Wayne Gretzky's Ghost

by Roy MacGregor

  “Goalies are different,” was what Dryden wrote.

  Whether it’s because the position attracts certain personality types, or only permits certain ones to succeed; whether the experience is so intense and fundamental that it transforms its practitioners to type, I don’t know the answer. But whatever it is, the differences between “players” and “goalies” are manifest and real, transcending as they do even culture and sport.

  Make no mistake: they are different. Goaltenders form almost a secret society within the hockey world, so caught up in their own world that they have virtually created a second one for themselves on the Internet, where sites for “hockey goaltenders” number close to nine thousand and where the discussions about personality and preparedness can sometimes reach into the mystical.

  “Our position,” says goaltending instructor Paul Fricker, who calls himself “The Goalie Doctor” on the World Wide Web,

  is truly played against ourselves, rather than the other team. The players on the other team are just there to give us or deny us what we need from playing goal. A real goalie (regardless of the stock answers we hear in the newspapers and on the TV) plays for one reason: to be the star, the centre of attention. In another word, ego. We all play goal to fulfill our need to be wanted, appreciated, needed, etc.

  A hockey goaltender, Dryden wrote back in 1983,

  is more introverted than his teammates, more serious … more sensitive and moody (“ghoulies”), more insecure.… [A] team allows a goalie to sit by himself on planes or buses, to disappear on road trips, to reappear and say nothing for long periods of time, to have a single room when everyone else has roommates.… What these qualities suggest is a certain character of mind, a mind that need not be nimble or dexterous, for the demands of the job are not complex, but a mind emotionally disciplined, one able to be focussed and directed, a mind under control.

  Used to the pressure of their position, they find the pressure of the camera and deadlines relatively simple. “If you lose,” Frank (Ulcers) McCool, who played in the War years, once said, “the fans blame the goalie and the reporters take up the cry. After a while, the other players believe what they read and the goalie feels like it’s one man against the world … Pretty soon, the goalie feels like an outcast.”

  But no longer. Today they are the first ones the media goes to for an explanation of what happened, and perhaps because of this increasingly cozy relationship, the first ones the media managers go to when an opening arises in the hockey broadcast industry.

  One almost certain to head there some day is Boston’s Bill Ranford, who says, “I’d love to do that when I’m done playing.” His reasons are much the same as the others’—a chance to stay with the game, a second career, a natural outlet for his easygoing, articulate nature—but he inadvertently lets slip one of the best-kept goaltender-broadcaster secrets.

  “Goalies figure they’re always the scapegoat for all the times the team blew a game. This is their chance to get back.”

  By 2011, the proliferation of goaltenders as analysts and panellists was even greater, though former enforcers and fourth-liners were giving goalies a good run for the money in the broadcast world. It continued to baffle as to why there were so few highly skilled former skaters in the booths—and no European-trained players whatsoever, despite the fact that many of the most interesting hockey thoughts expressed in the English language were coming from those speaking it as a second or third language.

  THE MONOTONOUS SAFETY OF CLICHÉS

  (The Globe and Mail, May 21, 2007)

  I have been rendered unconscious. It has now been more than a month since the Stanley Cup playoffs began and we have yet to hear an original thought.

  “Is the first goal important?” the media want to know. Presumably, in a game in which a 1–0 score is not at all unusual, it is.

  “Your best players have to be your best players,” the coaches tell us and, presumably, if they weren’t they wouldn’t be.

  “So long as we stick to our game plan we’ll be all right,” the players say. I have long given up the obvious follow-up to that comment—“And what, pray, is that game plan?”—because, well, they don’t know, but it sure sounds good.

  Hockey is a terribly simple game complicated by error, and in this way it largely defies analysis beyond “stuff happens.” A “game plan,” fancy as it might sound, amounts to the team deciding to send one player or two players into forecheck. The rest is all speed and skill and pucks flipping like coins—luck, more than anything, determining the heads and tails of an outcome involving two largely equal opponents. But the games—and even more so, the days between games—demand words. The media insists; the water cooler demands.

  “We just want to take it one game at a time,” the players say, although with June fast coming on we sure do wish there was an alternative.

  “We don’t want to get too high or too low,” players say after wins as well as losses, though the post-series dressing rooms suggest it is impossible to get any higher or lower.

  “It is what it is,” someone will say and someone else will nod, though no one has a clue what this phrase means.

  “Talk to us about …,” someone will say, inserting whatever fits at the end of the sentence—a particular player, the power play—and essentially conceding that there is, in fact, no question to ask when there is really no answer to be given. The old clichés persist: we have to bring our “A” game … we had our chances … we out-chanced them … they’ll have to regroup … we need to play desperate … we have to stay focused … obviously …

  There are also new clichés being born before our very ears: Players checking successfully now have “quick sticks,” as if the sticks—not the players—have somehow taken over the task; fourth lines are now called “energy lines” so as not to hurt the feelings of those players who simply are not good enough; goaltenders now stay in “the paint” instead of in the crease; long breakout passes—hardly a new invention—are now called “stretch passes”; and digging in the corners now involves something called the “half-boards.”

  All this, of course, is in the sportswriter’s attempt—and I myself am guilty—to make more of an extremely simple game (“He shoots, he scores”) than should be necessary. Yet what makes it necessary is that sports channels now have as many panels as Ottawa and Washington politics and the demands of the media, particularly between games, are so immense that “filler” is required both in content and conversation.

  It has reached the point this year where several times I have heard the word “plethora” applied to hockey—a word that had those of us covering the 1979 federal election rolling our eyes every time Joe Clark hauled it out. I still have no idea what it means.

  Ken Dryden, who has experience in both hockey and politics, says it is perfectly understandable that clichés and catchwords and catchphrases should dominate in both cultures. There is great safety in saying nothing, great danger in actually saying something. “It’s why athletes sound dumb and why politicians sound dumb,” Dryden said over lunch at last December’s Liberal leadership convention. “There’s not much upside, and a very big downside.”

  Clichés, says Dryden, are controlled. “They’re sort of acceptable—and they don’t lead to something else that may get you into trouble.”

  Trouble is when a coach might accidentally use the word “choke” even if casually discussing a lunch that didn’t go down particularly well. Trouble is one player on one side daring to suggest the goaltender on the other can be had.

  Trouble is a politician admitting a mistake rather than accusing the opposition of being on “a fishing expedition.” It’s why politicians promise their campaigns will “focus on the issues” and then focus on nothing but personality. It’s why they promise “change” but shy away from “reform.”

  It’s why they speak inanely of “going forward” without the foggiest notion in which direction forward lies. It’s why “at the end of the day” the late-night news is al
most invariably no news at all.

  It’s why, after years of covering both sports and politics, I’ve come to think the main difference between the two worlds is that politicians don’t have numbers on their backs.

  No question about it.

  New phrases continue to take on new life until they have long since been beaten to death by tongues. The current fad in the hockey world is to say “moving forward” at least once a sentence. As if there were any other direction to go …

  SUPERSTITION: THE ULTIMATE INTANGIBLE

  (The Globe and Mail, April 14, 2007)

  He probably has no idea what he is sitting on. But if Sidney Crosby were to stand up and raise the plywood seat in the locker stall he has been assigned in the Scotiabank Place visitors’ dressing room, he would find something remarkable. At the very bottom, below all the extra pads and tape and assorted hockey detritus, he would see that someone has taken a Sharpie pen and written: “Wayne Gretzky sat in this stall during his final game in Canada, April 15, 1999.”

  And it is here that Sidney Crosby sat for his very first National Hockey League playoff game in Canada, April 11, 2007.

  Some kid, likely here for a minor-hockey tournament, has scribbled his own name in red ink over the makeshift plaque. His first name is Michael. His last name is Crosby. Coincidence? A sign? Who would dare say on Friday the thirteenth, the day before Crosby’s young Pittsburgh Penguins attempt to even their Eastern Conference playoff series against the more experienced Ottawa Senators.

  One game into the series and already superstition is at play. The Senators have declared nearly half of their far-larger dressing room off-limits to all, whether media or players. No one, absolutely no one, is allowed to tread over the huge Senators logo on the carpet.

  The Penguins have their own eccentricities. The team began its stay in Ottawa by posting all the news clippings of the day on the wall back of the workbench—stories of the miracle year this team has had, stories of the amazing young stars such as nineteen-year-old Crosby, eighteen-year-old Jordan Staal and twenty-year-old Evgeni Malkin.

  The morning after the Penguins fell 6–3 to the Senators in a game that was nothing short of embarrassing for the young stars, the clippings wall had vanished. And already, only one game into the post-season, the playoff beards are sprouting. Crosby says he hopes his amounts at least to a moustache by the time the end comes, whenever it comes. Young Ottawa defenceman Anton Volchenkov rubs his face and shakes his head in disappointment: “I’m trying, but that’s it.”

  “You noticed!” twenty-four-year-old Colby Armstrong, Crosby’s winger and close friend, shouts in triumph as a reporter remarks on the tiny stubble forming below the player’s chin. “This is my first playoff beard. I’ve never had one before. I’ve only got a few hairs coming up, but there’s a couple there that I’m just going to let go.”

  It is a time for insanity, but not time yet for the depths to which the madness of superstition can sometimes sink and will very likely sink somewhere, on some team, before the four long rounds of the Stanley Cup playoffs are through.

  The first time the Senators reached post-season play back in 1997, they threw their faith not in their coaches, not in the crowd, not in their goaltender—but in a tiny wooden Buddha that forward Tom Chorske had picked up in a San Francisco souvenir shot. “Buddha Power” became the clarion call of those young Senators, the equipment manager charged with making sure Chorske carried the tiny statue around in his shaving kit as the inexperienced team took the Buffalo Sabres to seven games before losing the final match in overtime.

  The following year, when the Senators reached the second round, they transferred their faith over to the dyed platinum-blond hair of goaltender Damian Rhodes, and rode this strange talisman for eleven games before losing to the Washington Capitals.

  The modern Senators may never have gone that far in the playoffs, but they have proved to be one of the more superstitious groups over the years. They once began playing with Lego parts in the dressing room in the belief it would make them all better team-builders. They have in the past switched to their third jerseys for road games in the hopes that a change of cloth would bring them better fortune. The coaching staff once tried to bring an end to a regular-season slump by holding a seance in the trainers’ room, complete with candles to help them call on the ghosts of One-Eyed Frank McGee, King Clancy, and Fearless Frank Finnigan. It didn’t work. One goaltender—and we shall spare him the humiliation of using his name—refused to change his underwear during one playoff run that, perhaps fortunately, came to a quicker-than-expected end.

  The greatest Senators superstition came about by accident. Forward Bruce Gardiner was once in such a terrible scoring slump that he dramatically marched his stick into the washroom and tried to flush the blade down the toilet. When he went back out on the ice and quickly scored a goal—and began scoring fairly regularly for a while—he never began a game without first going to the toilet. The stick flush has to rank among the great hockey superstitions of all time, right up there with the Philadelphia Flyers bringing in Kate Smith to sing “God Bless America” instead of the national anthem before must-win games. When Smith died in 1986, the team still brought her back—in video form singing from the scoreboard screen.

  Back in 1952, a local seafood merchant carried an octopus into a Detroit Red Wings playoff game and tossed it onto the ice from the stands. He said the sea creature’s eight arms stood for the eight victories then required to win the Stanley Cup. The tradition somehow survived expansion and the octopus, despite the sixteen victories now required to claim the Cup, remained an annual tradition.

  Making sense is not a requirement in hockey superstitions, despite the reaction of the Pittsburgh reporter who took one look at Ottawa’s carpet logo and rather appropriately growled: “If they don’t want anyone to step on it, why didn’t they put it on the wall?”

  Former NHL head coach Fred Shero used to carry rosary beads during games, though he was not a Roman Catholic. Former Toronto Maple Leafs coach Red Kelly once convinced his players they would perform better with “pyramid power” and began placing small pyramids beneath the bench. Punch Imlach, another Leafs coach, once wore a hideous sports jacket throughout the 1967 playoffs and believed if he ever failed to wear it, the Leafs would lose. They won that year—but have not since. Perhaps now it is the curse of the ugly jacket.

  We have barely touched on goaltenders: the late Jacques Plante claiming he played better in underwear he himself had knitted, Patrick Roy talking to his posts and refusing to skate over any of the lines on the ice …

  But if the Hockey Hall of Fame ever devotes a section to hockey superstitions, it will star a non-goaltender, Phil Esposito. The former Boston Bruins star used to flip out if someone accidentally crossed sticks in the dressing room. He had to wear an old turtleneck, inside out, every game. He would not stay in a hotel room that had the number 13 anywhere on the door. His game gum had to come from a brand-new pack. During the anthem he had to say the Lord’s Prayer, as well as several Hail Marys. He once had so many lucky charms and rabbits’ feet and four-leaf clover key chains hanging in his locker he had trouble finding his equipment.

  The team that would be represented in that special section would be the Edmonton Oilers of the glory years back in the mid- to late 1980s. Gretzky was among the worst, always dressing in precisely the same order from shin pads to gloves. He had the equipment manager carry a supply of baby powder, which he would sprinkle on his taped sticks to “soften” the passes. He had to deliberately miss the net to the right in the warm-up and after the warm-up, have a Diet Coke, a glass of ice water, a Gatorade and a second Diet Coke before he was ready to play.

  The Oilers would stand and “boo” the other team’s starting lineup as head coach Glen Sather read out the names. They had to slam the butt ends of their sticks into a steel door that led to the video room as they passed it on the way to the ice. Equipment handlers Barry Stafford and Lyle (Sparky) Kulchisky used to h
ave icemaker Trent Evans give them a bottle filled with water taken from the snow scraped off the Edmonton ice, and before playoff road games they would sprinkle some of this “holy water” on the ice surface of the enemy rink.

  Five Stanley Cups later, who could argue? And Evans, remember, was the icemaker who buried the “Lucky Loonie” at centre ice in Salt Lake City at the 2002 Olympics, thereby initiating one of the game’s most enduring superstitions.

  Most of today’s players have their own, though some are reluctant to speak of personal superstitions. “I have lots,” Ottawa fifty-goal-scorer Dany Heatley said, “but none I’m going to let you know about.”

  “I have habits but no superstitions,” Ottawa captain Daniel Alfredsson said. “If I feel I’m getting superstitious, I’ll change. So I guess I’m superstitious about not getting superstitious.”

  Armstrong, on the other hand, has them and has no fear of talking about them. When the players leave the dressing room, he says, he can’t move until Penguins teammate Ryan Whitney gets to where Armstrong stands waiting. “We don’t even do anything,” Armstrong said with a laugh. “I just wait for him. That’s all. That’s it. It’s stupid.”

  Maybe so—but just maybe as well …

  THE CASE AGAINST DECEMBER BABIES

  (Ottawa Citizen, December 26, 1990)

  This column must be written, but it is hoped that, at least until January 1, its contents will be banned from the nation’s maternity wards.

  The idea of some highly ambitious hockey nut sitting around with the paper while he waits for the doctor to announce “It’s a boy!” is just too much to bear. If he reads what Roger Barnsley has to say, he’ll find out he completely blew it. The chances of having a November or December baby boy make the National Hockey League aren’t all that much better than the chances of having a November or December girl make it.