by Grant Fuhr
So great was the Oilers’ margin of victory that spring, Grant’s heroics might not have meant the same degree of difference between victory and defeat as they had in 1984. His teammates supplied him with 98 goals—an average of 5.44 per game—the greatest offensive post-season in NHL history. Wayne Gretzky alone accumulated a record 17 goals and 47 points on the way to his first Conn Smythe Trophy. But Grant was still stellar: aside from an 8–6 beating at the hands of Chicago in Game 4 of the Campbell final, Grant never left the Oilers in difficult situations, forced them to play catch-up or suffer an off game.
The most telling indicator of Grant’s worth instead came from the NHL general managers who vote on the Vezina Trophy; they saw his work—not Moog’s—as more essential to the Oilers’ success. Grant finished third in the voting, a finalist for the award for the first time since his rookie year. Everything was looking up for Edmonton and pointing toward a sure third straight championship en route to cementing the high-flying Oilers as hockey’s newest dynasty.
For Grant, life was a banquet—and he and roommate Kevin McClelland enjoyed the meal. It wasn’t just a metaphor: McClelland marvelled at Grant’s unique dietary approach. “Fuhrsie’s a little overweight,” he told filmmaker Bob McKeown for his documentary The Boys Are Back. “He’s 195 [pounds]. He’s supposed to be 182. He eats six cheeseburgers all the time … I don’t understand the guy.”
If possible, things seemed to come even easier to the two-time defending champions during the 1985–86 season. Darlings of the media in general, and heroes to broadcasters like Peter Gzowski (who lionized their attractive version of offensive hockey), the Oilers were extolled everywhere they went. “The game they play is the game all of us played,” gushed Gzowski, who grew up on the rinks of Guelph, Ontario. “But the game of our lives is the business of theirs, and they are a long way from Dickson Park [in Guelph].”
It seemed that the merry-go-round of titles and fun would never stop spinning. Trashing the competition on the way to a first-overall finish with 119 points in 1985–86, the Oilers saw Gretzky break his own assists and points records for the last time, while Paul Coffey piled up an astounding 48 goals to break Bobby Orr’s record for goals by a defenceman in a season (another record likely never to be approached again, let alone matched). And though Grant played just 40 games to Moog’s 47, and his GAA was again inferior to his partner’s (3.90 to Moog’s 3.69), Grant owned a slightly better save percentage.
The first round of the 1986 playoffs was a cakewalk, with the Oilers going easy on the mediocre Canucks by “only” beating them 7–3, 5–1, and 5–1 in a sweep. But compared to the 13–0 embarrassment they’d laid on Vancouver earlier that year, the playoff dusting was child’s play.
In the midst of the anticipation for a third Cup, however, there were stories of the distractions dogging the Oilers: the internal battles over contracts for their stars, who seemed to be falling behind the league’s payment standards; the fast-and-loose attitude on the ice toward a team concept. Within the Oilers’ management, there was doubt about the team’s commitment, doubts that would surface a year later when John Muckler, the Oilers’ co-coach, noted, “I don’t think we were a team [in 1986]. The Stanley Cup is a team championship. The team that wins the Cup is the best team, not necessarily the team with the most talent.”
On top of the controversies swirling around him and his team, there was also the personal heartache in store for Grant both on and off the ice. The advanced cancer diagnosis came in on Bob Fuhr just as the 1985–86 season wound down, and life took on a new urgency. Suddenly, time was of the essence for father and son. In the midst of preparing for the playoffs, Grant would spend as much time as he could with the man who’d accepted him into his heart as his own son in 1962. “At least I got to see him after the game. It’s been coming for a while,” a sombre Grant told Cam Cole of the Edmonton Journal.
For a numbed Grant, it seemed the best way to get through the shock of his father’s passing was to submerge himself in hockey. He asked to play in Game 2 against the Canucks and was initially granted the okay from Moog to do so; then plans changed. Moog would play Game 2, and after spending much of the day with his mourning family, Grant instead watched from the bench as Moog and the Oilers cruised to a 5–1 win.
Grant:
I did want to play. It would have been easier. Less thinking. And as a tribute to my dad. But they went in there without me. It wasn’t to be.
Two days later in Vancouver, Grant was back in the Oilers net. His team made it easy for the grieving goalie, outshooting the Canucks 41–22 in a repeat 5–1 score. In front of an apathetic crowd of 7,854 at the Pacific Coliseum, Grant paid tribute to his dad in the way he knew best. Only a third-period goal from Thomas Gradin denied him the shutout. “I wanted [the shutout] for my dad,” Grant told reporters afterwards. “I’ll get one though … somewhere, somehow. It’s only a matter of time.” Grant summed up his team’s total domination of the Canucks, quipping, “Without Brodeur playing so well, maybe we would have won 10–1. He was the only reason it stayed respectable.”
For Grant, the loss was not just that of a father but of a competitive partner and sporting comrade. Bob had not only introduced his son to hockey and baseball, he’d also taught Grant to play golf, starting a lifelong passion for the game in the young man. As a junior player in Victoria, Grant had found the rainy, temperate climate of Vancouver Island perfect for his new hobby, and he was able to play year-round and quickly bring down his handicap. From then on, the sport became his refuge. By the time he was an established NHL star, he would sometimes play 36 holes on an off-day. As Marty McSorley noted, “It was his place to relax. If he wanted to play a couple of rounds between games, no one bothered him about it.”
Grant:
After my dad had introduced me to the game, I started playing lots of golf. I got to play some fabulous golf courses in Victoria. We were able to play in Gorge Vale a lot. We played at a place called Royal Colwood, which I think is probably one of the top 10 or 15 golf courses in Canada. Cedar Hills was another good golf course, took good care of us. It was a good place to start learning how to golf. From there it just took off. When they wouldn’t let me play other sports, golf was a place I could go to stay competitive, be sharp.
Hand-eye coordination is similar, except you’re not trying to catch anything. The focus is the same. It’s a four-hour adventure. You’ve got to stay focused. Your body is getting a break, but your mind’s working. It’s a different thought process than playing hockey, because it’s not a reaction sport, so you’re not burning yourself out.
Regardless of the sport, it was Bob, an optimist by nature, who had played a major role in Grant’s development as a pro athlete. Grant’s mother, Betty, saw their bond. “He and his dad were very close,” she told SI. “They both were very sports-minded.” Betty, who died in 2000, also saw that her husband had concerns about the carefree Grant being chewed up in the harsh world of pro sports. “Robert was a little concerned.… He knew the dedication, the sacrifice it took to play in the NHL as a goalie, and Grant was always such a happy-go-lucky child.”
When Grant started ascending the ranks of youth hockey, he received some excellent advice from his adoptive father.
Grant:
He told me not to worry. He told me to have fun and enjoy life. He told me that as soon as hockey became a job, to leave it alone. He also played a lot and he coached me a lot as a kid. We kind of worked hand in hand. There was no dictation that you had to do it. I mean, you see a lot of parents now that are critical about their kids that are playing, and I noticed that the last few years when I was coaching minor hockey. He would never be critical. He would ask me how I thought I played and leave it alone until the next day. Then he might make a comment somewhere along the way. Never criticized anything, just “Would you think it’d be better if you did this and you did that?” to leave you thinking about it.
You played because you loved doing it. Now, you’re seeing some ki
ds that are being told they have to do it. The parents think you have to do it 24/7, 12 months of the year. It’s not like that. If I had done it 24/7 I would have been tired by the time I was 20 and probably would have never turned pro. My dad shielded me from that. The fact that I got to get away, play baseball, do different things, play football for a little bit, my dad helped with that. He didn’t put pressure on me. More than anything, he was someone I could bounce things off of.
Grant was hoping to memorialize his father with another Stanley Cup in the spring of 1986. The Oilers’ dream of a third straight championship hinged on a Smythe Division final matchup against the rival Calgary Flames in another Battle of Alberta classic. While Calgary had finished 30 points behind the Oilers, they were always a formidable foe when the clubs met in the provincial “death match.”
Grant:
We played Calgary, which was, as always, fun. A see-saw battle. Obviously, our best rivalry was with the Flames, the Battle of Alberta. Al MacInnis came out the same year as I did. He went to Calgary while I was selected by Edmonton. He really could shoot the puck as well. He was a little wild his first couple of years, so everything was a little higher up. They had some good players: Lanny McDonald could still shoot the puck. Hakan Loob was a good hockey player. Kent Nilsson. Doug Gilmour was always in your face, always talking to you—we had fun with that. Theo Fleury was fun to play against, because he was as competitive as could be. John Tonelli, because of the Islanders’ run, and then ending up in Calgary—it was fun to play against him. Joel Otto was a challenge in front of the net. Then there was Vernie [Mike Vernon] at the other end. We’d played each other going back to our days in minor hockey in Alberta.
It was all making to be a great series for us. And then it ended on a crushing note, which everybody remembers. And if you don’t, they show it on TV all the time. So that was kind of a gloomy end to a gloomy month.
Ah yes, the “own goal.”
After a tense six games of the Campbell Conference semi-final, the Oilers and Flames came to a Game 7 showdown on April 30. Edmonton always appeared to be playing from behind in the series as Calgary coach Bob Johnson threw a blanket over the Oilers’ power offence. Once more, Calgary gained a 2–0 lead only to see Edmonton come back to tie the contest. The Oilers seemed to be building momentum as the second period came to a close in a raucous Northlands Coliseum. Then, five minutes into the third period, disaster struck. Rookie defenceman Steve Smith’s cross-ice pass from behind his own net bounced off the back of Fuhr’s left pad and into the Oiler net for what would eventually prove to be the winning goal. Calgary’s Perry Berezan, who was credited with the goal off his dump-in pass, was on the Flames bench. “I never saw the goal,” Berezan admitted later. “I was just sitting down and I heard this noise.”
As Grant stood, stunned, looking at the puck behind him, Smith collapsed to the ice and the Northlands crowd groaned. There was 14:46 remaining, but the Oilers never recovered, and the Flames went on to meet Montreal in the 1986 Cup Final. While Grant was one of the least culpable in the blame game after the series, he had nonetheless been out-duelled for arguably the first time in his playoff career as his old rival Mike Vernon stole the show.
Things were about to get worse. Within days of the Oilers’ elimination, Sports Illustrated came out with a blockbuster report claiming that five Oilers were using cocaine. Rumours suggested that Grant was one. The weight of the SI story, the loss to Calgary and his dad’s passing culminated in a turbulent time in both Grant’s professional and personal lives. His use of recreational drugs—often rumoured in the press and leaked to Oilers management—was taking a toll.
Grant:
It had gone on like that for about three years. But I had been able to keep that separate from the hockey. As long as they didn’t blend it was okay. Then in the summer of ’86, the end of that year was kind of a real crashing halt for me. Things took a turn for the worse. I hadn’t prepared for it whatsoever. We got the lovely Steve Smith goal, and Dad had passed away two weeks before that. It was a hard summer.
We definitely partied too much. But it wasn’t so much for the fun part of it. For the longest time there had been no harm, no foul in what we did. But ’86 was probably the turning point, where things got a little out of hand. Things blended together. That month kind of turned everything bad.
Grant sought the privacy of Edmonton nights to work out his pain and frustration from a year gone wrong.
Grant:
I could hide with the best of them. It was the one thing that I knew how to do very well. I could blend into little neighbourhood bars and stuff where nobody would know who I was, even in Edmonton. Nobody would know where to look.
Marty McSorley had an up-close view of how Grant’s life was spiralling out of control. “Grant never led socially,” McSorley recalls. “If you said to him at 11 o’clock, let’s go home, he’d go home. But if you said let’s go to another party, he’d go with you. He never said, ‘Let’s go do this, or let’s go do that.’ He was a very good guy. Even when there were some issues during his career he wasn’t a hell raiser. He was not a guy to look for trouble. He would follow somebody’s lead. And it was sad because you’d like to think that the people cared enough about him to lead him in the right direction. But that didn’t happen.”
Grant’s marriage to his wife, Corrine (whom he’d married in 1983), was also showing the stress of balancing an NHL career, a family and a raging nightlife. Over the next year, it would come apart.
Grant:
It had gotten a little out of control, but we enjoyed each other’s company too. We had two daughters at that time, so all that being thrown into the big picture was just something more to juggle along with everything else. We just decided we were going different directions and wanted to stay friends. And to this day we’re still friends, which is good.
At the conclusion of that bruising summer, Grant’s solution to his distress was to bury himself in hockey, the only safe haven he knew. After a long time submerged in his own private world, he found salvation in the sport he’d known since boyhood, and the men with whom he shared the Oilers dressing room.
Grant:
About September that year, I kind of re-grasped the world again. And that year was probably the best year I had in hockey. The Rendez-vous series, Canada Cup and the Stanley Cup all in one year. The only thing that I cared about was the hockey. I’m pretty good at focusing on one thing: we still went out a bit, but hockey was everything. In ’87 we worried about one thing and one thing only: hockey.
Grant wasn’t the only one looking for vindication in 1986–87. The entire Edmonton organization was seeking redemption after the previous season’s disastrous end against Calgary. In what was a put-up-or-shut-up situation for the Oilers, Gretzky and crew delivered a season for the ages—one that began with Grant’s greatest role in his country’s uniform.
GAME 5
SEPTEMBER 13, 1987
CANADA 6 USSR 5
After the debacle of Steve Smith’s “own goal” in 1986 had wrecked the Oilers’ dream of four consecutive Cups, the media and fans were pitiless about the distractions surrounding their team. Grant was still coping poorly with the sudden passing of his father and its effects on his life. Was Wayne Gretzky spending too much time in Hollywood with his new girlfriend, actress Janet Jones? Paul Coffey, Andy Moog and Grant were all in contract negotiations with the Oilers, rancorous talks that threatened to disperse the core of the team.
In the wake of all these mini dramas, general manager and head coach Glen Sather needed to impose order—and quickly—upon his young players before things spun out of control. After Edmonton’s run-and-gun style was exploited by the Calgary Flames’ aggressive forecheck in the 1986 playoffs, Sather made the decision to change gears. He implemented the stingy checking style of co-coach John Muckler throughout the 1986–87 season. This more conservative approach was partly necessitated by high-scoring defenceman Paul Coffey missing 21 games to injury—and partly
by Sather’s criticism of Coffey’s play in 1986 as defensively irresponsible. As a result, Sather cut back on the Norris winner’s ice time, sowing seeds of discontent that led to the first of many Oiler defections (Coffey was dealt to Pittsburgh in late 1987).
While the forwards and defencemen were reined in, Sather declared it business as usual for Edmonton in goal, with Grant and Moog splitting the duties once again. For the second consecutive year Moog appeared in more games, 46 to Grant’s 44. This time, while Grant again had a lower GAA, he also had the lower winning percentage at 22–13–3, his worst record since 1982–83. That said, the duo cut the Oilers’ goals-allowed total from 310 to 284, a new franchise low. (While no one acknowledged it at the time, it was to be the final full year for the Fuhr/Moog tandem as Moog sought a No. 1 position somewhere else in the league.) Grant found some peace between the pipes. “The one place he was comfortable was in the net,” recalls Marty McSorley. “I don’t know that he was totally comfortable in other situations in the locker room. He wasn’t always confident in there, and he’d say weird things. And you’d go, ‘C’mon Fuhrsie …’ Not in a bad way, but he didn’t always know how to react to it. I never saw him have a mean moment. I saw him be disappointed, a lot of the time with himself because he wanted to win. But I never saw a mean moment with a teammate or a fan.”