“Universally respected in our business…whether you were competing with him or not. It wasn’t like other guys where I might want to run them over with my car. I’d actually swerve for Don,” laughed long-time agent Steve Bartlett, who represented Doug Weight among others. “For me, he was everything this business should be. He had great integrity.”

When Baizley talked, agents listened, GM’s listened. He didn’t try to snow general managers over how much his clients were worth. He was direct, to the point, no BS. He got deals done with little acrimony.

And when the agents got together, Baizley was the voice of reason. “Maybe we’d be having contentious agent meetings, or meeting over lockouts, and everybody would be talking but when Don spoke, everybody piped down. They’d be saying’ yeah, that makes sense.’ He was the level-headed, calm, unemotional, legal scholar who cut to t he chase on both sides of an issue,” said Bartlett, who said his best memory of Baizley was him talking of Nilsson and Hedberg, who played with Bobby Hull in Winnipeg.

“We were in Toronto and the two of us went out for a school of beers one night for about three hours, and Don talked about how he got into the agent business with Hedberg (on the Hockey Hall of Fame selection committee now) and Nilsson and the WHA and the NHL. A great night of stories,” said Bartlett.

Continued