The Crazy Game

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by Clint Malarchuk


  There was no draft in the Western Hockey League in the seventies. Each of the teams had a region from which they could protect a certain number of players for their roster. The Edmonton Oil Kings moved to Portland, Oregon, in 1976, but they maintained their territorial rights over Edmonton. A scout from the Winterhawks came and spoke to my mother and me about my future with the team. I was thrilled, but Mom was skeptical about me leaving home. She knew what I was like, still battling anxiety and depression. But there was nothing I wanted more in the world than to be a hockey player, and this was the only way. She believed I could make it to the NHL and be a star. I knew it more than anyone.

  I went to the training camp, but I was still young then, probably fifteen. So they asked me to go and play for their Tier II affiliate in Fort Saskatchewan, about an hour outside of Edmonton. At the time, the Alberta Junior Hockey League boasted future NHLers like Keith Brown, Jim Benning and Ken Daneyko. But the star of the league was Mark Messier, a fifteen-year-old playing for the St. Albert Saints. He was a big, powerful skater who could shoot. No one could touch him. He was pretty damn good.

  The rink in Fort Saskatchewan was an old barn with chicken wire instead of glass above the boards. We had a tough team. We used to brawl all the time. It was a small town—forget about a stop light; I think it had maybe one four-way stop. We played in one of those typical old-time hockey rinks that sat maybe 1,200 people. But it was always packed. Everybody smoked, so this grey cloud hung over the ice.

  To play back then, you had to be half-tough. You couldn’t back down from a fight. We had some serious bench-clearing brawls. And when we had a brawl, you had no choice but to get into them. A lot of them happened during warmups. There was only a painted red line separating the two teams. Somebody would skate over it a little bit, or you would steal a puck from the other team—or shoot a puck at them—and it was on. We had a few battles with St. Albert. They were really tough—mostly because they had Messier and he was a man at fifteen. But they had some other seriously tough guys, too. Those games always ended with blood and bruises. At the Fort Saskatchewan arena, both teams left the ice at the same end of the rink, and there was a lobby between the two dressing rooms. We fought with St. Albert back there one time, and the RCMP had to come and break us up as if it were a riot.

  The team called this kid up once, a chunky farm boy. We always had to wear dress shirts and ties, but he came to the game in a flannel lumberjack shirt. It was a rough game. So the coach told him, “Okay, you’re going to get out there and fight that guy, their goon.” The coach meant that the chunky lumberjack farm boy would fight him when it was his turn to go on the ice, but he just leapt over the boards without a stick or gloves and went after the guy. You had to at least wait for the puck to drop! I thought he was going to the dressing room. He could barely skate. And he just went up to this guy and pummelled him.

  I played two seasons in Fort Saskatchewan. I was the starting goalie at sixteen, played a lot and did really well. We won the Alberta championship, beat B.C. and then lost to Saskatchewan in the national semifinals. During the 1978 season, the goalie in Portland got hurt, so I went up and played. I was terribly nervous and far from home. That homesickness stuck with me for so long. But I did okay in my first major junior showing. I picked up two penalty minutes, which sounds about right for me.

  We had a few twenty-year-olds on that team in Fort Saskatchewan. After games, we’d all go to the local bar in an old hotel. Glasses of draft beer were forty-five cents, but I was still pretty tame then. I’d sip tomato juice.

  Our rink was about an hour from home, so sometimes I would stay at one of the billet homes after games and road trips. Otherwise, I’d trek back to Edmonton to stay with Mom. It was a long haul. At the time, I was enrolled at Jasper Place Composite High School, but I was still such a terrible student. I took ridiculously easy classes like guitar, art and drama.

  Drama was always my first class of the day, and I was always late. If I made it on time, I’d be exhausted, so I’d climb under the stage, where all the costumes were stored, and sleep for an hour. Our donkey of a drama teacher didn’t like me very much. After a few truancies, he started locking the door. So every time I got in late, I’d have to knock. One time, the class was in the middle of rehearsal, so he opened the door and started poking me in the chest with his finger.

  “Don’t do that,” I warned him. He was kind of hurting me. He was really mad.

  “You’re always late!” he shouted. “You don’t take this seriously. You’re always interrupting.” And the whole time, he kept shoving his finger into my shoulder. So I smoked him. I just drilled him in the face as hard as I could. He went ass over teakettle.

  I was suspended for quite a while after that. I think I was expelled, but my mom went and got me back in. She defended me because the donkey was poking me. I had told him not to. I said I’d drill him, and I did.

  I ended up with an extensive rap sheet at Jasper Place. I had a history teacher, Mr. Wey, with these dark horn-rimmed glasses and a bushy mustache. It looked like he was wearing a pair of those gag nose glasses. One day, he kicked me out of class, probably for talking or joking around or whatever. I went out into the hall—I’m pretty sure I’d planned this in advance—put these gag glasses on and walked back into the room a few minutes later.

  “Hey, Dad!” I said in a squeaky, nerdy voice. “Can I have the keys to the car?”

  Mr. Wey wasn’t impressed. “Get out.”

  “C’mon, Dad, I got a date. I got a date. Give me the keys. You’ll like her! She’s hot, Dad. She’s so hot!”

  “Get out of my class, you little punk creep. Get out now.”

  The class was in stitches, so I pushed a little further. I grabbed the fire extinguisher next to me on the wall. “You’re so hot and bothered, Dad. Why are you so hot and bothered? You need to cool off.” I sprayed the extinguisher everywhere. It was an old pump-style extinguisher—it squirted out water. I let Mr. Wey have it and then let the whole class have it. Everyone was laughing. They thought it was great.

  I got suspended for that one, too.

  Years ago, Jasper Place wrote me, asking for a picture for their wall of fame. I don’t think I sent one.

  7

  Butterfly

  I MIGHT HAVE BEEN A TERRIBLE STUDENT IN THE CLASSROOM, but I was a scholar of the game.

  I taught myself everything by watching the best. Goalie coaches didn’t really exist when I was learning the game. The closest I came to having a real mentor in net, beyond my brother, Garth, was Dave Dryden. When Dave played for the Oilers, he lived about a mile from Mom and me. I was about sixteen then. I used to hang out at the Oilers’ practices back when they were in the World Hockey Association. I’d just go by myself and sit in the stands. I was trying to learn from them. One day after practice, I went over and talked to Dave while he was standing by the bench. We kind of became friends. Dave was a very nice guy. I visited his house a few times, and he’d always stop to chat with me at the Coliseum. When I’d go down to watch him practice, I’d ask him questions about the game, equipment, the team—everything. He was one of the first guys to have a goalie-mask-and-cage combo, which seemed cool at the time.

  I was a sponge. I took in everything Dave said. Here was this NHL and WHA veteran, taking the time to speak to an overeager teenager. He represented huge moral support for me. I’m not sure if he knows how much that meant to me.

  I played in a transitional period for goalies. Basically, I was among the last of a dying breed: the standup goalie. Growing up, it was ingrained in your skull—”Stand up! Stand up! Play the angles! Play the angles!” But partway through my NHL career, the butterfly style revolutionized the position. Glenn Hall was the first butterfly goalie, but it wasn’t until Patrick Roy in the mid-1980s that the approach to goaltending really changed. When Roy came along and had all his success, I kept thinking, He’s playing it all wrong! He’s going down on every shot. But he was stopping all those pucks. It was unbelievable.<
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  Bernie Parent of the Philadelphia Flyers was always my favourite goalie. The Broad Street Bullies played my kind of hockey. Parent stood up and played the angles. So I did, too. I’d say it worked out pretty well for him, considering he won two Stanley Cups, two Conn Smythe Trophies and two Vezinas. Later, the Flyers’ Pelle Lindbergh was almost a clone of Bernie. Looked like him, played like him, wore the same pads. Pelle grew up idolizing Bernie, too. He even got to work with him. He had so much success before he was killed much too soon in a drunk-driving accident in 1985.

  I was also a big fan of the great Glenn Hall, who played with the Chicago Blackhawks and later with the St. Louis Blues when I was young. As I mentioned, he was one of the first butterfly goalies, but it would be years before his style caught on. I also loved Vladislav Tretiak. He’s the best hockey player never to play in the NHL. Years later, while I was playing for the Washington Capitals, I got the chance to train with him when I enrolled in his goalie school in Montreal. It was a camp for kids, but I showed up like a regular student. Tretiak got a kick out of that. I got to work with the students as well, but mostly I was there to learn from a legend. Standing next to Tretiak on the ice is a humbling experience.

  He was teaching the butterfly style. That was the first time I realized how effective it was. I was going from just trying to stand up all the time to learning to switch to a butterfly stance if the angles and shot warranted it. As long as you stop the puck, no one is going to say anything, but back then, if it went in or there was a fat rebound and you were a butterfly goalie, the coach would ask why you didn’t stand up. But the coaches had no idea what they were talking about. The majority of shots in games were low, because players didn’t have as much time to go top shelf. In practice, all these guys aim for the high glove because they have lots of time. In a game, someone is always putting pressure on them, so they don’t have time.

  I guess you could say I became a hybrid-style goalie after that, but I never fully overhauled my game to suit the new era of goaltending. I wish I had. But I didn’t have the knees for it. They were always bad. You won’t see many former goalies who don’t grimace when they stand up. Your knees aren’t supposed to twist the ways goalies contort them. We usually carry that pain as penance when our careers are done. But my penance should have been covered long before I even made it to the NHL.

  When I was seventeen, I helped take the Fort Saskatchewan Traders to the Alberta championships. I stood on my head that season. But in February, my leg started locking up during games. I’d just kick through it and play with the pain. I didn’t know any better. I wasn’t aware that I had torn cartilage, and each time I kicked through the pain, I tore it a little more. I didn’t find this out until after the playoffs, when Garth got me in to see a specialist in Calgary who confirmed that my knee was a mangled mess. I went in for surgery at the end of June, the day after school got out. It went well. The recovery was going as planned—until my knee started to swell up and I got a fever and chills. My leg was like a balloon. I had a staph infection.

  They got me on antibiotics right away, but nothing worked. I had to stay in the hospital. Then the infection went to the bone. It’s called osteomyelitis, which is basically gangrene. They kept me in isolation in a sterilized room. The only people who could come in wore these Star Wars–style gowns. I was in total isolation. When I finally rejoined civilization, people visited for a little while to be supportive, but they had their lives to live. My mom was always there. My buddy Jeff Bulat, who grew up with me in Elmwood, and a couple other buddies would come.

  By August, the doctors had almost given up. They said they were going to try to scrape some of this crap off my bone, but if things didn’t turn around in a couple of weeks, they were going to have to take my leg off. What started with some torn cartilage was about to turn into an amputation! Either way, leg or no leg, they said I’d never be able to play goal again. “You might be able to skate, but you’ll never be able to move around, up and down, like a goalie,” the doctor said. “That’s just not going to happen.”

  The thought that my leg—and with it, my dream—might be taken, that my life would never be the same, was debilitating. It felt like my rotting leg was a time bomb ticking down to my brutal execution. Then one day, the doctors tried a new antibiotic and, by grace, it worked. The infection began to lift—I could keep my leg. Nothing was going to get in my way now. The doctor’s doubts that I might not be able to play again meant nothing to me. They didn’t know the will inside me. I had dreams. If that leg stayed attached to my body, I would take care of the rest. Sure, I hadn’t skated in months and my bedridden body was a sack of fading muscles, but no one could outwork me. If anybody could spend an entire summer cooped up like Bubble Boy, with his leg weeks away from being sawn off, and then make a full recovery in time to impress the major scouts, it was me. Sometimes my obsessive personality was a curse. In this case, it was a blessing.

  Every summer, it was the same thing. I was pushing, pushing, pushing—You’ve got to be the best. You’ve got to be the best. You’ve got to be the best. I mean, who doesn’t want to be the best? Maybe some people don’t, I guess. But if you’re an athlete, your whole purpose is to be the best. If you’re going to try to make it all the way, you’d better be thinking that way.

  I never gave myself much credit for having actual skill. I always thought my success was all about hard work. I overtrained. In hindsight, I probably limited myself by overtraining. But it was the only way I had of dealing with the fear that I wasn’t doing enough. If I ran ten miles, I believed someone else was probably running twenty. If I did a hundred push-ups, someone was surely cranking out 150. The competition lived in my mind. I was terrified of disappointing my coach, and I wanted to never let my teammates down. I wanted my family and friends to be proud of me. I wanted the fans to love me. It always felt like I was being watched—like everyone and everything depended on me. But I guess that’s normal for an athlete. We’re always being judged.

  When I was playing junior, my struggle was not so much with depression as it was with anxiety. The time when I was hospitalized, when I was twelve, I was in a really dark place. Mentally, I wasn’t there anymore. Those feelings came in waves, and they would hit me like a cyclone later on. Anxiety was just my normal state of being. I was always on edge. I needed to find a reason why I felt this way, and of course high-level hockey seemed like the perfect reason. I was oblivious to the possibility that it could be anything more than that.

  I was in the hospital for just over two months before I was finally released the first week in September. I hit the weights right away. I missed training camp but got back on the ice just before the Traders’ season started. Never going to play again, my ass. I played the best hockey of my life that year. It was enough to impress the right people in Portland. I ended up with the Winterhawks full time the following season, in 1979.

  Portland is a great city for junior hockey. We led the league in attendance. For the first ten years after the team relocated from Edmonton, it sold out a lot of games. And in my first year, we had a very good team. We were coached by Ken Hodge (not the same one who played for the Bruins). Back then, junior coaches were all tough. It was all about discipline. They tried to make men out of you really quickly by yelling and screaming at you. They were all like that back then. Hodge was that kind of coach. He was the kind of coach who was difficult to get to know because he kept his distance. He was tough on everybody, but especially on the goalies. Major junior is a unique situation for a young athlete to be in. It’s basically this strange place where you’re living the dream, but not really. It’s a step up from Tier II and one step away from the NHL. There’s a chance that you’ll get drafted, but there’s also a chance that you’re going to blow it, pretty much ending your career.

  You’re treated well; local people recognize you. And there are a few perks, like actually getting a bit of coin. I can’t remember what they were allowed to pay us, but it was something like the
equivalent of thirty-five dollars a week today—maybe enough to fill up your gas tank.

  All these different things enter your life when you go away to play major junior hockey. The stress level is cranked way up. The possibility of realizing your dream is just an impressed scout away. You have to grow up fast. It was a gut-wrenching combination for me. That first year in Portland, I was so homesick I almost quit hockey altogether. I think I was conscious of the fact that Mom and I had been through so much and I felt like I was abandoning her by leaving. That was tough. I was really close with my grandma, too. I would call them all the time. It was just really tough for me that way—kind of like I was back at Bobby Orr’s hockey camp in Orillia. It was a constant feeling that I was a long way from where I was supposed to be. Mom came out to Portland to watch me play a few times, but Dad never did. He was still out of my life at the time.

  The only thing that got me through junior was knowing that this was my only shot to make it to the NHL. I had to get drafted. So whenever I started to feel depressed, I did my best to counter it by obsessing about the next game and the next game. It was kind of like a coping mechanism. The crazy game kept me going.

  In Portland, I surrounded myself with families. I think it helped fill a big hole in my life. I lived with Dick and Mary Lou Lisk. They were great. We kept in touch with them somewhat. They were a big comfort, considering how much I was struggling at the time. They had a daughter and son who were about sixteen and fourteen. We all got along well. The girl wasn’t around too much. The boy and I would kind of hang out and go to movies and stuff. There was another family that I got to know—season-ticket holders. They invited me over for dinners and to hang out. There were three girls in that family, and one of them was a little kid. She adored me. It was cute. She made me feel loved, like I was a big brother.

 

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