by Ken Dryden
When Steve was twelve, he joined the AA Mississauga Braves. His coach was Jim Donaldson: “Mr. D,” as the players called him. Donaldson had been a good minor hockey player in Toronto as a kid—an opponent or teammate of many who went on to have NHL careers. He was tough, and a good skater with a hard shot, but more than anything, he loved to play. He loved the trash talk and the laughter of the dressing room, the sweat-and-grin of practice, the give-it-all feeling of the big game. He loved being around the guys. He had dreamed of making the NHL himself, of course, but when he didn’t, his hockey life merely shifted direction. He became a father and a coach. He coached mostly the way he played, but now with a parent’s perspective—he and his wife had five kids, and his son Dave was also on the Braves. He knew that his players had their own dreams of making the big time, but his dream for them was to experience the full hockey life—the sweating, grinning, trashtalking, laughter, and give-it-all feeling—the one, years later, that he has come to value the most.
Donaldson turned forty-eight the year he coached Steve. He was working in the warehouse at Chrysler at the time, an eighteen-year veteran of the night shift—10:30 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. He had turned down promotions that would let him work other hours because, as he explains, “The night shift was perfect for me. It allowed me to coach.” During breaks at work, he drew up drills for the next day’s practice on IBM cards that were always lying around. On nights when his team wasn’t playing, he sharpened skates at one of two local arenas, Huron Park or Clarkson. He did that for twenty years. Later, when his kids grew up and he stopped coaching, he moved to the day shift, but found he couldn’t sleep.
Donaldson coached with a growl in his voice and a tight smile on his face, and when he spoke, his mouth turned slightly to one side, like tough guys used to talk. Most of the kids on the team had moved from team to team with him, from select to A, and now to AA. Nine of them would stay together for six years, which in a big city is something almost inconceivable in minor hockey. Steve was one of two players who were new to the team. He was also the youngest. With his December 21 birthday, a teammate or an opponent might be almost a year older than he was—not an insignificant advantage when you are only twelve years old. That older player can be more physically, emotionally, and intellectually developed. He is able to do more things, play with better players as linemates, be on better teams with better coaches. He is more likely to seem to others—teammates, coaches, parents—and to himself, to be a better player, and he is more likely to be a better player, both now and in the future. The first stars, usually the oldest kids, are often the future stars.
Steve had to find a way to fit in with his new team on the ice and off. But if anyone was worried he wouldn’t manage it, they needn’t have. Donaldson describes how, after a week, “I walked into the dressing room and there he was in the middle of the fray. He wasn’t exactly shy and retiring.” When Donaldson thinks about Steve later in that first season, he remembers him as “like [golfer] Lee Trevino walking up the fairway to his ball—talking to the fans, joking. But when he got to that ball, he would focus. It was his time. In practice, Steve would be kibitzing around, but then when I’d blow my whistle he was all business.” He did every drill to “his absolute maximum. Good mood, bad mood, when he came to the rink, no mood. Just hockey. This was like heaven for him. It was where he wanted to be.”
Steve had to pick up the pace of his game; this was AA now. He was a good skater, and had a good shot, but just because he did—and though he was immensely proud of it—it didn’t mean he had to shoot every time and from everywhere. Donaldson often reminded him that when he began to shoot he lowered his head and could no longer see his teammates, who might be open and in an even better position to score. (Donaldson remembers watching the Calgary Flames on Hockey Night in Canada more than ten years later. On the screen, he saw Steve standing at the point; the puck came back to him, he wound up, stopped, and wristed a pass to a teammate in the corner. Donaldson jumped up out of his chair. “He listened,” he shouted. It was a coach’s moment.)
Donaldson coached Steve during the most pivotal minor hockey season for every kid—the year when body-checking is introduced (the age has changed over time, and varies depending on the province). There had been lots of body contact in the seasons before, of course, but it was incidental—two players going for the puck and bumping into each other—and (mostly) accidental. In Toronto, minor hockey tryouts are held in May for the next season, not long after the previous season has ended. When coaches select their team before that body-checking year, they have to ask themselves for the first time: Is he big enough? Is he physical enough? Can he take it? For those kids and their parents who get the good news, they spend the summer thinking about what’s ahead, all of them excited, but many also fearful. Some kids mature earlier; some later. One of Donaldson’s players made the team in May wearing size eight skates and started the season four months later in size elevens. Physical growth brings confidence and aggression to some kids, and gangly, mismatched body parts to others. And suddenly, on the ice, these kids are allowed to collide.
In that first checking year, players look like little bighorn rams running at each other, and they can’t stop themselves from doing it. For weeks into the season and sometimes longer, the puck is almost forgotten. The kids have to prove—to their coaches, to their teammates, to their opponents, and to themselves—that they are tough enough to hit and to take a hit, in this game, next game, every game. Kids who, up until this moment in their lives had been the best players on the ice, who can skate like the wind, prefer suddenly to skate like the wind without the puck, to be the targeter not the target, the punisher not the punished. For some, the joy that has always been in their eyes is gone. And this is true of their parents, too; every season Donaldson saw it happen. A year or two later, and these kids are out of hockey, because of the financial cost of the game, because of the time commitment it requires—that’s what the kids and their parents will say. But really, for many, it’s because of body-checking.
The coaches try to prepare young players for body-checking: how to position themselves, how to take a hit. Although Steve was the youngest on the team, he was strong, big enough, solid on his skates, and had a “knack for hitting,” as Donaldson puts it. Just before the moment of contact, when both kids were loading up for the blow, Steve would deliver his a split second sooner. He had this sense of timing. Maybe it was from having an older brother, and all the wrestling and banging around they did. Steve wasn’t mean, Donaldson recalls, but he could really sting you.
For kids in minor hockey, there is “BC” and “AC”—“before contact” and “after contact.” And there are the “BSs” and the “ASs”—the “before stars” and the “after stars.” Steve, who had never been the best on the ice, at this moment began to see some of the best fall away, and he was still left standing.
One of Steve’s teammates on the Braves was Mike Gardner. Both he and Steve were defencemen, and both played the same defence-first style of game. They both liked to hit, but Steve hit the hardest, “like a truck,” Mike remembers. Steve was the best skater and had the hardest slapshot. Other guys with big shots blasted away from the point, the puck going high and everywhere, their teammates scattering from the front of the net to safety. Steve’s shot, though he used it too frequently, was heavy and low, and nearly always on the net—just right for deflections and rebounds. But it was Steve’s attitude that made him different. He was competitive, fearless, and intimidating to play against. You couldn’t get to him, Mike remembers. If other guys got knocked down they would get embarrassed and shrink away; Steve would get back up as if nothing had happened. If he got into a fight and lost, it was as if he hadn’t lost. He just kept going. If he tried to do too much and got caught out, which happened not infrequently, he’d try harder the next time. He’d do what needed to be done. The team might be behind 3–1, and in between periods “you’d look around the dressing room,” Mike recalls, “and some guys, you know
, they’d figure we’ve got no chance. I’d look at Steve and know we did.
“He was my idol,” Mike says now.
Mike’s parents and the Montadors were friends. The year before, Mike’s older brother, Jimmy, had been killed in a bicycle accident; Mike was devastated. He and Steve didn’t know each other well at the time. Maybe Paul and Donna said something to Steve about the accident, Mike thinks, or maybe Steve just knew, but that summer after his brother’s death, Steve hardly left his side. They had sleepovers, went for bike rides, played endless games of catch. “How many kids would do that?” Mike thinks now. When you are that age you don’t even know what to say when someone dies, let alone what to do. It’s not that they talked about Jimmy, Mike recalls. It was the comfort he felt from Steve being around, and doing things together.
When Mike thinks back on that year’s Braves team, he remembers “a great bunch of guys. We lived in the same neighbourhood, went to the same school. Everybody knew each other. We were a real team. We felt like a team. We played like a team. About 80 per cent of us still see each other today.” They play in a Braves reunion game every year; they play golf together. “It was the best team I ever played on.”
“Steve just loved to play,” Donaldson remembers. “He loved every part of it. He didn’t just love it when he was a star, when body contact came in, when he had a coach who liked him and put him on the power play; when the team was winning. He loved it, every bit of it, all the time. You just knew somehow he would make it.”
It’s tough being a minor hockey coach. It’s the long hours; it’s all the rest of your life that you don’t have time for. But it’s the responsibility you have, more than anything. That’s the best and the hardest part. These players like each other. They develop a feeling for each other and a loyalty to the team; they make a commitment to each other. In the end, they would do almost anything for each other. Those who are coaches and decision-makers in the league know this, but sometimes they forget. If they ask their players to go through a wall for their team, these kids might just try. They will do things that are good for themselves and for each other, and they will do things that aren’t. Coaches and the other adults in the league have to know the difference between what seems to be good for these kids now and what might be bad for them later.
Donaldson himself had been a heart-and-soul player. He did some things as a player that, now as an adult, he knows that he shouldn’t have done. As a coach, he came to know there were limits to what he should ask of his players—because each of these kids had his own life, and lots of years to live it.
At the end of the season with the Braves, Donaldson gathered the parents together. It had been a good year. The team had almost won the AA championship. The kids liked each other. The parents liked each other. Paul recalls how, at this point, Donaldson grew impassioned. There was no need to go on to AAA, he told them. They could stay together and get everything out of the minor hockey experience that they, as parents, had always said minor hockey was for. But the pull of moving up was greater, and several players left—including Steve, who would go on to play AAA hockey for the Marlies.
—
During that season with the Braves, at some moment that didn’t seem to matter at the time—and in a way he later wouldn’t remember—at age twelve, Steve got his first concussion.
CHAPTER FIVE
It took fifty years and the entry of Wayne Gretzky into the NHL for the possibilities of the forward pass to be realized. Passing had been at the centre of the Soviet game, but the Soviets were newcomers to hockey. Canadians were hockey’s creators—and we were the best—so our way of playing, not theirs, must surely be the best. It only followed. The Soviets had looked impressive during the Summit Series and in their smattering of games against NHL players during the rest of the 1970s, but faced with a full NHL season, Soviet players would never be able to stand up to the test. Their way wouldn’t work, Canadians knew, because it wouldn’t work.
Born in 1961, Gretzky grew up in Brantford, Ontario, as a hockey prodigy. He spent endless hours on a backyard rink his father had built, learning the game’s basic skills and much more. He took the game that he saw on TV and learned to think it, imagine it, and make it his own. Lots of kids dominate when they are young, especially when they are among the oldest in their age category, because they are bigger, more practised, and more mature than their teammates and opponents. But when age-related advantage begins to matter less, they get shuffled back into a pack they aren’t familiar with and don’t know how to handle.
Gretzky was a little taller than most kids, but he was skinny. He was a quick skater, but his stride was choppy and awkward enough to make coaches and scouts wonder. But Gretzky, even then, was able to stand back from the hype around his game to see himself. He realized that he wouldn’t be able to dominate in the way his hero Gordie Howe had done—by power and force. Gretzky was a good puck handler, but with the puck on his stick his opponents could converge on him, slow him down, bump him, outmuscle him, and make him ordinary. He needed open ice, and he would only get that if he passed to teammates, then skated to open ice himself so they, in turn, could pass to him. “I skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been,” Gretzky famously said. In other words, it is the players without the puck who determine where the puck is going, by going there themselves. This was how the Soviets played. For years, after the Summit Series, Canadian coaches and players had been able to ignore the Soviet philosophy, but Gretzky was one of our own.
Because of his own personal limitations, Gretzky uncovered other possibilities in himself, and he forced his teammates—Mark Messier, Jari Kurri, Glenn Anderson, Paul Coffey, even the Oilers’ lesser skilled players—to do the same. By playing the way he did, he pushed them to skate faster, pass better, and shoot more accurately. And out of opportunity and necessity, they discovered they could.
In the 1980s, scoring in the NHL increased dramatically. Ordinary players compiled the point totals of superstars of the previous decades; outstanding goalies carried the stats of sieves. If passing were to be the focus, hockey’s patterns had to change.
For its first century, hockey had moved in straight lines, forward and back. There was a right winger and a left winger, a right defenceman and a left defenceman. Those on the right stayed on the right; those on the left stayed on the left. Only the centre roved from side to side. For a winger, there was little worse than having a coach admonish, “Stay on your wing! Stay on your wing!” Yet with blue lines, a red line, and an offside rule which those generated, forward passes were difficult to complete. A pass in your own defensive zone was often too risky; in the offensive zone it was in territory too congested to succeed. Only the neutral zone, between the blue lines, offered promise—less risk, more opportunity—but there, players quickly ran out of space or needed to slow down, both of which defeated their purpose. To pass successfully, therefore, players needed to go to wherever there was open ice—on the right, on the left, it didn’t matter—and skating diagonally across the ice offered a player more space to pick up speed without going offside. With Gretzky and the Russians, hockey changed from an end-to-end “north–south” game, to a side-to-side “east–west” one; from a game focused on the puck-carrier to one focused on everyone else.
A player wearing skates on a surface of ice had always had the capacity to go fast. The rule that prevented a forward pass had slowed him down; the rule change that allowed such a pass gave him the opportunity to go faster. The rule preventing substitutions, and the rule change that allowed them, had similar effects. A regulation that increased the number of players permitted to dress for a game enabled each player to play fewer minutes—and so enabled them to put more into each minute, to go faster, creating the need to be in better shape, to train off-ice and off-season in order to go faster still. Even Broad Street Bully–style intimidation as team strategy couldn’t slow down this evolving game.
Those who grew up in the 1950s remember that decade as the NHL’s to
ugh old days, “when hockey was hockey and men were men.” But they are mistaken. In the 1950s, the team that led the league in fights each season averaged only about one fight every three and a half games. The “Big, Bad Bruins” in the late 1960s pushed that number to slightly more than one every two games; the Flyers to one fight per game a few years later. By that time, the league’s other teams—at first just trying to survive against the Flyers—learned to fight back. In the 1978–79 season, Philadelphia led the league with 74 fights, but Detroit had 71, Toronto 68, Chicago 66, Washington 64, St. Louis 62, and Boston 60. Of the league’s seventeen teams, twelve had 50 fights or more. These numbers increased again during the high-scoring Gretzky years, peaking in 1986. That season, Detroit had 154 fights, almost two per game.
More offence usually leads quickly to more defence, but in the 1980s it led only to more offence. The players, realizing they could score, suddenly seemed addicted to scoring—and their coaches seemed powerless to stop them from trying. Even the goalies had no answer, until they began to increase the size of their equipment, but that came later. It wasn’t until the 1990s that coaches and players started to adapt to the high-scoring game, and they did it with more hooking and holding, more clutching, grabbing, and obstruction—and for some, a team strategy called the “neutral zone trap”—to slow the game down. But the players were getting bigger; and the game, whether by passing or by forechecking, was always on the go. Collisions became more frequent and forceful. And while helmets, in an attempt to bring greater safety to the more dangerous game, had become mandatory for every new player in the league in 1979, they would turn out to have little effect.
