Making Of A Gm No Snap Chiefs’ Speltz Was Paid Nothing While Paying His Front-Office Dues

At 18, Tim Speltz was working at a full-service gas station and repair shop in Medicine Hat, Alberta.

At 19, he and two partners bought it.

He was a manager even before he was legally a man.

At 24, with the southern Alberta economy booming and his business going well enough, Speltz looked for something fun. He juggled his schedule and wound up managing the local midget hockey club.

Without pay.

Fourteen years later the 38-year-old general manager of the Spokane Chiefs is Western Hockey League Executive of the Year, the recipient of the league’s Lloyd Saunders Trophy.

The last time the Chiefs won a division championship, in ‘91, Speltz was along for the ride. He and his boss, owner Bobby Brett, had inherited a talented team with a history of chaos.

Before Brett, before Speltz was brought on board, the franchise functioned in spurts, failing and succeeding despite an under-funded absentee owner.

Some of that success is still evident. Jason Podollan was placed on the Chiefs’ protected list by former general manager Bob Strumm. The Chiefs won the ‘91 division championship, and the Memorial Cup that followed, in the first year of the Brett stewardship because excellent scouting had turned up superstars Pat Falloon and Ray Whitney for a proven coach, Bryan Maxwell.

Five years ago, Speltz was straightening out the mess in the front office. His contribution to the Memorial Cup was essential - pulling the trigger on a deal for goaltender Trevor Kidd - but essentially brief.

Five years later Speltz is the architect.

In that way this West Division championship means more. Given time, he’ll commend the owner, the coaches, the scouts and the office staff, but the franchise that is suddenly the envy of the WHL is a reflection of Speltz’s up-tempo warmth, forged from hard experience.

He was a left wing in major midget hockey in Medicine Hat at a time when the good players his age were at another level, in Junior B.

“I was never a good player,” he said. “I wasn’t a great skater and I wasn’t great with the puck.”

The message came across like the Jimmy Johnson pizza commercial - where the coach builds a kid’s hopes only to tell him he’s got all the makings of a security guard.

“I tried out for the major bantam team (at 14),” Speltz related. “In my interview, the coach told me I had a great camp, that I really worked hard, I was a great kid … I was thinking, hey, I made it.

“Then he told me I wasn’t good enough. I knew when I finished playing (at the midget level) that I wasn’t in it for the development. I was in it for the fun.”

Now he’s in it for life.

In sports coat and blue turtleneck, with blond hair brushed to the side, Speltz looks like the president of Delta House. He wasn’t much older than that when Russ Farwell asked him to manage the Medicine Hat Tigers’ affiliated midget team.

Speltz took the non-paying job for six years, writing budgets and arranging travel while managing two service stations and a complement of mechanics and attendants. “I had the business so I could allot time to the midget team,” he said. “The station was my real job. Everything I did with the hockey job was volunteer.”

When Farwell took the GM’s job in Seattle, Speltz was invited to take his place with the Tigers.

He declined at first, worrying that he wasn’t ready. When the GM that did come in started to fail late in the summer, Speltz was offered the job again.

He took it, a rookie manager teamed with a rookie coach, the management equivalent of a 16-year-old defenseman with loads of potential and no experience.

No experience on two levels proved lethal.

By then, Speltz had divested himself of the business. The economy was tighter and full-service stations were disappearing.

So were Tigers wins. Speltz’s first team in the Hat lost three straight playoff games to Moose Jaw and was bounced. When it dropped three straight the next year, Speltz and the Tigers parted company.

“I was hired Sept. 9, ‘88,” he said. “We had an exhibition game Sept. 10. We’ve got the two-time Memorial Cup champion with a rookie coach and a rookie GM, who’s a local guy who everybody in town has an opinion on. Talk about pressure to win. We felt pressure to win our exhibition games.”

When the Tigers went from great to pretty good, and from pretty good to fifth, Tim Speltz began bouncing ideas and frustrations off another young GM, Kelly McCrimmon, also going through a touchy baptism in Brandon, Manitoba.

Today, McCrimmon and Speltz manage the only two teams left standing. In the WHL championship series that starts Friday night in Brandon, McCrimmon’s Wheat Kings are on one side, Speltz and the Chiefs are on the other.

Rivals this week and next, close friends the rest of the year, McCrimmon and Speltz have burned a lot of time on the phone.

“We got into the league the same year,” Speltz said, “when we really didn’t have anybody else to bounce things off of. There were a lot of guys in the league who were great hockey people, who wanted to ‘help you’ by taking your best players. They were going to help me right back into the service-station business.”

Speltz and McCrimmon were the new blood in a tank of sharks.

They’ve swung two deals that shaped the balance of power.

When Brandon - last in the East at the time - sent Kidd to Spokane, major junior hockey’s ‘91 championship went with him.

Spokane also got Bart Cote in exchange for Bobby House, who went on to score 60 goals in his final year of juniors, and a player on Spokane’s protected listed named Marty Murray, who in ‘95 would win the Four Broncos Memorial Trophy as WHL player of the year.

It was a winner of a trade for both sides.

Last year, the two played different roles. Speltz had the developing team, McCrimmon the one with a chance to play for a championship.

Brandon, after some wrangling, sent first- and second-round picks in the bantam draft, plus Adam Magarrell and Trevor Chernicki, a player from their protected list, to Spokane for Bryan McCabe - “a heavy price to pay for a great player,” McCrimmon said.

“Magarrell is as good a young man as we’ve had in our organization,” McCrimmon added, “but when it got down to the trade deadline, we conceded that if we didn’t put him in the deal, McCabe would become a Prince Albert Raider.”

The addition of McCabe was the push Brandon needed to win the East Division championship and go to the Memorial Cup.

“And look what happened in Spokane,” McCrimmon said. “They traded away their best player and others stepped up. The playoff experience they got last year has a lot to do with the success they’ve had this year.”

Speltz was in a hurry Tuesday morning. The Chiefs were to pile on the bus at 10 p.m. to head for Regina, where they’ll lay over on the way to Brandon.

Speltz can sit back on the way and draw a breath and maybe think about what’s good. He’s GM of the year.

Not so many years ago, GM to him was General Motors.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo