Demise of the Broad Street Bullies
This should be a sad day for the city of Philadelphia. The influence of the Broad St. Bullies has officially and unceremoniously come to a sudden end when the ominous overlord of Flyers hockey, Bobby Clarke, resigned from his General Manager position. The news of today will focus on why he resigned, but that really isn’t important. What is important is to realize how significant this day is for a Philadelphia Flyers fan.
Handfuls of general managers leave their NHL teams each season. But if you think that this is just any old general manager, then you probably don’t live in or near Philadelphia. Lets start from the top…
This man is evil incarnate. Bobby Clarke is the mephestophelian union of a cunning businessman, a heartless mafia godfather, and a sadistic barbarian warlord.
He played in the NHL for 15 years and was known for his disregard for morality and the human skeletal system. He happened to score some goals too, but thats not what put the fans in the stands. He headed up a group known as the Broad St. Bullies. They were the rude, tough, hostile persona of Philadelphia manifested as a ‘professional’ hockey team. They won two Stanley Cups while bleeding their ways into the city’s heart.
Bobby Clarke’s impact on the sport was truely felt during the years following his career when Bobby Clarke took up the general manager position in 1984. From that day he began to put together a hockey team in his own image, pumping new life and new meaning into the Broad St. Bullies. For twenty years he maintained the ugliest hockey team possible using bloodthirsty tactics and an unscrupulous use of his canadian vocabulary.
How can a man be admired who is accused by some of eating babies as an act of vengence, and destroys peoples’ careers for his own sick pleasure? That’s easy to answer, he did it for the city. Philadelphia will embrace anyone, even someone who would trade his mother’s pacemaker for a draft pick, as long as they do it for the city.
So if you’re a hockey fan, try to sit back and admire Bobby Clarke. Not the methods, but the man behind it. He probably won’t go down as a hero in this city like Rocky or …Rocky II, but he deserves as much respect, and as many beatings, as the Italian Stallion received…and much more.
So I Was Wrong…Philadelphia Sports at Artificial Cheese on 07 Dec 2006 at 6:01 pm
[…] So in an effort to change my ways, I’ve decided to look back at a few public sports predictions that I made on this very blog. Lets start with my entry regarding Bob Clarke and his step down from the general manager role of the flyers, Demise of the Broad Street Bullies. In that article I said that the Flyers were starting a transitional period between the old NHL and the new NHL, and the loss of the last member of the Broad St. Bullies was a strong indication of that fact. […]