‘It was our watering hole’: How a South Jersey bar became the Broad Street Bullies’ favorite hangout

Fourth in a series remembering the Flyers, who won their first Stanley Cup championship 50 years ago.

There were a few minutes left in the game when a bartender came up from the basement of Rexy’s, a small bar on the Black Horse Pike in West Collingswood Heights that became a Flyers haven in the 1970s, and said there was a small fire. Everyone had to leave.

“I thought, ‘Small fire? OK. How bad could it be?’” said Dave Leonardi, a diehard Flyers fan and one of the bar’s regulars.

The fire department, Leonardi figured, would shove a hose in the basement and extinguish the small fire before he bought another round. So he left Rexy’s with his mug of beer, moved his car to a side street, and tuned the radio of his Buick Opel to the end of Game 6 of the 1975 semifinal series between the Flyers and the New York Islanders.

“We listened to the Flyers lose and then opened the car door to see what was going on with the fire,” Leonardi said. “Smoke was billowing out the front door. Just pouring out. I said, ‘I don’t think we’re going back in there today.’”

Rexy’s opened in 1943, when the Fietto family moved across the river from South Philly. They served hot sausage pizza and had Schmidt’s on tap, making it the perfect place in the late 1960s for a bunch of 20-somethings from Canada who skated for the Flyers.

The bar was both close to the team’s practice rink in Cherry Hill and on the way home from the Spectrum. The players sat on barstools in the afternoon and brought their wives after the games for dinner.

“It was our watering hole,” said Terry Crisp, a forward when the Flyers won back-to-back Stanley Cup championships in 1974 and ‘75.

» READ MORE: The legend of Sign Man: Meet the Flyers fan who urged on the Broad Street Bullies to the Stanley Cup

The team’s watering hole soon became the fans’ watering hole as it didn’t take long for everyone to learn about the pub where they could buy a beer for the Broad Street Bullies. After games, the fans packed inside with the Flyers, the shaggy-haired stars of the city’s sports scene. It was hockey’s Studio 54.

“It was a zoo after all the games,” said Patty Fietto, whose father, Pat, owned the bar. “It was crazy. It was just nuts.”

Bobby Clarke joined the Flyers in 1969, when he was just 20, a year younger than the drinking age in New Jersey at the time. But he was still at Rexy’s every day after practice.

“I could sneak a beer,” he said.

Fred Shero — the brilliant Flyers coach who even traveled to the Soviet Union to sharpen his tactics — practiced the Flyers early in the morning at the Cherry Hill Ice House, a dilapidated rink on Berlin Road.

“There were rats as big as cats running around there,” said Joe Watson, an original Flyers player who stayed for both Cup teams. “The ice was bumpy and there was a big dent at center ice. God almighty. The early days of a hockey player were crazy, but they were a lot of fun.”

The morning sessions meant Clarke and the boys could be at Rexy’s no later than noon. It was perfect.

“We would talk hockey, have a bite to eat, have a beer, and go home,” said Bill Barber, who joined the Flyers in 1972. “It was our stop. I think it drew our team even closer.”

The Bullies were mostly small-town Canadians who made decent but certainly not astronomical money to play hockey. Many of them lived in furnished apartments — “plastic drapes and plastic dishes,” Bob Kelly said — with six-month rentals in Barrington.

“It seemed like the guys who bought houses were the ones who got traded away,” said Kelly, who joined the Flyers in 1970.

Rexy’s was their sanctuary. About eight to 10 players sat at the bar after each practice, blending in with factory workers who just finished overnight shifts.

“They would come in after work at 8, 9, 10 in the morning, have a beer and a shot and a sandwich and then go home and sleep,” Clarke said. “It was just regular people sitting at the bar having a drink. We were all working-class people from Canada who came down here because we had an ability to play hockey.”

After the game, the players followed an unwritten rule to spend an hour at Rexy’s. It always seemed like the whole team was inside. It was intended as team bonding, but the unwritten rule became an even better way for players to bond with their passionate followers.

“We played hard and we partied hard,” Watson said. “We really did. We realized that it’s not going to last forever, so we might as well enjoy it.”

» READ MORE: How many 1974 Stanley Cup champion Flyers can you name?

It was the place where fans could sip a beer with the Bullies and talk about the game they just watched.

“I saw Bill Barber and I said, ‘Great job tonight,’” said Leonardi, a fan who became known as the team’s Sign Man. “We scored two power-play goals. That’s how we won. Both times, he drew the penalty against the same guy. He goes, ‘Wow. Thanks for noticing.’”

The Flyers transformed in the early 1970s from a sleepy expansion franchise to a phenomenon on ice that regularly sold out the Spectrum. The Broad Street Bullies had Clarkie, Moose, The Hammer, Big Bird, and the Hound. They pummeled their opponents and their games became spectacles. At the Spectrum, the Flyers were superstars. At Rexy’s, the Bullies were just normal guys at the bar.

“We weren’t any different than anyone else in the community who supported us and loved us,” Clarke said. “We were the same as them. Nobody had big egos. Nobody thought they were special. We were just normal people who happened to play hockey.”

Guido Fietto purchased a small bar on Black Horse Pike called the Homestead, moving his wife and children from 10th and Snyder to an apartment atop the bar. They renamed it Rexy’s, the nickname Guido Fietto earned as a boxer in South Philly. It had 36 seats at the bar, booths pushed up against the windows, and a dining room in the back.

“We did tortellini soup — no one had ever heard of tortellini soup,” Patty Fietto said. “We used to give the baskets of garlic bread. Nobody did that before. Hot roast beef with red gravy on a torpedo roll. They loved it. Nobody ever did anything like that.”

The home of tortellini soup became the Flyers’ spot after Forbes Kennedy, a center on the original team, stumbled in.

“He didn’t feel like going home after practice so he’d go to every watering hole and then come back and rate them,” Watson said. “He said this is probably the finest one we have over there. That’s how it started.”

Pat Fietto, Guido’s son, bought the bar from his father along with his brother, Tony. Pat Fietto quickly became close with the Flyers, doing more than just pour their beers. Clarke, who regularly stopped at Fietto’s Audubon home for dinner, said Fietto was a good friend and a terrific person. Crisp said the Fiettos were “the best people.”

“My father was almost like the Godfather,” Patty Fietto said. “No matter what they needed, they came to my father. If they needed a Realtor, they came to my father. If they needed a doctor, they came to my father. They spent a lot of time having a good time together. A lot of those guys would come into Rexy’s at 11 o’clock in the morning after practice and they’d still be there at 1 o’clock the next morning.

“They were all blue-collar guys. My father related to that because my father worked his ass off. I think that’s why they got along so well with my dad.”

Philadelphia had professional hockey before the Flyers arrived, but teams like the Ramblers and Rockets failed to move the needle. The region seemed tepid toward the game. But that changed in the early ‘70s as the Flyers — who reached the playoffs in three of their first five seasons but never finished a season with a winning record — transformed into brawlers.

They led the NHL in penalty minutes for the 1972-1973 season and three Flyers — Dave Schultz, Kelly, and Don Saleski — had more than 200 penalty minutes. The city was desperate for a winner as the Phillies, Eagles, and Sixers were struggling. And this — a crew of roughriders who loved uppercuts as much as they did power plays — was a team for Philly to love.

“We actually hated everyone,” Kelly said. “Especially the St. Louis Blues. We were built to go against the Blues and Boston. Everyone had a boatload of Looney Toons.”

The Bullies proved to be more than just fighters as they finished 1973 three wins shy of the Stanley Cup Final. A year later, the Flyers were champions. Pat Fietto was in the dressing room that afternoon at the Spectrum, drinking from the Cup with the players.

The Flyers eventually had to clear the arena — there was a lacrosse game in the building that night — and planned to take the party back to Rexy’s. But they couldn’t get there. Everyone else had the same idea.

There were thousands of fans outside the bar, waiting for their heroes to arrive. Traffic was backed up for miles on the Black Horse Pike. The Flyers had to find a new spot.

“You couldn’t get near it,” Crisp said. “I felt sorry for the traffic police.”

The small fire that started in the basement of Rexy’s on Mother’s Day 1975 soon engulfed the whole building. It was started, Patty Fietto said, by an automatic liquor dispenser that was recently installed. The Flyers practiced the next day with black armbands out of respect for their fallen watering hole.

They finished off the Islanders a day later and toasted Rexy’s after the game. The Flyers soon won their second straight Stanley Cup, but it was the end of an era.

“After we won our second Cup, players were being pulled in this direction and that direction,” Watson said. “It kind of faded a little. We didn’t go over there as frequently. Our team started going here, there, and everywhere.”

Rexy’s reopened later that year. It remained a popular place for some Flyers to eat but was no longer the place where fans flocked after games to drink with the team.

» READ MORE: Bernie Parent was the Broad Street Bullies’ brightest star. Now he’s the Flyers’ de facto mascot.

“The famous phrase there was ‘Watch your back,’” Leonardi said. “It was two to three deep at the bar. A mob scene. A waitress was coming through with a pizza. ‘Watch your back.’ It was probably overfilled, but nobody was counting. Everyone was just having a good time. It was like Cheers. If you walked in and no one knew your name, within 20 minutes someone would walk in that you knew.”

It’s been 50 years since the Flyers won their first Stanley Cup, but the affection felt for the Broad Street Bullies has yet to fade. They won two Cups, made Philadelphia fall for hockey, and fought everyone. But they also hung at Rexy’s, drank in Avalon, and played against fans in slow-pitch softball before staying for a barbecue.

They became insurance agents, opened liquor stores, owned landscaping companies, and sold houses. The Bullies acted like normal guys during their careers and became normal guys after their careers. It was easy for Philly to stay attached to them for 50 years because most of the Bullies never left.

“I remember Fred Shero saying, ‘Where are you going this summer,’” Barber said. “I said, ‘Well, I have a cottage back up North where I grew up.’ He said, ‘Yeah, but I think it would be important if you stayed in the area. You need to be seen. Your fans need to see you.’

“I bought a cottage one summer, sold it the next summer to my brother, and stayed in Philly. We were recognized no matter what time of year it was. They knew we were in town. We were in town for a reason. No one was running off at the end of the season to get back to Canada. We all kind of stayed in the area. This was our home. Philly was our home and it still is to this day.”

Pat Fietto died in 2019, 10 years after he sold Rexy’s. The bar is still open on the Black Horse Pike, but Patty Fietto has been there only a few times. It does not feel the same, she said, without her dad behind the bar. Leonardi never made it back in that day for another round, but he still has the mug he took to his car after the fire started. He calls it the last mug from Rexy’s, a bar where the Bullies fit in just fine.

“When you went in there, you felt like you were going home for lunch,” Clarke said.