by Grant Fuhr
The Oilers managed to avoid elimination with a 3–2 win in Game 4, setting up a winner-take-all scenario back home for Game 5 (the opening round was a best of five at the time). The team was forced to fly back to Edmonton on the same charter flight as the Kings for the deciding game. In a move typical of the Oilers’ hubris, the team brass (feeling that they would have the series taken care of in three or four games) had neglected to book their own charter and had to go cap in hand to the Kings to hitch a ride back to Alberta. Charlie Simmer, a part of the Kings’ Triple Crown line with Marcel Dionne and Dave Taylor, chuckled as the Oilers filed onto the plane. “We heard that Glen Sather wanted the Oilers to get the front seats on the plane,” he recalled years later. “But our owner, Mr. [Jerry] Buss, told them to get to the back of the plane. We enjoyed that.”
Fittingly, the Kings took the Oilers for another bumpy ride on the Northlands ice in Game 5, racing out to a 7–2 lead over their stunned opponents. The Kings then coasted home, winning the Smythe Division semi-final with a score of 7–4. Edmonton had only themselves to blame for wasting the home-ice advantage in the deciding game. To Sather’s consternation behind the bench, his club took foolish penalties early that resulted in two power play goals for the Kings. While Sather’s team held superstar Marcel Dionne at bay, unheralded players like Daryl Evans, Bernie Nicholls, Doug Smith and Steve Bozek scored some of the biggest goals in the series.
The Kings hadn’t won in Edmonton all year heading into the series, and yet they did so twice in three playoff meetings at Northlands. The 48-point disparity between that underdog series winner and the favourite they toppled is the widest in NHL history. Grant, a few months shy of 20, didn’t look particularly sharp in the series: his GAA was a bloated 5.05. The focus was not on Grant’s shortcomings alone, however; as a team, Edmonton had looked lost and undisciplined. The freewheeling Oilers treated defence like an option against the Kings, whose upset was the L.A. franchise’s only series victory between 1977 and 1989.
Grant:
All I remember is, it was my first playoff and we lose 10–8 the first game, win 3–2, win 3–2, then lose 6–5 in overtime, then lose 7–4. I thought, I’m not going to be here very long if that’s the way the playoffs are going to go. We should have beat L.A. Wow, I didn’t play very well in that playoff series. That Game 1 was a nice eye-opener for me about playoff hockey in the NHL. But it got worse. Much worse. The Miracle on Manchester. Then we lost at home in Game 5 to a team we’d owned in the regular season. Not a great way to go into the summer.
The run-and-gun style of the 1981–82 Edmonton Oilers and superstar Wayne Gretzky had received almost all of the attention from the press and hockey media. That was how Sather wanted his team to be known. In several memorable WHA series with the Winnipeg Jets, he had seen the opponents’ influx of European players (such as Anders Hedberg and Ulf Nilsson) at work. Their style made an impression, and influenced Sather to turn the Oilers into a similarly freewheeling club when he graduated from journeyman player to Edmonton’s head coach in 1976. (Sather’s admiration for how the Jets changed hockey was demonstrated over the years as he brought in former Jets such as Willy Lindstrom and Kent Nilsson, and even former Jet defender Ted Green as one of his assistants.) Sather believed that, unlike previous NHL dynasties, the Oilers could excel with an uptempo game that didn’t rely on conservative checking strategies. But the major stroke of luck came, of course, when a 17-year-old stick figure named Wayne Gretzky fell into the Oilers’ lap. Gretzky’s club, the WHA’s Indianapolis Racers, were undergoing hard times in the fall of 1978, and before the concerned parties could enter into any dispersal draft, Oilers owner Peter Pocklington purchased the contracts of Eddie Mio, Peter Driscoll and Gretzky for a now-laughable sum, reported to be anywhere from $700,000 to $850,000. Sather then managed to keep Gretzky out of the NHL draft and expansion redistribution of players.
The magnificent Gretzky had made the Oilers the darlings of the media crowd. What went largely unnoticed, however, was how Grant had handled the burden of being left alone at the other end, bailing out the offensive juggernaut in 48 of the Oilers’ 82 games in his first year. But in year two, when cracks began showing in Grant’s confidence, he and the team began searching for an explanation. His rookie campaign of 1981–82 had been such a revelation; most felt he would learn from the disastrous playoff experience against the Kings and move ahead from there. But now, the 1982–83 season was looking like more of the same.
Grant:
When you’re that age, you can’t possibly see how things wouldn’t keep going on forever the way they’d gone the year before. It was still the same game and the same puck. But by the time I went down to Cape Breton it felt like everything was different.
Grant was discovering what so many before him had learned about the vagaries of being an NHL goalie. There were only two dozen starting jobs in the world at the time; if you lost yours, it was often impossible to get it back. When asked why he chose goaltending as a profession, Grant’s hero from Toronto, Johnny Bower, explained the mindset: “I just made up my mind I was going to lose teeth and have my face cut to pieces. It was easy.” Another goalie from Grant’s youth, Roger Crozier, had won a Conn Smythe Trophy for his clutch playoff performance in 1966, but he, too, constantly battled the uncertainty of the position. “I like everything about hockey,” Crozier told writer Jim Hunt. “The travelling, the friends I’ve met, the interviews. I like everything but the games.” After losing three games in 1969, Crozier quit to work as a carpenter back home, finally returning to the game after being traded to Buffalo. Perhaps the most perceptive goalie ever, Ken Dryden, summed up the goalie’s dilemma in his classic book The Game when quoting his former peer in the Montreal farm system Tony Esposito. “The pressure is unreal. Most of the goalkeepers, they feel the pressure. The only ones that don’t worry are the ones too dumb to understand what’s happening to them.”
Former Vancouver Sun columnist Jim Taylor had a more droll explanation for the pressure: “Any discussion on hockey goaltenders must begin with the assumption that they are about three sandwiches shy of a picnic. I can prove this. From the moment Primitive Man first lurched erect, he and those who came after him survived on the principle that when something hard and potentially painful comes at you at great velocity, you get the hell out of its path. Goalkeepers throw themselves into its path. I rest my case.”
Those pressures of goaltending affect different men in different ways. While Grant was largely placid during his long career, his fellow Albertan and Hall of Famer Glenn Hall used to throw up before games. Esposito bathed himself in Rub A535 liniment. “Suitcase” Gary Smith shed his bulky padding and showered between periods. Canadiens legend Jacques Plante knit his own toques and sweaters. Many of the men who faced vulcanized rubber whistling past their ears were raging drunks, others brooding loners. Gilles Gratton, a goalie in the ’70s, might have been the strangest ever: he thought he was playing goal to atone for having stoned people in a previous life.
What was a teenager like Grant, fresh from junior hockey, supposed to do in the face of such stories? There were no goalie coaches per se in the NHL in 1982. Grant’s first goalie coach wouldn’t come till his stay in Buffalo in the 1990s, when Mitch Korn was his mentor. Most NHL head coaches let goalies work it out for themselves away from the rink. So while his team was rebounding from the devastating end to the previous year’s playoffs, Grant was trying to reclaim his mojo all on his own. Then came his public blast at the Edmonton fans midway through the 1982–83 season. By the time of his demotion to Cape Breton, Grant was barely at a .500 winning percentage. It was hard to reconcile the remarkable rookie of 1981–82 (who’d finished runner-up to Dale Hawerchuk for the Calder Trophy) with the inconsistent, irritable goalie in his sophomore campaign.
Grant’s sophomore dilemma is not uncommon for athletes, says the University of San Francisco’s Dr. Jim Taylor (no relation to the columnist). “You start to get nervous before a competition because you belie
ve you will perform poorly,” he writes. “All of that anxiety hurts your confidence even more, because you feel physically uncomfortable and there’s no way you can perform well when you’re so uptight. The negative self-talk and anxiety causes negative emotions. You feel depressed, frustrated, angry, and helpless, all of which hurt your confidence more and cause you to perform even worse.… As bad as you feel, you just want to get out of there. If you’re thinking negatively, caught in a vicious cycle, feeling nervous, depressed, and frustrated, and can’t focus, you’re not going to have much fun and you’re not going to perform well.”
The rough transition in 1982–83 was brought on, in part, by Grant’s relaxed attitude toward preparing for a new season. He had (against Sather’s wishes) refused to rehab his balky shoulder properly after off-season surgery, and he was chastised for poor conditioning when he showed up at Oilers training camp. Even Grant conceded that he came into his second NHL season 20 pounds overweight from an off-season of inactivity thanks to the ailing shoulder, and also because he “loved to eat.” Now living on his own in Edmonton, there was none of Mom’s home cooking; it was junk food and late-night snacks.
Grant:
I got my shoulder glued back together that summer. I couldn’t rehab for about the first eight or ten weeks, and then didn’t really rehab the way it probably should have after that. And it added some pounds that probably didn’t need to be there. Then, as the season began, I had the opposite problem. I’d lost a bunch of the summer weight when the year started. I was lighter even than what I had carried my first year. I was almost too light. Now you get tired faster and have no strength. So I’d gone from one extreme to another extreme, and couldn’t find the happy medium.
I got frustrated with that. I was quick, but with no stamina. And as you were thinking about all this, the puck was getting by you. The minute you think about what you’re doing as a goalie, you’re late. Doesn’t matter how fast you are. Playing goalie, you can’t think the game—you have to play the game. You can think afterwards and before, but you can’t when you’re playing. It just has to happen. So that was my first experience of thinking my way through the game. Not so good. I got off to a sluggish start. The team started slowly too. And things steamrolled from there.
For the first, but not the last time in Grant’s career, conditioning was a battle with authority. This time it was over baseball, a sport Grant played well enough as a catcher to get professional offers. It was his summer fallback sport (until golf came along).
Grant:
The only thing that really changed, fitness-wise, is that I liked to play baseball in the summer, and that was overruled by Slats about two weeks into my training camp: I got summoned to the office and told that there would be no more baseball. I had turned my ankle and that didn’t go over very well. We bent that rule the next year and played fast pitch. That got overruled pretty quickly too. But that was my way of staying in shape in the summer. Baseball kept your eyes sharp and gave you the opportunity to play. You’re competitive at something. You’re never really getting out of the competitive edge.
At the start of the 1982–83 season, the malaise affecting Grant seemed to have somehow crept straight through the locker room. Expecting to own the NHL as they’d done the previous year, the Oilers nevertheless got off to a disappointing 4–6–3 start through October, allowing a surprising 65 goals in those 13 games. Fuhr and Andy Moog were suddenly struggling to cover up for poor defence. After losing the starting job in the playoffs to Fuhr in 1982, Moog was now the more effective of the two Edmonton netminders. Finishing with a 33–8–7 record, a 3.54 GAA and a .891 save percentage, Moog got the bulk of the starts that season. Grant, meanwhile, suffered through slumps that produced a mediocre 13–12–5 record with an ugly 4.29 GAA and a .868 save percentage (not wretched numbers on a shoot-’em-up team like the Oilers, but still not up to anyone’s expectations or standards).
In the midst of the disappointment, however, the Fuhr/Moog tandem actually cemented a successful routine that would exist in the Edmonton net until Moog was dealt to Boston in 1987.
Grant:
Andy was a couple years older than me, and I’d played against him in junior. He was in Billings [Montana, with the Bighorns], and he was very good. We were going to split the season 50-50 [in 1982–83], and we did most years. I just happened to get lucky, to be able to play in the playoffs [in 1982]. That first year, I played and didn’t have a very good playoffs. Andy started the playoffs in my second year, and I thought he had a really good playoff, and I got lucky to play in the third year. Things turned out pretty well, so, it kind of ran from there. It could’ve just as easily been Andy.
Andy was more a butterfly guy. I more moved around a little bit, and relied on reflexes and tried to just figure it out as I was swimming around. You watch your defencemen, you see how they handle things, you try and figure out what they’re doing that makes you better. In the first few years, my style was all reflexes. A lot of it may have come from playing baseball, and catching, where everything’s based off you being in a crouching position, and having to be explosive from there. That kind of rolled in to goaltending. As you learn, you can control it a little bit more and you move a little bit better. The biggest thing I figured out after that second year was, as you start to struggle, your instinct is to get closer to the net. You think you can rely on what’s your best instinct, reflexes. But if you’re standing on your goal line at five foot nine, 180 pounds, you’re not taking up very much net. Guys in the National Hockey League are pretty good; if you give them that much net it doesn’t matter how fast you are. So even though the farther you got from the net the worse you felt, the result was actually better.
While Grant’s sophomore year didn’t come anywhere near his later standards, the Oilers did recover from their slow start. Edmonton took advantage of the Smythe Division’s weakness and caught fire, finishing 47–21–12 for 106 points and third place in the entire NHL, just behind the Flyers and Bruins. Once more, fans and the media were talking about just how far Glen Sather could take his team in the playoffs. But that 1982–83 regular season ended with Moog logging almost all the minutes in net, and despite the Oilers’ turnaround, Grant was left to contemplate the riddle of where his game had gone.
Grant:
I couldn’t quite put those two pieces together that year. You feel lonely, but you get really frustrated. Up until then, I never had a struggle before. And then it just kind of happened. And for the life of me I couldn’t figure out how to fix it.
But even though I struggled, I still got to play. I had my feet underneath me by the time I came back from the minors. It wasn’t like I was going to sit the rest of the year. I got the opportunity to be in the net, probably not as much as I would like, but about as much as I deserved. Slats kept letting me play. I was able to get my confidence back.
Other coaches might have nailed Grant to the bench, if only to preserve their jobs. But Sather had the advantage of being both coach and general manager. It allowed him to see the short term and the long term for his club. That meant investing in Grant even when he might cost his team a game. Coming to the Oilers was a fortunate outcome for Grant, who might have drifted into obscurity if left to his own devices in another organization. This crisis of confidence was just the first of many situations Sather and Grant would navigate in his Edmonton career.
Grant:
Slats kind of moulded us and gave us enough rope to hang ourselves. Then, at the last second, he reeled us back in. He was more like a father to us than anything. He let you get away with stuff that you probably shouldn’t have. But then he pulled you back. It was never a good sign when you got summoned to his “castle” [Sather’s office], because you had to go up the stairs in the back of the Coliseum to get up there. You always knew you were in trouble when you headed to practice by going up the back stairs first. And everybody can see you going up those back stairs. You worked out much harder in practice if he saw you in his office before, not
after, you skated. Which at the time we never realized. Pretty good thinking by Slats, because you’d be that much better at practice.
Grant took a seat on the bench for the Oilers’ run to the Cup finals in 1983, coming into a game only once during the 16 games (he was subbed into a 10–3 thrashing of the Calgary Flames in Game 4 of the 1983 Smythe Division final). He watched from the bench as Edmonton turned heads the way fans and critics had expected them to do in 1982, demolishing their first three opponents in the Campbell Conference en route to the Cup final. The Oilers posted an 11–1 record while outscoring Winnipeg, Calgary and Chicago by a laughable 74–33 margin—all with Moog performing solid duty instead of Grant. But even Moog at his best couldn’t save Edmonton from the harsh lesson of the finals, where they met the battle-scarred New York Islanders, the latest incarnation of a dynasty gunning for a fourth consecutive championship.
While many believed the meeting with the upstart Oilers was going to spell the end of an Islanders championship run that had started in 1980, Al Arbour’s team still had some fight left. The stick-wielding head games of Islanders star goalie Billy Smith distracted the young Oilers. In particular, Gretzky, unsettled by a slashing incident with Smith, ended the series goal-less. Edmonton’s fire wagon offence was neutralized to just six goals in four games by the Isles’ suffocating defence, relentless forechecking and Smith’s Conn Smythe–winning goaltending. As Grant watched helplessly, the Isles engineered a surprising sweep, dealing out some valuable lessons in the process. Smith—relishing the victory and rubbing salt in the Oilers’ wounds—then quipped to Hockey Night in Canada (within earshot of league president John Ziegler) that when he slashed Gretzky in Game 1, No. 99 had gone down as if shot.
