Toughest Broad Street Bully of them all? Barry Ashbee’s legacy lives on.

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

It was 4:30 p.m. April 16. In 2½ hours the Flyers would be hitting the ice for the regular-season finale against the Washington Capitals.

“Hold it a little higher and tilt it a little,” Flyers photographer Len Redkoles said as he directed Travis Sanheim and Dan Ashbee in the Zack Hill Media Center at the Wells Fargo Center.

The two were holding up a two-tiered award marked with names and highlighted by a bronzed skate on top. The names belonged to defensemen who sported the orange and black of the Flyers like Sanheim. The skate belonged to Dan’s father.

“The Barry Ashbee Trophy,” the plaque underneath the skate reads, “awarded annually to the most outstanding Flyers defenseman as selected by a panel of sportswriters and sportscasters.”

Ashbee wasn’t a member of the Flyers for very long.

He never hit the 1,000-plus-game mark like his teammate Bobby Clarke. His name does not fill the record book like Bill Barber’s or Bernie Parent’s. He donned the Flyers jersey for just 270 games across four seasons. But his name joins those Hockey Hall of Famers in the Flyers’ hallowed halls and his No. 4 hangs from the rafters. His legacy is as heavy as the trophy that now bears his name.

I met Barry when I was sent down by the Boston Bruins. I was still with their organization, and they sent me to Hershey, which they had a working agreement with. Barry Ashbee was a defenseman for the Hershey Bears at that time. ... Watching him play and play defense and how smart he was, how he controlled the puck and made plays, I said, ‘What is this guy doing here in the minor leagues? He should be in the NHL.’ That’s how good he was. — Gary Dornhoefer, Flyers forward, 1967-78

Barry Ashbee was a journeyman.

The 5-foot-10, 180-pound blueliner toiled in the minors for years, playing three in the Eastern Professional Hockey League and seven in the American Hockey League with Hershey. He did get a 14-game cup of coffee with the Boston Bruins in 1965-66, notching the primary assist in his NHL debut against the New York Rangers.

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But the guy known as “Ash Can” — who, by the way, never smoked and no one knows where the nickname came from — was sent back down. A back injury kept him off the ice for a good chunk of the 1965-66 season and the next. He returned for the 1967-68 season and helped lead the Bears to the 1969 Calder Cup. Ashbee was inducted into the Bears Hall of Fame in 2021.

He was one of those guys in the offseason when he was younger who worked on the towers, the high towers in New York that the unions all worked on. He said to me one day after practice, he said, ‘Yeah, I used to work on those high towers. It would really [tick] you off if someone fell in the afternoon. If you’re going to fall, fall in the morning so we get the whole day off.’ He had a good sense of humor. — Bobby Clarke, Flyers forward, 1969-84

New Flyers general manager Keith Allen acquired Ashbee in a minor-league deal in 1970. The move was termed “small and puzzling” in the Bulletin. Instead, the puzzle piece was a perfect fit.

Known as an old-school, rugged defenseman, Ashbee wanted to win. And he didn’t take too kindly to teammates who didn’t. Could you blame him? It took him till the age of 31 to become a mainstay in the NHL. But while “it was always black and white with him; there was never any gray,” he became a beloved teammate.

“He was the kind of guy that wouldn’t always tell you what you wanted to hear, but he’d tell you the truth,” Don Saleski said. “As hard as that is for people to hear sometimes, you can always count on him for his honesty and being forthright and he was a great human being.”

“You always knew where you stood with him, and he also had your back all the time, every single day,” backup goalie Bobby Taylor said.

And Ashbee proved it night in and night out.

He punched referee Bryan Lewis during a game in Pittsburgh to protest a call, earning an eight-game suspension. And in 1972 he was involved in a melee with the Vancouver Canucks — and their fans. According to a report in the Vancouver Sun, he was one of seven Flyers charged with creating a disturbance “by using obscene language and by fighting with spectators with fists and by wielding hockey sticks against and in close proximity to spectators in the general seating area for spectators.”

There’s a reason Barber said Ashbee “was the definition of a Flyer. He was a warrior, hard-nosed, tough, competed hard, a mentor on the hockey team for us younger guys, to make us accountable when it was needed.”

He was a Broad Street Bully. Maybe he was the Broad Street Bully.

My rookie year we were playing in Pittsburgh, and we had a rivalry with Pittsburgh, and there was a faceoff right in front of our bench. It was a rough game that night and they had a guy, Hank Nowak, for their team. He came on the ice and Barry thought that they were going to try to maybe go after Bobby Clarke. So he just jumped off the bench, said, ‘Freddie [Shero], I’m going on the ice,’ and he jumped on the ice and went and up and told Clarkie, ‘I’m going to go up against him.’ And that was it. And he just did that. — Jimmy Watson, Flyers defenseman, 1972-82

Ashbee led by example. While he showed toughness on the ice — he did have 291 penalty minutes in 284 NHL games — he also showed it in the locker room.

A guy who spent his summers working construction — including helping to build Three Mile Island — Ashbee dealt with a multitude of injuries. A blue-collar, reliable defenseman, he played through a pinched nerve in his neck that required him to play with a big white collar — a “toilet seat” — akin to the neck rolls once sported by NFL players in the 1970s.

“He didn’t like it if people wouldn’t work, especially after all the years he spent in Hershey feeling like he had gotten buried down there. So if a guy wasn’t willing to work hard for what he wanted and wanted to get, my dad wasn’t very tolerant of that,” Dan Ashbee said. “That’s one of the things I’ve heard from a lot of the guys over the years, he just wouldn’t take anybody not trying, taking a day off kind of thing. It wasn’t in his vocabulary to do that.”

And Ashbee played through pain to stay in games. To get those NHL minutes he longed for. Because he wanted to win. It is something that 50 years later still stands out to his teammates. He may not have worn a letter, but he was a leader.

One time, Freddie Shero was coaching and Freddie used to line us up on the goal line at the end of practice to skate. I was 20 years old and playing quite a bit so Freddie came up and said, ‘Clarke, you’re playing a lot, you can go off, you don’t have to skate. Ashbee, you can go off, you’re playing a lot, you don’t have to skate. Just lucky I didn’t leave the ice and I just stood there and Ashbee said, ‘[Expletive] you, Freddie. If my teammates can skate, I can skate.’ It was a [heck] of a lesson for a young player. — Clarke

But in a moment, it ended.

A shot by Rangers defenseman Dale Rolfe, ironically his roommate in junior hockey and teammate with Hershey, hit Ashbee in the right eye during overtime of Game 4 of the 1974 Stanley Cup semifinals. It was such a gruesome injury that Daily News sportswriter Jay Greenberg wrote in his book, Full Spectrum, that a woman in the stands fainted. Clarke recalled recently that the team trainer said his “eyeball was on his cheek.”

The blueliner, who waited forever to reach the NHL, who was so close to reaching his dream of winning a Stanley Cup, saw his playing days end against the very team he faced in his NHL debut.

The Flyers lost Game 4 but went on to win the series in seven games. Twenty-one days later the Flyers, and Ashbee, were Stanley Cup champions.

“It was bittersweet for him in that he couldn’t be on the ice with them,” Dan Ashbee said of his father, who was in the locker room, wearing sunglasses, to celebrate. “But he was very happy to be a part of that whole season, and getting to where they were and doing what he had done. Very happy, very proud of it in his own way. He really wished he could have been on the ice with them.”

[There was] a fishing camp up in northern Canada, the ones where you fly in and then they come back in a week and get you. After our first Cup, there was about 10 of us that went up there. Bill Flett and Ash Can and all those guys. Clarkie. Bill Barber. And Bill Flett, we called him Cowboy, he went to cast. ... Cowboy’s fishing hook caught Barry underneath his good eye; it was probably a quarter of an inch from his eye. And of course, we’re all, what do we do? What do we do? And Ash Can, he always gave Cowboy [stuff] all the time. And so Cowboy’s like, I’ll handle Barry. So, he started pouring out the whiskey on the eye, and we had these dirty old fish knives, he was digging it up from under his eye and Barry didn’t even blink. And he goes, ‘Cowboy, if you don’t [expletive] hurry up, you’re going to waste all that whiskey and that’ll really make me mad.’ — Bobby Taylor, Flyers goalie, 1971-76

(Further reporting on this fish tale suggests that Bob Kelly was the one whose hook caught Ashbee underneath his eye, and Orest Kindrachuck dug the hook out afterward)

Although his playing days ended as he lost the majority of his vision in the eye, Ashbee left a legacy on the ice. His toughness and leadership were imprinted on André Dupont, who was acquired in December 1972. With Ashbee the elder statesman and the kid who was almost 10 years to the day his junior — Dupont’s birthday is July 27; Ashbee was born on July 28, 1939 — they became a formidable duo.

Ashbee finished with a plus-minus of plus-53 and Dupont plus-34 in the season when the Flyers won their first Cup. It was such an impressive season for the grizzled veteran, he was named a second-team NHL All-Star. Dupont credits Ashbee for giving him the freedom to play a two-way game — and to help calm him down.

“I wanted to hit everybody, I was a physical player and sometimes I was too anxious,” Dupont said. “He would calm me down, say, ‘Hey, Moose, wait, wait. They’ll come to you.’ I was lucky enough to have a coach on the ice with me at the time.”

And then Ashbee was a coach on the bench. Offered a spot as an assistant coach to help run the defense, he thought about heading back to Canada before accepting the role in the 1974-75 season. A few months later, he was right there, mere inches from the ice, as the Flyers won their second straight Stanley Cup.

“When he sat down in that dressing room and talked to you, you just knew that the fire was coming, that it was there,” Terry Crisp said. “And that’s what sticks with me because, you know, in sports, you have to have that. And we won two years because Barry Ashbee instilled a lot of that in us.”

I still think about him, you know, all these years later, and I do a lot of crosswords. So very often, we would be sitting there on the bus or the plane, and he’d have like a four-letter word on the right side of the crossword. And he’d come up with a seven-letter word and just write the first four letters in the squares. And continue outside of the crossword with the other three letters and we laughed our asses off — Bill Clement, Flyers forward, 1971-75

Ashbee never wanted accolades.

The story goes that he almost walked off the ice when the Flyers honored him after he officially retired from the eye injury as a camper was rolled out onto the Spectrum ice. Because, as his son said, for Ashbee, “no one person should try and take more credit for anything that’s going on because you’re all doing it together.”

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

And he didn’t want the Barry Ashbee Trophy, but he was honored. The guys whose names now are etched onto the individual bronze markers that fill the trophy were honored to get it, too. Joe Watson was the first in 1975. His brother, Jim, received it the following year. Names like Mark Howe, Kjell Samuelsson, Éric Desjardins, Kimmo Timonen, and now Sanheim, for the second time, are among the Flyers’ best blueliners to earn the honor.

His old partner Dupont was the last to be presented the award by Ashbee in 1977.

I have more vivid memories of him when he was an assistant coach and coming into the locker room one morning and saying to me, ‘I’ve got cancer.’ And I said, ‘Get the [heck] out of here.’ He said, ‘No, I’m telling you I got cancer. He said, ‘Look at this,’ and he had bruises all over his body. And he went to the doctor and wound up in the hospital and I remember going to my last visit with him. I went to the hospital when he was near the end and my last visit with him was the day that he passed away. So it was real sad moment. Sad time in our life because of how much I respected him and what I thought of Barry as a person and as a friend. — Don Saleski, Flyers forward 1971-79

Following Game 1 of their 1977 quarterfinal matchup with the Toronto Maple Leafs, Ashbee showed the team doctor bruising on his arms and hands. He was hospitalized two days later to begin chemotherapy after leukemia was diagnosed.

A month later he was gone.

Ashbee was 37 but left behind a legacy for the Flyers that still lives on. The Flyers Wives Carnival has honored his memory for decades and portions of the money raised from the event over the years have gone to the Barry Ashbee Research Laboratories at Hahnemann University Hospital.

And every spring, who he was and what he represented is passed down to the next generation of defensemen to wear the same orange and black he proudly wore.

“I’m not bitter,” Ashbee told reporters at the time of his diagnosis. “Some people strive 60 years or so to achieve certain goals in life and never make it. I got what I wanted when I was 34. A Stanley Cup. I had thought about being on a Stanley Cup winner since I was 7 years old.”

Number one, he was a great hockey player, great defenseman. And, number two, it was the same as a human being. He was a great, great individual. I share this with people — don’t delay, enjoy the friends that you have, the people who will come into your life. Because life is short. It goes on fast. Look, I’m 79 already. And when you look at the rings when we won, it’s 50 years ago. So life goes by fast. — Bernie Parent, Flyers goalie, 1967-71, 1973-79