The Battle of Alberta

by Mark Spector

  “It was absolute war. War. War. War,” said Fleury. “If we played that series today, all of us would be suspended for one hundred games each. There were full baseball swings, slashing each other. There was no little tap, tap. If you were using your stick, it was to either maim someone or hurt them.”

  The Oilers defence, without Coffey or depth defenceman Randy Gregg, had transformed itself somewhat, and the Edmonton pairing that leading scorer Fleury would see all night every night was known as the “Twin Towers.” Six-foot-five Jeff Beukeboom and six-foot-three Steve Smith were assigned not only to defend Fleury but also to inflict as much pain upon the little dynamo as possible.

  Staying within the rules was merely a suggestion by head coach John Muckler. And, of course, Beukeboom and Fleury had their special friendship that went back to the pre-season.

  “Beuk would absolutely punish Theo Fleury every chance he got,” marvelled Craig MacTavish. “Fleury was tough, he kept coming back. But Beuk would just punish him. He was a tough, tough, tough guy. Theo, back in those days, was also a tough, hard-nosed competitor.”

  Recalled Fleury: “My left side and my right side were two different colours, and not the colour they are supposed to be. It was brutal. But it was one of the best series I’ve ever been involved with. And one of the best series I’ve ever played.”

  “He was dirty. Everyone knew it,” Beukeboom said of Fleury. “You had a lot of respect for him, but at the same time, a lot of hate toward each other. I gave it to him every time I could because I didn’t want him to be the determining factor that he tried to be. It was all fine.”

  Fleury had just a lone assist in the first four games of that 1991 series, and his Flames trailed 3–1 at that point. He added an assist in Game 5, and then, in a 2–1 Flames win at Northlands in Game 6, Fleury had an assist in regulation and the all-important overtime winner just four minutes and forty seconds into overtime.

  Messier, on the ice in overtime with Esa Tikkanen and Petr Klima, was stood up near the blue line by Jamie Macoun and stubbornly refused to shoot the puck in. Instead, he tried a risky cross-ice pass to Steve Smith, flawlessly anticipated by Fleury.

  “I just read the play perfect, and it was a foot race between me and Jeff Beukeboom. So, who’s going to win that one?” asked Fleury, a full twenty-three years later, still seizing the chance to get a shot in at Beukeboom. The goal was on Messier, not Beukeboom, but it was the defenceman who was left to chase the speedy Fleury as he bore down on Grant Fuhr.

  Asked if he’d planned to go five-hole on Fuhr, as Fleury did that night to extend the series to a seventh game, Fleury referenced author Malcolm Gladwell and his book The Outliers. There, Gladwell writes of “The 10,000 Hour Rule.” His premise is, in order to be an expert at anything, you must put in at least 10,000 hours of repetition. In Fleury, and most NHLers, that manifests itself in a clutch moment like Game 6.

  “When you’re going in on a breakaway, it’s not about knowing where you’re going to shoot or knowing the goalie’s tendencies,” Fleury said. “It’s a split-second decision. All those hours that I spent in Russell on the ice by myself shooting pucks, doing all that [practice], that takes over in a situation like that.

  “I just went in, shot the puck, and fortunately it went in. We lived to play another day.”

  You’ve likely seen Fleury’s celebration after that goal, and if you have not, do yourself a favour and Google it. On the evening of April 14, 1991, Fleury enacted a celebration that stretched 175 feet, from the corner to the right of the beaten Fuhr, across the blue line and the Northlands emblem at centre ice, and on to the half-wall in the Flames zone. There, Fleury lay on his back like a puppy waiting for a tummy rub when Joe Nieuwendyk finally caught up to him for a bear hug.

  “It is the biggest goal I ever scored,” said Fleury, who scored 489 NHL goals, regular season and playoffs. “Everybody has a goal that sort of defines their career. That one was it for me. Being an emotional guy—I wear my heart on my sleeve, I tell it like it is—that’s just all part of that.”

  “Theo was a clutch player,” said Glenn Anderson. “Certain things he said back then, you’d kind of wonder why he’d say them. He had a lot of frustration and anger built up inside of him. But that was great ’cause it showed on the ice. He wanted control of the game. Like a Cliff Ronning or Martin St. Louis, who always heard that they were too small and not going to be any good in the NHL, he proved all those critics wrong.”

  Fleury couldn’t be more matter-of-fact as he recollects things that happened more than twenty years ago, puffing on a smoke while the questions are asked, exhaling during the first few words of each answer. Perhaps the cards that Fleury has been dealt in his life—and having made so much of himself—leaves him this way. He truly does not care what others may think of him, so comfortable is Theo Fleury in his own skin these days.

  One of the things you learn, however, when you leave the world of hockey fans and talk with those players we all watched from those arena seats, our couches at home, or seats in the press box is that those of us who never played at the pro level stress over the minutiae of games gone by so much more than the actual players ever do.

  How many times over the course of interviewing for this book did a player recollect the wrong play, in the wrong game, in the wrong town? “Who did we play the series before?” they’ll ask. “Vancouver?”

  “No, it was Los Angeles.”

  “Oh yeah, that was a great series. How many games …?”

  “Game 7 was 3–0 or 3–1, I can’t remember,” Fleury begins. “The other team is trying to win just a badly as we are, right? And back then, the game was a lot more wide open. What did it go, to double overtime? And a shitty goal goes off of Frank Musil’s shin pad and in the top corner. It could have gone our way.”

  The irony of this final Battle of Alberta lay in the fact that it took the Flames five games to realize they could not be drawn into the physical battle with Edmonton. Just as Bob Johnson had bogged down the game in the early 1980s in order to slow down the offensively superior Oilers, in 1991 the Flames had to eschew the natural affinity to get even on players like Beukeboom, Smith, and Craig Muni and open up the ice for players like Doug Gilmour, Nieuwendyk, Robert Reichel, and Paul Ranheim. Oh, how the skate was on the other foot from the days when Neil Sheehy would attempt to drag Gretzky down to his level of play—but that’s where we’d come to. Full circle. Calgary was the better team now; it was the Flames who had led the league in goals scored in 1990–91, scoring nearly a goal per game more than Edmonton.

  But it had taken Calgary too long to solve the puzzle, and now we were heading into a Game 7. It was Johnson who had laid out, as the last entry in his Seven Point Plan, “Force them to a Game 7.” Then anything can happen.

  Anderson, along with Messier and Fuhr, would dress for this final game in the Battle of Alberta that night, on April 16, 1991, at the Saddledome. After all they had been through in that visiting team’s dressing room over the past decade; after all the blood shed, the Cup runs, and ultimately the success that the blue team had enjoyed over the red one, Anderson felt it in his bones that day that his team would do what it almost always had done to Calgary when the chips were down.

  They would win.

  “To knock off the Stanley Cup champions is a very, very difficult thing to do,” he said, referring not only to the previous spring but also the four Cups that preceded 1990. “We’ve got the will, and we had the nucleus. We had guys who had been there for five Cups—Kevin Lowe. Mark Messier, myself, Fuhrsie … You had a nucleus of guys who had been around the block a million times. If you’re going to try to knock us off, you’d better be bringing your A game, plus. ’Cause we’re not going down without a fight.”

  The Oilers had enough Game 7 experience, having beaten Calgary in seven games in 1984, lost to them in seven in 1986, won Game 7 in the final against Philly in 1987, lost Game 7 to L.A. in 1989, and defeated Winnipeg in 1990. If one learns as much from losing as the
y do from winning, a 3–2 Game 7 record was a pretty good education. Especially considering that, over the same time, Calgary had a 3–1 mark in Game 7s themselves.

  “In a Game 7, it’s never over,” Anderson said. “You’ve always got an opportunity, and you never say die. Once you’ve won it once, you’ve got it in your heart, in your mind, in your soul, that you’re never going to surrender.

  “And that’s the hardest things to beat: The heart, the mind, and the soul.”

  Calgary jumped to a 3–0 lead in Game 7, the kind of advantage that would seal the deal in today’s game. But, as Reggie Lemelin and Grant Fuhr have said in these pages, goalies were more fallible back in those days, unaided by the giant equipment of today. And sure enough, late in the first period, Esa Tikkanen unloaded one from just inside the Calgary blue line that would leak through Vernon’s pads, planting that seed of doubt in a Flames team that, sadly, was experienced at allowing that seed to germinate.

  Before long it was 3–3, then 4–3 for Edmonton before Ronnie Stern jammed home a puck at 17:50 of the third period to force overtime.

  “Any time any game goes to Game 7, anything can happen,” said Fleury. “And if you’re the favourite? There’s even more pressure on you. ’Cause you should never let a team get you to that point in a series.”

  After Fleury had brought the series back home with his Game 6 heroics in Edmonton, conventional wisdom had dictated that the Flames had exorcised their demons. They had looked adversity in the eye, down 3–1, and put themselves back in the driver’s seat of the series. Then they led the game 3–0 on home ice. With what everyone considered to be a better hockey team …

  “That Game 7,” Flames play-by-play man Peter Maher recalled, “that’s when I started not to believe so strongly in momentum. In Game 6, when Fleury scored that OT goal and slides across the ice and everything … And on top of that, the Flames jumped ahead 3–0 in the first period? So I’m thinking, What more can you ask for?

  “Then Tikkanen got his first goal, right at the end of the first period. It was a long shot, and that turned the game. Next thing you know, you lose in overtime and you’re done.”

  Overtime was not yet seven minutes old when Tikkanen, who had an assist and two goals already that night, picked up a loose puck at centre with his back to the Flames net. He circled to his left, was picked up at the blue line by a helmetless Flames defenceman Frank Musil, and taken wide on his off-wing down the right-wing boards. MacInnis cruised in as support, and neither Flames defenceman, at the end of a long shift, played a red-hot Tikkanen aggressively enough, allowing a lethal shooter to have a shot off the wrong wing through traffic.

  The puck glanced off of Musil’s leg and rifled past Vernon, a harmless chance transformed into a stake in Calgary’s heart, just like that. The goal was unassisted, and truly, a goal of that import should have required more work than Tikkanen did to score that series-winner.

  After a decade of violent, emotional hockey that had brought two Alberta cities to the forefront of perhaps the most entertaining eras of hockey history, Tikkanen had simply waltzed down the right side and zipped home a wrist shot. No one laid a stick on him. Nobody put a glove in his face.

  “This is one of the finest wins. One of the greatest series we’ve played,” Sather said post-game.

  And that was it. With that goal, the Battle of Alberta was over. Or, at least, it entered a long period of hibernation.

  “The highlight of my career, having an opportunity to play in one the greatest rivalries ever, in the history of the game,” Fleury says today. “Calgary didn’t give a shit about the other twenty-something teams. They only cared about beating Edmonton.

  “We hated everybody on their team. We hated Edmonton, they hated us.”

  Yet, everybody loved the Battle, and the hockey that it spawned.

  “I thought the Edmonton–Calgary rivalry would run forever,” said Grant Fuhr. “I am a little surprised—and I think everybody is —that it’s still not back [to that high level]. Both teams are rebuilding, but you’d think it would still be a hard-fought rivalry.”

  CONCLUSION

  You never want to become that dinosaur. The one who can’t listen to a song, go to a movie, or watch a game without squawking on about how much better things were back in the day.

  The Battle of Alberta wasn’t “better” than the hockey we watch today per se. It was, in fact, played with far less structure than the coaches of this era demand. Reggie Lemelin and Grant Fuhr whiffed on shots from outside the hashmarks far more often than goalies do now, while teams allowed more end-to-end rushes in one game by the two Pauls—Coffey and Reinhart—than you’d see in a month of current hockey.

  They fought far more often in the Battle than what we now consider to be an acceptable amount of violence. Not only to defend a teammate or to change the tone in the game that was being played but often to set a tone for the next meeting. The “just in case” fight that hockey has pretty much done away with.

  Truly, there was always an accepted justification to drop the gloves in the Battle, and at the time we loved that. Today, with concussion awareness, we know better.

  The lineups in the 1980s were not nearly as deep with fast-skating, physically fit players as they are now. Those players didn’t shoot the puck as hard with their wooden Sher-Wood PMP 5030s—or Gretzky’s classic white-and-red Titan—as the guys do with those composite rocket launchers they use today. And from a fan’s standpoint, there were probably thirty games or more a season that weren’t even on TV—anywhere —with no Centre Ice package or streaming video to pull in games from afar.

  No, yesterday’s game lacks a lot of the elements of today’s hockey. Above all, predictability.

  Every game is on TV now. Every player is in shape and executes the system he is told to play (or at least he tries). Goalies stop a little more than nine out of ten shots, and a goal from long range is now most often deemed a mistake by the netminder. Defencemen pass the puck three or four times before it reaches centre ice for a dump-in because modern defensive systems have deemed skating the puck up the middle to be too risky.

  Maybe that’s where the game they played during the height of the Battle grabbed me. That same lack of complexity, of systematic preparedness, also gave us an absence of predictability.

  Mix in nine or ten Hall of Fame players, some of the funniest characters in hockey, and several of the toughest fighters in the game, and you had the kind of hockey that Albertans fell in love with in the 1980s.

  I never heard Glen Sather lament, as coaches do today, “It’s a 3–2 league,” as if his troops would not even attempt to score eight or nine goals that night. Sometimes, Edmonton or Calgary scored five times in the opening period during the 1980s. Gretzky would have four points in the first fifteen minutes, and the building buzzed in anticipation of the possibility of a record-breaking night.

  The average score of an Edmonton game in the mid-1980s was 5–4 for the Oilers. That meant the old Oilers were splitting up nine goals a night, or nearly twice as many as they do today in the same sixty-minute game. Yet the size of the netminders’ equipment still left plenty of room for spectacular goaltending.

  You just didn’t know what would greet you when you went to the rink in those days, and for me, unpredictability is the necessary ingredient of any good sporting event.

  You might see Doug Gilmour score four goals for Calgary, or on a night when Gretzky was absent from the Oilers lineup, I once saw Pat Hughes score five. You might have been present when Doug Risebrough ripped Marty McSorley’s jersey to shreds with his skates while sitting in the penalty box after a five-on-five brawl. Or perhaps you were there when Flames trainer Jim (Bearcat) Murray ran out on the ice to tend to an injured player while his team scored a goal. And the goal counted.

  We all knew Gretzky would score fifty goals in fewer than fifty games in the 1981–82 season, as he had forty-one goals in his first thirty-seven games. But did anyone even consider the possibility he would s
core nine times in Games 38 and 39? That he’d set an unreachable bar of fifty-in-thirty-nine with a five-goal performance that night against Philly, providing the highlight of a diving Bill Barber—festooned in the long pant Cooperalls of the day—that is etched on my brain?

  It was the anticipation each night that maybe, just maybe, you’d see history when Edmonton and Calgary met. Or you’d see a brawl. Or likely both.

  At the time of this writing, the Alberta hockey landscape is once again emerging. Calgary had not hosted a playoff game in six years or won a playoff series in more than a decade, but went two rounds in the spring of 2015. After a string of nine straight playoff misses the Oilers cleaned house, adding a new general manger (Peter Chiarelli) and head coach (Todd McLellan), drafting Connor McDavid, and upgrading almost roughly one-third of its lineup through trades and free agency.

  As Sather lamented after his Rangers had dispatched the Oilers by a 2–0 score one night in December, “Nobody wants to hit anybody and that’s the way the rules are today. Move the puck, skate, dump it in, dump it out, and wait for a break. It’s all it is.”

  The two lineups in Calgary and Edmonton are filed with youth, speed, and the promise of a Battle of Alberta that may never be as violent, but could be as exciting as it once had been.

  With McDavid, Taylor Hall, et al, Edmonton looks like a team that could once again lead the NHL in scoring one day soon. It may never be like 1985 again, but a 2015 version of the 400-goal Oilers would be just fine with hockey fans.

  “That’s the fun of playing offensive hockey. You can make some mistakes,” Grant Fuhr said. “It was a new style to the league at that time. We just played run ‘n’ gun. We knew we were going to get our four or five every night, and we [as in, he] just had to keep the other guys to one less. It wasn’t about numbers. It was about winning and losing.”

  Goals, saves, end-to-end rushes. Hits and fights.