To this day it’s the only trophy I have in my home. It sits on a bookshelf in our study next to the kitchen. You can’t go anywhere in the house without seeing it.
• • •
I recently had a wonderful dinner with Alex Ovechkin, who reminded me of me when I first met Gordie Howe. I’d asked Gordie a thousand questions, just as Alex did. “How do you get ready? What do you eat before a game? What do you think of this guy? How many days a week do you practice?”
In the old days they used to say that if you don’t win a Stanley Cup, you’re not a Hall of Famer. Now it’s tougher to win a Cup. There are more teams, for one, and because of the salary cap there’s more parity. So in this day and age you can make it into the Hall without a Cup, but it’s an extra notch if you win it. Alex desperately wants to win a Stanley Cup. That’s all he thinks about, that’s all he cares about. I think that when most kids come into the NHL they’re in a sort of survival mode, just wanting to stay in the league. Then, as they start succeeding, their mindset changes to wanting to make a difference on their team, and from there it goes to wanting to win a championship. That’s where Alex is now.
We talked about what it takes to win, how special it is when you do, and how important it is to lift the Stanley Cup. Alex is a nice young man, and I have a great deal of fondness for him. I told him that when he gets to the final game and the chance to win the Stanley Cup, Janet and I will be there.
• • •
I’ve had the opportunity for some quiet, one-on-one sit-downs with other guys from the next generation. Hockey has changed—the game is different from what it was in the 80s, and in the 80s it was different from what it was in the 50s—but the players themselves haven’t changed a whole lot. I still see the will to win, the intensity, the unselfishness, the sacrifices they make, and the best players playing at a higher level when it counts. None of that has changed.
I’ve always carried with me something Gordie Howe told me at the ’79 series against Moscow Dynamo. We were talking about what to expect, and Gordie said, “All you gotta do is just play the way you’ve always played. Get the puck to Mark and me and we’ll be fine.” Not even two minutes into the game, Gordie got the puck and sent it to me. I gave it to Mark, Mark gave it to Gordie, and Gordie gave it back to me, and I scored. After the game I said, “Gordie, oh my God, you really are that good.”
He said, “You know, Wayne, I just love to play, and if you love to play good things happen.”
Mark Messier used to say, “There’s not one thing about the game I don’t love.” I felt the same way—going to practice, being in the locker room, sitting on the bench, playing big matchups. There were years when I played more than 130 games—preseason, the Canada Cup, the playoffs, and another fourteen exhibition games. We played in Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Cincinnati. Places where they were trying to promote hockey. Mark Messier and I played every one of them because people were paying to come and see us. Someone might have saved up for a whole year or driven for hours to see us play. You had to put your best foot forward. What if it was some kid’s first time at a game?
• • •
My dad’s mother, my grandmother Mary, took me to my first NHL game at Maple Leaf Gardens. I was seven, about to turn eight, and the Leafs were playing the Oakland Seals. On January 1, 1969, my dad drove us down from Brantford to the Gardens in Toronto. He had a light-blue Pontiac that chugged so much my stomach was in a knot the whole way. Would the car make it to the game or would we break down and miss it altogether?
He dropped us off in front and said, “I’ll pick you guys up right here when it’s over.” I think he was nervous because I was so young and my grandmother was older. She would have been only fifty-nine. That’s not very old to me now, but I remember looking up at her and thinking she was an old, old lady, which is funny because I’m in my mid-fifties now and have a grandson of my own.
We were at the very top row in the gray seats, right across from the Seals’ bench, between the red line and the blue line on the side where the TV cameras shoot Hockey Night in Canada. When the Leafs came on the ice for warm-up, I couldn’t believe how blue their uniforms were. I’d only seen the games on black-and-white TV.
Toronto had just won the Cup two years earlier. They had Dave Keon, Ron Ellis, Norm Ullman, Paul Henderson, Murray Oliver, Bob Pulford, and Tim Horton. The Seals were in just their second year after expansion. So Toronto’s shots on goal were almost double theirs, but to me it was incredibly exciting.
The final score was 7–3. My grandmother stood up to go and I said, “We can’t leave, I gotta see the three stars.” On TV you just saw them skate up to the announcer, but in real life they sat on the bench and skated out when their names were called.
I think Ron Ellis was the first star, if I remember correctly. On the way out I said to my grandmother, “That was the best night ever. I want to play hockey here someday.” It was the first time I’d ever told anyone about wanting to be an NHL player. She looked down at me and nodded. “You’re going to make it, Wayne. You’ll see.”
Howie Morenz was the game’s first superstar. Sportswriters voted him the best player of the first half of the twentieth century. When you think of the stars of the second half of the century, you realize just how good Morenz was. He is right up there with the guys in this photo: Jean Béliveau, Bobby Hull, Gordie Howe, and Phil Esposito. (Beside me on the left is my friend Mike Barnett.) But I imagine him playing the game like Paul Kariya. Not a big guy, but smooth and smart, and tough enough to pick himself up after a big hit.
Some defensemen are just playing a different game from everyone else. Bobby Orr was the only defenseman ever to win a scoring title. Like Orr, Paul Coffey could start behind his own net and go end to end. We were teammates in 1985–86 when he broke Bobby’s scoring record. All you had to do was watch Paul skate with the puck for ten seconds to know that he was a special player. Eddie Shore was like that. The phrase “power play” was invented to describe the way the Bruins could dominate when Shore was on the attack.
As important as our game is, our countries are more important, and that has always been reflected on the ice. In the First World War, an entire team of servicemen played a season in the NHL as the Northern Fusiliers before shipping out for the battlefields of Europe. In the Second World War, the league’s top-scoring line enlisted all at once. The Kraut Line, as they were called (because they were all from a town of German heritage), was carried off the ice as heroes at Boston Garden when they left for service. I personally experienced a small taste of that patriotism at the 1991 All-Star Game, which was played during the first days of Operation Desert Storm. The cheers that shook the Chicago Stadium during “The Star Spangled Banner” were unforgettable. (Here I am trying to get a saucer pass over the stick of one of the greatest defensemen I ever played against, Ray Bourque.)
There is a reason the annual trophy for the NHL’s best goaltender is named after Georges Vezina. During his career, he was a brick wall in net for the Canadiens, and recorded the first shutout in NHL history. I have played with some truly great goalies over the years, but I have to say that Grant Fuhr was the greatest. When the game was on the line, the whole team knew that Grant could shut the door. He won the Vezina in 1988.
Maurice “Rocket” Richard played the game with a ferocity anyone could see. He had pure speed, and he was strong enough to bulldoze his way to the net when he had to. There was just no way to stop him. But one thing we all have in common is that we slow down. I always respected Richard for hanging up his skates while he still had a little of that fire left, as hard as it must have been. I wanted to do the same.
I am very proud to have won the Lady Byng Trophy. The list of guys who have won it over the years would make a pretty impressive hockey team, from Frank Nighbor (Lady Byng invented the trophy for him, so he was clearly a deserving winner) through Stan Mikita and Bobby Hull (seen here with Gordie Howe, who was
nobody’s idea of a Lady Byng candidate), and Pavel Datsyuk. These guys had the kind of toughness that shows up not in penalty minutes, but in victories.
I know what it is like to lose to the United States in international competition. But back in 1960, the Americans were perennial underdogs. That year, they shocked the hockey world with a gold-medal victory at Squaw Valley (above). Then they did it again at Lake Placid in 1980. That’s when the sport really took off in the United States. In fact, it was the kids who were inspired by the “Miracle on Ice” that defeated Team Canada in the World Cup in 1996.
Hockey has always been a game of ice and sticks and pucks. But it was the owners who shaped it into the game we have today. It was Tex Rickard who saw the potential for a rough Canadian game to bring in crowds at Madison Square Garden and Boston Garden. Lester Patrick and his brother Frank came up with innovations as fundamental to hockey as artificial ice, numbers on sweaters, changing on the fly, and the blue line. Jack Kent Cooke did as much as anyone to expand the NHL in 1967 (that’s the Los Angeles Forum under construction in the background). There can be no doubt what the Oilers meant to owner Peter Pocklington. That’s him to my right at the press conference announcing my trade to Los Angeles.
Stitches and hockey have always gone together. That’s just the way it is when you’re playing a fast game with sticks and pucks. In 1959, Jacques Plante took a puck to the face from the Rangers’ Andy Bathgate. He went to the dressing room, got patched up, and returned wearing a mask. He played only one more game without one for the rest of his career. Howie Morenz, seen here getting stitched up thirty years before Plante changed the game, didn’t even wear a helmet. But a helmet didn’t help Brendan Shanahan, seen here getting some medical attention. A bit of discomfort is just part of the game.
When I look at these Boston Bruins in their practice sweaters from the 1935–36 season, it seems as though they could step out of the photo and play today. And they would certainly have been good enough. If you could hold onto a roster spot on an Original Six team, you were a very, very good hockey player. Dick Irvin certainly was. He came in second in league scoring after returning from the First World War, then went on to coach both the Leafs and the Habs to Stanley Cups. That’s Punch Imlach at the bottom, celebrating the Leafs’ Stanley Cup victory over the Black Hawks in 1962. They would win the last Cup of the Original Six era in 1967.
No matter how you define greatness, Gordie Howe was the greatest player ever. There will never be another player to finish in the top five in the NHL scoring race for 20 consecutive seasons—I didn’t come close. There will never be another hockey dad who rides shotgun for his sons—or plays at the highest level of international competition with them. But as great as he was on the ice, no one was warmer, funnier, or more generous off the ice either. No one who knew him will forget that the greatest ever was also possibly the humblest.
Hockey is about speed and vision and finesse. It also requires you fight through adversity. Lou Fontinato (on the left, being held by the linesman) was one of the toughest players of the 1950s. He led the league in penalty minutes three times, and his bout with Gordie Howe was legendary. Glenn Hall played over 900 games in net in the NHL without a mask, and lost only one tooth. He did take a few stitches though. On the following page is Ted Lindsay, one of the tougher guys in NHL history, after taking a hit (he scored four goals afterward). At the bottom, that’s me getting separated from the puck by Marcel Dionne.
How great was Jean Béliveau? The Montreal Canadiens bought an entire league just to secure his rights. Howe and Béliveau were very different players, but they were both big men who played the game with a kind of gracefulness that made it look easy. I met him at a tournament when I was a kid, and I spent the whole game worrying that I would let him down.
The history of the game is full of great lines, from the “Bread Line,” who played for the Rangers in the ’20s and ’30s, through to Vancouver’s “Brothers Line” of Henrik and Daniel Sedin, along with Anson Carter. But sometimes you end up on a line with your childhood idol, as I did with Gordie Howe in 1979. Famously, Jaromir Jagr came to Pittsburgh just so he could play with Mario Lemieux. Possibly the most lethal line in the history of the game was the Soviets’ “KLM Line” of Vladimir Krutov, Igor Larionov, and Sergei Makarov. There was almost nothing those three couldn’t do.
Hockey is a game of tradition, and usually that is something we can be proud of. But we also need to celebrate the pioneers, like Willie O’Ree, the NHL’s first black player (seen here being interviewed while making history) and Fred Sasakamoose, the groundbreaking First Nations player. When you think of the guys who followed in their footsteps, like Grant Fuhr and Jarome Iginla, or Reggie Leach and Carey Price, you realize what a debt we all owe the players who paved the way.
The NHL changed forever in 1967, and learned a lot about how to grow the game. The California Golden Seals had some strong hockey people in the front office, but never had much success on the ice or at the box office. The Minnesota North Stars did a lot of things right, and had a bona fide star in Bill Goldsworthy, but their best draft pick—Mike Modano—wouldn’t win a Cup until the team was in Dallas. The Pittsburgh Penguins struggled early, but thanks to drafting the likes of Mario Lemieux, Jaromir Jagr, Evgeni Malkin, and Sidney Crosby, they are easily the most successful of the 1967 teams. (Seen here on the left is Kim Clackson. I always wanted to know where he was on the ice.)
The first expansion team to win the Cup was Philadelphia. They had balanced scoring, team toughness, and possibly the best goalie in the league in Bernie Parent, but the heart and soul of that team was their captain, Bobby Clarke. Over the years, people have asked me how I started using the space behind the net as my “office.” I always tell them—from watching Bobby Clarke.
When the WHA came along, it gave players all kinds of new options. For a kid like me, who was too young to enter the NHL draft, it meant I could play pro hockey. Here I am in Junior B. In a couple of years I would be in Indianapolis. For a superstar like Bobby Hull, it meant the kind of negotiating power he could only have dreamed of earlier in his career. Here he is, holding a mock check for $1,000,000 as he arrives in the WHA.
I didn’t last very long in Indianapolis, and to be honest I wasn’t mature enough back then to be a major part of a new organization. I was traded eight games into the season, along with Eddie Mio and Peter Driscoll. When we hopped on this plane, though, negotiations were still in progress. We didn’t even know where we were going to land, Edmonton or Winnipeg. Below, here I am in my first game as an Oiler. You can tell it’s my first, because that was the only game I wore a CCM helmet. I switched to Jofa the next game and that was all I wore until I retired.
People often say that the Canadian roster at the 1976 Canada Cup was the best team ever to skate together. And it’s tough to argue against that—Bobby Orr, Bobby Hull, Bobby Clarke, Marcel Dionne, and Denis Potvin would be pretty tough to beat. Still, Canada was smoked 8–1 by the Soviets at the next Canada Cup five years later. That was my first time facing the Big Red Machine, and I was impressed. Here I am with Guy Lafleur.
Every team has to learn how to win—and when they do, they tend to keep winning. It’s no coincidence that Montreal has won the Cup so many times. They’ve had great players, and a culture of excellence. Here Guy Lafleur is coming over the boards to celebrate winning the 1979 Stanley Cup, followed by Yvon Lambert, Doug Risebrough, Mario Tremblay, and Pierre Mondou. Scotty Bowman coached that team, and brought some of that same culture to Detroit, where the Red Wings, led by Steve Yzerman, became the standard by which NHL organizations were judged.
We had a great team in Edmonton, but we were just kids. Here I am joking around in the dressing room with Dave Dryden and Brett Callighen. Below that is Mark Messier showing off his ping-pong skills. Even when we started getting serious, we never stopped having fun. Here are Jari Kurri and Glenn Anderson joking around with the Campbell Bowl. Some players think i
t’s bad luck to touch it, but that never stopped us.
Every game in the old Smythe Division was a battle. Winnipeg always played us tough—here’s Dave Babych hauling me down by my face. And our relationship with the Flames went beyond the word “rivalry.” We knew that the road to the Stanley Cup ran through Calgary, and they knew the same about Edmonton. Here I am making my way into the Calgary zone, a step ahead of Rob Ramage and Jim Peplinski, thanks to a little interference.
One thing we learned from our first trip to the Stanley Cup final against the Islanders was that talent was never going to be enough to win a championship. To win, you need heart and a willingness to sacrifice. Mark Messier had all that (seen here on the left against another true competitor, Joel Otto). But you only win the Stanley Cup as a team. Everyone has a role. When we won our fourth Cup in 1988, we savored that more than ever.
Canada’s roster in the 1984 Canada Cup was made up largely of Oilers and Islanders—and it took us a long time to come together as a team. One guy I really enjoyed playing with was Quebec Nordiques gunner Michel Goulet. And the 1987 Canada Cup was even more intense. I believe the Soviet team we played in the three-game final series may have been the best team ever to hit the ice. Even with players like Mario Lemieux, we had no business beating them. But we found a way. On the top right is Glenn Anderson getting position on Igor Larionov, one of the most complete players I’ve ever seen.
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