by Grant Fuhr
Pretty soon, Keenan was boasting about Grant’s body fat level dropping almost as fast as his goals against average. But it wasn’t all good news. Grant’s pre-season home debut went awry as the rusty goalie allowed five goals on just 12 shots before being yanked in the second period for Bruce Racine—to the cheers of fans at the Kiel Center. But the Blues coach/GM and his streamlined goalie got the last laugh. Setting records for goalie activity, Grant appeared in 79 games that season, all but three of the Blues’ contests that year. If it weren’t for a strained knee in a game against the Wings on March 31, he could conceivably have started every single game for St. Louis that year—a feat never accomplished in the 82-game NHL. He broke the NHL record for consecutive games started within one season by going 76 straight (prior to that the record had been 70, last accomplished in 1963–64 by the Bruins’ Eddie Johnston). It was the comeback effort of the decade, with Grant posting career bests in just about every category, topping his old save percentage by four-tenths with a .903 mark and posting his first sub-3.00 GAA (a 2.87 average in the 79-game haul). He also led the league in shots faced (2,157) and saves (1,948). “When I coached Grant in St. Louis he was an absolute workhorse [for us],” Keenan recalls. “I won’t say I expected him to play every game, but I knew he could handle the work. He was a great athlete who was able to master his position as a goaltender with incredible stamina, reflexes and instincts for the position.”
Much of this was accomplished in front of a putrid offence, making every goal Grant allowed a crucial one. To win the Stanley Cup, Keenan knew he needed more than a stingy defence. In March, the Blues struggling offence got a jolt when Keenan pried Wayne Gretzky out of L.A. with a massive trade (when the Maple Leafs declined to acquire him). Gretzky joined Grant and fellow Edmonton alumni Glenn Anderson, Charlie Huddy and Craig MacTavish on the Blues. The acquisition of “The Great One” was necessary for St. Louis to make the playoffs, as their vaunted offensive talent hit a major power outage in 1995–96, scoring just 219 times (43 of those goals provided by Brett Hull alone). Only the Devils and Senators scored fewer. In fact, eight of the 10 non-playoff teams produced more goals than the Blues that year. Still, with 80 points they snuck in past a few teams to claim the fifth seed in the tightly bunched Western Conference.
By that point, Grant had won over his coaches and teammates. “Almost every night he’s been one of our top players,” Blues assistant coach Bob Berry told reporters. “We used to sit on the bench and say, ‘Damn, did you see that save?’ ” said St. Louis defenceman Al MacInnis, Grant’s former rival in Calgary. Without Grant, said Brett Hull, “We’d have won five games, maybe seven, honest to god.” In spite of the heroics, Grant finished sixth in Vezina voting. He also finished sixth in the Hart Trophy contest. Curiously, his Hart vote total (taken by the media) ranked him ahead of all five goalies who’d finished ahead of him in the Vezina vote (according to the GMs who voted).
Grant:
You can’t put too much attention in that sort of thing. Maybe I’d been a little harder on general managers than on the media by that point. Who knows? It’s all good now.
In Game 1 of the Blues’ Western Conference opening series with Toronto at Maple Leaf Gardens, Grant marked his return to playoff hockey after a three-year absence with a 31-save performance. (He was beaten only by an old nemesis and teammate, Doug Gilmour, on a power play.) Based on his dominating performance in front of a national TV audience on Hockey Night in Canada, Grant looked ready to supply championship goaltending to a team loaded with stars—not a team that had just finished with a mediocre 80-point season. With Gretzky and Hull supplying offence while Grant made like a brick wall, there was hope entering Game 2. Enter Kypreos and the dying swan dive. The good vibes surrounding Grant and the Blues snapped along with Grant’s ACL and MCL when the Leafs forward fell on his leg during Game 2 of the opening round.
Grant:
I was pretty mad at Nick for a while. Now we laugh about it when we see each other. These things happen in the playoffs. He was just trying to help his team, not hurt me. Anyhow, I went back to St. Louis and they took an MRI of the knee. Not so good. I decided that, okay, the ACL’s gone. The MCL’s gone. If I put a brace on, can it work?
For Keenan—still livid at Kypreos and Toronto coach Pat Burns—even a remote chance to keep his goalie in the net was worth exploring. “We’re going to explore every possibility—if Grant wants us to, and I think he does,” Keenan told reporters.
Grant:
I went out to one morning skate and thought, “Well, it’s not hurting a whole lot.” Standing there, I was fine. I was like, “Maybe I can do this.” As soon as I went down, though, we were stuck. Didn’t realize you actually have to have ligaments to get back up. The knee bent in a funny spot and it wouldn’t unbend. No stability, nothing to push on—that was a problem. So I had to have a lovely four-and-a-half-hour surgery. I’d never had a major surgery before this. It had just been minor stuff, cleaning things up. In those days, they’d do an ACL repair and an MCL repair in separate surgeries. But I had an ACL, MCL and meniscus completely done at once. Which, for the two days afterwards, I could feel in its entirety. It had my undivided attention.
With Jon Casey replacing Grant in net, the Blues subdued Toronto in six games, but then fell in seven to Detroit. Game 7 went to double OT before Steve Yzerman’s famous long shot beat Casey and sent Detroit to the next round. It was one of the most dramatic goals in playoff history, and the heartbreaking finish only made Grant’s knee feel worse. There was just one way to ease the pain.
Grant:
I decided I was going to make it back, and told them I wanted to make it back for training camp. They said, maybe by Christmas, but I wanted to be back before that. I never would’ve gotten back as soon without Bob Kersee. Not a chance. Maybe I might not have gotten back at all. Bob pushed the flexibility and strength, and every time you felt like you were hitting a wall, he would push you through that wall. Then you’d sit there and shake your head trying to figure out what happened.
I think that the pain was part of it. Every time you thought you got to a certain point, he’d take it away from you so there was nothing to focus on, and you’d have to go back to the start and push again. The way he pushed Jackie, though—I think I got the lighter end of the deal. I could leave him there at the end of the day. To train with him, one, it was a lot of fun; two, it was a learning experience to see what he and Jackie went through every day for her to be best at what she did.
Grant arrived at Blues camp in September 1996 ready to prove that his rehabilitation was complete. Typically, he downplayed the pain and anxiety of the summer’s gruelling work with Bob Kersee. An insouciant Grant told the Blues beat reporters, “It’s been a four-month vacation. I think it’s been long enough.” Keenan was hopeful but knew the history of recovery from such knee problems. “I knew if anyone could do it, it would be Grant. But at his age I knew there were no guarantees.”
Grant:
I had decided the first day of camp I was going to skate. I went to kneel down and felt something sharp in my knee and was like, “That’s not going to work.” One of the heads of a screw was kind of sticking out a bit in the front of the kneecap. We had to run over to the doctor’s to get that taken out. He kind of opened it up, took a Black & Decker drill out and just backed out the screw. Yeah. They just put a little local freezing in it. I was kind of hoping for something advanced and elaborate, but he just backed it out like [it was in] a piece of wood, which I didn’t find very amusing.
With the screw fixed and the knee stable, Grant launched into a remarkable comeback that made his Iron Man show the previous season look pedestrian. Showing the resilience that defined his career, Fuhr recovered from what could have been a career-ending injury to post a nearly identically superb season. Ironically, 1996–97 was to be Grant’s first—and last—year free of major health woes since the Canada Cup/Stanley Cup double in 1987–88. Playing with renewed confidence, he was again a workhorse for Keenan, appear
ing in a league-high 73 games while posting a career best 2.72 GAA. “Nothing Grant does surprises me,” remarked Gretzky, who had left the Blues for the New York Rangers as a free agent that summer. “They counted him out in Edmonton, in Toronto, in Buffalo and in Los Angeles. But he came back. I knew if there was any way possible for him to come back from that surgery last spring, Grant was the one person who could do it. That’s why he’s so great in goal; he never gives up. He thrives on proving people who say he’s finished wrong. He’s a special player. Some might say he’s the comeback player of the year. To me, Grant Fuhr has been counted out so many times that he should be the comeback player of the decade.”
Grant, meanwhile, was his laconic self about all the fuss. “I think sometimes people lose sight of the fact that it is a game, and they take it too serious,” he told reporters. “If you happen to give up a goal, you’re not going to die from it. If you just relax, enjoy it and remember it’s a game, you can survive in this game a long time.”
With his knee healthy, Grant was left alone by Keenan, who was now coming under pressure himself for his dramatic and costly moves—ones that hadn’t gotten St. Louis to the promised land. He also had his hands full with some of his other players, such as the famously irascible Brett Hull.
Grant:
Mike just left me alone and let me play, which was awesome. He was too busy with Hully; he and Hully were having their feud. Brett and I were at the rink together every day, played golf together every day. He had his own theories on the world at that point, Mike had his, and they were not in the same universe. I sat beside Al MacInnis, who I played against all the time when I was in Edmonton, and we looked at each other and said, “It’s not like that in Calgary and it certainly wasn’t like this in Edmonton.” Mike and Brett would yell at each other, but it kept life pretty entertaining. My best Hully story is probably when he and Mike had an argument one night in the middle of a game. Hully stomped into Mike’s office between periods and you could hear Hully kick his desk, and Hully came limping back out screaming, thinking he’d broken his foot in between periods of the game.
Making Grant’s successful return particularly special was his ability to adapt his game to a changing NHL. The freewheeling league he joined as a rookie in Edmonton was quickly morphing into a league dominated by defence and coaches obsessed with video. The average goals-per-game in the league was dropping quickly from a peak of eight in the early ’80s to under six. Equipment changes were also making life very different for goalies brought up in an earlier era: butterfly coaches such as Francois Allaire (and his prized pupil Patrick Roy) were pushing goalies to be enormous walls of padding—not lithe acrobats like Grant.
Grant:
When I started in Edmonton it was athletic. We moved around a lot, because the game moved around a lot. Then it became very positional, where everything taught was about angles, taking away space. It wasn’t so much you had to go get the puck—you just took away space and let the puck come to you.
The change in equipment started with goalies such as Rejean Lemelin going to new, lighter Aeroflex leg pads. They were cut square and filled with foam instead of horsehair, and their weight was almost half that of the old pads. What at first seemed strange and uncomfortable soon became the standard for young goalies entering the league, and the classic leather pads vanished within a few years. Similar innovations in gloves and body armour followed.
Grant:
You couldn’t go on with less equipment and guys shooting the puck at the same speed. That leaves marks, so the changes were good in that respect. But I really didn’t go for the full switch. The new pads they wore kind of kicked out the puck. I wanted the puck to stay near; I didn’t want it jumping all over the place. I tried some of the different pads over the years and didn’t like the control they gave me, so I had a combination of the old and the new stuffing. It’s the same with gloves: I always wore a small catcher’s glove all the way right through to the end, just because I wanted to catch the puck and be able to control it. If the glove is too big you lose touch with the puck. Knocking it down doesn’t do you any good; it means you’ve got to be able to find a rebound somewhere. By the time I retired, I was getting too old to try and chase it around, so you wanted to control it.
I was always taught that you’re in control if you can catch the puck. You make it easier on your defencemen, more than anything.
The other innovation changing the sport was the use of video to analyze the tendencies and strategies of opponents. Roger Neilson—who coached seven different NHL teams—was the pioneer in the use of tape. Instead of coaches relying on their gut, they were now checking the video in between periods to improve their team. That also meant analyzing goalies such as Grant for ideas on where to shoot and how to distract him.
One of the major distractions for Grant the year before, of course, had been Kypreos. But this time there would be no Nick Kypreos to haunt him in the playoffs. Grant would get to start all of the Blues’ games. Unfortunately, there wouldn’t be that many of them. The first, however, was stellar: a shutout that stunned a Detroit crowd expecting their Red Wings to roll over the inferior Blues. Detroit outshot St. Louis 30–27 in that opening game, but they couldn’t make a dent in Grant’s defence. In the third period alone he turned aside 15 shots, including a full short-handed situation with two minutes to end the game. Detroit goalie Mike Vernon kept the game close, but he wasn’t able to keep the Blues off the scoresheet.
Said Blues coach Joel Quenneville, after coaching his first NHL playoff game, “[Grant] made a couple of saves that were unbelievable. I don’t know how he did that.” Grant was more matter-of-fact. “Defence wins playoff games,” he said. “We’re playing good defense right now.”
Grant’s second shutout of the series was a 4–0 win at home in Game 4, which knotted the series at 2–2. Grant stopped all 28 shots from the powerful Red Wings offence led by Steve Yzerman, Sergei Fedorov and Brendan Shanahan. This was no ordinary Detroit team; it was a club embarking on the first of two straight Stanley Cups. So while Detroit rallied to win the next two games (and the series), Grant’s play against the eventual champions was yet another example of how, even at age 35, he was still a goalie who saved his best for the big games. He posted a sparkling .929 save percentage in the series and a 2.18 GAA while recording two of his six career playoff shutouts. The Blues’ inability to score on Detroit doomed the team—and Keenan. Now the only opponent who could get the best of Grant was Father Time.
GAME 10
MAY 4, 1999
ST. LOUIS 1 PHOENIX 0
By the time the St. Louis Blues headed into the 1999 Stanley Cup playoffs as the fifth seed in the Western Conference, financial pressures and the aging of an expensive roster were creating some uncomfortable choices. The showdown with Phoenix was looking like a last stand for many. For Grant, who’d been a bulwark for the Blues since 1995, that meant prospect Jamie McLennan was lurking on the horizon to play netminder for the Blues. Thanks to Grant’s salary, the goalie position was one prominent place to make savings. Any kind of playoff disappointment that spring was going to make punting the future Hall of Famer to the curb easier to explain to Blues fans.
Things couldn’t have started worse. Keith Tkachuk and the Coyotes jumped out to a quick 3–1 lead in the first-round playoff series. Grant was less than impressive as the Coyotes put 12 goals past him in those first four disheartening games. To coach Jim Schoenfeld’s players, the Blues goalie seemed to have mentally checked out on the season. The Coyotes had heard stories that Grant was out playing golf—up to 36 holes—on his off days in the series. “We kept hearing these stories that he was playing golf instead of practising,” says Laurence Gilman, then the assistant general manager in Phoenix. “Even allowing for Grant, that gave us some confidence.”
It was just a matter of the Coyotes showing up for Game 5, claiming an easy victory on home ice and moving on. But Grant would once again remind the NHL that there was still a highly competitive
player—even at the age of 36—in the St. Louis net. Led by his revived goaltending, the Blues clawed their way back into the series, tying it at three games apiece with an overtime victory in Game 5 followed by an emotional 5–3 win before the home fans at the Kiel Center. The 31-save performance forced a seventh game in Phoenix.
While the Coyotes geared for all hands on board in Game 7, some of the Blues players were worried about Grant’s preparation. “The biggest thing Phoenix had was that white-out fan thing where everyone had white towels and it really pumped up their team,” recalls Geoff Courtnall. “It was pretty intimidating going in there, and friggin’ Fuhrsie is playing golf each day between our games. I was always worried about that; he’s not practising. He’s out playing 18 holes of golf; he’s not resting between. How much is that going to cost us? But that’s Fuhrsie. He wasn’t worried about what he had to do, and he just came out there and stoned them. They didn’t get a sniff. He’s legendary.”
Speaking of legends, Fuhr was playing golf with one while his teammates fretted.
Grant:
The day before Game 7 I played with Phil Mickelson in Phoenix. But that was my way of relaxing. I did the same thing when I was in Edmonton. It was Game 7; there wasn’t much you could do but relax. I wasn’t worried about what they were thinking. All I know is, it’s been a good series the whole way through, we have as good a chance as they do, and all the pressure was on them—it’s in their building. I knew from our Game 7 in Edmonton against Philadelphia in 1987, there’s always more pressure on the home team. So I did what I normally do during the playoffs: just relax, go play golf, and you have a clear head going into the game.
