by Ron MacLean
In 1982–83 I have my career high, fifty-seven goals. The year after, I break the record for left wingers with 121 points. I was getting older, getting better and knowing more about players and what’s very important—about the goaltender.
I love to practise more than everybody. When I was nineteen, Marc Tardif, who was the leading goal scorer in the history of the WHA, he says, “What you’re going to do is you’re going to put sixty to sixty-eight pucks between the red line and the blue line, and then you’re going to go down the wing and shoot the puck, every single one of them before every practice.” And I did that for fifteen years.
I had some injury in January 1985 when there was a fight with Kevin Dineen, who was with Hartford. I could see my thumb was broken on my top hand, and I missed like, three weeks, but I was trying to find a way to come back as quick as possible. So I take my stick with me to the doctor and we set the cast around it. Now, I can play. I have a pretty decent year—around fifty-five goals, I think.
Dale Hunter, he was my centre for seven seasons. What an amazing passer and playmaker. He was a little bit the fuel of our team. Everybody knows he’s got three thousand minutes of penalties, but not a lot of people talk about his one thousand points. He played for a long time, and it was one of the saddest days of my life when they trade him in ’87. Me and Peter Šťastný at the time were on a line with Dale, and all of a sudden they trade those guys. And you realize that you’re getting older, but you don’t have much help coming down. The younger core was not there yet. So you see the Nordiques were having some bad years coming up. When they trade Dale to Washington, I was really doubting what they were trying to do. It was sad. He had given the team so much. I feel if they had hung on for a little longer, they would have won the Stanley Cup.
But you know, it’s funny, we made the deal and nobody expect a whole lot, and all of a sudden the next season we grab Joe Sakic. He come in to training camp and I look at him and I go, “Whoa! That’s a player!”
The whole time I am playing, maybe I have a little secret not too many are knowing about. My second year in Quebec City, the first game of the season, all of a sudden during the national anthem my heart started racing. I went back to the bench and it didn’t slow down. So I go back to the training room and I called to the doctor. He said to relax a little bit, maybe you are just nervous, you know? I calm down and go back to play. It’s not a heart attack, it’s just my heart. It keeps racing like once or twice a month.
The doctor, he was trying to figure out what was wrong, so I went through tests on the treadmill and with oxygen and the electrode stickers for the electrocardiogram, and they tell me I have atrial tachyarrhythmia. What it is, your heart starts racing for nothing. At the time, there was absolutely no cure for that besides taking medication. And that medication would put you to sleep pretty much, which is no good for a hockey player.
I learn that while I was playing, if all of a sudden my heart was racing, I would sit on the bench and press the jugular vein on the side of my throat for a minute or two and then press my fingers on my eyes, and that would make me calm down. The heartbeat for a professional hockey player might be forty-nine to fifty-four beats a minute, but there were times where I was on the bench trying to stop my heart from going all of a sudden over two hundred.
Sometimes, I would be on the bench and I would say to my coach, “Well, you know, I’m going to skip my turn.” And I’d go in the trainer’s room and relax a little bit, and when it would go back to normal, I’d come back and finish the game. But you don’t know when it is going to start, you know? Most of the time, it happen when the body got a hit, like if I fell down on the ice, or a big elbow or a bodycheck. It was a little bit of a problem, and each year it was harder and harder to get my heart to slow down. And at the time, not a whole lot of people knew what to do until ten years later, when I was traded to Chicago.
My second year in Chicago in 1991 at training camp, I just start the scrimmage and then all of a sudden I got hit, and I fell to my knee, and the pounding started—the heart. I go back on the bench and try to squeeze my throat and press my eye with the fingers and it won’t stop. So after five, six, seven minutes, I told my trainer, Mike Gapski, “It won’t slow down.” I went back to the room and tried to relax. He took my pulse and said, “Wow, you are at 220!’ After forty minutes, everybody start panicking, including myself. I am thinking, “Maybe it won’t stop!”
So they take me to the hospital, and this doctor in Oklahoma City, Dr. Warren Jackman, had a cure. To him, it is an electrical problem with the heart and he is a pioneer in fixing this, what they call atrial fibrillation. So he does what is called a catheter ablation procedure on me. It is a line through your groin and up to the heart to destroy a small area of the heart tissue that is causing my heart to go so fast. Personally, I was watching what was happening on a TV as they play with my heart for about four hours, and then after that, I said, “You know what? I’m tired,” and I go to sleep. They tell me when I wake up that the surgery took sixteen hours to finish.
I was back on the ice almost a week later. I didn’t miss any games, and I never had a problem with it since.
Mike Keenan was my coach in Chicago. I had played for him at the 1987 Canada Cup. In 1984 at the Canada Cup, Glen Sather was my coach. With Sather was the best time of my career because I play with Wayne Gretzky and Rick Middleton on a production line.
Mike Keenan in 1987 had a totally different approach. I was more like a checker than anything else, but it was great to have the chance to play with Mario Lemieux. He was my roommate for six weeks. That was an amazing time and filled with the pressure and the beauty of representing your country. For me, it was my Olympics, basically, because in those days professionals in hockey weren’t allowed to play in the Olympics.
The line in Chicago in 1991–92 was Jeremy Roenick, Steve Larmer and Michel Goulet. For me, it was probably one of the best lines in the NHL. I had some good lines in Quebec, but with this line I score my five hundredth goal on February 16, 1992. I score 499 on the road in San Jose, but we are back home and we are playing at Chicago Stadium against the Calgary Flames. It was such an amazing night. There was a breakaway, which is always special. And it was a dream because it was a little bit like the five hundredth goal scored by Jean Béliveau. I come down on the goalie’s glove side and it go in on the backhand. My mother remembered I told her I was going to do that when I was eleven.
We end up in the Stanley Cup finals against Pittsburgh that year. Jeremy Roenick was a young guy, just second or third year in the league, and he score fifty goals two seasons in a row. And Steve Larmer was like Hunter, a very, very underrated player. Never missed a game. There was no nickname for the line. I am thinking Roenick would call it “Roenick’s line.”
We had a very good team—Joe Murphy, Chris Chelios, Ed Belfour. Our problem we had was no Lemieux or Jaromír Jágr or Ron Francis. In the end, it was Mario who beat us. Mario was the key guy. He was just unstoppable. And Jágr was just a young guy coming in who was pretty unbelievable too. But it’s just nice to have a chance to win the Cup, you know? And that’s what we tried to do.
After five years in Chicago, I am thinking I have maybe three or four more years, but then there is an accident. I didn’t remember it until I saw it on TV three or four months later, but it was the toughest time of my career, no question.
I remember in the old Forum that the board was cement at the bottom. I was just going wide with the puck, looking for Roenick. He was going to the net, and I go to turn in, bringing my leg across my body. I’m five feet out from the board, and I am not sure what happen, but I lost balance and after that I woke up in the hospital. My eyes, they opened, but I don’t remember absolutely anything. That was a challenge. I was four weeks in the hospital there.
To show you the impact of how hard my head hit, the doctor, he says to me, “You hit the left side of your head and it was bleeding on the right side of your brain.” He said, “You know, a football helmet w
ould probably help you a lot.” No question, but that is not going to happen.
He tells me, “The level of concussion you have, it is the worst. The next level you wouldn’t be able to breathe. But you’re alive.” So at the end of the day, I know I was lucky. But the brain it takes time to fix, and you need to refocus, recharge and obviously, not give up on yourself, because that’s the toughest part.
I was going back home to Chicago and struggling with my coordination and my memory and everything else. Three months later, I couldn’t even catch a baseball, I couldn’t bench-press thirty pounds. I was weak. I was walking and hitting the corner of the house. So I have to relearn how to live and move, and it mean you go slower. It’s not much fun, three or four months later, and you’re driving and you know you’re going to downtown Chicago, but you’re not sure to where. You forgot.
Physically, it was always easy for me, and now to go golfing and you miss the ball, but the worst was to get on the ice and fall down. That is a thing that will break your heart. What help me the most is the doctor saying to me what was going to happen, so I am not surprised. But I still get mad at myself. I learn to just sit down and try to refocus a little bit and try to stay as positive as I can. When I was in rehabilitation, there was a young boxer with me at the same time. One morning, he didn’t show up. He had taken his own life. And the doctor, she said, “Michel, that’s the thing that scares me the most, when I get that phone call. Sometimes you just have that two or three minutes of weakness, and what you do to yourself could be forever.”
I don’t know if you can have a worse way to hit a board, but at the end of the day I’m sure you can have a worse injury. But the fact is, I’m alive and have function and am working as a scout for the Calgary Flames. That, for me, is a blessing. For sure, I can have tough days. When I think about a lot of things that happen in hockey and the head injuries that’s going on now, you need to be strong. I know I’m going to make mistakes, but it’s not going to kill me, you know?
Montreal
QUEBEC
POPULATION:
1,649,519
One Hundred Per Cent
During the 1987 Stanley Cup playoffs, the Montreal Canadiens and Philadelphia Flyers were involved in a battle royal. By the time Game Six rolled around, we on the telecast were aware that the Flyers had grown weary of the Habs’ Claude Lemieux and his pre-game ritual. Lemieux would remain on the ice until the end of the warm-up, wait for all the Flyers to clear the ice, and then rifle a puck into the Philadelphia net.
For Game Six in Montreal, the Flyers had a plan. Two of their players (goalie Glenn Resch and defenceman Ed Hospodar) would linger in the hallway just a few feet from the ice, and when Lemieux collected his lucky puck to begin the routine, they’d storm back out and intercept the shot. In fact, they did even more. They attacked Lemieux, and a full twenty-minute brawl erupted.
It was a memorable broadcast. After we signed off, a woman suddenly appeared in our CBC studio. I was in my rookie season, so it wasn’t unusual for me not to know this person. Don Cherry bellowed, “Well, Ma, that was right up there with the Nordiques’ Easter riot!”
The woman replied, “Donald, how many times have I told you there’s no place for that stuff?”
Don chortled, “Remember Dick and I did that Quebec game three years ago and Dick was so disgusted, he took off his headset and refused to talk?”
After a couple of minutes, with no introductions coming my way, I felt a bit like a loose wheel standing there. So I blurted out to the woman, “I’m Ron MacLean, and you must be Don’s mother.”
Ever seen two people bowled over by something you’ve said? Don actually sat down, but he didn’t say a word. The woman, in a miracle of grace through a kick in the gut, replied, “Ha, that’s right, I am Don’s mother . . . I’m Wilma Irvin—Dick’s wife.” And she walked out.
When I heard “Well, Ma,” I figured Kingston was a little over two hours to the west and I knew Don’s mom lived there. And, well, no matter how I pieced it together, the fact is that in order for Wilma to have been Don Cherry’s mom in 1987, she would have to have been close to eighty years old. She was fifty. And she was beautiful.
On the taxi ride back to the hotel, Don wouldn’t let up. It got to the point where Bob Cole actually got protective of me and my blunder and told Grapes to lay off.
At my home in Oakville, after my wife, Cari, has gone upstairs to watch Kerry Washington in Scandal on our bedroom television, I stay with hockey on the bigger screen downstairs. It takes about fifteen minutes before I get the munchies. I make popcorn and grab a pop. And always, I think of Wilma Irvin.
In the years after the “big blurt,” Wilma told me she enjoyed quiet evenings home alone, watching or listening to Dick’s broadcasts with a bowl of popcorn and a diet cola. Wilma was a great sounding board as I embarked on my career, helping me understand Cari’s life and my own in broadcasting. And Dick was my coach on where a story sets out and when hubris sets in.
Wilma is gone now. Dick is our statesman. He slides into every situation with an uncanny way of making the biggest or smallest shows seem like a trip to the fridge for a pop, and then to the hot stove. Something to be shared or enjoyed alone.
The first year the Chicago Blackhawks went into business, 1926–27, Dick Irvin Sr. was the captain of the team. By 1930–31, he was coaching the Hawks, and they made it to the finals but lost to Montreal. So the summer came and went, and he was packing for training camp when he got a telegram from the owner, Frederic McLaughlin, who was the heir to a coffee business. It said that the board of directors had decided his services were no longer required.
The Toronto Maple Leafs hired Irvin that fall, and in 1932 he won his first of four Stanley Cups as a coach. The Blackhawks, meanwhile, went through three coaches over the next two seasons, before settling on one of the founding members of the NHL, Tommy Gorman. Tommy won the Cup for Chicago in 1934, but he was fired anyway. McLaughlin owned the team for eighteen years and went through eighteen coaches.
Because coaching jobs were so volatile, Dick Sr. didn’t move his family around. Instead, he made Regina his home. In late September, when he boarded the train, it was always a sad day. Bertha and their two kids, Dick Jr. and his younger sister, Fay, wouldn’t see him again until the end of March or April. Because he was a celebrity, people would ask his son, “What’s it like growing up with a dad who’s a coach in the NHL?” and Dick Jr. would reply, “I don’t know.”
Dick Sr. kept in touch whenever he could. He’d call home when the Leafs were on the road in Chicago, where long-distance rates to Saskatchewan were the cheapest, and he wrote a lot of letters, most of them about hockey. His chicken scratch was pretty bad, so Dick Jr. would get his mother to decipher it.
When her husband was away, Bertha raised the kids by herself. Her father-in-law lived with the family in Regina until he died in 1944, but he sat in the corner and smoked his pipe all day.
Dick Sr. coached in Toronto for nine years altogether and made it to the Stanley Cup finals six more times. During the 1939–40 season, Leaf owner Conn Smythe spoke to him about coaching the Montreal Canadiens. The city’s other NHL team, the Montreal Maroons, had gone out of business in 1938. Now, the Canadiens’ owner, Senator Donat Raymond, was seriously considering folding too. The Canadiens had won only ten of forty-eight games that season and fans had lost interest. Raymond couldn’t keep the team alive with only 1,500 people buying seats at the Forum.
Early in the season, the league had a meeting and decided it couldn’t afford to lose the Montreal franchise. It was the birthplace of hockey in Canada. But what to do? The problem with the Canadiens, besides their lack of talent, was that they had no discipline on the team. Conn Smythe told them, “I have just the guy to send in there. I got Irvin. Let me talk to him.”
In January of his last year with the Leafs, Dick Sr. had brought the whole family to Toronto to live with him for the rest of the season. Dick Jr. was in Grade 3. The team made it to the final
s against the Rangers but lost in six games. Bryan Hextall Sr., whose grandson Ron is now the general manager of the Philadelphia Flyers, scored the winning goal right in front of Box 4, where Dick Jr. was sitting, and the little fella started to cry.
On the way home in the car, his dad surprised him by saying, “Think you could cheer for the Montreal Canadiens?”
Dick Sr. coached in Montreal for fifteen years, where he had players like Rocket Richard, Doug Harvey and Jean Béliveau, and together they won the Stanley Cup three times, in 1944, ’46 and ’53.
Bert Olmstead once told Dick Jr. that whenever he had a problem, he’d think about something Dick Sr. had taught him. He said that back when he played for him, if he was in a slump, Dick would have him go one on one against Doug Harvey, one of the great defencemen of his era. But beforehand, Dick would quietly tell Harvey to let Olmstead beat him. Olmstead said Dick Irvin Sr. was better than a sports psychologist. “He was father, brother, coach, you name it.” In April of 1950, Montreal was in the semifinals with the Rangers. The Rangers were ahead in the series 3–0 when Montreal’s goalie, Bill Durnan, a six-time Vézina Trophy winner—the best goalie in the league at the time—came to Dick Sr. on the train and asked him to pull him. Durnan told his coach his nerves were on edge “and I don’t want to crack up all at once.” Dick called for his backup goalie, Gerry McNeil, to join them. Gerry had been playing with the Montreal Royals in the QSHL and the Cincinnati Mohawks in the AHL. He’d only been called up for a few games with the Canadiens here and there when Bill was injured. When Gerry entered the compartment, Bill was crying and Dick was crying, and then Gerry started crying. Durnan never played another game. With Gerry in goal, the Canadiens won the next game against the Rangers but lost in Game Five.