The eighth in an occasional series of profiles on Southern California athletes who have flourished in their post-playing careers.
The black-and-white photo is as dated as it is iconic.
It shows Rogie Vachon, left hand tucked into a pocket of his bell-bottom jeans and a cigar wedged between two fingers of his right hand, which rests on the hood of a new Mercedes in an empty parking lot outside the Forum. His open V-neck shirt has huge lapels, his hair hangs down to his shoulders and a bushy mustache creases his smiling face, leaving Vachon looking more like the bassist for Spinal Tap than an NHL goaltender.
And that was the point.
Hockey was a bruising, inelegant sport played in the frozen tundra of Canada and the upper Midwest when Vachon was traded from the Montreal Canadiens to the Kings in the winter of 1971. The NHL had expanded to California four seasons earlier, yet even taken together the Kings and California Seals weren’t drawing enough fans to merit the word “crowd.”
“We were the punchline of a bad joke for a lot of years,” said Mike Murphy, who played with Vachon on those early Kings teams.
Hockey was wilting in the sun. If the sport was going to survive in the desert it needed stars, it needed personalities and it needed a cultural makeover — especially in Los Angeles, where the box-office draw was everything.
That’s where Vachon, a small-town farm boy from French-speaking Quebec, came in.
“It was really a culture shock,” he said. “In Montreal we won three [Stanley] Cups in four years. And then I come to L.A.; it’s sunny every time we go to practice or the game. Not a whole lot of people in the stands. Our team was pretty lousy too.
“So yeah it was a hell of a culture shock.”
Which brings up back to that 1975 photo, with the long-haired Vachon and his ferret-sized mustache looking fabulous in front of the Forum.
The clean shave and conservative haircut he had been forced to wear in Montreal were gone and Vachon was all Hollywood cool, as if Central Casting had created a West Coast hockey player — one with an unforgettable French-Canadian name full of soft vowels and voiced fricatives — and dressed him in a purple-and-gold No. 30 jersey.
And it worked.
“I think the fans really adopted me when I got there, probably because of my style,” said Vachon, who stretched out to 5-foot-8 if he stood on his tippy toes, but had a heart bigger than his body. “I was pretty quick. Small, but you know the style I was playing was very aggressive.
“Then we started winning games.”
The NHL would never be the same.
By the end of his third full season in L.A., Vachon had become Southern California’s first hockey star and the face of a franchise that badly needed one. He was not just a crowd favorite, NHL All-Star and the team’s first Vezina Trophy finalist, but he started the Kings on a streak that would see them qualify for the playoffs nine straight times, still a franchise record.
Not even Wayne Gretzky could match that.
“He was very popular,” said Hall of Fame broadcaster Bob Miller, who began calling Kings games in Vachon’s second season in L.A. “He was very approachable. He was so dynamic and friendly. He made people want to come out and see games.”
Vachon, 80, did more than help the Kings survive, he helped them thrive. As a player he led the team to its first winning record, then returned to become the general manager who traded for Gretzky and drafted Hall of Famers Luc Robitaille and Rob Blake. He also had a winning record in three stints as an interim coach, making him the only man in franchise history to serve as a player, assistant coach, head coach and general manager.
In his last five seasons as the Kings’ goaltender, Vachon ranked in the top five in wins four times. In 1974-75, he led the NHL in save percentage (.927), had a career-best 2.24 goals-against average and finished 14 points behind Bobby Clarke in voting for the Hart Memorial Trophy, the league’s MVP award.
In many ways it remains the best regular season in franchise history, with the team earning a record 105 points and a .656 winning percentage in an 80-game season. It lost just 17 times, also a team record for a full season.
By the time Vachon left after seven seasons, the Kings were a perennial playoff contender. The Seals, who never found their star, went through four name changes and three ownership groups before moving to Cleveland.
Did Vachon save hockey in Southern California, and by extension open the NHL to a wave of expansion that has seen the league grow to 32 teams, some in warm-weather markets such as Miami, Tampa, Dallas, Anaheim and Las Vegas?
Well, he certainly didn’t hurt it.
“If it weren’t for him, maybe the Kings wouldn’t exist,” said Robitaille, the team’s all-time leading goal-scorer and its president since 2017. “He was a superstar. He brought people in, kept the Kings alive.
“It’s a pretty amazing record when you think about it.”
During his playing days, Vachon’s home was the 46 square feet directly in front of his team’s goal. Today his home is an eight-acre ranch in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, about 45 miles south of Missoula.
“It’s nice and calm and we have mountains all over the place,” he said.
The nearest town, Hamilton, isn’t much bigger than the one where Vachon grew up in rural Quebec. Back then the farm he lived on had more than a dozen dairy cows, plus sheep, pigs and plow horses, since his family didn’t have a tractor. In retirement, he’s gone back to that childhood, mucking the stalls and helping care for a menagerie that includes two horses, 10 mini goats, two mini pigs, a pair of horses and a bunch of chickens and dogs and cats.
“The idea of coming out and getting a little bit of land and getting some animals, he liked that idea,” Vachon’s son, Nick, remembered. “But he said no cows. He might have been traumatized by the early mornings and milking twice a day.”
One of eight children — four boys and four girls — Vachon played his first hockey games at age 5 on a makeshift rink on the farm, and it wasn’t long before the neighborhood kids were taping department store catalogs to his legs for goalie pads and pushing him in front of the net — ostensibly for his safety since he was always the smallest kid on the ice.
He would never leave the crease, proving so comfortable there he was playing against grown men when he was just 12.
Montreal sent a regional scout named Scotty Bowman — who went on to become the winningest coach in NHL history — to scout him and he liked what he saw, so much so he convinced Vachon’s parents to let their teenage son sign with the Canadiens. Shortly after his 21st birthday, Vachon was in the NHL, making his debut without a mask and recording his first save on a breakaway by Hall of Famer Gordie Howe.
Montreal made the Stanley Cup Final in each of Vachon’s first three seasons, winning twice. But when he lost the starting job in goal to rookie Ken Dryden early in his sixth season, Vachon requested a trade and the Canadiens obliged, banishing him to L.A., then the NHL’s version of a warm-weather Siberia.
The Montana ranch where he lives now, surrounded by fir and pine trees, the shadows of the Bitterroots and silence, is the perfect retirement home, although it’s one Vachon found more by accident than design.
Vachon was still living by the beach in Southern California in 2016 when his wife, Nicole, whom he married less than a month after his trade to the Kings, died of brain cancer. Four years later, Vachon approached Nick, who was working as general manager of the L.A. Junior Kings/L.A. Lions, with the idea of uniting the family under one roof again.
“I was living in a big house in Venice all by myself,” he said. “This sort of put into my mind that we should sell our houses in L.A. and move in together.”
So father and son rented a motor home, and along with Nick’s wife, Renee, and daughter Chloe, now 16, headed to Montana, where they found a home big enough for two horses, allowing Chloe, who grew up near the ocean in Redondo Beach, to train to become a barrel racer in the rodeo.
“We were definitely not horse people. Like what is a barrel racer? We had no idea,” said Nick Vachon, who followed his father into the NHL, playing one game with the New York Islanders — against the Kings — in 1996.
“She just loves animals. She’s kind of our resident vet. She helped deliver our baby goats and she does all the horse stuff.”
The elder Vachon hasn’t faced a puck in anger since his second and final season with the Boston Bruins in 1982. He says he’s just 15 pounds over his playing weight of 165 pounds, pretty fit for a guy limited by two knee replacements.
The once-famous dark mane has gone white and is neatly cropped and the bushy mustache is now just a brush of hair below his nose. But the cigars remain as do the memories, which are rekindled by the letters and autograph requests that still arrive regularly in the mailbox.
His Hall of Fame jacket, which Vachon says he hasn’t won since his induction a decade ago, sits on a hanger in a closet and just a few framed jerseys and photos hang on the walls of his five-bedroom farmhouse.
“He’s got some stuff,” Nick Vachon said. “But he’s pretty humble. He doesn’t like to put up too much.”
Vachon became one of the NHL’s top goaltenders in Los Angeles, so when he left as an unrestricted free agent after the 1977-78 season, he commanded what was then the top salary in history at his position, a five-year deal with the Detroit Red Wings worth $1.9 million. But he had two miserable seasons there, giving up more than 3½ goals a game, before being traded to Boston, where he did little better.
Still, when he retired in 1982, Vachon ranked among the top six all time in games and wins by a goalie. More than four decades later only Jonathan Quick has played or won more games for the Kings, who made Vachon’s No. 30 the first to be retired by the franchise.
However, there would be a second act for Vachon’s hockey career and naturally it would unfold in Los Angeles.
A year after his retirement, Vachon returned to the Kings as a goaltender coach, but before that first season was over he had been promoted to coach, then general manager, a position for which he had no experience, yet one he would hold for eight years, guiding the team to seven straight playoff berths and three trips to the division finals.
Those years proved consequential for other reasons as well since Vachon was the general manager who finalized the 1988 trade that brought Gretzky to L.A. Soon the Kings were the talk of the town, with President Reagan and wife Nancy even sitting rinkside.
The franchise had come a long way since Vachon’s early playing days, when those rinkside seats would sit empty.
Vachon was also the one who took Robitaille with the 171st pick, in the ninth round of the 12-round 1984 draft — and even then it was considered a gamble. But it was one that quickly paid off with Robitaille recording 191 points in his final junior season, then scoring 45 goals and winning the Calder Trophy in his first NHL campaign.
“The scouts were not quite as high on him as my dad was,” Nick Vachon said. “Finally he forces the scout at the table; he’s like ‘we’re picking Luc this round. I don’t care what you guys say.’”
“I owe him a lot,” Robitaille said of Vachon.
Robitaille, who also spent more time as an executive with the Kings then he did as a player with the team, said the transition from the ice to the front office can be a difficult one. Yet it’s one Vachon mastered quickly.
“When you’re a player, you live the moment. All that matters is that day,” Robitaille said. “When you get into management, you’re trying to win tomorrow but at the same time you’ve got a plan for next season and sometimes two, three years ahead.”
In retirement, however, Vachon doesn’t have to think any further ahead than the next sunset.
“He’s such a nice man but at the same time he’s got a ton of character,” Robitaille said. “Every time I talk to him, he just sounds so happy. That’s what life is about, isn’t it?”
Vachon’s son agrees. Because while the long hair, the mustache and the Mercedes are all gone, a broad smile still creases the old goalie’s face.
“When we first moved out here, he’d go out every day and just take in the air,” Nick Vachon said. “He just sits outside and enjoys the fresh air and so yeah, he’s super happy.”
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