by Mark Spector
“A lot of the veterans thought that Bob liked to be the show,” confided Maher. “He had practices that were probably too long. Some of the players thought, ‘He’s just there because he wants to get the publicity.’ There was a lot of that, or some of that. But it didn’t bother [Johnson].”
And it didn’t bother the fans or media, who grew hungrier for the Battle with every step forward that the Flames took.
“If you went to cover a Battle of Alberta game in those days, you knew that every check was going to be finished,” said Calgary columnist George Johnson. “That everything would be contested at this seismic level that you’d never get if the Hartford Whalers were in town. You’d look forward to them. We all would.
“Whenever the Oilers were coming in, Badger would walk into the [media scrum] and say, ‘Beat the drums! Beat the drums, boys!’ He wanted the hype because everyone was at this playoff pitch for Game 44 of the season.”
Johnson had his notebooks at hand at all times, giving him that professorial air that he loved. In those notebooks were line combinations likely going back to his first gig at Colorado College in 1963 and various other thoughts that would pass through the winding road that was Badger’s mind.
There’s no doubting the fact that he was very smart, but not many accused Badger of fully thinking out all of his hare-brained schemes. He was the king of holding team meetings in the highest rows of the Saddledome and getting Murdoch and some scrubs to re-enact the Oilers’ breakout while he yelled for them to stop and start from Row 58.
It seems innovative until you realize that Neilson had already introduced both video and radio headsets to the NHL a few years previous. But that was Badger. He always had a plan—it was just a matter of how fully cooked the plan was. Some schemes, like keeping a left winger back to turn the puck into the middle, would morph into a defensive scheme used by likely two-thirds of the league in the mid-1990s.
Another—like Johnson’s mythical Seven Point Plan—existed in two worlds. It was both a tangible and an intangible, a tenet of every Flames player’s experience in Calgary, yet a manual on “How to Beat Edmonton” that none of them can recite from start to finish.
“Bob would never throw all of the Seven Point Plan at you at once,” Murdoch said. “It would be over the course of the series. I think it started out as a four-point plan and turned into a seven-point plan.”
“I also heard it variously described as a five-point plan. To me, it was a myth,” added Hockey Hall of Fame hockey writer Eric Duhatschek, who’s been around Calgary as long or longer than anyone. “I think it was a one-point plan: if the game went longer than three hours, the Flames had a chance. If the game went shorter than three hours, they didn’t. It was, ‘Try to win the games between the whistles, rather than during the play.’ ”
Johnson’s plan was both mythical and masterful, falling perfectly into the college drum-beating that this old schoolman lived for. And it was brilliant really: everyone talked about the Seven Point Plan, yet no one could ever divulge it because it had never been laid out specifically in front of everyone, all at once, to be memorized. If Badger were here today, he would likely swear by its existence. But the simple fact that it was perceived to exist was enough to accomplish the goal of planting the intrigue.
The Oilers never had a Seven Point Plan. Why did Calgary? What was in this closely guarded plan, and why wasn’t anyone ever allowed to see it, point by point? It was the Bat Cave of hockey strategies —everyone assumed it was somewhere, but nobody really knew where to look.
The Seven Point Plan was likely a list of strategies that Johnson found effective, built over time rather than conceived all at once and thrust upon his team, like some game plan from the Hockey Gods.
“Having a left winger back, to turn Coffey in [toward the defencemen],” began Murdoch. “Their tendencies on a power play. Being able to neutralize certain players … It wasn’t anything magical, but it was something we gave our guys so they could look at it and say, ‘Yeah, goddamnit. We can win this game.’ ”
“In many ways it was Bob Johnson’s brain versus Edmonton’s talents,” said then CBC producer John Shannon. “I don’t think there ever was a Seven Point Plan.”
“He believed it, and I think we believed we could beat Edmonton,” Patterson said. “But we didn’t necessarily know how to. He gave us the tools to compete as well as you could.”
There is no question that Johnson was an accomplished coach and one of the premier tacticians of his day. Then he was smart enough to take that plate of solid meat-and-potatoes coaching skill, gravy it up thick with hype and magic beans, and then sprinkle a little Stu Hart “Stampede Wrestling” hucksterism on top.
Johnson might have had seven points, five points, three points … who really knew?
“I remember one time reading the paper going into a series,” said Wayne Gretzky. “They had asked Bob Johnson what he was going to do. He said, ‘I’ve got Plan A. If that doesn’t work, we’ve got Plan B. And if that doesn’t work, I’ve got Plan C.’ That’s the hockey man he was—a really smart, astute student of the game. He designed a system that made it really difficult for us to play the style we wanted to play.”
Was there really a Plan C? As long as Gretzky believed there was, that’s all that truly mattered.
Of course, the dichotomy between Bob Johnson and Glen Sather was as stark as you could imagine. One was college-bred, the other educated on hockey’s streets. It was book-smart versus wily. Guts versus brains, and it made for a fantastic coaching matchup.
“He was a very good tactician. Always trying to find a way to throw us off our game,” said Sather. Prior to the 1986 series against Edmonton, Johnson dressed a pair of junior goalies in Oilers jerseys and had his players shoot on them at practice the day before Game 1. They were former University of Calgary Dino Al Hryniuk and ex-Calgary Canuck Jamie Bowman. Johnson told the media it was no different than when a football coach uses a scout team, dressing players in the same uniform numbers of Sunday’s opponent. But his true theory was that his players would get used to seeing rubber fly by that Oilers jersey, and they would have a psychological edge come game time.
“I’ve never seen that tactic before,” Sather said at the time. “It must be something you learn in college in the U.S. Of course, he’s an American. I guess he thinks differently than I do. Me, I’m Canadian-born, in Alberta … in High River. I probably think more logically than he does.
“When he quit the Flames, I sent a note to him. I told him I was sad to see him leave,” said Sather. “He had all those notebooks, but why not? He did things one way and I did things another. He was a complete coach. He took advantage, technically and psychologically.”
Johnson’s Flames would climb Mount Oiler in 1986, knocking off Edmonton and finding their way into the Stanley Cup final against Montreal. The Flames had spent the majority of their oxygen getting out of the Smythe Division in that memorable seven-game series, however, and mistakenly allowed an inferior St. Louis Blues team to take them to seven games once more in the Campbell Conference Final. It crippled their Stanley Cup hopes.
Johnson’s Flames won Game 1 of the Stanley Cup final in Montreal, but they couldn’t summit, losing the next four games to a rookie goalie named Patrick Roy and his Canadiens. It was as close as Johnson would come in Calgary, and the loss stayed with him.
The next season, 1986–87, Edmonton, Calgary, and Winnipeg would finish as the three top teams in the Campbell Conference, and place first, third, and sixth respectively in the NHL. Edmonton drew Los Angeles in Round 1 of the playoffs and scored thirty-five times in a five-game series win. Calgary got the Jets, in what would be Johnson’s finale behind the Calgary bench.
Winnipeg won that opening round series in six games, capping it with a resounding 6–1 trouncing of the Flames. It seems the Jets had their own mountain they were climbing, and while Johnson and the Flames were focused on Edmonton, the Jets were beating a goat path right past Calgary in that series
.
In the meantime, USA Hockey had been courting Johnson, and that summer he and Martha decided to return to the States and live in beautiful Colorado Springs, and Johnson would take the job as president of USA Hockey in 1987. He would last there until 1990, when the lure of coaching Mario Lemieux and the Pittsburgh Penguins was simply too much.
Johnson would win his only Stanley Cup in 1991, fittingly, in the state in which Johnson was born. The Penguins defeated the Minnesota North Stars in six games to win Pittsburgh’s first Stanley Cup. Johnson had finally summitted the hockey world, even if the route had been a tad more circuitous than planned.
Between being the reigning Stanley Cup champion head coach and his ties with USA Hockey, Johnson being named to run Team USA at the 1991 Canada Cup was an obvious choice. It was during that training camp, however, that Johnson was diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer. Pittsburgh doctors removed one tumour but could not remove another, prescribing radiation treatment.
Only ten days after being admitted to hospital, Johnson vowed to coach the Pens again. “The fire still burns in me to coach,” he said. “It will be my greatest day in coaching.”
Not fearing those brain tumours was a window into how Johnson never backed down from the mountain that was the Battle of Alberta.
“Bob Johnson loved the challenge of trying to beat the Oilers,” Murdoch said. “He didn’t fear the Oilers. He loved the challenge of trying to coach against them.”
On November 26, 1991, the fire went out. Bob Johnson died, aged sixty, leaving behind his wife, Martha, five children, and nine grandchildren. “This was the one fight he couldn’t win,” Sather said that day.
Those Flames players from Johnson’s time as head coach wore black armbands made from hockey tape at practice that day. Presumably, they’d saved the white tape for one more outline of a hockey rink on the dressing room floor.
“He would always say, ‘This is a great day for hockey,’ ” defenceman Neil Sheehy told reporters that morning. “Often guys would ask, ‘When isn’t it a great day for hockey?’
“I guess today.”
5
Oiler Mark Messier’s Subtle Direction
“We were all mindful enough to realize our teacher was right in front of us.”
Mark Messier is sitting across the breakfast table—“No coffee. Just orange juice, please” —and he’s talking leadership. And the more you listen, the more it becomes clear that, to one of the greatest captains the game of hockey has ever known, leadership doesn’t have that much to do with the leader at all.
“The need to give yourself to the team,” he says. “It was very clear to me that, without that, there wasn’t any chance.”
Messier was born into hockey. His father, Doug, was on the road playing minor pro hockey for the first eight winters of Mark’s life. When he returned to play senior hockey in Edmonton in 1969 and then coach the Junior A Spruce Grove Mets, Mark would be his stick boy, getting the time he’d missed with his father back in spades.
It was there—in the Edmonton city rinks like The Gardens or Jasper Place Arena or those small prairie rinks in Spruce Grove, Red Deer, Taber, or Drumheller—that the Mark Messier we now know was truly born.
“As a stick boy, I learned a lot of lessons in those rooms,” he said. “The chalk talks, the inspirational speeches … You can’t get that kind of education unless you’re in there. It was tough hockey, a lot of intimidation in the game back then. It was a great education.”
We’ve all seen the little Mark Messier before, the son of one of our buddies running around the beer league dressing room, fetching tape and hauling sticks to the bench. This Mark Messier, however, was Doug’s son. This was no beer league room, for one. And when Doug Messier stepped inside a hockey dressing room, I am told, it wasn’t going to be a place of jokes and merriment until the game was over and his team had won.
The Alberta hockey room, like one of those “Hinterland Who’s Who” commercials, was the habitat of the Messier family. With the Mets, who went to two Centennial Cups, winning one, Doug coached, older brother Paul played, and Mark was the stick boy. Messier would never complete high school, but it was here that he earned his Doctorate in Hockey.
“I was allowed in on all of it—the speeches, the talks. I supposed there was a little bit of swearing, but nothing too bad,” he recalled of his childhood. “But I’d been around the locker room when my dad was playing senior hockey before we’d even started coaching juniors. It didn’t seem to be that big a deal.”
Ask him for specific stories and Messier is left speechless. Ask him to talk about how, of all the quality characters who starred in the Battle of Alberta, he emerged as one of hockey’s great leaders and he has an easier time talking about it. Because now the story doesn’t have to be all about him.
“Someone once asked me, am I a dependent leader? Or an independent leader? Well, my initial reaction was, ‘I’m an in-dependent leader. If something needs to be done, I’m going to go do it!’ It was simple,” he recites. “But, upon further reflection, it became obvious to me that, no, I was a de-pendent leader. That I needed everybody else around me for success.”
While even Wayne Gretzky, the game’s most generous passer, has a favourite he’ll tell you all about, Messier does not. His mind, it seems, just doesn’t work that way.
“When you really strip it all down, it’s the journey that was really the interesting part. That took you all the way through, that forged the bond, the chemistry.”
Mark Messier’s journey began on January 18, 1961—the day he was born into one of Edmonton’s most prolific hockey families. The journey wound through junior hockey with the St. Albert Saints—as un-Saintly a group as ever you’ll meet—through the old WHA and right on course into the Battle of Alberta.
His was a legend built on nights like May 8, 1990, at the old Stadium in Chicago, when Messier scored two-and-two in a 4–2 Oilers playoff victory. It was a heroic display of grab-’em-by-the-scruff-of-the-neck leadership and unalloyed physical dominance that harkened back to Maurice Richard and Gordie Howe. The kind of game you watch once and remember for the rest of your life.
Or on May 25, 1994, when, as a New York Ranger, Messier called the shot, guaranteeing a Game 6 Rangers win at New Jersey, with the Devils leading the Eastern Conference Final 3–2. New York was behind 2–1 on the scoreboard after forty minutes, but Messier scored a hat trick in the third period to deliver the victory that night. It was a performance that legends are built on, one that the New York media compared with Babe Ruth’s famed “called shot” or Joe Namath’s guarantee that the New York Jets would beat the heavily favoured Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III.
When Messier arrived in Edmonton, however, he wasn’t close to what he would become. He was a gangly kid who’d scored one goal in the WHA, drafted in the third round of the Oilers first-ever NHL draft, in 1979.
It was, by a thousand miles, the best third-round draft pick the Oilers organization has ever made.
“When I got to the Oilers,” Messier said, “I wasn’t as developed as a player. But I did have that deep understanding of what it took to be a team member. A very in-depth schooling in hockey from my childhood.”
Mark Messier. In Edmonton he would come to be known as “The Moose.”
Even a team as strong as the Edmonton Oilers had to stay fresh. You couldn’t expect to come back with the same twenty players every year and keep winning. In fact, if you didn’t create an atmosphere where the young players were pushing the older ones for roster spots, stagnation would set in. People would get comfortable, and at this level, comfort becomes a six-letter synonym for lose.
But think about it: you add five new players to a hockey team every year, and that means you’re changing out 25 percent of your team. Even assuming there are twenty-five players who make reasonably meaningful contributions to the team, it’s still 20 percent.
Get that turnover wrong, and you’ll find the reasons why teams win just one in a row.
Why players look back and say, “Man, we should have won more than we did.” The ice, as it turns out, is the place where we see the finished product. But a hockey team is no different than a house or a great recipe. Get the foundation wrong—pick the wrong ingredients, the wrong mix of concrete—and your finished product doesn’t stand a chance.
This is where Glen Sather did his finest work. Sure, he had all the great players at the top of his roster, the ingredients that would make a pretty good club down the road no matter what happened. But how to make a great one?
Sather knew that change was constant in the NHL. Hell, he had played for ten pro organizations, and his vantage point came from the middle to bottom of most of those rosters. His nickname, “Slats,” literally came from riding the pine, so Sather clearly knew the value of the followers, having been one. He was a smart, observant teammate who knew that every great team required proper leadership at the top of its roster. The right someone. Someone to set the relentless culture that could win at all costs. A person who had hockey in his veins, the will to lead his team during the endless but crucial hours spent outside of the game uniform, and the skill and strength to lead once the puck was dropped.
So in the Oilers’ first-ever draft, in the third round of 1979, he picked Messier with Edmonton’s second-ever draft choice. (Edmonton’s second-round pick had been traded to Minnesota for the rights to Dave Semenko.) Messier would become a captain whose glare was as sharp as his wrist shot, whose elbows and fists were as dangerous as his immense skill and fearless net-crashing. But before Messier would carry the Stanley Cup into The Bruin Inn, the teenaged drinking hole for every kid who grew up in St. Albert, Alberta, or ride with Stanley down the Canyon of Heroes in New York, he had much to learn.
