Had Buddy Voth, a self-described middling clarinet player, not repaired to a high school parking lot with friends for a few brews during a school function in September 1981, your Dallas Stars may well have never hoisted the Stanley Cup 25 years ago this week.
Backstory is obviously required.
Voth was a junior at Carman Collegiate, a high school in small-town Manitoba, Canada. He was participating in a 24-hour band fundraiser when, during a break, he and three friends saw no harm in popping a few tops in the comfort of a Chevy Vega. The school official who stumbled upon the quartet didn’t find the interlude quite as innocent and dutifully reported the perpetrators to school principal Frank McKinnon.
McKinnon was livid, probably because one of the drinking buddies was his son, Jeff. The four were called out at an all-school assembly and suspended from school for a week.
It just so happened Buddy, Jeff, and the third boy were also members of the Carman Cougars varsity hockey team. Their coach, Don Revel, wanted to suspend them for the upcoming season. McKinnon balked. Revel countered by threatening to quit, and McKinnon called his bluff, accepting his verbal resignation. And took over the team himself.
The Cougars reached the semifinals of the provincial playoffs, a best-of-five series against their rivals from favored Winkler. Carman was dominated in the first two games. The boys figured they were finished.
McKinnon assured them all was not lost. He had a plan for Game 3. He would start the third-string goalie, a rambunctious junior who had failed to make the varsity as a sophomore, a kid who had not even dressed for most varsity games that year, relegated to standing with the cheerleaders.
“Ed Belfour’s going to start our next game,” Frank McKinnon announced.
“Guys were hanging their heads,” Voth, 59, recalled last week. “I was captain, trying to keep everybody going. And they were like, Oh, no! But Eddie wasn’t fazed. He was ready for it.”
Voth says the principal saw something in Belfour.
“They’d been back and forth a few times,” Voth says. “[McKinnon] thought he could use hockey to help Eddie out, helped direct his energy.”
The Cougars won Games 3 and 4 at home to tie the series. Back they went to Winkler, followed by a caravan of cars like a scene straight out of Hoosiers.
“Eddie got us to overtime,” Voth says. “One of the guys on our team got like a triple [penalty]—he high-sticked a guy, punched a guy in the face, tripped the guy. All on one play. We almost killed that six-minute penalty off.”
Almost. The Cougars lost. But Ed Belfour had found himself.
“The next year, he was our number one guy [in goal], and we won everything,” Voth says. “Really made a difference in Eddie’s life.”
Alma Belfour insisted her son could do anything he set his mind to. With no scholarship offers from big-time college programs in the United States, he walked on at the University of North Dakota and started for the NCAA champion during his one season there in 1986-87. Undrafted that summer, he signed as a free agent with the Chicago Blackhawks. In his first full NHL season, he was named Rookie of the Year in 1990-91, won the first of two Vezina Trophies as the league’s top goalie and finished third in the MVP voting.
“The thing about Eddie was he improved every year, and he kept that going into the pros,” Voth says.
Voth was also a standout athlete, particularly as a middle-distance runner. He was invited to Canada’s Olympic trials for the 1988 Summer Games in Calgary. The top three in each event qualified, and he finished fourth in the steeplechase.
“Whenever you get that close to a big goal of yours and you just miss it, it’s a little rough,” Voth says.
Things got rough on and off the ice for Belfour in Chicago in 1994. He reached out to Voth, who was working and coaching in western Canada, to become his business manager.
“I was a little bit of Jerry Maguire,” Voth says with a laugh. “I had one guy!”
That guy signed with Dallas in July 1997, and Voth tagged along. Belfour amassed ridiculous numbers during the 1999 Cup run. His goals-against average for 23 games (the most played among goalies that postseason) was 1.67 with three shutouts. He won two Game 7s. Four of his 16 wins came in overtimes that stretched 12 periods.
Stars fans of a certain age vividly recall Brett Hull’s controversial clinching goal in the third overtime of Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Final in Buffalo. It came at 1:31 a.m. Eastern time on Sunday, June 20. Here’s what Jim Kelley, then the lead hockey writer for the Buffalo News, wrote of Belfour: “Without him, Hull wouldn’t have had a chance to score the decisive goal, legal or illegal.”
Voth was there, part of the family-and-friends contingent flown in and back by Stars owner Tom Hicks. Voth and Belfour celebrated in the locker room.
“One of the best things I’ve experienced in my sporting life,” Voth says.
He was with Belfour when the Stanley Cup arrived at Carman that summer. “One of the first places that Eddie took the Cup was to Frank,” Voth says, his voice cracking. McKinnon died in 2015.
Belfour and Voth went their separate business ways in 2002, but Voth remained in Dallas. He and wife Rebekah live in Kessler Park, and he splits his time between here and Little Rock, Arkansas, developing single-family rental properties.
Belfour, who maintains a home in North Texas, was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2011 and into the Stars’ version last fall. He invited Voth to introduce him at the latter and told the black-tie gathering that, without his longtime friend, “I wouldn’t be standing here.”
“That was generous of him to say,” Voth says. “He likes to hang a lot on me.”
And an eventful night in a Chevy Vega all those years ago.
