by Grant Fuhr
A community of 18,000 with few non-white families, Spruce Grove was typical of small-town Canada in the 1960s. Settled by homesteaders in the 1870s, it was comfortable in its identity as a town on the railway line heading west out of Edmonton. The greater world that would intrude later that turbulent decade might as well have been a million miles away. In Spruce Grove, life revolved around the local hockey rink and the weekly broadcast of Hockey Night in Canada on Saturdays. The long, frozen months of a northern Alberta winter had to be endured until spring made its late appearance. Little wonder that the town’s most notable athletic products—Grant, NHLers Stu Barnes, Nathan Dempsey and Ben Scrivens, plus Olympic gold medal skier Jennifer Heil—are all participants in winter sports.
While there were only a couple of black families in the area, Spruce Grove proved to be largely accepting of the active little boy with a passion for hockey. Betty and Bob later adopted Grant’s sister Debbie, another mixed-race child. They accepted that they’d just have to cope with their fear of shortcomings. When Grant was four or five, his parents told him that he was adopted. Any concerns they had about him being unsettled were groundless.
Grant:
Probably being told that early—It didn’t mean anything. The rest of the time growing up, you just saw them as your parents. It didn’t really make much of a difference. At the time, you didn’t know any better. While growing up all you knew is your mom and dad. That’s all you worried about. They made sure you had whatever you needed. It was harder for my sister, though, because she really wanted to know her parents. I think after Mom passed away she had mentioned it, and it didn’t work out the way she wanted. Whereas I just assumed there’s one set of parents and was treated that way. That’s the way I was brought up. For me, I didn’t know any better and didn’t get treated any different. You don’t realize, until you’re a parent yourself, how much they gave up to give you everything. It reminds me of that saying, “Money isn’t everything, but it sure keeps the kids in touch.”
Bob and Betty worked hard to keep their active and energetic boy busy playing sports. Aside from part of a year spent in Saskatoon, home was 619 McLeod Avenue, a modest corner bungalow that, outside of the now-huge spruce tree on the front lawn, looks remarkably similar to the days when Grant was a child there. The garage that Bob built still stands. There was also an unfinished basement that served as a perfect indoor hockey surface.
Grant:
It wasn’t a big house, but it was comfortable. Everyone sat in the living room and watched Hockey Night in Canada on TV. Everybody played. We could play hockey in the basement, because it wasn’t finished. I think we drove Mom nuts, but we all kind of congregated there. And the other games kind of took place just out on the side street. There wasn’t very much traffic except for the neighbours, so we played there and then ran across to play in the park. It was kind of a perfect spot. During the winter, you played hockey, summer baseball, sometimes field hockey. Drove the neighbourhood crazy while playing street hockey. Probably there were lots of neighbours that weren’t very happy with us. But it was a perfect neighbourhood to grow up in. We had a whole bunch of different types. There were kids who were French. We had some Native kids. It was a wild mix of kids, but all die-hard athletes. Even the guys that weren’t really athletically good still played.
For a boy more inclined to sports than studying, the park and the unfinished basement of the house on McLeod were the perfect laboratory. Betty was not athletic, but even she could see that her son was remarkably coordinated for his age. Teachers noticed, too. And so she accepted her son’s 24/7 sports obsession.
Grant:
She liked it because it kept me out of trouble. So she would drive us wherever we needed to go. At that time I played baseball, hockey … hockey on a couple of different teams. Sometimes baseball on a couple of different teams. It was seven days a week doing something.
Against the backdrop of the long, cold northern Alberta winter, Grant became hockey obsessed. One night, at the age of seven, he told his family that he was going to play goalie in the NHL. “He said that more than once, too,” remembered Betty Fuhr in a 1996 interview with Sports Illustrated. “Grant had a natural ability from a tender age. He was very well coordinated. He went to grade one, and the teachers were astounded at his coordination. Playing NHL hockey was a dream Grant had very early on. In concentrating on it so much, he never really liked school.” The manifest hockey destiny was just fine with his father, a sports nut himself. Still, it fell to Bob, a former teacher, to make sure there was some balance in his son’s life. That meant getting him off the rink and into his homework.
Grant:
He used to be a schoolteacher, so the school work for him was a big priority. I wasn’t the best of students at that time. I banged heads with him a few times over the years over that, because sports were my priority. A lot of the time you would have to have that homework done in order to play, so you found ways to do both things.
School was at Spruce Grove Composite High School. With the rink on the school grounds, it was easy to slip away during school. A lot of times they’d look to see which kids were missing and it was always the same kids. The vice-principal, Orest Haday, would walk over and knew exactly where to find us. It wasn’t like they had to search hard. You got some kids that would go to the pool hall, and we were easy to find at the rink. We were always there. Well, then we’d get a little lecture about “Do you really think it’s appropriate?” We’d be, “Probably not.” He’d say, “Okay. Go back to the school,” and we’d stay and play hockey. He’d just send me to the office and it would turn into a conversation about hockey. Our principal was another sports fan who was great. You might be in trouble but you were never in real trouble. A couple of the other teachers didn’t quite see it that way. Mr. Haday took a lot of heat from them, but at the end of the day they also pushed you to be better. You just didn’t realize it at that time.
The sports obsession that was natural to Grant, however, was less so for his sister.
Grant:
She probably got overlooked a little bit by the parents because sports dictated everything. In that sense, I’m probably not a very good older brother. She got dragged to a lot of baseball games, a lot of hockey games. I think she kind of got the bad end of the deal there and probably sacrificed a bunch. She got dragged to a lot of spots where I’d know she probably didn’t want to be.
In addition to his family and friends in Spruce Grove, Grant had an extended family of cousins and grandparents living in nearby Stony Plain, Alberta. His grandparents (Gramps and Betty) lived together on a farm just outside of Stony Plain, right off of Highway 16. Grant still has many cousins out there: it’s a big family, and they’ve all had kids. The kids have all had kids, too. Most of them still live around the Stony Plain area. Sunday visits to see the grandparents and cousins inevitably evolved into sports of some kind, with Grant and his cousins playing hockey, baseball or any other game that came to mind. Later, he would play those same sports against his cousins as a member of Spruce Grove teams taking on the boys from Stony Plain.
Grant:
Spruce and Stony was a pretty good rivalry. We had a lot of fun playing against Stony. It was kind of like Edmonton-Calgary, only the towns were a little bit closer. We always played minor sports against each other. We played minor baseball against each other. It was always kind of Spruce versus Stony. To go from that into Edmonton-Calgary wasn’t that big a step.
Playing in tiny Spruce Grove had its advantages. As opposed to the big city of Edmonton, there was plenty of available ice in the small town and plenty of teams who could use a goalie. Grant was soon playing for multiple teams, often one or two age groups older. He’d occasionally fill in for his father’s adult teams when the need arose for a goalie. The higher-calibre opposition pushed the young netminder to become faster in his reflexes and more calculating in his angles. Like so many NHL stars—such as future teammate Wayne Gretzky or Steve Yzerman—Grant’s game was a
ccelerated by the challenges of older competition.
While his fidgety self was in the classroom, Grant’s mind was always on the sport he watched on TV every winter Saturday. With the Oilers not joining the NHL until 1979, he became a diehard fan of the Toronto Maple Leafs and their stellar goalies Johnny Bower and Terry Sawchuk. (He still calls Sawchuk, who starred in both Detroit and Toronto, the best goalie of all time. “He’s always struck me as the guy who set the bar for everybody else with his style and his movement,” Grant says.)
For an aspiring goalie, Sawchuk and Bower were the early role models—ironic since Grant’s acrobatic style so little resembled their structured angles-first approach. Furthermore, Grant was left-handed, meaning he caught the puck with his right hand, the opposite of Bower and Sawchuk. Later, Grant would find more-similar models in Detroit’s Roger Crozier and Chicago’s Tony Esposito, both left-handed goalies who excelled at angles and agility in the 1960s and ’70s. Being left-handed had its challenges for the young Fuhr: up until peewee, Grant had to make do with conventional gloves, playing the position cross-handed.
Grant:
I learned to play with flipped hands, so I actually caught with my left hand probably my first seven or eight years playing goal. I could still play that way if I had to. This one birthday, I finally got the set of gloves my natural way. Dad got them for me and it made things a thousand times easier, because it was just instinctive. I shot right-handed, so if you caught the puck, you could play the puck instead of letting it bounce. I felt pretty fortunate to get the gloves, and I seemed to get a lot better right away.
Neuroloigists talk about the flexible nature of a young brain that allows for dramatic leaps in cognitive and reactive abilities during the first two decades of life. This elasticity is why young people can change their hand preference or even their speaking accent after an accident—something virtually impossible to accomplish after the age of 20.
Grant’s athletic style, mixing acrobatic movement with brazen courage, was soon the talk of the hockey community in Spruce Grove and nearby. Locals began discussing the pro prospects of Bob Fuhr’s son. That notoriety also put him on the radar of Kenny Larue, a bird dog scout for the Victoria Cougars of the Western Hockey League, who operated Ken Den Crests in Edmonton. In the days before a bantam draft, most of the scouting was done by local men such as Larue, who passed on their reports to a particular junior team. Larue inquired whether the young lefty with the lightning hands and feet might be interested in playing for the Cougars. Grant didn’t need to be asked twice.
Grant:
I drove out with my dad and my Uncle Roy, going to my first camp in Victoria. The first people we met in the office were Archie Henderson, Greg Tebott and Jim Clackson. As a 15-year-old kid, that was a little intimidating. At the same time, I didn’t realize that it was going to be a career choice. It was just another level hockey to try out, to see if you liked it.
In the fall camp of 1978, Kenny Larue’s impressive scouting report was validated: Grant was raw, but he impressed everyone with his competitive zeal and his blazing hand speed. Still, the Cougars had older goalies ahead of him on the depth chart, so that season Grant bounced back and forth between Victoria, his midget team in Spruce Grove and the Alberta Junior League. By his 17th birthday, however, he was in Victoria to stay. With a job assured in the Cougars’ net, he dropped out of school to concentrate on becoming a pro goaltender. It was now the NHL or bust.
Grant:
I think the original plan was that we were going to take classes while I played junior—which lasted all of about half a year. The program we ran, coach Jack Shupe would practise at 11 o’clock every morning. It was run like a pro program. The big thing about Victoria was that it had a big-league atmosphere because, at that time, it was the only game in town. Plus we practised like an NHL team during the day. So you got to see what the pro game would be like. Some of the guys still managed to go through school, but mainly we just kind of treated it like, “Hockey’s going to be it,” and I stuck to that theory. At the time, you don’t see it as a gamble. You look back at it now, it’s a pretty big gamble. It was a big step, but my parents knew this is what I wanted and they were willing to give me a shot at following the dream.
The lovely harbour city of Victoria was a fortuitous place to land. Since entering the WHL in 1971, the Cougars had been a solid franchise (after a rocky debut). Despite a number of scoring stars and solid finishes, however, the team had never broken through in the post-season—even with future Blackhawk all-star Murray Bannerman in net. Grant’s timing was perfect: he was the hero the Cougars were looking for. Grant was also fortunate to find himself alongside many stars who would go on to varying degrees of pro success. There was an authentic superstar in Barry Pederson, who became a Top-10 pick to Boston in 1980. In addition, the Cougars featured Greg Adams, highly touted first rounders Brad Palmer and Paul Cyr, enforcer Torrie Robertson and hard-nosed defenceman Bob McGill. Grant’s draft season of 1980–81 was also the breakout WHL season of future NHL star Geoff Courtnall, who would be Grant’s teammate in Edmonton’s 1988 Stanley Cup run and from 1995 to 1999 in St. Louis. “We had a good team,” Courtnall remembers. “We had a fast offensive team but defensively we weren’t great. It was a run-and-gun team like Edmonton. [Grant] could stop two or three shots while the guys got back. I think in one of the games he had 50 shots. He just really made a lot of saves. The team won and lost based on how he played.”
Many teenagers thrust into the high-stakes competition of major junior hockey far from home can experience extreme emotions of dislocation and stress. The transition for Native or black players can be even harder as they struggle to find a place both on the team and in a community usually unfamiliar with racial diversity. But with all the excitement of starting his junior career in a new city far from home, there was little time for Grant to become homesick.
Grant:
I wasn’t ever homesick, but getting away from home was a little bit of an eye-opener. The family I billeted with was the McKaskills. Great household. Buddy McCarthy, Randy Zinn and I all lived in the same house. At the same time, the McKaskills had two kids with Down syndrome. It was an experience, and then to have us three fools running around made it even more interesting. All you did was live, breathe and die hockey.
For the first year, you’re so preoccupied with playing that you don’t understand that you’re away from home that much until you get home around Christmas. My first road trip with the Cougars was 22 days by bus across the entire west of Canada. Play your way out to Winnipeg against the teams in Alberta and Saskatchewan, then play your way back from Winnipeg. We made the big swing though Alberta. You had to come back through Calgary, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, so my parents would always make the full swing to see me play.
I think it was tough on my mom, though. She had a hard time with it, because right about that time, she and Dad got divorced. But I was away from it at the time, so I couldn’t really tell. We talked on the phone all the time, so it didn’t seem that bad to me. I didn’t know any better except to play hockey every day. Leaving after Christmas is always hard, because now you got all this nice new stuff and it’s got to stay at home till you get back at the end of the season in April or May. But the minute you’re back with the guys on the team again, it’s your built-in family.
Grant piled up the wins in his rookie season of 1979–80, going 30–12 while playing 43 of the Cougars’ 72 regular-season games in his first year of major junior. He split time with holdover Kevin Eastman during the regular season, but the tandem produced the league’s top goals against average (GAA) as Victoria allowed a whopping 67 fewer goals than anyone else.
A young Kelly Hrudey, playing for the Medicine Hat Tigers, had heard about the hotshot goalie who would become both an opponent and teammate in the NHL. “I had heard tons about him,” Hrudey recalled. “He was a year younger than me, and I never knew what to expect about him. But in a league full of really athletic goalies, he had a bette
r set of athletic skills at that level. And he used them. Not everyone did that. He relied on his catching hand all the time and he could recover with it. He was a pleasure to watch even then. You knew you had to be really good.” Grant’s almost perfect rookie season did not have a perfect ending, however. He suffered a dislocated shoulder on April 27 during the playoff game in which the Regina Pats defeated Victoria to win the WHL title. The shoulder woes were a precursor of ongoing issues he’d suffer during his NHL career, issues that led to pins being placed in his shoulders to hold them in place.
Grant’s dynamic play garnered the Jim Piggott Memorial Trophy as the WHL Rookie of the Year for 1979–80. Better yet, for the first time, Victoria had made it all the way to the WHL final. The playoff breakthrough paved the way for the following season’s success.
Grant’s play left opponents and teammates in awe. “He had the perfect personality for a goalie,” recalls Courtnall, who was called up to the Cougars midway through Grant’s rookie year. “He was very calm and relaxed, not only in life but the way he played. He was a silent competitor. I was playing junior B and I hear that this goalie was up and coming and was one of the best coming up. In our playoff series, the reason why we got there was Grant.”
For Grant, the following 1980–81 season would prove to be one of the best a goalie has ever had in the history of major junior hockey. Fuhr’s Cougars owned the competition, setting a WHL record that still stands for wins (60) while outscoring opponents 462–217. Grant played 59 of the 72 games with numbers that sparkled by the high-scoring standards of major junior at the time: A GAA of 2.78, a save percentage of .903 and four shutouts—with a 48–9–1 record to go along with it. He led the entire CHL in every major goalie statistic possible and was given the Del Wilson Trophy as WHL Goalie of the Year.
