by Mark Spector
“You grow up in Edmonton, it starts out as a kid,” said Kulchisky. “You get to provincials, you often had to go to Calgary to win the province. The Labour Day Classic, you had to beat Calgary. When I grew up, it was the Calgary Centennials versus the Edmonton Oil Kings. Scotty Munro versus Bill Hunter. You just had a dislike for Calgary, whether football, hockey, volleyball, basketball … Calgary was the enemy.”
“It was bred into us here,” said Otto. “Cliff, Coatesy, [assistant to President Al Coates] Al MacNeil, they were all good hockey men and they had a job to do. That was to get on par with Edmonton. It was instilled that this was the enemy up north. And that’s the way it was. I took it to heart. I was playing for the crest, and they were the enemy.”
Behind the scenes, Bearcat and his Flames equipment man, Bobby Stewart, cooperated famously with Kulchisky, head Oilers equipment man Barrie Stafford, and medical trainer Ken Lowe, who was Kevin’s older brother. Whichever team was on the road, if the other guy needed a helmet repaired or an extra pair of laces, they were welcome inside each other’s equipment rooms. They were the Switzerland in the greater picture, and awfully busy some nights when the fists started flying.
“I had to go out on the ice one time for Kevin,” remembered Bearcat. “He’d been bodychecked behind the net and hit his head on the glass. Kenny was busy and had gone to the dressing room. So I said, ‘Kevin, it’s Bearcat. You hit your head. Kenny’s busy, but everything’s going to be fine. Just relax. By this time, Kenny was there.
“So, we’re coming off the ice now and I say to Kevin, ‘You’ve got to start smartening up because you’re married now. You’ve got a wife now. Somebody to look after you, and somebody to look after. And it’s about time you showed her some respect and starting wearing something on your head to protect yourself other than that goofy [Jofa] helmet. I give it to him all the way off the ice.
“Kenny had been trying and trying to get him to change helmets too, and he wouldn’t do it. But you know what? When he recovered from that, and he came back, he was wearing a proper helmet. I went up and shook his hand and he says, ‘Bear, you were right.’ ”
Kulchisky agrees—but only to a point.
“We’d do anything for them and vice versa. But once the game started, it was a different world. You’d look down that bench and you’d think, ‘Go eff yourself, Bearcat,’ ” he said. “Win the game or go down swinging. From my view behind the bench, listening to the coaches between periods, and listening to the players. That’s what I got out if it.”
It was in Calgary in January 2003 when Craig MacTavish, by then the Oilers head coach, reached over the glass and grabbed Flames mascot Harvey the Hound by the tongue after the six-foot-six plush dog taunted him repeatedly. Oh, how Neil Sheehy would have liked to do the same to Esa Tikkanen a decade before. “I was surprised by how easy it came out,” MacTavish said afterwards. “It was one of those tear-away tongues.”
Some of the strangest confrontations occurred not on the ice but in the stands behind the teams’ benches. Remember, it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that the NHL mandated teams have extra-high glass behind the benches, so interaction between fans and the coaching staff were known to boil over.
In Calgary, Oilers head coach Glen Sather had a long-running feud with a Flames season ticket holder who rankled Sather for years in the Stampede Corral and Saddledome. When you see the 1988 highlight of Gretzky streaking down the left wing and blasting a slapper high to Mike Vernon’s glove side in overtime of a playoff game, the clip always includes Sather fist-pumping at someone behind the Oilers bench in Calgary. That’s the guy, and Slats couldn’t wait to shove it up the rear end of some shmoe who’d paid his way in. The high ground, it must be said, was seldom travelled in the Battle.
Off the ice, that is. On the ice, as the two teams matured, most nights they cut through the rest of the Campbell Conference like butter. In those eight Stanley Cup seasons, when the Flames or the Oilers emerged from the Smythe Division to play against the survivor of the Norris, the Alberta teams went a combined 32–10 in the conference final. The Chicago Blackhawks, a pretty fine team in the 1980s, had four cracks at getting to a Stanley Cup. In those four conference finals, the Blackhawks won but five lonely games.
It is said that one of the reasons the Oilers went from being a collection of good players to a championship team of the highest order was because of the Flames and the level of play required just to get out of the Smythe. Bob Johnson always had a “seven-point plan” on how to “get to the top of the mountain,” but once again, Johnson’s strategy often came with a gimmick.
Prior to the Oilers–Flames playoff matchup in spring 1986, Johnson dressed two college goalies in Oilers uniforms and ran them out on the ice for the Flames shooters to fire away at. Of course, this infuriated Sather, who thought the entire exercise to be bush league. But it distracted the Oilers that day, so in some small way, Badger had succeeded.
In his heart of hearts, Johnson knew that the Oilers had him outmanned in most positions. But he always believed there was a way to coach his team up to that level, and damned if he did not accomplish that in 1986, when the Flames’ courageous pursuit of the two-time Cup champions resulted in a Game 7 victory for Calgary in Edmonton with “the Steve Smith goal,” an own goal that is burned into the memory of every Flames and Oilers fan born after about 1980.
It was a goal for the ages, a Game 7 winner banked in by the Oilers defenceman off of the back of goalie Grant Fuhr’s leg and credited to Calgary’s Perry Berezan—an Edmonton native, no less. What rankled the Flames was that here they’d knocked off the champs in a seven-game series and the only goal anyone remembers was the one they didn’t even score themselves.
“Everyone talks about the Steve Smith goal,” grouses Lanny McDonald. “Well, they forget it was a seven-game series. We had to find a way to win three other games. If that happened in Game 3 or 4, no one would be talking about it. They’d be talking about what an unbelievable series it was. And it was.”
From that moment on, once Calgary had checked in with its first series win over Edmonton, the complexion of the Battle would never be the same. Equal footing had been attained, and with that came a higher level of respect from Edmonton.
“All the most important, most memorable team meetings we ever had were in that dressing room in Calgary,” MacTavish said. “We were the best two teams in the NHL of that day, and we would meet very early in the playoffs. It was good because the players weren’t worn down from the rigours of three previous series, and they were absolute wars.
“A pleasure to be a part of, in hindsight.”
Said Peplinski: “I continue to be shocked and amazed that there were not more serious injuries from those games. There was a never a game that wasn’t vicious … and violent.”
Was the hockey better? Well, if you grew up watching 5–4 hockey games with two or three fights, as I did, you are likely going to say there was more entertainment in a night of the Battle than when those same teams play a fightless, 3–2 game today—at four times the ticket price.
As for the players on the ice, they would probably rather get paid like today’s NHL player, and not fearing for your life wouldn’t be such a bad thing. But as Craig MacTavish said, sometimes when the old fight-or-flight response gets activated, the rush can feel pretty good once you’re back in that dressing room, a cold beer in hand.
“For me, it was where we really challenged each other—in a lot of aspects of the game, but mostly the toughness part of it,” he said. “Everybody had to get outside of their comfort zone for what they were willing to do from a toughness standpoint, and there is a lot of satisfaction when that happens. When everybody does it on your team, and you win.
“I mean, those games were highly satisfying. They were big games. We were the two best teams back in that era. You didn’t have to look too long into the tea leaves to see what was ahead. It was going to be a tough, hard game.
“And those playoff series? Everybody
in the league was watching them. It was just a battle of attrition.”
Years later, in 2003, the Oilers, toiling in obscurity and playing inside a building renamed the Skyreach Centre, were scraping along the bottom of the NHL standings and fixing to welcome an only slightly better Flames team that night. The pendulum had swung on the Battle of Alberta, and the chances of ESPN dropping its American coverage to televise the Battle —as the network had done in the 1986 playoffs—was a distant memory.
Oilers president Patrick LaForge was asked if his club had anything special planned for that night’s tilt, the first meeting between the Calgary Flames and Edmonton Oilers since MacTavish had poached Harvey the Hound’s tongue.
“No,” replied LaForge. Then he thought for a moment.
“Other than to beat the shit out of the Flames.”
2
U.S. College Talent Boosts the Flames Roster
“Really? I didn’t have a clue …”
Jamie Macoun would play more than a thousand NHL games eventually. But on January 22, 1983, he was as naive as a college kid could be, surrounded by NHL executives in the front seat of a rented car heading for an airport hotel in St. Louis.
Macoun, a defenceman, was facing his first four-on-one as a Calgary Flame. “Cliff Fletcher is in the front seat, and Al Coates, Al MacNeil, and Badger Bob Johnson are in the back seat,” Macoun recalls. “I met the team down in St. Louis. I’m sitting there negotiating my own contract, right out of college.”
Still a student at Ohio State University, where he’d had a total knee reconstruction the year before, Macoun had no idea what lay ahead. But he was already the consummate Calgary Flame before he’d even shaken general manager Cliff Fletcher’s hand that day in Missouri.
You see, while Edmonton chief scout Barry Fraser had hit five or six early home runs, drafting five Hall of Fame players plus defensive rock Kevin Lowe in his first three NHL drafts, Fletcher was catching up with his own bird dog, a U.S. college scout by the name of Jack Ferreira.
If the Oilers were two or three years ahead of Calgary in the Battle of Alberta, and they surely were with players like Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier, Grant Fuhr, Jari Kurri, and Paul Coffey, then it didn’t make much sense for Fletcher to think he would ever catch up to Edmonton using the NHL draft. Any eighteen-year-old he could draft would always be at least two years behind the crop that Fraser had drafted, and as each season passed, two years turned into three, and into four, and so on.
Meanwhile, Ferreira, who would go on to become an NHL general manager himself, was in the midst of a forty-year career in the game. He had found quite a lode in these older, twenty- and twenty-one-year-olds coming out of the U.S. college ranks, and it made a ton of sense, snapping up players like Joel Otto out of Bemidji State; Colin Patterson from Clarkson; Eddy Beers, a Merritt, B.C., kid on scholarship at the University of Denver; and Gino Cavallini, a Toronto boy who went south to Bowling Green State University. Especially considering that Fletcher had gone out and hired a head coach named “Badger” Bob Johnson, a National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) legend who was fresh out of the University of Wisconsin.
(The Flames had so much success with college guys, they would even sign a defenceman named Charlie Bourgeois out of the Université de Moncton. He came with a tragic back story, retold a little further below.)
On this day it was Macoun’s turn to make the jump from college to pro. There was, however, a little matter of a contract to be hammered out. But Macoun was college-educated, so he didn’t require an agent, right?
Well …
“Being in college, you didn’t see a lot of the NHL down in Columbus, Ohio,” he remembers. “I’m thinking, ‘The Calgary Flames. Okay.’ I know a couple of names, and I’m checking out the standings. But to be honest, it was pretty new to me. They’re telling me, ‘Well, Timmy Hunter is in the minors for us, and this guy’s here, and that guy’s there.’ But really? I didn’t have a clue.”
Macoun always had the gift of the gab, and though he likely could have used an agent to negotiate his contract, he surely didn’t need one for self-promotion.
“We’d brought him in,” said Al Coates. “He’d watched the game, and now we’re talking to him. He’s telling everybody what kind of a player he is. He’s saying, ‘I can really skate, I’m a great first-pass player. I hit like a truck, I see the ice really well …’ Finally, Badger says to him, ‘Well, do you have any weaknesses at all?’ And Jamie stops, thinks for a minute, and says, ‘Well, every once in a while, on a two-on-one I run at the wrong guy. Other than that, I’m a pretty good player.’ ”
Finally, the management team asked the twenty-one-year-old Macoun what it would take to get his name on a contract. Again, Macoun was at a loss for any real negotiating strategy.
“My only thought was, ‘I’m in college right now, and I’m getting paid to go to college.’ If I could somehow guarantee that my college would get paid for if these guys decided they didn’t want me in a year, then I’m happy,” he surmised. “So I say, ‘Are you going to pay for my school?’ And they say, ‘Absolutely. And we’re going to pay you to go to school.’
“We used to get $300 a month at school for food. They were going to pay me $2,000 a month. I’m going, ‘This is unbelievable!’ They were paying me if things didn’t work out and I went back to school, and they paid me when I went back to school in the summertime. Talk about a no-lose situation. I’m thinking, ‘If I can get a chance to play one or two games … Or maybe I’ll get lucky and play twenty or thirty games. And, I’ve still got my schooling!’ ”
But wait, they said to Macoun. How much did he think he should earn if he was actually playing for the Flames full time? Well, that thought had never even entered the steel trap that was Macoun’s mind. Playing in the NHL? Was this a real possibility?
“I remember saying to myself, ‘Bankers are getting this much, I should get as much as a banker.’ They say, ‘Sure, this year that’s great. But what about next year?’ I go, ‘You mean, everything changes …?’ ”
The Flames management could have taken advantage of these kids, locking them into deals they would have regretted the moment they arrived at their first NHL camp and found out what everyone else was making. But Fletcher and MacNeil were fair-minded people, entering into what they hoped would be a long-term relationship. As it turns out, with many of these guys it was long-term, so you can imagine the error it would have been to have started that relationship on nefarious footing.
“I look back now, I was treated incredibly fair,” Macoun said, long after his 1,128-game career was done. “Cliff Fletcher, Al MacNeil, Al Coates, they are all great family people. Like Badger Bob, there was a genuine concern about what you were all about. Compare that to how Sather would have dealt with Jamie Macoun when I was coming out of college. Different schools, let’s put it that way.”
Thirty years later, and still lobbing shots at one another.
While Edmonton was owned by the high-profile Peter Pocklington, who was always accessible to the media though less so to collection agencies, the Flames ownership group was financially comfortable, highly respected in the community, and, as a rule, quiet as a mouse. The Flames had Badger Bob, the university professor with the wrinkly tie he would, every so often, use to wipe his nose on. Edmonton had Glen Sather behind its bench, wearing a smirk and a suit from Sam Abouhassan, Edmonton’s clothier to the stars. Wipe your nose on Slats’s tie and you’d need a lot more than a strip of silk to stop the bleeding that would ensue.
And when it came to building their rosters, they were similarly dissimilar. Johnson, whose roots were in the U.S. college game, was not only receptive to having college grads in his dressing room, it was probably a necessary route for his boss Fletcher to pursue. Had you stocked the room only with Canadian junior players in the early 1980s, then put an NCAA-trained coach in charge of them, you’d likely have had a mutiny.
Frankly, Calgary would have been crazy to believe that they could amass as m
uch raw skill as the Oilers possessed. The solution for the Flames would come from masterful coaching and the devising of systems that—when executed with precision—could stymie Edmonton’s free-flow, freelance offence. And as any coach will tell you, that level of execution requires a unanimous buy-in from your roster. Twenty men would need to be 100 percent committed to Johnson’s teachings if Calgary was going to pull this off, so the fact the dressing room was being salted with players whose backgrounds were identical to Badger Bob’s was part of the design.
From the players’ side, each and every one of them had been overlooked by the NHL into his early twenties. So guys like Colin Patterson, a Rexdale, Ontario, kid who had found his way down to Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, viewed the Flames as one last chance at playing pro hockey.
“None of us were drafted,” Patterson said. “We got a chance to play, where otherwise we probably wouldn’t have. And Badger Bob was the coach at the time, so we all blended in.”
From a roster-integration standpoint, there are mileposts throughout hockey history that are frequently acknowledged as game-changing trends. The moment the NHL finally abolished the Montreal Canadiens’ territorial rights to the best young French-Canadian players was one milepost. The rise and fall of the WHA was another. The Winnipeg Jets gathering Ulf Nilsson, Anders Hedberg, and several other Swedish players together to produce a WHA team that would, most believe, have beaten many NHL clubs on a regular basis was yet another. When the Stastny brothers arrived from Czechoslovakia. When the Red Army began to disseminate, and Russian players began to appear in NHL uniforms.
The Calgary Flames’ success with undrafted U.S. college players was something, however, that few saw coming. Today, of course, it seems like there is a Danny DeKeyser or a Torey Krug coming out of the NCAA every spring and walking right into a feeding frenzy of NHL general managers. But in 1982 there was no frenzy. Just an airport hotel in St. Louis and a rental car full of hockey men.
