In terms of innovation, Brumm set the standard

By Michael Dobie | Staff Writer

July 11, 2004

On Feb. 2, 1954, the puck dropped on the most unusual hockey game ever played by an NHL team.

Gordie Howe and the rest of the powerhouse Detroit Red Wings were two months away from winning their third Stanley Cup in five years when they traveled to the wilds of Michigan's Upper Peninsula for an exhibition game -- against a team of inmates at Marquette Branch Prison.

The contest was the brainchild of Leonard "Oakie" Brumm, the prison's recreation director, and it was played on the outdoor ice rink Brumm and a group of inmates built in the prison yard. Howe said later it was the best ice he ever had played on.

The game was one-sided -- the Red Wings led 18-0 at the end of the first period, after which the teams swapped players -- but it is memorable today as the high point in what arguably was the most comprehensive and revolutionary prison sports program in the history of corrections.

Brumm, a Marquette native who had coached hockey at two colleges, was hired in 1953 as recreation supervisor because the warden at the time believed a sports and recreation program at his maximum security prison would help prevent the kind of bloody riot that had exploded at another Michigan facility the year before.

"I thought he was nuts," Brumm said. "I thought: What the hell do you need a coach for those bastards for? I didn't want to take the job. It was a very nasty prison."

Brumm was not the nation's first prison recreation supervisor, but he might have been the most creative.

He built an 18-hole miniature golf course, constructed shuffleboard courts and a regulation-sized bocci court, and introduced paddleball. He built a curling rink that lasted one winter; the sport was so popular a frustrated inmate unable to play broke all the curling stones one night. Brumm formed a football team which played outside squads, started a Winter Carnival featuring skating races and barrel jumping, and staged semiannual field days with cash prizes for events ranging from track and field races to chess to pillow fights on a greased log.

"In modern terminology, we tranquilized them with sports," said Brumm, who wrote a colorful book about those days called "We Only Played Home Games."

"When they came out in the yard there were so many different activities, most of them competitive," Brumm said. "If you didn't want to play shuffleboard or handball or ping pong, we always had a varsity game going with outside teams -- baseball, softball, hockey, football ... There were very few who didn't either watch or participate."

One day Brumm was approached by an inmate playing shuffleboard.

"The guy called me a lousy bastard because he was doing life and I had him thinking he was having a good time," Brumm said.

Brumm left in 1957 to go into construction but stayed active in hockey. He coached the real-life Hanson brothers on the semipro Marquette Iron Rangers, co-founded the Kuwait National Hockey League in the mid-1980s and, at 77, still is involved in high school hockey in Wisconsin.

Brumm isn't sure he could run his prison program now. But he's proud of what he accomplished and of his status as a pioneer in the profession.

"When I talk to serious correctional professionals today about what we did in Marquette years ago, they just shake their heads and would not believe it if I didn't show them the photos."