Wayne Gretzky's Ghost

by Roy MacGregor

  The man an entire province prayed for when Jean Béliveau moved on has arrived at his full bloom. It is hardly possible to believe today that those same hands that ruffle children as if their imaginations were crops he himself had planted once struggled to put down his desperate feelings in poetry. It is harder still to realize these same friendly eyes could have spilled tears over the red, white and blue Canadiens-coloured chesterfield in Jean Béliveau’s office as Lafleur sat crying over whatever it was that had gone so wrong with his promised life.

  But eyes can also weep for joy. And Antoine Viau, who has waited much of his life for this moment, is dampening slightly as he stands watching his beloved Canadiens skate and shoot and actually breathe. The Montreal Forum is empty of fans, but Guy Lafleur—who an hour earlier has said “What good is money when you play and lose?”—is skating with Stanley Cup intentions during a $25-per-player pre-season scrimmage. His wispy hair matted with the cream cake his teammates have used to celebrate his twenty-seventh birthday, Lafleur commands his magic to turn a 4–2 deficit into victory. In the dying minutes he scores, sets up the tying goal, then single-handedly wins the game in overtime with a phantom shot from the point. He has served notice against the best hockey team in the world, his own, that Lafleur is ready for the new season. For Antoine Viau, who sweeps floors nights at the American-owned IBM plant, the state of les Canadiens is, in many ways, the state of his own well-being. The team and Lafleur are an unspoken vindication.

  “Ah, Lafleur,” Viau says, courteously speaking English to the reporter who helped him sneak in. “Lafleur … Lafleur … I love it!”

  Guy Lafleur is more symbol than human to a great many Québécois. “There is,” says Jerry Petrie, Lafleur’s agent, “probably more pressure on him to perform from the people in this province than there is on René Lévesque.”

  We may be, as Irving Layton has said, “a dull people enamoured of childish games,” but Layton is certainly not speaking for those to whom hockey is a far more mature passion than politics. For them, Lafleur occupies the highest office in the land. “Guy is the true throwback,” says Ken Dryden, the Canadiens’ goaltender. “I look out sometimes and see the St. Lawrence skater, not the player, and it is a beautiful thing to behold.”

  Pierre Larouche, who came to Montreal from Pittsburgh last year, says he actually used to cheer for Lafleur when their teams played: “They’d be ahead 6–1 and I’d be on the bench wishing he’d score more, just so I could watch and see how it is done.”

  The last to recognize this special status has probably been Lafleur himself. In Moscow this summer he was asked by the head of hockey and the director of all Soviet sports to pick his own world all-star team and when he came to right wing he blushed deeply and said “Me!”—quickly covering his embarrassment with a laugh that implied it was merely his own little joke, but the Soviet officials gravely nodded in total agreement.

  “The Flower is a very strange person,” says Lafleur’s linemate and good friend Steve Shutt. It is not for any obvious idiosyncrasy such as his superstitious tap of the goal netting to start each game and period; what is truly odd, in Shutt’s evaluation, is that Lafleur is “the furthest thing from an athlete you’d ever want to see off the ice.” A loyal consumer of Molson’s ale (the brewery owns his team) and a chain-smoker who two weeks ago switched to a pipe, Lafleur does little more than work out with suntan oil in the off-season.

  “He shows up at camp, puts on his skates and it’s the first time he’s been on them since the playoff,” says Larry Robinson of the Canadiens. “And the frightening thing is he just flies by everybody immediately.”

  For people like Jean Béliveau, who even in retirement runs two to three miles a day, it is a continuing mystery how Lafleur—who hasn’t attended an optional practice in years—remains so fit. “The most amazing thing about him is his physical resistance,” says Béliveau. “It’s because he’s so hyper,” says Shutt. “He winds himself up like a coil.”

  The bad nerves are a mixed blessing: what Lafleur gains in reflex and metabolism he gives up in what it does to his mental fitness. Before particularly important games he has been discovered in the dressing room at three o’clock in the afternoon—his equipment on, his skates tightened—fully five hours before game time. By the time the puck drops he is drained, which partially explains his periodic slumps in critical games. Before the pipe came along he tried to smoke out the devils inside, and there have been games, one teammate says, when he would begin chain-smoking hours before a game and continue through the intermissions.

  The best solution, he has discovered, is to rinse the mind completely of all hockey thought. He spends the jittery pre-game hours reading car magazines, clipping from architectural books for the dream-home file he keeps or taking bubble baths. On the road he and his roommate, Shutt, fight over the television, Shutt constantly looking for sports events and Lafleur’s bad nerves making any contest, even tennis, an unbearable agony. He is at his happiest watching reruns of The Three Stooges.

  It can be argued that the premium theorizing on most sports has fallen to the journeymen players—the Sheros and Nesterenkos of hockey, baseball’s Jim Bouton—and that the magnificently gifted—Rocket Richard in hockey, Pete Rose and Mickey Mantle in baseball—often appear to be in lifelong thinking slumps. Lafleur would rather keep things simple. His priorities always place the team and the game first, and either his fans or family second. Only once, when the team was in a rare slump, has Lafleur deliberately tried to inspire by anything but his own standard of play. He moved from his locker to the play blackboard near the showers, picked up the chalk, thought a moment, and then scribbled, “A winner never quits and a quitter never wins.” He then moved back to his locker where he sat staring up at the approving, legendary faces of les Canadiens of past years, and he read again the lines of poet John McRae that are stencilled just below the ceiling: “To you from failing hands we throw the torch; be yours to hold it high.”

  —

  I’ve always been there when he needed somebody.

  He knows I’ll always be there. —Jean Béliveau

  “I may never be able to play like him,” Lafleur once said of Béliveau. “But I’d like to be the man he is.” It is a hero worship that has been both inspiration and salvation to Guy Lafleur. Twenty years ago in the Ottawa River town of Thurso, Quebec, Lafleur’s parents found him sleeping in his new hockey equipment, and though the dream of that night has long since faded, it is not unlikely that Jean Béliveau threaded a breakaway pass to his new young winger and that the roar of the Forum crowd for Lafleur’s goal sounds yet in whatever dimension dreams retire to.

  As Béliveau had before him, Lafleur left the small town for Quebec City, and their resulting glory was comparable. As an “amateur” junior, Lafleur made close to $20,000 a year, drove a free Buick and dressed in the finest “gift” clothes. He wore No. 4, Béliveau’s signature in Montreal, and Lafleur made sure he kept a poster of his idol taped to the wall beside his locker.

  In Lafleur’s final year—when he scored an astonishing 130 goals—it was arranged that the sensation would come to Montreal. By rights, as the best amateur in the country, he should have gone to the last-place California Golden Seals, but a celebrated sleight of hand involving trades and draft picks engineered by Montreal’s general manager Sam Pollock saw the Canadiens come up with Lafleur.

  It was accepted that Lafleur was carrying Béliveau’s torch even before the 1971–72 season began. Ken Dryden remembers an exhibition game against the Boston Bruins when he overheard Phil Esposito growl to his linemates, “Which one is Lafleur?” The season before, Esposito had scored a record seventy-six goals, but there was obvious concern in his voice. So much was Guy Lafleur on people’s minds—despite never having played a single professional game—that a manufacturer was rushing production to get a Lafleur-endorsed table-hockey game out in time for Christmas. Its main competition, naturally, would be the Phil Esposito game.

  By the third
winter, however, the Lafleur game was off the market. Not only had the rookie award gone to his teammate Ken Dryden, but the word around the league was that Lafleur was “yellow.” The junior promise had become a professional deceit. “He’d been somewhat of a bust, you might say,” says Steve Shutt.

  “My legs were in Montreal,” Lafleur says, “but my heart was in Quebec City. My mind wasn’t on hockey.” With the press constantly demanding what was wrong, Lafleur took to hiding in his Montreal apartment and writing depressing poetry about the meaninglessness of life and unfairness of death—a melancholia that still surfaces from time to time—and his game deteriorated even further. To give him confidence the Canadiens countered a $465,000 (over three years) lure from the Quebec Nordiques of the WHA with a new contract for Lafleur—$1 million over ten years, fully guaranteed. He responded with his worst season of all: twenty-one goals.

  The unhappy sessions in Jean Béliveau’s office weren’t providing a solution either. It took a gamble by Béliveau in the spring of 1974 to provide the remedy. Béliveau let it be known that he was less than pleased with the performance of his heir, and he castigated Lafleur for not working hard enough. The effect, at first devastating, became “a wake-up” for Lafleur, and he emerged from his sulk by announcing, “I’ll show the bastards.”

  When training camp opened, he discarded his “yellow” stigma with his helmet and the new Guy Lafleur suddenly and aggressively emerged as Béliveau reincarnate. A broken finger probably cost him the scoring championship that year, but he has held the title for the three years since.

  The legendary team that in the past revered such names as “Battleship,” “Boom Boom” and “Rocket” found itself following the “Flower,” but as Pierre Larouche says, “He’s as gentle as a flower, but plays like Superman. In Quebec, hockey is a religion, and Lafleur is the new god.”

  In the four years since the rebirth, there have been times when Lafleur has found himself in his office in Pointe-Claire looking at the tiny skates with the red laces that now keep the door open, the same skates he began on, and poring over the two massive albums, one a foot thick, that are offered to his glory. “It is like a dream to me,” he says at these times. “Even now it is like a dream.”

  There have, however, been darker sides that are not pasted in any album but linger anyway. And this has led him to wonder rather than gloat. In April of 1976, the Montreal police were investigating the holdup of a Brinks truck when they stumbled on a plot to kidnap Lafleur before the playoffs began and hold him for a rumored $250,000 ransom. He will never forget what it was like when Jean Béliveau told him.

  “I was at home and the phone rang,” Lafleur recalls, the memory sending his fingers searching for cigarettes. “It was Jean and he said he wanted to see me. I said okay, tomorrow. He said no, right now, and he’d come over because we couldn’t talk about it over the phone. I hung up and my wife said ‘What was that?’ I didn’t know what to say—I thought I’d been traded. Then Jean arrived with two big guys and they’re cops and they tell me I have two choices. I can go to Miami and the club would pay for it and make excuses for me, or I can stay. I said I just wanted to play hockey.”

  For a full month Lafleur lived in sight of two detectives. His wife, Lise, and eight-month-old son, Martin, stayed for a while in a hotel and then with her parents in Quebec City. The Lafleurs had a home in the country at that time—a renovated two-hundred-year-old farmhouse at the end of a long, dark drive, and his nerves, never reliable, erupted. A squirrel would drum-roll across the roof and Lafleur would scramble for cover. Night after night he couldn’t sleep, and once he knelt shaking by the windowsill as a large, black car pulled partway up the drive and sat idling. All he could make out was the glow of four cigarettes, rising, burning brightly, then falling. After a torturous hour the car left, but the reality of the threat stayed. Lafleur’s play disintegrated and when the fans and press squeezed him for answers he had to fight to keep it from pouring out.

  The very next year he made up for that small lapse by winning the Conn Smythe Trophy as the most valuable player during the playoffs. But there was a new threat to deal with. One of the Boston Bruin players, John Wensink, whose hockey talent is to Lafleur’s what punk rock is to Beethoven, proudly announced: “If I get on the ice, Lafleur will not come out alive.”

  Lafleur survived, of course. Wensink, who has trouble catching his own wind, had to make do with Lafleur’s as the Canadiens star flew by and led his team to its record twentieth Stanley Cup. Still, the incident had its effect on Lafleur. “It’s supposed to be a sport,” he says of his beloved game, “not butchery.”

  It is such things as this that cause Lafleur to measure just what it is all worth. Even a simple vacation with his family must now be spent in the south of France, so badly have the adoring fans crippled his freedom in Canada. He turned up at a charity baseball game this summer but was forced to give up in the third inning when the worshippers insisted on running out and playing the field with him. He is now paid—thanks to the team renegotiating his ten-year contract—approximately $200,000 a year, a sum that is vast only until it is recognized that Lafleur’s salary would not place him in the top twenty of professional hockey. His present contract depresses him to the point where he refers to it as an “iron collar” and is currently pressing the Canadiens for yet another renegotiation.

  There are times when he rises in the dead of night and goes into his son Martin’s room and crawls in beside the boy. Martin is only three and though he has seen first-hand what it means to be Guy Lafleur—the fawning attacks at shopping malls, the crowds that wait in the streets—he has already announced to his father that he too will be a great hockey player one day. Lafleur, who saw his own youth pummelled by fame, is concerned. “I tell him to sit down and relax,” he says. “I know he’d have even more pressure on him than I had. And that? … Well.” He shrugs and can say no more.

  Little wonder, then, that the heir to Jean Béliveau has thought of abdicating one day. The mysterious European offer of this past summer has more attractions than its tax-free value (possibly $400,000 a year). The freewheeling style of international hockey is where Lafleur’s immense grace on skates would be best served, and playing a short thirty-five-game schedule for one of those countries—Shutt says West Germany, logic says Finland and Lafleur isn’t saying—would leave him both time and places for escape.

  “I still haven’t said no,” he says, the chipped tooth adding mischief to the statement (undoubtedly to throw a scare into his present employers). “The offer came too late for this year, but maybe next year.” Lafleur looks out from the comforting shadows of the restaurant and sees those who shortly will be stalking him as he works his way back to the Forum.

  “The other thing is,” he says as he pushes back his chair, “you have to live sometime.”

  Lafleur played for another seven years with the Canadiens and retired in 1985. He entered the Hall of Fame but was unhappy away from the game and “unretired” in 1988, spending one season with the New York Rangers and returning to the site of his original fame, Quebec City, for two years with the Nordiques. He had gone from a dominant player to a modest threat, scoring only a dozen goals in each of his seasons in Quebec. In 1991 he retired for good, having scored 560 goals and 793 assists in only 1,127 games—numbers that would have been even more impressive had he not lost three years to “retirement.” Five Stanley Cups, three Art Ross trophies as the league’s leading scorer, two Hart trophies as the league’s most valuable player and one Conn Smythe Trophy as the MVP of the playoffs. Today, Lafleur is a restaurateur in the Montreal area.

  KING OF THE KINGS: MARCEL DIONNE

  (Maclean’s, March 24, 1980)

  Before it is over the death toll will reach twenty-seven. But on this, the first of ten days of California downpour, the rain is but a small annoyance, lightly chording on the clover-shaped pool. A dark, stubby man with the build of a Chubb vault stands beneath the eaves of his $400,000 home and scowls toward
the mist lingering over his neighbour’s corral. He stops talking, grabs his head and bends over double, the strain turning the eighteen-stitch cut over his left eye into a black caterpillar. Yet it is neither injury nor weather that bothers Marcel Dionne; it is the future. “I have got to think positive,” he says in a rising voice. “Pos-i-tive!”

  For four hours he has sat working over a few cans of Coors beer and the past. He has touched on the sacrifice—the marriage breakup his parents once faked, the baby his Aunt Denise lost—all tied to the young Marcel’s hockey. He has traced himself from Quebec’s Drummondville through Ontario’s St. Catharines, from Detroit to Los Angeles, once running from his own demanding family, once from his own damning mouth. In awe, he has spoken of Guy Lafleur, first the boy and now the man, and whom, boy and man, Dionne has “been chasing since he was ten years old,” in the words of his own best friend, Mickey Redmond.

  Only this past weekend, with Dionne a distant sixteen points ahead of Montreal’s Lafleur in the National Hockey League scoring race, has that eighteen-year chase seemed won. And with that accomplishment may come another: with agent Alan Eagleson demanding a $500,000-per-year plus contract from the Los Angeles Kings, Marcel Dionne is about to become the best-paid performer in the sport’s history. Either that or Marcel Dionne, ever caught on the far edge of his promise, will move on yet again. Perhaps to Switzerland, where the offers are already being made. It is all too much to consider at once. Dionne changes the subject by pointing across the private road toward a neighbour’s yard where another expatriate, an Australian eucalyptus, leans wearily over the drive lane. “I hate those trees, you know,” he says. “They’ve got no roots, nothing to hold them up.”