An Excerpt From: Then Perreault Said to Rico: The Best Buffalo Sabres Stories Ever Told

by Paul Wieland

He filled the room. His massive head blocked much of the sunlight from a picture window. His hands appeared to be the size of a pair of hockey gloves, but instead of colored leather, they were gnarled, scarred-fingers splayed by fracture, sprain, and pain after 50 years of serving as weapons in the wrestling ring.

Fred Atkins was truly a physical giant, not a grotesque, but an awesome chunk of humanity. He reminded me of the late Fred Gwynne, a television actor who played an amiable Frankenstein with platform shoes, a prosthesis head, and shoulder pads that made Gwynne lurch through scenes as a friendly grizzly bear.

Fred Atkins had it all for real. He stood about 6′6″ or so and was Hummer-wide. His leonine head was topped by jet black hair, the result of dye job after dye job from his days attempting to remain youthful in the fast-turnover world of professional wrestling.

Fred was an Australian who came to North America to pursue the bucks available to successful professional wrestlers in the days when Gorgeous George turned the sport from sport to exhibition.

Fred didn’t wrestle as a clown or a good guy or even a bad guy. He wrestled in the days when there were real matches. Even if the winner might be predetermined, the wrestlers really did put on a show of wrestling. In short, they beat the hell out of each other and had a beer afterward.

Atkins had been introduced to the yearling Sabres midway through their first season, after Punch Imlach had seen his roster crammed with drinkers, smokers, hasbeens, and never-will-bes drop too many games just on conditioning alone.

As late as 1970, pro hockey was a self-contained sport. The money was lousy, and most players worked summer jobs back home pumping gas in an Ontario outpost or (if they were lucky) shilling beer at Canadian taverns that still had separate men’s tap rooms and no doors on the bathroom entrance. The point was, one could surmise, that most who drank there didn’t care about privacy in the loo. Those who played hockey for a living stayed in reasonable shape in the off-season, which extended from May 1 (if you were lucky enough to play on a team that survived to late playoff rounds) until Labor Day. But the word is reasonable. A summer with heavy lifting confined to beer glasses meant that first part of training camp was devoted to dry-land training.

Camps were usually held in backwaters all over Ontario and Quebec, one-burger towns with the main drag boasting a Canadian Tire Store and a pub inevitably named the “Kings,” “Queens,” or “Princess” hotel.

The fight for jobs and league level took place on the town’s junior hockey arena ice, and thousands of Canadian boys caught their first glimpses of professional players in those freezing barns.

Training camp opened with a week or two of just conditioning and intersquad scrimmages. Camp usually included running over hill and dale (despised by all) with the idea being to develop lung strength and get in shape for the season ahead.

The coach and the trainer usually supervised the workouts. Since major league teams trained with all their contract players and amateur tryouts under the same rink roof, minor league coaches and staff helped oversee the training regimen. Naturally some players devised clever and creative ways to avoid running and other muscle exertion that didn’t happen on the ice with a puck and a stick. Players would disappear into the woods on a three-mile run, get picked up in a car by a friend, and show up minutes later sprinting across the finish line.

They did all these kinds of things in Buffalo’s camp until Fred Atkins showed up on the heels of a home loss in which the Sabres were so hung over and lackadaisical that Imlach couldn’t talk about his players without an every-other-word obscenity.

Atkins had already worked with many hockey players in his Crystal Beach, Ontario, home. Crystal Beach was home to an amusement park that served generations of tourists who crossed by excursion boat from Buffalo and rode the Comet Coaster or danced to the big bands in the park’s Starlight Ballroom. But a day at Fred’s house was more like a day on the rack for the unwilling.

Fred’s gym was in the basement of his modest bungalow near the Lake Erie shore, and some called it a torture chamber. Atkins offered a back-breaking workout for those with the right attitude, and it was understood you didn’t go there with the wrong attitude.

Two ex-players for the old American Hockey League Buffalo Bisons, Pat Hannigan and Bill Dea, who lived year-round near Fred, had worked out with him for years in the off-season and recommended Atkins. Hannigan, who later became a Sabres TV analyst and died in December of 2007, told the Toronto Star in 1983 that if he had discovered Fred earlier in his pro hockey career, the

Atkins method might have made him a 10-year big-leaguer, instead of the four seasons he had with the Rangers and Flyers.

What was the Atkins method? Fred told the Star that same year: “A hockey player is the same as any other athlete. The trouble with them is, they’ve never been in shape. They’ve concentrated on building muscles, you see, when in athletics you have to be quick-and you lose quickness by lifting weights. I turn them around, get ‘em stretching ligaments.”

That was not all Fred stretched in his tiny basement gym. He once told a friend that blood had flowed off the basement’s walls, “and it wasn’t mine.”

Now here’s where you have to get something straight. Fred didn’t just talk a conditioning game. He didn’t just look mean. He wasn’t just an old beat-up shell of a pro wrestler, scamming money-or truly earning it-off athletes and coaches with his glare and quaint Aussie accent.

Fred Atkins in his seventies was the toughest son of a bitch in the world.

Or if he wasn’t, consider this: One of the most famous wrestlers in the history of the sport-a champion before it became vaudeville-was Whipper Billy Watson. His take on Atkins when Fred was in his seventies and ready to work with the Toronto Maple Leafs at their training camp in 1983: “Even today I would say that Fred Atkins would defeat 90 percent of the wrestlers in the business. He was the toughest, best-conditioned wrestler I ever saw.”

That was a decade after we met with Fred. He came to Buffalo. He saw…and wow, did he conquer.

“This excerpt from Then Perreault Said to Rico: The Best Buffalo Sabres Stories Ever Told is printed with the permission of Triumph Books,  www.triumphbooks.com.”

Tagged with: Buffalo Sabres, Colored Leather, Fred Gwynne, Gorgeous George, Grizzly Bear, Hasbeens, Head And Shoulder, Hockey Gloves, Massive Head, Ontario Outpost, Picture Window, Platform Shoes, Pro Hockey, Professional Wrestlers, Professional Wrestling, Pumping Gas, Punch Imlach, Shoulder Pads, Television Actor, Wrestling Ring

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