The Battle of Alberta

by Mark Spector

  “At that time, there was a stigma about U.S. college hockey players, that the only hockey players there were played in the Canadian major junior hockey leagues,” recounts Fletcher. “Bringing Bob Johnson to Calgary was the easiest decision because at that time if you suggested that Calgary was a little redneck-y as sports fans go, you wouldn’t be far off. But we needed someone to make our players better and I thought if anybody could do it, he could.”

  Necessity, as always, became the mother of invention. Fletcher needed to play catch-up with Edmonton. “I was just looking for an edge. Being innovative. When I was working in St. Louis we were at the start of what turned out to be the origin of scouting combines. We got involved early in computerized scouting. I was just a guy looking for an edge over my opponents … and we were just looking at it as a possibility of acquiring players who’d make us better quicker—without having a lot of competition to get them. The scouts did a great job. Three [undrafted NCAA players] played on our Stanley Cup team, and three more were traded for a Hall of Famer [Joe Mullen].”

  While Edmonton had drafted their crop of Hall of Famers, Fletcher was in the process of trading for a group of his own. Over the years he acquired Lanny McDonald and Doug Gilmour and traded three of those college kids (Beers, Bourgeois, and Cavallini) to St. Louis for Mullen, the Hell’s Kitchen, New York, native who would reward the Flames with a fifty-one-goal season in their Cup year of 1988–89. Then the Flames would draft Joe Nieuwendyk, Al MacInnis, and Brett Hull, all of whom have been awarded plaques inside the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto.

  “You land a fifty-goal guy out of players who had been acquired—not through the draft system—but through the college ranks? It gave you assets to deal with,” Coates said. “All of a sudden there was some depth within the organization, and almost without exception they were character people. Still not as good as the Oilers but getting closer every year.”

  Slowly, Calgary checked off the boxes: Neil Sheehy would become Gretzky’s personal discomfort zone. On every night of the Battle, No. 99 would wear the Flames defenceman “like a hair shirt,” as Hall of Fame Edmonton Journal writer Jim Matheson used to say. Paul Reinhart, a power-play quarterback, was Calgary’s answer to Paul Coffey in Edmonton. Hakan Loob was Calgary’s Jari Kurri, Tim Hunter rivalled Dave Semenko, and so on.

  But perhaps the most difficult matchup fell to Joel Otto. He was a six-foot-four centreman, strong in the faceoff circle, and with decent foot speed. So that paired Otto up with Mark Messier. The two couldn’t have come from more divergent backgrounds.

  “Badger was way ahead of his time with line matching, and I was out whenever we could [against Messier],” Otto said. “My role was to be strong, and as best I could, nullify him. It gave me a focus, a responsibility. For him, he probably had that guy every game [on the other side].”

  Messier had grown up in a Northern Alberta hockey family, his father trekking through the minor leagues before coming home to wage the Battle of Alberta as a senior player with the Edmonton Monarchs in 1969–70. Messier himself had left home to turn pro at age seventeen, quenched like molten steel in a World Hockey Association culture that was both tough and unfair in equal portions. He learned to fight at fifteen, and as a sixteen-year-old racked up 194 penalty minutes as an ironically named St. Albert Saint in the Alberta Junior Hockey League.

  Otto, meanwhile, was nine months younger than Messier and miles behind when it came to the style of hockey that the Battle would require. With seventy-five points in just thirty-one games during the 1983–84 season, Otto had led his Bemidji State Beavers to a national Division II title in his final year of college. By that time, however, Messier had played in two Stanley Cup finals, winning the Conn Smythe in 1984 as Edmonton ended the New York Islanders dynasty.

  Within a season, Otto was busting helmets—going Cooper to Winnwell—with Messier, a lot to ask of a college kid making his first couple of tours through the NHL. Otto was physically up to the task right away. But the mental part? It would have to come over time.

  “He was unpredictable,” Otto said of Messier. “I approached him like I was going into the cage with a lion. You had to be careful. He brought something that not many guys did, and that’s a lot of everything. There aren’t many more complete players than he was, and he’s not one to back down.

  “Hey, Edmonton games were nervous. It was an important part of our era … and it kept me focused because I had to know his unpredictability. And he had the entire package.”

  In hindsight, going head to head with Messier was, in a perverse way, the safest place to be in the Battle. It kept Messier in front of Otto at all times, and the Flames centre could be excused for never letting Messier out of his sight—which was always the safest vantage point when Calgary met Edmonton.

  “I know he gave it to Nats [Ric Nattress] with an elbow one time. Couner [Macoun] once, just about killed him,” Otto listed off. “And I’m missin’ a couple others. Caught Perry [Berezan] with his head down once …”

  It became a fascinating clash of twosomes in the Battle: Messier and his sidekick, Glenn Anderson, against Otto and his permanent right-winger, Jim Peplinski. “Pep and I were together for most of the five years we played [in Calgary] together,” Otto said. “And I owe Pep all my penalty minutes ’cause he’d start the stuff, I’d wade in. You’d get ten minutes back in those days.”

  Otto has been quoted many times on Messier, saying, “I owe him my career, basically.” That may be a tad charitable, as it is hard to believe there weren’t twenty other teams that would have loved to acquire a six-foot-four centreman with all of Otto’s attributes for their lineup. But, like many of these college grads who gravitated to Cliff Fletcher’s team in Calgary, Otto still holds a special reverence—almost an indebtedness—to the Battle.

  “Well, it got me in the league, personally. I’ve said that to many people,” Otto said. “Calgary trying to find a blueprint that would match Edmonton. That’s what it was all about. It gave me the opportunity to play, and I was lucky enough to be in the right place and make the most of it.”

  “For us,” echoed Patterson, “without them, we would not have formed our team the way we did. For me personally, had it not been for them, I don’t know if Calgary would have signed me.”

  Getting conscripted into the Battle of Alberta in the early 1980s was one thing. Finding the games on television or radio outside the province of Alberta was quite another. In the 1990s, when Glen Sather was no longer behind the Oilers bench, sometimes he would be out of the market when the Oilers were playing. Unable to find it on television, he would call home and instruct one of his family members to place the receiver near the radio so he could listen to the radio play called by Rod Phillips.

  A decade before that, remember, there was no Internet and no Centre Ice package on digital TV. Even when the Battle burned the brightest, it was difficult to tune in from anywhere outside what was then a 403 area code that enveloped the entire province of Alberta.

  “It wasn’t like the CBC was carrying Edmonton or Calgary games every weekend,” Patterson recalled. “There was no double-header on Saturday night. Unless you were going to stay up ‘til midnight and get a satellite dish that could give you illegal access to the game, you weren’t seeing it.

  “My parents lived in Toronto, and they’d try to listen to our games on the radio. My dad was an electrical engineer, so he had all these hookups. They’d pick up some station from another station, from another station, but they could never get the game. So you’d phone them after it was over and tell them the score. Or if you couldn’t call [there were no cellphones in the mid-1980s], they’d pick up the paper the next afternoon to get the score.

  “So many of Gretzky’s feats weren’t even seen nationally. Can you imagine?” said Patterson. “People outside the province, I don’t think they understood how good the hockey was. You’d have to ask [CBC producer] John Shannon, but I’m pretty sure that ’86 series cost him his job with CBC. ‘We’re not leav
ing this broadcast. We’re not going to show The Pig and Whistle, or whatever the hell was on at the time. That’s how you knew, people didn’t know about the Battle.”

  The Battle left a tattoo on the hearts, however, of those who were on its front lines. Even years later, with careers now winding down and both teams far removed from any Stanley Cup chatter, there was a certain feeling that lasted—in the pit of your stomach, a tension that still had a grip.

  “I can remember being in the locker room before an Edmonton game,” Otto said. “This is my eighth, ninth year in the league. It was just another game in the regular season, and I turned to Pep and said, ‘I’m nervous.’

  “I was never nervous before any game, but I was nervous because of what’s at stake. The rivalry. The way the game’s going to be played. There was going to be fights, there was going to be physicality. It was going to be that type of game.”

  It’s almost uncanny the way the matchups formed, as if they were keeping up with the Joneses. Even as insignificant as it may seem, there were two stay-at-home defencemen registered in the Battle who came from the Canadian university ranks. One resided on each team’s blue line.

  Edmonton had a big, red-haired graduate of the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Medicine named Dr. Randy Gregg, whose skating style was best described by Oilers play-by-play man Rod Phillips, who would greet a Gregg puck rush with, “Here comes Randy Gregg, snow-shoeing up through centre-ice …” I played baseball with Gregg on a men’s team called the Edmonton Tigers. He was a sharp-fielding third baseman with a fine arm who, as a hitter, could launch the ball a mile. He was, like most NHLers, simply an excellent all-around athlete.

  Of course, Calgary would have an answer for Gregg, and that came in the form of Charlie Bourgeois, a similarly safety-conscious defenceman out of the Université de Moncton. Gregg had been the premier defenceman in what was then the Canadian Interuniversity Athletic Union—they have since named an award after him, given to the top academic hockey player—before joining the Canadian Olympic team in 1979. Two years later Bourgeois would be named an All-Canadian defenceman and take his Université de Moncton Aigles Bleus to the national tournament.

  It was at another of these tournaments, in spring 2005, when I ran across Bourgeois again, now the U of M’s head coach, as he brought his Aigles Bleus to Edmonton for a University Cup championship tournament. Bourgeois’s team practised at Clare Drake Arena on the University of Alberta campus, not 100 metres away from the U of A Pavilion that only two weeks previous had held one of the largest funerals in RCMP history, as the four Mounties killed in the Mayerthorpe massacre were laid to rest.

  Officers Anthony Gordon, Lionide Johnston, Brock Myrol, and Peter Schiemann were executing a property seizure on a farm near Mayerthorpe, a rural community in North Central Alberta, when they were ambushed by James Roszko in what was the worst multiple-officer killing in modern Canadian history.

  “My dad was a good cop. A real good cop,” Bourgeois told me that day. “I remember, he’d run into a drunk, and some nights he’d bring him to our house instead of taking him to [the station]. Just a good cop. Very fair, but tough.

  “He was just a good man. He wanted to help people.”

  Charlie Bourgeois’s story begins in the 1960s when a young cop named Aurele Bourgeois moved his family from Toronto to Moncton. “There was less danger,” recalls Charlie as the reason for the move. For those who serve the public the way the RCMP do, the concept of “less danger” may be attainable. A workday without any danger, however, is not something they sign up for.

  And so it was that two members—Cpl. Aurele Bourgeois and Const. Michael O’Leary—were dispatched with $15,000 in ransom money in December 1974, instructed to free fourteen-year-old Raymond Stein from a pair of local thugs. One of the kidnappers was the notorious James Hutchison, who, like Roszko, had a litany of violent offences on his record when he shot his way into Canadian history books.

  “It was a kidnapping—the son of a wealthy restaurateur in Moncton—which had never happened in the city,” Bourgeois recalled. “My dad and his partner, Constable O’Leary, were responsible for delivering the ransom. That’s where there were several errors. There was no backup, and they were caught by surprise. They boy was let go safely, and my understanding is [the kidnappers] were able to get the gun off one of the police officers and forced the other police officer to put down his weapon. Since then, the law has changed. A police officer is never to put down his weapon.”

  Bourgeois was fourteen, going on fifteen years old when this tragedy played out. He was playing minor hockey in Moncton. His dad came to as many games as his shift schedule would allow. Even when he was working, you might have seen a patrol car parked outside the local hockey rink for twenty minutes or so, when young Charlie’s team was on the ice.

  “There were several days when we didn’t know what was happening. Dad didn’t come home,” Bourgeois remembers. “Those three days of not knowing, those were trying times. Back home, nothing like that had ever happened. The police force just wasn’t prepared. There was a series of … mistakes. There was no backup. My dad and his partner couldn’t have access to the shotguns. Looking back now, they just didn’t take all the precautions. It was a small community.”

  Bourgeois and O’Leary’s last contact was made when they radioed their dispatcher to say they were in pursuit of a Cadillac that contained the kidnappers. Something went wrong, however, and before long the two officers were on their hands and knees in the woods north of Moncton, digging their own graves. Both were killed execution-style, with their own revolvers. Hutchison and his accomplice, Ricky Ambrose, purchased shovels at a local hardware store a few hours later and buried the bodies. The graves were found two days later by an elderly trapper.

  Aurele Bourgeois was just forty-three years old, with a wife and four kids. The Bourgeoises did not attend court proceedings or demand an inquiry.

  “As a family … we just kind of wanted to push it away. Our mom sheltered us from it, and kept us away,” Bourgeois said. “My dad. My hockey coach. Building the outdoor rink in the back, he’d be out there hours in the night, flooding a big outdoor rink. Wouldn’t miss any games, even if he was on duty. You’d see up in the corner of the building, a guy dressed in his uniform, sneaking in. He never played the game, but he had a great passion for it. He just loved the game of hockey. He’s probably why I’m still involved in this game at forty-five years old.”

  But even that was a close call for a while. Bourgeois nearly quit the game after his father died. “I was fourteen. In high school,” he said. “It was tough, at first. It was devastating. I just stopped playing.”

  It is hard to know if Bourgeois found the Battle of Alberta or if it found him. But he was cut out for the work: a big, burly defenceman with a chip on his shoulder who wasn’t about to take any crap from anybody.

  “The first NHL game I saw live was the first NHL game I played in: at the old Stampede Corral against St. Louis. Fought Brian Sutter,” he said. “My first game at the Forum, the twelfth game of my NHL career, I had my family and friends there and I scored that night. My first NHL goal.

  “It’s as clear as if it happened yesterday: Mel Bridgman making the pass back to me; just a shot from the point; Richard Sévigny, a shot over his shoulder; Willi Plett picking the puck up and giving it to me …”

  It was the first of only sixteen career goals for Bourgeois in a stay-at-home, 290-game career. “The odds of my mom and my family being in the rink where I’m going to score a goal? My first NHL goal? And growing up as a Montreal Canadiens fan? My dad and I watched the Canadiens every Saturday night. That was his team. So, for that all to happen, you wonder if somebody upstairs wasn’t looking out for you.”

  Ricky Ambrose, now sixty-three, was paroled in July 2000. He changed his surname to Bergeron and was living in Edmonton when his parole was revoked. He is, by all reports, still in the system. James Lawrence Hutchison died in the Kingston Penitentiary in 2011 at age e
ighty-three. Both had been sentenced to hang as cop killers, but their sentences were commuted to life without parole for twenty-five years when capital punishment was abolished in Canada.

  Charlie Bourgeois has settled in Atlantic Canada, where he is heavily involved in youth hockey programs. He is a good man who has been through a lot.

  3

  Glen Sather and the Art of Experience

  “Your parents aren’t here.

  Your agents will run from you.

  You come to me and I’ll be able to help.”

  Wayne Gretzky scanned the lineup of former Oilers greats and focused on his old boss, Glen Sather, at the end of the line. They were sitting on a stage reminiscing about that first Cup, won three decades ago. Messier, Coffey, Fuhr, Anderson, Lowe … A pretty good band, to be sure, but even the finest orchestra needs a damned good conductor.

  “I once told Glen,” Gretzky said, “for a six-goal scorer, he had tremendous hockey sense.”

  When it came to those Oilers teams, Sather was the motherboard. He ran everything, and everything ran through him. Yet, because of Sather’s keen awareness of when and when not to get involved, you could never call Sather a micromanager. He trusted people, and if they performed and were honest, he remains loyal to them to this day.

  For any leader, knowing when to step in is no more or less important than knowing when to stay out of something. Whether that concerned a player’s learning curve or the all-import drafting process that built this Oilers dynasty, Sather possessed this innate ability to make the right call.

  “Here’s what the media’s misconception of [the draft] always is,” said the Oilers grizzled former chief scout, Barry Fraser. “They think the managers go out and see all these [junior] guys play? They’ve never seen ’em play at all, most of them.”