The Crazy Game

by Clint Malarchuk

  We were on the road a lot. The travel was insane because we were still treated like a team from Edmonton, even though we were a sixteen-hour drive away. We’d go on road trips for weeks at a time and play everybody—all the way out to Brandon and Winnipeg. We never flew. It was always a bus, just a plain old Greyhound.

  On those road trips, we’d be on the bus for hours, all day, and we’d pull into some backwater town at around five in the evening and just feel like shit. But we were a bunch of eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds, pumped up because scouts were going to be there. We were always aware that scouts would be at every game, regardless of how cold and remote the place was.

  They made us wear suits and ties every time we stepped off the bus. It didn’t matter when or where. Once we got on the bus, we’d change into sweats. But then we’d roll into the next town at three in the morning and have to put our suits back on to check into the hotel, only to take them off and go to bed. Just ridiculous stuff.

  The bus stunk on those trips. We’d eat at McDonald’s or Kentucky Fried Chicken and places like that. This was before nutrition was really a part of sports. We heard chicken was good for us, with all that protein, so the team figured there was nothing wrong with buckets of Colonel Sanders’s finest. We’d eat it, with all that grease dripping off the skin, and be lined up for the bathroom at the back of the bus. Today, junior teams are run almost like the pros. They have meals prepared and ready for the boys as soon as they get on the bus, and it’s a spread of good, healthy food. Things have changed.

  Being cooped up like that for days on end will make you a little cranky. There would be the odd fight between teammates, which turned into entertainment for the others. We were a good bunch of guys, but these things happen. There was a lot of pent-up aggression. Being trapped on a bus was terrible for my obsession with working out. We only stayed in dingy motels, so there was never a gym to lift weights in. It drove me crazy. I’d do push-ups and sit-ups in the room or on the bus if I felt like my body was rotting away.

  I passed most of the time by reading. I think I read every Louis L’Amour western. The Sony Walkman came out around that time, and you could listen to cassette tapes—that was the greatest thing in the world. I listened to a lot of country music—Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris. The good stuff. Country always lifted me up. I was a cowboy at heart. Dreams of rounding up cattle and hunting bears and conquering bucking broncos always lifted me out of my darkest funks. The wild, open country, the twang of a guitar, a good western tale—all of it took me someplace else, someplace better. Then I’d open my eyes and be thousands of miles from home again, with a winter storm beating against the cold bus window. We went through some serious ones driving across the open plains in the middle of winter. We’d be out there with no other vehicles on the road, going thirty miles an hour in a whiteout. One time in the B.C. interior, it snowed so much that these big old pine trees were weighed down with snow and bent over the road like a canopy. It was beautiful, but it was scary, too. We drove through it all.

  The longest trip we took was twenty-eight days. We started in Seattle and then went on to Victoria. We had to take a ferry to get there, so we’d leave at three in the morning to catch the first one at nine, and then we played that night. After that, it was off to New Westminster, B.C., and then to Calgary, Lethbridge, Swift Current, Medicine Hat, Brandon, Winnipeg—all the way to the middle of Canada, a couple hours from the edge of Ontario. Our last game was in Brandon, and we left right after the game and drove straight to Portland—two and a half days. They didn’t want to stop. We slept on the bus both nights. We didn’t have sleepers; we’d just sleep sitting up in the seat, or some guys would curl up on the floor or climb up in the luggage rack. We found ways.

  They flew in a driver halfway into the trip because it was against the law to have one driver on such a long trip. They switched him up and we kept rolling. We got home at around three in the afternoon and played a home game that night, after almost a month on the road.

  We were a pretty good team both years that I played in Portland, but we never did well in the playoffs. That first season was tough for me. I played well, but I wasn’t great. Hodge split the starting duties between Darrell May and me. At the end of the year, the Vancouver Canucks drafted Darrell. I wasn’t drafted at all. My numbers were decent, and people had thought that I would go that year. I was devastated. Totally devastated.

  But there were bigger things to worry about. At the time, I was facing five years in prison for assault causing bodily harm.

  8

  A Strong Defence

  I RETURNED TO EDMONTON AFTER THE SEASON ENDED IN PORTLAND and got into a bit of a scuffle with the entire family that lived next door to my mother. These were some goofy neighbours. I had only been home a couple days when one of our dogs went over onto their property. The father chased him with a rake. That pissed me off, so I went over to their house and told them if they ever touched my dog, I’d fry their cat.

  Coincidentally, the next day, their cat was hiding under their step and wouldn’t come out. It had broken a leg somehow. They thought I was responsible, so one of the sons came over to confront me. He was about my age but he was very big—the whole family was big. I opened the door and he started screaming, “You hurt our cat!” and smoked me right in the face. He hit me so hard I landed on my ass. I saw red. I got up and kicked the living snot out of him. I beat him pretty bad. I was pissed off. You get sucker punched in your own house? And I didn’t even touch their cat!

  My mother came out and broke it up. The other guy was hurt pretty bad, so she got a first-aid kit to clean him up. Then his mother came over, yelling at us, demanding to know what we’d done to him. My mom tried to calm her down and explain, but she just grabbed my mom’s hair and pulled it back so hard she fell over. So I grabbed the lady and said, “Get the hell out of here.” I guess I kind of dislocated her shoulder in the process. Just as that was happening, her son-in-law showed up. He jumped over our hedge and charged at me. I don’t blame him. If I saw that and didn’t see everything, I’d probably do the same thing. I popped him right in the face—boom—and he was out cold. Like snoring.

  So I got charged with three counts of assault causing bodily harm. I had just turned eighteen, which made the potential consequences that much more severe. My brother Garth was a cop in Calgary then, and he connected us with a great lawyer. At the court case, the whole family showed up, still bandaged from our altercation. But the judge decided I had acted in self-defence and all the charges were dropped. Thankfully, this was long before the days of the Internet, and the Winterhawks never found out. These days, it would have been all over the news.

  When I wasn’t in court that summer, I was in the gym, determined that I wouldn’t go undrafted again. It worked. I improved my goalsa-gainst average from 4.53 in my first season to 3.81 in my second. My save percentage went up from .875 to .893. Those numbers may not sound that impressive today, but it was a different game back then.

  It was a better year all around. I was still terribly homesick, but I was more comfortable in Portland. I even met my first girlfriend. My life had always been centred completely around hockey. My parents had told me to stay away from girls when I was young. “They only want to mess you up and take your money,” Dad told me. Even after he left, Mom continued to warn me. “Just use it for peeing through,” she told me when I went to Portland.

  One day after practice at one of the smaller arenas in Portland, the team went back to the Memorial Coliseum to drop our gear off. The arena was hosting a big high school basketball tournament. I wasn’t a basketball fan, so I was really just watching the cheerleaders. Honest to God, I went down to get my coat from the dressing room when I was leaving and walked right into this cheerleader. She was beautiful. I’m sure it seemed like a pathetic pickup attempt. “Oh my God! I’m so sorry,” I said.

  Her name was Jodi Bauer. And I was a gentleman, so we ended up going out. So Jodi was the first girl I let my gu
ard down with.

  Her dad was a Lutheran pastor. Her family was really nice, and I think they liked me. We’d go to church together every Sunday. I used to go to church when I was a kid, and I was always amazed by the idea of God. I always felt I needed help. I often wondered why I was like this, and whether other people were like me. I wondered, Is this normal?

  In some ways, I was very confident, but in others I was very insecure. God seemed like a good idea to lean on. I read a lot of Norman Vincent Peale books when I was younger. He was a motivational author who always wrote in a Christian context. You know, he’d pull out inspiration quotes from the Bible, like “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” Which means I can do anything I want because God’s with me. Just hold the faith. That verse stuck with me. I wouldn’t think of it for years, and then it would suddenly jump into my head.

  My relationship with God was always very personal. I never felt the need to actually go to church, but I’d pray every night and in the morning. I’d pray during the day when I was stressed. I prayed my whole life.

  At the end of the 1980–81 season, I prayed that I’d be drafted. My chance of making the NHL was slipping away. It was now, or it was likely never. I was home in Edmonton when I got the call in June 1981. The NHL draft wasn’t televised back then, the way it is today. Players just sat at home and waited for the phone to ring. It was excruciating—like watching water boil, but knowing there’s a chance it never will. Everyone thought I’d be drafted, but it was still a shock when the phone rang. It was Maurice Filion, the general manager of the Quebec Nordiques, on the other end. That’s how I found out what the next chapter of my life would involve.

  Mom was there. Dad wasn’t.

  It felt like I’d won the lottery. I went seventy-fourth overall, two spots after John Vanbiesbrouck went to the Rangers. It was the year that Dale Hawerchuk went first, to the Winnipeg Jets. Bobby Carpenter, Ron Francis and Grant Fuhr all went in the top ten. Calgary drafted Al MacInnis fifteenth. Another defenceman, Chris Chelios, went fortieth to Montreal.

  My dream was almost a reality. I was going to the NHL. Holy crap, I’m going to the NHL! Then the joy gave way to a nervous reality: Oh shit, this is real. I’d better get ready for training camp.

  9

  Training Camp

  WHEN I SHOWED UP TO MY FIRST PRO TRAINING CAMP IN 1981, I still had all these illusions about what life in the National Hockey League would be like. This was the big time. This was the show, right? True, but it wasn’t the show I expected. If you watch the movie Slap Shot today, you probably won’t recognize many of the hilarious stereotypes in the modern NHL. But damn, back then—holy shit.

  On day one, I walked into the gym for “fitness testing” at the arena. There was a husky guy pedalling leisurely on a stationary bike, smoking a cigarette. I thought he was some trainer testing it out. But there was a guy with a stopwatch standing next to him keeping time! The husky guy was riding this thing so slow, it was like he was on a carousel. His cigarette was just hanging out of his mouth, bobbing up and down as he chatted away in French. The other guys in the room were laughing along with whatever the hell he was saying. I asked someone who the guy was. He looked at me like I was nuts. “That’s Moose Dupont. Our captain.”

  Andre Dupont, a defenceman best known as one of Philly’s Broad Street Bullies in the 1970s, was a unique kind of captain. Before one of our practices, I was stretching out on the dressing-room floor, sitting in a split, reaching for my toes. Moose walked in and saw me on the floor. “Hey kid, what the hell are you doing down there? Looking for bedbugs in the fucking rug?” he asked. He was smoking a cigarette again. “Cut it out. You’re making me sore. You look like a ballerina.”

  As part of the fitness test at the Nordiques’ training camp, players had to run up and down this huge hill at a resort on the outskirts of town. But the vets didn’t really care for being tested. One of the coaches stood at the starting point and told us when to take off. We started off in a pack, but a short ways up the hill, Moose and Michel Plasse, the Nordiques’ backup goalie, pulled off to the side into the trees and lit up a smoke. It was a long haul, probably a thirty-to-forty-minute uphill run. When the pack came back the other way, Moose and Plasse put out their butts and jogged back to the finish line with us.

  I met Dale Hunter for the first time during that camp. It was Dale’s second year, but the team put us together as roommates. There weren’t a lot of English guys on the team, and we sure as hell didn’t know any French, so it was nice to be around a guy you could understand. Dale and I also had a lot in common. He was an Ontario farm boy and I was a rancher from Alberta. He was one of the toughest, hardest-working players I’d ever seen. Dale was probably the fittest guy in training camp—not that the bar was set very high. We also shared the same juvenile sense of humour. Dale was a big-time prankster—he mastered the classics, like putting Saran Wrap across the toilet bowl so some needle-dick’s piss would splash back on him or his shit would just squish there against his ass. It worked every time. He and I became really good friends. We would go on to have one of those relationships where we might go years without talking, and as soon as we’d see each other again, it’d be like no time had passed at all.

  I was up against Plasse and Dan Bouchard for a spot on the team that first year with the Nordiques. They were both vets and I was a long shot to make the team as a rookie. Bouchard was the established starter, but Plasse had played for fourteen pro teams in four leagues over the past thirteen seasons, so I thought I might have a shot. I really wanted to prove that I deserved to be there.

  They dressed all three of us through a few of the pre-season games. During one of them, the coach sent Plasse in halfway through the second period. He played for a few minutes and then, after a whistle, skated over to the bench and pulled a cigarette pack and lighter from behind his goal pad. He handed them to the trainer and went back to the net. He was so used to smoking between periods that he forgot he’d stashed his pack in his equipment.

  I had a really good camp. I was probably the best goalie. It really stung when I was one of the last cuts. I knew I had made them notice me. They sent me down to Fredericton in the American Hockey League. With the exception of a couple of NHL games with Quebec, that’s where I spent the year.

  The Fredericton Express was an expansion team. It was the first pro team of any kind in the city, which was small, probably 45,000 at the time. New Brunswick was a great place to play hockey. The people were really nice. Maritimers reminded me of the farmers and ranchers in Alberta, where I grew up.

  But life in the minors wasn’t glamorous. We all knew where we wanted to be. My NHL contract was worth $80,000 in the first year, then $85,000 and $90,000 in the following two seasons. In the minors, I’d only make about $25,000. As soon as you’d get called up, your NHL contract would kick in. It was decent money—eighty grand in 1981 would be worth about $210,000 today. Obviously not the exorbitant sums players make today, but not a bad paycheque for a twenty-year-old who, just a few years earlier, had been selling his family’s furniture just to get by. Even as a minor leaguer, my $25,000 deal was the equivalent of $65,000 today. It was more money than I’d ever seen. But I was pretty frugal. Some guys spent their paycheques on Mercedes-Benzes or BMWs, stuff like that. I drove an old beater pickup truck that I bought for $1,500. It was puke yellow. It was practical—until the transmission fell out.

  As much as I liked the fans and team in Fredericton, I couldn’t wait to get sent up. When I got the call for my first NHL game, midway through the 1981–82 season, I was nervous as shit. It was in Buffalo. During warmups, Jacques Richard wired a shot at me, and he could shoot it. I turned my head and the puck hit me in the ear.

  The trainer took me into the medical room to stitch me up. The coach, Michel Bergeron, came and looked at my bloody ear. “You can’t play,” he said.

  I was so on edge that I had barely slept the night before. I was a mess all day. I wasn’t going through all that
just to be denied a start. In the NHL, if you get one chance, you’d better take it.

  “I’m fucking playing,” I said.

  It was a 4–4 tie, but it says a lot about the style of hockey they played back then that I was named the game’s second star. Hockey in that era was wide open and exciting, even if it was a goalie’s worst nightmare. You could make a ton of unbelievable saves and still let in four goals. There were only twenty-one teams, so the talent wasn’t diluted. All the talent in the world was there. In Edmonton, the score would be 6–5 or higher, and the Oilers would win because Grant Fuhr had played great. So it wasn’t unusual for fans to see eight goals scored in a game.

  Or seventeen, if you were playing the Islanders.

  I’d played so well against Buffalo that the Nordiques started me the next game, in Long Island. This was the Islander dynasty that had just won its first of four Stanley Cups in a row. They had Mike Bossy, Bryan Trottier and Denis Potvin. They had Clark Gillies, John Tonelli and Ken Morrow. Billy Smith was in goal. Need I go on? You know the team—it was one of the all-time greats. A year before, I had watched these guys win the Cup on TV, and now I was facing them. It was overwhelming. I felt confident after getting a game under my belt, but I knew stopping the Islanders was going to be a huge challenge.

  I was right. Things didn’t go well on the scoreboard. We got lit up 10–7. I played the whole game. Bossy got a hat trick—he had four breakaways on me. They scored on breakaways and two-on-ones. It wasn’t that I played bad in Long Island; I made a lot of great saves. But the only thing that made me feel good about that day was that Billy Smith let in seven, and he was the best goalie in the game at the time.