The Battle of Alberta

by Mark Spector

  Luckily, Mark Douglas Messier didn’t have far to go to school.

  Doug Messier was an ornery minor-pro defenceman who never played an NHL game. But while the hippies spent the 1960s making peace and love, Messier went to war in the old Western Hockey League—an old professional league, not the junior one of today—his rights controlled, though never fully exercised, by the Detroit Red Wings. Messier Sr. wasn’t a dirty player, but he was hard-nosed as a square-mouth shovel. Messier was known to be very, very tough if necessary, and, of course, he had The Glare.

  “Was he crazy?” opponents asked. “Or is he just real intense?” Only the brave hung around to find the true answer. What Doug Messier was, however, was wise beyond the game. “He had more irons in the fire than just a hockey stick,” said an old friend and opponent, Gregg Pilling, another Alberta kid who was busing around hockey’s minor leagues about the same time.

  While Doug was barnstorming through the Western Hockey League, mostly for the Portland Buckaroos with men like Tommy McVie and Connie Madigan, Mark was at home with his mother and three siblings. At age thirty-two, without ever having played an NHL game, Doug Messier came back home to Edmonton to play senior hockey for the Edmonton Monarchs and teach school. He’d play two seasons, the second as a player-coach, and then hang up his skates for good.

  By 1969, Doug’s first season coaching the Monarchs and last season as a player, young Mark was eight years old: the perfect age for a stick boy. At home, with his older brother Paul and sisters Jennifer and Mary Kay, Mark listened while his mother, Mary-Jean Messier, served up supper and his father dispensed the kind of hockey lessons one could only collect in that day and age. Those helmetless years before corporations bought naming rights and players signed seven-year deals, a time when arenas carried handles like the Civic Arena (Seattle), the Edmonton Gardens, or the Cow Palace outside San Francisco.

  “Many kitchen-table talks,” Mark recalls, “where kids really get a lot of their knowledge about the game. In-depth knowledge. Stuff you can’t necessarily teach [elsewhere]. I came through my minor hockey career with a great understanding of what hockey was, what it should be, and how to conduct yourself on the ice. What it meant to be a teammate, a team member.”

  Doug coached Mark in pee wee, then not again until junior with the St. Albert Saints, on a roster that included future 1,000-game NHLer (including playoffs) Troy Murray. Today there is a twin-rinks complex in St. Albert called Servus Place. There, the kids check the whiteboard in the foyer to see if their ice time is scheduled for Mark Messier Arena or Troy Murray Arena.

  Messier was a sixteen-year-old on that Saints team, in an Alberta Junior Hockey League that included players up to age twenty, with names like Duane Sutter, Kelly Kisio, and Dave Babych. Messier would lead his team in both penalty minutes and assists—at age sixteen—testimony to the unselfish, courageous mindset that would endure throughout his days in the Battle.

  Sather knew Doug, and had driven out to the old Perron Street Arena in St. Albert to watch his friend’s son play for the Saints. The Oilers general manager believed in bloodlines, and while scouts from outside Alberta would gauge Messier’s skills and physique, Sather already knew he had a heart the size of a buffalo’s—because that’s what his dad had. The next season Messier turned pro at age seventeen, scoring just a single goal in fifty-two WHA games for the Indianapolis Racers and Cincinnati Stingers. On draft day in the spring of 1979, Sather was waiting.

  “Messier came from the WHA,” Sather said. “Nobody [among the NHL GMs] really liked him.”

  As it would turn out, no one in that 1979 draft—not even the great Bruins defenceman Ray Bourque—would exceed Messier’s 1,756 regular-season games played. Nor would anyone from that class come within 300 points of Messier’s career total of 1,887. Messier would play just four games in the minors, sent down to the Houston Apollos of the Central League as a rookie, punishment for missing a pre-season flight.

  As Messier readily admits, he was a raw piece of clay in those days, yet to be sculpted. So he fell in line with the rest of the rookies and young players, as is the pecking order in any dressing room, keeping his mouth shut more often than not. Sather, however, wisely surrounded his young core with the right veterans: Ron Chipperfield, Lee Fogolin, Colin Campbell (a current vice-president of the NHL), and goalie Ron Low, a streetwise veteran from Foxwarren, Manitoba.

  “They didn’t push us down or try to hold us back,” Messier said of those vets. “They accepted the fact we were an expansion team and we were going young. They understood what their jobs were. Not only did they play well, but they guided us along the way.”

  Messier, as has been pointed out, never found the time to complete high school. Yet he is articulate and well spoken well beyond the average current or former NHLer. So, for that matter, is Sather, who was smart enough to turn relatively meagre earnings as a hockey player in the 1960s and 1970s into a largesse of Banff real estate and savvy investments. The two were perfect as teacher and prodigy. Doug had filled his son with guts and guile and passed Mark along to one of few hockey men who had even more of each. Sather was perhaps the perfect mentor to sculpt a raw, young St. Albert kid into one of the most feared and respected captains of his generation.

  “Glen really punched home the fact that you had to be a team player, which was reassuring to me because that’s what I had always learned,” Messier said. “Nothing was ever about the individual. Everybody had to make sacrifices for the team.”

  The Battle of Alberta was a way of life for Messier, who required no introduction or explanation to what Edmonton versus Calgary was supposed to mean. In fact, it may have been the Battle itself that had never seen anything like Messier before.

  “It was easy for me,” Messier said. “Through my childhood, I grew up with the Eskimos and the Stampeders. I grew up with my dad playing senior hockey against Calgary and waking up in the morning, shaving with black eyes and lumps on his head. The Battle of Alberta was ingrained in me from a very young age. I was well versed in what it meant.”

  Messier was born, as we said, on January 18, 1961. Two months prior, the Eskimos and Stampeders had met in the CFL’s Western semifinal, a two-game total-points affair won by Edmonton. The following November, in the West final, Calgary would win the two-game series by a single point. A rouge, as they say in the CFL.

  When Mark was one year old, Doug won a Western Hockey League championship as a member of the Edmonton Flyers. They had rolled over the familiar-named Calgary Stampeders in five games en route to that final, which turned into a seven-game war against Spokane. So beating Calgary—or watching the local CFL team trying to beat Calgary—was a Messier family tradition long before Mark ever stepped on the ice. Now he was an Oiler, and the Flames were in his way.

  In 1981, the Battle was headed in the wrong direction for the Flames, with one organization on its way up and the aging Flames needing a restart from the club that had arrived from Atlanta. The gap was widening because everyone could see the Oilers were only going to get better. Messier was the young lion, ready to take his place atop the pride, and the folks in Calgary’s front office knew it. Their pride was led by older players like Ken Houston, Eric Vail, and Willi Plett, all of whom would be moved out within a season or two.

  “If you had to put your finger on one moment, it was when Bob Johnson arrived [for the 1982–83 season] that things really turned for them,” Messier said. “They understood that they had to build a team that could compete with us. And the second thing they needed to do was to make that team believe they could beat the Oilers. It’s one thing to build that team, but it’s another thing to make that team believe. All coaching, and all teams, once you have the talent they are all based on belief. And they did that. They brought in some amazing players, and built a team whose sole focus was to beat the Oilers.”

  Edmonton was firmly in the lead position, mostly because of the age of all of their future Hall of Fame core players. As a leader, Messier was passing from infa
ncy into his adolescent years. He’d gone from Doug to Sather, and now Messier looked across his own dressing room at one of his peers—Wayne Gretzky.

  But follow him … where? As great as Gretzky was, Edmonton had lost the final Avco Cup of the WHA’s existence to Winnipeg in 1979, when Gretzky was eighteen. As nineteen-year-olds, Gretzky and Messier exited in three straight games in Round 1 to Bobby Clarke’s Philadelphia Flyers, Edmonton’s first-ever playoff series. The next year, 1981, they blew out the Montreal Canadiens in a milestone series for the Oilers, but the New York Islanders were too much in Round 2, and Edmonton exited in six games.

  In Year 3, as twenty-one-year-olds, Messier and Gretzky found themselves in an opening-round best-of-five series against the lowly Los Angeles Kings, who had finished forty-eight points behind the Oilers in the Smythe Division that season. It was to be easy work for Edmonton, and the Oilers came out fat and sassy, losing Game 1 at home 10–8. That’s right: 10–8. It took a Gretzky goal in overtime of Game 2 to avoid losing the first two games at home. Then came a game so famous, at once so memorable and catastrophic, it has its own title in hockey history: The Miracle on Manchester.

  Messier opened the scoring in Game 3, and then Gretzky strung together four points for a 5–0 Oilers lead after forty minutes. In a fabulous show of immaturity, Edmonton would somehow blow that lead, with the unheralded Daryl Evans sifting one past Grant Fuhr just 2:35 into overtime to seal the win. A 5–0 lead had drifted into a 6–5 loss. YouTube it—it’s something that needs to be seen to be believed. Despite a 3–2 win in Game 4, Edmonton was shaken and had let the Kings into their soft underbelly. Edmonton choked in the series finale, losing Game 5 at home by a 7–4 score.

  Eliminated in Round 1, they had taken a step backwards. After having gone two rounds the previous spring and won their first Smythe Division title in 1981–82, the Oilers were first-round fodder. They had a team, and some great young players. But Edmonton didn’t know how to win, and Messier still had not figured out how to haul his teammates over the hump.

  “We didn’t have anyone on our team who had ever won before,” Messier remembers. “We were navigating our way through this by ourselves, trying to figure it out. Reaching plateaus and failing. Getting knocked back down. Then trying to reach past that the next year. Get knocked down …”

  It seems contrived, that romantic tale of the moment in Oilers history when they finally learned what it took to win. That instant when Gretzky, Messier, and Kevin Lowe walked past the open door to the New York Islanders’ dressing room on their way out of the Nassau Coliseum after being swept by the mighty Isles in 1983. When they gazed inside the enemy’s winning bathhouse and were expecting to see a loud, bubbly celebration. Instead, the legend goes, they saw the New York players bandaged up, iced down, and eroded from having sacrificed at a level the young Oilers did not know existed.

  Like Woodstock, more people claim to have been privy to that snapshot than possibly could have been there. I’ve walked past that very door many times, and though you can truly see into the Islanders room, could three or four young Oilers have actually stopped, poked their heads in, and drank in enough of that scene to generate the reams of copy and mythical tales of yore that ensued over the next thirty years?

  “A million lessons along the way,” Messier said, “and our best teacher just happened to be the four-time Stanley Cup champs because we had played them three times along the way. They were the perfect role model.

  “When they beat us in ‘83, we realized we had to go back and play a much better, stronger team game. They dismantled us in four straight. We had gotten used to having our way, and we had pushed them before to six games [in 1981], and all that. But this was a real wakeup call that we needed to take our whole team game to a higher level. That was their fourth Cup in a row, and when you did walk by that dressing room, you did see the sacrifices that were being made in order to win. I mean, they were really banged up.”

  Four consecutive Stanley Cups. It is impossible to describe, in that innocuous four-word sentence, the pain, the blood, the selflessness that a team must produce to win nineteen consecutive playoff series. They would have won twenty, those Mike Bossy–, Brian Trottier–, Billy Smith–led Islanders, but in the spring of 1984, after disposing of the New York Rangers, the Washington Capitals, and the Montreal Canadiens, from the West emerged Edmonton, back for more. A year older, a year hungrier, a year wiser. And a year better.

  “It all is true. That is exactly the way it unfolded,” Messier said of the dressing room walk-by. “We were all mindful enough to realize our teacher was right in front of us. They became our playbook. Our guide to the Cup.”

  It’s about everyone else, it seems, when you talk to Messier about what makes a winner. (Not an uncommon trait, I found as I interviewed the various leading players for this book). And it makes sense because in hockey there is no Kobe or LeBron. Or perhaps even a Peyton. The top player on the team can play twenty-two, twenty-three minutes if he is a forward, maybe twenty-seven or twenty-eight minutes as a defenceman. So by definition, the most accomplished leader is the one who is not only a leading player on the ice but also does the most to raise the level of the lesser-skilled players that much higher.

  Sure, Edmonton had so many future Hall of Famers. To a man, however, they’ll tell you they would not have won all those Stanley Cups without the foot soldiers. For every Paul Coffey, there was a Charlie Huddy. For every Wayne Gretzky, a Dave Lumley. For every Messier, a Jaroslav Pouzar.

  “The whole issue becomes, how does everybody else contribute?” asked Messier. “Not everybody is Wayne, so how does Pat Conacher contribute? How does Rick Chartraw contribute? How do these guys feel a part of the team, even when they don’t have the same kind of responsibilities? Inclusion. That becomes the focus, the priority, inside the locker room.”

  Some teams win because they perform marvellously inside a short window: for example, the 2004 Tampa Bay Lightning or the 2006 Carolina Hurricanes. But the ones who keep coming back, they drill deeper into the well of success. Sure, it takes truly great players —and more than one of them —to win five Cups in seven years as Messier’s Oilers did. But many great teams only win one Cup. One only has to look across the Battle of Alberta to find one.

  There would be no surpassing Gretzky as the on-ice leader, not in the big picture. But if Messier was going to be the spiritual leader, the vocal chieftain inside this dressing room, he would have to meet a certain on-ice standard. Sure, Gretzky did things that no one else could do. But Messier, he did things that no one else would do.

  Jamie Hislop first met Messier when he joined Hislop’s Cincinnati Stingers in the WHA as a seventeen-year-old. The two would find themselves on the other end of the Battle years later.

  “He played only forty games or so in Cincinnati and scored one goal,” Hislop told my colleague George Johnson in 2005. “But you could just tell. He was already physically dominant. Great skater. Big shot. And mean. Even then, he didn’t take anything from anybody. He set the ground rules early.

  “I played with Mark at seventeen, and against Gordie Howe in the twilight of his career. When you look at them, and the way they were able to beat you so many ways, there’s a lot of similarities between the two.”

  Messier did not quite match Howe’s 1,767 NHL games played, but he did become in the eyes of many Howe’s most recognizable prototype. Now a man of twenty-three, with a Cup disappointment from the previous year rubbing him the wrong way, Messier used the 1983–84 campaign to establish himself as a dangerous man when the chips were down.

  Midway through season, on Boxing Day to be exact, Messier did what every opponent he’d ever played against feared he might do. “I just snapped,” he would admit later that night. Calgary defenceman Jamie Macoun had belted Messier with a hard bodycheck in the second period and hurt Messier. Circling like a shark for the rest of the game, Messier exacted revenge later on. It was a different time then, a time before video review. As such, they spoke
more freely about their transgressions in 1984 than players do today.

  “I was going to go after him after the hit, but my hip and elbow hurt, and I had the wind knocked out of me,” Messier told reporters that night. “I’d rather have done it at the time. The only thing I regret is maybe giving him an eye injury.”

  “I don’t remember necessarily doing anything,” said Macoun today, typically forgetting any wrongdoing he might have done that started things. “I played a tough game; I wasn’t the biggest guy out there. If he thought something happened, it happened. Or maybe it didn’t.

  “I had skated by the bench, and he had come on the ice from behind me. He suckered me from behind. I was pretty groggy, getting suckered like that. He was a pretty big boy, north of two hundred pounds. To get caught from behind, it was a sucker-punch.”

  It was, at best, a vicious, vicious play, for which the NHL suspended Messier ten games. That was a pretty big suspension for the day, and a classic example of the kind of infraction that has been legislated out of today’s hockey.

  “It was different back then,” Messier said. “I learned very early on that you had to be a player who was not going to be an easy target. Who was going to be around for a while. In order to do that, you needed to set some boundaries. That’s the way the game was played back then.

  “I’m not saying it was right or wrong. But those were the types of things you had to do as a player to ensure the likelihood that you could be healthy and playing for an extended period.”

  A few players stumbled into Messier’s court of retribution along the way. Russian Vladimir Kovin was one. Calgary’s Mike Eaves another. They often left on a gurney or, at best, with a teammate under each arm.