DEFINING MOMENT IN HOCKEY
When the Edmonton Oilers traded Wayne Gretzky to the Los Angeles Kings, it sent a shockwave through the NHL.
In the late summer of 1988, life could not have been much better for Wayne Gretzky. The Edmonton Oilers had won their fourth Stanley Cup championship in five seasons and with the hefty list of stars on their roster in the prime years of careers, they appeared likely to add to that achievement. Gretzky’s wedding to actress Janet Jones was the highlight of the summer in Alberta and during the playoffs, she had informed No. 99 that he was going to be a father. The Gretzkys were looking for a home in Edmonton.
THE NAIVE ONE
“I figured the Oilers had three or four Cups still to win because we had started as a gang of teenagers in the very early 1980s, climbed to the top four times and everyone on the team was still hungry because we knew how much fun winning was,” Gretzky said. “There had been a bit of guff around the NHL and a little in Edmonton that Janet didn’t want to stay in Edmonton but that was absolutely not true. I was four years away from unrestricted free agency and I wanted to be an Oiler at least until then when I could make my own deal to change my career. Janet had agreed to all that. But I guess figuring I would have control over my life was pretty naive.”
L-OIL-TY
The Oilers were a success on the ice and at the gate, playing to capacity crowds (16,239) every night in Northlands Coliseum in a city of 600,000. After four Cups and all the individual awards the team had won, the payroll was becoming a challenge for owner Peter Pocklington and GM-coach Glen Sather. Several of the team’s stars knew there were greener pastures in bigger markets but there was a great deal of loyalty to the Oilers—the team that gave them a chance, the team where Gretzky, Mark Messier, Jari Kurri, Paul Coffey, Glenn Anderson, Grant Fuhr, Kevin Lowe and Esa Tikkanen had become stars. The big money in other cities was inviting but the chance to add to their winning mark with the freewheeling fun-to-play hockey style was a big lure, at least until they knew the team had run its championship course.
THE WOES OF POOR PETER PUCK
But while the Oilers were doing good business, owner Pocklington’s other businesses (oil, meat packing, land development, trust company, car dealerships) were encountering trouble, and he needed an infusion of capital to keep his empire afloat. His expensive art collection had been sold and the Oilers were used as collateral for a loan. A year earlier, Gretzky had signed a personal services contract with Pocklington when the Oilers owner was thinking of turning the team into a public company as a way to raise cash for his other businesses. The plan was to make Gretzky part of the team. “It turned out that Janet, my father and my agent Mike Barnett had known all through the playoffs about Pocklington having discussions with several teams about a deal for me that would include a lot of cash. But they didn’t tell me because they knew I was zeroed in on the playoffs and they knew I wanted no distractions.”
HONEYMOON INTERRUPTED
Gretzky and Janet were on their honeymoon in Los Angeles when he received a call from Los Angeles Kings owner Bruce McNall, a flashy Californian who was regarded as a genius for amassing a fortune dealing in antique coins. McNall said that he had the Oilers’ permission to talk to him about a contract that would follow a deal. “It was slap in the face not to have the Oilers tell me about the whole matter,” Gretzky said. “But when I thought about it, I realized that if I was going to be traded, L.A. was good because it would mean Janet could pick up her acting career again.”
GRETZ HELPS NEGOTIATE TRADE OF HIMSELF
McNall said he would pay $20 million plus three first-round draft picks and two players for Gretzky and two or three players. “I told him one of the other guys had to be Marty McSorley,” Gretzky recalled. “The Kings had been a bad team, one without much grit, and McSorley was one of the toughest guys in the NHL. I actually was in McNall’s office when Pocklington called him and Bruce said McSorley had to be one of the players. I told McNall to tell him if Marty wasn’t in the deal, I wouldn’t report to the Kings.” The deal finally was hammered out. Gretzky, McSorley, and forward Mike Krushelnyski would go to the Kings in exchange for three draft picks, young forwards Jimmy Carson and Martin Gelinas, and $15 million. The trade could not be announced for two weeks because the Oilers were staging their season ticket drive and word of No. 99’s departure would hurt that.
WHAT HEART?
A reporter in Quebec where Gretzky had owned the Hull Olympiques junior team somehow grabbed the scoop on what most call the biggest deal in NHL history in a story on August 8. The next day, Gretzky flew to Edmonton where a press conference was held in which Pocklington wanted Gretzky to say the trade was his idea but Gretzky refused. On the nationally televised conference, Pockington talked of his “heavy heart” that he had when granting Gretzky’s request to leave the Oilers. “What do you do when an outstanding, loyal employee approaches you and asks for an opportunity to move along?” Pocklington said. “You know you don’t want to lose him but at the same time, you don’t want to stop him from pursuing his dreams.”
When Gretzky tried to speak of his feelings, tears ran down his face. “The tears were real because I realized that I had nothing but great times, big wins, awards and the best of everything hockey can offer and now that was over,” Gretzky said. “I would have to start again in a new place with a team that had been 18th the season before.” But at another press conference in Los Angeles later that day, Gretzky had regained his composure and spoke with optimism about his future with the Kings and how he and Janet looked forward to their life in Los Angeles.
HOTTEST TICKET IN HOLLYWOOD
As soon as the deal was announced, the Kings were bombarded with requests for season tickets. Hollywood is built on stars and the biggest one in hockey had just landed in town. Gretzky rewarded the Kings with a monster season—54 goals, 168 points, second to Mario Lemieux’s 85 and 199—and lifted the team to second in the Smythe Division, seven points ahead of the Oilers. The teams met in the playoffs and the Kings won the series. The jolt that Gretzky gave the NHL in Los Angeles was the inspiration for expansion in that area with the San Jose Sharks and Anaheim Mighty Ducks joining the league in the next few years. He won three scoring titles in the next five years and produced 40 points in 25 in the 1993 playoffs when the Kings lost the final to the Montreal Canadiens. Gretzky wound down his career with the St. Louis Blues and the New York Rangers. After retirement, he was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1999, saw his jersey number retired league-wide, and had a second career as a coach and manager…while McNall wound up in jail for a variety of nefarious money schemes.
* * * * *
SHOW ME THE MONEY
“I don’t know the salaries of the other players and I really don’t want to know. It’s the World Hockey Association, I think, that was the direct cause to all the changes in salary structures. But I think that the excesses are over and that soon, things will be back to normal.”
—Yvan Cournoyer on salaries in the 1970s
“We’ve made a final offer. We hope Ziggy Palffy will come to his senses. We have NO hope his agent will.”
—Islander GM Mike Milbury
“Sources also confirm that there is no one left in Canada who can remember when hockey was a simple game, played for fun.”
—Ottawa journalist Roy MacGregor, on Alexei Yashin’s contract holdout
“As always, I remain hopeful that Don Cherry won’t be offered the same length contract.”
—broadcaster Ron MacLean,
on his contract renewal
GALLIVAN-TING
Broadcaster great Danny Gallivan had a unique way of using the language in calling Canadiens games for 30 years.
Danny Gallivan, the radio and television play-by-play broadcaster of the Montreal Canadiens, described a shot by Boom-Boom Geoffrion this way: “Geoffrion creases the post with a cannonading drive.” When he received a letter from an English professor who claimed that there was no such adjective as
“cannonading,” Gallivan’s short response was “There is now.”
A college English teacher himself, Gallivan’s command of the language inspired his literate descriptions of the great Canadien teams he covered. He called 16 Stanley Cup championships in his 32 years behind the microphone, starting in 1952. The team advanced to the playoff final in Gallivan’s first eight years on the job, the large audience exposure in the spring quickly making him a household name across Canada.
GREAT GALLIVANISMS:
“Lapointe avoids the forechecker with a slick spinnerama move.”
“Dryden stymies Esposito with a scintillating save.”
“Rousseau just failed to negotiate contact with that high pass.”
“Bossy failed to negotiate the puck through the plethora of players in front of the net.”
“Provost makes a visitation to the penalty box.”
“Montreal takes the lead on a classic Robinsonian effort.”
“The puck is lost in Gump Worsley’s paraphernalia.”
“Ferguson and Shack are in a real donnybrook, if not an outright brouhaha.”
“A multiplicity of faceoffs is the overwhelmingly dominant feature in this game.”
“There is an absence of sustained scintillation through the opening half-period.”
WHEN HOCKEY TRUMPED HITLER
During the 1936 Winter Olympics, Hitler hoped to demonstrate Aryan superiority, but he couldn’t stop Germans from cheering for a beloved Jewish hockey player.
GLORY DAYS
Rudi Ball’s hockey career began in 1925 when he was 15 years old. During a local game Rudi was inspired by Blake Watson, an amateur Canadian hockey star who moved to Austria to study medicine and played for teams there. Rudi asked his father for a pair of skates and, once he got them, spent as much time as he could on the ice. Within three years, the talented teenager went from ice-rink newbie to up-and-coming star. In 1928, playing with the Berliner Sports Club, he won the German Championship and Switzerland’s prestigious Spengler Cup. He was only 18 years old.
Though very short (5'4") and light (140 pounds), Ball was described as one of hockey’s most “dreaded” players. What he lacked in bulk he made up for in clever tactics, incredible speed, and shooting accuracy. In 1930 Ball helped to bring the Berliner Sports Club a World Championship silver medal and a European Championship gold, and a French sports magazine voted him number one of Europe’s top 10 hockey players. But it was at the 1932 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York, that Ball became a German hockey hero. Their country got its first Olympic medal in hockey when Ball pulled a hat trick in the final game against Poland. With a score of 4–1, he led Germany to the bronze.
PUSHED OUT
Ball returned home as one of the most popular players in the country. But the next year, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. The new dictator made no secret of his hatred of anyone with Jewish lineage…and Ball’s father was Jewish. As Jewish businesses were boycotted, Jewish civil servants were fired, and Jewish athletes were banned from sports facilities, Rudi and his brothers decided to leave the country. They moved to St. Moritz, Switzerland, where all three played hockey. Their parents stayed behind. And then the 1936 Winter Olympics rolled around.
SINISTER GAMES
In 1931 the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had voted to hold the 1936 Winter and Summer Olympic Games in Germany. But back then, Germany was a democracy. Five years later, Hitler was in control, and he planned to use the Olympics as a platform for Nazi “values.” Hitler and his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels wanted to showcase Germany’s athletic prowess as a way to demonstrate the supposed superiority of the Aryan race.
But at the same time, Hitler also wanted to avoid a boycott of the Games. If other countries and the IOC thought Germany was aggressive and racist (violating the Olympic premise of tolerance and peace), they would be unlikely to participate. So to appease any detractors, the Nazis officially proclaimed that German Jewish athletes wouldn’t be discriminated against. But unofficially, they excluded all “non-Aryans,” including Rudi Ball.
SORRY, HITLER
But another young hockey star was poised to foil Hitler’s plans for an Aryan-only team. Gustav Jaenecke wasn’t Jewish, but he had been Ball’s teammate at the Berliner Sports Club and the Lake Placid Olympics. The two were Germany’s highest scorers and had developed a friendship and a respect for each other’s abilities. Jaenecke believed that Ball should represent Germany in the Olympics, and he refused to play without him.
Without its two best players, Germany would likely be humiliated on the ice. Plus, the Nazis realized, Ball was an international star—the world knew he was Jewish and would notice his absence. But Ball wouldn’t play for a racist country for nothing, and he cut a deal with the Nazis: he agreed to return and play for Germany…but only if he could get his parents safely out of the country.
FAST BALL
By February 6, 1936, in the scenic twin villages of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Bavaria, the Nazis had hidden all the signs saying that Jews were not welcome, and the Olympic opening ceremonies began. During the Games—as Great Britain, Canada, and the United States battled for hockey gold—a different kind of drama unfolded. German fans were going crazy over Rudi Ball.
Journalists reported that Ball’s terrific speed and energy dominated his team and made Germany a respectable contender in the Games. Germans cheered as Ball led his team to victory over Italy, Switzerland, and Hungary. And they cheered him when he staved off a rout when Germany lost to the United States. After Ball was injured and unable to continue, the Germans finished fifth. But he’d shown himself to be Germany’s best hockey player, and the country loved him.
DER FUMING FÜHRER
How Hitler felt about all that admiration wasn’t recorded, though it’s doubtful he shared in the joy. Still, the Nazis were clever when it came to propaganda, and they used Ball’s success to claim they weren’t a brutal, racist regime after all. Some in the international Jewish community were angry that Ball had participated and allowed Hitler to use him that way. But for Ball himself, his family’s freedom was on the line. He remained very guarded in his comments to the press, but a clue to his real feelings came in an interview with a Canadian journalist. Ball’s mother was Lutheran and non-Jewish, and he could have aligned himself with her faith and family to toe the Nazi line when asked how he identified himself. But instead he simply stated, “I belong to the Jewish faith, but to the German nation.”
Ball did get his family out of Germany, but he stayed behind to play for Berliner Sports Club, winning several European Championships. After the war, he moved to South Africa to live with one of his brothers. Ball was the first hockey star on the African continent and was still playing hockey in his 40s, winning the South African Championship in 1951. He died in 1975 and in 2004 was inducted into the International Ice Hockey Federation Hall of Fame.
THOSE NUTTY NETMINDERS
The basic absurdities of the position mean that not all men who wear the pads fit the parameters of so-called “normal.”
The job could be described this way: A man, his body covered with small mattresses and carrying a large wooden club, stands in front of a piece of fish net stretched over a rectangle of pipes and tries to place his body in the way of a three-inch piece of frozen rubber fired towards him at speeds in excess of 110 miles per hour. A U.S. magazine writer once called hockey goaltenders “a special breed of man, half commando and half human pincushion.”
“There’s only one job in sports that’s worse,” said Lorne “Gump” Worsley, a front-line NHL goalie for 21 seasons, “and that would be as the javelin catcher on a track team.” Throughout the century or so of hockey, the men in front of the nets have been a breed apart from other players, “different” in a variety of ways; some actually, well, unusual.
THESE ARE NORMAL MEN?
Arguments claim that many goalies are ordinary chaps, level-headed guys simply trying to earn a living. Ken Dryden, the intell
ectual goalie of six Stanley Cup championship teams in the 1970s with the Montreal Canadiens, was viewed as normal…Sure, all “normal” folks play goal in the NHL while attending law school as a full-time student! Johnny Bower was a pleasant, easygoing man during his splendid career with four 1960s Cup-winners as a Toronto Maple Leaf. But the “normal” Bower did not start his 13-season stay with the Leafs until he was 33 and was considering retirement after years at the minor league level.
SOME PRE-GAME WARMUP
Glenn Hall was a remarkable athlete who played in a record 502 consecutive complete games. But he vomited before most of them, and often between periods. “I do think the media blew up the fact that I was throwing up,” Hall said. “When I threw up, I felt like I was doing what I needed to do to prepare for the game. I felt that if I threw up, I played better.”
BUT DID THEY EVER TALK BACK?
Jacques Plante was normal, except for 2,456 idiosyncrasies. Andy Brown was normal, except that he refused to wear a face mask, the last NHL goalie to play without one, and he raced stock cars in the offseason. Gump Worsley, also one of the last goalies to put on a mask, reasoned “Would it have been fair not to give the people a chance to see my beautiful face?” (Gump’s antics are explored by Uncle John in more detail elsewhere in this Reader.) Patrick Roy, a brilliant goalie on four Stanley Cup championship teams with the Canadiens and Colorado Avalanche, often talked to the goal posts, asking them for help.
ANKLE-HACKERS
Billy Smith was the goalie on four Cup-winning teams with the New York Islanders and Ron Hextall was the Conn Smythe Trophy winner as playoff MVP with the Philadelphia Flyers even though they lost the final to the Edmonton Oilers. Both goalies created the notion that they were sadistic nuts, swinging their sticks at the ankles of opponents who ventured near their creases, and even picking fights with intruders.
PLANTE A SEED
Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Shoots and Scores Page 31