by Ron MacLean
Del stormed over to Don. He was just livid. He said, “Donald, if you ever shake the hand of a man who’s crossed you again, you’ll not live under my roof.” And that became a code for Don. His dad was a fierce guy.
In 1996, we had probably one of our worst meltdowns on Coach’s Corner ever. Usually, I am aware when I’m pushing Don’s buttons. I’m playing with a bull, so if I’m careless, I deserve to get the horn. It was during the first World Cup of Hockey, which replaced the Canada Cup as the top professional hockey tournament outside of the Olympics. We were in Montreal at the Molson Centre. Canada had a best-of-three against the United States. In the first game, Canada won, but lost Mark Messier and Al MacInnis with elbow bursa injuries.
Canada lost game two and went to the rubber match. Game three was at the Molson Centre, now the Bell Centre, in Montreal. Canada came out and threw everything at the Americans. Canada outshot them by about 20 to 4, but the American goalie, Mike Richter, stood on his head. Don is always promoting tough guys, not finesse players, so he is a little anxious during international events. Canada always has the toughest team, so that means if we lose, it’s his fault. Before we even started the Coach’s Corner segment, I could see the sweat off his palms leaving marks on the desktop of the Hockey Night set.
The red light went on in the first intermission and Don said, “You know, Ron, a little something I have to get off my chest here. Really, really ticks me off. You know, I hear there are players, they’re tired, they’re sick, and they’ve played too many meaningful hockey games. Is that what you say?”
“Yes, Don.”
“All these important hockey games they’ve played in their lives. It’s just too much. They’ve given their all for their teams, for their country. They need a break. They need to have some time with their family. They need some quality time. It’s just not possible to expect them to come and play for their country here in the Canada Cup, World Cup, whatever we’re calling the stupid thing now. It’s absolutely ridiculous.”
I said, “Well, who do you mean, Don?”
“Never mind who I mean. I’m just saying there’s some guys ought to be here for Canada. They wanted them to come and they didn’t show up.”
“I know, Don, but you’re plowing a pretty broad swath with a statement like that. I mean, you don’t think Mario Lemieux should be playing, do you?”
“No, of course not, with the cancer. What are you, stupid? I’m just saying there’s guys who ought to be here.”
I said, “I know, but you see what I—”
“Oh, I got it. I got it.” And at this point, I could tell things were kind of going off the rails, but I didn’t know why. “I got it,” he said. “You just come back from the Olympic Games there in Atlanta, all the great write-ups in the newspapers … kudos? Is that what you call them? Anyway, gold medal coverage, CBC, ‘Ron MacLean, Investigative Journalist.’ Ron here is going to get to the bottom of this story—is that what you’re doing?”
“No, Don, but if you’re sitting at home with your family and you’re being sort of charged with not being patriotic, that’s a tough thing.”
He said, “Look. Will you just … shut … up! Just shut up. I’m trying to tell a simple story here.”
And I had to think quickly, because it was really tense to watch and to be a part of. I knew if I were aggressive in return, I’d be a bloodstain on the floor. In order for him to understand what I meant, I brought up an incident that had occurred eight months earlier. In January 1996, the Bruins’ rookie coach, Steve Kasper, had benched his star players Cam Neely and Kevin Stevens after Boston lost to the Blackhawks. Neely was crushed and said of Kasper, who was also his former teammate, “I’ve been through a lot in nine and a half years to be treated this way.” Grapes was furious and ripped Kasper on Coach’s Corner. He said if he could reach through the TV screen, he’d take care of Kasper himself. So I was referring to that when I said, “Well, Don, I’m just doing what you did for Cam Neely when Kasper benched him in Toronto. I’m trying to stick up for anyone unjustly tarred by the same brush.”
I could see Don was starting to feel a little bad. He said, “All right! It’s Ray Bourque, if you have to know. Ray Bourque ought to be here. He lives five minutes down the road, for heaven’s sakes. Matter of fact, Jeremy Roenick ought to be here for the Americans. The point I was trying to make, but you kept buttin’ in, was Bobby Orr was the MVP in the 1976 Canada Cup. And Bobby did it on one leg, and now we’re out of time, and that’s that! You ruined the whole thing.”
He folded his arms and glared at me. I felt a moment of regret, because I had obviously sent him down a path he didn’t want to travel. Bobby Orr had chronic problems with his right knee dating back to the mid-1960s, when he risked his professional career to participate in the Memorial Cup. And in 1976 he did it again by helping Canada win the Canada Cup. Don was the assistant coach of that winning team, and he and Bobby are great friends. Grapes was Bobby’s coach when he scored the most goals of his career—46 in 1974–75.
Don has superior radar about public perception, and the reason he had been reluctant to mention Bourque was because he was worried people might get the mistaken impression that Bobby had criticized Ray Bourque and sent Don out to throw snowballs for him. And here I was, stumbling along, thinking, “Geez, why is Grapes all riled up?” As television goes, it was wild and it was funny.
After blowing up on me and mentioning Ray Bourque on air, I wondered if Grapes would speak to me again that night. When Don and I are on the road, we have a routine. After the broadcast, we like to pull up a couple of chairs in one of our rooms and fill up the garbage pail with ice and cold water and light beers. (I know when Don reads this, he’ll say, “Light beers? You told them we drink light beers? Why didn’t you say Export, for Pete’s sake? Make us look like men.”)
Because it was the last game of the tournament, we were planning to have beers. I ran out to get something to soak them up. As I walked down the street toward the sandwich shop, a cabbie pulled up beside me, rolled down the passenger window and shouted, “You really had him going tonight.”
We were both staying on the thirty-third floor of the hotel. When I got back, I stepped off the elevator, intending to knock on Don’s door. As I made my way down the hallway, I spotted a rubber tree plant with a human arm extended from it, offering an icy beer. I recognized the arm immediately, because Grapes wears cut-off shirts all summer so the guns can breathe. That beer was his way of saying, “Sorry, kid, I got a little carried away tonight.”
4
I WOULD PAY TO REFEREE
I was always happy, but secretly worried about life. I can vividly remember being nine years old and lying in bed thinking, “Rats! I’m going to have to grow up and life won’t be easy like it is now. I really enjoy school. I love Mom and Dad. It’s all so nice. It’ll never be better than this.”
I’ve had that thought a lot of times. In fact, to this day, when Don Cherry and I crack a beer in the hotel room after Hockey Night in Canada, it’s kind of a line we say to one another—“Who could beat this?”
I worked hard at whatever I did. It didn’t matter what it was, I put everything into it, and it sometimes made me really full of myself. During a class debate in Grade 12, I thought I was amazingly clever. I was the Mark Twain of Camille J. Lerouge High. My opponent knew nothing! I had this one in the bag. Then it came time to vote on who won, and nobody sided with me. I thought, “You’re kidding. What is wrong with everybody?” I was superior in the debate, making all my points and absolutely burying my opponent. Then it dawned on me—my attitude had turned everybody off. It was a moment of clarity. I had communicated to my class all right. I had communicated that I was an arrogant twerp.
I liked to be a leader, and after learning to tone it down a bit I became class president and team captain in hockey, right up to the time I tried out for the Red Deer Chiefs in 1977. I definitely didn’t like the rough stuff, so when I got to Red Deer there were a lot of kids with way m
ore moxie than I had for that kind of play. I was scrawny, really scrawny, at five foot ten, maybe 140 pounds, but there were plenty of guys my size and smaller who were far braver than I was.
I’d made it to camp thanks to my skating ability, but I had horrible hands. So I played one level below Midget AAA, and by that time I was a left winger and centre. Sometimes I could see the ice, sometimes I couldn’t. It was frustrating because once every ten games or so, it would magically appear. Most times when I played, I knew what I was missing. Wayne Gretzky always saw the ice, ten for ten. The only thing we had in common is that he credits fear for his awareness.
In 1978, I quit playing hockey and instead chose to referee. I’ve often equated broadcasting with refereeing. In principle, you are supposed to let your guest be the star. It’s the same with reffing. Your job is to bring the players to a level of entertainment and honesty. I like the game to be exciting, with an edge. I use that same philosophy on air with Don Cherry or Gary Bettman or whoever I’m interviewing. I want a little anger. I want a little freedom of expression. I don’t want to rein it in, constantly squeezing it so that it’s deadly dull. I’ve had a few good experiences in both reffing and broadcasting that have helped me learn what works and what doesn’t.
When I refereed, I didn’t see everything, but I was a good communicator. As one of our supervisors used to say, “Some people referee with honey, some people do it with vinegar.” I liked to try to charm my way through. That worked most nights, but not every night.
I liked to use the player’s number, not his name, even if I knew it. I would say, “Look, Six, you’re down 2–0. We all know that was a hook, but I’m not going to call it or you’ll be down 3–0 and then we could all just go home. But I need you to help me out. Everybody in the rink knows you got away with one, so let’s improve your chances of having a good night. You can’t be hooking like that.”
The guys would usually respect that. I think they enjoyed the dialogue, and I would feel confident I had the game under control. But for every five times that it worked, the sixth time a player would say, “Oh, screw off, just make the call.” And I would walk away thinking, “Wow, that’s interesting.” Just when I was feeling like a wonderful manager of a game, I’d get shot down.
When I first started reffing, at eighteen, it was for atoms and pee wees. I moved up to novices, and within a year, bantams, midgets and senior hockey in central Alberta. Now, that was fantastic. I had some crazy moments. Early in my refereeing career, I was in Bentley, Alberta, reffing the Bentley Generals against the Sylvan Lakers. I was twenty years old and given a playoff game, which was pretty important. It went to overtime, and there was a collision between the Bentley goaltender and a Sylvan Lake forward as they both went for a loose puck. The goalie went down and glanced at me, so I knew he wasn’t seriously injured. But he continued to lie there. We had a senior referee named Bruce Small working the lines. Bruce yelled, “The goalie’s down!” and I yelled, “I know he’s down!” I was mad at the goalie for peeking at me to see if I would blow down the play in order to save him from the risk he had taken. So I allowed the player from Sylvan Lake to shoot into the empty net.
Now, what I maybe should have done was blow the whistle. No one would have been upset, and I could have said it looked like the goalie was hurt. Later, I was driving home through the snow, trying to justify my actions and saying to myself, “Well, he wasn’t hurt, and in fairness, the guy should have been allowed to score.” But I knew I was wrong. The prudent move would have been not to allow recognition of the ploy to overrule fairness. The whole basic essence of refereeing is conflict management. You’re trying to adjudicate, just like the police. Sometimes they crack down, and other times they let you go with a warning.
So I allowed Sylvan Lake to score in overtime to win the game. The Bentley fans poured over the glass onto the ice. They were all around me at the referee’s circle, which is in front of the penalty box. Everybody was screaming at me, but nobody louder than the mother of this goaltender. One of the Sylvan Lake players, an RCMP officer, stepped in to protect me because there was only one police officer from Bentley available. I think they thought the Bentley goalie’s mother was going to kill me. She was screaming about how I had let her son get hit and he was hurt, and I shouldn’t have let the play continue, and I was a fool and a moron and an idiot and had no idea what I was doing and should read the rule book. At that point I was still confident in my decision. I argued back, “I’m sorry, ma’am, but your son gambled and I was sure he was okay.”
She was pounding her fists into her hands and shaking her head violently in disagreement when suddenly the top plate of her dentures came flying out onto the ice. They began spinning around and around until they stopped suddenly in between my skates. Everyone was silent. There had been bedlam, and then her teeth were lying at my feet. It was the strangest thing. We all kind of skulked away, embarrassed for her.
Today, I would have given the game a chance to go on under fairer circumstances. Scoring into an empty net in overtime was too easy.
I was owed $75 for reffing that night. As I was changing into my street clothes, a gentleman from Bentley came by the referee’s room and fired seventy-five one-dollar bills at me.
Half the time, I didn’t submit my chits to get paid for reffing. I don’t know why. I don’t think I ever charged mileage. I loved it. Even when I made mistakes like I had that night, I would have paid to referee.
5
KICKING IT PURE
I wanted so badly to be cool. I wanted to be a jock, a high school sports sensation. I was such a sports junkie, and I loved to compete. We’d won the city baseball title in 1974—the Eastview pee wee community team. It may sound strange, but I play to win, and when I do, I don’t really get a kick out of it. I like the competition for it’s own sake. I was a second baseman, so my biggest job was to field ground balls, and I was determined to be good at it. I spent most of my spare time throwing golf balls against the wall to practise catching grounders or practising golf on the driving range. I practised so much I won the Balmoral junior golf title a couple of years later.
Like every other guy my age, I dreamed of making it to the NHL, but by Grade 11, it became clear that I wasn’t going to make it in hockey. I was cut by the Red Deer AAA Chiefs after breaking my thumb in a game and refusing to fight. So football became my new focus. I love football for starters, and I always liked testing myself. Dave Cutler, the former Edmonton Eskimos kicker, was one of my early heroes. Dave had been a middle linebacker at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, and he was always the first man downfield to make the tackle on kickoffs or missed field goals. And he was great in the clutch. He made the kick when it mattered.
The first football game I ever attended was at Clarke Stadium in Edmonton on September 29, 1971. It was pouring rain, with winds so high the stands were alive with flapping coats and hats. The Edmonton Eskimos beat the Montreal Alouettes 12–11. There were 13,346 of us in the crowd braving the elements. Dave Cutler came in and kicked a 50-yard field goal in that driving rainstorm, and I was won over that day. It was just fantastic for me. A kicker is supposed to be the ballerina on the team, not a tough guy. But he was both, graceful and tough. And funny. I remember hearing him interviewed, talking about his placeholder, quarterback Tom Wilkinson. “Wilkie has to stand on tiptoes just to piss on a flat rock!” Grapes is like that, the yin and yang. I admire that.
I would say that for about six years, from the time I saw Dave Cutler kick that field goal, I began kicking religiously through the uprights at Red Deer’s St. Thomas Aquinas High School. You have to be certifiably insane to practise by yourself, because when you kick it, it goes 50 yards. That means you’ve got to run and get it, bring it back and kick again, over and over. In my head, I was kicking for the Grey Cup or the Super Bowl. I got so I could kick a reasonable distance, but I wasn’t CFL material. A CFL kicker is good from 55 yards. I was good from 45 yards, which isn’t too bad. I would kick every day during
the season. So, my right foot became kind of dead.
I had lots of friends on my team: Marty Vellner, Jerry Murphy, Ray Blair and our quarterback, Pat Quesnel. Pat would place the ball for me. The fact that our quarterback was also a holder made him meat for the opposition. I was not known for fighting, but one time they came down so hard that I jumped in and threw a punch. Ironically, I still had that broken thumb from hockey. I was suspended for our next game, in Delburne. While I was out, a guy named Michael Watson, who at 130 pounds was an unbelievable player—he could run, catch, he could do anything—replaced me for a game during a big wind storm. He kicked it straight on barefoot. Today, everyone kicks soccer style. We called that a sidewinder back in the 1970s. I kicked straight on, like Cutler, with a modified kicking cleat—it had a square toe. But Michael gave it a nice high leg kick and drilled it through the posts. A 40-yard field goal into a hurricane. I was completely shocked by how good he was. I was on my best behaviour after that.
In Grade 11, the year I joined the football team as the kicker and cornerback, we won the championship. I didn’t contribute much, other than to kick the converts and the field goals. But the next year, my big chance, the chance I’d played out over and over in my mind, became a reality.
In 1978, Don Sinclair was the coach of our team, the Camille Cougars. Don was a successful lawyer in Red Deer, and still is. We made it to the finals of the nine-man football championship of the Central West Alberta Schools Athletic Association at Great Chief Park in Red Deer. We fought hard, winding up in a 10–10 tie with thirty seconds to go. We had the ball on the Delburne Trojans’ 27-yard line near the left hash marks. A 34-yard field goal would cinch a victory for us. I was called out onto the field. Even if I missed, it would likely sail through the end zone, which was 25 yards deep in those days. All we needed was a single point for the win.