THE HOLY GOALIE TURNS 80

The great thing about Joe Daley is that he’s always ready to have a conversation. Especially if that conversation is about his beloved Winnipeg Jets. For most young sports memorabilia collectors in Winnipeg, Daley is the nice, elderly man who sits behind the counter at Joe Daley’s Sports & Framing on St. Mary’s Road. But for their grandads – and even some of their fathers – Daley was the “Holy Goalie,” the man who helped the Jets win three Avco Cups and the man who was the All-Time WHA leader in games played (308) by a goaltender, in wins (167) and play-off wins (30). Daley, who celebrated his 80th birthday on Feb. 20, 2023, was a three-time all-star and one of only a handful of players to win the Avco Cup three times in the seven years of the league’s existence. On Nov. 3, 2018, Daley was inducted into the Manitoba Sports Hall of Fame. Of course, he was already a member of the Manitoba Hockey Hall of Fame (1995) and the WHA Wall of Fame (2010). The nice man who sits behind the counter of the card shop was indeed one of the best goaltenders ever to wear a Jets jersey. Interestingly, the greatest moment in Daley’s hockey career didn’t take place on the ice. It didn’t arrive in front of a huge crowd of adoring fans. It didn’t happen while stopping the shots of some of the greatest players in the game’s history. It happened in his kitchen. “I think the biggest moment of my career was the day that I was at home listening to the radio in 1966, at the time of the first expansion,” Daley recalled, with a quiet smile. “I heard that the Pittsburgh Penguins had selected Joe Daley in the NHL expansion draft while I was hearing names like Glenn Hall, Terry Sawchuk and Jacques Plante. I think then, something registered with me. ‘Maybe now there are some people who feel I might have a chance to be a player,’ I thought. That day was pretty special for me.” Daley had plenty of wonderful moments in a 16-year professional hockey career that ended with a World Hockey Association championship in front of his family and friends at the old Winnipeg Arena. Born and raised in Winnipeg, Daley played more than 100 NHL games with Pittsburgh, Buffalo and Detroit before coming back home to play for the Winnipeg Jets in the new outlaw World Hockey Association in 1972. “Coming home to play in Winnipeg also turned out to be a special moment for me,” he recalled. “I never regretted that decision to leave the NHL and jump to Winnipeg in the WHA. I played with some wonderful players. “I look back on it now and I appreciate the quality of the guys we had playing in Winnipeg over the seven years of the WHA. We had Bobby (Hull) and obviously, for me, Bobby coming to Winnipeg meant the survival of the league for seven years. He was the most important factor for me and for hockey and for all of us who certainly got a pay raise by jumping from the NHL to the WHA. I think there are a lot of players who owe a debt of gratitude to Bobby.” Daley started his hockey career at Bronx Park Community Centre. “I had a lot of fun playing minor hockey in Winnipeg,” he said. “I was eight years old when I first walked down the highway to Bronx Park from Leighton Ave., in East Kildonan. I went to the community club because I’d heard there was a sign-up for Tom Thumb Hockey. I looked at the sheet and there were no names down for a goalie so I put my name down to be a goalie. “I went home and told mom and dad that I’d signed up for community club hockey, and they asked me, ‘What position did you sign up for?’ and I said, ‘Goalie,’ and they said, ‘Why?’ and I said, ‘Because nobody else put their name down and I think I’m going to have a pretty good chance to play.’” He played a lot. In fact, he got so good, so quickly, that on any Saturday in the Bronx house league, he’d play for his own team while other teams prayed their goalie wouldn’t show up so they could ask Daley to play for them, too. “I might get in a couple or three games on a Saturday when I was only supposed to play one,” he said. "And before you knew it, there was a fellow coming around the community club, standing in the snowbank and watching me play on weekends and he called me over one day and said, ‘We want you to come over to East End Barons and play in our playground hockey team. We think you’re going to be pretty good.’ So, I left Bronx and went to East End Barons to play playground hockey and we had a pretty good team. “But by the time I reached Bantam, I went back to Bronx and played out my minor hockey at Bronx, winning the provincial juvenile championship in my last year and that was special because no team had won a championship out of Bronx since Terry Sawchuk did it.” In 1961, the Detroit Red Wings, who had signed Daley, sent him to Weyburn to play for the first-year Red Wings of the Saskatchewan Junior League. In Weyburn’s inaugural season, the Red Wings finished seventh, but Daley was so good, he won the SJHL’s Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player awards. After a great year in Weyburn, he went to the Red Wings’ training camp and had to beat out 10 other goaltenders for a job. That wasn’t going to happen, but he didn’t quit. He accepted an assignment to play for the Johnstown Jets in the Eastern Hockey League. After spending nine seasons as a pro, bouncing from the NHL to the minors, Daley wasn’t certain about his future until the rumour surfaced that there might be a new professional league forming. “That’s about the time I got a call from Billy Robinson of the new Winnipeg Jets,” Daley recalled, with a wide smile. “He said, ‘What do you think of the opportunity to come home and play in Winnipeg?’ And I’m thinking, ‘This has to be something coming from heaven because I wanted no part of the Red Wings anymore.’ So I said to Billy, ‘Yeah, I’m interested,’ and we worked out a deal on the phone. The rest, as they say, is history.” Daley had a wonderful seven years in Winnipeg and while he played on three Avco Cup championship teams, he also beat the greatest team in the world. On Jan. 5, 1978, after the Soviet National Team had won three straight games from the Jets in Tokyo, the Russians took a quick 2-0 lead, but with Daley in goal, the Jets battled back and beat the best team on the planet in front of a full house at the Winnipeg Arena, 5-3. “When Anders (Hedberg) stood up in the locker room after the game and said, ‘Boys, I hope you know what we accomplished tonight,’ it really set in for all of us,” Daley recalled. “Anders, a guy who played against the Russian National Team many times and probably never beat them (with Team Sweden) and yet here we were, a club team, that took them to task that night. It’s a memory that many fans in Winnipeg will cherish forever.” After he retired, he coached the Penticton Knights for a while, but returned to Winnipeg and opened up Joe Daley’s Sports Cards, which is now Joe Daley’s Sports and Framing. You can find him in the store pretty much every day. “I played the game because I wanted to play the game,” he said. “At the end of the day, somebody paid me for doing something I loved to do. I think the game was very good to me. I hope that I gave enough back to the game that I don’t feel I cheated anybody. We had a lot of fun. Maybe more than we should have.”