By Budd Bailey
You have to remember one crucial point about professional sports. Someone has to be really, really good to simply play one single, solitary game at a sport’s highest level. Just reach that point, an athlete has to be a star for most of the steps leading up to that brief appearance at the highest point possible.
At last look, the Buffalo Sabres have had nine players who have played exactly one game with them … and never returned to the NHL after that. It’s interesting to look into their stories, which we will do in the next nine Mondays:
Jeff Eatough certainly had some talent on the ice, as he showed over the years. The problem was that he checked in at 5-foot-9 and 170 pounds, and that proved to be a big obstacle in reaching the big time.
Eatough had a solid season with the Cornwall Royals of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League in 1980-81, scoring 30 goals and 42 points in 68 games. The squad won a Memorial Cup as Canada’s junior hockey champion. The right winger caught Buffalo’s attention, and the Sabres drafted him in the fourth round (80th overall) in 1981. That draft is best remembered for Buffalo’s first-round selection of Juri Dudacek, who never played a game in a Sabre uniform.
Eatough went back to the junior ranks that fall, and picked his game up another notch. He had 53 goals (seventh in the league) and 37 assists for 90 points in 66 games, and added 180 penalty minutes. It certainly helped that his center on that team was future Hall of Famer Doug Gilmour, and future Sabre Scott Arniel also was on that team.
That earned him a brief recall with the Sabres late in the 1981-82 season. On March 25, 1982, he wore No. 19 when he played in a loss in Boston, making his debut before his 19th birthday. Oddly, Eatough played while Dale McCourt, Tony McKegney and Alan Haworth sat out. “We used Eatough to see how he can do for the playoffs,” coach Scotty Bowman said later.
It must not have been good enough. Eatough played another year in junior hockey, scoring 57 points in 59 games with Cornwall and North Bay. The winger signed a pro contract with the Sabres in 1983, and one sportswriter in Rochester after that called him “the next Danny Gare.” That prediction didn’t work out, probably because of a serious knee injury suffered while playing lacrosse that summer. He didn’t suit up for the Rochester Americans until mid-December, and he only played 29 games (5 goals, 6 assists) with Rochester and Flint in the minor leagues. Jeff broke his thumb late in at season.
From there, Eatough did some serious bouncing in the minors. In the fall of 1986, he was cut by Flint; in an ironic twist, the coach of the Spirits was ex-Sabre player and future Sabre coach Rick Dudley. He played through 1988 in a few different stops. Jeff’s best season was in 1986-87, when he was with the Mohawk Valley Comets of the ACHL. Eatough had 43 goals in 53 games, and added five more goals in 13 playoff games. That was good for a first-team all-league selection in the Atlantic Coast Hockey League. He was out of hockey in 1988.
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