Ken Morrow, who’d been part of U.S. Miracle on Ice, joined the team right after the 1980 Olympics. And as soon as Ken got on the ice against Detroit in his first game with the Islanders, Arbour knew he’d have a big impact on the team. The other big change was acquiring Butch Goring, a great two-way second-line center from L.A., in exchange for popular and longtime right-winger Bill Harris, along with defenseman Dave Lewis.
Butch Goring wasn’t a big guy, but he was smart, a great skater, and incredibly fit. He’d been in the NHL for a long time—and without him, there might not have been any Islander Stanley Cups. He brought an element to the dressing room that was really good for the team. One of the first things he did was stand up in the locker room and say, “You guys don’t realize how good you are.” The team finished the season on a twelve-game undefeated streak. Butch kept the room loose, but when the puck dropped, he was everywhere.
Butch was also a character. He didn’t have laces in his skates. He had Velcro straps instead—because as he saw it, tying skates was wasted energy. He wore cowboy boots and no socks with every suit he owned, which were all made out of corduroy. When the Islanders were on the road in Butch’s hometown of Winnipeg, they’d come back to the dressing room after the pregame skate and there’d be only one or two sticks left for each player. The Goring family had gone home with the rest. And Butch is the guy who everyone says started the playoff beard tradition. He’d been playing well and didn’t want to make changes, so he went into the playoffs with it and everyone on the team kind of followed along. A beard made guys look ready to fight it out.
When Butch came in, he was put on a line with Clark Gillies and Duane Sutter as his wingers—making for a heavy line with a smaller center who had savvy and skill. Another line, with Bobby Nystrom, Wayne Merrick, and John Tonelli (all of them big, 205–210 pounds), was counted on to check, to create energy, and to contribute offensively. The top line was Bryan Trottier, Mike Bossy, and Bobby Bourne. They had skill, speed, and two-way play. Finally there was Anders Kallur, Lorne Henning, Garry Howatt, and Steve Tambellini. That team had just incredible depth.
In the 1979–80 Stanley Cup finals, the Islanders beat the Flyers in six games. Bill Torrey would address the room once a year. He was a very positive guy. He’d echo what Al had been saying all year long and would talk about guys’ roles on the team, how important they were. Are you a penalty killer? Are you a checker? Are you a power play specialist? Are you a guy out there playing against the other team’s top line and ready to shut them down? Just like Scotty Bowman, he always emphasized that everyone on the team had something to contribute.
He always tried to talk about the teams that won Cups. He’d say, “Yeah, they had stars, but what the perennial Cup winners like the Montreal Canadiens have always had is balance. If you want to win you can’t just be a one-man band. Every guy is important. Mike Bossy’s a goal scorer. But shutting down their goal scorer is just as important.”
What Bill Torrey told his players is still a huge part of what it means to come together as a team. Many players go unnoticed, and yet they’re important. And when you win a Stanley Cup, everyone is rewarded.
At the Coliseum on May 24, 1980, the Islanders were leading 4–2 at the end of the second period, but Philadelphia evened it up in the third and the game went into sudden-death overtime. The locker room at the end of the third period was silent. But then one of the guys said, “Who’s going to be the hero?” and each guy all the way down the bench said, “I am. I am. I am. I am. I am . . .”
They went out and Bobby Nystrom deflected a John Tonelli pass into the net. In just eight seasons of existence, the Islanders had won the Cup.
• • •
In their third run for the Cup, in 1981–82, the Islanders had Bryan Trottier, Butch Goring, Wayne Merrick, and Billy Carroll as their centers. In mid-season they brought in Brent Sutter and moved him into third-line center behind Trottier and Goring. He scored forty-three points in forty-three games that season. In the playoffs, Game One against the New York Rangers, second round, Brent was leaving his own zone with the puck when he tried to beat Rob McClanahan on a one-on-one. McClanahan stripped the puck from him, and the Rangers scored.
That was it for Brent: Arbour moved him to the fourth line. He didn’t get much ice time after that, and it was frustrating. He knew he’d made a mistake and that it had cost a goal, but at the same time it was Stanley Cup playoffs! Brent didn’t play a regular shift in the next ten playoff games (five more against the Rangers, four against the Nordiques, and one against Vancouver), but then, in the third period of Game Two in the finals against Vancouver, all of a sudden Al sent him out on a regular shift. He was also killing penalties and playing on the second power play unit.
Al played him a ton in Games Three and Four—and they ended up winning the Stanley Cup. The guys were all celebrating in the dressing room when the Islanders’ equipment manager, Jim Pickard (who passed away recently), came in and said, “Brent, Radar wants to see you outside the room.” Radar was Al Arbour’s nickname.
Brent waited, and then Al came up to him and looked down. Al was over six feet, broad-shouldered, and wore big glasses. He said, “Did you learn anything from this?”
Brent, who was nineteen at the time, didn’t know what to say. He was a little worried about his mom and dad and his brothers, Duane, Ronnie, and Richie, who were all back in the dressing room. So he just kind of mumbled something. Al grabbed him by the shoulders and said, “I just made you one of the stars of the Stanley Cup, and you’re going to have a long, long career.”
Brent has carried that with him ever since—not the party, or the dressing room, or the skating around with the Cup on the ice, but that moment with Al. Here was a kid who’d come into the show and everything was rosy. He was playing on a team that had won three Stanley Cups. By sitting him through most of the playoffs, Al was building Brent’s mental toughness and making sure he didn’t get too far ahead of himself. It was a great, key moment in his career. Al was a firm coach, a hard coach, but most of all, he was fair.
• • •
The Islanders made it through to the finals the next season, 1982–83, and even though they’d won three in a row, the media were calling them the underdogs. Against the Oilers.
Thirty-Three
ONLY THE GOOD DIE YOUNG
People often say that when you expand the league, you dilute the talent. And that is partly true. But I don’t think talent is a finite resource. I think talent is developed. A good team can grow talent, and a bad situation can damage it. So by bringing new teams into the league, I think the NHL created more opportunities for talent to thrive.
One reason I think that is the way the Oilers came together. In 1979, Glen Sather selected Kevin Lowe with the Oilers’ first-ever pick. The four surviving WHA franchises picked at the bottom of the twenty-one NHL teams. (The last thing the NHL wanted was for a WHA team to jump into the league and start winning, so they dispersed the WHA talent, then gave the new franchises the worst draft positions.) The Oilers had the last pick of the first round and got a building block of the franchise.
In the second round, we could have added Neal Broten. But Glen had traded that pick for a pivotal guy in our lineup, David Semenko. In the third round, we got Mark Messier, 48th overall. In the fourth round, we got Glenn Anderson. The next year, 1980, we added Paul Coffey sixth overall, Jari Kurri at sixty-ninth, and Andy Moog at 132nd overall. In ’81 we added Grant Fuhr at eighth.
That’s three years and five Hall of Famers—Messier, Anderson, Coffey, Kurri, and Fuhr. I would have been in the ’79 draft if the Oilers hadn’t been able to protect me as part of the roster from their last season in the WHA. That would have made it six. It’s hard to make the case that talent was thin when one team could draft that much raw talent that fast.
The key word is “raw.” Those Oiler teams were not destined to be a dynasty. We could have messed it all
up. In fact, when we started out, we had no idea how much work it was going to take.
• • •
The team had a lot of fun together in those early years. Wrestling was a part of that. The early 80s was its golden age in North America, and a lot of people would watch the WWF on TV. It was huge in Edmonton. When he was a teenager in Winnipeg, Cam Connor, one of our tougher wingers, had been good friends with Rod Toombs, later known as Rowdy Roddy Piper, one of the all-time great wrestling personalities. Thanks to what he’d learned from Piper, it was Cam’s opinion that wrestling was an outstanding conditioner—as good as lifting weights. So after practices, he and Lee Fogolin (Cam’s roommate and a man I will always admire) would team up to take on Dave Semenko and Mark Messier. They’d go into our little players’ lounge and wrestle for real. And although Mark was just eighteen at the time, he was so strong that Cam had to dig pretty deep to pin him. That’s how strong Mark was even then.
We’d give each other the gears—a lot. Kids and dogs were the only things that were sacred in our locker room. Dave Semenko always kept it loose there—which is what you need in a hockey club. When we were struggling as a group, Semenko would play a little prank or do something funny and it would just lift the weight right off our shoulders. Fans never got to experience that side of Semenko. They’d look at him and think, “That’s just a real tough guy.” But I’ll tell you what, he was very witty and very intelligent. That’s how I’ll always remember Semenko.
He’d come in early in the morning and use a sewing needle to poke holes in the bottom of the Styrofoam coffee cups. Our shirts were always covered in coffee drips. Dave himself would never drink out of Styrofoam—he always had a heavy stoneware mug. So one day Lee decided to fix him. He went down to the hardware store and bought a 1/32 carbide bit, made it to the rink early in the morning, and drilled a tiny hole into the bottom of Dave’s mug. A couple of hours later, Dave was sitting there reading the paper, coffee dripping down his shirt. He started looking around because everyone was laughing and he didn’t know what was going on. Suddenly he saw that his shirt was all wet and he said, “Fogie, I know this was you—you’re the only guy in this dressing room who knows how to work a drill!”
• • •
Whenever you walked into our locker room, you’d hear rock and roll. It had to be turned off thirty minutes before the start of the game, and someone was always delegated to do that. But you didn’t shut it down hard. You’d fade it out. Paul Coffey had a big impact on the music because he had an absolute man-crush on Bruce Springsteen. He loved the Boss. One night, Andy Moog heard Stevie Ray Vaughan play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and decided he must be the coolest person in the world. (Still, Vaughan would get on the playlist only once in a while because his music was a little too off the beaten track.) There was also some pop, a little bit of electronic, like Devo. Canadian bands were popular, Rush and April Wine. We listened to a lot of Cheap Trick too. Guitar rock.
The booster club in Edmonton used to make signs for us all and hang them way up high in the Coliseum rafters. One night we stepped on the ice for a game and the sign in the rafters said “Penticton sent us a real peach.” Paul Coffey knew that our goalie, Andy Moog, was the only Oiler from there, and so from that point on Andy was Peach. When I told Paul that I hadn’t seen the sign, he said, “Really? You should skate with your head up.”
Andy had a signed Gump Worsley hockey card in his locker. When Andy was very young, for Christmas one year he was given a hockey book full of spectacular color photos. One of the photos was of Worsley, the great Rangers/Canadiens goalie, getting ready to stop a shot with his face. (Worsley didn’t wear a mask.) His nose is wrinkled and his lip is curled up. Young Andy had looked at the photo, seen Gump’s courage, and thought, “Okay, that’s what a goalie is.”
Andy had been up and down to the minors a couple of times. Sometime during the 1981 season, Glen called Andy into his office to tell him that he’d be going down again, and Andy was not happy about it. No one is happy getting sent down—you’ll never make it to the NHL if you don’t believe you can play. But Andy was probably unhappier than most. So Glen gave him a stern lecture and told him to toughen up. “The NHL is no place for a sensitive guy. Get tough or get run over,” he said. Glen leaned on all of us, especially early on, because we were all so young. He cared about each guy, he really did. But he could be hard on us.
It was quiet in the dressing room back then. We didn’t have nearly the responsibilities after the game that players do today. The media weren’t allowed back there, so you could be elated about a victory or frustrated about a defeat. The team even had a sort of post-game tradition where we’d take a bit of time after every game. It might be only five minutes, but it gave us a chance to decompress. Those few minutes talking about the game were special for me. We didn’t say anything earth-shattering or mind-blowing, but we said enough.
• • •
By April 1981 we’d clinched a spot in the playoffs, but we didn’t know who we’d be up against first. Billy Joel was playing at Northlands on April 5, and on the night of the concert we were in the locker room having hors d’oeuvres and cocktails with him when we found out that we’d be playing the Canadiens. Billy Joel was a hockey fan, and having been born in New York, he loved the Rangers and the Islanders. We went into that first game against Montreal with the ghetto blaster turned up full, playing Billy Joel songs like “You May Be Right,” “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me,” “Big Shot,” and “Only the Good Die Young.”
Eddie Mio was our number-one goalie, Ron Low was his backup, and Andy Moog was the third. But going into the first round against Montreal, both Ron and Eddie were out of action, each with a broken hand. Andy hadn’t played much. He’d had only four starts, but they were all in the final few weeks that spring.
Earlier in the season we’d been at Maple Leaf Gardens, and during the morning skate, Glen told Andy that he’d be making his first start with the team that night. But thirty minutes before the game, right after warm-up, Andy came off the ice and Glen said, “Andy, we’re making a change. Eddie’s going to start tonight.” Glen’s rationale was that if he told Eddie he was playing at Maple Leaf Gardens that night, Eddie would be nervous all day. He wouldn’t rest or eat properly. Believing that Andy was going to play allowed Eddie to relax. And so, at his first NHL start, Andy was pulled in the warm-up.
On the way to the airport the next morning, Andy was sitting next to Paul Coffey, who’d been on the team only since the start of the season. They were talking about how frustrating it was not to get the chance to establish themselves. Each of them was saying, “Just give me a chance and I’ll show you what I can do.” Of course it doesn’t work that way. You have to bide your time. But the guys were impatient to contribute.
The first day of the playoffs against Montreal, we were having a morning skate when Glen skated over to Andy and said, “How do you feel?”
“I feel pretty good.” Andy was cocky and ignorant—a good combination.
“How would you like to start tonight?”
“I think I’d like that.”
Glen said, “Okay, you’re in,” and skated away.
At that time, the first round of playoffs was a best-of-five series, so you wanted to get off to a quick start. We beat Montreal 6–3 that opening night. Andy was solid in net. Lafleur got some really good shots off, but Andy laughed and said he couldn’t believe he’d made the saves. He told me that the puck came off Lafleur’s stick differently—it exploded off his blade like a slingshot, but with greater accuracy.
Dick Irvin asked to interview Andy after the game. Dick said, “Andy, are you unhappy you didn’t receive a star tonight?” Andy was green, not cocky, when he answered, “Well, maybe I’ll get one tomorrow night.” And sure enough he had forty stops the next night. We won 3–1 and he got his star. The headline in the Montreal paper the next day was “Andy Who?”
Toward
the end of that second game, the Montreal fans let their team know they were unhappy. The whistles went up in the Forum non-stop. It was like another bit of ammunition we could use to try to beat them.
We were still flying commercial at that time, so we flew back to Edmonton the next morning, and when we landed we were met by cheering fans holding up signs. That took us all by surprise. And then about forty-five minutes before warm-up, we could hear screaming, foot-stomping, and cheering. Once we got out onto the ice, it was incredible. The fans stood and clapped and cheered for over three minutes. Northlands was actually vibrating from the noise.
Andy had to block out all that excitement or he’d overreact. Like a lot of goalies, his nerves showed up in his eyes. It’s a hard one to explain, but Andy put it this way: “When you’re calm, relaxed, and confident, your eyes stay focused on the puck. You’re into the puck, you’re on the puck. But high-energy games can distract you and make your eyes twitchy.”
Andy’s dad, Don, had been a goalie for the Penticton Vees, back when guys didn’t wear masks. As a result he had no teeth and a nose made out of rubber—it was like a ball in that it could move all over his face. By the time Andy was thirteen, he was at a level where the technical parts of the game had gotten past his father. So for Andy’s birthday he bought him a sports psychology book about mental preparation by Thomas Tutko. By the time he was fifteen, Andy had read it through a dozen times. It gave him an advantage in mental strength.
That night, I looked over at Andy. His head was down. He was staring at the ice in his crease, using the visualization and focus skills he’d studied. Moving back and forward. Slowing it all down.
The Montreal Canadiens were thrown off. They did not look like the team everyone knew from the late 70s. We were all over them. When we scored to make it 6–2, I looked over to the bench and saw my teammates’ faces and started to realize that it was real. It had been twenty-nine years since the Canadiens had been swept in a playoff series.
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