Edmonton Oilers Legacy - Peter Pocklington

Aside from intervening on Tikkanen’s contract, Pocklington entrusted personnel management to Sather, who had been groomed for the general manager’s job before the Oilers entered the NHL.

"After Gretzky, Peter Pocklington’s most important hockey asset was Glen Sather," wrote Douglas Hunter in The Glory Barons. "For all the disparaging remarks Peter Pocklington would invite over the ensuing years, he was a good owner for the Oilers as they entered the NHL. He had money, and he did not have some dangerously deluded notion of himself as a hockey sage. He would play a minimal role in the day-to-day affairs of the team, leaving its management almost entirely to Glen Sather."

Life before Sather had presented challenges that Pocklington met head-on. After the 1975-76 season, with the Oilers debt reaching about $1.6 million, Nelson Skalbania convinced Pocklington to relieve him of half the team’s equity.

The two split up the team at the same press conference announcing Skalbania’s purchase of the team from Dr. Charles Allard. But Skalbania first proposed the idea at a restaurant in October 1976. Pocklington and his wife, Eva, were eating at the Steak Loft in Edmonton when Skalbania arrived with a group of reporters.

"The two entrepreneurs bartered their way to a new ownership agreement," wrote Douglas Hunter in The Glory Barons. "Pocklington gave Skalbania a vintage Rolls Royce Phaeton used in the film The Great Gatsby, a painting by Maurice Utrillo…and a diamond ring worth about $150,000 that happened to be on Eva’s finger. Pocklington put the value of the swap at about $700,000. In acquiring the team, he also agreed to take on half the $1.6 million in debt, putting him $100,000 in the hole."

Meanwhile, Pocklington’s public profile would extend far beyond professional hockey. The son of an insurance executive from London, Ontario, Pocklington’s business ventures began in car sales and real estate.

He would eventually run for the Progressive Conservative Party leadership and had the national name recognition (not all was positive) to go with it.

In a book published in 1981, Pocklington admitted to having participated in dangerous jet-boat racing, and claimed Mexican bandits captured him when his craft broke down during one of the races.

He also was the victim of a hostage taking at his Edmonton home in 1982. Ironically, police wounded Pocklington during the rescue. Pocklington also admitted to consulting a psychic, who, incidentally, tried and failed to sue him for sexual harassment.