by Mark Spector
This was where Sather had the good sense to hire smart people and let them do their jobs. It’s true—he had very little to do with those drafts. But when he struck his nose in, Sather’s touch was perfect. Like the time some kid named Mark Messier was next on Edmonton’s draft list.
“He wanted to take Messier in the third round, and I wanted to wait one more round,” Fraser remembers. “I mean, he’d only scored one goal the year before [in Cincinnati of the WHA], and it was one that hit him in the ass and went in, as I remember.”
“I said, ‘No, we’re taking Messier now,’ ” Sather recalls. “I’d seen Mark when he was a kid playing in St. Albert. He was just a kid, but he had tremendous instincts.”
Between the two, after twenty-three NHL drafts together, that was the only memorable conflict they could come up with. If you knew the smug, cocky Sather in the mid-1980s, you might find it hard to believe that one of his strongest qualities as a leader was knowing when to get the hell out of the way and trust his people.
“I found that out very early in the whole process,” Sather said. “Barry would see 230 games a year, and all of his scouts would see over 175. I went to see Grant Fuhr [play junior] in Victoria, and he was awful. I saw him at the Memorial Cup at Windsor? He was awful. And I remember talking to Barry about it, and him saying, ‘This guy is going to be a great goaltender. We’re drafting him.’
“I went to see Paul Coffey when he was playing junior hockey. Barry was telling me about this guy, and how he was going to be a great player,” said Sather, who didn’t exactly fall in love with Coffey’s game that day. “But I didn’t argue with him because I could see that he could skate and shoot the puck.”
Once Fraser drafted the players, they were turned over to Sather to mould into NHL players—and to turn into men. And not necessarily in that order. Sather leaned hardest on the guys he knew would and could deliver his message. The players he trusted the most? They got the most heat.
“He was harder on us than our parents were,” Gretzky said. “The very first phone call you ever made if something bad happened, or something wasn’t right, if you called Glen he was going to take care of it. So he really became a father to all of us, especially those of us who were here at eighteen, nineteen, twenty.”
On the other end of the scale was Fuhr. His finances were a wreck, and his level of maturity simply wasn’t sufficient to handle all that came along with NHL stardom. Yelling wasn’t going to help, and Sather likely fathered Fuhr more than any other player.
“I might be responsible for a lot of those grey hairs on his head now,” laughed Fuhr. “Financially, as an eighteen-year-old kid, just because all of a sudden you have money doesn’t mean you know what to do with it. So, he helped me buy my first house here in the city. Basically, he helped me along until I figured it out, if I ever figured it out.
“He gave us a lot of rope, so that we could learn on our own. But he also knew when to yank on the rope to reel us back in,” Fuhr said. “So he let us grow, thinking it was our idea.”
Covering Sather’s teams for more than a decade, one consistency I observed was his affinity for doing exactly what you thought was not necessary. Just when you figured you were coming down to the rink to cover a bag skate, he would run a teaching practice. And when things were good, and Sather perceived his team might be getting a little fat and sassy? He’d skate the hell out of them.
Inside the dressing room, the guys who produced the most also got the most heat when things were slipping.
“Most of the meetings that Glen had were one-way meetings, you know? You kind of took it,” Gretzky remembers with a wry smile. “As coaches have to do, he called out guys. But Glen’s forte was, he never picked on guys he didn’t think were frontline guys. He was the hardest, always, on myself, Kurri, Messier, and Coffey. He believed that, if he could get through to us, get us to play the system he wanted, then everybody else would conform to it.”
It worked the same way with the journalists who covered the team. He’d test you, and if you responded with a strong backbone, you had his respect. If you shied away, you were irrelevant. He had little time for the weak, whether on the ice or off.
I can attest, as a young reporter for the Edmonton Journal, his modus operandi was always the same. Where some coaches would pull you aside and berate your story, or a line of questioning in private, Sather wanted it well known that he was taking you to task. In my first couple of years on the beat, he would challenge me in the midst of a scrum of my colleagues.
It would happen during his interview session, in his dressing room, with many of his players within earshot. On his turf, by his rules—that was always Glen’s M.O.
At first I wouldn’t see it coming, and thought I tried not to let on, here was the great Glen Sather questioning something you’d written in front of everybody. I was rattled —exactly as Sather wanted you to be. But you had to stand up to him. You couldn’t cower or apologize because in the big picture it was a test. He wanted to know what kind of adversary he was facing, and you had to show him that you were going to chase the next story as hard as you’d chased the last one.
Once, in the mid-1990s, I had a story about a young Oilers player who had fathered a child out of wedlock. That fact alone wasn’t so newsworthy, but the legal process that ensued was crushing the player mentally. He was missing practices to attend the legal appointments, and his game had fallen off a cliff.
I confronted the player, got all the quotes, and although we couldn’t run the story that day, it would certainly be vetted by the Journal lawyers and run the next day. I went to bed late and was startled to hear my home phone ring at 6:45 a.m. It was Sather.
“You’ll never cover another game in our rink,” he threatened. “Your career will be done if you run that story.”
I was still half asleep while he was sharp and pushing the conversation. He had created an advantage for himself, a skill at which Sather was masterful. I told him the story was running, that I had it nailed with all the player’s quotes, and if he wanted to talk to me about it I would add in his perspective.
“I’m not going to talk to you about that!” he shouted. The thought of actually helping me with the story had never crossed his mind. I was scared as hell, truthfully, but the story ran and there wasn’t a single repercussion.
Sather’s bark was worse than his bite, which I would later learn was a pattern with those whom he liked or at least respected. I’d passed his test enough times, I guess.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that a general manager can’t win games in the NHL. No one in a suit has the ultimate control over a game. So a GM’s job description is to put the right people in all the right places—the amateur scouts, the pro scouts, the head coach, the assistant coaches, the training staff—to deliver his plan. But when the WHA closed its doors in 1979—with the Edmonton Oilers, Quebec Nordiques, Winnipeg Jets, and Hartford Whalers merging into a now twenty-one-team NHL for the 1979–80 season—to say Sather had even the skeleton of a team that would become a dynasty would be stretching it.
What he had was Wayne Gretzky, the odd Blair MacDonald and Brett Callighen, a Stan Weir here, a Dave Dryden there … and not much else. The NHL fathers, bitter that the WHA had driven up player costs (the Canadian NHL teams were also sour that Hockey Night in Canada revenue would now have to be split among three more Canadian clubs), made sure that the four merging WHA teams were stripped bare. They allowed each team to keep just two skaters and two goalies. Every remaining player who had been drafted by an NHL team reverted to becoming that team’s property again.
“They took Bengt Gustafsson. Screwed us on that one,” spat Sather, still sour some thirty-five years later about losing to the Washington Capitals what had been a savvy, late-season acquisition in the WHA’s final campaign by Sather. But the Oilers were able to keep Wayne Gretzky, and history shows, he was the only player from that last WHA team that really mattered, right?
Wrong. The Oilers brought Sat
her into the NHL as well, and without him the words “Edmonton Oilers” and “Stanley Cup” might never have been found in the same sentence. For one, Sather had instructed owner Peter Pocklington to acquire Gretzky in the first place, and he did so on November 2, 1978, from Nelson Skalbania, whose Indianapolis Racers were said to be losing an unheard-of $40,000 per day in their WHA operation. It gave Sather a centrepiece around which to construct a hockey club, and surprisingly, there was relatively little push back by the NHL teams about allowing Gretzky to remain with Edmonton.
“They knew that we had to have a good player. And a lot of the guys in the NHL were not convinced that Wayne was going to be a good player. I don’t think a lot of them looked that hard [at the WHA],” Sather said. “There were lots of other pieces we had to surround Wayne with, and those pieces changed all the time. It was a matter of developing them, taking your time, encouraging them, building them. Getting them to do the right things. Getting them to be disciplined on the ice, but letting them grow into mature young men.”
Sather had been perhaps the last of hockey’s player/coaches when he replaced head coach Armand (Bep) Guidolin behind the Oilers bench midway through the Oilers 1976–77 WHA season. It was Guidolin’s idea, the kind of thing they did in the days of the WHA. The move was made partly because Guidolin was aware the team had stopped responding to him—and that Sather was the smartest hockey man in his employ—and partly because ownership didn’t feel like adding another contract to the payroll.
Sather, as it turns out, had been running many of the Oilers practices anyhow. He was clearly the next in command, by then a savvy, thirty-two-year-old left-winger who would find a way to score the overtime winner in his first game as player/coach. It was in Sather’s DNA to always be looking ahead, setting up his next move in life. And as Sather surmised the similarly aged players on the Oilers roster—Bill (Cowboy) Flett, Norm Ullman, goalie Dave Dryden—he saw men whose hockey careers were drawing to a close.
The WHA was an iffy proposition on the best of days, and Sather wasn’t going to be caught without a chair when the music stopped on that rickety old circuit. So he took the job as head coach.
“The thing about the WHA is, it offered opportunities,” said Dryden in Ed Willes’s excellent book, The Rebel League: The Short and Unruly Life of the World Hockey Association. “My brother [Ken] played with Slats in Montreal, and he said, ‘He’s got a lot of confidence and he’s smart,’ and that was pretty accurate. He was a horse trader and he was good at picking up information by asking the right questions and talking to the right people. Once he got behind the bench, I really liked the way he handled things. He didn’t over-coach. He was clear and direct. Then, when we got Wayne, he made sure [Gretzky] was surrounded with the right guys who’d teach him the right things.”
The career that would land Sather in the Hockey Hall of Fame began the day he replaced Guidolin behind that Oilers bench, with eighteen games remaining in another middling Oilers WHA season. The kid with the brush cut out of High River, Alberta, had eked out 658 games for six NHL organizations, plus another 81 games in that final WHA season in Edmonton. By the time the 1976–77 campaign had ended—despite scoring nineteen goals, thirty-four assists, and fifty-three points, all career highs—Sather knew his future was behind the bench. He hung up his skates after that season, and it was at that moment that Glen Sather the plugger—nicknamed “Slats” because of all the time he’d spent on the end of a bench—began the transformation into Glen Sather the Hall of Fame builder.
“How does anybody become what you become? You become a lot of things by chance, by luck, or by planning for the future,” Sather, now seventy-one years old, said when we spoke. He was sitting in the Rexall Place press box, in the visiting team’s booth. The cigar he chomped for all those years was absent, but the hint of smugness, the “here’s how it works” demeanour, was as strong as it ever was, even if some of the details from those old games have blurred a tad.
“The first few years I played pro, I ran hockey schools in Red Deer, in Banff, in Kimberley. Ran three of them at one time. I was organized. I planned. I liked the kids. I liked teaching. And I knew how to get the best out of them.”
We are all a product of our surroundings, and nowhere is that more true than in sports. You might have one or two wives in your life and think you know about relationships. But a guy like Sather—loyally married to Ann for forty-six years—played for a dozen or more coaches along the way. Some of them were Hall of Famers themselves, and each taught Sather a little something different.
“You think of Harry Sinden, Emile Francis, Scotty Bowman, Red Kelly … I learned something from all of those guys. I learned things to avoid. I learned things that I liked, and I knew what the players liked. I had a chance to analyze the game from [the bench] because I was playing ten minutes a game. I wasn’t playing eighteen minutes a game.”
In 1979 the Oilers were coming off a loss to Winnipeg in the Avco Cup, the WHA’s corporate, less historic version of the Stanley Cup. That loss was meaningless as soon as the final horn sounded, as everyone knew the next game would be with the big boys in the NHL. That first NHL game, on October 10, 1979, inside the old Chicago Stadium, was a milestone, to be sure. But the most important thing that Glen Sather—now the Oilers’ general manager and president as well as head coach—did in that first year? Well, it didn’t even happen in a hockey rink.
It occurred August 9, 1979, at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal—exactly nine years to the day before Sather would be forced to sell Gretzky to the Los Angeles Kings. It was here that Sather’s trust policy really began to pay dividends.
It was the Oilers’ first NHL draft after joining the league as a WHA survivor alongside the Winnipeg Jets, Quebec Nordiques, and Hartford Whalers. Sather and Fraser chose Kevin Lowe with their first pick, twenty-first overall. They traded their second-round pick to Minnesota to secure North Stars property Dave Semenko, whom the Oilers had lost off their roster under the terms of the WHA merger.
(The trade went like this: Edmonton’s forty-second-overall pick [which Minnesota used to select Neal Broten], plus Edmonton’s sixty-third-overall to Minnesota, for Semenko and Minnesota’s forty-eighth-overall pick. The Oilers re-acquired the heavyweight they’d lost in joining the NHL, and their plan worked perfectly when Messier was still available six choices later at forty-eight.)
Fraser drafted Lowe thinking he would be the glue guy, that high-in-character, stay-at-home defenceman whose pain threshold was out of sight. He was right. Lowe emerged as a shut-down defender whom Sather could play against the best in the NHL. A guy who wore a letter yet conducted himself every night as if he were still trying to make the team.
“He didn’t make many mistakes, a sound guy,” said Fraser when asked what he saw as he scouted Lowe in junior paying for the Quebec Remparts. “He was an English captain of a Quebec Major Junior team, which was rare. His competitiveness …? They didn’t call him ‘Vicious’ for nothing. He had a temper for sure, and I liked that.”
Lowe was known in his younger years as “Vish.” It was derived from Sid Vicious, a singer and bass player for the punk band The Sex Pistols, and its origins described perfectly what Sather liked in a player. Lowe wouldn’t travel across the zone to injure anyone. In fact, he was highly respected as a stand-up player by his peers. But if you thought you might run Lowe, he would not hesitate to hold his stick in such a way that bodychecking Lowe meant going through his stick to get to him. Call it the ol’ Sher-Wood sandwich. Lose a few teeth? Well, maybe you should have tried to hit someone else, eh?
That a player with Lowe’s characteristics would be the first-ever draft pick seems like a sound investment in the future. In the here and now, boardrooms full of hockey men would debate the merits of which position should be attacked first. Do they build from the goal out? Do they start with a big, right-handed centreman? How about a quarterback for the power play?
In those days, however, the consultation was minimal.
/> “We didn’t have a whole lot of discussions about anything like that,” Fraser said. “Glen was coach, general manager, and president of the team. He didn’t have a whole lot of time for this stuff. I was pretty much left on my own. He never entered into any of it.”
In a time long before analytics, Fraser’s gut was operating at a level far above what any math whiz could attain. We didn’t know it in 1979, but Fraser could hardly miss. His draft picks would form the basis of a team that is in the conversation for the best team in NHL history, and when he saw Anderson practise, he just knew that this was a kid you wanted on your side.
“His speed, his recklessness … I mean, here’s a guy who was going to play on the Canadian Olympic team at eighteen years old. That’s outstanding enough as it is,” Fraser said. A year later they held the draft in an NHL arena for the first time, moving down the street to the old Montreal Forum. That year, Fraser only drafted two Hall of Famers—Paul Coffey and Jari Kurri.
“Coff played for the Kitchener Rangers, and I lived in Kitchener,” Fraser said. “I got to know him, I saw him a lot, and his coach [Bob Ertel] was a friend of mine. There was a lot of speculation about how good a defenceman he was going to be, but there was no doubt in my mind that if he couldn’t be a defenceman, he surely could be a winger.
“He was just so smooth, so effortless. He could go like hell. Went through the whole team in junior just like he did in the NHL.”
Kurri was a sighting from a trip the Oilers had made into Finland to play some exhibition games when they were still in the WHA. Then, in the seventh round, Fraser took a flyer on a kid out of Penticton, B.C., a little goalie named Andy Moog who would turn out just fine, playing eighteen NHL seasons and over 700 games. Just in case though, Fraser used his first pick the following year to select Grant Fuhr at number eight overall in 1981.
