The Battle of Alberta

by Mark Spector

  “It was the first time we’d beaten them by any margin,” recalled Calgary winger Colin Patterson. “Hey, any time you could beat the Oilers it was good for your confidence.”

  Peter Maher, the radio voice of the Flames, looked down on a scene he’d not witnessed in the Saddledome in ages. And as the goals went in, he could feel—at least for one night—the air coming out of that Oilers mystique. The Flames were playing the way Bob Johnson wanted them to play, executing the vaunted Seven Point Plan to perfection.

  That much was satisfying, that the Calgary players were finally able to take all of Johnson’s Xs and Os and execute them successfully on Saddledome ice. But the fact that Johnson’s agenda was really working on Edmonton, for the first time in about three seasons …? That was what gave Maher a different feeling that night.

  “It was the game that Gary Suter had six assists. Tied the Flames record,” he said. “I look back at that 9–3 game, and that had a lot to do with giving the Flames confidence. Because they couldn’t beat them all year.”

  The game went all but unnoticed in Edmonton, with the general opinion being that Calgary had won a game that didn’t mean anything. Big deal, right? If the Oilers were ever accused of being cocky, this was hard evidence of a dismissive attitude built on years of besting the Flames.

  As expected in a six-goal game, this one ended in a huge brawl. Marty McSorley fought Joel Otto. Kevin Lowe went at it with Jim Peplinski. Semenko, Patterson recalls, “fought, then was on the loose and the refs tackled him.

  “We’d played really well, and I remember the big brawl, with four or five minutes left. I do remember it being a turning point for us, and gaining some confidence.”

  After the two teams disposed of their Round 1 opponents—Edmonton in three straight over Vancouver, Calgary in three straight over Winnipeg—Johnson seized that Game 78 result in the lead-up to what would be the third Battle of Alberta in a four-year stretch.

  “It’s like when you broke par on a golf course—shot 69. You know it can be done because you’ve done it!” he crowed, the media gathered round after a Flames practice in Calgary. “It’s like batting practice. It’s four hundred feet down the left-field line. If you’ve never hit one out in batting practice, how the hell can you hit one out in the game?”

  In Edmonton, they’d written that 9–3 loss off by the time they got off the plane at the downtown Municipal Airport post-game. They were still rollicking in their years of dominance over Calgary. Years that were, unbeknownst to them, about to come to an end.

  “Calgary seems to have such a complex about our city. I don’t know why,” Oiler Dave Lumley told reporters prior to the series opener. “We’ve only got the Oilers, the Eskimos, West Edmonton Mall … The only thing they’ve got is a nickname. You can have Cowtown though.”

  Yuk, yuk, yuk. While Johnson was showing his team film of that 9–3 game, reaffirming that his plan, when properly executed, could fell the giant, the Oilers were aloof. They’d won two straight Stanley Cups. How was that going to change?

  “There was one game we lost late in the season, we lost 9–3 in Calgary,” recalled Glenn Anderson, unprompted. “Not only should we have learned from that game, we should have countered out attack and revamped our own system against that team. Because they’d done that to us.

  “Bob Johnson revamped their whole system to play against us. How to beat Coffey how to beat Gretzky, how to beat Kurri. He started matching guys up. He implemented is system, and we didn’t counteract it.”

  The CBC had to change its broadcast plans even before they’d dropped a puck in the 1986 Battle of Alberta. Mother Corp had planned to sequester the Battle to Alberta and British Columbia, and treat the rest of the country to the mighty Toronto Maple Leafs’ second-round series against the St. Louis Blues. It was typical CBC—giving Westerners in Saskatchewan and Manitoba a crappy, fifty-seven-point Leafs team against an American opponent rather than the two-time defending Cup champs against a provincial rival, either of whom could have mopped up the Maple Leafs using wrong-handed hockey sticks.

  Inside the CBC’s Jarvis Street offices, however, whatever was happening out in the colonies was only a sidebar to the daily drama at Maple Leaf Gardens. It was partly Toronto’s self-importance and partly ratings-based decision making. But as the disparity in the quality of hockey grew—Edmonton’s 119 points to Toronto’s 57 in 1985–86—so too did the level of ridiculousness surrounding a Canadian broadcaster believing that Canadians outside of Leafs Nation would share their Toronto bias.

  “People outside the province, I don’t think they understood how good the hockey was,” said Flames winger Colin Patterson, a native of Rexdale, Ontario. “You’d have to ask [producer] John Shannon, but I’m pretty sure that 1986 series cost him his job with CBC. He said, ‘We’re not leaving, and we’re not going to show The Pig and Whistle, or whatever the hell was on at the time. That’s how you knew, people didn’t know about the Battle.”

  There was so much blowback from hockey fans on the prairie, when Saskatchewan and Manitoba fans found out they were going to be shown the Norris Division series, CBC knuckled under. “We decided to change that distribution when it became apparent that viewers in Saskatchewan and Manitoba preferred the Calgary–Edmonton series,” CBC spokesperson Glenn Luff said diplomatically. That it would take angry phone calls to lift the CBC brass’s heads out of their cauldron of Toronto-centricity was quintessential CBC.

  Calgary and Edmonton had only been in the NHL for six and seven years respectively, and among Canadian NHL owners in Vancouver, Montreal, and Toronto, there was still some bitterness that the Alberta teams (and Winnipeg) had bitten into the Canadian TV pie. National TV money that not long ago was shared three ways was now being split six ways, even though in those days before the Saturday night double-header, Hockey Night in Canada was still exclusive ground of the Leafs and Habs out East.

  The TV landscape, compared with today, was antiquated. While today Rogers has the ability to air seven Canadian teams simultaneously on seven different channels—and TSN has five or more digital channels from which to choose—in 1985 there was one English and one French CBC channel. Hockey Night in Canada games were shown regionally across the country, all at the same 8 p.m. Eastern start time on a Saturday night. So the Jets’ home game would go at 7 p.m., Edmonton and Calgary at 6 p.m., and the Vancouver Canucks at 5 p.m. local.

  Sometimes, if your game ended early, CBC would switch you to another one that had three or four minutes left. Other times, if the national news was up, the CBC would not. It was analogue television —prehistoric by today’s technical standards —a time when people bought satellite dishes that wouldn’t fit through the garage door once assembled.

  As such, while prairie fans watched the Oilers rewrite the record books throughout the regular season, fans in Ontario were treated to Alberta hockey only when the Leafs were playing either the Flames or Oilers

  When the Oilers and Gretzky would roll through Toronto for a Saturday night game, it was hockey’s version of The Beatles coming to town. Tickets were so hard to come by that, one night, Gretzky did not have a ticket for his own father. He sent PR man Bill Tuele into the streets outside Maple Leafs Gardens an hour before game time, brandishing one of No. 99’s famous white and red Titan sticks, signed, to be traded for a pair of tickets to the game that night. That’s how they rolled in the 1980s, a time before cellphones and the Internet.

  So, in April 1986, Albertans were amped up as another edition of the Battle approached. And those CBC types who were immersed in it, like producer John Shannon, who produced “every Oilers–Flames game between 1979 and 1986,” knew damned well that it was going to be the kind of hockey that every Canadian should see. Even ESPN took notice.

  “The Battle was Red Sox–Yankees every night. Regular season and playoffs,” Shannon said. “Because it was Gretzky, ESPN was here a lot. Wayne drove so much of Western Canada … he was the icon who drove the sport. They talk about what he’s done for
the Sunbelt markets, he did it first for Western Canada—whether people in Calgary like it or not.”

  The difference in 1986 was that Calgary was ready to compete. They’d lost in five games in 1983, seven games in 1984, and now the Flames were back for another kick at the Oilers can.

  “It was a growing, a maturing as an organization and a team. We could play with the Oilers, and if we played to our level of ability we could win,” said assistant coach Bob Murdoch. “We had toughness; we had our Seven Point System; we had our left winger back; our power play firing full throttle. We not only had the answers to what the Oilers were throwing at us, but we had some things going where they had to worry about us.

  “I think the Oilers were so arrogant—not in a negative way—but so confident that they could beat us under any circumstances. They [thought they] could turn it on and turn it off.”

  Johnson knew one thing, and it would turn out to be prophetic: “The longer the series, the better the chance we have.” Truer words, it would turn out, were never spoken.

  Game 1 was, of course, up north at the Coliseum. It took Lanny McDonald eighty-seven seconds to score the series’ first goal, and six minutes after that Gary Suter made it 2–0. Calgary won the game 4–1 and had now outscored Edmonton 14–4 in their last two meetings. Confidence? You bet. Edmonton, meanwhile, was nervous, and if you weren’t sure about that, their lineup changes for Game 2 were the greatest tell.

  Into the lineup went Lumley, who had played just once in the past six weeks, and out came McSorley. In went veteran defenceman Don Jackson, out came rookie Steve Smith. The more defensive-minded Raimo Summanen replaced Esa Tikkanen. Johnson, it seemed, had Sather on the run just sixty minutes into the series.

  But Calgary had its own problems. Mike Vernon was injured in Game 1, Reggie Lemelin lost Game 2 in overtime, 6–5. Lemelin was a good goalie, but Edmonton was his nemesis. He just couldn’t keep them under five. Still, the Flames had scored first again and led the game 4–2 after forty minutes, and as Calgary made its way south for Game 3 the Flames’ level of confidence had never been this high. Not only had they scored nine goals in Edmonton, they had limited Wayne Gretzky to two measly assists—one each night.

  “You started playing, and you’d get in those moments in the game, and you weren’t panicking,” Colin Patterson said. “All of the sudden we could feel ourselves not panicking in situations where we’d have been a little tense [in the past]. Now we’re starting to get that feeling, ‘Yeah, this is the year we can do it.’ ”

  Remember, Edmonton had gone through all of those lessons in losing. The Oilers were more battle-hardened than Calgary, after being upset by Los Angeles in the Miracle on Manchester in 1982, losing to the Islanders in 1981 and again in the 1983 Stanley Cup final. Then Edmonton had gone ahead and won two Stanley Cups, while Calgary had never made it out of the Smythe Division since Johnson took the reins in 1982.

  So in the evolution of the two franchises, Edmonton was far ahead of the Flames in the spring of 1986 when it came to staring down adversity with their season on the line. Now Calgary was banging on the cell door, and the hand that held the keys was beginning to shake. Calgary won Game 3 at home on a Joel Otto goal, 3–2. Then Edmonton punched back on a Gretzky hat trick and five-point night in a 7–4 win.

  Calgary came up to Edmonton and handled the Oilers 4–1 in Game 5. It was their third lead of the series, and now it wasn’t just the Flames who believed. It seemed like the entire city of Calgary was on the bandwagon when the Flames landed back home that Saturday night.

  “It was eleven-thirty, twelve o’clock. The airport’s jammed,” said Otto. “They’re screamin’, high-fivin’ us all the way through the terminal. We don’t get home for a couple more hours because the parkade is so packed we can’t get out. And that was only Game 5! We hadn’t even won the series. I’m in my second year, going, ‘Oh my God …’ That was my baptism into this rivalry.”

  Of course, the quotes coming out of Calgary on that off day were staid. A quiet confidence pervaded the Flames dressing room, having won two of three at Northlands, their only loss coming in overtime. “We haven’t won anything yet,” said Jim Peplinski. “We’ve gained a little respectability, but we’re not anywhere yet. We’re still trying to get there.”

  The biggest shot in the Flames’ collective arm was their newfound ability to get pucks past Grant Fuhr. This was brand new in the Battle—Fuhr entered the series with a 16–1–4 regular-season record versus Calgary—and couldn’t have possibly had anything to do with those two practice goalies, Al Hryniuk and Jamie Bowman. Could it?

  The Flames were silently convinced that they had discovered the long-sought-after formula, and to a player they were ready to put the hammer down Monday night at the Olympic Saddledome. However, any writer worth his notebook knew that the best practice day quote that Sunday would be found in Edmonton.

  “I don’t think I’m speaking out of line when I say, if we don’t win, there will be changes made on this team next year,” said Wayne Gretzky that day. “Not only are we playing for the Stanley Cup this year, but for our lives and jobs next season. We’d better win, it’s as simple as that.”

  Okay, so Gretzky wasn’t fooling anybody. He wasn’t really playing for his job. But his message was, “Nobody here should feel safe.” Even if, coming off two Stanley Cups, there were clearly ten or eleven guys who weren’t going anywhere.

  Among those players, however, there had been little production thus far in the series. Jari Kurri had scored sixty-eight goals that season, but under boa constrictor–like checking from Colin Patterson, Kurri had one goal on just thirteen shots through five games. Mark Messier hadn’t scored yet. Nor had Paul Coffey. Fuhr wasn’t playing as well as he needed to play to beat the new and improved Flames.

  The Seven Point Plan was unfolding like a flawless map to the top of Bob Johnson’s mountain. The Flames, for the first time in the Battle of Alberta, were better.

  “Maybe we caught Edmonton off guard in Game 1,” allowed Otto. “And then Edmonton won Game 2, and maybe kind of got comfortable again, and we won Game 3. They won again in Game 4, and maybe they got comfortable again in Game 5.

  “But we knew, ‘We can get these guys.’ We started to believe in ourselves. We weren’t there 100 percent skill-wise, for sure. But we were strong enough to match them in a bunch of areas. We could play with them.”

  The mystique crumbled that spring, and the regular-season results over the remainder of the Battle of Alberta’s pertinent years proves it. The next time Edmonton would win a season series over Calgary was 1996–97, long after the air had been let out of this rivalry. Edmonton surrendered the one intangible that had been most valuable that spring; the singular element that Johnson had coached, and coached, and coached to try to eliminate. It was the aura. The belief that Edmonton was just too good for Calgary to defeat. All that flashy skill, that dominant toughness, the superior goaltending, and the winning depth that made Edmonton the big brother in this rivalry disappeared that April.

  “Badger was ahead of his time,” Otto said. “He went over stuff I’d never seen before. Locking wings. Understanding that the Oilers would come up their right side because they had Coffey and all these left-handed shots. He was on top of a lot of stuff we tried to expose against Gretzky’s line …

  “It was a great series, a physical series, and we got a break.”

  “We got sloppy,” Kevin Lowe admits, looking back. “We were a little more selfish in our play and less committed to the overall team game. That was the difference. Their tenacity was getting to us. We weren’t as disciplined in reacting to it, and we weren’t able to play with the lead enough to really get our swagger going.

  “They had closed the gap,” Lowe revealed, “and we needed to be even more disciplined than we ever had been. We weren’t in that series.”

  Before the puck dropped on Game 6, scalpers outside the Saddledome were getting $500 per ticket, big money in the pre–StubHub days of 1986. A ho
memade sign behind Mike Vernon’s net read “Champagne for the Flames, Whine for the Oilers.” In Calgary they were fixated simply on beating Edmonton, while the Edmonton Journal headline belied a bigger picture concern up north: “Oilers’ Cup Crown on Line.”

  With back-to-back Cups at stake, it wasn’t as much about being the best in Alberta. In Edmonton, it was about being the best—period.

  The visitors came out on fire in Game 6, outshooting Calgary 14–3 in the first period. But Vernon, who was enjoying his coming-out party as a legitimate NHL No. 1, kept the game scoreless. Then, in a 1:22 span of the second period, goals by Joe Mullen and John Tonelli gave Calgary a 2–0 lead. It was then, however, that Fuhr’s legend held true. The Flames peppered him with chances, yet he simply refused to allow that third goal—that next goal that would have made the deficit insurmountable. If there is one thing they all say about Fuhr in his retirement, it is that he always knew when to slam the door, as he did that night in Calgary.

  Esa Tikkanen, like he would five years later in the last, and perhaps greatest, Battle of Alberta, slipped an awkward goal in behind Vernon to give Edmonton a spark. Messier followed up, checking in with a short-handed goal, and the Oilers were in business, tied at two after two.

  On his locker room stall that night, Gretzky had taped up a picture of his mom, Phyllis, with her arm around him as he clutched a bottle of champagne after a Cup victory. Why? Why not? His mom and Stanley each had a piece of No. 99’s heart, and he came out flying in that third period, bent on ensuring Johnson’s prophesy of a longer series.

  Gretzky set up Anderson on the power play, then Mike Krushelnyski for an empty netter. Craig MacTavish ripped a late one home for a resounding 5–2 win, and the series would head back to Northlands, where Edmonton usually won. There we would have a Game 7, which the hockey world fully expected Edmonton to win.