I didn’t play in the Original Six, of course, but I know exactly what it feels like to compete with another team so closely that you come to hate them. We played the Smythe Division teams eight times per season—the Edmonton Oilers, Calgary Flames, Vancouver Canucks, Winnipeg Jets, and Los Angeles Kings. Calgary was our biggest rivalry. Calgary was just a three-hour drive away, but the feeling was not neighborly.
You play eighty games in the regular season and you get into a rhythm. As an athlete, you prepare the day before the game in a certain way. You eat properly, sleep, and get ready for the game. But when a Calgary game was on the schedule, you’d start preparing days in advance because you knew it was going to be everything you could handle. Both teams had tough guys, dirty guys, skill guys, and elite goaltending. In the mid-1980s, we were the two best teams in the West. Winnipeg was close. The Cup stayed in Alberta for six of seven years. And the year it didn’t, the Flames narrowly lost to Montreal in the final.
In 1986, we ended the season with 119 points. Calgary had 89 and Winnipeg had dropped to 59. In the playoffs, Calgary swept the Jets and we swept Vancouver. And then we faced each other in the Smythe Division finals. They beat us because the Flames coach, Bob “Badger” Johnson, figured out how to bottle up our offense. We’d won the last two Cups and got lax in our commitment to detail. We needed to learn a lesson. And it took a team like Calgary, who played a system-oriented game, to beat us.
I later learned that in practice Johnson put all the Flames up in the nosebleed seats of the Saddledome and had an assistant coach down on the ice with a walkie-talkie simulating Paul Coffey’s breakout. Johnson was showing his players how to scrub off Paul’s speed. His plan was to have his team funnel Paul up the boards to stop him from getting into open ice. It took a strategist, a real deep thinker like Bob Johnson, to come up with a game plan to neutralize us.
We were two talented teams with lots of competitive guys, so yeah, we hated one another. It wasn’t so much that we hated them as people, though. We hated them as matchups. Mark Messier knew he was going to be seeing Joel Otto night after night. Dave Semenko knew he was going to be battling Tim Hunter over and over. For Jari Kurri and me, we knew the Calgary defense was going to target us physically every chance they got. One thing Glen Sather used to say was that he didn’t ask fifty-goal-scorers to fight, and he didn’t ask tough guys to score fifty goals. But he did make sure we all knew that if we were going to be successful, we had to be tough enough to make the play. Both teams had that mindset. You knew you were going to be physically punished, but you would do anything to score.
We wouldn’t go out together after a game and party like some teams do today. We didn’t even want to see their faces. An Oiler and a Flame wouldn’t be caught dead with each another, even in the off-season. But that mutual dislike lasted only as long as we were playing against each other. Today, a lot of those guys would do anything for one another to help out with a charity. That’s the beauty of sport. When you get two similarly stacked teams with highly competitive people, there are going to be fireworks. But that’s just a form of respect.
One of the greatest things we have in our sport is our history. The trophies we have, and the great players, and the rivalries differentiate our game from everything else. You can’t replace history, so I don’t want to say that the rivalry between the Oilers and the Flames was the same as, for example, the one between the Canadiens and the Leafs. But from the first day of every season, we knew that the road to the Stanley Cup went through Calgary, and I’m sure the Original Six teams felt the same way about one another. Knowing our opponents that well and wanting to beat them that badly made us better teams. And I think that spirit was something that was passed down by the Original Six.
Eight
THE STANLEY CUP
Hockey is a team game. So when you win the Stanley Cup you share the win. Throughout the season and the playoffs you’ve also shared some of the heartaches and disappointments and you’ve come through it all together. If you ask anybody who’s won a Stanley Cup, he will tell you it’s the ultimate team accomplishment. Everybody has to participate. It’s not like other sports where some of the best players play three-quarters of the game. Every guy on the team has to play his heart out to win the Stanley Cup.
When I was four years old I won the Stanley Cup every night, because every night was April 14, 1955, Game Seven, Detroit versus Montreal. And I was Gordie Howe scoring the Cup-winning goal. I’d do everything Gordie did, come in on my picnic table net, look over to one side, flick my wrist as if I were going to pass it, and then shoot. I’d even switch hands like Gordie did, and I got pretty good at skating with one hand on the stick. I tried to comb my hair like Gordie’s and go out onto our backyard rink without my helmet on, because Gordie Howe didn’t wear a helmet. When my dad got home from work he’d come out and make me put one on—“You gotta wear a helmet, Wayne.” And so I’d be Gordie Howe—with a helmet.
I’ll never forget the excitement of watching the Red Wings play the Leafs on Saturday nights. NHL games came on at eight-thirty so I’d have to go to bed after the second period, but if the Red Wings were playing, my dad would let me stay up and watch the whole game.
Lord Stanley of Preston, who became the governor general of Canada in 1888, saw his first hockey game at the 1889 Montreal Winter Carnival. Not long after, his thirteen-year-old daughter Isobel played shinny in the first recorded game of female hockey. His sons, twenty-three-year-old Edward, nineteen-year-old Arthur, and fourteen-year-old Algernon, loved hockey too. They joined the Ottawa “Rideau Rebels,” and in 1890 Arthur came up with the idea for the Ontario Hockey Association, which was formed by teams from Ottawa, Kingston, Toronto, and London.
Lord Stanley would go to watch his sons and Isobel play. He was the original hockey dad. He wrote a letter that was read at the 1892 Ottawa Amateur Athletic Association dinner, where they were celebrating the club’s third winning season. The letter said, “It would be a good thing if there were a challenge cup, which would be held from year to year by the leading hockey club in Canada. . . . I am willing to give a cup which shall be held annually by the winning club.” That fall, a 7½” by 11½” sterling silver punch bowl arrived from England. One side said, “Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup,” and the other said, “From Stanley of Preston.”
When Lord Stanley donated the cup, he laid out some rules. The Cup had to be returned in good shape and on time. Each winner could have its team name and the year engraved on it. The Cup would never belong to any one team no matter how many times they won it and the trustees would have final say. He donated it to the Amateur Hockey Association of Canada.
Lord Stanley’s brother died before the end of the regular season the year Stanley donated the Cup, so he returned to England to become the 16th Earl of Derby and never saw the Cup presented.
They don’t say it’s the hardest sports trophy in the world to win for nothing. There are sixteen teams in the playoffs. They line up to play best-of-seven series. The winners move on to play other winners in another best-of-seven series. Those winners move on again until there are just two teams left. To take home the Cup, you have to play up to twenty-eight games, about one every other night.
It is probably not fair to judge a guy’s legacy by whether or not he won a Cup. There is no player in the world that can carry a team through four rounds. That’s another way of saying that no team that counts on one or two guys game in and game out is going to win the Cup. It’s just not going to happen. You look at the way Alex Ovechkin played in the 2016 playoffs, and there is no way you can say it’s his fault the Capitals fell short. It’s a team game, and Washington lost as a team.
And yet, you look at guys like Mike Keane, who seemed to win a Cup wherever he played. That’s no coincidence. Or you look at other guys who seem to have a knack for scoring game-winning goals in the playoffs. And it’s almost never the team’s superstar. It’s true that playoff hockey
is different, and some guys just have another gear when the regular season is over. The year we won our fourth Cup, Kevin Lowe broke his wrist in the first round and played the rest of that spring in a cast. Every team has a player like that. At the end of the day, the prize is too big not to give that kind of effort.
In big games, the stars are bigger targets than ever. One reason third-line guys often end up being the heroes is that the first-line guys have been shut down by smart coaching and stifling defense. In my mind, what makes a star player a superstar is the ability to play through that in big games. To me, that’s Mark Messier. The bigger the game, the better he played. Whether it was a Canada Cup final or a Game Seven, he could bring the energy and the passion to a whole new level.
Just about the biggest compliment I can offer to a hockey player is to compare him to Gordie Howe, and to me Mark is the closest I’ve ever seen. He was a big, strong guy—as a center, he could bull guys right off the faceoff dot. Or he could just grind the other team down over the course of a game. I’ve taken many faceoffs against Mark Messier, and I can’t see how anyone would describe it as fun. Like Gordie, Mark could create space for himself with the liberal use of his stick. And if someone took issue with that, he was more than happy to settle the dispute with his gloves off. If you’re playing in the NHL, you’re probably not an easy person to intimidate. But Mark could scare guys.
But also like Gordie, Messier became more of a finesse player as his career went on. It’s hard to go from being a pure power forward to playing a finesse game. But those two guys did it. They were among the best passers and playmakers in the game. That just comes down to a tremendous hockey sense, which is another of the best compliments you can pay a guy. It’s a pretty impressive thing to win a one-on-one battle in the NHL with pure skill or speed or strength. But it’s even harder to slow things down and beat a whole team just by seeing the ice better. Those two could do that.
Mark’s leadership skills are no secret. He won the Conn Smythe in 1984, so it’s pretty clear what he meant to the Oilers. But I think that was magnified when he was with the Rangers. Today it’s common for players to guarantee a win, but nobody did that in 1994. When the Rangers fell behind 3–2 in their Eastern Conference series against New Jersey, however, Mark told the media that his team wasn’t done. Then he came out and played the game of his life. Remember, the Rangers were trailing going into the third period. Their season was almost over. Then Mark took a pass as he was heading up the middle, powered in on the backhand, and found the net behind Marty Brodeur. He went on to score two more to complete the hat trick, but that backhand goal defined his career—power, finesse, and the ability to come through when he had to.
Some people thought that his comment to the media was cocky or selfish, but that wasn’t Mark at all. He was just the opposite. He was putting all the pressure on himself and letting the other guys just play their game. If he hadn’t made that prediction, the whole team would have felt like chokers. After he made it, it was all on him. Every New Jersey player wanted more than ever to shut him down. Every reporter would have mocked him if the Rangers had lost. He knew that. And he knew that would be good for the team. That’s real leadership. Standing up and yelling in the dressing room before the game doesn’t make you a leader. Being unselfish does.
I wasn’t on that 1994 Rangers team, of course. But I’ve seen his unselfishness firsthand over the years. If I had a three-goal game with the Oilers, Mark was as happy as if he’d scored those goals himself. He was genuinely pleased for a teammate who had a good game. We are still good friends, and we shake our heads when we read about teammates who don’t get along or who ask to be traded because of poison in the dressing room.
For us it was the opposite. We made each other better. Glen Sather used to play our lines against each other in practice. How could I not become a better hockey player lining up against one of the best of all time almost every day? I consider myself lucky to have played with him. I know we wouldn’t have won the 1984 Canada Cup without him, and in my mind he is the definition of what it takes to win a Stanley Cup.
As a hockey player, the thing you remember most is your first Stanley Cup. It’s a feeling you wish every guy in the NHL could experience at some point. But the fact that not everybody gets that chance is part of what makes it so special. There are some pretty special players who never got to lift the Cup. You think of really well-respected guys like Marcel Dionne and Darryl Sittler. Everyone would love to see Jarome Iginla finally win one after coming so close. And it was almost a relief when Ray Bourque finally did.
The Cup has gone missing a few times. In 1905, on the way to a party, the Ottawa Silver Seven placed some bets on how far it could slide and drop-kicked it onto the frozen Rideau Canal. In 1923, King Clancy took it home to show his father, but the following season the Senators forgot he had it and drove themselves crazy looking for it.
In 1924, the Canadiens were on their way over to owner Léo Dandurand’s home with the Cup when they got a flat tire. They placed the Cup on the sidewalk while they changed the flat and accidentally left it behind when they drove off.
In 1970, the original collar beneath the bowl was stolen from the Hockey Hall of Fame and then found seven years later in the back of a Toronto store.
In 1987, when we won the Cup against Philadelphia, we didn’t have a formal after-party. We’d won three Cups in four years so we celebrated at the rink and then we all went to a nightclub called Barry T’s in the south end of Edmonton. We were having a great time. The whole team was there. About two hours into the night, we looked over and the Stanley Cup was just sitting at the end of the bar. No players were around it, just the odd fan who would come up and take a picture with it.
Later on, our goalie Andy Moog and his wife decided to head home. Andy picked up the Cup from the end of the bar and held it over his head while the guys cheered and slapped him on the back. Then the party went on.
Andy carried the Cup out the door, put it in his trunk, and drove home. Three hours later, he got up and drove his little daughter Alyssa to school. He got out, opened his trunk, grabbed the Cup, and carried it in. He put it on the office counter and said, “I’ll be back after school,” and went home to bed.
Around lunchtime, the Oilers public relations director Bill Tuele called up. He’d been calling the whole team and finally he got to number 35. He said, “Andy, do you know where the Cup is?” When Andy said, “Yeah, it’s at my daughter’s school,” he made Bill’s day. No one wants to be the guy who loses the Cup.
The next year, in September 1988, the NHL hired Phil Pritchard, the Keeper of the Cup, and it hasn’t been lost since.
Nine
THE VEZINA
The Stanley Cup meant so much to Georges Vezina that on March 30, 1916, the night the Canadiens won their first Cup and the night his second son was born and only a few hours old, Georges named the baby Marcel Stanley. His older son, Jean-Jules, had been the first baby to have his picture taken while sitting in the Cup. Today, just about every guy with a baby does it. I might have done it too if I’d thought of it.
Vezina grew up in Chicoutimi, a small, very beautiful French-Canadian town of about 6,000 people, two hours straight north of Quebec City in the middle of the northern wilderness. It’s very close to the town of Péribonka, where my 1984 Canada Cup linemate Michel Goulet grew up.
In February 1910, the Canadiens were on the road and stopped at Chicoutimi to play a group of locals from the Price Brothers Pulp Mill. Everyone thought it would be an easy win, but the Canadiens couldn’t get the puck past the goalie—a guy named Georges Vezina. At twenty-three years old he wasn’t a very big guy, only 5’6” and 165 pounds. And he’d been skating for only five years. He learned to play hockey in his boots.
When they returned home, Montreal’s goalie, Joe Cattarinich, convinced the team to give Vezina a tryout. By December they had signed Georges for $800 a year.
Georges Vezina was the first goalie to record an NHL shutout. He did it against the Toronto Blueshirts on February 18, 1918. He led the league in wins that year.
At that time, Montreal was the unhealthiest city in Canada. More than 85 percent of the people rented their homes, many of them in sprawling slums. The only healthcare and welfare available were through religious charities. The death rate from tuberculosis alone was more than 200 per 100,000. There were about 618,500 people living in the metropolitan area. That means more than 1,200 men, women, and children died from TB each year. Somewhere along the way, Georges Vezina contracted the disease, but he kept it to himself and kept playing.
Rangers legend Frank Boucher said that Vezina was “pale” and “frail-looking” but “remarkably good with his stick.” “He’d pick off more shots with it than he did with his glove. He stood upright in the net and scarcely ever left his feet. He always wore a toque—a small, knitted hat with no brim in Montreal colors—bleu, blanc et rouge.” That toque was so famous that Canadiens goalie Jose Theodore wore one over his mask for the 2003 Heritage Classic as a tribute.
Goalies are all different. Vezina was one of the calm ones. Boucher remembered him “as the coolest man I ever saw.” He stayed so unruffled in the net that the newspapers called him the “Chicoutimi Cucumber.” His teammates said that before a game, he’d sit by himself in the locker room smoking his pipe and reading the paper.
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