And I thought I was on drugs...

...well, I was. The date was March 14, 1981 and the Kings were to square off in an afternoon game at the Fabulous Forum with the Minnesota North Stars. I was celebrating my 26th birthday on this particular Saturday, which really was not unlike most other days in my life prior to that point. I was high. Quite high. This particular day was a mescaline day. Ah, psychedelic drugs. I couldn't do them during the week, but the weekends were stunningly trippy. My partner in crime on this day was Rebecca, a dear friend who had worked with me at RCA Records and enjoyed ogling Kings rookie Larry Murphy, and getting as high as I was on any given day.

We arrived early, and went down to the row of seats immediately behind the glass, next to the penalty box. This was a ritual, and because this was in the pre-Gretzky era, there were very few of us in Los Angeles who bothered, and therefore were never bothered by the Forum security people. In fact, the names Beatrice and Ronnie stand out as ushers who knew us well, and welcomed our presence during warmups.

I had become good friends with Kings left wing Steve Jensen during his tenure with the team, and this, his third season, was a day that he'd skate over to the glass to say hi to Becky and to wish me a happy birthday (Steve was exactly one month younger than me, but his birthday usually fell in the off season, as Kings teams didn't go too far in the post season even back in those days... grin.)

So Becky and I were just coming on to the mescaline, and we were grinning from ear to ear. Steve said, "Hey buddy, I have a surprise for you." and I figured we would be going out to Pancho's after the game for some margaritas, and merriment.

We went up to our familiar seats in Section 12, and the game was set to begin. Mario Lessard defended the goal to our right, and Don Beaupre defended the goal to our left. The puck was dropped and seemingly just seconds later the Kings scored. Then another goal. And another. And another. The crowd was going wild. I remember thinking it was as if the teams just skated from one end of the ice to the other, taking turns putting the red light on. It was less than halfway through the first period and the score was Kings 6, Minnesota 3. I turned to Rebecca and said, "This is it!!! This is the surprise!!!" and I was certain that Steve had somehow fixed it so that the two teams were just going to score at will until time ran out, and that for my birthday I was given the opportunity to see the highest scoring hockey game in NHL history.

Well, as it turned out, the two teams settled in and only scored a few more goals for the remainder of the game, and eventually the mescaline wore off, and my birthday was celebrated with a Kings victory, margaritas and merriment at Pancho's.

One of the goals that was most memorable in that game was by veteran Don Luce, whom the Kings had acquired four days earlier in a rather celebrated deal that included picking up Rick Martin for their playoff run. In fact, this was the only goal of Don's career scored in a Los Angeles uniform, and my memory of it is pretty vivid. Luce was going off on a change and had the puck on his stick in the neutral zone. He lofted it high in the air (causing me to say, as I always did when a player did that for the Kings... "Syl Apps!!!" --- as that was his "trademark") and skated to the bench. The puck floated into the Stars zone and landed neatly on Don Beaupre's left shoulder, bouncing off of the rookie goalie and falling behind the goal line into the net. When Dennis Packer, the Kings public address announcer said, "LOS ANGELES GOAL, scoring his FIRST goal as a King, and sixteenth goal of the season, Number 23... DON LUCE!" there was no one more shocked than Luce himself. He never saw it once it left his stick.



So the title of this piece was "And I thought I was on drugs..." because in researching this story I found two wire service articles detailing the game. Unfortunately I did not find a box score, but check this out... Two articles... two different final scores. The correct one is 10-4, but I suppose if you lived in certain parts of the country, you thought the Kings had rolled a lucky 11.