by Mark Spector
“Edmonton is not the end of the world,” countered former Calgary mayor Ralph Klein. “It’s just easier to see it from there.”
Edmonton hosted the Commonwealth Games in 1978? Calgary got the Winter Olympics a decade later. The Calgary Cannons won a couple of divisional pennants in Triple A baseball’s Pacific Coast League? The Edmonton Trappers won the league title four times, thank you very much. In the Canadian Football League (CFL), the degree of hate in the Labour Day Classic has always transcended wherever the clubs are in the standings, and it was Warren Moon’s Edmonton Eskimos that set the table for hockey’s battle so perfectly when the Esks won five consecutive Grey Cups between 1978 and 1982, often stepping on the Calgary Stampeders’ dreams along the way.
As the oil business has evolved, Calgary has become the white-collar Dallas while Edmonton is the Houston that services the oil patch. Calgary’s airport gets more and better international flights. Edmonton has a better arts scene. You name a forum and I’ll show you a place where one city is trying to one-up the other.
By the time the two NHL teams had been established in Alberta, however, so was the pecking order of the two sports towns. Edmonton called itself the City of Champions, which took some nerve considering its hockey team was in its infancy. But they had a better football club, a better football stadium, and a better and newer hockey rink. And they had Wayne Gretzky, the great difference-maker, whom some Edmontonians believed might one day be known as the best player the sport of hockey has ever seen.
Behind the Oilers bench resided Glen (Slats) Sather, a smug young savant with a scar on his lip that gave him a perma-smirk. He was cocky, and so was his team. “Sather had a right to be. They won,” said Flames centre Joel Otto. “You have to be confident to be good, but it rubbed me the wrong way. A lot of our guys knew they had a smugness to them, in our minds.”
Sather surrounded Gretzky with reams of toughness, perhaps even more skill, and patterned the Oilers’ game after the Swede-heavy Winnipeg Jets of the WHA.
“Edmonton played hockey the way you’re supposed to play hockey,” said Calgary Flame Mike Bullard. “It was just ‘Let ’em loose, Bruce.’ ”
“I don’t think we realized it at the time,” said Mark Messier, who entered the battle as an unknown kid from St. Albert and left it as one of hockey’s legendary leaders. “A lot of us came here when we were eighteen years old. We were just trying to hang on to the rope, to stay in the league. We were scared to death, and the best way to stay out of trouble against the big, bad Flyers—and a lot of the other teams—was to skate as fast as you could. So skating, the free flow, really became a staple of our game.”
Some old-time hockey players were still in the mix, including Ken Houston and Eric Vail, left over from Calgary’s days as the Atlanta Flames; and Al Hamilton and Dave Dryden (Ken’s brother), hanging on from Edmonton’s time in the renegade WHA. None of those names would last for long on two teams that changed the way the game was played (the Oilers) and altered the way an NHL general manager built his team (the Flames).
“I remember playing on a line with Ron Chipperfield and Bill (Cowboy) Flett, God rest his soul,” Messier said. “It was the middle of the game, and somehow I ended up inside our zone on his side of the ice. He looked at me and he says, ‘Get the hell outta here!’ He was from the old school, up-and-down-the-wing kind of hockey, while we were trying to play this innovative, European, more weaving style.
“As time went on, we realized that the style of play we were introducing, it forced the league to change because of us. If they were going to compete against us, they were going to have to skate, and up their talent level as well.”
The first team to realize that was Calgary, and make no mistake —the Flames were in the chase position for the first several years. Eventually Flames general manager Cliff Fletcher would piece together a lineup that could give Edmonton a game on a nightly basis. Of course, it was easier to catch up in toughness and attitude before actually collecting enough Joe Mullens, Doug Gilmours, and Joe Nieuwendyks to challenge Edmonton’s collective skill set.
So Calgary fought with and intimidated Edmonton as best it could while trying to build a team that could actually play with or, on occasion, outscore Edmonton.
“I remember before a game,” said Flames winger Jim Peplinski, “Bob Johnson says to us, ‘Well, boys, it’s going to be a war tonight. So I want you to look at the guy beside you and know who you’re going to be in that foxhole with.’ ”
The toughest Flame was Tim Hunter, who could handle himself any night in any rink against any opponent. He was a big, mean, Calgary-born winger who’d put together a couple of 300-penalty-minute seasons in the Western Hockey League.
The Flames’ best player in those days was Kent Nilsson, one of those Swedish Jets with marvellous skills. Skills, shall we say, that were spoken of more often than his heart and will.
“So I look to my one side,” continued Peplinski, “and it’s Timmy Hunter. I think, ‘Okay.’ Then I look to the other side, and it’s Kent Nilsson. And he’s shaking his head.”
“Well, one out of two isn’t bad …”
They still tell the story about Nilsson having a hat trick and two assists in the first period one night. Johnson could see his star was jumping. “You could really rack up some points tonight, Kent,” he said. “Keep ’er goin’. There’s still forty minutes left! You might set a record!”
Nilsson, however, was never known as an avid perspirer. He had three times the talent of 90 percent of the NHL in those days, but the Flames already had this one in hand, and Nilsson, nicknamed The Magic Man, told Johnson: “Bob, five points is enough. If I get more, they’ll expect that from me every night.”
Edmonton, of course, was the polar opposite. Sometimes it looked like the Oilers played their hardest when they were crushing some unfortunate Norris Division team and the points were easier to get. When goalies like Don Beaupre, Allan Bester, poor Murray Bannerman, or Gretzky’s childhood buddy Greg Stefan set up in the Northlands Coliseum crease, their success was measured not in goals allowed but whether they lasted two periods before getting the hook.
It could have been Gretzky’s example, as he was noted for never taking his foot off the gas, even in a blowout. Or perhaps it was their coach and general manager, whose career as a journeyman winger taught Sather never to give a sucker an even break.
“They had something very unique,” said Peplinski. “That was Slats’s ability to cause Dave Hunter to be better than you’d think he should be. To cause Pat Hughes to be what he was. To cause Dave Lumley to perform the way he did. To give Semenko the confidence to play on a line with Wayne Gretzky and not just be a tough guy but score once in a while. Kevin McClelland, Marty McSorley … Somebody gave those guys some confidence, believed in them.
“If it was 6–1, it was going to be 7–1 if you didn’t keep playing,” Peplinski said. “They just came in waves. We had a stretch where we couldn’t get through the start of a game where they wouldn’t score in the first thirty-five seconds.”
If there wasn’t a goal scored in the opening thirty-five seconds of the Battle, then there might be a five-on-five brawl. Nobody could promise, when you bought a ticket for Edmonton–Calgary, whether the game would have an R rating or merely PG. The guarantee was, however, that you would be entertained.
Craig MacTavish played 1,093 NHL games, so the dates and seasons blend together somewhat when he reaches back into that helmetless memory bank for some data on another train wreck of a night in the Battle of Alberta. Much water has flowed under a bridge that was constructed in 1980 when the Atlanta Flames couldn’t make it in the South anymore and the original “Man Who Sold Wayne Gretzky,” Nelson Skalbania, led a group that purchased the Flames and moved the club to Calgary.
It began in the old Stampede Corral in 1980, where the boards were so high they made grown men look like pee wee players, and 300 kilometres north, inside the Northlands Coliseum. That building had various names over the ma
ny seasons, but that same edgy tension always existed when the two best teams in the NHL met during the mid- to late-1980s.
“We’d been beaten in Calgary, and it was a back-to-back game,” began MacTavish. “We knew we had to answer the bell here in Edmonton. I started the game; Kevin [Lowe] started the game. Well, after the first shift, Kevin and I are both back in the locker room taking our gear off.
“He looks at me and he says, ‘Boy, were we ever on the same wavelength.’ ”
That wavelength was often of a violent nature in the Battle, whether it involved Marty McSorley skewering Mike Bullard, Dave Brown busting up Stu Grimson’s face, Carey Wilson losing his spleen, or Jamie Macoun busting a cheekbone on a blindside punch from Mark Messier. Somehow the Oilers gave better than they received when it came to injurious acts that ended up in a hospital visit.
“My sense would be that we were much more the recipients than the instigators,” said Peplinski. “We were a team that were much happier to play a hard game up and down. The Oilers seemed to be much more about wolf pack. They bordered on the personality that Slats had as a player—an irritant or an agitator.
“When I think back to The Rat [Ken Linseman], when I think back to Lumley, to Kevin McClelland, even Wayne. I don’t think we were near as yappy as they were either. Then again, maybe that’s just me remembering it the way I would have liked it to be.”
It was Paul Bunyan rules most times when these teams met. And God forbid there was a three- or four-goal spread as the clock ticked down.
“They were big, strong, physical. They were dirty, just like us,” said Oilers defenceman Jeff Beukeboom. “They did everything in their power to win, as did we. We adjusted to them, and they adjusted to us. It was like the nuclear war of hockey: you were constantly trying to arm yourself in a way to beat them. They did it too, vice versa.”
“You would never turn your back on anybody,” said Lowe. “As a defenceman, if the play went up the ice, if Tim Hunter was behind me, or beside me, I’d never take my eye off him. He’d chop you on the back of the legs or on the wrist. In front of the net in scrums, you never took your eye off anyone or the guy would pop you. Your guard was always up.”
Once the game was decided, the winning team tended not to keep taking cheap shots. You were already thinking about next time out, and there was no point in fuelling that fire. “The shoe could be on the other foot next time,” Lowe said.
How about this Kodak moment, from long-time Oilers equipment man Lyle (Sparky) Kulchisky, taken from a typically rough night in the old Corral: “Middle of the second period, brawl breaks out, and into the dressing room comes Dave Semenko and Don Jackson,” he said. “Same ice bucket—Sammy had his right hand in there, and D.J. had his left. They sat there next to each other and watched the rest of the game on TV.”
It was a style of hockey that time has forgotten. Or is trying to forget.
“You always knew going into it that there was going to be blood shed, and it was going to be some of your own. That was a certainty,” Steve Smith said. “It was real then. There were going to be fights. You were going to be part of fights, and you were expected to be part of fights and physical hockey. If you were going to win, you were going to take some real severe hits to make plays. You knew that.
“And if you weren’t going to be physically beat, you could be mentally beat by the end. You knew it was a sixty-minute game, if not longer, every single game. With no easy times at any point in time during one of those series.”
As the NHL game has grown more civil, the smallest indiscretion has people calling for a suspension. If the NHL’s Department of Player Safety had existed in the 1980s, they might have built a separate wing in the New York office for the Battle of Alberta. Luckily, it was a time before the league was technically able to capture every transgression. By the time that VHS cassette had been Fed Ex’ed to NHL president John Ziegler’s New York office, well, usually everyone had already moved on.
The result was that few across the hockey world actually witnessed all of Messier’s Gordie Howe–like elbows. And that classic playoff spear —McSorley versus Bullard, April 23, 1988—garnered not a game’s suspension yet goes down as a classic moment in the Battle.
“Gary Roberts went in the corner and absolutely tattooed McSorley,” remembers Bullard, a short-term tenant in the Battle who would be dealt away in a package that brought Doug Gilmour to Calgary. “It was a huge bodycheck. He really hurt him, and just as McSorley is coming by our bench [Flames head coach Terry] Crisp calls my name. I hop over the boards, and, well, there’s nothing like being in the wrong place at the wrong time, eh?”
McSorley arrived in ill humour, dazed and furious, on his way to the Edmonton bench. He was like an enraged bull, and there was Bullard, wearing a bright red jersey.
“As soon as he saw a Calgary player, he was going to pitchfork them. It just happened to be me,” Bullard said. “Marty and I are good friends, we’d played together in Pittsburgh. But in the Battle, there were no such things as friends. Marty and me? We hated each other.
“It was about Calgary and Edmonton. It wasn’t about hockey anymore. It was about which city was a better place to live. Who drives the nicer cars. Which restaurants were better. Which rink had better fans. I think we became secondary as players on the ice,” he said. “So they take me off on the stretcher, into the room, and I say to [Flames trainer Jim] Bearcat Murray, ‘We need a win here. I’m okay. Go tell Crispy.’ He goes out to the bench, Bearcat, and right where the players can hear, he says to Crispy: ‘Bully says he’s okay. He can play. Do you want him?’ And Crispy yells back, ‘Hell, no. He hasn’t done a goddamned thing yet anyway. Leave him in the room.’
“I knew Crispy wasn’t gonna keep me. I’m just telling you from the horse’s mouth. The real story is the bugger didn’t want me to come back.”
Ex-players are excited to tell their Battle stories some twenty-five or thirty years later, but while the Battle was still burning hot, the truth and the quotes did not always intersect. Like the next morning at practice, when the journalists arrived, looking to mine McSorley for an explanation of his Zorro routine.
“Everyone is waiting for McSorley to come to his stall in the room. There’s a big group of us around his cubicle,” recalls Al Maki, a columnist for the Calgary Herald at that time. “He walks into the room, sees us, and you can see him think, ‘Uh, oh.’ Slats motions him over, and they step into the corner, and they’re talking. They’re getting their stories straight.
“So McSorley walks to his locker, he stands in, and the first question comes: ‘What happened?’ He says, ‘I don’t know. I have no recollection of what happened.’ He just blew it all off. Pleaded amnesia.”
Of course, the Flames remembered what had happened. The victims, it seemed, always had a clearer recollection of crimes committed than did the perpetrators. Assistant coach Doug Risebrough handled the press briefing that day, working himself up into quite a lather: “ ‘That’s the most vicious thing I’ve seen in hockey!’ ” Maki recalls him saying. “ ‘An abomination!’ ”
On one hand, the game is clearly a better place now that players have stopped spearing each other in the jewels. On the other hand …
“That’s the thing we’re missing in the game today. Emotion,” said former Flames goalie Mike Vernon. “Those games had so much emotion, and those things were all real. Emotions were high, and there was a price that had to be paid. Like the time Dave Brown fought Stu Grimson. Grimmer sat in the penalty box for ten minutes with a broken face.
“You want to see real? That’s real.”
The Battle of Alberta, however, was filled with these strange dichotomies. On one hand, as the 1980s unfolded, Edmonton and Calgary became the two best teams in the West every year—and in the entire NHL most times as well. But at the same time, each team made sure they were the toughest, buttressing their immense skill with plenty of players who could and would do the dirty work of the day.
For two teams t
hat scored nearly twice as many goals as a good team does today, fighting and physical play was always held in high esteem. If you won the game, but my team won the fights? Well, I hadn’t completely lost, had I?
“There had to be a lot of pressure on those guys [who fought a lot],” said Lowe. “Knowing that they’re carrying not only the team but the fans, almost the whole city for that matter. [Winning fights] was almost like a badge of honour. Bragging rights the next day.”
Behind the bench, Flames coach (Badger) Bob Johnson was a professorial type out of the U.S. college ranks who’d never played an NHL game, brandishing a notebook and a pen like McSorley wielded his Koho. Meanwhile, Sather was this street-smart journeyman who wore slick suits and operated with a swagger that came to define the Oilers organization. To the naked eye, they were nothing like each other. Both, however, possessed immense motivational skills, even if they came at the task from opposite ends of the earth, it seemed.
Even ownership was contradictory: the Flames were run by a conglomerate of well-heeled, respected Calgary businessmen who would only step behind a microphone when they were announcing money donated to put a wing on a hospital for children. Whereas in Edmonton, Peter Pocklington was brash and entrepreneurial, with a portfolio that went up and down like the hood of a car. He didn’t always pay his bills, but if a hockey writer wanted a quote from Peter, you just phoned his home number, and after a few minutes of chatting with his wife, Eva, she’d hand him the phone.
Another strange branching of this plant was the level of hucksterism that pervaded the Battle, perhaps a homage to the days when WHA co-founder Bill Hunter operated his junior Oil Kings out of Edmonton, and his partner in crime, Scotty Munro, was hawking tickets for the Calgary Centennials down south. Truly, the roots of the Battle began in senior hockey, where the Edmonton Flyers and Calgary Stampeders went at it with straight sticks and horsehair goal pads, and filtered through the junior ranks to the Oilers and Calgary Cowboys of the WHA.
