New York – To comprehend the impact John J. McMullen had during his life, you needed only to look around at the people gathered to honor him in death.
The former owner of the New Jersey Devils and Houston Astros, the Navy man, the businessman, the family patriarch, the “Jersey guy,” as his son Peter described him, died Sept. 16 at his Montclair, N.J., home at the age of 87, after battling a long illness.
From former New Jersey governor Brendan Byrne to current U.S. senator John Corzine, from New York Yankees Hall of Famer and close friend Yogi Berra to men in uniform of the armed forces and out of uniform as current Devils, the funeral mass Wednesday at the Immaculate Conception Church in Montclair drew a standing room only crowd from various walks of life.
McMullen is best known as the man who brought an NHL hockey team, the former Colorado Rockies, to New Jersey in 1982. In an era in which sports franchises are increasingly run by faceless corporations, McMullen was an owner who took great pleasure in actually being an owner.
McMullen was old school, but he wasn’t old-fashioned. He took a dramatic departure from the old boy network in 1987 by making what was a borderline- radical hire of a general manager whose only hockey experience was at the collegiate level. Lou Lamoriello has been the team’s guru since, and in his eulogy Wednesday, Lamoriello recalled the meeting at McMullen’s office at the World Trade Center that changed Devils history.
“He looked me right in the eye and said: ‘Lou, I’m tired of the Devils being pushed around, on the ice and off the ice. I’m just sick and tired of losing. We have to change this,”‘ Lamoriello said. “That’s when I became a Devil. I knew that this was a man I wanted to work with.”
With Lamoriello at the helm, the Devils won Stanley Cups in 1995 and 2000, before McMullen sold the team to a holding company of YankeeNets.
McMullen was also an innovator in drafting veterans from the powerful old Soviet hockey machine, and then fighting his way through a maze of international red tape to allow players such as Slava Fetisov and Alexander Kasatonov to help pave the way for Eastern European athletes to play in North America.
“Nobody knows or understands, but he had a lot of input to get (those players) here,” said Fetisov, who is now the Minister of Sport for Russia and who flew from Moscow solely to attend McMullen’s service. “It took him a long time, but he did it.”
McMullen was patient with his team, and patient with the players he grew close to.
Ken Daneyko, who played his entire 20-year career in New Jersey despite a troubled personal history that included battles with alcoholism, said that McMullen’s support helped save his life.
“I thought many times that if it wasn’t for him, my personal problems could have all crumbled, but he was always a rock to me,” said Daneyko, who was one of the pallbearers Wednesday.
Daneyko said he learned that McMullen refused to include the rugged defenseman in any trades, even when Lamoriello would try to play salary hardball and threaten Daneyko with banishment to the former NHL outpost in Winnipeg.
“He remembered me always standing up for the team, and that meant the world to him,” Daneyko said.
McMullen seldom felt appreciated by Devils fans, who never forgave him for flirting with moving the team to Nashville in 1995, at the time the diehards were celebrating their first Stanley Cup. It was a power play, of course, since McMullen was trying to broker a better arena deal.
He won that battle, but lost the public relations war.
“Lou said (McMullen) could have been misunderstood a lot of times,” Daneyko said. “It used to hurt him deep inside. But if you were in his inner circle, you were treated like gold.”
On Wednesday, those in that big circle finally had their chance to say “Thanks.”
