by Grant Fuhr
It was more than NHL shooters who’d be challenging Grant in the net that season. With the Canada Cup on the horizon in September 1987, Grant got an early glimpse of the vaunted Soviet machine in February of that year. An NHL all-star team took on the USSR in a pair of games in Quebec City as part of the Rendez-vous series, the pet project of Quebec Nordiques owner Marcel Aubut. In the first game, Grant turned away 24 of 27 shots as the NHLers triumphed 4–3. The Soviets reversed the tables on Grant and his teammates in Game 2, however, winning 5–3. Used to the storm-the-walls style of the NHL, Grant now had to accommodate himself to the patient patterns of Viktor Tikhonov’s Soviets, patterns that resembled soccer strategy as much as hockey.
Grant:
You can’t be all helter-skelter and throw yourself all over the place. You have to have a little more patience. It’s completely different than anything you know. So that took a little bit of learning. At the same time you’re learning by fire. At that level, with the whole country watching, you couldn’t be bad while you learn. It was a real challenge.
Back for the stretch run with the Oilers after facing the Soviets, Grant benefited both from having raised his game against the USSR and from Muckler’s more defensive approach. Edmonton’s goal scoring total suffered due to the team’s new-found commitment to defence—dropping from 426 to 372 goals scored—but that output still led the league, the sixth straight year Edmonton sniped the most goals in the NHL. As a result, Edmonton owned the league’s best record for a fourth time in five years. And despite Moog’s workload advantage, Grant again was a Vezina finalist (eventually placing third behind Ron Hextall of the Flyers and the Whalers’ Mike Liut).
Once the playoffs rolled around Grant received the nod to start against Los Angeles in round one. When he and his mates stumbled in a surprising 5–2 loss in Game 1 to the mediocre Kings, Moog took the reins for a couple of games. Andy enjoyed record goal support once Edmonton re-took control of the series in Game 2 with a 13–3 laugher that smashed a few NHL playoff marks in the process. But despite picking up another win in Game 3, Moog didn’t sparkle in the 6–5 nail-biter. That earned Grant a chance to redeem himself. He would not relinquish control of the Edmonton net in a playoff game until an injury sidelined him in 1990. His Game 4 kicked off a remarkable string of 44 consecutive starts for Oiler playoff games, no doubt playing into Moog’s departure the following year. Grant performed admirably enough in 6–3 and 5–4 wins to close out a surprisingly tough five-game series over L.A. From there he took his game to another level in a sweep of the Jets in the Smythe final, allowing just nine goals in the process. Next, he limited Steve Yzerman and the Red Wings to 10 goals in a five-game Campbell Conference final victory that sent Edmonton back to the Stanley Cup final against a familiar opponent.
Reclaiming their role as Stanley Cup champions would mean facing a challenge from Mike Keenan’s Philadelphia Flyers and their pugnacious goalie Ron Hextall, a contender for Grant’s title as the best goalie in the league. Philadelphia had knocked off Mats Naslund and Montreal in six games in an emotional Eastern final. Unfortunately for the Flyers, they had lost several stars to injury during their run, including offensive sparkplug Tim Kerr. Still, the favoured Oilers would have all they could handle fending off the injury-ravaged Flyers in the first final to go seven games since 1971. Grant allowed just 18 goals all series and was perhaps at the peak of his “money goalie” years. However, his rival Hextall took home the Conn Smythe Trophy as a result of his own courageous performance in the face of the Oilers’ offensive fusillade. Part of the reason for the media’s admiration for Hextall was his aggressive attitude toward Oilers forwards in his crease, contrasting with Grant’s more stoic body language in the Edmonton net. Some observers thought that Hextall was passionate while Grant was simply steady. It was a great underestimation of the Fuhr Factor, and his performance in Game 7 would demonstrate his own worthiness for the Conn Smythe.
The deciding game in Edmonton served as a perfect example of Grant’s ability to shut the door when it mattered. “The Flyers received a two-man advantage just a minute into the game,” McSorley recalled. “They scored once, but Grant kept the lead from growing after that. I think that might be his best moment I’ve ever seen.” Messier and Kurri eventually gave the Oilers a 2–1 advantage they carried into the third period. With Edmonton nursing a slim lead against a desperate Flyers squad, Fuhr kept Philadelphia at bay for the final 23 minutes-plus in the decisive game. With Rick Tocchet, Scott Mellanby and Mark Howe pressing the Flyers attack, there were no openings for a tying goal with Grant in net, and Glenn Anderson added an insurance goal to end the game late in the third. The Oilers were champions again after a one-year hiatus, skating around the ice in Edmonton to the adulation of their fans. Grant was now the unquestioned No. 1 man in their net—and perhaps in the league.
Wayne Gretzky summed up his teammate for Sports Illustrated. “You have to understand that I mean no harm to the men who played in the ’40s and ’50s, but they played without masks. There is no way you could play without a mask today, against us, in this faster league. I’ve never seen reflexes like Grant’s. I think he’s the best goaltender in the history of the NHL. In two or three years, Ron Hextall may change that. But for now …”
Little did anyone know that Grant’s performance in the 1987 Stanley Cup finals would not even be his greatest accomplishment of that year. A rematch with the Soviets lay ahead in the fall—a stirring showdown that might define his career.
For Canadian hockey fans of the Boomer generation there is only one possible defining game in their hockey pantheon: Canada’s incredible 6–5 victory in Game 8 of the 1972 Summit Series. For younger fans, it might be Sidney Crosby’s gold-medal overtime winner as Canada defeated the USA in the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. But for sheer skill and wizardry, there is nothing that compares to Game 2 of the three-game final series between Canada and the USSR at the 1987 Canada Cup. The series would be the only time in their pro careers that the two Canadian geniuses of offensive hockey, Mario Lemieux and Wayne Gretzky, played on the same team and (with brilliant results) on the same line for a brief while. It was the final time to see the legendary Soviet squad intact before political changes allowed their players to seek big money in the NHL. With Gretzky, Lemieux, Dale Hawerchuk and Ray Bourque leading Canada against the legendary Soviet attack of Igor Larionov, Sergei Makarov, Vladimir Krutov and Slava Fetisov, the three-game final series may have been the greatest orgy of scoring talent ever assembled.
Grant:
The Soviets were loaded that year. Every line could score. Krutov, Larionov, Makarov, Bykov, Fetisov, Kasatonov. Later I got to play with Alex Mogilny in Buffalo, and became good friends with Alex. He was a fourth-line guy at that time. Alex, Pavel Bure, Sergei Fedorov: not too shabby for the fourth line, right?
After the Oilers’ third Stanley Cup championship in four years, Grant became the consensus favourite to start in the 1987 Canada Cup when training camps got underway in August. Canada’s head coach Mike Keenan had seen first-hand only months earlier what Fuhr was capable of, and Iron Mike was predicted to tab Grant as the starter over his own Conn Smythe winner, Hextall. Keenan recognized the intangibles Grant brought to the biggest games. “Grant was one on the most focused athletes I ever coached,” Keenan reflected years later. “He was able to mentally prepare himself for every game by almost putting himself in a mental trance. Also, Grant’s ability to quickly move mentally beyond any goal scored on him gave him a winning edge.”
Grant, as was his custom, did not spend much time brooding over the decision of who would wear the maple leaf that fall.
Grant:
Never thought about it. Never worried about it. When I got the phone call telling me I was on the team, I was a little surprised. We’d finished in May. Then all of a sudden in August you’re right back in training camp again. So it was a short summer. Right back at it. But it was fun because the same group of guys from Edmonton was there. You’ve got Glenn there, Mark
’s there, Wayne and Coff. So I guess it was a good time.
Keeping busy at the rink and away from other distractions was also a balm for Grant. And having the core of the Oilers team around also helped keep distractions at bay.
Grant:
We’d just come back from winning a Cup in 1987. You win a Cup and all of a sudden it’s August, and it’s serious hockey. Playing for your country—you don’t take that lightly. You maybe didn’t have the same urgency that you would have had if it was back in May or June for the final rounds of the playoffs. But you also had the same urgency to win. It’s the same but different, if that makes sense.
As usual, Grant’s summer training regimen had consisted of golf, more golf, and, if that didn’t work, even more golf. When asked why he played 36 holes of golf between games that summer, Grant drily noted, “Because it got too dark to play 54.” But that pastoral approach to conditioning had yet to meet Mike Keenan. As Grant would discover later in St. Louis, Keenan had a penchant for fitness. Something was going to give when a well-rested Grant arrived at Team Canada’s camp in late August 1987.
Grant:
Obviously, he already thought I was maybe not in the shape he thought I should be in. But I was also in the shape where I knew I could still play. So I got to pedal the bike a couple extra times with Wendel Clark. We had a good time laughing, because at certain points you’d say, “Okay, enough’s enough, it’s August.” And Wendel, he’d just keep pedalling. I think he rode the extra minutes for me.
At that time Mike didn’t push my buttons much—we had to wait until we were in St. Louis for that. Back then he would just make me ride the bike and let me play. Which was fine by me. There were a lot more choices and a lot of different angles that they were working on other than the goalies. So I got lucky at that time.
Keenan made a now-famous speech to the Canadian team in the ’87 camp in which he asked the assembled players how many minutes were in a hockey game. “Sixty,” came back the answer. “Wrong,” said Keenan. “There are 360. Grant’s going to get 60, Gretzk will get 25, Mess will get 23 …” Players soon saw that, while they were stars on their own teams, they were going to be lucky to get ice time with the stacked lineup representing Canada. Grant saw established players like Steve Yzerman, Al MacInnis, Scott Stevens and a future Keenan stalwart in Chicago, Denis Savard, cut from the team. Patrick Roy was one of the notable goalies left off. Keenan made his point about team concept in one pithy lesson.
Grant:
There were a lot of good hockey players that Mike had to let go. He could have made two really good hockey teams that could have won, just with the guys we had at camp. There were a lot of guys in your fourth line that are first-liners on any other team. It makes it interesting.
By the time the ’87 Canada Cup rolled around, we’d played the Rendez-vous series earlier in ’87. It was another chance to see some European hockey and get a chance to get a feel for it. The first time I experienced playing hockey against European teams, I learned their strategy is not to shoot from everywhere but to take a good shot. Something you have to learn again in a very short time. Different speed, different shot selection, that sort of thing. But it took some time to build back up again, and Russian teams were very good.
Thanks to the 1987 Rendez-vous games in February and the Calgary Olympic Games the following year, interest in international hockey from Canadian fans was at a fever pitch. After a lull since the NHL’s first burst of international play in the ’70s, there was once again genuine interest in how a Canadian team might fare against the world’s best. Grant and the players on the team were about to undergo scrutiny that no Canadian team had experienced before.
Barely three months removed from winning the Stanley Cup, Grant found himself taken from his customary sleepy summer and thrust into the national pressure as the starter for Team Canada. Having won the job over Kelly Hrudey (who’d turn the tables later in Los Angeles with the Kings) and Ron Hextall, it was also his first chance to carry Canada in the finals of the Canada Cup, after injuring his shoulder in the 1984 tournament’s round robin (where Rejean Lemelin took the starter’s job in Fuhr’s absence).
Grant:
In 1984 it wasn’t too bad for the Canada Cup. It was still a fairly new event, then. The rivalry hadn’t really got that nasty yet. So you didn’t really have to worry about it. In ’87, that changed. There was enough of it on the news that you knew it was a going to be a big deal, you knew enough from being in the dressing room it was a big deal.
If you went out in public you had to listen to it. But we weren’t out in public the whole time. Everything was pretty sheltered. We all hung out as a group. We knew what was at stake for the country, but at the same time, you reminded yourself that it was still a hockey game. You’d played lots of games before, and in tough situations. You tried to look at it that way. I can tell you it would be a lot harder to play on Team Canada today with Twitter and Facebook and the 24-hour sports channels going at it all the time about who should make the team and who should be left off.
The Canadian lineup assembled by Hockey Canada was filled with players from the two teams featured in the most recent Cup final series, with Flyers and Oilers filling the roster. Besides Grant, Gretzky, Anderson and Coffey for Canada, the Flyers’ Rick Tocchet, Brian Propp, Doug Crossman and Ron Hextall made the lineup for Keenan, their regular-season coach. One of the assistant coaches chosen for the squad was John Muckler, Keenan’s acknowledgement for the role Muckler played in Edmonton’s 1987 return to Cup glory. (Jean Perron and Tom Watt filled out the staff—this was clearly still before the days of goalie coaches.) Canada was favoured to win on the basis of its 1984 Canada Cup victory and the fact that so many of those stars were back for this tournament.
As the series progressed, however, fans and media started to believe that perhaps the early enthusiasm for a Canadian romp was a bit misplaced. After all, the Soviets had split the two games of the Rendez-vous in February—hardly a walkover. Despite a 3–0–2 record in round-robin action during the tournament, Canada hadn’t exactly destroyed the competition once play began. Many of the wins were one-goal affairs that hung on a save one way or the other. A desperate comeback from down 3–1 against the Soviets in the round-robin portion salvaged a 3–3 tie in Canada’s fifth contest at Hamilton’s Copps Coliseum—the first meeting between the squads (Gretzky’s goal with just 2:30 left had gained the tie). Grant stopped 33 of 36 Soviet shots he faced in a “spectacular” display, according to Tom McMillan of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. His performance was all the more impressive as Grant was learning on the fly about Soviets like future NHLer Valeri Kamensky.
Grant:
He was fast, fast and extremely good. At that time, too, we were still learning the Russian players. They weren’t regulars in the NHL yet. You had basically a one-week window to try and figure out what everybody’s strengths were. We thought about their star guys—that’s all anybody talked about. Nobody talked about the back end of their teams. They’re buzzing around me and I was like, “Who are these guys? They’re not in my notes.” You learned by trial and error.
The stirring comeback performance against the USSR earned the Canadians a semi-final rematch with a then-unknown goalie, Dominik Hasek of Czechoslovakia, who had registered a surprising 4–4 tie against Canada to open the tournament on August 28. Missing defected stars such as the Stasny brothers (who were banned by Czech officials for signing with the Quebec Nordiques), the Czechs were given little shot at beating Canada, with only 10,262 bothering to attend the game at the Montreal Forum. The ones who did show up, however, witnessed a dandy. After trailing 2–0 and being stymied by the acrobatic Hasek early in the semi-final, Canada eventually solved the Czech goaltender, prevailing 5–3 in the end. Grant faced 24 shots while Hasek had to deal with 37 from Team Canada. (Hasek would go on to become a teammate of Grant’s with Buffalo a few years later.) Meanwhile, the USSR had beaten Sweden handily in the other semi-final. That set up a showdown with Ca
nada in the best-of-three final.
In the first game, also held at the Forum, Grant was helpless to stop the early Soviet onslaught, and Canada fell behind 4–1 in the second period. Flashing their dazzling best, the Soviets scored a power-play goal and a short-handed marker from Sergei Makarov, a member of the KLM line with Igor Larionov and Vladimir Krutov. But a furious rally from Canada put the hosts ahead on a Wayne Gretzky goal with under three minutes left in regulation. It was short-lived; 32 seconds later, while the Forum PA announcer was still giving details of the Canadian goal, the USSR got a tying score on a nice re-direction by Andrei Khomutov on the doorstep of Grant’s crease. In overtime, Alexander Semak (a future 37-goal scorer in the NHL with New Jersey) snapped a high blast off the crossbar from in close past a flailing Fuhr—and the Soviets had grabbed Game 1 by a count of 6–5. It was a humbling defeat for the favoured Canadians.
Grant:
Getting down 1–0 put a little bit of heat on us. We felt we probably should have won Game 1 after coming back from down three goals, but at the same time we gave them too many chances, and they could score. We learned from that.
The back-and-forth, high-scoring nature of Game 1 set the table for what was to come in Game 2 at Copps Coliseum. With Canada facing elimination, Game 2 produced arguably the most exciting, entertaining international hockey ever witnessed in a single game. Even with tremendous defenders such as Canada’s Ray Bourque and Paul Coffey—or the USSR’s Slava Fetisov and Alexei Kasatonov—there were chances galore and plenty of goals. Despite numerous key saves, including a stacked-pads beauty by Grant on Makarov just 30 seconds into the game, the score went into double digits. After the quick 4–1 start by the Soviets in Game 1, it was Canada that jumped into command early in Game 2. Quebec Nordiques defenceman Normand Rochefort, a surprise selection for Team Canada, completed a fine passing play to score and give Canada the early lead. Sparked by key saves from Grant on the penalty kill, Team Canada built a 3–1 margin in the first period with goals from Doug Gilmour and Coffey. But the Soviets fought back to tie the game in the second with goals from Fetisov on the power play and a short-handed marker from Krutov.