He’ll Fight for the Right to Make Ducks Winners

So, what kind of hockey player was Ron Wilson, the first man in NHL history to dare to coach Ducks?

“A Paul Kariya-type defenseman,” says Ron Wilson.

A run-of-the-mill, rather gentlemanly defenseman, say the stats--26 goals, 93 points and 68 penalty minutes in parts of seven NHL seasons.

“Kind of a wuss,” says Lauren Wilson.

That assessment probably didn’t make the Father’s Day card Lauren handed Ron two weeks ago, but rest assured, Ron has heard it before.

“My sister and I always used to joke about it--’Dad, you’re such a wuss,’ ” says Lauren, now 13, giggling at the recollection.

“He never fought. Never. Whenever a fight would break out, he’d skate to the other end of the ice and talk to the goalie. We’d tell the people sitting next to us, ‘There goes our Dad.’ ”

And how would Dad react when getting ripped by the young scouts in the family?

“Oh, he’d laugh and change the subject,” Lauren says, “because he knew it was true.

“I remember one time when he was playing in Switzerland, and a fight broke out, and he didn’t know what to do. He took one swing. The other guy punched him right in the eye--so hard that it knocked out his contact lens.

“He couldn’t find it, so he couldn’t play the rest of the game.”

Teen-aged daughters can be the harshest critics a man can have. When Wilson was first contacted by the Ducks and the prospect of leaving his cushy job as a Vancouver Canucks assistant to who-knows-what with Disney and Anaheim began to grow and grow, Lauren lit into Ron again.

“She told me, ‘Dad, you don’t want to be a Mighty Duck. You’ll be a loser ,” Wilson says.

Wilson chose to consider it constructive advice.

“She was concerned about the length of an expansion coach’s career,” he says. “So many times you see a coach go through the tough years and then, when the franchise is just about to turn the corner, they turn to someone else.”

The precedent is imposing, but this time, Wilson opted to stand up and fight.

“That,” he says, setting his jaw, “won’t happen here.”

At first inspection, Ron Wilson appears hand-delivered by Disney Central Casting. He’s young, 38, without a scar or whisker on his face. His hair is blond and so short, he can sell ice cream outside New Orleans Square if the coaching gig doesn’t pan out. He owns a collection of Disney ties and wore one--he swears it was a Christmas gift from Pat Quinn--to Wednesday’s press conference at Anaheim Arena.

And, as Lauren has already testified, he’s anti-fighting, which ducktails straight into Disney Corp.’s family-values, peace-love-and-understanding-ice-hockey philosophy.

You could have guessed that the Ducks wouldn’t be hiring Don Cherry for this position.

But Wilson has done his homework and checked the spelling. The Ducks’ address is the NHL’s Pacific Division, not Pacifist Division. Wilson understands the reasoning behind the Ducks’ drafting of Stu Grimson and Troy Loney, two lords of the penalty box.

“However I feel about fighting, what can I do about it?” Wilson says. “It’s part of the game.

“In 10 years, I don’t think fighting will be allowed in the NHL. We’ll have to be prepared for that. But in the meantime, you have to have people who can stand up for their teammates when the other team gets carried away.”

Fail that, and an expansion NHL coach will bide most of his time watching his players get carried away, one by one.

“I know from my experience with Vancouver that whenever we played San Jose--and we’ve played them countless times--that we were always licking our chops. San Jose drafted a very small team, and Vancouver has one of the biggest teams in the league. All we’d have to do was pound on them. Even if they were tied with us for a period, a period and a half, we knew we’d wear them down.

“Here, Jack (Ferreira) has drafted some size. Teams will come to Anaheim, stay at the Disneyland Hotel, have a good time, but that’s where the fun ends. Once they step on the Pond, it’s going to be a long night.”

Easy to say that now. We’ll check back with Wilson in January. The coach will be as new as the team at Anaheim Arena this winter, maybe even greener. Some Ducks have NHL experience. Wilson has no NHL head coaching experience. Or IHL head coaching experience. Or pee-wee league head coaching experience. Four years as an assistant coach--that is all he has been able to stuff under his belt.

But, Wilson points out, he comes from a hockey family. His late father, Larry, played for and coached the Detroit Red Wings. His uncle, Johnny, also coached in Detroit, Los Angeles and Colorado.

“I feel like I’ve been preparing for this day all my life,” Wilson says. “As a teen-ager, I felt like I was my dad’s assistant coach. He’d come back after a game and we’d talk late into the night. I was 14, 15 years old and I’d be telling him, ‘You got to get rid of this guy. He stinks.’

“A few times, he might have even listened.”

Wilson can trace his family tree on the rings of the Stanley Cup. Larry, a member of a 1949-50 Red Wings, is there. Johnny’s name appears five different times.

“My name is next,” Wilson boldly announces. “I plan on bringing the Mighty Ducks a Stanley Cup and adding my name to the Cup.”

That road will be a long one, and that was only the first tottering step he managed Wednesday. But the way he views it, Ron Wilson has not yet begun to fight.