Having few friends was part of Colin Campbell’s job

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Postmedia is profiling the 2024 class of the Hockey Hall of Fame ahead of Monday’s induction. Today, builder Colin Campbell.

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There was a time during Colin Campbell’s lengthy service that NHL people dreaded seeing his number appear on their phone.

Such was the lot of the league’s disciplinarian, who had to inform someone he had crossed the line with a late check, too high a stick or other transgression that meant a fine, suspension or both. There was no option to mute or ignore a Campbell communique.

So in 15 years on the Hall of Fame’s selection committee, one of his other many job titles, he used to playfully pester late chairman Jim Gregory to let him make at least one congratulatory call to a new inductee. On selection day last June, after Campbell’s term on the committee had ended, that familiar 416 area code popped up for him.

“The best news you could hear, other than having a child born,” is how Campbell termed it.

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The Hall’s builder wing is usually reserved for those who have done everything in the game, which certainly fits Campbell’s C.V. back to the early 1970s. He was a hard-nosed defenceman for Roger Neilson’s junior Peterborough Petes, spent his rookie year in the wild World Hockey Association, and a decade in the NHL with eclectic teammates from an old Peter Mahovlich to a young Wayne Gretzky and some of its greatest rogues, Mark Messier, Tiger Wiliams, Dave Schultz and Bob Probert.

He later coached Gretzky and Messier and you will find his name on the Stanley Cup, as Mike Keenan’s associate on the New York Rangers’ bench in 1994. But it was his experience with the dark side that commissioner Gary Bettman saw as a strength when making him senior vice-president and director of hockey operations.

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“I had many (other) opportunities,” Campbell said of his name floated for other coaching positions and at one time, to be general manager of the Maple Leafs. “But when I got to this league … one thing all hockey people love is loyalty, someone who has your back. I’ve had a few moments where I tripped up, got mad at certain people or maybe do and say things I shouldn’t have. Gary and (deputy commissioner) Bill Daly were always there.”

His 10-plus years with the gavel, in what’s now the player safety portfolio, meant he was nobody’s friend.

“For one, we didn’t have the video available to us today (Campbell helped create today’s NHL war room). We can set up (controversial plays) in seconds. When I first did it, half the games weren’t televised and we had referees taking game tapes with them to the airport to send to Toronto, sometimes in the next 24 hours before the team played next. Then I had to get everyone together with the GM and have a call.

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“The temperature rose 10-fold in the playoffs. If a player got hurt and you didn’t suspend him, the other team was missing a player. I remember Toronto – New Jersey, Tie Domi and Scott Niedermayer (the former’s infamous 2001 elbow). That (Domi’s eight-game sentence) hurt the Leafs more than Jersey stopped them in their tracks.”

Two of the ugliest incidents in league history occurred on Campbell’s watch, Marty McSorley’s 2000 clubbing of Donald Brashear in the back of the head and Todd Bertuzzi’s career-ending attack on Steve Moore in 2004.

McSorley and Bertuzzi paid dearly in suspensions, lost salary and Bertuzzi wound up in court, but like Brian Burke before him and Brendan Shanahan and George Parros after, the league’s definition of guilt or leniency sparked intense criticism. There were other controversies that led Campbell to voluntarily step aside from the role in 2013, telling Bettman the position “needed some fresh eyes.”

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Shanahan, now president of the Leafs, credited Campbell for the handoff.

“Colin was a really great supporter when I was transitioning out of the game, a mentor about what was expected in the next phase in your working life in the NHL,” Shanahan said. “He’s done every job there was to do in the NHL. He’s worked for a very long time in what a lot of the time is a thankless position.”

COLIN CAMPBELL (BUILDER)

BORN: Jan. 28, 1963, Tillsonburg, Ont.

HALL CALL:

As a defenceman, played 681 NHL regular season and playoff games for five teams … Spent three years of junior with the Peterborough Petes … After his playing days, he was an assistant coach with Detroit, the New York Rangers, a head coach in the AHL and upon Mike Keenan’s firing by the1994 Stanley Cup champion Rangers, became their head coach for three seasons, with one conference final appearance … After his coaching tenure, was hired by the NHL as Vice President and Director of Hockey Operations, which included a role in creating new rules to open up a stagnant game after the 2004-05 lockout … He continues as a senior VP of hockey operations.

DID YOU KNOW:

Was the first-round draft pick, fifth overall, of the WHA’s Vancouver Blazers in 1973, but signed with the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins, who drafted him in the second round that year.

Lhornby@postmedia.com 

X: @sunhornby    

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