Thirty Years of the Game at its Best

by Gare Joyce

  Quinn was already one of Canada’s most decorated international coaches, having guided the Canadian men’s team to gold at the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City.

  In addition, he had answered the call in the spring of 2008, coaching the Canadian under-18 team to gold in the World Championship in Kazan, Russia.

  Picking Quinn to coach the under-18s was a surprising choice to say the least. While Quinn had a wealth of experience, his years in the NHL had been marked by whispers that he didn’t get along with young players.

  Now, fresh off another gold medal and two years removed from his last NHL job, Quinn once again accepted Nicholson’s invitation. “I wanted to put that whole thing about young players behind me,” he said. “And besides, I was bouncing off the walls.”

  Quinn’s 2009 Canadian junior team included six players who had been with him the previous spring in Kazan. One of the six was Eberle, who had played well for Quinn on the under-18 team and had overcome his bad August camp with a blistering start to his season in Regina.

  This Team Canada was younger than usual, as eight players, including Steven Stamkos and Drew Doughty, had not been released by their NHL teams. On the eve of the tournament, chief scout Al Murray made a bold prediction.

  “He’s not the biggest guy or the fastest skater,” Murray said. “But when it’s all said and done, I think Jordan Eberle will score some big goals for this team.”

  After three games, it didn’t seem as if any heroics would be required in Ottawa, because drama was in short supply. Canada opened with an 8–1 win over the Czechs, beat Kazakhstan 15–0, and then won 5–1 against Germany. The aggregate score of 28–2, combined with the fact that Canada had won the previous four world junior tournaments, had critics wondering if the competition had become too one-sided.

  But on New Year’s Eve Canada faced the United States in the first tough test of the tournament—and almost failed it miserably.

  Less than 13 minutes in, the Americans had seized a 3–0 lead, silencing the Ottawa crowd and forcing Quinn to call a time out. “Have you forgotten how to play?” Quinn asked his bewildered players. But he calmed them, and urged them to get back to basics.

  “He has this unbelievable presence,” Eberle said later. “Everything about him is big: his head, his hands, his voice.”

  But Quinn was more than just a figurehead; he was also a veteran NHL coach who knew how to run a bench. He immediately began double-shifting his best player, John Tavares of the Oshawa Generals. Tavares was a breakout star in the 2008 tournament in the Czech Republic, and now was one of only four returning players in Ottawa.

  Two explosive

  first-period goals by

  John Tavares led a

  rally from an early

  3–0 deficit to a key

  opening-round victory

  over the United States.

  Tavares scored two quick goals, and Eberle scored before the end of the period to tie the score at three. The game was fiercely contested the rest of the way before Canada scored two empty-net goals to win 7–4.

  “We hadn’t really been challenged to that point,” Eberle remembered. “We were way too jacked up at the start of that game. It was a good lesson for us.”

  It was already being called a classic, the most exciting game Canada had ever played at the WJC. It was inconceivable that just three days later, the team would play in an even better one.

  “Right from the start, that Russia game was wild,” Eberle said. “We’d score, and they’d come right back, and every time we thought we were finally in control, they’d come back again.”

  Canada took a quick 1–0 lead, but the Russians answered, a chain of events that would repeat itself four times, as Canada took leads of 2–1, 3–2 (on a goal by Eberle), and 4–3, only to see the Russians come back every time.

  Now, with 2:20 to go, there was a scramble to the right of Canadian goaltender Dustin Tokarski. Russia’s Dimitri Klopov poked home the loose puck for his second score of the game and the Russians led for the first time, 5–4. The Ottawa crowd fell silent.

  As he did against the United States, Quinn tried to steady his team. When Russia’s Dmitri Kugryshev iced the puck with 1:24 left, Quinn called a time out and pulled Tokarski from the Canadian goal.

  Quinn normally left tactics to his assistants, but this time he ran the time out himself, at one point telling Eberle, “If the puck is on the right hand side, get to the net.” It was a play Quinn had used countless times in the final

  A last-minute icing

  call in the third period

  against the Russians

  set in motion events

  that led to one of

  the most memorable

  goals in the history

  of Canadian hockey:

  Jordan Eberle’s tally

  with 5.4 seconds

  left that took the

  2009 semifinal into

  overtime. Here, the

  puck comes to Eberle

  at the edge of Vadim

  Zhelobnyuk’s crease.

  Jordan Eberle was

  sliding across the

  goalmouth on his

  knees when he

  answered Canadian

  fans’ prayers against

  the Russians.

  minutes of games in the NHL. (Later, he was asked how many times it had worked. “Not very often,” he said with a chuckle.)

  With 41 seconds left, Klopov gained control of the puck in his own zone. Despite having time and space to move the puck ahead, he fired down the ice at the empty Canadian net, perhaps looking for the hat trick. He missed. It was icing, and the faceoff came back to the Russian zone. Far from being distraught, Klopov and his Russian teammates were laughing as they prepared for the faceoff.

  “When I saw that, I was really hoping it would come back and bite them,” Eberle said.

  After Canada had won a third straight faceoff in the Russian zone, Cody Hodgson got a good shot away with 24 seconds left, but Zhelobnyuk kicked it to the corner. The puck went to Nikita Filatov, who tried to clear it on his backhand, but Ryan Ellis read the play and moved to cut it off. Ellis slammed into the boards, actually knocking the puck down with his shoulder to keep it in. Instead of blindly throwing the puck toward the goal, Ellis squeezed it by two Russian defenders along the boards.

  In the ensuing scramble, Tavares poked the puck free. Russian defenceman Vyacheslav Voinov went to clear it, but Hodgson deftly lifted his stick. The puck went back to Tavares, who saw three Russian players around him. “I knew there wasn’t much time left, and when I saw all those Russians along the wall, I just threw it blindly toward the net, thinking maybe there was an opening,” he recalled.

  Goaltender Dustin

  Tokarski had won a

  Memorial Cup with

  Spokane in the spring

  of 2008 before landing

  the starter’s job with

  the Canadian juniors.

  Coach Pat Quinn gave

  Tokarski a vote of

  confidence despite

  his struggles in games

  against the United

  States and Russia.

  Remembering Quinn’s instructions, Eberle left the battle along the boards and moved to the slot. When Russian defenceman Dmitri Kulikov tried to block the shot, the puck bounced off his shin pad and went right to Eberle, whose momentum was carrying him to the front of the Russian goal. Forehand, backhand, up. Tie game.

  Unlike Paul Henderson’s goal in the 1972 Summit Series, Mario Lemieux’s goal in the 1987 Canada Cup, or Sidney Crosby’s gold-medal clincher in Vancouver in 2010, Jordan Eberle’s goal didn’t win the game for Canada. Pat Quinn thinks that’s why it’s so widely remembered.

  “If Henderson doesn’t score, or Lemieux or Crosby don’t score, those games continue, and who knows what happens,” Quinn said. “If Jordan Eberle doesn’t score, the game is over and there’s no gold medal.”

  The rest of the game was s
omething of an anticlimax. Canada dominated the OT but didn’t score, sending the game to a shootout. Tavares and Eberle scored on the first two shots for Canada, while Russian coach Sergei Nemchinov mysteriously left his best player, Filatov, to shoot third. He never got the chance. Tokarski stopped the first two Russian shooters and the game was over.

  Two days later, Eberle had three points as Canada beat Sweden 5–1 to win a fifth straight goal medal.

  Jordan Eberle isn’t much for collecting souvenirs. The puck he put in the Russian net went back into play and was never recovered. Eberle kept using the same stick in the OT, the shootout, the gold-medal game, and even two more games in the WHL until the shaft finally snapped. Eberle discarded the stick, but the Pats equipment man, knowing it was the one he had used to score the now famous goal, retrieved it and kept it for him.

  Eberle’s biggest thrill came two months later, when he met Paul Henderson, who welcomed him into the exclusive club of Canadians who had scored iconic international goals. “Congratulations, Jordan,” Henderson said. “You’ll be talking about that goal for the rest of your life.”

  Of all the moments I have called, the one I am asked about most is “the Eberle goal.” More than a year after he scored it, I was walking through my

  neighbourhood and came across a bunch of kids playing road hockey. Sure enough, one of them went forehand, backhand, roof and looked over at me, smiling.

  “C’mon,” he said. “Say it.”

  “CAN … YOU … BELIEVE IT!” I boomed, my voice echoing down the street. The kids raised their sticks, roaring their approval.

  Even now, it gives me chills.

  Eberle’s goal against

  Russia wasn’t a game-

  winner, but it was a

  game-saver and kept

  Canada’s hopes alive

  for a fifth straight gold

  medal.

  Brayden Schenn

  goes airborne to deck

  U.S. forward Derek

  Stepan in the neutral

  zone. Two tight games

  between Canada and

  the United States kept

  fans in Saskatchewan

  on the edge of their

  seats.

  Crunch!

  Crunch!

  Crunch!

  These are not the sounds of the game being played—though there was much physical contact, as usual, at the 2010 world junior hockey championship—but the sound of people walking to and from the rink, the sound of heavy boots on hard, frozen snow, the sounds that carry at –30°C and below.

  Welcome to the true home of the winter game. It is not an actual place—not Windsor, Nova Scotia; not Kingston, Ontario; not Montreal, all of which claim to have been the true birthplace of hockey—but a climate, the game Canadian weather created born of necessity where one must find a way to keep warm as well as keep moving over ice as slippery as a soaped glass.

  “In a land so inescapably and inhospitably cold,” Bruce Kidd and John Macfarlane wrote many years ago, “hockey is the dance of life, an affirmation that despite the deathly chill of winter we are alive.”

  And nowhere is the game more alive than on the Canadian prairies. Here is where the hockey rink became the natural community gathering place for towns otherwise fragmented by immigrants arriving from Europe with different languages

  Jake Allen won the

  starting job, but he

  was pulled from the

  Canadian goal in the

  third period of the

  gold-medal game.

  and different churches. Here—just on the outside of Saskatoon—is where little Floral once stood, the small community where a neighbour returned Katherine Howe’s kindness during the Great Depression by dropping off a gunny sack containing a pair of old skates. Katherine’s awkward son, Gordie, tried them out on the pond back of the house, “fell in love with hockey that day”—and the rest is history.

  Those who love hockey could not help but love a WJC held in Regina and Saskatoon in the dead of Canadian winter. Crunching snow, early dark, battery jumps in the parking lots, 50/50 draws worth as much as a new home, volunteers happily paying $50 apiece for the “privilege” of giving up their holiday time in exchange for long days at the rink helping stage this remarkable event.

  Team Canada even arrived with its own compelling storyline from the Prairies: Travis Hamonic, a 19-year-old defenceman with the Moose Jaw Warriors who had grown up in little St. Malo,

  Manitoba, and who used to drive to the rink on his Ski-Doo, hockey bag thrown over the back and sticks held across the handlebars. Hamonic was the youngest of four children and hoped, one day, to be like older brother Jesse, who played. Their father, Gerald, had been head of the local minor hockey system until he died suddenly of heart failure. Travis had been only 10 at the time and had dedicated his junior career to his father’s memory. Deeply religious, he wore No. 3 to honour the Holy Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and before each game would write a private message to his father on the blade of his stick, quickly taping over the secret words before anyone else could see.

  The City of Saskatoon itself even offered a charming connection between the national game and local politics, with Mayor Don Atchison having once been the goaltender for the local junior team, the Saskatoon Blades, and later enjoying a brief minor-league professional career in which he tended net for the Johnston Jets, the wonky team that inspired Slap Shot, the 1977 cult movie about hockey. Atchison’s locker was next to Ned Dowd’s, a player who took notes for his sister Nancy, who wrote the Hollywood screenplay. Dowd took Atchison’s crazy sense of humour and the personality of the team’s other goalie, Louis Levasseur, and out of that created Denis Lemieux (“You feel shame”), a character as beloved as Paul

  Newman’s Reggie Dunlop and the infamous Hanson Brothers. “Everything in that movie is true,” claims the mayor of Saskatoon.

  A much more evident truth is that the “world juniors” has come to mean something very, very special to all Canadians—especially when played in Canada. It has become as much a part of the annual Christmas break as Boxing Day sales and New Year’s hangovers. It is an 11-day festival that begins the day after Christmas and extends into the heart of winter itself, as the game of cold and ice should. It also helps, of course, that Canada wins the tournament often, thereby calming the insecurities that fly up each time the country that gave the world this game has to give the world credit for playing it as well as, even sometimes better than, Canadians themselves.

  Team Canada came to Saskatoon with a chance to mark its sixth successive victory in the championship. Victory in Saskatoon on the final day would mean that this string would surpass the record five in a row that Canada set in the 1990s and matched in Ottawa in 2009. Canada’s success had already proved to be a remarkable accomplishment—five gold, four silver, and three bronze over the past 12 championships—and stood as a powerful statement that the game at the youth level has never been in as excellent shape as it is today.

  The Canadian team

  rallied around Travis

  Hamonic, who had to

  watch the final from

  the sidelines with a

  separated shoulder.

  The pride Canadian players bring is obvious. “When you pull on a world junior jersey,” Team Canada forward and Regina native Jordan Eberle, the hero of the gold-medal victory in Ottawa, said when he came to his home province, “you’re expected to win gold. That’s just how it is. For me and for every kid on this team, we grew up watching this tournament. It’s a special event. Kids grow up dreaming of playing in it.”

  “These kids are all prospects for the NHL,” added Taylor Hall, the Windsor Spitfires star many were predicting (accurately, it turned out) would go first overall in the NHL draft the following June. “I think fans have an interest in watching that. When I was a little kid, there was nothing better than watching the world juniors with my buddies on Boxing Day. It’s something special to C
anadians. It’s a combination of hockey, for sure, and holidays. I find it attracts even non–hockey fans.”

  Willie Desjardins, the Saskatchewan-born coach of the Canadian team, tried to put it all into perspective when he said one beauty of the tournament is that, each year, it contains “a little bit of the unknown and a little bit of the unexpected.” And while the outcome could often be a surprise, the interest in the tournament is no surprise at all. “It’s the time of year,” Desjardins said. “Everybody’s home with their families and it’s something they do together.

  “It’s hockey and it’s Canada.”

  The 2009 WJC had been decided in Ottawa by that 6–5 final, a score held to be almost sacred in Canadian hockey circles when it came to discussing the greatest of games ever played in hockey. Paul Henderson’s dramatic last-minute goal in the 1972 Summit Series had given Canada a 6–5 victory over the Soviet Union. Wayne Gretzky’s pass to Mario Lemieux and Lemieux’s rifle shot had given Canada the 1987 Canada Cup by a 6–5 score. It seemed only fitting that one of the greatest WJC games ever played should also end 6–5.

  Even before the medal round, Saskatoon had enjoyed a world junior match between Canada and the United States that set the stage, brilliantly, for the final. Before a record crowd of 15,171 at Credit Union Centre—the stands bleeding red with screaming Canadian fans—Team U.S.A. and Team Canada fought to a 4–4 tie that ultimately went to a shootout. It had been a game for the ages so far as early-round matches go, the lead changing twice, the swift Americans scoring two short-handed goals, the determined Canadians coming back from being down 4–2 and scoring short-handed to tie the game in the dying minutes. Canada’s Jordan Eberle, the previous year’s hero, had scored twice, Stefan Della Rovere once, and Alex Pietrangelo had delivered the tying goal by intercepting a clearing pass and roofing a shot just under the crossbar. Philip McRae, Jordan Schroeder, Tyler Johnson, and Danny Kristo had all scored for Team U.S.A.