“I don’t remember a time that I was not playing hockey”, Warren Holmes tells me. Our Wednesday evening conversation is rich with laughter and warm memories from his hockey, his life. Over an hour into talking with him, I am not wanting our discussion to end. But let’s start from the beginning. “Beeton, Ontario is about 40-miles north of Toronto, and I was the fifth professional hockey player to come out of my hometown”; not bad for a town of only 500-700 people in the early-1970s. “There was Wayne Carleton; he was the first. Won a Stanley Cup with Boston. He’s the other Bruin you see in that iconic photo of Bobby Orr, even if it’s only his leg in the picture. John Gould; he was a 30-goal scorer with the Vancouver Canucks, and he played in Buffalo and Atlanta too. Larry Gould is John’s brother, and he got into a few games with the Canucks as well. And then Jimmy Rutherford; he’s the General Manager for the Pittsburgh Penguins, but played as a goaltender for the Detroit Red Wings, Penguins, Maple Leafs, and the Kings too. Jimmy and I also ended up being teammates together with the New Haven Nighthawks in the twilight of his career. And then I was the fifth”.
Warren Holmes is jovial and gracious, and is the kind of gentleman who would always give you a firm handshake and look you in the eye when you meet him. “We all lived within a mile to a mile-and-a-half radius of each other. I was fortunate in that I had the only swimming pool in the whole town, so in the winter time I could learn to skate on the frozen pool. I probably started skating at a year-and-a-half. Our town also had one of the first indoor ice rinks north of Toronto”. Throughout Warren Holmes’ hockey career, he was always capable of playing at a level higher than where he was assigned to or what his age afforded him. It also helped matters that he had the size, standing at 6-feet, 2-inches and weighing around the 200-lbs. mark. “At one time, I was playing on a Pee-Wee, a Bantam and a Midget team. Now, part of that was from necessity because I was from such a small town and the teams needed the bodies. But I was good enough to play on each of those teams, even if I was younger than some of the other older players. So I would play on one team for a game at 7:00 o’clock. Go into the next locker room, change my sweater, and then play a game for the next team. Then I’d go back to the first locker room to change again because the town only had four locker rooms <laughs>”.
Growing up in Ontario in the 1960s, Warren Holmes saw some of the greatest players who ever played the game. Though he lives in Texas now and has not lived in Ontario for over 40-years, he still has Maple Leafs blood flowing through him strongly. “Even though I played for the Kings, if it came down to it that the Leafs and the Kings were in the Stanley Cup Finals, I would have to want the Leafs to win”. That being said, Holmes’ hockey hero is one of the most underrated players throughout the history of the game. “Plain and simple, my all-time hero is Red Kelly”. Leonard “Red” Kelly won eight Stanley Cups during his 20-year NHL career; the most of any hockey player who did not play for the Montreal Canadiens. It is interesting to me that Holmes has such an affinity for Kelly, a player whom many of today’s hockey fans are not familiar with, but it makes sense when considering the type of player Red Kelly was and what he did for the game. The 1989 Hall of Fame inducted Kelly would win four of his eight Cups with the Maple Leafs of Holmes’ childhood, and a factor that Warren points out to me is even more noteworthy. “You have to remember”, he says, “it is more likely that as a player is aging that he would transition from center to defense. Red Kelly did the opposite; the later stage of his career he went from being a defenseman to playing center”, arguably the most arduous position for a positional player. Kelly would play the last six-and-a-half years of his career with the Leafs as a centerman, between the ages of 32 and 39. “The local Rotary Club used to bring in the Leafs players to speak at our hockey banquets, and it was just a thrill to meet Red Kelly there”.
A secondary hero of Holmes’ would be more of a contemporary of his, as opposed to Kelly, who had retired when Warren was still a boy. “In the late-60s, for three years I went to Phil Esposito’s hockey school up in Sault Ste. Marie. Now I don’t know if he remembers it like I do, maybe he does, but Phil really took me under his wing there and bonded with me. The last year that I went was right around the time of the Summit Series (1972)”, referring to Esposito’s brilliant performance for Team Canada against the Soviets in the best of eight series; “Espo” would lead all scorers throughout the legendary hockey series and iconic occasion in Canadian history with 7-goals and 6-assists in 8-games.
At the age of 15, Warren Holmes would leave his hometown Beeton and would end up playing junior-B hockey with the Toronto Young Nationals. Holmes tells me, “without a doubt, that was the most talented team that I ever played on. Guys like Dave Shand, Dwight Foster, Barry Scully, Rob Palmer would all have great careers. It was the best team that I played on in terms of pure talent. The Young Nats would actually set the record for the most players drafted into the OHA for major junior”. Holmes strings me along a little bit with what he says next. “Yeah, there was another guy who would end up playing for the Young Nats a few years later from Brantford…. I want to say his name was… Gretzky”. Holmes actually got me on that one and I tell him so, as I had not known that “The Great One” had been a product of the Young Nationals. “Yeah, I like to tell people that it was really Dave Shand and I who paved the way for Wayne Gretzky to play for the Young Nats”, he chuckles. As Holmes recalls, it would not be long after his own time playing for the Young Nats that he would find himself drafted into the OHA by the Ottawa 67’s. “Tony McKegney was drafted before me, and then I think Trevor Johansen was drafted right after me”.
While playing his major junior years in Ottawa, Warren Holmes suffered a number of injuries that would limit his opportunities to play with the team. Among his injuries, Holmes would suffer repeated shoulder dislocations that would eventually require surgery. The injuries hampering him enough that during his sophomore campaign, Holmes would put up a mere 3-goals in 28-games for Ottawa. On top of that, Holmes would have a rather contentious relationship with head coach for Ottawa, Brian Kilrea; a man who is a Hockey Hall of Fame inductee and widely known for his 35-year association with the 67’s. As an interesting, even ironic side note, Kilrea scored the very first goal in Los Angeles Kings’ history; the same team with whom Warren would spend all of his time with in the NHL.
“I was on the team that got Brian Kilrea his first win in the OHA as coach with the 67’s. But to be brutally honest, I did not like him and he did not like me. But what I can say about Brian Kilrea is that he taught us to be professional hockey players. He also taught us a lot of different skills in practice too. Kilrea was a great passer of the puck when he played, and he worked a lot with us on our passing. The way he coached us prepared us to be professional hockey players. If it were not for Brian Kilrea, we would not have had our successes in pro hockey”. So while he and Brian Kilrea had a mutual dislike for one another, Warren still acknowledges the many skillsets and the intangibles that he garnered from his former coach; all of which would be applied throughout his career.
Though his playing time was limited due to injuries, when Holmes was healthy he was flanked by two incredibly talented hockey players, one of whom was an eventual Stanley Cup champion and scorer of over 1,000-points in the NHL. “When I was healthy, Bobby Smith would be on my leftwing, and Timmy Higgins was on the right. Kilrea would double-shift Bobby by having him center the fourth-line”. Smith would win the Calder Trophy as the NHL’s Rookie of the Year with Minnesota in 1979 and a Stanley Cup title with Montreal in 1986, while Tim Higgins would become a veteran of over 700-NHL games across 11-seasons. With star defenseman Doug Wilson patrolling the blue-line and this trio up front, the 67’s would win the 1977 J. Ross Robertson Cup as the winner of the OHA playoff championship that season. This being done despite the fact that Holmes had briefly distanced himself from the team, demanding a trade. “I had left the team for about 6-weeks, and demanded a trade. I had later heard, and I don’t know how true it is, that Brian Kilrea had asked an exorbitant price in return for trading me and no deal could be completed. I mean, how could you ask much in the way of compensation when you had a player who only scored 3-goals the year prior? You couldn’t. Eventually Kilrea talked me into coming back to the team”. Holmes was absolutely on fire during the 67’s playoff run that championship season, on a tear with 11-goals and 10-assists for 21-points in 19-playoff games.
Winning the ’77 J. Ross Robertson Cup vaulted the 67’s into the Memorial Cup tournament where they would face both the Sherbrooke Castors and the New Westminster Bruins. The tournament, which featured the first time that a double round-robin format was used, saw Holmes and Ottawa lose their first game to the Bruins 7-6, followed by three wins in a row; 6-1 over the Castors, 4-3 in overtime against the Bruins once more, and then 5-2 victory over the Castors after that. Holmes maintained his scoring prowess during the tournament, tallying 3-goals and 2-assists to have 5-points in 5-games. Unfortunately, the 67’s would lose to New Westminster in the Cup Final, 6-5. Holmes recalls, “we had brought in (goaltender) Pat Riggin from the London Knights specifically for the Memorial Cup. Brad Maxwell scored against Riggin on an end-over-end shot that he just fluttered to the net. I guess that’s why they always tell you to put the puck on net. It ended up going five-hole on Riggin, and that ended up being the game-winner for New Westminster”.
The 1977 amateur draft saw both rival professional leagues, the NHL and the World Hockey Association (WHA) draft Warren Holmes; the NHL’s Los Angeles Kings drafting him in the fifth-round, number-85 overall and the WHA’s Winnipeg Jets selecting him in the eighth-round, the 72nd-overall player. But according to Warren, the WHA was not really a route that he seriously considered. “Nothing was ever really up (with the Jets)”, he tells me. “At most, in the Fall of ’77 they had stated that they were going to having their training camp over in Europe, and that they were only taking 23-players or so, and I was not one of the players included in that mix. No, the Kings were really the only team that wanted me at the time”.
Though the Kings may have been the only team wanting to enlist Warren’s services, it was still somewhat of an odd setup or situation for him to become a part of. “What you have to understand is that the Kings of late-70s and early-80s were not a team that presented a lot of opportunity, unless you were uber-talented like Marcel Dionne. They were not developing their team through draft picks and growing it the proper way. They were kind of their own worst enemy. In fact, they traded many of their assets away and were not fostering homegrown talent. With the exception of probably Dave Taylor (drafted in the 15th-round of the 1975 draft)”, Warren recalls. The Kings did not even invest in a full fledged farm team system at the time either; electing instead to share minor league affiliations with other NHL clubs. And without the commitment to develop their own talent pool, there was little of a farm system to work with. In fact, the Kings of that time period had built a penchant for trading away their high draft selections time and time again in exchange for players that had once been talented but were now in the twilight of their careers. “That’s why you saw guys like Glenn Goldup, Rick Martin, Dave Schultz, Brian Glennie coming in for very brief stops”, Holmes tells me. The one instance in which the Kings would strike gold was when they had signed winger Charlie Simmer as a free agent in August of Holmes’ draft year (1977). With Dionne, Taylor, and Simmer together, the Kings would have their famed “Triple Crown Line”. Most of the remaining assets of the team were disparate.
When Warren Holmes entered into the fold, he actually was not yet under contract with the Kings himself, despite having been drafted by them. Holmes would play his first year of professional hockey with the IHL’s Saginaw Gears, one of the minor league teams that L.A. shared an affiliation with. “Wren Blair (formerly the first head coach in Minnesota North Stars history) was a part-owner of Saginaw. He was the one who helped get me a 3-year contract with the Kings. After all of those injuries in junior, it was the first time that I was playing healthy. And I was playing on a good team”.
Holmes would score the most goals in a single season for his professional career that year (notching 48 of them), and his second highest seasonal points total as well (81). “Back in those days minor league teams really only carried fourteen skaters and two goalies”, he says. “You’d skate three lines and have five-D. That’s the reason why I scored so much because I had so much ice time”. It was also during his time in Saginaw that Warren Holmes and Gears head coach Don Perry forged a longstanding relationship that would carry on for years between multiple teams and multiple leagues, including the NHL. “If you ask Don to this day, he’ll agree that of all the players he coached, I was the one who played for him the most. Maybe not in exact number of games, but for the amount of years on teams that he coached”. Perhaps fostered by Perry’s leadership at the helm, Holmes found in Saginaw a team and a place where he belonged. “We were a team of friends. Guys like Dennis Desrosiers, Dave Westner; I’m still friends with those guys to this day, forty years later. It’s the most comfortable that I felt with one team”. Warren’s 48-goals were good enough for second spot overall in the IHL that season.
The next few years, between 1978 until 1982, Warren would repeatedly find himself on the move between cities and leagues; some of it not clearly depicted in the seasonal stats from that time. Warren explains to me that for 1978-79, “I started the season in training camp with Los Angeles. Finished training camp and they sent me to Springfield for 2-weeks”. The Springfield Falcons being the Kings’ AHL minor league affiliate. “Then I went back to Saginaw. I guess I got it in my head that because I had so much success my first year that I didn’t need to work as hard my second. Well, I was wrong. So Don Perry, despite the relationship that I had with him and would end up having with him, shipped me to Milwaukee (Admirals) in exchange for Scott Gruhl, and to basically teach me a lesson. But then Saginaw brought me back again at the trade deadline and would have me for the playoffs”. The following season though, with Holmes back in the fold in Saginaw, he, Gruhl, and Dave Westner formed a very dangerous forward line for the Gears.
The 1979-80 season would begin nearly exactly the same as the one prior. Holmes would start out the year at the Kings training camp in L.A., be sent to their new AHL affiliate for that season, the Binghamton Dusters, where he would play all of two games, and then again he would be sent to Saginaw in the IHL. Easy to see why Warren’s comfort level in Saginaw was growing. In terms of points ’79-’80 would be his most productive, finishing the year with a career-high total of 92 (37-goals, 55-assists). Warren would finish second overall for the Gears in team scoring, while linemate Scott Gruhl led the way with 93-points of his own (53-goals, 40-assists), and the third part of their line, Dave Westner, was sixth with 20-goals and 41-assists. Though the Gears would sweep Milwaukee 4-games to none in the opening round in the playoffs, they would be eliminated themselves in the next round as they fell to the Fort Wayne Komets 4-games to 1. Holmes would finish the playoffs with 5-goals and 3-assists in 7-playoff games.
And then finally, a championship! Perhaps as they say, “the third time is the charm”. The 1980-81 season would be the third time that Warren would begin the year with the Kings training camp, before being sent to the Houston Apollos of the Central Hockey League (CHL). Houston was an old team that featured a wide array of veteran NHL players, including Rick Hampton, J.P. Kelly, Alex Tidey, John Smrke, Brad Selwood, and Barry Gibbs. Unfortunately for the aged guard, the Apollos organization proved unstable and the team would fold in January. But after this took place, once more Warren Holmes found himself in the familiar confines of Saginaw. “After the Apollos folded, me, Don Waddell, John Gibson, and Claude Larochelle were sent to Saginaw to finish the season and gear up for the playoffs”. Going into the playoffs, the Gears also had leadership from veteran defenseman Larry Goodenough who added some invaluable previous championship experience, having already won the Stanley Cup with the Philadelphia Flyers in 1975.
Whether it was the sudden influx of new players, having the guidance of trusted coach Don Perry, the bell-weathered goaltending of Bob Froese and Ted Tucker, or whatever intangible it may have been, the 1980-81 Saginaw Gears were awesome come that season’s playoffs. “When we won the Turner Cup that year, we did so in just 13 games. We only lost one game that year, and that was against Fort Wayne in double-OT. We had so many veterans like Larry Goodenough, Gord Brooks, and John Gibson. I don’t want to say that it was easy for us, but we had really good chemistry”. That championship team still holds a special place in Warren Holmes’ heart, as it does for all of his teammates from that year.
As if some icing on the cake, after winning the Turner Cup in 1981 Holmes would receive his first bit of NHL action the following season, 1981-82. The ever present Don Perry would be called upon to coach the New Haven Nighthawks that year. Warren Holmes had been assigned to play for the Nighthawks already that year, and was enjoying a solid season which would eventually see him finish fourth overall in scoring on the team. But when the current Kings coach Parker MacDonald was relieved of his duties halfway through the season, Perry would be given the reins of the parent club. It would not be long until he would tap Holmes upon the shoulder to join him. “I remember Nighthawks owner George Maguire had called us into his office. He told me, Scott Gruhl and Al Sims, who had played a bunch of years with the Boston Bruins and the Hartford Whalers, that we were going to Pittsburgh and that we had been called up. George said, ‘You guys are going to Pittsburgh; grab 3 sticks and a toothbrush, and get on the plane. And you’ll be back here Sunday afternoon'”. Basically a one night stand of sorts, as New Haven would need them for a Sunday matinee game of their own that weekend. The details of Warren Holmes’ first NHL game in Pittsburgh against the Penguins are next to impossible to forget. The three call-ups would have their presence felt all throughout the game. Holmes tells me, “The game was a 3-3 tie. I had 2-assists and was a plus-3. Gruhl had 2-assists and was a plus-3. And Al Sims was a plus-3 too. I was named as either the First or Second Star of the game”. Not bad at all for a first NHL game.
The best was yet to come as the next year (1982-83) Warren would get his fullest amount of time in the NHL, practically splitting the season in half between New Haven and with the Kings. “I went to training camp with New Haven that year and stayed there until about mid-November. Bernie Nicholls hurt his knee, and so I got called up to L.A. and stayed there until about January. Because I had been considered an emergency recall, they had to send me back down to New Haven to avoid losing me on waivers. So I would be down in New Haven for about a month to 5-weeks before they called me back up again to finish out the season with the Kings”
Recognizing what he offered the team and where he fit in, the versatility of Warren Holmes was greatly appreciated by his Los Angeles teammates. “I killed penalties. And I would play the point on the power-play with the ‘Triple Crown Line’. I remember Marcel Dionne always asking about when I would be up with the team. I wasn’t stupid”, Holmes laughs, “a guy scores 700-goals in the NHL, I knew who to get the puck to. So I would be on the point for the power-play with the ‘Triple Crown Line’ with me and Larry Murphy on the back end”. Playing in these keys situations, especially with such great talents around him was very much reflected in Warren’s stats with the Kings that year. In 39-regular season games, he would score 8-goals and 16-assists for 24-points. “I don’t want this to sound like me tooting my own horn, but I remember Don Perry saying to me that I was the only player that he ever coached who played better in each league that he went up”.
Further elaborating on his time with the Kings as a whole, Warren goes on to say, “we were a fairly tight team with one another. Terry Ruskowski was my roommate on the road. A lot of the guys were married at the time, but we would still get together and hang out. To this day, I still stay in touch with Mark Hardy and Bernie Nicholls on Facebook. Pete Demers was our trainer and I stay in touch with him too. Dave Lewis was our captain, and occasionally we’ll say ‘hi’ to each other”. Besides thoughts on his teammates, Warren has a very interesting take on what playing hockey in the NHL was like, at least for him. “Now let me explain this fully so that it’s not taken the wrong way”, he says. “For me, the NHL was the easiest league that I played in. I am not talking about the speed of the game or anything like that, because it is the fastest league in the world and you have to make adjustments to that if you are going to play in it. But, it was the only league that I played in where everyone knew their position and how to play it. They were in the right places most, if not all the time, and knew where to be. Everyone knew what to do, which wasn’t the case in other leagues. Playing in the NHL, there was less chaos. That is what I meant by saying it was the easiest”.
I present to Warren a totally oddball question. During the 1982-83 season, Holmes played on three different teams with the first ever Soviet-born and trained player in the NHL, Victor Nechayev. More of a trivia question of sorts than anything else, Nechayev played with the Saginaw Gears, New Haven Nighthawks, and the Los Angeles Kings that season too, and also became the first Soviet player to score a goal in the NHL. When I ask Warren to tell me his memories of Nechayev, he has a one word response – “Screwdriver!”, referring to Nechayev’s love of the vodka and orange juice mixed drink. “It would be about 95-percent vodka and just the tiniest bit of orange juice when he’d make them. Oftentimes it just looked like cloudy water; that’s how little orange juice was in it”. Now I had previously heard that the reason why the Soviet Union had allowed Nechayev to defect to North America, and not players like Larionov, Fetisov, Makarov, and Tretiak, was because he was not really a good hockey player and had played mostly in the lower-tiered Soviet leagues. Holmes has similar sentiments about his former teammate and confirms that he was not a good player, and that the story of his being allowed defection would make sense. Holmes also recalled a Christmas party that the owner of the Nighthawks had hosted at his home in which a drunken Nechayev went into the backyard and jumped in the family’s frozen pool. Needless to say, Nechayev would not find himself on the team much longer after that.
One last note about Holmes’ 1982-83 campaign is that he would score his first NHL goal that season too. “I wish I could tell you that it was a real pretty one, but it wasn’t. We were playing Detroit, and we had a two-on-one break with Charlie Simmer and myself. Charlie had passed the puck to me, and I tried to put it back across. It ended up hitting the stick of the defenseman and then bounced up over the pads of Greg Stefan. I remember standing at center ice in L.A. after I scored the goal, waiting for the face-off, and just shaking uncontrollably. Because I knew the next day that my dad would be listening to the rundown of the NHL scores from the night before and would hear my name being called that I had scored”. Whether the goal could be deemed as pretty or not is inconsequential. What matters is that it is still a very memorable and meaningful one for Warren.
1983-84 would see Holmes play the majority of the year in New Haven, putting up 26-goals and 31-assists. He would also see three more games with the Kings, but nothing particularly noteworthy at that point in time. Holmes goes on to explain, “This is going to sound like sour grapes, but that last season in New Haven I had been screwed over by Management. At the end of the season, I was pretty much just sitting on the bench. Coach Nick Beverley eventually came to me afterward and apologized to me for not handling the situation better, saying that he had made a mistake”. At that point, the thought of retirement crept into Warren’s mind. “The L.A. Kings didn’t offer me a contract after that. I went and played for the Flint Generals (under coach and former teammate Dennis Desrosiers). Then they moved the team back to Saginaw in 1985-86, and I had some injuries once more. I was really playing for nothing in Flint. And my heart just wasn’t in it anymore. I think I pretty much knew after that last season in New Haven”.
Today’s game is a lot different from when Warren Holmes played. “Players these days have a nutritionist and a masseuse. I never lifted weights when I was playing. Maybe for a few weeks at the end of the off-season, but not otherwise. I remember being in the fitness room at the Forum in L.A., and we still had guys on the team who smoked cigarettes and we used this area as a smoking room. Me, J.P. Kelly, Mario Lessard, Jerry Korab, We would sit on the Nautilus machine and smoke. I look at the players these days and see how committed they are to training. All I can say is, is that money is a very powerful motivator. A very powerful motivator. But you really can’t compare, and it’s not fair to compare, today’s game with when we played. It’s like comparing apples and oranges”.
With taking those thoughts into consideration, Warren proceeds to tell me that there are two things in particular that he deems as being the most important things he learned as a hockey player. Firstly, he says “I learned the importance of working with others. You need to surround yourself with talented, good people around you. You need to recognize that you are a piece of something, and you need to identify where you fit. People wonder sometimes why Steve Yzerman, Sergei Fedorov and Adam Oates all couldn’t fit together in Detroit. Well, each is a centerman, and each player would have needed to fit. So you have to understand where you fit, and then also be able to fit”.
And then secondly, “You need to be accepting of defeat. If somebody beats you, well, take your hat off to them. There is nothing wrong with being upset if you beat yourself by making a dumb mistake. But if somebody beats you outright, then you need to be accepting of it. Be gracious in defeat. For 99% of the players during my generation, no matter what happened during the game, you go out afterward and have a beer together. See a guy, and ask him how he’s doing. If you were beaten, you need to be gracious in your defeat”.
When it comes to Warren Holmes though, even especially during our conversation this evening, I can say that he is gracious in far more than just defeat. Warren is gracious as he shares his stories with me. As he put it to me this way, “Thank you Nate for making an old man feel appreciated”. Hoisting the Turner Cup with the Gears. Or as he manned the point on the power-play for the “Triple Crown Line”. As he speaks of his relationships with two opposite ends of the spectrum in Brian Kilrea and Don Perry. Fighting to win the Memorial Cup for Ottawa. Going about everyday life. Warren Holmes did (and does) all of the above, graciously.
Musings of a Hockey Enthusiast 