by Mark Spector
There is no exaggeration here. Messier played a brutal, relentless, and uncaring game and was suspended many times for it. That was simply how, by the knowledge he had accrued over all of his years in and around the game, the game of hockey was to be played. Like St. Nick, in Messier’s world, ‘twas always better to give than receive.
Did Messier ever regret any of his actions?
“Probably,” he said now, as close to an apology as you’ll ever get. “It’s hard to say if regret is the right word. At that time, there weren’t as many rules, it wasn’t as closely monitored … It was just different. Whether it was right or wrong … you did some things that you felt were required to win, and to get room on the ice. However that’s interpreted [laughing], I don’t know.”
He was no less dangerous with the puck than he was when the opponent possessed it. In Game 7 of the 1984 Smythe Division final, Messier knocked three Flames players out of the game with various acts of demolition—all during the decisive third period, no less. Paul Reinhart had long since been stretchered off; Mike Eaves lay crumpled like a discarded cigarette pack in a corner after being run over (“It was as if he got hit by a bus,” recalled Oilers goaltender Grant Fuhr. “There were tire tracks running up and down his back”); and Al MacInnis exited early after being cut down by a knee injury. All courtesy of one man.
Carnage. Sheer carnage. Messier carnage.
“That Messier!” Flames coach Badger Bob Johnson would growl after that game. “That Messier! He knocked three of our guys out of the game! Three! That was …,” he stammered. “That was …,” he muttered. “That was …,” he repeated, his face changing to a look approaching awe, “Amazing!”
Where Gretzky was a points machine, averaging just fewer than two points per night throughout his career, Messier was like the Swiss Army Knife of leaders.
“Mark had all the tools to deliver whatever the team needed at any particular time,” said teammate Craig MacTavish. “Leadership is about stepping up and filling voids in the team’s performance, and Mark’s game was so complete, he could fill any void. If you needed a goal, he could score you a goal. If you needed an elbow … If you needed a fight …
“There are very few players in the history of the game who had that amount of depth to their game. Combine that with an infectious personality … He was very inclusive of everybody—fun to be around. So guys naturally gravitated toward him. Even guys who we brought in from other teams who weren’t necessarily viewed a winners, he would bring them into the circle, and treat them like winners. They wanted to perform for him. He just had the whole package. And a tremendous hockey player. Second overall in the history of the game in points and games played.”
It was a time when leadership meant holding mandatory meetings at Edmonton’s Grand Hotel, an aged downtown tavern that Messier somehow favoured, situated next to the Greyhound bus station. Maybe it reminded him of The Bruin Inn. It was a time before the Internet and cellphone cameras, so players could let their hair down in private.
“It was a fun era to play in back then, much more than it is today,” said MacTavish. “No Twitter, no Facebook, no ‘Gotcha!’ [with a phone camera]. Less media. And the expectations … We’d practise and we’d be done. Now, you come, you have an hour of meetings, and an hour of practice, an hour of fitness. It’s changed a lot.”
Messier became married to left winger Glenn Anderson, who had the speed and skill to keep up with him and a net-crashing game that set Anderson apart from everyone else on the team. While Gretzky was fitted to the legendary sniper Jari Kurri, exactly the finisher that Gretzky’s game required, Anderson was to Kurri what NASCAR is to F1 racing.
“We understood each other, and not everybody did. But Glenn did … and I loved his courage and his heart,” said Messier. “When the chips were down, I knew I had a guy beside me who wasn’t going to turn away. It’s a comforting feeling, that you can rely in each other in the toughest spots.”
In the Battle, a “tough spot” could have many definitions. It could be a Game 7 at the Saddledome. It could be a five-on-five at Rexall. It could be something off-ice, and yes, there were some hot times there as well for this Oilers team.
“All of that. All of it,” Messier said. “It goes deeper than that, through to the whole team. But certainly the guy you’re on the ice with every shift, for the better part of twelve years or more. He was a tremendous hockey player, a big-game player. But his courage, his ‘No, compete,’ was just off the charts. It was a perfect blend of styles.”
Anderson, of all the Oilers, would take on the role of the closer. Only Kurri notched more playoff goals than Anderson’s eighty-one in an Oilers uniform, and Anderson was behind only Gretzky and Kurri in playoff game-winners. His three overtime playoff goals were the most out of all them, as Anderson somehow channelled a sense of timeliness when it was needed most.
His expectation of winning was as ruthless as Messier’s.
“What does it take to win? What do you need to do to win? I didn’t want to have the feeling of loss in my gut, in my heart, in my soul anymore,” he said. “So what did I need to become to be the winner? I became being the clutch guy. The go- to guy who is going to score the game-winning goal on a regular basis. The team would look at me and guys would say, ‘Hey, this is your time, Andy.’ And I felt like, ‘Yes. Give it to me.’ I loved those moments in life.”
Somehow the Oilers boiled down into pairs. Maybe all hockey teams do. But in Edmonton it was Gretzky–Kurri, Coffey–Huddy, and Messier–Anderson. Gretzky wore the C, but Messier was every bit as important a leader.
“You learn from your battles, your wars, and your losses more so than anything else,” Anderson said. “As the Dalai Lama said, ‘Never lose the lesson from a loss.’ Mark read up on it. He developed his own mind so that he would be one of those guys who would not be beaten in any situation. But he just didn’t learn it overnight. It was a period of losses, of championships, of heartfelt successes and heartfelt failures.”
“Every year I was reminded of how hard it is to win,” Messier told me, without ever being asked the question. He wasn’t talking about the final game of the Stanley Cup as much as he was talking about the first pre-season game after a short summer off. In October when the games are for real, and the level rises again. Then again in late November, early December, when every player’s timing has fully returned, and each team has a full grasp of how to execute its system.
“So what happens over time is you’re playing [at the highest level] all the time. Because that’s the only way you know how to play. So you become a winner,” he says. “You don’t just play winning hockey when it’s time to play winning hockey. You play winning hockey all … the … time.
“Your mindfulness, your direction, the way you do things. You become a winner. Not only when you’re at the rink, but in everything that you do. It takes a long time to settle in to that. And it takes a lot of good people around you.”
Inclusion. It takes the right people up top, with the ability to include the group underneath.
6
Reporting from the Battle Press Box
“The buildings had a certain crackling.
Always waiting for something to start.”
Old media men are no different than your father. For them, it was always better in the old days.
The reality is, however, that when it comes to covering the Battle of Alberta, it undoubtedly was better in the old days compared with what today’s media endures. Better deadlines; better access; longer interviews with no bloggers hanging around, and fewer cameras; better players; better travel; better teams playing more meaningful games … And as such, better stories to write and report.
If you’ll suffer a rant for a moment, all the Internet has done for hockey journalists is to allow them to file faster and with less hassle. And to communicate with fans and readers through social media. And to shoot video.
So today’s editor wants more copy faster than yesterday’s editor whil
e demanding “Internet chats” with readers and plenty of tweeting. Oh, and because the Internet has crippled the newspaper industry, there are fewer reporters: “So can you file an extra sidebar after the game, and give me something off the morning skate?”
As legendary Toronto Star hockey scribe Frank Orr said to me recently, “Most of my contemporaries have gone to the big newsroom in the sky. I only hope they don’t have to shoot video up there.”
Okay, my rant is done. Seriously though, it isn’t the increased workload that scares anyone off today. Almost to the person, the hockey beat journalists I’ve known over three decades in the business are not fazed by hard work, deadlines, or an extra sidebar. If anything has changed from the days of the Battle, it is that diminishing access and cookie-cutter personalities among the players have rendered the daily material to be simply not as intriguing or original as it once was.
For instance, both the Oilers and Flames were noted for having what us reporters called “good rooms” in the 1980s. They were full of characters with stories to tell about elements of life that didn’t always involve a stick or a puck. Even Wayne Gretzky had played lacrosse and baseball growing up, while most of today’s players have been one-sport kids since age eight.
Compared with today’s dressing room, the opportunity to speak to those players of the 1980s—to really get to know them personally—was far, far better because the media relations staff didn’t “close the room” and the players were happy to hang around and kibitz. The other difference? The old dressing rooms didn’t have a labyrinth of hallways in which players can go but the media can not. They were small, and there were few—if any—boundaries.
“You just went into that dressing room, and you just sat down and waited for the guy you wanted to talk to. You knew he was going to come, and you knew he would talk to you when he did come,” said Al Strachan, the curmudgeonly hockey writer with thirty-seven years in the biz. “Maybe he was having a shower or whatever. But you never had to wonder, ‘Gee, maybe he’s not talking to the media today.’ Of course he was talking to the media today. They talked every day, for as long as you wanted, basically.
“And if you knew them at all, you could meet them after the game for a couple of drinks.”
I’ll never forget when “Planet” Al Iafrate would come through town, one of the all-time characters in the game. You’d see him in the room after practice, ask him to chat, and he’d say, “Meet me at the stick bench in a few minutes.” You’d go to the workbench where players once doctored up their wooden sticks, and after a few minutes Iafrate would arrive, in sandals, shorts, and a T-shirt.
He had a cigarette in his hand, one behind his ear, and he’d hop up and take a seat on the table. Then he’d light one smoke with the blowtorch used to curve sticks, take a long drag, squint his eyes, and say, “What’s up?” You knew you had Al’s full attention for two smokes, or about twenty minutes, and if you couldn’t mine a column out of Planet Al in twenty minutes, well, it was probably time to turn in your Professional Hockey Writers Association card.
Clearly, the walls weren’t as high in the 1980s, just as they had been even lower in the 1950s when the Montreal Canadiens trusted Red Fisher to make up their quotes, to save everyone the bother of the post-game interview process. Or so went the legend.
The players on either side of the Battle got to know the various writers, partly because they didn’t make nearly as much money and they were simply more normal folks and partly because there were a lot fewer members of the media in those days.
“I’d spent a year and a half backing up [beat man] Dick Chubey at the Edmonton Sun, so I knew all those [Oilers] guys,” said George Johnson, who was on the beat with the Calgary Sun in the earlier years of the Battle. “I remember Gretzky—and he’ll never remember this—but I remember him going out of his way to talk to me. And by doing that, he showed everybody else in that room, ‘It’s okay. You can talk to this guy. I’m talking to him. You can too.’
“I always felt like I could go into that Oilers room and get anything,” Johnson said, looking across the coffee shop we had met at that day. “That lady over there having a double latte with chocolate sprinkles? She could get good stuff out of that room. It was a good, good room to work.”
A journalist’s goal is to tell the story as best one can—to bring the reader not only to the game but also to somewhere that the TV set cannot. It was about telling the reader who this Neil Sheehy character was, and why his whole Harvard Boxing Club shtick was such a ruse. Who was this Stu Grimson kid who’d taken Round 1 from big Dave Brown? How did it feel to be Steve Smith, who heard that Saddledome crowd croon, “Shoooot!” every time he picked up a puck behind his net for all those years?
Or when there was an issue either inside the greater NHL game or inside the team itself, it was far easier in those days to explore that issue with the names who mattered. That’s where Gretzky was fantastic. He loved to sit and talk hockey, and after the formal stage of questions had passed he would ask reporters as many questions as we had asked him.
Remember, these were pre-Internet times, so if you’d come in from another series, players would want to know the inside scoop from St. Louis, or Vancouver, or wherever you’d been. It was an informal time when not everything was on camera or on the record. The scrum was small, and often everyone in it knew one another’s name, wife’s name, and how many children we all had. We trusted one another.
“I had left all of my laundry at the Westin in Edmonton,” Al Strachan began, telling a story that occurred prior to Game 7 of the 1991 Battle of Alberta. “The Oilers, a bunch of them, used to go sit on the bench at the Saddledome an hour and a half before the game, just in their underwear. I used to go down there early and chat with them. There would always be six or eight guys just sitting on the bench with no one in the building.
“MacT says, ‘What do you think happens tonight, Strach?’ And I say, ‘Well, I hope to hell you win because I left all my laundry up in Edmonton. If you guys don’t win, I’m screwed.’ MacT said, ‘Don’t worry, Strach. We’ll get your gaunchies back for you …’ ”
Come playoff time, the beauty of the Battle was that, on a game night, it gave you a plethora of angles to explore. Then, on an off day with the proper opportunity to gather quotes and speak with players, the idea you’d brought to the rink could be adequately reported and written. It was a writer’s dream—great drama, impeccable access, and the star power that sold newspapers.
As the Battle of Alberta simmered, both the players and the travelling hockey writers circled the games on their calendars weeks before puck drop. And during playoffs journalists came from far and wide to cover them. If your mission was to be at the epicentre of the game on an inordinate amount of nights, this was the place to be. And, of course, the greatest player in the game was here, which meant you could always sell your boss on a trip to cover Wayne Gretzky.
“It was different, and the buildings had a certain crackling. Always waiting for something to start,” said Al Maki, the Calgary Herald sports columnist of the day. “Because you never knew what was going to happen, and it could happen on a variety of platforms. These were the things you came to the rink for.”
It is a fallacy that there is no cheering in the press box. The true writer’s rule is this: There is no cheering for your team. You can, however, cheer for your story.
So, let’s say you predicted a breakout game for a player, or you’d written about how the one team’s goalie wouldn’t fare well against the other’s shooters. You could pump a fist quietly when your story panned out or curse the goalie for making some saves. But whatever angle you might have had in your back pocket when you arrived at the rink for Flames versus Oilers, chances are you weren’t going to need it anyhow.
When asked by his editor at 10 a.m., “What are you writing today?” then-Journal columnist Cam Cole’s standard reply was, “An eff’ing column.” Then he’d nod over to you and say, “The Lord will provide.”
I�
��m not sure if Cammy prayed a day in his adult life, but the Battle did indeed provide like a golden goose, for him and the rest of us, for most of a decade.
“Even as a writer or an observer, you got caught up in the wave of emotions,” said Maki, whose nickname, of course, was Chico, after the old Chicago Blackhawks player Ron “Chico” Maki. “This game, you had no idea what you might see. Great artistry? Sure. It was always competitive. Bad coaching? Great goaltending? But the game, it spoke for each city. ‘We’re better than you are.’ ‘No, you’re not, ’cause our hockey team is better than yours.’ ‘No, it’s not.’
“It made it hard, years later, when both teams had lost their way. Both were losing, and missing the playoffs, and you were starting to sound like an old grandfather: ‘Remember those old days …?’ ”
Let’s face it: A good, solid spear in the nuts made for great copy. And the fallout? There would be mayhem on the ice, and reams of quotes afterwards about the heathen from the opposing team, while our poor boy was just standing there, minding his own business …
“I remember when Carey Wilson lost his spleen in the ‘86 series,” began the Edmonton Journal’s Jim Matheson. Wilson had his spleen removed in the hospital after Game 6, and the Flames wanted everyone to know that it was the fault of Oilers defenceman Steve Smith.
So a Flames assistant coach escorted a few writers inside their video room to witness the heinous spear of Smith. After watching the video, however, the reporters emerged unsure if there had been any serious spear at all. The messengers were ready and willing to deliver the message—it would have been good copy, and likely got them down to the lobby bar that much quicker once the write was complete. But you can’t report on something you’re not sure even happened, and the next day when Wilson himself came down to look at the game films, he found out that it wasn’t Smith’s stick that had injured him at all.
“Turned out it was Charlie Huddy, later on in the game. A crosscheck in the back.” Matheson chuckled. “Back in those days they were fast and loose with the facts.”
