league to be connected with," Oakes explained.
    Certainly amazing by the standards of today's high-profile, high-priced and generally self-centered athletes.
    Almost orphaned at times because of the extravagant dreams of under-financed owners, the WHA was a league in constant turmoil. The season before Oakes joined the Mariners, that franchise had to play out its season without an owner -- one of many which encountered acute financial problems in an era when major corporate sponsorship was a fantasy. Players banded together for the love of the game and played out the season for any playoff monies.
    "The guys played about the whole year without a paycheck. I had a lot of admiration for them. It was incredible," Oakes recalled.
    Oakes spent the 1977-78 season in Chicago broadcasting NHL Black Hawk games. "The big story every game seemed to be whether Bobby Orr would play or not," Oakes offered. A programming decision at the station saw Oakes move on once more. It was back to the minors and San Diego. This time with the San Diego Hawks of the second-year Pacific Hockey League.
    It proved a homecoming in more ways than one for Oakes. Not only was he back home with his family of five daughters and wife Jean but also with much of his hockey family from the Mariners and Gulls. With the WHA downsizing toward eventual assimilation into the NHL, the Hawks managed to sign many popular and familiar faces from the Mariners, and also a couple ex-Gulls, still in playing shape.
    Among those back were Joe Noris, Kevin Devine and Ray Adduono from the Mariners and Willie O'Ree -- Mr. Legend himself, now into his 40s -- from the original Gulls. It seemed to be a marriage made in heaven -- the best of both hockey worlds and initial fan and media response was fantastic. The Hawks drew over 8,000 people to their home opener against the Spokane Flyers.
    Despite offering a high-caliber of play -- the Hawks were just a tick below the WHA level -- the league quickly sprang leaks and became insolvent and folded after the 1978-79 campaign with the Phoenix Roadrunners declared the league's final champion upon cancellation of the playoffs.
    Following the demise of the Hawks and the PHL, Oakes found himself in St. Louis, where he was teamed with the late Dan Kelly, regarded as one of the best hockey announcers of all-time.
    But fate once again intervened. The sport that somehow wouldn't die sprang up once again in "America's Finest City."
    When the International Hockey League awarded an expansion franchise to San Diego for the 1990-91 season, Oakes was there as the team's radio and television broadcaster. There had been an 11-year lapse since his voice had last graced local airwaves but the electricity once again filled the building when the San Diego Gulls, Edition II skated onto the San Diego Sports Arena ice. He called the team's first two seasons, both on radio and television.
    This city's love affair with hockey, however, was always with the original Gulls, and Oakes has many pleasant memories of the "good old days," as he likes to call them.
    There was the moment, he reminisced, when 10,000 fans sang "happy birthday" to him during intermission at a game, replete with a large birthday cake on the ice.

    "Moments like that you don't forget," he said.
    Despite his past affiliations with pro hockey in San Diego, the 1995-96 WCHL team was the first to hang a championship banner in the San Diego Sports Arena.
    "This is a good caliber of hockey. For those sports fans who haven't seen this team play yet, they should come and have a look. I think they'll be surprised," he said.
    With a strong link to the sport's past and introducing a new generation of San Diegans to pro hockey, Oakes' audience has responded to this latest Gulls' squad by setting league attendance records. The Gulls own the WCHL's 10 largest crowds in league history. A sellout crowd of 12,940 greeted the two-time Taylor Cup champions on opening night of the current 1997-98 season.
    Is the WCHL the last stop for hockey in San Diego? Or are there greater things in store for Gulls' fans in the future?
"I always believed we were programmed to be in the NHL one day. We may never be," Oakes admitted with a somewhat forlorn look. "We're a hell of a hockey town but we seem to be of an acquired taste."