99

by Wayne Gretzky

  I was out for three of ten playoff games that season. And then eighteen months later, on September 14, 1991, I was checked from behind by Gary Suter in a Canada Cup game and sustained another injury. Again, not a dirty hit. It was my own fault. The Americans were on a power play and I was first to the puck at the side of the net. I think Gary thought I was going to take the puck behind, but instead I turned into him. I didn’t see him and I don’t think he anticipated it. When you play against a guy, you know his tendencies. He probably thought I knew he was there. It all sort of settled down until I got reinjured in a game later that year. I must have seen four doctors. They all had different ideas as to what was wrong—from a cracked rib to a strained ligament.

  About eight of us were at dinner in Hawaii at the end of the season when suddenly that injury flared up. Bad. I couldn’t sit or stand, so I lay down on the floor of the restaurant.

  Come June, I started training to get ready for the next season. Things were better. I felt really comfortable. But after the first day of training camp I couldn’t walk. This time they sent me to the Kerlan-Jobe Orthopaedic Clinic—those are the guys who invented the Tommy John surgical graft procedure where they replace a ligament in the elbow with a tendon from somewhere else in your body. A lot of major league pitchers have had it.

  I met with Dr. Robert Watkins at the clinic, and the first thing he said was “Has anybody checked your back?” I said, ‘“No, it’s my ribs.” He ordered an MRI, and when I met him mid-December to go over the results, he said, “The good news is that it’s not cancer.” I thought, “Cancer? Geez. He thought it might be cancer?”

  It was a herniated thoracic disc. They started me on an IV for inflammation in my upper back and lower neck while Dr. Watkins spent the next four days talking to doctors around the country. Three recommended surgery and three recommended physical therapy. The only other professional athlete who’d been treated for the same injury was a downhill skier. She had the surgery and had to retire, so we went with 120 days of rehabilitation instead. I asked Dr. Watkins, “Am I allowed to golf?”

  He shook his head and said, “You’ll be playing hockey before I let you golf.”

  I started skating lightly and was feeling really good—eager to get back in the lineup. On Christmas Eve I practiced by myself, and then on Christmas Day I skated for two hours. That was one of the best presents ever.

  The team was having a great year. We were in first place in the division. And then, on my first game back, January 6, 1993, we were beaten 6–3 by Tampa Bay. I remember coming off the ice and Marty McSorley, who never held back, looking at me funny and saying, “Good job.”

  I made the team worse for about fifteen games. We were forty-five games into the season and near the top of the division. I wasn’t playing well—and you reward players for how they’re playing now, not for their past history. I didn’t want to take time from the other guys who were contributing. And yet I had to catch up because my timing was off, and even though I was in shape, I wasn’t in playing shape. It was kind of a catch-22 situation. So I asked Barry Melrose, “Okay, how are we gonna make this work? How are we going to make this comfortable for the team and still let me get in enough time so that I can be ready for the playoffs?” But the turning point for me was on February 22, during a road trip to Tampa Bay. I had a really good game that night—I could feel the momentum and the timing of my game come together. I became a different player for the rest of the season.

  Now, the flip side of the long layoff is that in the last ten games of that year and heading into the playoff run, I was the freshest I’d ever been in my career. There were years when I’d played 130 games when you factor in preseason, regular season, playoffs and the Canada Cup. After that many games you’re ground down.

  That year we played Calgary first round, followed by Vancouver, Toronto, and then Montreal. We played all four Canadian cities, and because we’d finished third in our division, we started on the road in every one.

  In the first playoff game in Calgary, five minutes into the first period, I was in a faceoff with Joel Otto, who was a really good player. He was tough, really tough. Kind of like Mark Messier tough. If you did something stupid he was going to get even with you, but he was honest and pretty fair. I won the faceoff, but when I turned away from him he cross-checked me right in the side. Joel was a big man, 6’4”, 220 pounds, and those sticks were solid wood. He broke my rib. I went to the locker room as soon as it happened.

  As I lay on the trainer’s table, I was thinking, “Oh my God, what do I do now?” The doctor came in. In the regular season you use the home team’s doctor, but in the playoffs you don’t want the other team to know who’s injured and so you use your own. Joel had gotten me pretty good, though. I was in a lot of pain and worried about the rest of the playoffs.

  The doctor said, “You know what we’re going to do, Wayne? We’ll just put a flak jacket on you.” In those days a flak jacket was like a quarter inch of rubber. Hardly better than nothing. And so for every single game during the rest of the playoffs, at 7:25 after warm-up and right before we’d go on the ice, I’d put this vest on. The doctor would come in and take me to the trainer’s room, where he’d use a long needle to inject freezing into my upper thigh.

  I used to tease the doc: “Don’t hit the wrong spot or I’ll be walking around on one leg.” I played the entire eight weeks of playoffs with a broken rib and never felt it once in a game. His reasoning was, “It’s not going to get worse.” But for about an hour after the game as the freezing came out, it was pretty painful.

  We started the series in Calgary and we won it in Game Six. We started the next series in Vancouver and won a big game in double overtime in Game Five and then Game Six at home. We were on our way to Toronto for the semis.

  • • •

  One of the reasons we love sports is that anything can happen. But how Marty McSorley and Wendel Clark played in that series was a privilege to watch. Dougie Gilmour and I might have been the skill players, but Wendel and Marty were the heart and soul.

  Wendel Clark was a phenom. He wasn’t born with the natural talent some guys have. But he was one of the most dominant players in the league. His wrist shot was a laser, his open-ice hits were like being run over by a truck, and he was absolutely impossible to intimidate. It seemed as if he scored two goals every single game. He was the one guy on the Leafs we couldn’t control. We did manage to slow Doug Gilmour down a little, though we were never going to stop him. But Wendel was just out of this world. Barry Melrose tried everybody against him, including Robbie Blake and Marty McSorley, yet Wendel still found a way to score. What was interesting is that Barry and Wendel Clark are cousins. Barry’s mother’s mother, Norrie Clarke McLean, and Wendel’s father’s father, Bud, are brother and sister. So Barry and Wendel grew up together.

  There was a saying at that time: “You can’t stop Wendel Clark. You can only hope to contain him.” At the end of the night, if Wendel had scored only one goal, we thought we did a great job. It was such a tough, physical series, with Marty on our side and Wendel on theirs. Those two guys played above their talent level. Neither one would give an inch.

  On May 17, 1993, in the third period of Game One, we were a little flat. The travel had been really tough. This was our third series and we’d yet to open at home, so we needed to get that bad blood and emotion back. Marty, who saw that as part of his job, was looking for an opportunity to fire us up. And then Gilmour came across the middle with his head down. Marty stood up inside the blue line and just drilled him. Dougie is a tough guy and I can guarantee that’s the hardest he was hit all year. It was an important move. It sent a message to Toronto that we were going to challenge them. And it told Gilmour that he wasn’t going to have free ice. He’d have to pay a price. It really brought us into that series.

  And then Wendel came in and did what everyone in the rink knew Wendel would do. He challenged Marty. That’s
when I saw one of the greatest fights I’ve ever seen in my career. It was an incredibly emotional clash. Neither Marty nor Wendel hung back. Each of them was swinging from his heels and making contact. It was a classic toe-to-toe scrap that you just don’t see anymore in today’s game. Both guys had black eyes the next day.

  That fight really set the tone for the series and inspired our team. Wendel was one of the toughest guys in the league—absolutely the toughest guy in Toronto—and for Marty to take him on like that propelled us into the Stanley Cup finals.

  There was still a ton of incredibly intense hockey to be played in that series. It was hugely emotional and physical, and the momentum tipped back and forth. And sometimes mistakes happen. When I accidentally clipped Dougie Gilmour on the chin in Game Six overtime, was it a penalty? Probably. It was a tie game when Glenn Anderson, who was now with the Leafs, tried to run Rob Blake through the boards from behind. He got a charging penalty. At the faceoff, the puck seemed to stall and I took a shot that deflected off Jamie Macoun’s shin pad and bounced back to the faceoff circle. I came over behind Gilmour and we both went for the puck. He bent over, grabbed his chin, and the play stopped.

  The rule back then was that you were in charge of your stick. Even if a guy skated into it, you got a five-minute penalty. I know what the league was trying to do, and yet it was a stupid rule. Some rules come in and work and some don’t. But in those days the rules were arbitrary. An owner would say, “This is what we’ve got to put in the game,” and snap, new rule. A GM might say “Hey, I don’t like the guys standing in the crease!” and they’d change the rule the next day. That’s how the league operated. Now they have a rules committee, a management committee, and a players committee that all have to decide together.

  When Kerry Fraser asked him what happened, Dougie said it was my follow-through that clipped him. On a normal follow-through there’s no high-sticking infraction, and Fraser told him that that meant no call.

  Dougie and I are good friends today, and so when people ask me about it, I always say, “You know what? In those playoffs, Dougie got a little cut on his chin. Well, a guy broke my rib and nobody talks about that. So no, I don’t feel so bad about it.” The real difference in that series wasn’t a high stick in Game Six. It’s not fair to either team to say that the series came down to one call—or one missed call—by the referee. Both teams should be proud of the way they played, and focusing on one non-call only takes away from the accomplishments and sacrifices of the guys who were going over the boards shift after shift. Both teams left absolutely everything on the ice for seven games, and in the end we were so closely matched that the difference was one goal in Game Seven.

  We’d become the first team ever to play all four rounds against Canadian teams. We’d played nineteen games in the first three rounds. The final Toronto game was on a Saturday night. We had an early Monday afternoon flight to Montreal and then a light skate. Game One of the fourth round was scheduled for Tuesday. That game was as good or better than any game we played the entire playoffs. The Canadiens were a little flat-footed from their time off. We won 4–1.

  We were on a high, but we were also starting to erode physically and mentally. We weren’t as good a team as the Montreal Canadiens. But what we had was maybe better: tremendous chemistry, desire, and heart. Still, we knew they were going be a good team, and they were.

  • • •

  You always want to be up 2–0 on the road if you can. It gives you a tremendous confidence advantage. (We experienced it in ’88 against Calgary in the quarterfinals. On paper, Calgary was a better team than the Oilers that season.) And so it was really important to keep the lead in Game Two in Montreal. Even though the Canadiens were playing much better than they had in Game One, we were tied 1–1 after two periods.

  In the locker room going into the third, we told everyone, “We know we’re a little tired right now, so we gotta simplify things. We gotta keep our shifts short and keep the puck in deep and don’t do anything fancy or silly.”

  Every home team supplied the visiting team with an extra pair of hands to help out the trainers with equipment and sticks. After all, you can travel with only so many people. Edmonton did it, we did it in L.A., and Montreal did it. The Canadiens had a fellow named Doc who came in, and there were times when he was in our locker room by himself. It’s not as though he did anything wrong, but all you had to do was eyeball Marty’s or Luc’s sticks and you could see that they had big curves. A curve helps with puck control. It hugs the puck, making it tougher to lose. The NHL has restrictions not only on a stick’s weight, height, width, and length, but also on its maximum curve. And so we’ve got a Montreal Canadiens employee in our dressing room working with our sticks that are clearly illegal.

  Before we went out, I said to the guys, “Look, we’re tired, let’s be smart here. Luc, you and Marty, they’re gonna come after you guys. There’s no question about it in my mind. So make sure you take out a legal stick.”

  Luc nodded okay and Marty looked at me and said, “My stick’s good.”

  I said, “Okay, we’re good to go.”

  We were in the third period, now leading 2–1, with 1:45 left when Guy Carbonneau and Kirk Muller, captain and assistant captain of the Canadiens, came over to ref Kerry Fraser and said, “Jacques wants Marty McSorley’s stick measured.”

  Kerry said, “What is it specifically that you want measured?”

  Carbonneau said, “The curve.”

  Kerry said, “Okay.” He went over to Marty and requested his stick, which Marty gave over. Reluctantly.

  I skated up to Marty and said, “Is your stick okay?”

  “Yeah, it should be fine.”

  I was hanging at the edge of the referee’s crease as Kerry pulled out the plastic gauge. He had his back to the players, and Ray Scapinello, the linesman, was holding the stick. Kerry measured it twice—it was a big call—and then turned to me and said, “Here, have a look at this.” He showed me the slide measure: it didn’t touch from the heel to the toe. There was a wide-open gap. Fraser called a penalty. Montreal coach Jacques Demers pulled Patrick Roy to make it six on four. They scored on us barely thirty seconds in.

  No one was more devastated by it than Marty. Even though he sometimes puts on a brave front, I know him better than anyone, and I know he was crushed.

  That night in the locker room there was a tremendous mood swing. We went from being up a goal with a minute and a half left, playing great and looking to take a two-game lead back to Los Angeles, to heading into sudden-death overtime. Montreal had only two shots in the last eight minutes, and then a power play, and then suddenly a tie. And then, suddenly, a loss. Montreal scored in the first minute of overtime to tie the series. We were pretty disheartened to let the opportunity to go home up 2–0 slip away.

  I think in his heart Marty wanted to get five or six minutes in with his stick because he knew they wouldn’t check early in the period. But he was playing so much and the emotions were so high that I think he got caught up in the game and just forgot to change it. I have some friends on the other team, and when you retire you talk. They told me that the plan was to check either Luc’s or Marty’s stick—whichever guy was on the ice in the last two minutes. Had it been Luc, there would have been no problem. Luc’s stick was fine.

  The crazier part of it was that we ended up losing three games in a row in overtime. Patrick Roy played so well in the series. He won the Conn Smythe that year.

  Let’s not take away from what Roy did by blaming Marty. Sometimes all you can do is sit back and say, “We played hard and we played good.”

  Montreal deserved to win the Stanley Cup, but we had a group of guys who’d played beyond their level—a lot like the ’86 Montreal team. They maybe weren’t the best team in the NHL that year, but they beat Calgary in the final. Our effort and our team commitment were definitely special, and that’s what made the run so great.r />
  In the end, we wouldn’t have gotten through the playoffs to the Stanley Cup finals had Marty McSorley not played at the level he did. Marty was the kind of player who could lift a team, and he did that for us many times that spring. As far as I’m concerned, if it wasn’t for Marty and how he played against Toronto in that series, we wouldn’t have been playing Montreal anyway, and there would have been no curved stick story.

  Nineteen

  THE ST. LOUIS BLUES

  The St. Louis Blues were in so many Stanley Cup finals in the late 60s and early 70s that they almost didn’t seem like an expansion team. Even their colors looked like classics from the beginning. Over the years they have had some great teams, and it’s easy to reel off the names of the Hall of Famers who played there. Hull, Pronger, MacInnis, Shanahan, Fuhr, and many more. Those guys all came well after expansion. But one of the things that made the Blues so successful right from the beginning is that even in their first years, they had guys destined for the Hall of Fame.

  First off, the general manager was hockey royalty. Lynn Patrick was the son of Lester Patrick, one of the brothers who had done so much to improve the game of hockey in the first place. That first year, Patrick had only enough money in the budget for one employee, and he hired the right guy—someone who would go on to earn a reputation as one of the shrewdest minds in the game—assistant GM Cliff Fletcher. Fletcher went on to win a Stanley Cup in Calgary as the GM and built the gritty Leafs team the Kings met on the way to the final in 1993. Not a bad front office.