Family Affair : In His Debut Tonight as an NHL Coach, Ducks’ Ron Wilson Will Face Red Wings, Who Once Employed His Father and Uncle

It will be father-son night behind the bench at Anaheim Arena tonight, even though Larry Wilson has been gone now for 14 years.

The Mighty Ducks are playing their first game in the NHL, and Larry’s son, Ron, is making his debut as an NHL coach against the Detroit Red Wings, the team his father and uncle once coached.

As often as he sees the Red Wings, there is almost always a moment when Ron, 38, thinks of his father or his Uncle Johnny, who both played for Detroit and later coached the Red Wings. The uniforms are so virtually unchanged that the memories stay alive.

Johnny will be in the stands tonight, pulling for his brother’s son. It will be one of those nights when Ron and Johnny wish they could reach into forever and bring Larry back to watch.

Instead, Ron can only reach for a frame lying against his office wall, waiting to be hung.

“This is my best picture; my wife just framed this,” he said, holding up a black-and-white photo of his father on the ice in a Buffalo Bison uniform with three tiny crew-cutted skaters all around. “That’s my dad and me and two of my brothers, and we’re wearing my dad’s uniform. I think I’m 6 or 7. That’s me, the coach’s boy, looking up.”

At home, Ron has a replica of the bowl of the Stanley Cup his father helped the Red Wings win as a player in the 1949-50 season. He wrested it away from his three brothers three years ago by winning what they named the Larry Wilson Fishing Derby.

“It was just for myself and my brothers and other relatives, and I was the only one who caught a fish that day, so I got the bowl,” Ron said. “I’m not about to give it up now. It was the first and only Larry Wilson Fishing Derby. Whenever the next one is, I’ll have to put the bowl up there, but I’ll have to rig it so I win.”

*

Ron never got to see his dad behind an NHL bench, because by the time Larry broke out of coaching in the minors for a 36-game stint behind the Red Wing bench at the end of the 1976-77 season, Ron was away at Providence College.

“Unfortunately, we were having games and I was in school and I never even got to see my dad coach a game in the NHL,” Ron said. “Nope, never saw him.”

Two years later, Larry was preparing for the season as coach of the minor league Adirondack Red Wings when he went out for a summer jog and fell dead of a heart attack at 49.

Ron was 24, and his father had never seen him play in an NHL game, either, what with their conflicting schedules--one on the road as a coach, the other on the road as a player. But there was the one exhibition game, in 1976, when Larry was the coach of the Red Wings’ minor league team in Kansas City and Ron was in training camp with Dallas, Toronto’s minor league team, during his first pro season.

“It was right at the end of training camp, and I was with the farm team, and they brought me up because I was playing well in my first training camp,” Ron said. “They called in the afternoon and said, ‘We want you to play in an exhibition game in Detroit, do you want to go?’ I said, ‘Sure, yeah.’ So my dad was the Kansas City coach, which was Detroit’s farm team, so he was there. I didn’t even have an opportunity to tell him I was coming.

“We skated out on the ice, and he was on the bench with Bobby Kromm, who was the coach of the Red Wings. We skated out, once around and right by the bench, and I banged the boards and there he was. He couldn’t believe it. And I had a goal and an assist in the game, I’ll never forget. And that was the only game he saw me play in the NHL--that exhibition game.”

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There were six teams in the NHL when Larry played. There are 26 now that the Mighty Ducks and the Florida Panthers are starting their first seasons.

Larry grew up at a time when young Canadian hockey players left school after the 10th grade and never went back and when dressing rooms were cramped, dank catacombs. He coached the Philadelphia Flyers’ minor league team when the Broad Street Bullies knew how to fight and knew how to win, with players such as Dave Schultz and Don Saleski.

Ron is practically a pacifist who has a degree in economics from Providence. He played seven seasons in the NHL and six in Switzerland. He has a corporate-looking office packed with video equipment and a computer on his desk that he uses to create practice schedules with his desktop-publishing skills.

“My uncle is coming, and my uncle and my dad are very, very similar,” Ron said. “It will be interesting to see what he has to say when he sees all this, just the things that we have and the dressing room. You bring in people from the old school and they can’t believe all the accessories that come with the job.”

His father’s career gave Ron extra opportunity to be around the game as a boy, though he and his brothers played some form of hockey anywhere from a rink to the driveway to the street.

“Until we started school, we were three rats or brats and had to give my mother some time off to rest her sanity. So we hung out at Memorial Auditorium in Buffalo,” Ron said. “We’d go down in the morning, and our job was to vacuum the room, pick up the tape and, like, do the trainer’s job while the team was on the ice. Then we’d get a bottle of Pepsi and a couple of doughnuts, and then we were allowed to go out on the ice and skate til they turned the lights off.

“We were just engrossed in hockey. We didn’t really pay attention to what my dad was doing. In fact, I can honestly say, he wasn’t my favorite. He was my dad, I didn’t think he had to be my favorite hockey player. My dad must have felt awful when they’d ask us, ‘Who’s you favorite hockey player?’ and we’d have all these other guys. It wasn’t my dad. None of us ever said that. They’d say, ‘Well, why isn’t your dad your favorite player?’ and we just didn’t have an answer.”

As Ron, the oldest, grew up, his father gently steered him toward coaching. Ron was 13 when the family moved to Dayton, Ohio, so his dad could coach the minor league team there.

“Right off the bat, he said, ‘Ron, why don’t you sit in the press box and write down, like, who’s winning faceoffs and some of that stuff,’ ” Ron said. “I’d do that and then after the game, like every kid at 13, I always thought I knew more than my dad. I always spoke up, and my dad always listened. He never said, ‘No, you’re wrong.’ He’d just hear you out.

“When we went to Providence two years later, then I was doing more and more up in the press box in terms of watching for stuff. Then I was a little older, 15 or 16, and I was allowed to stay up late. Then after the game, you’d sit around the kitchen table into the wee hours and talk. I mean, I feel real sorry for my mother that all she ever heard was hockey. It must have driven her nuts--hockey, hockey, hockey.”

As winter took hold, a rink usually appeared in the Wilsons’ back yard.

“As soon as it got cold, and there was enough snow on the ground, my dad would be out there and make the rink,” Ron said. “Then when we were 13 or 14 we went out and started helping him, and maybe at 15, we were making the rink ourselves.

“You put like two-by-fours, actually two-by-sixes, around the area that you want and square it up. Then you pat down the snow, you sort of make it slushy--it’s hard for Californians to figure this out. You sort of wet the snow down, then you’d either just go around with your feet--you’d need to do this for two or three hours and flatten the snow. Or what we would do was make our own kind of Zamboni with a toboggan and just sit on the toboggan and pull it around and it would flatten the snow. And then you’d have to be out there all night, watering, and you’d just build up the ice. I’d say it would take three or four days, and then you’ve got ice about three inches thick to skate on.

“A couple of years, we got the paint from the rink, and we’d paint the blue lines. We wanted to paint everything. We’d paint lines and we had nets. It always seemed like the ice lasted forever. I’m sure it was only four or five weeks, but when you’re a kid you think it lasts forever.”

*

Nothing does, though, and amid all the hullabaloo of opening night, Ron expects he’ll think about his father in between thinking about the game.

“I’ll be sitting there, and I’ll look up during the national anthem and I’ll think about everything and there will be an emotional part,” he said. “I was talking about that movie the other day, ‘Field of Dreams.’ I watch that movie all the time. You sort of see Kevin Costner build that field and he didn’t know why he was building it. He thought it was for all those other people, but he really built it for his dad.

“Kevin Costner plays catch with his dad, and that’s emotional for me, because when a parent leaves early, you don’t get to right the wrongs or say anything. You neglect saying things, like that you love your parents. You never say that stuff until you realize that they’re dead, and you realize it would have been so easy just to say it when they’re alive. That’s what that whole movie is all about, and that’s probably what this whole thing’s about in the end, who knows?

“I said I have this feeling I’m going to come in here before I address the team and my dad’s ghost is going to appear right here in this office,” Ron said, beginning to smile. “Like, why am I here? I think it’s for other reasons, but it’s for my dad, and that’s why the Red Wings are here. You just don’t know why all these pieces come together. So I was saying he’s going to show up, and he’s going to look around and say, ‘Is this heaven?’ And I’m going to go, ‘No, Dad, it’s the Pond.’ ”