Chuck Murray
WIS & Effingwoods Hockey Almanac
I stand absolutely corrected, and I have no idea why I spaced on this. You think I'd remember any UNH "hardware", and I definitely recall the '98 Final at The Whitt, which as Sparkee correctly recalls involved the infamous L'affaire du Guite et Mowers amidst UNH's 7-0 romp. The pre-Blue Skies Scarano Whitt could be a very hostile place, but almost 30 years later, after the Internet and then social media changed the world, you'd never believe it, unless you were there.
Prime example of our back in the day "Champions of November" Era for sure, and winning those back-to-backs so handily (7-2 and 7-0) was more of the same, definitely fodder for overconfidence. MS7 himself would end up as a two-time GC champ. Of course, when it comes to UNH and UMaine, the 7-2 scoreline that occurred a few years later, halfway across the country in early April, rightfully carries a lot more weight ... but before we knew the outcomes of the events that followed, there was ample evidence that UNH fans truly had a basis to believe "next year" was only just right around the corner ... well, until it wasn't ...
https://sports-chronicles.com/chit/pages/governors_cup_ne
Yup, that was Tom Scholz's home/studio for the early years of the "band", which as the uninitiated may not know, was basically Scholz laboring hour upon hour with his musical hobby that turned into what was the best-selling rock debut album in history as of 1976. He was working his full time job on the other side of Waltham, out near Rte. 128 where Polaroid once had their huge campus - since long gone due to obsolescence. One of my best friends in HS' dad also worked for Polaroid out there at the time, and when Scholz' story became more widely known, he would tell us that while he didn't have anything to do with what Scholz's "day job" was, he was easy to spot on a rare occasion he might be out on the campus, because his hair length was not exactly what was typical for the rest of the senior design staff.
It's funny, what started as a really inspirational story of a DIY project-turned-mega-rockstar didn't age well. It got complicated when Scholz had to get real musicians to fill out his band, and frankly they were mostly journeyman rockers who really couldn't cut it live in an era when competent touring was a big expectation from your fanbase, as opposed to an afterthought. Scholz felt "pushed" to "rush" the second Boston album out in (wait for it) two years, and refused to be pushed for the 3rd album, which kind of came out of nowhere a few years after I graduated Bentley, almost a full decade after their debut.
The one truly gifted musician to hook up with Scholz's Boston project was Brad Delp, the vocalist with the perfect voice for the medium at the time, but he was probably financially harmed by the long gaps between Scholz's production schedule, which didn't speed up at all after Third Stage. Eventually, musical trends shifted, and people really got tired of waiting for the next Boston album, and Delp was kind of caught in between as the virtually anonymous singer for someone else's basement project, and the producer's painfully slow production schedule. I vividly remember Delp fronting his own Beatles' inspired cover band "Beatlejuice" when he was living in Atkinson NH, and would do low profile gigs all over southern NH and beyond, while waiting for Scholz to call on him for his trademark "Boston" vocals. I got to meet him and his bandmates at a gig not too far from Effingwoods once shortly after the turn of the century, thru mutual friends whose daughter I coached at the time, and to say he was a salt-of-the-earth regular guy wouldn't do him justice.
I have to think he had some kind of arrangement on royalties with Scholz that kept him afloat for a long while, because the Boston back catalogue was so ubiquitous on FM rock radio for such a long time. But if you are an artist at heart, and something prevents you from fully utilizing your gift for so long, then there comes a pinch point sometimes, and Delp hit his in 2007, just like another musical hero of mine Keith Emerson hit his in 2016, and at that point it's a tragedy. Scholz is almost 80 now, and the last 40 years of his life have been entwined in an endless series of litigations. Rock & roll can be a tough business.
Prediction for the weekend: UNH finds a way to get a tie out of Orono (who cares who wins the shootout, right?), and lives to fight another day ...
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