Bob Clarke

There's no statue of Bob Clarke anywhere in the Delaware Valley. No schools named after him. No giant billboards with his picture along I–95 or any other highway. No radio show or TV commercials. No tell-all autobiography chronicling his life on and off the ice.

And that's exactly how Clarke likes it.

"I guess I'm not real comfortable having the attention directed at me," Clarke said. "Even though I know I played on a great team, was a decent player, and a lot of attention has come my way, I never enjoyed going out of my way to get more attention."

In the pantheon of Philadelphia sports, there might not be any more influential or important sports figure than Bob Clarke. From winning two Stanley Cups as a blood-and-guts leader on and off the ice to becoming an executive who built teams that went to the Stanley Cup Final three times, the conference finals seven times, and were in the playoffs 16 times in 17 full seasons (not counting the 2004–05 lockout or his aborted 2006–07 season), Clarke has earned his spot on the Mount Rushmore of Philadelphia sports.

It's Clarke who helped turn Philadelphia into a full-fledged hockey town and make the Flyers one of the NHL's benchmark franchises. No one outside of Ed Snider has been more dedicated to the orange and black.

"Bob Clarke, more than any other person ... is responsible for the success the Flyers have had through the years," Snider said.

Clarke arrived in Philadelphia in 1969, and for more than 40 years, he's never really left. Even when he did leave, he was never really gone — Clarke always maintained a house in South Jersey while he worked for the Minnesota North Stars and Florida Panthers.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. Clarke didn't possess impressive size, overwhelming speed, or a blistering shot. He came from a town that was remote even for western Canada — the mining town of Flin Flon, Manitoba, hard on the Saskatchewan border, a 12-hour drive north from Winnipeg.

Oh, and he was a diabetic. In the late 1960s, not much was known about the disease — only that it made you too sick to play pro hockey. "As long as I looked after myself, the diabetes wouldn't affect my game," Clarke said. "I was playing in Flin Flon, and I guarantee you the travel and the hockey life up there was a lot tougher than the hockey life in Philadelphia. And the [NHL] travel was a lot easier than it was in Flin Flon. So if I could play junior in Flin Flon and if I was good enough to play in the NHL, it was a lot easier to play in the NHL than it was up there."

The Flyers took him in the second round of the 1969 draft with the 17th pick, and within five seasons the Flyers won the first of back-toback Stanley Cups. In 15 seasons, he had 358 goals, 852 assists, and 1,210 points. He's the club's all-time leading scorer, was league MVP three times, played in eight All-Star games, and was elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1987.

"He never gave up," teammate Gary Dornhoefer said. "The fights for the puck, aggressiveness in the corner. He did whatever he had to do to win a hockey game. His attitude and how he played rubbed off on everyone else."

His run of success continued when he moved into the GM office in 1984. Things always seemed more interesting with Clarke in charge, and whether he was changing coaches, feuding with Eric Lindros, or eternally searching for that final piece to a Stanley Cup puzzle, Clarke always had winning in mind.

"Through most of it, we were always competitive, we were always good, we were always trying to do the right things to try and win the Cup," Clarke said.

And when he decided to leave in 2006, he did it because he thought it was for the best of the club.

"He himself decided that he had done a poor job," Snider said the day Clarke quit as GM. "I think that's the measure of a man. I didn't ask him to leave; he decided to leave the position."

Bob Clarke remains a fixture in the Delaware Valley and a fixture with the Flyers as a senior vice president. He's a sounding board for GM Paul Holmgren, does some scouting, and occasionally works with the players on the ice. There have been job offers from other teams that would allow him to run a team again, but he's quite content in his current position.

"I've been here 40 years," Clarke said. "The few years that I was away I always had a home here. ... This is home for me now.

"This is where they'll bury me, I suppose."

Walking Together Forever

They were eight words. Eight words that changed a hockey team and sparked them to a championship. And the players who saw those words firsthand still live them today:

Win together today and we walk together forever.

"The significance of it probably never hit home for 10 years," Bob Clarke said. "For me, anyway. Now, 35 years later, you still remember the players, you remember them with a fondness. You consider them a friend even if you haven't seen them in 10 years. It made a special bond among the men on that team. Like he said it would."

The words were scrawled on a chalkboard in the Flyers' locker room at the Spectrum by coach Fred Shero hours before they were to take the ice for the biggest game of their lives — Game 6 of the 1974 Stanley Cup Final against the Boston Bruins. The Flyers, in just their seventh year of existence, were about to do what was believed to be impossible. They were on the precipice of becoming the first expansion team, the first of the Second Six, to win the Holy Grail of hockey.

Shero's memorable words that May 19 afternoon are memorable and fitting. Shero, like his players, was overlooked and underestimated. Many saw the Flyers as the Broad Street Bullies, bloodthirsty animals who did little more than punch the puck into the net. They overlooked the four 30-goal scorers. They looked past Bernie Parent's 1.89 goals-against average and 12 shutouts.

The same goes for Shero. People remember him as The Fog and for his corny sayings. They missed the fact that the man was a visionary.

"He was one of the first to have an assistant coach and the video, breaking things down, doing some studying in Europe," Bill Barber said. "He was a man before his times."

Through his days coaching in the minor leagues, Shero learned how to get inside his players' heads and motivate them to be the best they could be — or better, perhaps, than they thought they could be.

It was Shero who convinced his team that giving the puck to Bobby Orr in the 1974 Finals would work. It was Shero who told his Flyers they could beat the Russians in 1976. And it was Shero who took equal parts brutality and finesse and created a championship equation.

"Freddy Shero was the perfect guy for this bunch of characters," said Keith Allen in Jim Jackson's Walking Together Forever. "He wasn't one of these guys who told them what they could and couldn't do at every turn. Instead, he let them develop their own personality as a team. As a result, the players developed a great deal of respect for him. He was loved by those guys."

Loved, but not always understood. That had to do with the frequent notes that appeared either on the locker room blackboard or in their locker stalls.

Some memorable Shero-isms:

"When you have bacon and eggs for breakfast, the chicken makes a contribution, but the pig makes a commitment."

"Success is not the result of spontaneous...