by Grant Fuhr
Doggedly, Canada built another lead in the second period, with Lemieux bulging the twine behind Evgeny Belosheikin to make it 4–3. Once more the Soviets responded, with Vyacheslav Bykov tying it at 4–4 just 4:45 later. In the third, Lemieux (playing at the top of his powers) struck to make it 5–4 on assists from Gretzky and Coffey. That lead didn’t last either. After a concerted push by the Soviets to get the equalizer, a young Valeri Kamensky tied it at 5–5 with a brilliant individual effort. The future Quebec/Colorado star forward wove through the Canadian defence at 18:56 of the third period, beating a poke-check from Grant to score high glove side, leaving the game headed to overtime again as the exhausted 17,026 fans in Copps Coliseum tried to catch their breath.
The classic match went through a heart-pounding 20-minute extra session with the ice tilted the way of the Soviets. Grant was called on to make 12 saves in a period dominated by the USSR. On one chance, Kasatonov and Larionov set up Krutov for a tip that Grant stymied by jamming shut the five hole. He then flashed his trademark catching hand, snaring the rebound from Krutov as well. As the horn sounded to end the first overtime, it seemed inevitable that Canada and Grant would succumb to the assault by the Soviet forwards in the summery warmth of the early September night in Hamilton. But Canada somehow found new legs. Halfway through the second OT, Mario Lemieux was left alone at the side of the net for the winner, assisted by—who else?—Wayne Gretzky. After 90 minutes and eight seconds of furious hockey, the series was tied at one game apiece. Canada still had life.
Despite another five goals allowed in Game 2, Grant was his usual unflappable self when reporters inquired about the pressure of a decisive Game 3.
Grant:
You’d like to think you could be perfect every day, but I was also taught that, for as much as you think you’re going to be perfect, at some point the breaks go against you. Whether you like it or not, get over it and keep playing. If you gave up a goal, at some point you made a mistake. It doesn’t matter how you look at it, at some point you had to have made a mistake for it to get by you. So I always believed the goal was more my mistake than anybody else doing something right. But I wasn’t going to worry about it.
What would become the more famous finale of Game 3 was now set. Today, it’s remembered for the three-way passing play on the winner scored by Lemieux with an assist from Gretzky. But it wouldn’t have happened at all had Grant not stymied a great chance for the Soviets just moments before. As it was, Grant had the best seat in the house to watch the play move up the ice with Gretzky, Lemieux and Hawerchuk on the attack.
Grant:
I had the best view of the goal. I got to watch it go up the ice and develop. After a little mad scrambling all around our end after the faceoff, we broke up out on the rush. Gretzky has the puck, you’ve got Mario, you had [Mike] Gartner up there. Hawerchuk was there. Gretz could have passed it to Larry Murphy, too. They were wide open on the other side. Any time Gretzky and Mario have control of it you’re in pretty good hands. Something good is going to happen. Once they scored the goal, we knew that there were still two and a half, three minutes left. We’d seen how fast they could score. But our guys were pretty good with that lead. It was one we weren’t going to let go of.
There was another factor in the series that was less heralded but just as key, believes Grant. That was a momentum-shifting hit by his Edmonton teammate Mark Messier.
Grant:
When he ran over Kasatonov that was vintage Messier. They were really getting the momentum a little bit at that point. Mess pretty much stuck an elbow on his chin and it changed the whole tide of the way things went. He did that in a lot of different series. He did it against the Islanders; he did it against Calgary a lot. He did it against Winnipeg. At any given time, he could turn a game around just by knocking over somebody. But he also had a finesse where he could score 40 goals. There’s not a lot of guys that have that package.
While the 6–5 win for Canada in Game 3 was a thriller, and Grant played almost as well despite allowing five goals again, Game 2 is widely considered today as the gem. Gretzky has referred to his five-assist performance in the second contest as the best game he ever played. While Lemieux never acknowledged as such, Game 2 may just have been Mario’s best as well.
After the contest, reflecting on his team’s effort, Wayne recognized Fuhr’s important role, saying, “Grant has won so many games for us in goal that we have to take some of the burden off him.” Overall, Grant posted respectable but not outstanding numbers in the Canada Cup, with a 3.34 GAA and .893 save percentage. But he played all nine tournament games after winning the job over Hextall and Hrudey, and, as ever, it was the timing of the saves he did make—the confidence he instilled that he would not give up the backbreaker—that buoyed Canada in its struggle to win the tournament. The media covering the games recognized this, and Grant was voted to the tournament’s all-star team. Keenan, too, singled out Grant for his clutch play despite the five goals allowed. “Grant proved in 1987 to be the best goaltender in the world by winning both the Stanley Cup and Canada Cup. He was a true champion and one of the best goaltenders to ever play the game of hockey!”
The ’87 showing was one of only three times Grant represented Canada internationally. As it turned out, Grant was the last Canadian to backstop a conquest of the Soviets at their peak as an international power, before glasnost and the dissolution of the USSR left Eastern European hockey in shambles through the mid-90s. It was a fitting cap to a 30-year rivalry that had come to define international hockey greatness, and the win could be seen as Grant’s greatest contribution to the game in his country.
For Grant, the overtime heroics of Game 2 against the Soviets and the series itself crowned probably the greatest season of hockey ever experienced by a goalie: a Stanley Cup in the spring of 1987; starts in Rendez-vous and the 1987 all-star game; Vezina Trophy winner: and hero of the hockey nation for his performances at Copps Coliseum in Hamilton. “I don’t think we’ll ever see another season like that from a goalie again,” says Keenan. “He was everything you could ask for back there.”
Talk about redemption.
GAME 6
APRIL 15, 1989
LOS ANGELES 6 EDMONTON 3
During the first years of Grant’s career it would have been a stretch to call him an ironman capable of carrying the full workload of a Stanley Cup winner. Coming off his triumph in the 1987 Canada Cup, Grant was at the top of his craft (even if he wasn’t being paid like it by the Oilers ownership), but he’d been evenly dividing the workload in the Edmonton net with Andy Moog since his rookie year of 1981–82. That was about to change. While rumours continued to circulate in Edmonton’s close hockey community about Grant’s private life, there was no doubting that the Oilers’ local product was only getting better on the ice. Now that his longtime partner Moog was with the Canadian Olympic team, holding out for a trade out of Edmonton, Grant’s starts ballooned. In his first year as the acknowledged No. 1, he zoomed to 75 regular-season and 19 playoff starts in 1987–88. Not only did he step up his workload, he won his only Vezina Trophy as the NHL’s top goaltender that year, and finished second in voting for the Hart Memorial Trophy as league MVP, behind Mario Lemieux and ahead of teammate Wayne Gretzky.
The jump in starts alarmed some who thought it would burn out the five-foot-nine-inch goalie. Could he physically sustain the pace? What about his mental makeup under the increased duty? During the season, Sather grew bored with people asking if Grant was being overworked. “I’m not amazed at all Grant can play that many games,” Sather told the Boston Globe. “I am amazed that people ask the same questions about it. Did you see Larry Bird the other night? He plays all the time. Or how about Ray Bourque? There’s a guy I’m amazed with. He plays 40 minutes a game on defense. Grant Fuhr stands in front of the net for 60 minutes. Glenn Hall and Jacques Plante did the same thing for their entire careers and they didn’t wear masks. Grant is a young guy. Why should he be tired mentally?”
&nb
sp; Fuhr’s play certainly didn’t reflect any fatigue. Former roommate Ron Low summed up his protegé for SI: “Grant reads the game as well as any goalie that has ever played. His goals-against average will never be the best. He’ll give up the occasional soft goal. But in the big moment, for the big save, he’s 95 percent unbeatable. Under pressure, there is none finer. He proved in the Canada Cup that he is the finest goaltender in the world.”
Grant then proved his value to the Oilers in more than durability. His critics said he had been the lucky recipient of being on a team with the greatest offence ever. But with Gretzky shelved for 16 games and producing a “pedestrian” 149-point total in 1987–88, Grant’s reliability in goal was needed more than ever. He provided his team with some of his most stellar numbers, posting a career-high 40 wins, a 3.43 GAA (the lowest since his rookie year) and four shutouts—by far the most he’d had in a single season. For the natural athlete who once relied upon his reflexes and unpredictability, there was suddenly some method to his seeming madness between the posts.
Grant:
Each year you’re trying to add something. I think if you get stale and try and work with only one thing you have, they figure you out at some point. You’ve got to give them different looks, and try and learn something yourself, to try and get better every year. As I got older, obviously I wasn’t getting any quicker, so now you have to get a little bit smarter: able to play angles a little bit better, read the game a little bit better, which will make you look just as quick as you ever were—but it’s more that you have a sense of what’s going on. It’s all trying to look the same while doing different things.
In the 1988 playoffs, the Oilers showed that, like their goalie, they’d been learning from the past few seasons of defensive preaching by co-coach John Muckler. Their offence continued to churn out goals by the bushel, but their back end was now as tight as the best defensive squads in the NHL. Which was a good thing for any team playing in the shooting gallery known as the Smythe Division.
Grant:
Three of, probably, the top six teams in the league were just in our division. It wasn’t even in our conference; it was just our division. Any time you played Winnipeg, you played Calgary—Vancouver was okay at that time—the hardest part was to get out of your own division. Every year it was us and Calgary right out of the gate. One of us would get either L.A. or Vancouver: somebody got an easy one, and somebody got the battle of Winnipeg every year. With Dale [Hawerchuk] they were always a challenge.
In the first round of the 1988 playoffs, it was the Oilers who had their hands full with Winnipeg, finally prevailing four games to one over the pesky Jets. That brought them another dance with the hated Calgary Flames in Round 2. Over the course of the decade, Calgary GM Cliff Fletcher had assembled a very talented squad at the Saddledome with veterans such as Lanny McDonald and Hakan Loob meshing with the products of the Flames’ deep farm system, Al MacInnis and Theo Fleury. Sharp trades had brought Doug Gilmour and John Tonelli to the Flames as well. With Calgary’s 105 regular-season points good enough for the Presidents’ Trophy, there were whispers that Edmonton might finally have met its match. Calgary had scored more goals (398 to the Oilers’ 363) and had their own proven playoff goalie in Mike Vernon to match Grant.
Someone forgot to tell the Oilers—still keenly feeling the sting of the 1986 Steve Smith goal—that they were through. Led by Grant, who allowed just 11 goals in the four games, they buried the first-place Flames. The beat-down started with a sweep of the first two games on the road at the Saddledome. The back-breaker came after the Flames had blown a two-goal lead in Game 2. A highlight-reel short-handed goal in overtime by Gretzky then ended it as he streaked down the left wing, blasting a laser to the far side over Vernon’s catching glove. Game 3 in Edmonton brought a scare as Joel Otto of the Flames ripped a drive off Grant’s collarbone early in the second period. The entire Northlands crowd hushed as Grant writhed in pain on the ice: Who could withstand such a shot without being badly hurt? Then, like Rod Tidwell in Jerry Maguire, Grant bounced back up on his skates, seemingly as good as new. Pain would not stop No. 31; the Flames were going to have to beat him the conventional way. A five-minute major penalty to Oilers defenceman Marty McSorley was overcome without incident and Calgary’s Game 3 hopes died right there. With revenge for 1986 at hand, Edmonton wasted no time. Game 4 showed the mighty Oilers offence in peak form as they outscored Calgary 6–4. Any Battle of Alberta talk seemed settled as the Flames crawled home, swept out by their acrobatic nemesis from Edmonton.
After drubbing the Detroit Red Wings four games to one in the Conference finals, the Oilers faced their old teammate Moog and the Boston Bruins in a bid for a fourth Stanley Cup in five years. This was the legacy year for Sather’s team, the chance to leap from excellent to great. The final was no contest as the Oilers surrendered just nine goals in the four completed games (one game in Boston was abandoned due to a power failure). The Oilers’ 16–2 record that post-season is still the best winning percentage in the four-round era since 1979–80, and Grant backstopped every minute along the way. At this point he was finally getting help from his defence as the Oilers regularly held opponents to under 25 shots during this run—one in which every facet of the team truly shone, and there seemed to be no evident trace of weakness.
“Nothing at all bothers him,” said Grant’s Victoria teammate Geoff Courtnall, now in Edmonton. “He is so relaxed, yet he is one of the quickest goalies in the league. Some guys get beat on a shot and they let down, get caught on a couple more quick ones. With Grant it’s the exact opposite. He responds to the challenge and plays even better.”
With a fourth Stanley Cup in the bag, the Oilers and their fans prepared for the Hollywood-style wedding of Gretzky and actress Janet Jones in Edmonton on July 16, 1988. National television coverage and a breathless Hollywood paparazzi brought every last sequin on Janet’s $40,000 ensemble to the attention of a waiting world. While Edmonton firemen formed an honour guard on the steps of St. Joseph’s Basilica, the Edmonton Symphony played the transitional music. Celebrities in the church ranged from actor Alan Thicke to Mr. Hockey himself, Gordie Howe. Grant had front row seats for the hockey “wedding of the century.”
Grant:
Oh yeah, third or fourth row, at the front. It was something. Everybody turned out, dressed to the nines. One of the few times I ever wore a suit in those days, especially in the summer. Gretz never seemed to get bothered by the attention. But we’d been watching Wayne for years, and by that point, nothing really surprised us. Well, I should say the next thing that happened to him that summer surprised us.
Grant was in his customary summer residence on a golf course on August 9, playing in Bob Cole’s tournament in St. John’s, Newfoundland, with teammate Marty McSorley (or a guy Grant thought was still his teammate) when the shocking rumours that Gretzky would no longer be an Oiler were confirmed. “I didn’t know till I called my agent, Mike Barnett, after I’d heard that Gretz had been traded,” recalls McSorley. “And I was saying ‘You can’t tear this team apart, you have to stop this.’ Mike said, ‘Sit down, I think you’re in the trade.’ ”
Grant:
We were out playing in Bob Cole’s golf tournament. People kept coming up to us, and we were hearing these stories about a trade. Marty thought everybody was kidding him that he’d been traded to Los Angeles with Gretz. I hadn’t heard anything about it. Turns out they’d been talking all summer about it. So that was a little shocking. You knew there were some contract issues and Peter [Pocklington] was having troubles financially. I was having my contract troubles with Glen. But Gretz? No way.
As Garth and Wayne liked to say, “Way.” The deal that shocked Canada was Wayne Gretzky, Marty McSorley, and Mike Krushelnyski to the Los Angeles Kings in exchange for Jimmy Carson, Martin Gelinas, the Kings first-round draft picks in 1989, 1991 and 1993, and $15 million. Almost as surprising to NHL players was the fat new contract Gretzky got after the trade. Kings owner Bruce McNall felt h
is new star need to be paid like a star and awarded No. 99 $3 million a year for five years. (Gretzky’s agent, Mike Barnett, revealed later that the centre had actually requested a lower salary, concerned the Kings could not then afford the other players to produce a champion. McNall laughed him off.) The Gretzky contract was a tide that would soon raise all salary boats for NHL players. Told for decades by the NHL and their own union leader, Alan Eagleson, that there wasn’t much money in the hockey business, they suddenly discovered that a pot of gold lay in Los Angeles and other major cities. As important as Gretzky was to the popularization of hockey in the Sun Belt, he was equally as important to his fellow players, such as Grant, who would eventually collect millions in salary over the rest of their careers.
