The Battle of Alberta

by Mark Spector

  Was there an “aha! moment” for Smith?

  “I’ve gotta tell you, I’m not sure there was one. Not early on in junior,” he said. “I remember my first training camp in London, [marvelling] that I would ever have an opportunity to play at this high pace. That quickly changed in my second year of junior. I went back with a lot more confidence.”

  Only fifteen players from Smith’s 1981 NHL draft class would go on to play more games than the 804 logged by that lorry driver’s son from Cobourg. None would retire with more Stanley Cup rings than Smith’s three. But back then he was a nobody. As Dale Hawerchuk went first overall to Winnipeg, Steve Smith wasn’t even the first Steve Smith to have his name called at the draft. Philadelphia picked a defenceman with the same name at sixteenth overall, out of the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds. He would go on to play a grand total of eighteen games.

  “It’s amazing,” Smith said now, looking back at how the cards fell. He didn’t get drafted until the sixth round, 111th overall—right between Jim McGeough (Washington) and Rod Buskas (Pittsburgh)—the eagle eye of Edmonton Oilers head scout Barry Fraser still in its very prime. What seems obvious today, however, was never quite so noticeable when Smith was plugging up and down the right wing on his way to a sixteen-point season in his first year of junior, his draft year. He hadn’t played in the Ontario Hockey League as a sixteen-year-old, like so many others.

  “I think, in all honesty, that’s what gave me my chance. Just knowing how hard I had to work every game. Knowing that I was afraid for my job every day made me a better player, a better person,” Smith reckons. “It made me drive harder for an end goal, which eventually became the goal of making the NHL. Knowing how hard I had to work to stay [in London] was a key component.”

  The Knights were a middle-of-the-road club, but getting drafted took Smith to the next level: the Moncton Alpines, another collection of less than notable hockey hopefuls. Except for one, who would later be immortalized in the movie Slap Shot.

  Bill (Goldie) Goldthorpe was one tough bastard, a surly left winger out of Thunder Bay, Ontario, with minimal skills but tougher than a five-dollar steak. He played for ten minor-league teams and another four in the old WHA. While Smith was a young, impressionable, up-and-coming player with a chance, the man who would be characterized as Ogie Ogilthorpe in the 1977 classic movie Slap Shot would play one final game with Moncton that season. It was a game that Smith will never forget.

  “We were in Halifax, back when John Brophy was coaching Halifax. He had all these tough guys on his team, and I remember Goldthorpe saying to me before the anthem, ‘Hey, kid, watch this.’ He got off our bench, skated down the boards to the other bench, and I see him literally pointing at each one of their players as he’s going along. Boom, boom, boom—right out of the Slap Shot movie.

  “He comes back to our bench and he says, ‘Now, watch this.’ Maybe ten seconds before the anthem ends, every one of their guys sits down,” Smith remembers. “I say, ‘What’s that?’ And he says, ‘I told ’em it was my last game, and whoever was the last guy standing up? That was gonna be my guy.’ ”

  While Smith was percolating on the farm, the big team was winning Stanley Cups in Edmonton. His rookie NHL season was the 1985–86 campaign, and it was a blur. Smith played fifty-five games, mostly on the five–six pairing with Randy Gregg, scoring twenty-four points and collecting 166 penalty minutes. He was plus-thirty, as good or better than every other defenceman except for Lee Fogolin and Paul Coffey, who was an amazing plus-sixty-one.

  The Oilers rolled that season, going 56–17–7 to win their second Presidents’ Trophy. They stomped Vancouver in the Smythe Division semifinal, winning in three straight games with an aggregate score of 17–5.

  After having beaten Calgary in five games in 1983, and seven games in 1984, the 1986 Smythe Division final was, in a way, an odd place for Smith to find himself. Everyone else had so much invested in the Battle, but Smith was more concerned with his own standing. He didn’t even have any promises that he’d be in Glen Sather’s lineup every night—he would dress for just six of Edmonton’s ten playoff games that spring.

  Smith’s hockey intuition told him, however, that something wasn’t necessarily right. This team had won games for fun all season long, but even before Game 1 at Northlands Coliseum that April, he could sense that something had changed.

  “I’ll always remember that feeling,” he said. “We always felt like we were going to win games, but I remember going into that series with Calgary thinking, ‘This is really a solid team. This is a team that could beat us.’ They were really, really well coached. They were in the right spots all of the time. They were taking away, being physical against our top players, and we were taking penalties against the Baxters and Sheehys of the world. And they were scoring on the power play. They had a wonderful power play.

  “They had all the components to win games, so there was always a feeling they could beat us. They were a fast-moving team, they moved the puck really well, they were a physical team, they were an intimidating team … And, of course, the emotions of the Battle of Alberta just tightened everything up.”

  Fast-forward to Game 7. Smith had been in and out of the lineup, but he’d been practising with the team every day and was around the dressing room on game nights whether or not he was dressing. Even a rookie could sniff the air and know there was a whiff of something new in the Oilers’ room. Something he’d not smelled before in there.

  In hindsight, what Smith likely smelled was fear.

  “Overall, there was a real uneasiness about the team,” he said. “It was almost beyond being a quiet confidence about that team when I arrived in Edmonton. They had won a couple of championships … and there was a confidence—nor arrogance, for sure —but a confidence that was around that squad. And it seemed like that confidence wasn’t there as we went through that series. It was like, ‘Wow, these guys are better than we thought. These guys are good players. They’ve caught us a little bit off guard.’

  “They were a very, very disciplined hockey team, and we just didn’t have the answers.”

  The score was 2–2 after forty minutes. In Game 7, with less than twenty minutes to play, everybody is thinking the same way: don’t make a crucial mistake because one more goal will probably be enough to get a team to the finish line.

  That’s what Calgary’s Perry Berezan, an Edmonton native playing for the Flames, was thinking when he gained centre ice and dumped the puck into the Edmonton zone before turning and getting off the ice. The puck took a path along the boards, sliding slowly around the corner and settling on to the stick of Grant Fuhr, who had hustled behind his net to set the puck up for his defenceman.

  Smith was that defenceman, and in that very situation—with the Flames changing on the fly at their bench up the left-wing boards —the Oilers had installed a quick breakout into their scheme that called for the defenceman to look up the right-wing boards for a long pass.

  “You just went back and you almost didn’t look,” said defenceman Kevin Lowe. “You just forced it up to the spot.” The centreman and whoever was available were expected to be near where the blue line meets the boards, across the ice from the changing Flames. Maybe even as high as the penalty box doors. A long pass would spring them, and the changing Flames players had eighty feet of ice to travel to get to the puck carrier.

  “Fuhrsie was a little lazy getting back in the net, and Smitty just tried to cut the corner a bit,” Lowe said. “He was firing it to that [far] blue line. That’s how he hit Fuhrsie in the back of the foot. Grant was kind of meandering back to the net, and Smitty was trying to be quick … on that quick-up play.”

  The late Don Wittman, the CBC’s Western-based play-byplay man whose voice provides the soundtrack for so many moments in this rivalry, was caught in mid-story, talking about how Mike Vernon and Fuhr weren’t afraid to leave their crease to challenge the shoo —

  “Oh! They scored!” he blurted. “Oh! Steve Smith! In attempting to ge
t it out of his own zone, put it into his own net!”

  It was a surreal moment at Northlands that those of us who were there will never forget. Wittman, as always, was right on the play. But so many people in the rink that night had used the Berezan dump-in to take a breath, to grab a couple of seconds in a game so tense you could have parcelled the collective worry and angst and sold it in loaves.

  The people in the end of the building behind Fuhr could see the puck in the net. The folks at the other end could see the red light, but most didn’t have a clue why it would be on at this point. On Writers Row up in the press box, there was a cacophony of noise, metal chair legs scraping on concrete as the scribes pushed their chairs back, stood up, and gathered under the televisions that hung every twenty feet or so.

  The video showed Smith in a moment you wouldn’t wish on anyone: a young player who, with a flick of his wrists, had stepped into ignominy. He’d only just arrived, and in a blink of an eye he was infamous. A pass that couldn’t be recalled, a play never to be taken back.

  Alas, Smith saw exactly what happened in real time. And as 17,498 patrons, in the days before there was even a video replay screen above the ice in Edmonton, looked for some explanation of what had just occurred, Smith took his first dejected stride toward the Oilers bench. He would not take a second one, his legs simply folding underneath him in disbelief, dejection, and embarrassment.

  “At the time it was devastating,” he says now.

  I can honestly say that in a quarter-century of covering the NHL I have never seen a man fall to the ice as Smith did that night, burying his head in his hands. After the final buzzer sounded? Sure. We’ve all seen that many times. But with fourteen minutes and forty-six seconds to play in a 3–2 game?

  Smith rose to his knees, and the merciless camera of the CBC focused on his face. Was he crying yet? If not, he soon would be. There would be more tears later on in the handshake line, and in the post-game dressing room.

  Happy birthday.

  Today, Smith takes full responsibility for the play. Doesn’t duck his fault in the goal for a moment. But as Lowe points out, he didn’t make the wrong play. He made the right play the wrong way.

  “The play that I made was a play we were working on as a team. Get the puck, and they were forechecking real hard so we were trying to get the puck up as quickly as possible,” he explains. “I remember thinking afterwards, ‘What was I doing? Why would I do that? Would I do it again?’ And that was something we were working on: quick-ups. I take ownership of what I did, but it was something we were trying to do to alleviate some of the forecheck pressure Calgary was bringing at us.

  “I went back for the puck, and as I went back for it I knew I was being forechecked pretty quickly. I think it was Mike Krushelnyski I saw heading toward the penalty box. I turned, pulling the puck back away from the net toward the bench side, and went to force a seam pass across the ice.

  “At that point in time, you’re looking at your receiver. You’re not looking at where the puck is or whether it’s on your stick or not. You’re looking up-ice. Obviously I didn’t see Grant or his leg. It went off of him.

  “If I look back on my career and ask, ‘Did I make a lot of bonehead plays in my career?’ Well, everybody does. Everybody makes mistakes; everybody does things that they would take back. That was a natural play for a defenceman: take the puck, get yourself a stride away from the net, and get the puck up-ice. It was a common occurrence in the game. It was a catastrophic result. But it wasn’t [a mistake borne] from thinking the game incorrectly. It was just the result that made it a memorable play.

  “If that’s in the middle of December, nobody remembers that.”

  There isn’t a player on either team who’ll tell you that it was Steve Smith’s fault that Edmonton lost that game, or the series. On Calgary’s side, they had worked for five years toward this victory. Bob Johnson’s boys had climbed their mountain, and you’d better be ready for a fight if you were going to walk into that visiting team’s dressing room and suggest it was all really a fluke, handed to them by a rookie defenceman.

  “Whoever got a break was going to win it,” Calgary assistant Bob Murdoch said matter-of-factly. “The puck went in, and it was a break for us. It was our day.”

  In Edmonton’s room, they knew that no seven-game series was ever decided on a single play by a single player. And even if you did blame Smith, that 1985–86 Oilers team recorded the second-most goals ever scored in a season (426), second only to the 446 Edmonton scored in 1983–84. (Perspective: Chicago led the NHL in 2013–14 with 267 goals.)

  The highest-powered offence in the history of the NHL still had most of fifteen minutes to score a goal after Smith’s gaffe and it failed, offering up just six third-period shots in total.

  The news cycle, however, does not rely on common sense or big-picture thinking. Steve Smith would be the story for the collective media when those dressing room doors opened that night in Edmonton and the media questioned him mercilessly.

  Under Glen Sather, and aided heroically by long-time public relations director Bill Tuele, the Oilers had always taken media access—and the responsibility of players to speak to their fans through the media—extremely seriously. Ask any of the national newspapermen of the day, Al Strachan, Scott Morrison, Frank Orr, or Red Fisher, the Edmonton room was known industry-wide as a place a journalist could get good work done. You could sit and talk to players. Get to know them. Talk for ten minutes on the record, and another five or ten afterwards with the pen and notepad having been put away, a time when you learn things that truly help a writer paint the picture for the reader.

  Had Steve Smith had his misfortune today, there are teams that would shield him from the media. Or, at least, try to. But not this team. It was not Edmonton’s style.

  First, though, they needed to find this twenty-three-year-old around whom history had turned. He wasn’t in his stall taking his gear off like everyone else was that night.

  “I went to look for Steve Smith,” said equipment man Lyle (Sparky) Kulchisky. “He isn’t in his stall. He isn’t in the washroom. He isn’t in the players’ lounge. I can’t find Steve Smith. We had an equipment room in behind the coaches’ room. You had to go through the coaches’ room to get to it. And Smitty was in there, devastated. Crying. I just wanted to say, ‘Smitty, it’s not the end of the world.’ ”

  If it truly wasn’t the end of the world, Steve Smith could see it from where he sat at that moment. When he emerged, both Randy Gregg, the picture of calm and maturity, and owner Peter Pocklington, for whom the loss of at least one more round of home gates (and likely two) meant losses of well over $1 million, instructed Smith to face the media.

  “They looked at me and they said, ‘Handle this right. Go out there, like a man, and talk to the press.’ I made the decision that I would go out into the locker room and take my lickin’ then.”

  I was in the first wave of press that swarmed into the Edmonton dressing room as soon as Tuele gave the doorman the okay. I was a kid of twenty on a press pass for the University of Alberta newspaper, The Gateway. Because I did not have the same “buzzer beater” deadline responsibilities that the real newspapermen had, I got a jump down the stairwell to ice level. I didn’t know much about the trade at that point, but I knew enough to realize that the story would be sitting in the stall belonging to Edmonton defenceman No. 5.

  Several photographers had pushed to the front of the media pack, which was rare, as a still photographer seldom attended the post-game dressing room. When they ran down the corridor (never get in between a good shooter and his preferred photo position), they found Smith in his stall, awaiting them. Before the reporters could assemble to begin the interview process, the photographers mercilessly set upon him with their motor drives. Click, click, click, click, click …

  As Edmonton Journal writer Ray Turchansky penned that night, “Steve Smith’s stall in the Edmonton Oilers dressing room was no longer a comforting cubicle. It was a witness
box.”

  “It was human error. I guess I’ve just got to live with it,” Smith said that night before managing a faint smile in self-deprecation. “I got good wood on it. I thought the puck went in fast.”

  Today, Smith is comfortable in his own skin, a long and successful career behind him. He is an assistant coach for the Carolina Hurricanes as I write this, and still, when someone makes a real bonehead play, his phone will ring. Not as much now as before, though.

  “One of the things you decide upon when you play this game, and I hate to use the cliché from The Godfather, but this is the business that we chose,” he said. “If I didn’t want to have the possibility of being exposed, this was the wrong business for me. I should have been an accountant. I should have been a doctor. Something behind closed doors where nobody knew what I was doing. I decided pro hockey was for me. It was the game I wanted to be part of, and I understood the risks that were involved.”

  He didn’t play another shift after the 5:14 mark of the third period that night. Sather would likely have trusted the pre-goal Smith to play again, but the player he had seen on all fours on the ice, tears streaming down his face? This was no place for that person.

  The play was a life-changer for Smith, as it would have been for anybody. Not everybody, however, would be able to say that the effects of that night have been almost entirely positive, as Smith can say. Like Stu Grimson, who told himself after that terrible beating by Dave Brown, “If that’s the worst I can suffer, and if I can bounce back from that, then I’ve got nothing to fear,” Smith has become a more compassionate soul since that day at Northlands.

  “It taught me humility. I came into Edmonton as a brash young guy. It taught me to cheer for people,” he said. “To expect—and want—good out of people as I moved forward in life. Never did I spend another minute cheering against someone, whether it was an opponent or not. I always wanted the best for everybody, and always felt that, if I was going to be part of a winning team, I wanted the other team to be at their best, and we were just going to be better that day.