Son of Bruins player suspended from NHL for betting returns to Boston to thank fans
The son of a Bruins player suspended from the NHL for betting in the 1940s says he’s not angry about how the league treated his father, and instead, he’s thanking fans for their support over the decades.
Don Gallinger Jr. returned to Boston last week with his wife and daughter, handing out cards of his father Don Gallinger to fans outside the TD Garden prior to last Thursday’s win over Toronto.
In the 1947-48 season, NHL president Clarence Campbell banned Gallinger and his teammate Billy Taylor for life from the league for betting on games involving the Bruins. The suspensions were lifted 22 years later.
“Anybody who is my age or older are aware of the story and aware of my father,” Gallinger Jr. told the Herald. “Many people today who’d be in their 20s or 30s, they’ve never heard of my father.”
“He never got a chance to say goodbye,” Gallinger Jr. said of his father. “And he never got over it. It ruined his life and tainted everything he attempted to do thereafter.”
Hockey historian Fred Addis also made the trek last week from Canada to the hub alongside the Gallinger family. The trip coincided with the release of “Gallinger: A Life Suspended,” a biography that Addis wrote highlighting Gallinger’s disrupted hockey career and life after the suspension.
Before the suspension, Gallinger was the youngest player to ever play for the Bruins when he made the team as a 17-year-old in 1942. He scored two overtime playoff goals and led Boston in scoring in 1945-46.
Already betting on the Bruins to win games, Taylor convinced Gallinger to bet the team to lose games they thought they’d lose anyways, instead, Addis said. The pair became involved with James Tamer, a Detroit gambler and convicted criminal, and bet on eight games over a period of three months in 1947-48.
“He had quite a run here in Boston before everything went south,” Addis said. “What we were hoping to do is to come to Boston – although it is the next generation or even the generation after that – and just to say ‘Thank you’ to the fans in Boston who supported Don Gallinger during the good times.”
The trip to Boston came a week after the NHL suspended Ottawa Senators forward Shane Pinto for 41 games, making the 22-year-old American the first modern-day hockey player banned for sports gambling.
The league said the half-season ban was for “activities relating to sports wagering” and that its investigation found no evidence Pinto bet on NHL games.
Addis called Gallinger’s suspension “certainly relevant” today even though “you can’t compare” society back then to what it is now.
“You watch all the hockey games and football games today, every second ad is about gambling and where to go and how to do it,” Gallinger Jr. said. “We go from suspending my father for 22 years for gambling to now they’re sort of like the ones running the house of gambling.”
