by Ken Dryden
Daniel remembers the final game of a tournament in Kitchener when he and Steve were playing AAA with the Mississauga Senators. Their opponent was the Elgin-Middlesex Chiefs, and future NHLers Joe Thornton, who was already six-foot-three, Mike Van Ryn, and Brian Campbell. Playing against Thornton, Steve had a choice. Most players, if not intimidated by him, became passive. They backed off, avoided the one-on-one contest that by size and skill they would surely lose, and waited for help. Steve wasn’t as big as Thornton, but he was big enough, and he could skate. He was competitive; he could focus; he could live with humiliation and defeat. He went right at Thornton. “He got in his grill,” Daniel remembers, and he stayed there, giving him little room to breathe. Thornton wasn’t used to that, and the Senators won. Steve ended up on the tournament all-star team.
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Early in a season, a team doesn’t know what it has. The Calgary Flames had missed the playoffs the previous four years and hadn’t started the 2000-01 season well. Players were being moved into the lineup, and out. Some were sent to the minors.
Saint John was also sorting out its roster. Steve played some games and didn’t play others. Playfair worked with the defence in practice drills to get the puck out of their zone. “Passing from deep in your corner to the middle of the ice, that’s insane,” Playfair says. But sometimes that’s where the open ice is. As a defenceman, you need to read when to make that pass, and when not to—and be able to make that decision instantly. “One game,” Playfair recalls, “Monty passes the puck to a teammate in the middle, it goes off his skate, into the slot, one of their guys takes a slapshot; it hits the crossbar and goes up into the stands. When Monty comes off, I say to him, ‘That’s exactly the play we want. Next time, trust yourself and make it again.’ Monty had this ‘but it hit the crossbar’ look on his face. I said to him, ‘They didn’t score.’” It wouldn’t be the last time Steve made a pass up the middle in his own zone, but the puck didn’t always ring off the crossbar.
A player needs to know himself, and a coach needs to know his player, what he’s good at and what he isn’t, what he aspires to be and what his capabilities are. It’s the only way their relationship can work. In December, the Saint John players and coaches were given new forms to fill out. The players were asked to rate themselves, and the coaches rated each player—excellent, good, adequate, or poor—in the following categories: pre-game preparation, pre-practice preparation, determination/battle level, work ethic during games, and work ethic during practices. Steve answered, respectively, good, excellent, good, good, and excellent. The coaches rated him good, adequate, adequate, good, and good.
Of the areas of his game about which he felt most satisfied, Steve mentioned his “work ethic; commitment.” His coaches wrote about him: “willingness to compete (toughness); good skater and strong passer; his desire to learn pro game.”
About those aspects of his game that he believed helped the team the most, Steve answered: “aggressiveness; high intensity with moving pucks; being physical.” His coaches wrote: “playing physical game; plays within himself.”
Calgary GM Craig Button reviewed these forms with his Saint John coaches, and kept them, so that one day if a player had problems and Button was looking for answers, he might find some clues here. Button still had these forms many years later.
By December, Saint John was in the middle of the pack in the AHL, at times doing well enough to make the players and coaches think that greater success was possible, but then doing poorly enough to make them wonder. There was a team-making moment just before Christmas. Wayne Fleming, coach of the Canadian team at the Spengler Cup tournament in Davos, Switzerland, phoned Button and asked for four of the Saint John players; Steve was one of them. Playfair called the four players into his office and told them the news. Then he and Ron Wilson met with the rest of the roster. Playfair recalls telling them, “This is a great opportunity for us. Are we a good team, or do we just have some good players?” Two or three of these players had been sitting out most games; now they got to play. The others had to fill bigger roles. “When those guys were in Switzerland,” Playfair remembers with a smile, “we won all three of our games.”
The players who stayed behind in Saint John proved to themselves, to each other, and to their Spengler Cup–playing teammates, that they were good, too. Steve and the others who went to Switzerland, tested in the playoff-like atmosphere of a tournament, came back better players. When they rejoined their teammates, they also realized that they weren’t indispensable. “The second half of the season,” Playfair recalls, “the players believed we had something special.
“Between those high moments,” Playfair now says, “there was some misery. Some days when those kids didn’t have a passion for this life anymore and thought I was holding them back.” Steve’s bad moments came, as they usually did, when he tried to do too much. Playfair worked with him patiently. “First of all, with Monty,” he says, “you had to understand he was always prepared. He worked in practice, and in the gym. He was always into the game. He didn’t do things for his own glory. If the team needed something, he tried to give it. So his weren’t lazy mistakes. They were winning mistakes. He was trying to make the winning play. Lots of players just want to get through their shift. Monty wanted to win every shift. Lots of players, when they make a mistake, they slam their stick on the ice, or bang the glass. They want you to know that they care. I don’t remember Monty ever doing that. He knew I knew that he cared.”
When the team had injuries to its forwards, sometimes Playfair asked Steve to play wing. “Some games I know he didn’t want to do it, but it gave us our best chance to win. I told him that there would come a day sometime when a team, finalizing its roster, would have to make a choice between two players as their seventh defenceman: one who could give the team some flexibility and also play up front, and one who couldn’t. I’m sure Monty thought that I was just giving him the company line.” But Steve did it. And years later, when he was playing with Florida, Jacques Martin, the Panthers’ coach and general manager, had to make a roster decision between Steve and another defenceman. “I opened the paper this one morning,” Playfair remembers, “and there is Jacques saying something like, ‘We like Steve because we can also put him up on the wing.’ So I sent Monty a text: ‘All those years ago that you didn’t want to be a winger?’ And he texts back: ‘Yeah, that just made me a million dollars.’”
Playfair and Daniel Tkaczuk both remember a particular game later that season. It was on the road against the Providence Bruins, who had won the AHL’s Calder Cup two years before. “They had some physical guys,” Daniel recalls. “It was a crash and bang game, and the crowd was really into it.” Playfair picks up the story: “They were running at us and pushing us around. Monty was sitting on the bench waiting for his shift and he leans back and says to me, ‘Put me on.’ He goes out, grabs somebody, and fights him.” It was Lee Goren, a big, physical winger. Later, they fought again. “It changed the whole temperature of the game,” Playfair says. “Monty just said to the other team, ‘Enough. You’re not allowed to do that.’ He wasn’t going to let us be on the receiving end any longer.” The Flames won, 6–2.
After that game, Daniel recalls, the coaching staff and the players saw Steve differently. He had “stood up.” He had given them a reason to see to the other non-physical aspects of his game. His occasional lapses seemed to matter less. He stayed in the lineup the rest of the year.
The Flames finished the regular season behind only Worcester and Rochester, with the third highest number of points in the league. They swept Portland in the first round, then beat Quebec, then Providence (who had upset Worcester in the second round), and advanced to the final against the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins, Pittsburgh’s farm team. The Penguins won the first game in Saint John; the Flames won the next two; the teams split the two after that. The Flames headed home to New Brunswick for the sixth game, and a chance to win the team’s first Calder Cup championship.
&n
bsp; With one minute to go, Saint John was ahead, 1–0. This is a player’s time, Playfair says; it is the players, not the coaches, who will decide the outcome. There was a time-out. The Flames captain, Marty Murray, had been with the team three years earlier, when the Flames lost in the finals to the Philadelphia Phantoms. Playfair had told Murray at the beginning of this year’s playoffs that, if the team had a chance to win, he would have him on the ice at the end. During the time-out, Playfair gave the players their assignments and reminded them of a few things; but his real purpose, in the biggest minute of the biggest game of the season, was to get the players on the ice that he could count on most. Murray skated out for the faceoff. So did Steve.
Steve’s brother Chris tells this story with a catch in his voice, because Steve had a catch in his voice when he told it to him. Fourteen years later, before Steve’s funeral, Steve’s mother Donna told Jim Playfair this story, because Steve had told it to her. The kid who had never been drafted, who needed to talk his way into the home opening night lineup, who the whole year had done the kind of mucky stuff that his team had needed even if he wasn’t very good at doing it—he was sent onto the ice to bring the game home.
A minute later, the season was over. The Flames had won.
Lindsay has a full-page photo from The Hockey News hanging in her basement. With a jammed arena of heads as the background, it shows her brother mostly in profile, a baseball cap on backwards, his arms upraised, his eyes on fire, his mouth open in a roar of triumph, the Calder Cup in his hands.
—
When the next season began, Steve was back in Saint John. At 2:30 in the morning on November 23, 2001, Steve was awakened by a phone call. It was Jim Playfair. Calgary defenceman Igor Kravchuk had been injured, and Steve needed to get to Buffalo right away. He would play his first NHL game that night.
He got an early-morning flight to Toronto, but the plane got rerouted to London, Ontario, because of fog. The plane stayed at the gate in London, and passengers were instructed to remain on-board as the pilots waited for the weather to clear. When it didn’t clear, the flight attendants eventually gave in to Steve’s pleading—“I’ve got to get to my first NHL game!”—and allowed him to collect his bag and sticks from the hold and get off the plane. He rushed and got a taxi to take him directly to Buffalo. Paul, Donna, Chris, and Lindsay all drove down from Toronto to be there.
No goals were scored in the first period; Buffalo scored three by the mid-point of the second. Rhett Warrener was a defenceman for the Sabres at the time; two years later, he and Steve would be teammates in Calgary. “I can remember looking at the stats sheet that night before the game,” Warrener says, “and thinking, ‘Here’s a kid who’s played the last two years in the minors and has just been called up. Guaranteed he’s going to want to fight and make a name for himself. I know that’s what I’d do. I looked around our dressing room and I’m thinking, ‘He doesn’t want to fight Rob Ray [the Sabres enforcer]. I’m probably next on the list. I’m going to have to chuck the knuckles with this kid.’”
Instead, four minutes after Buffalo’s third goal, Steve got into a fight with Denis Hamel.
In the third period, with the score at 4–0, Steve got an assist on a goal by a former Saint John teammate, Steve Begin. The Flames lost, 5–2. Steve had two shots on net and played just under fifteen minutes. “[He] was pretty good,” Calgary coach Greg Gilbert said after the game. “He was pretty steady. That’s what Steve Montador is going to be, a defenceman who moves the puck well and doesn’t try to do too much with it.” Earlier in the day, a Saint John journalist had asked Jim Playfair why Steve was the one called up. “We didn’t say to ourselves, ‘Well, he’s the hot commodity of the day. Let’s send him up there,’” Playfair said. “He’s undergone steady growth and development. He’s a very steady, strong player who moves the puck well, gets up the ice well, and gives us a physical presence. With all those factors, he’d earned the right to go and play in the NHL.” Two days later, Steve played again, in Columbus, then was sent back to Saint John when Kravchuk returned from his injury. He would play a total of eleven games for Calgary that season.
Not long after his return to Saint John, Steve and his teammates and coaches filled out their December review forms. Under the categories of pre-game preparation, pre-practice preparation, determination/battle level, work ethic during games, and work ethic during practices, Steve rated himself excellent, good, excellent, excellent, and excellent. His coaches rated him excellent across the board. As to the areas of his game he felt good about, Steve wrote: “defensive zone play; understanding on-ice awareness/ice management; being confident about my game.” His coaches wrote: “overcame a rough start; confidence—wants to be an impact player; physical presence—becoming a feared defender.” To the question of how the organization could make him a better player, Steve responded: “expand the workout area.” The coaches wrote: “time and patience.” For the first time, Steve’s coaches saw more in him than he saw in himself.
In his rookie year in Saint John, Steve had learned to survive. He had learned to be a regular. He had learned how to win again. Over the next few years, in Saint John and in Calgary, in the words of Marty Gélinas, “he learned how to be a pro.” He had known how to prepare himself for games and practices; he knew the importance of the little details; he knew he needed to commit and deliver every night, and every moment of every night. But he got better at all of these things. Steve was young when he began his second season in Saint John—just twenty-one. Defencemen and goalies, hockey wisdom says, take longer to develop. Not because of the physical skills required, but because of the consistency and discipline that are needed to play such unforgiving positions—a consistency and discipline that maturity brings. Forwards have to create, and they fail almost all of the time because of the difficulty of what they are asked to do. It’s to be expected. Not so for defencemen and goalies. Very few goals are scored in a game; very few can be allowed. Offence is about opportunities; defence is about mistakes.
Steve played solidly for the rest of the 2001–02 season, and the following year, when he was mostly in Calgary. He was getting better, but he wasn’t yet ready to be a regular. Being ready is not something you wait for. It is something you prepare for. Steve was preparing himself for a season and a moment he couldn’t be sure would ever happen. The Cup run of 2004 was still ahead.
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In Calgary, near the end of the 2002–03 season, Steve was struck in the face by a puck and received several stitches. His injury was described as “facial lacerations.” It was likely his third concussion.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Cup run runneth over.
It was late June 2004. The bars along the Red Mile were still red with Flames jerseys; even a little green, with all the hard hats. The frenzy of Calgary’s miracle run to the final had died down, but the glow remained. The city felt good: summer-good; playoff-good. Iginla and Kiprusoff were still the team’s stars, but all of them were now heroes, Steve included. And with time finally to fathom what he had achieved, to the fans Marty Gélinas was even more than “the Eliminator.” Three series-winning goals, two of them in overtime. How was that possible? Three playoff series wins; three wins over division champions; the Flames scoring just two goals in the last two games of the quarter-finals against Detroit, winning them both, one of them in overtime. How was any of it possible? In a few short days, their playoff run had gone from unbelievably exciting to legendary.
When a player wins, he celebrates as long as he can; until somebody tells him to go home. He squeezes every bit of pleasure out of the victory, because he doesn’t know if that feeling will ever come again. The Flames didn’t win in 2004, but it seemed as if they had won. The team partied like they had won. And Steve, with no regular girlfriend, his family more than 2,000 kilometres away, had no one to tell him to go home.
“Marty [Gélinas] and I used to train at the gym at the Father David Bauer Arena,” Hayley Wickenheiser recalls. “That’s h
ow I met Monty.” It was not long after the 2003–04 season had ended. Wickenheiser was twenty-five, a year older than Steve, and the best women’s hockey player in the world. She had won her first Olympic gold medal two years earlier in Salt Lake City, and would go on to win three more. Calgary, the base for the Canadian women’s team, had become Wickenheiser’s home. She also had a little boy, Noah, age four, whom she had adopted—the son of her former boyfriend. “Monty would come and train at the gym. We became friends and hung out occasionally. He became like a brother, and was very kind to my son Noah.
“Monty was always a larger than life, happy-go-lucky guy. He would come into the gym and say hi to everyone. He was an NHL player, but he didn’t take himself too seriously. He didn’t think he was better than anyone else. This wasn’t just an elite gym. I remember this one older gentleman, he had an oxygen tank and he was there for rehab, and Monty would always ride the bike beside him. The guy was probably eighty years old, and they’d just be chatting away.”
Steve was also a confusing set of contradictions, Wickenheiser says. “He would come and go. He was pretty aloof when he wanted to be, and a very cerebral person. He wanted to talk about life, about all kinds of things in life. Publicly and outwardly he was this big hulking strong man, a hero in the run for the Cup; in reality, he was always trying to figure out who he was. What his place was. I’m not sure he ever felt he was worthy of what he had.
“It’s a really insecure life, especially as a 5–6 defenceman. You don’t know if you’re going to be in the lineup, or even have a job, and he didn’t have a lot of stability outside hockey in his personal or family life. And one thing about Monty, he was like a very open book. He would tell you everything. Sometimes you didn’t want to know as much as he was telling you.
