Cornered

by Ron MacLean

  But I was a little hot and pressed my point. “He may have thought … that’s why … just ‘cause he got twenty-five doesn’t mean …” I could see a smile playing on Don’s lips. He thought I was just spouting “liberal crap.”

  “No, I’m serious!”

  Still in a relatively good mood, he shrugged. “All right.”

  I had a full head of steam. “You have to ask Chris, but … thirty is good, the league has shown that obviously you can’t cross that line, but until Chris accepts that he’s getting a fair shake, the message won’t sink in. That’s a little defence of him, too, to go along with what you’re saying.” I paused and ceded to Don. “Benches on the same side …” But it was too late. I had tugged on his cape.

  “What are you saying, that uh … Natives have an inferiority complex? That when something happens to them—”

  At this point, I realized it wasn’t a reasoned discussion. I thought, “This is not working. It’s gone off the rails.” I said, “I’m saying, why wouldn’t they? Why wouldn’t some kids feel like they haven’t been given a fair shake in life? Ask Davis Inlet.” In the 1950s, the Canadian government forced a number of Innu off their traplines and relocated them to Davis Inlet, an isolated spot on the coast of Labrador that lacked even running water.

  “Fair shake in life!” Don shouted. “Go out and get your own fair shake in life and work for it!”

  I closed my eyes and hung my head, thinking, “How do I pull out of this?”

  I held up my hand. “Don … that’s—”

  “Don’t give me that stuff. It’s like when Ted Nolan didn’t get the job …”

  My eyes rolled heavenward. Nolan, who is Ojibwa, grew up on a reserve near Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. He had eleven brothers and sisters and learned to play hockey on frozen ponds. He made it to the NHL with the Pittsburgh Penguins in 1985, until a back injury ended his career. He wound up coaching with the Buffalo Sabres, but repeatedly clashed with his general manager, John Muckler, and was fired after two years, even though he took the Sabres to the Cup final in 1999. They both denied rumours that Ted was undisciplined off the ice and that Muckler was a racist.

  Don defended Muckler. “[They said when] Ted Nolan didn’t get the job, it was racism. It wasn’t racism! Him and Muckler got at it, and that’s why he got fired!”

  When Nolan was fired, there was a tremendous backlash. Two hundred people showed up outside the Marine Midland Arena in Buffalo, chanting his name. The rally was organized by the New York chapter of the American Indian Movement. Jean Knox, whose husband, Seymour Knox III, had founded the Sabres, was part of it. After that, no one would touch Nolan.

  I said, “Well, since you bring that up, if you were an NHL club and you saw all the reaction when Ted was fired in Buffalo, wouldn’t you be a little leery of hiring him a second time?”

  Don said, “Well, yeah …”

  I said, “So he is in a case where prejudice—”

  Don shook his head, “Wasn’t racism though, it was because—”

  I said, “Yes, it is.”

  Don said, “No, it isn’t! It was between him and the GM, that’s why he didn’t get it. It wasn’t racism at all and …” Still angry, but wisely realizing we were stomping into dangerous territory, he held his hand up in front of my face. “Let’s never get into that again.” He gritted his teeth and, angry about losing the time to talk about everything he had planned, he said, “I’ve lost the whole thing.”

  I bumbled around. I held my hands up, trying to calm the storm. “That’s good. That’s good.”

  He said, “No, it isn’t! Well, we might as well just sit here, then. How much time do we have left?”

  I said, “No, we got a couple minutes for sure, or three …”

  “A couple minutes? A couple minutes?” Petulantly, he leaned back and waved his hand dismissively. “Well, let’s go to the troops [the final feature].”

  “No, we’ve got more time than that,” I cajoled. “It’s Christmas. Let’s get back into the Christmas spirit.”

  “No, no, no, I had nine thousand things I wanted to talk about.”

  I tried to be reassuring. “Well, we’ve got lots of time—”

  He threw a bah-humbug wave toward the camera. “We’ll talk about them next week.”

  With three minutes of dead air looming, I said, “No, no, come on. We can do it! We’ve got to do it.”

  “Do what?”

  I started to count off on my fingers all the things he wanted to talk about. “Well, listen, we’ll make a little truce here. The benches on the same side is one thing you recommended …”

  He threw his hands in the air. “No! You ruined the whole thing. The whole thing is—”

  I was worried that I’d just sent him to the gallows. I continued to try to dig us out. “The other thing you said is, puck over the glass, and sure enough, it showed up … foot in the crease, it showed up … touch icing, the players have all said it … instigator rule …” He looked at me stone-faced. I wasn’t getting anywhere. I said, “So why don’t we show Sid the Kid?”

  He wasn’t buying it. He narrowed his eyes at me. “You wanna show him? Show him, then. Go ahead.”

  “Sure!” And as we went to video of Sidney Crosby, I continued my attempt to placate him. “We’ll do this instead of the benches on the same side, but you were right—”

  “Yes, yes, I guess so,” he said sarcastically.

  “Sid would be pleased to make Coach’s Corner.”

  “Oh, I guess he would. Yeah, sure.” Then he said, “I gotta show him, because I show Lecavalier and I show the rest of the guys. So I gotta show him.”

  “It’s good.”

  “Keeps ‘em all happy.” He imitated players whining at him, “Oh, Don … Donnn …”

  In the video, Crosby deked Bruins defenceman Andrew Ference and scored. Meanwhile, Don continued spouting off on everything that was bugging him. Referring to Ference, he said, “Look at Dr. Suzuki there, that left winger …” I’d done an interview with Andrew the previous week, and he had brought up the issue of greenhouse-gas emissions and talked about how the teams were donating money to offset whatever carbon emissions their flights created.

  Grapes considered Ference to be in lockstep with the environmentalist David Suzuki and was disgusted by it.

  “… that ‘Sky Is Falling’ Suzuki …”

  “Ahhh,” I sighed.

  Still stewing, Grapes said, “That was sickening last week, by the way.”

  “What? What is going on with you here?”

  “That junk! That’s not … What is this stuff going on here?” We were back on camera now, and Don continued to vent. “We’re Hockey Night in Canada and we’re talking about saving the world and all that stuff. Let’s talk hockey.”

  I tried to keep it light. “Well, that’s the whole idea behind December the twenty-fifth!”

  “Let’s talk about some good guys.”

  I said, “Okay!”

  “Let’s talk about the troops.” We went to stills of the troops in Afghanistan, having Christmas dinner. “Now let’s show the troops here. We’re gathered around turkeys and having a good time. Look what these guys are gathered around.” Don wanted the second slide, which showed the troops hunkered down, surrounded by their munitions, but it was late coming up. Impatient, he shouted, “Show the next one! Look what these guys are gathered around. Ammo! They’re the guys over there. God love you. We want you to come back. That’s the Van Doos. Bonne chance—is that what you say? Anyhow, they’re good guys, God love ya, come back, and all the troops overseas, but especially those guys. I’m out!”

  In our debriefing, Grapes said, “You know, Ron, you live in the land of Billiken.”

  “What?”

  “Billiken,” he repeated. “That’s the god of the things as they ought to be.”

  And a few days later, he gave me a statue of the elflike creature. He’d found it in Kingston in 1952. According to legend, it brings good luck if you find
it, and even more if you steal it.

  There was a media backlash against my land-of-Billiken outlook on Chris Simon. Toronto Star TV critic Chris Zelkovich jumped on me for what an irresponsible tack I had taken—what a silly question I had raised. Tom Benjamin, a blogger I respected, wrote, “Ron’s way off base with this notion.”

  And do you know who else was on Don’s side? Phil Lafontaine, national chief of the Assembly of First Nations. Somehow, I got to be the bad guy for bringing up this ridiculous notion that First Nations kids feel victimized. It was just like the debate I had in Grade 12, when the class took my opponent’s side. I thought, “I either articulated this very poorly or came across as too arrogant. I guess I’ll never learn.”

  28

  A FAIRY-TALE ENDING

  My first Olympic assignment was in 1988 in Seoul, South Korea. The schedule was a killer. From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., I did play-by-play of field hockey in Seongnam. It was assumed that, because I knew ice hockey, I would know field hockey. The players carry sticks, but that’s where the resemblance ends. Then, from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m., I took over the host’s desk. After my shift, I would re-tape the openings, because they would be aired on a tape-delayed basis to different parts of Canada. And so I would get out of there at two in the morning, get back to the hotel at maybe 2:30, get up four hours later and work another eighteen-hour day—and repeat, for sixteen days in a row. But I was twenty-eight years old—no sweat.

  Just ahead of the field hockey games, I’d get to the stadium, and I’d have to do my business. They had Asian toilets, which are no fun. Each is a porcelain bowl, set flush with the floor, with grooves for your feet. You assume a crouching position as if you are downhill skiing. It’s basically a hole in the ground.

  In all, I spent a month in South Korea, because there were two weeks of preparation leading up to the Games, and then the Games themselves. On day fifteen of the competition, a few days before it was time to go home, South Korea qualified for the gold medal match in women’s field hockey. Seongnam Stadium was packed. I got there as usual and went into the bathroom. I hit the first stall—it was occupied. Second stall? Occupied. There were sixteen stalls. I went all the way down to the end, opened the last one, and discovered a North American toilet. It turned out there were eight Asian toilets and eight North American toilets. For an entire month, I had painfully stretched my hamstrings using a Korean toilet, and now, on the second-to-last day of the Olympic Games, I discovered the real deal.

  Ben Johnson was busted for using the steroid stanozolol after running the 100 metres in a world record 9.79 seconds and winning the gold medal, all of which was later erased from the record books. But what do I remember about the 1988 Olympics? Those damn toilets.

  My next Olympic experience was in Albertville, France, in 1992. One morning, we were supposed to cover cross-country skiing, but it was postponed because of inclement weather. So we prepared to go to our second event, in the town of Pralognan-la-Vanoise—women’s curling. Curling was a demonstration sport at these Games. Canada was to play on sheet number two. But there was a problem with the ice-making equipment at the venue. Only the outside sheets, numbers one and four, were usable, so Canada’s game was postponed.

  We were six hours ahead of the Eastern time zone. It was 3 p.m. in France, which made it 9 a.m. in most of Ontario and Quebec. I signed on and said that, unfortunately, the women’s match that was supposed to be broadcast was not being played because they were “having trouble between the sheets, like so many of you last night.” I got a call from Alan Clark and Doug Sellars, admonishing me for my juvenile humour. “You’re thirty-two years old. Surely you have a little more maturity than that.”

  It was a tough Olympics for Canada—the first week was a bust. Figure skater Kurt Browning, the three-time world champion, was expected to be one of our heroes, but he had a bad experience. He’d injured his back. I watched him skate onto the ice for the short program, and his face was ashen. Within ten seconds, he went Bambi while attempting his combination jump. I was in the kiss-and-cry area—so called because it’s where the skaters wait with parents and coaches to receive their marks. I sat there thinking, “Good God, what do I ask him when he comes over?” Tracy Wilson, the former Canadian bronze-medal ice dancer, was working for CBS. She was right beside me with Katarina Witt and Verne Lundquist. I said to Tracy, “Any recommendation on what I say to kid-glove the interview when he comes off the ice? Because I know he’ll be devastated.”

  She said, “Well, Ron, his choreography was spot-on. He clearly designed a program that would appeal to a French audience, and they embraced it fully. You can compliment him on the choreography and then just say, ‘But obviously, the combination jump at the beginning was a problem.’” Tracy had given me a point of entry. She was right, and I was your host-with-the-most, an expert, although I had never seen a live figure skating performance in my life. But even I could see that Kurt was the only one who moved exactly to the notes. Every little motion was in sync with the music. I knew he was special, even if he had a horrible result that day.

  In men’s hockey, Canada was playing in the quarter-final against Germany, and that should have been be a gimme. We should have blown them away and moved on. But we were tied 3–3 after regulation. And nothing was decided in the ten-minute overtime, so the game went to a shootout.

  I was watching from down at one end of the arena in Méribel. Sitting to my right was Marcel Aubut, who at the time was the president and CEO of the Quebec Nordiques. Next to him was Rangers president Glen Sather. They were trying to figure out who Canada’s coach, Dave King, was going to select as the five shooters.

  Jim Peplinski, the former Calgary Flame, was upstairs in the booth, working as a colour man. He was with Don Wittman, who was calling the game. In my earpiece, I heard Peplinski say they’d been given Dave King’s list of shooters before the game: Joé Juneau; Dave Archibald; Wally Schreiber, a good penalty killer; Jason Woolley, a defenceman, which was unusual; and Eric Lindros. I nudged Aubut and handed him the list. He said, “Are those your picks, Ron?”

  I said, “No, these are the actual picks. Dave King gave us the list before the game.” Aubut looked at me with an instant smile. He elbowed Sather, who hadn’t heard our conversation, and said, “Do you want to wager on the five guys? We can bet the tab for dinner tonight.”

  Sather took the bet. The shootout started. By the time Wally Schreiber, the third shooter and an unlikely pick, came out, Sather was kind of mad. He couldn’t believe that Aubut had got it right. And then the fourth guy, Woolley, hit the ice, and Sather was very upset. He slammed his list down and yelled, “Cockroach!”

  Here I was at the Olympic Games, with Canada’s medal hopes going down the drain. I knew I should be totally invested in watching the shootout, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the interaction between these two guys.

  The teams went through their five shooters and the game was still tied. And then Eric Lindros scored, while Sean Burke stopped Germany’s Peter Draisaitl. Canada won the semifinal against the Czechs and lost in the final to the “Unified Team,” also known as the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States), which by either name was the former Soviet Union.

  I got up on the morning of February 15, 1992, and turned on the TV. Everything was in French because we didn’t have the CBC feed in our hotel rooms. The seventeenth skier was on the course, and across the bottom of the screen her name was posted—Kerrin Lee-Gartner of Canada—and her time to beat. But I don’t speak French, so I couldn’t understand what the announcers were saying.

  There were several bottles of a fizzy orange drink called Orangina stacked in the cool air outside on the windowsill, and I was grabbing one when I said to Cari, “You know what? I think Kerrin Lee-Gartner is leading the downhill!”

  The race ended, and I phoned around and confirmed that Kerrin had indeed won the gold. She was the first Canadian downhill racer to ever win an Olympic gold medal. There was total jubilation all over the country. Later, in the studio
, where I sat with the crew waiting for her to arrive, all of us were falling in love with this rosy-cheeked, sandy-haired athlete and her Cinderella story.

  It started when Kerrin was very young. Several uncanny things happened. She grew up in Nancy Greene’s hometown of Rossland, British Columbia. Nancy was Canada’s top ski racer in the 1960s. She paved the way for future generations in the sport. Everyone called her Nancy Greenski, and in a 1999 Canadian Press survey she was voted Canada’s female athlete of the twentieth century.

  When Kerrin was small, she was up on a hill near her home, wearing a snowmobile outfit and leather boots, sliding along on wooden skis, holding two long poles taller than she was. The local newspaper snapped a photo, and the next day it ran with the caption, “Is this the next Nancy in the making?”

  In a small town, people know and care for each other. Kerrin knew Nancy’s parents. She would go for tea with Nancy’s mom, Helen, and her father, Bob. She’d knock on their door and they’d let her go into Nancy’s room to play dress-up with Nancy’s medals.

  Kerrin’s future husband, Max Gartner, had played pro soccer in Austria and Germany. He then started working for the Canadian junior ski team, where he met Kerrin. They married in 1985. Kerrin and Max were an outdoorsy, wholesome couple, likeable and understated.

  Max worried about Kerrin. First, she was in the most dangerous sport in the world for women. And second, he knew that Kerrin was convinced she was going to win the Olympic gold medal in the ladies’ downhill in 1988. When it didn’t happen, Kerrin was devastated. Max, who was her coach, thought, “Oh my God, she really thinks that winning gold is her destiny.” When 1992 came around and Kerrin had another chance, he was so anxious for her, he could barely hold it together.

  Canadians woke up hearing that an unknown had just won gold in the downhill. Kerrin had tried to speak with her folks by cellphone at the finish line, and they did connect for about twenty seconds, but she couldn’t hear them. Between the flower ceremony, the urine test, the media conference and the lead-up to the medal ceremony, Kerrin and Max were whisked thirty minutes by car over to our studio, where I was hosting the morning portion of the Olympics.