Once upon a time
There was a screenplay for a hockey movie that was so absurd, so over the top, that even the studio executives who wanted to make it wondered if it was too unrealistic.
Almost every page of the script featured profanity.
There were wild brawls on the ice, fights with fans in the stands and a trio of bespectacled brothers who raced toy cars at home and pummeled opponents at night.
It was so outrageous that one day Ned Dowd, a minor-league hockey player, received a call from his sister, Nancy, who wrote the screenplay and was trying to get the movie made.
She asked for Ned’s help.
Nancy Dowd had shadowed Ned’s team, the Johnstown Jets, for a month during the 1974-75 season of the North American Hockey League (NAHL), about the lowest rung of the minors, a place for long shots, has-beens and brawlers. Nancy had degrees from Smith College and UCLA’s film school, but she’d become fascinated by her brother’s existence on hockey’s frontier and wrote a script about a rowdy minor-league team on the verge of collapse that rallies to win the championship.
The movie, “Slap Shot,” would go on to become one of the greatest sports films of all time, a classic still beloved by both fans and players more than 45 years later. But first a studio had to make it, and that’s why Nancy Dowd called Ned. She asked him to fly to Los Angeles and meet with actor Paul Newman, director George Roy Hill and skeptical executives from Universal Pictures.
Ned, a self-described raconteur with a history degree from Bowdoin College, walked into a private dining room at Universal and started to regale the group with stories about his playing days in Johnstown, Pa. Soon it must have become obvious that the wildest thing about “Slap Shot” wasn’t the brawls on the ice or fights in the stands or the goofy, goony brothers later immortalized as the Hansons.