99

by Wayne Gretzky

  Vogan got out of the car and put his arms around him. Vogan was half crying when he said, “Freddie, you’re going to make it. You’re going to make that team.” He took the boy to a diner in Chamberlain, a small town nearby, and talked to him for a long time. It was dark out when they got back in the car and headed home for Moose Jaw. It was the first time a white man had made Sasakamoose feel loved.

  When he was twenty, Sasakamoose was named MVP in the Western Canadian Junior Hockey League. After his last game in junior, the team was sitting in the dressing room when Vogan walked in carrying an envelope. He opened it and read it to the room. It was from the Black Hawks, who were calling up Sasakamoose to play against the Leafs in Toronto. On February 27, 1954, he became the first full-blooded Native Canadian to play in the NHL. He played the rest of that season for Chicago.

  They called him Chief. And whenever Sasakamoose stepped onto the ice, the organist would play the song “Indian Love Call.” In the years to follow, the same thing would happen to pretty much every First Nations player. But as a pioneer for his race, Sasakamoose heard a lot worse in opposition rinks.

  • • •

  George Armstrong, a player with some First Nations ancestry (his mom was part Ojibway), had established himself as an NHL regular in the early 1950s. Like Sasakamoose and a lot of guys with First Nations heritage, he too was known as Chief. But it was meant with true respect—Armstrong was the captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs in the glory days of the 1960s. He played his whole career for the Leafs and was captain for twelve seasons, the longest term of any captain in Leafs history.

  George Armstrong was a legend to Leafs fans. In the last game of the 1967 Stanley Cup finals, when the Leafs won their fourth Cup of the decade, it was Armstrong who scored the very last goal of the Original Six era. (The Leafs haven’t won a Cup since.) From 1950 to 1971, he played twenty-one seasons for the Leafs, a total of 1,187 games. That’s a franchise record. Armstrong is now one of only two First Nations players in the Hockey Hall of Fame. The other is Bryan Trottier.

  • • •

  Since the days of Sasakamoose and Armstrong, there have been many great First Nations players, including Dale McCourt, Reggie Leach, Chris Simon, Theo Fleury, T.J. Oshie, and Jordin Tootoo (who is Inuit). Carey Price, one of the best goalies in the world, is Métis. His mother, Lynda, is a former chief of Ulkatcho First Nation.

  Price’s father, Jerry, is also a goalie. He was drafted by the Flyers in 1978. Jerry played four seasons as a pro but never made the NHL. When Carey was young, the family moved to the remote town of Anahim Lake, in northern B.C. Carey didn’t live on the reserve, but most of the kids he went to school with (and a large percentage of the people at Anahim Lake) were First Nations.

  Every day after school, Carey would skate on the creek that ran through the family’s backyard or head to Anahim Lake to play shinny with his friends. He’d be out there until it was too dark to see the puck anymore. Jerry wanted to make sure that his son had an opportunity to play organized hockey. So when Carey was ten years old, he made the commitment to sign him up for peewee hockey in Williams Lake, two hundred miles away. That meant making an eight-hour round trip three times a week by car.

  First practice was at six a.m. on Tuesdays, the next at six p.m. on Thursdays. Games were on the weekends. Jerry and Carey would drive to Williams Lake Monday night, practice Tuesday morning, and head back to Anahim Lake for school that day. Carey would go to school on Wednesday and half of Thursday, then head back to Williams Lake for evening practice. He’d return home late Thursday night, go to school on Friday, and then head back that night for the games on Saturday and Sunday. Jerry never saw it as a sacrifice or anything like that. It was just something they both enjoyed. To this day, neither of them would trade a minute of those drives. Carey would do his homework, or they’d listen to CBC Radio. Sometimes they’d catch a WHL junior game on the radio. In remote settings, you can often get AM stations that are normally out of reach.

  Jerry got his pilot’s license around the time Carey was born. He bought a little Piper Cherokee, and he and Carey flew to practice when they could. Carey couldn’t land the plane or take off, but from the time he was eight years old, Jerry let him handle the controls. He says Carey could fly the Piper just as well as he could ride his bike. Unfortunately, they didn’t get to fly to practice much because of bad weather and limited daylight. The runway at Anahim Lake wasn’t lighted.

  Carey is an expert hunter and fisherman, but not just for sport. Like his ancestors, he learned to harvest food from the land. His connections to his Ulkatcho First Nations roots run deep. When he was nine years old, he had a dream one night that Patrick Roy walked by him fully dressed in his equipment. Carey’s neck was tingling and he had trouble catching his breath as he stared up at Roy in complete awe. When Carey woke up, he couldn’t shake the dream. Being so close to his idol—even in a dream—was too powerful. He could still smell the wet leather on Roy’s Koho pads as he moved along. Over the years, in quiet moments, Carey would sometimes let himself relive the thrill he felt that night in his dream.

  Carey became a top goaltender in the WHL and was drafted fifth overall by Montreal. He became the Canadiens’ starting goaltender during his rookie season, 2007–08. In November of the next season, the Canadiens retired Patrick Roy’s number 33.

  Carey was twenty-one years old when he found himself standing next to Roy at the Bell Centre in Montreal. He stole a glance at his hero. Roy still had the same bright blue eyes he saw in his dream. As Carey watched Roy’s number rising to the rafters, his heart was racing and his eyes were stinging. And then he noticed that the banner was as red as the Indian paintbrush wildflowers that grew in spring alongside the highway back home.

  Now Price is a hero to kids around the world, the way Roy was to him. In 2015, he won the Hart Trophy, the Ted Lindsay Award as MVP elected by the players, the William M. Jennings Trophy for allowing the fewest goals, and the Vezina. No one had ever won all four of them in the same season before.

  Fred Sasakamoose’s NHL career could have been longer, but he fell in love with a girl back home and so he returned to Sandy Lake. But he will always be remembered for doing something no Native Canadian had done before, paving the way for other great players like Carey Price.

  Seventeen

  THE SECOND SIX

  Hockey is a game of tradition. That’s one of the things I love about it, and I know that a lot of fans and players feel the same way. For me, while growing up, hockey meant the same six teams that had made up the NHL for years. The same cities, the same colors, the same names. Hockey didn’t change much, and I don’t think many people thought it needed to change.

  But the NHL is also a business. There is nothing wrong with that. If it weren’t a business, there would be no league. The fact that the players are professional means they can focus on being the best they can be. The travel, the bright lights, the crowds—so much of what we love about the game is possible only because it’s a business.

  It’s interesting that for so long tradition and business went together in the hockey world. Hockey is pretty unique in the way it avoids being too flashy. You think of Bobby Orr scoring a highlight-reel goal, then barely smiling as he heads back to the neutral zone for the faceoff. For a long time, the whole league was the same way. Just drop the puck, and let’s play hockey.

  Hockey games were first broadcast over telegraph. During the Stanley Cup playoffs, newspapers would often send a hometown reporter across the country by train; between periods, the reporter would fire off bulletins to the paper, and then someone there would use a bullhorn to keep the hometown crowd up to date. On Valentine’s Day 1923, CFCA radio (owned by the Toronto Star) broadcast the first live NHL play-by-play ever as the Toronto St. Pats defeated the Ottawa Senators 6–4 at Mutual Street Arena. Two days later, Foster Hewitt, a sports reporter at the Toronto Star (his father, W.A. Hewitt, was its sports editor), was
the second person to call hockey play-by-play on the radio.

  Hockey Night in Canada (known then as the General Motors Hockey Broadcast) debuted in November 1931 with Foster Hewitt barking out the play-by-play of a Toronto Maple Leafs game for about a hundred thousand rapt fans. HNIC broadcast thirty games that season.

  By the next spring Conn Smythe had hired Hewitt as the director of radio, and more and more stations were picking up the games. At that time Canada’s population numbered only about fifteen million, and a third were listening to the show every Saturday night. In 1935–36, the Mutual Broadcasting System picked up a few Chicago Black Hawks games in the States, but they never caught on. Fans in border towns and cities were able to listen to the games on CBC.

  Hockey sounds great on the radio, as generations of fans know. If you know the game and you know the players, a guy like Foster Hewitt could re-create a game in your imagination. But the thing is, you had to have already seen a lot of hockey, or played it, for a radio broadcast to make any sense at all. Otherwise, a hockey broadcast is like a foreign language. In other words, radio is a great way to broadcast to people who already love the game, but it is never going to reach new fans.

  Television is a different story. Hockey is all about speed and power and free-flowing athleticism. You have to see it to believe it. A lot of people are hooked by their first game. But there has to be a first game for that to happen. In 1949, Clarence Campbell vowed that hockey would never be televised. He figured the cameras would pick up the violence, but that the small, grainy screens would not be able to communicate the grace and speed. He also worried that if fans could watch the games at home, they would have no reason to go to the rink.

  He was overruled, of course. The first publicly televised hockey game in Canada was on October 11, 1952, as the Montreal Canadiens defeated Detroit 2–1 on La Soirée du hockey, the French-language version of Hockey Night in Canada. René Lecavalier called the play-by-play for French Canada. Conn Smythe saw a closed-circuit broadcast of a Memorial Cup game that year and hated it. “If that’s what hockey looks like on television,” he said, “then the people of Toronto won’t be seeing it.”

  But it was his own son, Stafford Smythe, part owner of the Leafs, who started pushing the league to harness the power of television. He knew he couldn’t bring every sports fan in North America into Maple Leaf Gardens, but he could try to convince his fellow owners to take the game to those fans. He started pushing the other NHL team owners to expand the league into the biggest television-viewing audiences they could find. It took him five years to get them to agree.

  In March 1965, NHL president Clarence Campbell announced plans to expand to twelve teams. In February 1966 the franchises were awarded to Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and San Francisco–Oakland. CBS had the television broadcast contract in the U.S. and the network wanted all American cities. Each team had to come up with $2 million and guarantee a building with at least 12,500 seats. The game was changed forever.

  Eighteen

  BLACK, WHITE, AND SILVER

  The world seemed very big to us back in 1967. Boston, Detroit, New York, Chicago. I knew where those were. But Los Angeles? Oakland? I really had no idea.

  People were very excited about it. I was excited, of course. There was nothing about hockey I didn’t love. I knew by the way my parents and neighbors would talk about it that everyone was eager to see the puck drop in the new NHL. When we saw the colors of the new teams, I admit we were a little surprised. Yellow and purple? It didn’t look like hockey to me. But everyone I knew was excited, and everyone watched.

  The league was split into two divisions, with expansion teams in the West and Original Six teams in the East. The thinking was that they didn’t want a league with all six originals at the top and all six new teams at the bottom. Four teams in each division would qualify for the playoffs. The winner of the Clarence Campbell Bowl in the West would compete with the Prince of Wales Trophy winner in the East for the best-of-seven Stanley Cup finals.

  St. Louis was by far the best expansion team out of the gate, appearing in three straight finals. But they didn’t win a single game—they were swept twice by the Canadiens and once by Bobby Orr’s Bruins. In fact, the Blues have not been back to the finals since. For a while, a lot of fans started to think that while these teams were in the NHL, they weren’t very good. But four of the teams have won the Cup since then, and some of them have gone on to become the class of the league. But there were a lot of ups and downs before that could happen.

  • • •

  The Washington Post has called Jack Kent Cooke the best owner in the history of sports. He was a Canadian who moved to California in 1960. Although he’d never even seen a professional basketball game, he bought the L.A. Lakers five years later for $5,175,000—the most anyone had ever paid for an NBA franchise. He won his first NBA title in 1972, and then five more in the 1980s with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Magic Johnson. He also owned a share of the NFL’s Washington Redskins. But Cooke’s real love was hockey.

  When he acquired the Los Angeles Kings he immediately started making plans to build a fifteen-thousand-seat showplace on thirty acres in Hollywood Park for hockey fans. He called it the Fabulous Forum and chose royal purple and gold as the team’s colors. After all, he predicted that Los Angeles would one day become the most important hockey city in the world. When he was awarded the franchise, Cooke called it the happiest day of his life.

  Yet hockey wasn’t selling in L.A. And although Cooke was an intelligent guy, it takes real dedication to and passion for a sport to make it fly. In 1979, Cooke decided to sell to Jerry Buss. Buss was both a businessman and a visionary. He bought the Forum for $33.5 million, the Lakers for $16 million, the Kings for $8 million, and a thirteen-thousand-acre ranch in Kern County for $10 million—$67.5 million in total. At the time, it was the biggest sports transaction ever. Buss would take the Lakers to ten NBA championships, but hockey still wasn’t selling.

  Enter Bruce McNall, an ambitious young guy who dealt in ancient coins. He’d taken a very small business that nobody cared about, opened an establishment on Rodeo Drive, and started bidding on coins at auctions around the world. Bruce always paid high, which drove up the price and made his coins more and more valuable. He’d also gotten involved with the Dallas Mavericks when the NBA expanded in 1980. Dallas was football country—no one cared about basketball there in those days—but Bruce was really good at sales and marketing, and so with his help they turned things around.

  Bruce was a huge hockey fan. (He hesitated to buy season tickets to the Kings because you could pick up tickets for almost nothing on game nights outside the Forum back then.) Kings players like Rogie Vachon, Whitey Widing, Gene Carr, and Mike Murphy were his heroes. Meanwhile, although Jerry Buss loved the Kings and would have given anything to win with them, whatever magic he had with the Lakers he never really had with them. One of the problems was that he doubled up on his people in the organization—the PR people, the ticket people, and the sponsorship people were all the same. And if you’re in that business and you work on commissions, you’re going to focus on the team that brings you the most personal success. Now, as it happened, Buss was into coins and so had known Bruce for many years. Bruce would kind of teasingly say to him, “I want to buy the Kings!” and Buss would laugh it off.

  But at one point Buss was a little pressed for money. That sounds crazy for someone who owned the Lakers, but he had a high overhead. Bruce would lend him small amounts, $25,000 or $50,000, until those amounts had built up to a couple of million dollars. So Buss approached Bruce and said, “If you want to use the debt for partial ownership in the Kings, okay, we can do that.”

  Bruce said, “Great, but I’d like to have the option to be able to buy the balance.” Buss, to his credit, felt that Bruce’s enthusiasm for the game would make a difference. So in 1986, Bruce bought about 25 percent of the
team, and by 1988 he’d acquired 100 percent ownership.

  That’s when Bruce said, “Look, we have to get away from being the Lakers and become our own team.” Instead of departments sharing offices, he hired his own staff and literally put up doors and walls to mark out a clear distinction between the two groups. Next, he changed the team colors. Bruce felt that purple and gold made people think Lakers. Also, who the heck wears purple and gold? Bernie Nicholls, one of the Kings’ top scorers, told him that they looked like bananas on ice. Bruce said, “Okay, what do you want?”

  The team responded with “Well, white at home, obviously. Black on the road is cool because it makes us look bigger.”

  Bruce said, “Okay, what about the third color?”

  “Well, you’re in the coin business, and coins are silver.”

  The team unveiled the new colors in 1988, at the same time I was traded from Edmonton. At the press conference back in L.A., Bruce went up on stage to announce the new team colors and introduce their “model,” and then I came out wearing the new sweater.

  • • •

  Once I’d been traded to the Kings, my number-one concern was winning the Cup. Bruce and I talked a lot about how we could accomplish that. By 1992–93 we had a very good team and a very good coach in Barry Melrose. We played an eighty-four-game regular season—except that I missed the first thirty-nine because of a back injury that went back to March 22, 1990, in a game against the Islanders. I was checked by Alan Kerr and went flying headfirst into Kenny Baumgartner’s chest. It wasn’t a dirty or a bad hit. I just got hit from behind, and thankfully Kenny caught me and kind of cradled me. If he’d been coming at me full force, I would have been hurt really badly. I was lucky because I’d roomed with Kenny a year before, when he was with the Kings. All guys are good friends when they’re teammates, but when you’re roommates you become even closer.