Patrick Williams, TheAHL.com Features Writer
Dunc Fisher’s shot never left him. Nor did his competitiveness.
The long-time forward will go into the American Hockey League Hall of Fame on Monday, nearly 65 years after he last took the ice for the Hershey Bears. Fisher, who passed away in 2017 at 90 years old, still owns the Bears franchise record with 260 goals across eight seasons in Hershey, where he also won two Calder Cups, reached 40 goals four times, and was a First or Second Team All-Star five times. He also appeared in six AHL All-Star games. Add it all up, and he finished his AHL career with 620 points (285 goals, 335 assists) in 579 games.
Along the way he also appeared in 275 NHL games with the New York Rangers, Boston Bruins, and Detroit Red Wings during the height of the Original Six era.
Years after Fisher retired, his son, Duncan, came home to Regina, Sask., for the holidays. Duncan played college hockey at Princeton in the 1970’s and was a team captain. But he was in a scoring slump, so he asked his father for a few pointers.
They headed to one of Regina’s outdoor rinks. The old wooden boards on the rink had a nail sticking out, making it perfect for some target practice to fire some pucks and work on one’s shot.
“Hit that nail,” the elder Fisher told his son.
Duncan fired off a half-dozen shots. Missed them all.
Then Dunc, who hadn’t picked up a stick in years, took a crack at it.
Four out of six shots rang off that nail. He still had that shot, the one had helped to put him in the NHL at the age of 20. In 1949-50, he played all 70 games with the Rangers, finished with 33 points (12 goals, 21 assists), and then came within one win of the Stanley Cup in a seven-game series with Detroit.
And there was that fire. The younger Fisher’s own son played the bagpipes and had a competition coming up soon. Maybe there were a few nerves. Duncan told his son simply to try his best. But grandpa Dunc, an accomplished bagpiper himself, would have none of that.
“‘We’re going to win,’” Dunc recalled his father saying. “‘We’re not going there to do our best.’”
He needed that competitive snarl. Fisher was a 5-foot-8 right wing trying to break into the AHL with the New Haven Ramblers in 1947. Trying to crack New York’s lineup. Trying to make it through the AHL well into his 30’s in an era of cramped rinks with chicken wire rather than glass and surly defensemen occupying opposing rosters looking to punish him each time he had the puck on his stick.
While today’s AHL has 32 teams and stretches from California to Quebec, Fisher’s AHL topped out at 11 teams during his playing days and went down to six clubs for the latter half of his career. Tight schedules, demanding travel, and a limited number of jobs defined so much of that era for Fisher and his contemporaries. One January weekend in Fisher’s final season featured a Friday night game at Springfield, a quick trip back home for a Saturday night in Hershey, and then a Sunday in Cleveland.
“I think that was one of the biggest tools [he had] to be a successful hockey player,” Duncan Fisher outlined. “He had that drive. He wanted to win. He didn’t want to just show up. I don’t think he thought of himself as small. He could fend for himself out there.”
Fisher thrived in the second half of his 13-season pro career, piling up 121 goals in three seasons with the Bears. He lifted the Calder Cup in 1958 and 1959. He got back to the NHL for eight more games with Detroit.
But of course, the wear and tear did eventually catch up to Fisher, who finished his playing career after the 1959-60 season when he still scored 22 goals as a 32-year-old.
“I guess the legs have just gone,” Fisher told the Harrisburg (Pa.) Patriot-News in March 1960.
Duncan, then still very young, had spent some of his earliest years skating at Hersheypark Arena and attending games here and there, but it was time for the Fisher family to try something new. Dunc and his wife, Doreen, headed back home to Regina to begin a new phase of their lives. A daughter, Heidi, soon followed. Dunc spent two seasons as a coach with the Regina Pats, then a member of the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League, before going into sales and then managing the city’s aquatic center and swimming programs.
Life moved along for the family. Dunc went into the Saskatchewan Sports Hall of Fame in 2011. Next came his induction into the Hershey Bears Hall of Fame in 2014. Dunc and Doreen built a 61-year marriage before she passed in 2013.
Throughout the years, Fisher maintained strong ties with former teammates even as life scattered them. The late Nick Mickoski, a fellow 20-year-old Ramblers teammate in 1947-48, went on to play 705 NHL games and the pair remained tight for decades; in Fisher’s final NHL run, he had a chance to reunite with Mickoski with the Red Wings. In Hershey, Larry Zeidel and Willie Marshall became some of his close friends, and Marshall attended Fisher’s 2014 induction in Hershey. They even faced each other in the NHL in 1958, Fisher with Detroit and Marshall with the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Opponents who had to contend nightly with Fisher’s fierce play might disagree, but it was his collegiality and team-first approach that made him popular with his teammates during his playing days – and in everyday life for decades afterward.
“Off the ice, he was one of the nicest guys you’d ever meet,” Duncan said. “Post-hockey, he would meet people and befriend people, and those friendships lasted.
“He was somebody who was interested in you.”
On the American Hockey League beat for two decades, TheAHL.com features writer Patrick Williams also currently covers the league for NHL.com and FloSports and is a regular contributor on SiriusXM NHL Network Radio. He was the recipient of the AHL’s James H. Ellery Memorial Award for his outstanding coverage of the league in 2016.