Grant Fuhr

by Grant Fuhr

  But Grant’s debut against the Jets in the fall of 1981 was the first time a black man had played in goal for an NHL club in a regular-season game. Grant was to prove different from those men who had blazed the trail for him; he would show that a black hockey player could not just make it, but could succeed at an elite level, given the opportunity. As usual, though, Grant was perhaps the least impressed person when it came to his history-making turn in net.

  Grant:

  I remember that first game mostly because I lost 4–2 to Winnipeg, and it was at home, which is never any fun. It was one of those things that wasn’t supposed to happen. Your first game. You’re not supposed to lose at all. I didn’t really think about the other stuff.

  Fuhr was bested in his debut by the Jets’ newly acquired goalie, Ed Staniowski, fresh from languishing behind 1981 Hart Trophy runner-up Mike Liut in St. Louis. At the Oilers’ end of the ice, Grant held his own, but he couldn’t come up with what would become his signature save—foiling an opponent on the breakaway. Morris Lukowich beat him one-on-one at 16:12 of the second period for the winner. A final-minute empty netter by Lucien DeBlois meant Grant had allowed only three goals, a respectable total in those firewagon times, and one with which the Oilers usually won handily. Grant made 24 saves, but Staniowski was the difference maker, stopping 34 Oiler shots.

  In what would become his usual reaction to a sloppy loss, Sather moaned and groaned about his team afterwards. “You spend thousands of dollars on scouting reports to get a feel for the other team, and then the guys don’t believe what’s written on the pages.… We definitely served up a turkey tonight,” he quipped after the game—which came just after Canadian Thanksgiving.

  Grant:

  I actually don’t remember the goals they scored that night. That’s the great thing about being a goalie—you don’t have to remember. You’re like a relief pitcher in baseball or a cornerback in football: you can only think about the next play. All I knew was I’d played in an NHL game. After the game, I went out with my parents for something to eat at Coliseum Steak and Pizza, which is kind of like a food staple in the city. The guys used to go there all the time. It was a mixed feeling, sitting there after the game. One, you’re disappointed, but two, you’re also happy to have played your first game in the NHL. So it’s kind of a six of one, half dozen of the other. And for the next two or three days, you hear from everybody, because you’re playing an NHL game. Which, at least, I could always tell everybody I played at least one game in the NHL.

  Having made his debut and broken the goalie colour barrier, Grant now had to get a win. Amazingly, the loss to the Jets was the last time the rookie would taste defeat until well into the New Year of 1982. Starting on October 21, when Grant backstopped Edmonton to a 5–2 win over the Hartford Whalers, he etched his name in the books with a 23-game unbeaten streak (15–0–8), a record for a rookie netminder that remains to this day. It’s also an Oilers franchise record for a goalie of any experience. By the time the winning streak was over, the NHL had taken notice of the kid from Spruce Grove. Following an 8–3 win over the Pittsburgh Penguins in the second game of the streak, Fuhr’s prowess in handling 35 saves prompted Pens head coach Eddie Johnston—a former big league goalie himself—to remark to reporters, “If that’s an indication on the type of goaltender he’s going to be, he’s going to be a great one.”

  After the next victory, a 5–3 decision over the Rangers during which Grant stopped 37 pucks fired at him, Sather’s appreciation for his rookie’s incredible focus was evident. “I thought Fuhr would be nervous. But he’s not affected by a lot. He’s not affected at all.” To underscore his belief in Grant, Sather would demote Moog, the hero of the previous spring’s playoffs, to the minors to get some work. Ron Low, at risk of being stolen off of waivers if exposed, remained to spell Grant in the Edmonton net.

  Others in the goalie brethren were impressed by Fuhr as well. “I think Grant Fuhr reminds me of myself in the early part of my rookie year,” praised Don Beaupre, a rookie sensation himself in 1980–81 and the second-youngest starting goalie to Grant at the time. “What I like about him, he’s quick, he has really good concentration, he challenges the shooter and he’s got a good [catching] mitt.” In the midst of the undefeated streak, Fuhr was part of another milestone when he assisted on Wayne Gretzky’s unprecedented 50th goal in 39 games. That historic moment came shortly after Grant returned from a dislocated right shoulder suffered on December 17, when Jamie Hislop of the Flames crashed into him. (Grant had suffered a dislocated or separated shoulder at least twice in his junior career, and the injury would start to shows its effects on his game as the season progressed toward the playoffs.) Grant had clearly overtaken Moog in terms of effectiveness.

  The historic streak ended abruptly in Toronto on Grant’s first visit to Maple Leaf Gardens, home of his boyhood heroes. Entering the building where Johnny Bower, Terry Sawchuk and Mike Palmateer had played was a thrill for the Oilers’ aspiring goalie. But the result of the January game against a mediocre Toronto team was less thrilling.

  Grant:

  It was my first game at Maple Leaf Gardens, so it was pretty cool. Some games you do remember. That was one. After the first game with Winnipeg, I hadn’t lost that season until that night: 7–1 on national TV in Maple Leaf Gardens. The Leafs weren’t a very good team in those days, and a couple of those goals allowed were not very good. I had one go in from centre. I don’t even remember who shot it: all I remember is that I went to field it like a catcher and it bounced over my shoulder into the net. It was kind of the start of my evening. It was like, “Oh boy.” We just didn’t play very well.

  So Slats made sure we paid penance the next day. We had a wonderful little skate, for an hour and 10 minutes, where pucks were not an option. It was kind of the “welcome to pro hockey” edition of the bag skate. You see it in junior all the time, but it was the first time I’d seen it in pro. Once you’ve paid penance, there’s no reason to do that very often. You have your skate, the guys all go for a beer together, and it just brings the guys closer.

  Later that month at the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland, Grant received the prestigious starting nod in his first All-Star Game, after being named to the Campbell Conference team along with three of his teammates. The record unbeaten streak he’d put together would underscore a breakthrough season for the Oilers as a whole, with Grant finishing as runner-up for the Vezina Trophy (to Billy Smith) and Calder Trophy (to Hawerchuk). It was a rookie season on par with some of the greatest ever.

  Grant:

  It was a blur that year. You’re just enjoying each moment of playing. You have no idea that it was close to a record or even near a record, because you’re just you’re happy that you’re playing every day. As a kid, everything just blows by so fast. Especially an 18-year-old kid, your first year. You’re not caring about winning or losing, you’re just happy to be there playing in the best hockey league in the world.

  Grant’s final 3.31 GAA that season was among the league’s best in just the third year after the NHL merger with the World Hockey Association, when jobs and opportunities were scarce. While the number sounds mediocre to modern ears, it was a stingy average in a league with a whopping average of 8.03 goals per game. The tsunami of scoring represented the NHL’s highest scoring season between 1944 (when the Second World War diluted talent) and the present day. While his .899 save percentage and GAA would prove to be Grant’s lowest for another 15 years, his final record of 28–5–14 was remarkable by the standards of any goalie, let alone a freshman netminder. Grant was often the impressionable type, for good or ill, and so he was quick to credit his roommate for his accelerated development.

  Grant:

  I had Ronny Low my first year, which really helped the transition of playing in the National Hockey League, because he’d been there for a while. So I got a little bit of an idea as to what to expect. He taught me angles, travel, all that stuff. Stuff that he’d overlooked on the way up, which, as an
18-year-old kid, you never think about. He made it comfortable and made it easy. He also had a great work ethic at practice. You’d see that and figure that’s the way it’s meant to be. That, you hope, wears off on you a little bit. And obviously, later, it was the same with Andy, who, because we pushed each other, made each of us better. You go from Ron to Andy to Bill Ranford—same thing. All the way along, you get pushed to be better, which is the best way of coaching.

  Fuhr’s phlegmatic approach was famously observed by author Peter Gzowski in his book The Game of Our Lives. “He would answer questions as if he had never learned the art of the ‘interview’—the ritual by which hockey players would phrase wordy and predictable answers to wordy and predictable questions. Fuhr answered what was asked of him, no less but certainly no more. Asked if he found NHL play much tougher than junior A, he would not say, as the ceremony demanded, ‘Well, they’re faster here and they shoot harder and I’m playing against guys I used to read about and dreamed of playing against, but I just try to do my job one game at a time, and if I hang in there I think.… Instead, he answered ‘no.’ ”

  Through his miracle rookie season, Grant’s unflappable nature became a standard tale for reporters. A Sports Illustrated article on the Oilers of 1981–82 illustrated a typical conversation with the 19-year-old:

  “Grant, do you get excited about anything?”

  “Not really.”

  “Why not?”

  “There’s not a whole lot to get excited about.”

  “I’ve never seen anyone like him,” added Glen Sather in the same article. “He never gets rattled or shakes his head or panics.” Oiler winger Dave Lumley was astonished, too. “A puck may have just whizzed by his head, and all Grant will say is, ‘Hmm, that was an interesting shot.’ ” Grant went out and proved in 1981–82 that all the ink the press had been using to extoll his coolness under pressure was not being wasted on clichés. It was dead on. His first game was a milestone on several levels. It was notable because of his age, his colour, and because it was the last time the pro hockey world would look at Grant Fuhr as just another goalie prospect.

  GAME 2

  JANUARY 9, 1983

  DETROIT 4 EDMONTON 3

  They say a week is a long time in politics. The same applies for NHL goaltending. In the eyes of the fans, a couple of poor games in a short span can transform a netminder from a hero to a punchline. A bad few months of play, especially before the home fans, can be fatal. The 1982–83 sophomore season Grant experienced in Edmonton is all the proof one needs of the transient nature of fame for an NHL goalie. The flashy reflexes and uncanny anticipation that characterized his rookie year were suddenly a thing of the past. The raucous cheers heard so often from Oilers fans the year before had morphed into catcalls. As reporters surrounded the second-year Oilers netminder in the dressing room following a dispiriting 4–3 loss to lowly Detroit, scribes who’d once extolled the unflappable Grant Fuhr had to double-check their notepads. This angry 20-year-old was anything but the what-me-worry Fuhr of his breakthrough rookie campaign.

  The fickle nature of the fans at Northlands that night had not played well with No. 31. “I’d like to get the fans out of my system,” Grant growled following the loss. “I could care less what they want to do … they’re all jerks. I’ve given up on them.… The fans here are all over my case.… I’ve not had good luck in this building. For me it’s a lot easier to play on the road than here.”

  Grant was correct when he moaned to the media about being haunted in his home rink. While Grant played acceptably on the road in 1982–83, games at Northlands seemed to have brought out the worst in him.

  Grant:

  I was not very good. And at 19 years old, you’re not sure how to deal with not-very-good. So, of course, we stuck our foot in our mouth about the fans to get off to a flying start. We’d played the Jets a few nights before. That night I tripped over the back of the net going to stop a puck, and it hit my stick. It bounced out in front of the net. It was one of those highlight goals. Then one banked in off the glass from centre as I was going behind the net. I didn’t move to stop it, it bounced off the Plexiglas. So I had two goals go in while I’m sitting behind the net. That was not very good. We played a few nights later at home, and lost 4–3. To Detroit—not a very good team. Then after the game I called the fans jerks. Yes, “jerks” would be the exact term I used. Obviously I vented a little. It might have been the only time that I didn’t think before I spoke that year.

  The boys got a good chuckle out of me on that one. I learned from it, though. When I came back I got even quieter. Because I figured if you’re not sure what you’re going to say, don’t say anything. Or answer in one or two words. And I got pretty guarded for a lot of years after that. I wasn’t going to get us in trouble again.

  With the Edmonton media baying for a solution to the Oilers’ suddenly poor goaltending, GM Glen Sather summoned Grant to his office for a chat. In the course of the one-sided discussion, Sather fulfilled Grant’s desire to play away from Edmonton for awhile, sending him on a prolonged road trip. This wasn’t a road trip with the Oilers, however: following a 4–3 loss to the Vancouver Canucks on January 22, the rookie flash was assigned a 10-game stint with the Oilers’ AHL affiliate, the Moncton Alpines. There, all the games would be road games.

  Grant:

  Slats called me in, and we had a little conversation about things you should and shouldn’t say. It was like you did something wrong, and then you were scolded for it. (At least I only called the fans jerks—Messier missed a plane one time.) I don’t think he was very happy. I got myself a really nice middle seat to the farm team in Cape Breton so I could get away from the pressures of Edmonton, find my game, and get my head back to where it’s supposed to be. Just go down to Sydney, jump on the bus, ride around a little bit, get to see some of the nice places that the American League has to offer—then realize that that’s not where you want to be.

  Messier’s dad was coaching there. And I had played for him before with the Spruce Grove Mets. Messier’s brother Paul was playing there, too. So it was a comfortable place to be from that standpoint. I was there for about two weeks, playing games and keeping quiet, and then came back. I only played another four or five games in Edmonton that season. I watched Andy Moog play a lot. It was more frustrating for me, because I’d got comfortable with everything going on the year before, and I expected it was going to keep going well. And, more than anything, I had a hard time figuring out why it wasn’t going well.

  Perhaps his loss of confidence in Edmonton dated back to the 22 pucks that had gotten by him in three dreadful playoff losses against the Los Angeles Kings the spring before in the 1982 playoffs. The embarrassing performance against the Red Wings that January night in 1983 was a harsh reminder of how Grant and the highly favoured Oilers had folded against a mediocre foe during the post-season. Memories of that collapse no doubt inspired boos from the normally supportive Oilers crowd.

  Following the Oilers’ impressive upset of Montreal in the spring of 1981, many had thought the high-scoring team would, at the very least, be in the Campbell Conference finals, if not taking a turn as the Islanders’ dance partner in the Stanley Cup finals of 1982. It was a classic case of putting the fire wagon ahead of the horses. Like all disasters, it started simply enough: with a “warm-up” against the Los Angeles Kings, the lowest-ranked of all 16 post-season clubs. The Kings had finished the regular season with a whopping 48 fewer points than the Oilers (63 to Edmonton’s 111) in the Western Conference standings. Adding to the Oilers’ confidence was the fact that Edmonton had also dominated the Kings in the regular season, winning by baseball scores of 7–4, 11–4, 5–1, 10–3, 6–2 and 7–2 in six of the eight meetings. A walk in the park for Edmonton, said the critics, ignoring a few small details. The Kings were loosey-goosey, as most underdogs tend to be, playing the Oilers as if they had nothing on the line. After a season of success, Grant and his defence suddenly looked (and felt) like the ones who
had everything to lose.

  And lose they did. The tone was set with a wild 10–8 Kings victory in Game 1 (still the NHL record for most combined goals in a playoff contest). The game revealed an Oilers club that seemingly had forgotten about defence and was bent on wearing out the nets behind the two goalies. Edmonton barely survived Game 2, with a 3–2 overtime victory over a Kings team whose cockeyed confidence was growing by the minute.

  Then came the game that would be forever known as “The Miracle on Manchester” (so named for the Los Angeles street on which the Great Western Forum stood). The Oilers got out to an easy 5–0 lead, seemingly playing with a hand tied behind their back. But then the tone of the game changed. The Oilers’ 34-year-old veteran centre, Garry Unger, took a five-minute high-sticking major that spurred an L.A. comeback. Before a delirious home crowd, L.A. stormed back in the third period to tie the score in regulation time. With Grant and the Oilers stunned by such a rapid change of fortune in the final 10 minutes of play, the Kings got a goal from unsung Daryl Evans to win 6–5 in OT. It was—and remains—the biggest blown lead in the post-season history of the team.

  Grant:

  It was a “last shot wins” game. There weren’t very many saves made. It was one of those games where the harder you chased it the farther away it got from you. The lovely Miracle on Manchester. That was the [Kings] franchise’s only highlight till then: even when I got traded there in 1995, they still played it before every game. It’s not the highlight that you want to see when you’re coming out of the locker room.