Willi Plett was a legit tough guy. As a matter of fact, if you're talking guys who were actually players as well as fighters, off the top of my head, only Behn Wilson was tougher.
Plett fought Curt Fraser a minimum of 9 times.
Their 2nd fight was in the playoffs, and Fraser, who had incredible power, floored Plett.
I don't know what happened in their 1st fight, but pretty much all of their subsequent fights were really boring hugfests. Will I learned to watch out for Fraser's power, and fought him in close. Fraser was really strong for a somewhat smaller fighter, and was able to nullify Plett's (assumed) advantage from in close.
But because Fraser had floored Plett, and Plett had come in with the bigger reputation (not to mention his size advantage) every time they fought and Plett couldn't exact revenge, he grew increasingly frustrated.
The Canucks media took Plett's frustration as a sign he was losing every fight. He wasn't. But he lost the one that counted, and he lost it in a big way.
The Atlanta Flames were kind of peculiar in how they came up with 3 big forwards (for that era) that all started their NHL careers with a bang.
Willi Plett was 6'3" and 210+ pounds and scored 33 as a rookie (56 points in 64 games).
Harold Phillipoff was 6'3" and 220 pounds and scored 53 points in 77 games as a rookie
(Terry O'Reilly took out his knee and he was largely done as a player after that).
Eric Vail was a little smaller at 6'1" and 200+ pounds, but he scored 39 goals as a rookie.
That's pretty impressive.
I'm too lazy to look it up now, but I think they were good at letting these guys get their feet wet in the minors, rather than rushing them into the lineup right away like a lot of teams loved to do (Toronto and Vancouver seemed to love doing that).
