Tim Hunter's Black Magic

Picture it. The gloves are already on the ice, and Tim Hunter has a fistful of a man half a head taller than he is. The big fellow’s right arm, the punching arm, is folded across his own chest and going nowhere, and Hunter’s left is very much free. Somewhere in the building, somebody reaches for the only word that fits a smaller man taking a giant apart.

Black magic. The name stuck because nothing else explained it.

Tim Hunter stood six foot two and went about 200 pounds, which sounds big right up until you line him up against the men he actually fought. Edmonton had Dave Semenko, Don Jackson, and later Marty McSorley. Detroit had Bob Probert. Philadelphia had Dave Brown. Hunter fought all of them, most of them more than once, and he mostly won. In an era built for giants, that was not supposed to be possible.

A middleweight in a heavyweight town

Understand the job first. Hunter was Calgary’s sheriff for eleven seasons, the guy who answered for whatever happened to Joe Nieuwendyk, Theo Fleury, and Lanny McDonald. He did it at a size that, by enforcer standards of the 1980s, was a genuine disadvantage. The men across from him were bigger, and several of them hit like the end of the world.

He made up the difference with two things nobody could teach: conditioning and technique. For the record, this is not nostalgia inflating a fourth-liner. Hunter led the entire NHL in penalty minutes twice, 361 in 1986-87 and 375 in 1988-89, and both are still Calgary single-season records. His 2,405 career penalty minutes are the most in franchise history. He fought well over 200 documented times. You do not survive that volume against that competition on toughness alone. You need an edge.

The grip

Here is the edge, and it is beautifully simple.

A standard hockey fight starts with each guy grabbing the other’s jersey with one hand and throwing with the other. Grab with the left, punch with the right. Hunter flipped it. He would reach his right hand all the way across his opponent’s body and tie up their right arm, the punching arm, before it could do anything. That left the bigger man with one hand pinned and no offense, while Hunter’s own left stayed free to work. He turned every fight into a one-way conversation.

Against giants who were used to trading blows, that was maddening. They had the reach and the power, and none of it mattered, because the hand that delivered it was folded up and going nowhere.

Slaying the beast

So where did the name come from? One night in particular, and for once the paper was there.

The two of them had been talking about it for days. Four days before the game, Hunter told the Calgary Herald that Semenko, the most feared man in the sport and the fellow whose literal job was keeping the world off Wayne Gretzky, did not worry him. “He’s one guy who is supposed to be tough who doesn’t faze me one bit,” Hunter said. “He’s a big guy, but not a good fighter. I think he’s improved as a hockey player in the last year. If it (fighting Semenko) has to be done, I’ll be glad to do it.” Semenko’s reply was to tell the same paper that fighting was “the only reason Hunter’s there,” then pick up a camera with a 200-millimetre lens at practice, hold it in front of his face and announce: “My Tim Hunter impression.” Hunter’s nose was a running joke in two cities.

They settled it on April 17, 1983, at the Stampede Corral, in game three of the Smythe Division final. The Saddledome was still six months from opening. Four minutes and one second into the first period, Hunter got hold of him, killed the right hand and went to work, and Semenko could not get out of it. The Herald’s account the next morning had Hunter edging the Oiler tough guy in what it called the NHL’s fight of the year.

A giant, helpless, dismantled by a middleweight. Nobody had a tidy explanation, so they reached for the untidy one.

Then the linesmen arrived, and the night taught Hunter something the trick could not.

The era was insane, exhibit A

To appreciate what Hunter was operating in, borrow a story Gretzky has told. Hunter and Oilers tough guy Kevin McClelland went at it in front of the Edmonton bench during a game that was already a blowout. Hunter landed one so cleanly it broke McClelland’s nose sideways, pointing it east to west across his face. McClelland, bloodied and rearranged, turned to his own bench and screamed that it did not hurt, that he had not felt a thing. Gretzky says Hunter stopped and just stared, and the whole Oilers bench rose off the seat. That was the room Hunter clocked into every night.

The one man the magic didn’t work on

Every good trick has a counter, and Hunter was honest about his.

The crossover grip was built for right-handed fighters. Dave Brown threw left. A southpaw scrambled the whole geometry, and worse, Brown was the one heavyweight Hunter openly admitted he fought with caution. Hunter said he watched Brown crush the orbital bones of two other NHL heavies, Stu Grimson and Jim Kyte, and that he warned other fighters off trading with him. One clean shot from Brown could end a career. Against everyone else Hunter had an answer. Against Brown he had respect and a very careful plan.

There is no code

Back to those four minutes at the Corral, because they were not finished.

Hunter had won, and he knew it, and he stuck his chin out to let Semenko know. One linesman had him tied up. Semenko freed a hand and threw a punch over the official, and caught him flush. Jim Peplinski came in as the third man and fed Semenko a few of his own, which cost Peplinski a game misconduct at 4:01, the timestamp that lets you line the whole sequence up in the penalty summary decades later.

Hunter said years later that it taught him the truest thing he ever learned about the job: there is no code. He and Semenko eventually became friends and laughed about how much they had once hated each other. The punch stayed with him anyway.

Calgary lost the game 10-2. Hunter won the four minutes that people still talk about.

Why it still matters

Hunter won a Stanley Cup in 1989. He was a two-time nominee for both the Masterton and the King Clancy, the trophies that go to character guys, and he won the Flames’ humanitarian award. He went on to a long coaching career. The penalty minutes are the headline, but the part worth remembering is that Calgary’s most prolific fighter got there by being the smartest man in the fight, not the biggest.

They called it black magic. It was really just a guy who did his homework.

Correction, September 6, 2026: An earlier version of this article told the Semenko fight twice: as a 1983 playoff bout in one section, and as a separate sucker-punch incident "in one of their first meetings" in another. They are the same four minutes of the same game, April 17, 1983 at the Stampede Corral, game three of the Smythe Division final. Three independent accounts carry the identical sequence, including the Calgary Herald of April 18, 1983, which we obtained after publication. That version also said Hunter "held his own," which understates what the Herald reported, and it implied this was one of their earliest meetings. The Herald records an earlier fight between them in the fourth game of that season.