By Bob Markus





Dale Tallon has done just about everything a man can do if he's a hockey lifer--except sip from the Stanley Cup. Now, just as the Chicago Blackhawks, the team he served for 36 years, are likely going to sip the wine, Tallon has gone to the last place you'd expect to find hockey's holy grail. Heck, the Florida Panthers not only have never won the Stanley Cup, they haven't even made the playoffs for nine years. Of course, there's many a slip between the Cup and the lip, and the Blackhawks were still seven wins away going into Tuesday night's Western Conference Final Series game in Vancouver. But they already have seized home ice advantage for the remainder of the playoffs. This is a team that, when Tallon took over as general manager four years ago, had missed the playoffs for six of the seven preceding seasons.

The Blackhawks were my beat for the final two of my 36 years writing sports for the Chicago Tribune. At the time, they still routinely filled the United Center for every home game and had done so for many years. But it also had been 35 years since the Hawks won the Stanley Cup and another 13 seasons have slipped by since then. Now, thanks to Tallon's coup of drafting Jonathon Toews and Patrick Kane in successive years, trading for Patrick Sharp and Kris Versteeg, and signing free agent Marian Hossa, the Blackhawks may be bound for glory. Tallon's thanks for turning the team around in just three years, was to be fired last summer just after signing Hossa, the final piece in the puzzle. Tallon, who was named general manager on Monday, on Wednesday will be bound for Germany to meet with Panthers coach Pete DeBoer. Although he has had no success in breaking the chains of apathy that have bound the Panthers for nearly a decade, DeBoer seems likely to survive, at least until Tallon has a chance to evaluate his work. "I've got to give him some tools to work with," Tallon observed.

While I was covering the Blackhawks I knew Tallon first as a player, then as the color man on the Hawks' radio and TV broadcasts, a job he held for 16 years. He also was a scratch golfer, who won the 1969 Canadian Junior Championship and served as the head pro at Highland Park Country Club in suburban Chicago. Tallon became assistant to general manager Bob Pulford a couple of years after I retired and became the main man in 2005. There are many in Chicago who believe Tallon was undermined by Scotty Bowman, who had been brought in earlier as a "senior advisor." Not too much a leap in logic is required to believe that, given that Bowman's son, Stan, moved up from assistant GM to replace Tallon.

Tallon's task in South Florida will be infinitely more difficult than it was in Chicago, which has a hard core of dedicated fans and a long line of great players, stretching from Bobby Hull and Stan Mikita in the '60s through the likes of Tony Esposito, Denny Savard, Chris Chelios and Jeremy Roenick. The Panthers have one Stanley Cup Finals appearance on their team resume, a team noted more for slap-shotting rats off the dressing room wall than for reaching the door to Valhalla. Their lone super star, Pavel Bure, is long gone. Nor is Tallon the first high profile GM to take on the task of making the Panthers relevant in an area where ice normally is found only at the bottom of a cocktail glass.

First there was Mike Keenan, who had led the Blackhawks to the Stanley Cup finals and the Rangers to a championship among many stops in his peripatetic career. Keenan's main claim to infamy was to trade goalie Roberto Luongo to Vancouver in the worst hockey trade since the Blackhawks sent future Hall of Famer Phil Esposito to the Boston Bruins. When Keenan slunk out of town he was succeeded by Jacques Martin, who had turned around the Ottawa Senators, but could work no wonders for the Panthers.

Now it's Tallon's turn. I wish him well. And if things don't work out on the ice, there are plenty of good golf courses down here.