99

by Wayne Gretzky

  It was like turning very good teams back into expansion teams. But the new WHA franchises had no choice—it was a take-it-or-leave-it deal—and so they restocked their teams with fringe players available in an expansion draft. It would take until 1985–86 for all four teams to make the playoffs in the same season.

  • • •

  Bobby Hull came back and played with the Jets in the first year they were folded into the NHL—but only for eighteen games.

  Tom McVie insisted that his players be in the dressing room an hour and a half before the game. If you were late, even by one minute, you didn’t play. So everyone was always there on time.

  Saturday, December 15, 1979, was the very first time the Jets hosted the Montreal Canadiens. The game was scheduled for eight p.m. but got moved to seven p.m. for the CBC. An hour before game time, Bobby wasn’t around, so Morris Lukowich got on the phone and called him. He said, “Bobby, where are you?”

  Bobby said, “I’m just leaving for the rink.”

  Morris said, “You’re late.”

  “What do you mean? I’m looking at the tickets and it says eight o’clock.”

  Morris explained that the hour had been changed for the CBC. He said, “Bobby, is there anything you need? Any of your equipment? Do you need your skates sharpened or anything like that?”

  “No, no, everything’s ready to go. I’ll be right down there.”

  But when he arrived a few minutes later, Tom wouldn’t let him play. Bobby drew a line in the sand and said, “Either the coach goes or I go.”

  John Ferguson said, “Well, we can’t fire the coach. He just helped us win the WHA last year.”

  Bobby said, “Then I’m gone.”

  There are certain things that happen when egos get involved, and you wonder about them later. Tom McVie was a good coach, but it’s hard to make your team better by driving Bobby Hull away.

  • • •

  The NHL’s amateur draft was renamed the entry draft so that the underage WHA players could be included, with the eligible draft age being lowered from twenty to eighteen. I wasn’t selected in the entry draft because Edmonton protected me as one of their two skaters. But everyone else was going into the expansion draft, meaning that we’d lose guys like Blair MacDonald and Dave Semenko. Fortunately, Glen Sather was able to work out deals to keep those two.

  Glen’s very first pick in the draft was Cam Connor. Cam was in his mid-twenties and one of our strongest guys—he’d worked construction for cement companies in Winnipeg. Cam was a clutch player. He played with us most of that season, and was then traded to the Rangers. The Oilers’ second pick was defenseman Lee Fogolin, who’d been playing for the Buffalo Sabres. Buffalo had a very good veteran team led by Gilbert Perreault and Danny Gare. They consistently came in at the top of the standings. But sometimes there’s a fit for a player and sometimes there isn’t. Lee wasn’t progressing the way he wanted to as a player, and so he decided to move on. That’s when the Oilers picked him up. We all listened when Lee said something—he commanded so much respect in our locker room.

  The very first day Lee was in training camp with the Oilers, it was apparent to all of us that he was going be the spokesperson for our group. Nobody gives you leadership. You earn that mantle, and he earned it from day one. The Oilers had a lot of natural talent in our group—Mark Messier, Jari Kurri, Glenn Anderson, and Paul Coffey. Lee wasn’t super talented, but we really respected how hard he worked each and every day.

  In the late 1970s and early 80s, long hair was the style. All the guys wore it that way. Darryl Sittler, Bobby Clarke, even Bobby Orr. I don’t mean long, long hair, but full and over the ears. Guys would come in and the first thing a team would do is shave your head. Lee Fogolin, who was our captain by that time, said, “Hey, we’re not doing that. Everybody’s the same here.” He learned that kind of respect from his father. The tradition of the rookie dinner actually started in Edmonton. Rookies would take everybody out for dinner one night as initiation instead. It was a great introduction to the NHL, but no one said it was cheap.

  Twenty-Five

  THE SUMMIT SERIES

  Phil Esposito has won just about everything there is to be won in the game of hockey. He scored almost 1,600 points in the NHL, won major trophies several times, and has had his number retired. But when he tried out for a bantam team in his hometown of Sault Ste. Marie, he was cut.

  That’s what family is for. His father drove truck for Phil’s uncle, who owned a company called Algoma Contractors that used to remove the slag from steel plants. The company was doing well, so his uncle was convinced to sponsor a team so that Phil could play in the league that year. Phil went on to play junior in Sarnia, Ontario, which made him the property of the Chicago Black Hawks.

  The Black Hawks’ GM, Tommy Ivan, offered Phil his first professional contract, but because he held out for more, Ivan considered him a troublemaker. Billy Reay, who’d been a second-line center with the Canadiens in the late 1940s and early 50s, was the Black Hawks coach. (He was a player’s coach. He didn’t have to scream and yell—he’d just give the players a look. Billy would retire with a 516–335–161 record, the best in the team’s history.) Billy wanted Phil to improve his skating. He also thought Phil was too heavy, and told him to lose weight. Phil was 215 pounds and Billy wanted him to weigh in at 190, so he started to fine Phil ten bucks for every pound he was over. But every time Phil tried to steam the weight off, someone would bring in a six-pack of beer and mess up his plans.

  Phil was doing a great job centering Bobby Hull. For whatever reason, Reay didn’t take him seriously, though. Maybe Reay and the Black Hawks just thought that every center should be a warrior like Stan Mikita. A year earlier, in 1966–67, Mikita had won the Art Ross, the Hart, and the Lady Byng trophies (and he did it again the next year, 1967–68). Reay didn’t see Phil as that guy. And in a way, he was right. Phil didn’t get by on hustle. His genius was being in the right place at the right time, and the right place was usually the slot. But Reay was spectacularly wrong in another way. A year later, in 1968–69, Phil would win both the Ross and the Hart.

  • • •

  The expansion trade deadline freeze was scheduled for May 15, 1967, at midnight. That afternoon, Milt Schmidt, the only man in Bruins history to serve as player, team captain, coach, and general manager, took a call from Tommy Ivan. All season long Ivan had been after hard-hitting defenseman Gilles Marotte. But Milt’s GM, Hap Emms, had coached Gilles in junior and wanted to keep him.

  Boston hadn’t won a Cup since 1940–41. They hadn’t even made it to the playoffs since 1958–59. They had the makings of a great team, with Bobby Orr as a rookie and Bernie Parent and Gerry Cheevers in goal, but they were missing the final piece of the puzzle: a top forward.

  Schmidt thought Fred Stanfield might be the answer. Stanfield had grown up in Toronto, and Schmidt had seen him play enough to like him. The two GMs went back and forth. After five hours of negotiations, they agreed that in exchange for Marotte, goalie Jack Norris, and Pit Martin, Tommy would send over Fred Stanfield, Ken Hodge, and Phil Esposito. It turned out to be one of the most lopsided trades in history.

  Stanfield did become a great top-six forward for the Bruins. But the key to the deal was the guy the Black Hawks wanted to get rid of. Phil Esposito was about to go on a six-year streak leading the league in goal-scoring. There was a popular bumper sticker in Boston that read, “Jesus saves. Esposito scores on the rebound.”

  By 1968–69, the Bruins finished with a then–franchise record, one hundred points. They’d also go on to win two Stanley Cups, in 1970 and ’72. But I’d say that it was the 1972 Summit Series that was the highlight of Phil Esposito’s career. It’s probably where he played his best hockey.

  • • •

  The Soviet Union’s national team had been dominating amateur hockey for a decade. They’d won seven world championships and three
Olympic gold medals in a row. They also spent at least nine months of every year at camps away from their wives and children, working out three times a day, getting stronger, faster, and incredibly skilled. The amateurs from Canada and the U.S. had virtually no chance against the Soviets.

  Canadian hockey hadn’t changed much from the 1930s. Go after the puck, play physical, shoot every chance you get, and crash the net for rebounds. The Russians brought all kinds of innovations. Instead of three-man lines, they changed as five-man units. They played in constant motion. Everyone seemed to know where his teammates would be. Wingers cycled the puck in the corners. Forwards looped back to start quick transitions. Rather than firing the puck in deep for a change, they’d pass it back into their own zone and hold on to it during the change. Every one of these strategies would be adopted in the NHL. The Oilers’ Glen Sather was one of the first NHL coaches to bring in this kind of play.

  The Russians didn’t begin working on their game until 1946. But once they’d started, they wanted to win everything. Excelling at sports was political, a way to demonstrate that communism was superior to capitalism. Coaches started evaluating kids at an early age. They would pick out the most promising and put them in special programs to get them ready for the national team.

  Anatoli Tarasov is considered the father of Soviet hockey. Using ideas from Canadian Lloyd Percival’s The Hockey Handbook, he worked with the Russians on a new way to train and play the game. He concentrated on building up his players with dryland training—weights, jumping exercises, balance. They carried each other across fields. They played a game called Kill the Canadian (which involved smashing into the boards, dropping down to one knee, then smashing into the boards again). His drills in the 40s and 50s look like the drills today. Tarasov was sixty years ahead of his time—and he was also a great sportsman. The players loved him. After the 1960 Olympic final when the Americans beat the Russians, Tarasov came into the American locker room and kissed coach Jack Riley on the cheek.

  But after winning gold in 1972, Tarasov—who’d coached the Russians to seven consecutive world championships and three Olympic gold medals—was fired, in part because he’d disobeyed an order to throw a game against Czechoslovakia that would have pushed the Czechs instead of the Americans to a silver medal. He was later replaced by Viktor Tikhonov, whose grandson played for the Coyotes (I coached him when I was in Phoenix). Where Tarasov had been grandfatherly, Tikhonov was an iron-willed general. He didn’t want to lose, but I don’t think he was much liked by his players. In fact, at the 1988 Olympics he punched Alexander Mogilny in the face right on the bench. Tikhonov became known for everything people hated about Soviet hockey.

  But between Tarasov and Tikhonov, the U.S.S.R. tapped Vsevolod Bobrov to coach the national team. No matter what our thoughts were about the Russians, it would be pretty hard not to respect Bobrov. He was a truly gifted athlete. He started out as a soccer player and absolutely shone in international play. When his club, Moscow Dynamo, toured the U.K., he scored six goals in games against Arsenal, Chelsea, and Glasgow Rangers. He scored five goals for the U.S.S.R. in the 1954 Olympics. But as good as he was at soccer, he was even better at hockey—which he’d never even seen played until he was twenty-three years old. He led the Soviets to the gold medal in the 1956 Winter Olympics, and took the world championships in 1954. Incredibly, he scored eighty-nine goals in fifty-nine games wearing the famous CCCP sweater in international play.

  It was Bobrov who was behind the Russian bench for the most famous series in the history of hockey.

  • • •

  For years the Russians had wanted to prove that they were as good as NHL players. Tarasov had been asking for a game against the Canadian pros since 1964 (he got permission from Khrushchev, who later changed his mind). But in December 1971, a Russian sports columnist put a small article in a Moscow newspaper suggesting some kind of “friendly” series. A Canadian diplomat read it and knew right away that its appearance in the paper meant that the idea had come from the Soviet government. Today, of course, the NHL has players from all over Europe, Canada, and the United States, but back in 1972, the league was almost entirely Canadian with just a handful of Americans. So the two governments started talking and set up a series of games to be played in September before the NHL season began. It would be four games in Canada, four games in Russia.

  The Canadians put together a team of the best players in the league, led by Phil and Tony Esposito, Bobby Clarke, Brad Park, Yvan Cournoyer, Frank and Pete Mahovlich, Jean Ratelle, Guy Lapointe, Ken Dryden, and Paul Henderson. Bobby Orr couldn’t play because he was injured. Bobby Hull couldn’t play because he’d jumped to the new rival league, the WHA. Gordie Howe had retired. But still, it was an incredibly stacked team.

  Canadian fans and Canadian sportswriters thought their team would dominate, maybe win all eight games. The players felt that way too. They figured they would roll right over the Russians.

  • • •

  On September 2, 1972, the two teams skated onto the ice at the Montreal Forum for Game One. Prime Minister Trudeau dropped the ceremonial puck. Phil Esposito took the faceoff for Canada. The Canadians scored in the first thirty seconds, and then scored again minutes later. But even so, the Canadians knew they had a game on their hands. Then the Russians settled into their game—and it was a revelation to Canadian hockey fans. The Soviets looked like they were toying with Team Canada. Circling with the puck, passing with a kind of craftiness NHL fans weren’t used to—and doing it all at top speed.

  As the night wore on the difference in the two teams’ conditioning started to show. Canada had dressed only five defensemen, and during the last part of the game the Russians were all over the ice. By the end of the night, the Canadians were in a state of shock. They had been hammered 7–3.

  The Summit Series continued across the country. In Game Two in Toronto, Peter Mahovlich scored one of the prettiest goals ever in hockey history. Canada was up 2–1 and the Russians were on the power play in Canada’s zone. Mahovlich picked up a pass from Phil Esposito and skated all the way down, deking Vladislav Tretiak. Canada won that game 4–1. It seemed to make people think, “Okay, it’s going to change. We’re going to win seven out of eight games now.” But then Game Three ended in a tie.

  Team Canada was booed at the beginning of Game Four in Vancouver, and booed again at the end. In between, they lost 5–3. And the score actually flattered Canada. Coach Harry Sinden called the game a “beating.”

  When Phil Esposito, who’d been chosen as the Canadian star of the game, skated over to accept the honor, the fans booed him too. Canadian sportscaster Johnny Esaw later interviewed Phil, who was really upset. What I remember is the sweat pouring off his face from the effort he’d put into the game. “Some of our guys are really, really down in the dumps,” he said. “We know, we’re trying like hell. I mean, we’re doing the best we can, and they got a good team, and let’s face facts. But it doesn’t mean that we’re not giving it our 150 percent.”

  I really believe a speech can turn a team around. You would think that highly trained professionals shouldn’t be swayed one way or another by a few words. But hockey is a game of emotion. All the skill in the world won’t help you if you don’t have passion. It’s hard to have that kind of passion if you’re expecting an easy win. Phil’s emotional outburst, and his acknowledgement that Canada’s biggest stars were in deep against the toughest competition they had ever faced really changed the way Canadian fans looked at the series.

  The players didn’t hear Phil defending them, because they were back in the locker room. I’ve heard Phil Esposito say that a side trip to play the Swedish national team during a fourteen-day break between the four Summit games in Canada and the final four in Moscow united the team because the Sweden games were so physical. Wayne Cashman was cut for fifty stitches by a high stick that actually split his tongue. Phil has said that up to that point, the Canadian team was more
or less of a collection of all-stars, but in Sweden they gelled.

  But I’ve had an opportunity to spend some time with the great Serge Savard, and he says that it wasn’t until they got to Russia that the team really came together. That’s when coaches Harry Sinden, who’d come out of retirement, and John Ferguson decided to shorten the bench from thirty-five to twenty. Sinden had said that before the series he was “just a guy from Rochester with a million friends. Now I can count them on one hand.”

  Sinden made some tough decisions and gave some pretty good hockey players news they didn’t want to hear. Take Vic Hadfield, a left-winger on the Rangers’ GAG (goal-a-game) line along with right-winger Rod Gilbert and center Jean Ratelle. Hadfield was the only fifty-goal scorer in Rangers’ history. A month before the Summit Series, the WHA’s Cleveland Crusaders had offered him a five-year, $1-million contract, and he used it as leverage with the Rangers to get the same offer. Sinden told Hadfield he wouldn’t be playing. Hadfield didn’t want to just hang around, so he left Moscow and headed home along with Buffalo players Gilbert Perreault and Richard Martin, and Jocelyn Guevremont of the Canucks.

  Serge told me that the guys who stayed made a decision: “‘To hell with them, we gotta do it together’—and to me that’s where we became a real, real team.”

  • • •

  Everyone was nervous going behind the Iron Curtain. When the team arrived there were guards with automatic weapons everywhere. The players felt they were being watched constantly. They were also pretty sure their rooms were bugged, so they were careful not to talk about their game plan. They even got calls waking them up in the middle of the night—and one night they had to leave their hotel while police investigated a bomb threat. Alan Eagleson didn’t trust the food, so he’d brought in a shipment from Finland: 350 steaks, 350 cases of milk, 350 cases of soda, 350 cases of beer. By the time it was delivered to their hotel, half of it was gone.