Aug 31, 2020
If we ever get around to creating a Good Seats Still Available "Hall of Fame," this week's return guest will most certainly be part of its inaugural class of inductees.
Dennis Murphy (“Murph: The Sports Entrepreneur Man and His Leagues”) is a bona fide legend in sports entrepreneurial circles - a man responsible for helping found no less than four "major" game-changing leagues across the North American pro sports landscape, including the polychromatic American Basketball Association (our previous Episode 129), and this week's focus: the raucous World Hockey Association. (The others: World Team Tennis and Roller Hockey International.)
This week's shorter-than-normal episode was originally intended to be our second full-length discussion with "Murph" - and our first exclusively devoted to the founding and operation of the WHA - until events last year conspired against it.
A scheduling snafu resulted in a shorter window of conversation than originally intended, and the recording itself was feared lost during our internal archives transfer process weeks later.
However, in the process of doing background research for our recent episode on the original Winnipeg Jets with Curtis Walker, we were lucky enough to stumble across the fully intact audio file on a redundant backup server - which we now present as the bulk of this week's episode.
What it lacks in length is more than made up with in depth and surprising detail from the now-93-year-old Murphy's still-sharp memory of hockey's "rebel league."