Height: 6-2
Weight: 220
Shoot: L
Born: 29 May 1953, Ponoka AB
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Regular Season & Playoff Scoring Record (key)
| year | team | |||||||||||
| 1973-74 | Edmonton | |||||||||||
| 1974-75 | Edmonton | |||||||||||
| 1975-76 | Calgary | |||||||||||
| Totals: |
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Why, It's "Mountain" McCrimmon • by Terry Jones • The Hockey Spectator • November 16, 1973
"Mountain" they call him. "Man Mountain McCrimmon." You've heard of the Medicine Hat Tigers junior team which supplied Lanny McDonald to the Toronto Maple Leafs and Tom Lysiak to the Atlanta Flames. Man Mountain McCrimmon played defense for that team last year. Going into Medicine Hat Tiger end of the ice was like playing Buck Buck with the Bill Cosby gang and Fat Albert coming down on you saying "hey, hey, haaay." He's a rookie defenseman with Edmonton Oilers of the World Hockey Association. McCrimmon is 6-2 and 215 pounds. He has flaming red hair and wears it in an Afro sort of style. He wears two twos on his back, which is symbolic. Jim McCrimmon isn't against taking two two-minute penalties. He's short on temper but long on crime. McCrimmon doesn't come so much to play as he comes to hit. Which, although highly desireable in a hockey player, is more along the lines of what you'd expect from someone who played football. Jim McCrimmon almost made it with the Canadian Football League Edmonton Eskimos two years ago. He was a late cut in training camp. He decided to quit the game and relax during the summer before his draft year. "I had to give up football," he said wincing. "During the two years I combined both there didn't seem to be a month of the year when I wasn't hurting. Eskimos asked me to attend a college in the States on a scholarship to develop my football potential but I had to make up my mind between football and hockey. They told me the door is still open if I want to come back but I don't think I'll be playing any more football." Why hockey? "When I looked around the training camp in football and found out what some of the players were getting then started thinking about what some of the guys I was playing with in hockey got, it really wasn't a difficult decision." McCrimmon was the head of the riot squad in Medicine Hat, a team that set all time penalty records in the league. "Sure we had a reputation of being dirty," he said. "I don't know if that's the word I'd use. Aggressive, maybe. But I'll tell you one thing, it works. We got our sticks up a little too much and took some bad penalties. We lost a couple games because of that. But we won some, too." The last time McCrimmon got the tar beat out of him was in Eskimo camp. Even then, the other guy smarted some, too. He says there are several similarities between hitting in the two sports and figures football has helped him some. It also had drawbacks. "Football gave me a bad habit of swinging my hands and elbows. Sometimes my fists and elbows are up when I hit someone and I've taken several penalties because of it." There was another little problem. "When I played football I got my weight up to 200. I came to training camp two years ago at 230. Training camp isn't too pleasant at 230." |
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