You can call it the ‘High Wrap’ or ‘The Michigan.’ Just give Bill Armstrong the credit he deserves
Sometime in the summer of 1992 at a hockey camp hosted by former NHLer Doug Crossman, one of the instructors fiddled with one of the scores of pucks on the ice, just like he had done for thousands and thousands of hours before. Towards the end of a practice, the kids wanted to do penalty shots, like most kids want to do at the end of every practice. The instructor told them if they did a set of suicides from one goal line to the other, they could finish on a shootout. They went back and forth, then back and forth, all while the instructor continued fiddling with the puck around the net.
He’d been doing it his whole life. Hockey players, like all professional athletes, practice their craft meticulously, through Timbits and peewee, and if they’re good enough, junior and college, right through the brief window of time that someone pays you to play a game your parents spent thousands for you to play. It’s a career you start training for before you start forming sentences. You’re wearing skates as much as you’re wearing sneakers, and there’s hours and hours and all kinds of time to come up with this stuff.
Then it happened. As the kids finished their gruelling task, the instructor, Bill Armstrong, coming off his third season of professional hockey and having already played the one and only NHL regular-season game he would ever appear in, was standing around the net, scooped the puck on his blade like he practiced before and — *BANG* — put it in the net under the crossbar. The kids collectively went “ooooh,” seeing something no one had ever seen before. On some rink in London, Ont., one of the greatest highlights hockey has ever produced was created. Over the next six seasons between the American Hockey League and the now-defunct International Hockey League, Armstrong would score eight goals with the move, six before someone used it on national television.
Today, Armstrong lives a quiet, private life in Hartford, CT., long retired from hockey and working in real estate. After I saw Connor Bedard of the Chicago Blackhawks and Trevor Zegras of the Anaheim Ducks score what Armstrong calls “The High Wrap” in the same night, I reached out to the 57-year-old they call “Army” to find out what it felt like to see two players at the game’s highest level score using the goal he created 30 years earlier. He agreed, and a scheduled 20- or 30-minute interview turned into nearly an hour and a half, filled with fascinating anecdotes of a life in hockey, the granular details that can affect someone’s Hockey DB page, the origins of The High Wrap and why there’s no resentment in the move almost never being called that.
A native of London, Armstrong dressed for his hometown Junior B club with the London Diamonds (now called the London Nationals), then earned a college scholarship and played three seasons with the Western Michigan Broncos in the NCAA before former Philadelphia Flyers general manager Bobby Clarke signed him to a professional contract. When thinking back to his first professional season with the AHL’s Hershey Bears in 1989-90, scoring only 10 goals and 16 points, he says there was an adjustment period.
“Immediately I felt a difference, and this was when players would really police themselves. I came out of college where you weren’t allowed to fight or you would be automatically kicked out of the game, and everyone had to wear a full face mask,” Armstrong said. “All of a sudden, you had to stand up for yourself. I had to really decide what kind of style I wanted to play.”
He certainly made his choice. Despite the origin of this interview being a skill move Armstrong forged and having played a career where he scored over 500 points in nine professional seasons, the left winger evolved into a bruising power forward who finished checks and could catch you with your head down if you came across center ice. He finished with 1,222 penalty minutes through those nine seasons, and you’re more than welcome to look up his name plus “hockey fights” in the YouTube search bar if you want visual proof.
He was able to carve out more space for himself in his second season, scoring 36 goals and 27 assists for 63 points and 150 penalty minutes through 70 games. It was during this season that Armstrong would be called up and play the one career regular season game that appears on his Hockey DB page, where he recorded an assist on a Scott Mellanby goal, which ended up being the game winner, in a 5-3 win for the Flyers over the Chicago Blackhawks on Feb. 18, 1991. When I asked him about the experience of being called him and getting a chance to play in the NHL, he shared a bit of frustration over what he and the over 400 other players and goalies may feel who are part of the one-game club.
“It’s funny to me when people bring this up because, for me, I played nine years of professional hockey, but on the back of a card, it says I played one game. There’s so much missing from that,” Armstrong said. “It doesn’t account for the amount of exhibition games I played or how many times I got called up to the NHL and didn’t play, or how many times I went out for warmup then told me in the tunnel ‘you’re not going in tonight, the guy you were called up for is good to go.’
“There’s so much sweat and tears that went into trying to be there and play at level. I often sat in the press box and watched an NHL game, and while I was being paid to be in the NHL, on the back of a hockey card, it looks like I played one game and was sent back down,” he continued. “If I start telling the story of playing one game at dinner parties, they don’t grasp that I was in the NHL for weeks at a time, practicing with the club on call up.”
There’s exasperation in his voice, maybe at me for asking the question, others who have asked him that before or the circumstances that led to it being something to ask to begin with. When he shares this and other stories, it doesn’t feel like there’s resentment or a feeling of woe is me; the frustration comes from fans not understanding or appreciating what went into that one game on the stat line or how many opportunities there were along the way to add to it.
Look at Armstrong’s 1994-95 campaign, where he played with the New Jersey Devils’ AHL affiliate, the Albany River Rats, finishing second in scoring with 79 points (32 goals and 47 assists) and helping them win the Calder Cup that spring. What you may not know is that after they won the Calder Cup, he was called up with the Devils for their Stanley Cup run as a Black Ace. Not many players can say they were part of two championship runs at the same time, and while Armstrong’s name doesn’t appear on the Stanley Cup and he did not receive a ring when the Devils handed them out, he practiced with the club every day and watched them sweep the Detroit Red Wings.
“None of that shows up on a hockey card.”
After winning the Calder Cup with the River Rats, Armstrong bounced between leagues in 1995-96, playing 10 games in Albany before splitting the rest of the year in the IHL with the Indianapolis Ice and the Detroit Vipers, producing another 40-goal, 75-point season with more than 100 penalty minutes between the three teams. He would struggle with the Grand Rapids Griffins to start the following season before being traded to the Orlando Solar Bears midway through the year.
Before joining Orlando, Armstrong had pulled off the High Wrap four times when he played for Albany after River Rats head coach Robbie Ftorek gave him permission in a game. At the time, he called the move the “Do it,” since that’s what fans and teammates would yell at him when he held the puck behind the net. “Do it! Do it!” When he joined the Vipers in 1996, he did it twice more, the second being on March 23, 1996 against the Cleveland Lumberjacks in a 5-3 win. Through the years when he scored using the move, either the arena’s television production wasn’t up to par and any footage of the goal was too grainy for ESPN or the game wasn’t televised at all. But the footage from the Lumberjacks game was so good, the Vipers sent the tape to ESPN to see if they would like to air it on SportsCenter.
What Armstrong didn’t know is that the day after he did the move vs. Cleveland, someone else would score using the move with a slightly larger audience.
If you asked the average hockey fan, or even those within the game at various levels, most would call Armstrong’s move “The Michigan,” coined after Mike Legg scored while playing for the Michigan Wolverines against the Minnesota Gophers in the 1996 NCAA West Regional semifinal. Legg’s goal became a sports highlight staple, going viral when going viral still meant being sick. It won ESPN’s 1997 “Outrageous Play of the Year” and TSN’s Goal of the Year in 1996. Legg was even part of an EA Sports campaign promoting that the move would be added to the NHL video game’s 2021 version.
Legg and Michigan would go on to win the NCAA Championship and the goal has engrained itself in the collective hockey psyche in the near 30 years since. But anytime Legg, who spent a year in Finland and bounced around lower-tier professional leagues in North America, was asked about how he learned the move, he would credit Armstrong with being the one who taught him how to do the move at one of the many pro skates that take place in the London every summer.
“Bill has great hands,” Legg said in an interview with Patrick Hruby in an ESPN interview from April 2010. “I’ll never forget, one day I’m watching him, maybe from the far blue line, and he does something. It was the move. I’m like, ‘Oh, my goodness, I have to see this again.'”
Armstrong told me that the week both goals were scored, they got relatively even coverage in Detroit and throughout Michigan, with broadcasters saying “here’s the guy who taught Mike Legg … now here’s Mike Legg.”
Now in Orlando, Armstrong played for a team that shared an arena with the Orlando Magic of the NBA, meaning they had a top-level camera production for each of the Solar Bears home games. With the various angles and crisper feed, Armstrong scored twice with the Solar Bears and finally made ESPN, with Rich Eisen calling highlights of him using his unpatented move.
Armstrong’s relationship with his creation and its place in the game speaks to a larger tale that’s seldom told for those who spent nearly their entire careers in the minors, playing in front of three or four figures worth of fans and finding second careers outside of the sport once they retire. He sounded more introspective as our conversation went on, recognizing that the game itself will always be bigger than any one individual or one move that may have started as a gimmick, but has evolved into a way for players to showcase how freakishly talented they are.
Towards the end of the interview, I asked Armstrong if after all this, after scoring eight goals as a professional while using the move, if it bothered him that Legg’s goal had taken up most of the oxygen, and that he received the lion’s share of credit when it came to the history of the move, including its generally agreed upon name.
“No not at all. Legg scored the goal in a huge game, and good on him,” said Armstrong. “But when it’s misreported, that’s when it bothers me. Is it The Michigan because he scored my goal? Or is it The High Wrap because I created it? You can call it whatever you want, I’m happy knowing it’s my goal.”
Seeing two of the game’s young stars in Bedard and Zegras use the move at the highest level over 30 years after creating it? That must make him happy as well.
“Absolutely. That’s what makes it so special.”
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