The trademark “Har-r-rold, Har-r-rold, Har-r-rold,” broke out from stands at Hastings Racecourse in September when Snepsts was a special guest
Recommended Videos
Snepsts played his last game in Canucks colours in 1990. He’s now 70 years old.
Snepsts sits eighth all-time in regular season games played (781) by a Canuck. He spent 12 of his 17 years in the NHL with Vancouver. He has a great appreciation for the response he can still receive from Canuck Nation. Explaining the why behind it is harder for him.
“I’m very honest. I wasn’t a good skater. I didn’t have the greatest skill. I was always in good shape and I wanted to compete and win at any cost,” Snepsts says when pressed for an answer for that endearing enduring. “With these fans, as long you give 100 per cent, they’ll respect you.”
That was Snepsts in a snapshot. He was the big, rugged, stay-at-home defenceman who took care of the space in front his goalie. He never seemed interested in chasing glory, which, oddly enough, is probably what brought him glory in at least a couple of the places he played.
He was so good at that role that he represented the Canucks in two all-star games, including in that 1981-82 season when the team made its run to the Stanley Cup Finals, where they fell to the New York Islanders. He was also a four-time winner of the Walter “Babe” Pratt Trophy, which goes to the best Canucks defenceman every season, according to a fan vote.
Adding to his appeal was the fact Snepsts was highly distinguishable on the ice. There was the glorious moustache, which remains one of the best-ever in the game. He was also one of the last players in the NHL to not wear a helmet.
He had two stints with Vancouver, and that chant took hold with the second one, which started in 1988-89 after signing back with the team as a free agent.
According to Snepsts, the chant originated as a ribbing from a Washington Capitals fan when Snepsts was playing for the Detroit Red Wings. The Capitals’ supporter picked out opposing players to yell at, and he went after Snepsts during Detroit visits.
Apparently, the chants could be heard on television broadcasts, and Red Wings supporters turned it all around, belting out Snepsts’ first name in the waning moments of wins.
“It was just crazy there for awhile,” Snepsts recalls. “Even after games in the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel (which connects the two cities) people were chanting ‘Harold’.
“I remember going to Stevie Yzerman. I told him, ‘Stevie, I feel embarrassed.’ He was the star. I didn’t know why they were chanting my name and not his. He says, ‘That’s okay … you’re taking pressure off everybody.’”
There was a bar in Detroit that started selling T-shirts with Snepsts’ likeness underneath ‘Ha-arold!” You can still find some on the internet.
The bar owner asked Snepsts if he wanted any royalties. He turned him down. He didn’t think they’d sell any. Sure enough, there were multiple printings.
The Red Wings bought the rights eventually. They offered him a cut of the profits, too. He told them to give the money to charity.
The chant, which was reserved for the waning moments in Detroit, took on a new life in Vancouver, starting early in games.
“I was, ‘Geez, now I’m afraid to make a mistake.’ If I made a mistake, it wasn’t like I could rush the puck up the ice and score a goal (to make up for it),” Snepsts says.
Snepsts, who is originally from Edmonton, played his junior hockey with his hometown Edmonton Oil Kings. He was part of the Canucks’ fifth-ever draft class, grabbed in the fourth round (No. 59 overall) in 1974.
He was working at a warehouse on draft day. He came home, and his mother told him that, “Somebody called from Vancouver … something about a draft?”
It was certainly a different time.
Winger Ron Sedlbauer was Vancouver’s first pick that year, taken in the second round. Canucks general manager and coach Phil Maloney brought Sedlbauer and Snepsts to town to show them around. Snepsts remembers Maloney telling him then that it would take him “two or three years,” to make the big club.
Snepsts proved him wrong, as he was in the Canucks’ lineup on opening night that 1974-75 season, playing against an Atlanta Flames team that featured Pat Quinn on defence. Snepsts split the campaign between Vancouver and the minors, but was a regular the following season and became a mainstay in the lineup.
He was the Canucks’ all-time leader in games played and penalty minutes when he was traded to the Minnesota North Stars before the 1984-85 season by general manager Harry Neale.
It caught Snepsts off guard. He admits to thinking then that “I was going to retire here.”
The deal was initially announced June 21, 1984, with the Canucks receiving winger Al MacAdam from the North Stars for future considerations. As it happens, Snepsts had gone out for lunch with members of the Canucks office staff that day. Someone mentioned to him that they had completed a swap with Minnesota for futures, but didn’t have more information than that.
“Early the next morning, Harry Neale called me and said that I was the futures,” Snepsts explains. “Neale had told Minnesota they couldn’t report it until he talked to me directly, so I give him credit for that. The lady from the office called me, too, and she was crying, saying she didn’t know.”
Snepsts played just one season in Minnesota before signing with the Red Wings as a free agent. He spent three seasons with Detroit before signing back with Canucks. In his second season back, the Canucks dealt him to the St. Louis Blues at the 1990 trade deadline in a swap that brought back defenceman Adrien Plavsic and the 1990 first-round pick (No. 18) the Canucks used on winger Shawn Antoski.
He played the next season with the Blues and then retired.
Over his career, Snepsts amassed 38 goals — he was the first Canucks defenceman to score on a penalty shot when he beat North Stars goalie Gilles Meloche in a 5-4 win on Feb. 2, 1980 — and 233 points, along with 2,009 penalty minutes.
Harold Snepsts’ favourites
• Favourite memory as a Canuck: “The first game. And obviously the 1982 Stanley Cup playoffs. All I can say is that it was a character team. No one expected us to go that far. We didn’t have big superstars. But It was a team you wanted to go into battle with.”
• Favourite Canucks teammate: “It’s a bunch of guys. I liked 97 per cent of the guys I played with. And who’s in that other three per cent is going with me to my grave.”
• Favourite Canucks coach: “There’s not really one guy I could name. You could say Roger Neilson because we went to the (Stanley Cup) Finals with him. I liked all of them in Vancouver. There’s one coach from another team I played on that I didn’t respect, but I’m not going to name him.”
• Favourite road city: “When I started out, it was Toronto and Montreal. You liked to see the pictures, the nostalgia. The best rink was Chicago, with that organ. When we played them in playoffs, I remember starting the game, and I couldn’t hear whoever I was standing next to during the national anthem.
• Favourite Canuck jersey: “The first one, with the stick in rink. I loved the colours. Some people say the V, and I thought it was one of the worst, but it did take us to the Stanley Cup.”