by Mark Spector
Few businesses have changed like the media between the pre-Internet years of the 1980s and today, when everyone is connected 24/7. In the early days of the Battle, newspapers were yet to have their monopoly impinged upon. In 1982, a reasonable percentage of the population still awoke without knowing the score from last night’s game, a percentage that is infinitesimal today. Newspapers weren’t only pertinent, they were necessary, and the better the hockey teams, the more well read the sports sections.
If you were a Flames fan on an off day, you got literally 100 percent of your Flames news from the Calgary Sun or Herald. In Edmonton, what the Journal’s Jim Matheson and the Sun‘s Dick Chubey printed was taken as gospel. Cam Cole’s Journal columns were the first pieces that much of the male population of Edmonton read each morning.
There was no Sportsnet or TSN breaking stories in those days. Scoops were the sole property of the newspapermen, with the odd play-by-play announcer like Peter Maher or Rod Phillips breaking a story along the way.
I delivered the Journal as a kid and grew up on Jim Matheson’s “notebooks,” his daily collections of notes, quips, predictions, and touts strung together on an inside page. Nobody in the Edmonton market cobbled together a notebook like Matty, while in the Calgary market, George Johnson and Eric Duhatschek worked across the street from each other at the Sun and Herald respectively, two highly talented beat men who have forged long, distinguished careers in the local and national market.
And those men held sway in those dressing rooms, to be sure. Like the time the notoriously grumpy Robert Reichel decided early in the season that he would boycott the media that year.
“He announced at the beginning of the year that he wasn’t talking to the media,” recalls Al Strachan. “The Flames had Frank Musil, the Czech defenceman, and he was a real nice guy. A great guy. And Reichel decides one day that he will talk. So Frank comes over to Eric in the dressing room, and he says, ‘Robert has decided that he will talk to the media now, and he’d like it if you’d go over and have a chat.’
“Eric, very politely, says to Frank, ‘Tell Robert that I’m not talking to him, and my ban lasts all year. He can go *$@# himself.”
I ran into Reichel a few times, from covering the Flames and the other teams to which he was moved. He was as advertised: a bit of an aloof jerk. Perhaps he’d have been a nicer guy if he’d ever produced in the clutch. Alas, we’ll never know.
“The Oilers played Calgary so often, all the Flames players knew us Edmonton scribes by name,” Matheson said. “Neil Sheehy? We became like best friends. He had no problem telling you what he was going to do to Wayne Gretzky. In those days, they didn’t care if you knew what they were going to do. Sheehy made no bones that he was not a very good player, and that he was going to get under Gretzky’s skin any possible way. And for the most part, not legally.
“Really, the Saddledome was almost like a second home,” Matheson said. “You knew the security guys when you were coming in the back door at the rink. You knew Bearcat, Al Murray, Bobby Stewart …”
Matheson started on the beat for the Journal in 1973—Year 2 of the World Hockey Association. He has literally seen it all in the Big E, from Jacques Plante tending goal for the old Alberta Oilers in the Edmonton Gardens to attending the meetings in which the Oilers were accepted into the NHL.
“They were held at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City,” he remembers. “They’d been talking for several years that some teams from the WHA might get into the NHL, but it was a war of attrition as teams tried to last until the NHL finally did let them in. There were only four teams left when the Oilers got in.”
Matheson worked for years on the Oilers broadcast with Rod Phillips. Together they met owner Peter Pocklington’s plane on the tarmac in Edmonton to break the story of a kid inside that plane who would sign a twenty-one-year personal services contract with Peter Puck. His name? Wayne Gretzky.
From there, Matheson, Phillips, and Dick Chubey pretty much joined the Oilers themselves, watching Glen Sather mould a championship team from their seats on the plane, the bus—whatever mode of transportation the team was using at the time.
“The same media guys travelled all the time. It was me for the Journal, Chubey for the Sun, and Rod,” he said. “You became a part of the travelling circus. We were like part of the team. They’d let you travel on the bus with the players, to the rink and back. It’s probably not right, but you did it.
“Back in those days, Pocklington would go out to dinner with the scribes,” Matheson said. “Me, Dick, Rod, he and Slats, and Tuele would come to dinner with us.” (And usually Pocklington would pick up the tab.)
Together, Phillips and Matheson were introduced to that Bobby Hull–led Jets team that would serve as Sather’s template for the NHL Oilers.
“He watched them play, as an Oilers player and a coach, and he just loved the style they played,” Phillips said. “That’s the kind of team he wanted to have, and once all of these guys showed up, their whole offensive attack was based on what he had seen with the Winnipeg Jets.
“We’re going to wind up, do some circles, and we’re coming at you. Coffey was coming up hard, and there was always five guys.”
Those eyes have seen a lot of goals, plenty of records, and perhaps more fights than Ferdie Pacheco. Only once, however, can Matheson recall a night when things went too far—that back end of a home-and-home in 1990, when Dave Brown tangled with Stu Grimson.
“Dave was beating him up, and didn’t seem to want to stop. It made me a little squeamish. I mean, the whole idea of telling us, ‘Don’t be going for coffee,’ ” Matheson said. “The rest of the time, there was a lot of theatre. Guys jumping into dog piles, punching somebody in the face. It was as much theatre as it was a game. But that was not Stampede Wrestling or make-believe. That was very real.
“You don’t get that much anymore, where a guy can say, ‘I’m going to get him next game.’ Today, the NHL would step right in. Collie Campbell would be in the stands at the next game. Back then, though, you could do it.”
Phillips was equally sympathetic to poor Grimson: “Ach. They were both enforcers, tough guys,” he said. “One enforcer had won the first fight and there was going to be another one. Simple as that.”
The Battle was fought, by and large, in the days before sports radio. Your market might have had a nine-to-midnight show, but there was no two-hour hockey shows on at lunchtime, or surely no all-sports radio stations in the province the way there are today.
Hell, a fan couldn’t even get all eighty games on TV back then. If Calgary went out on a five-game road trip, two of the games might well not be televised. If the Oilers played a Saturday matinee in Boston or Philadelphia, it simply would not be shown on TV. Saturdays were for CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada, and CBC only showed the games that started at 8 p.m. Eastern.
This was also the time before the dais. Before coaches held “availabilities,” with strategy sessions beforehand between coach and PR man, sussing out the line of questioning that could be expected. Sather did his press scrums right in the dressing room, in front of the stick rack, where the players could hear his message. The crowd of reporters was smaller, and as such, a journalist could pursue a line of questioning. If it was a good one, and the juicy quotes were forthcoming, the group often knew enough to let the soloist continue. They were all going to harvest the quotes anyhow, so why get in the way or change the line of questioning?
Today’s general managers might make the odd media appearance during a playoff series or speak to their local media once every month or so. But it will be well staged, generally taking place only if his team is losing and in need of some kind of edge. In 1986, Cliff Fletcher came to practice on most off days and was more than approachable. Glen Sather was both coach and general manager. They were both available on game days, and off days, and thus the pot stirred with more centrifugal force than today, when the Internet, the sheer mass of media, and those damned podiums all combine to sanitize the acc
ess that the reader/viewer gets.
There was, however, a different atmosphere surrounding both teams. Their collective personalities mirrored their two leaders, Johnson and Sather.
“Badger Bob had that college mentality,” said the easily perturbed Strachan. “They were always meeting, those people. Sometimes you had to wait three hours for another one of the Flames meetings to finish. MacTavish used to call it, ‘Paralysis by analysis.’ The only time the Oilers had a meeting was at noon, and that coincidentally coincided with the arrival of the pizza [for the players]. So they’d have their alleged meeting, and after twenty minutes they’d open the room back up to the media—once the pizza was consumed.”
It was the military precision of Badger’s Seven Point Plan versus the creative freedom of Sather’s bunch. Tactics versus freelance. It extended away from the rink.
“Badger, when he had an eight o’clock bus, well, that bus left at eight o’clock,” Strachan continued. “The Oilers bus left when people got there. If they got there. Sometimes they had to go back into the hotel to get people, and sometimes it was a coach. I remember one time, they had to go back in and get [assistant coach] Bob McCammon out. But nobody worried about things like that with the Oilers.”
All beat writers travelled closely with their teams in those days. There were no charter flights in the NHL back then, so the team would book their beat people on the same commercial flights they were on, and the same went for hotels. Then they’d send the newspapers the bill.
Covering the Oilers meant an annual trip to the home of Pocklington’s buddy, former U.S. president Gerald Ford. I was lucky enough to enjoy one of those trips, and it came with a round at Pebble Beach. I can’t imagine today either a newspaper allowing their reporter to accept this type of hospitality or a team willing to offer it.
“That was Pocklington,” said Matheson. “After golf we’d all go out to dinner at a place called Wally’s Desert Turtle. We’d eat, and then Gerald Ford would make a speech about the U.S. economy or the government. It was over the head of most of the players, who were mostly Canadian.”
Then the party would adjourn, Secret Service men and all, to the Fords’ lovely Palm Springs home. I can say that I’ve shaken the hand of President Ford and met the former first lady Betty Ford at one of these. Even made friends with the Ford’s dog, a spaniel as I recollect.
“I was there the night Rod Phillips was talking to Betty Ford,” Matheson recalled. “He missed his mouth with his drink and it went all the way down his shirt. She had been talking about the Betty Ford Center, and she puts her arm around Rod and says, ‘Maybe you should come with me …’
“I remember being in Gerry Ford’s office and putting my feet up on his desk, just thinking I was a big shot. Dave Hunter, he went to the bathroom and plugged the Fords’ toilet. He was so embarrassed, he didn’t know what to do or who to tell.”
The Oilers and their media ended up on the set of M*A*S*H* one day, meeting Alan Alda and Loretta Swit, and spent an evening at the home of Muhammad Ali, where the aging heavyweight conducted a magic show for his guests. Eventually, Ali would end up at the old Edmonton Gardens, fighting Dave Semenko in a charity bout.
Through it all, there were many relationships forged. Those former players and managers, almost to the man, greet the reporters today with a smile and a handshake. They had spent nearly a decade of their lives travelling the same road, seeing one another more than they did their own families during the season. As a scribe, you never cheered for a team. But as objective as I am proud to say I am, the biggest test of one’s sympathies was not to cheer for some of the really good guys you’ve met along the way.
Hockey players tend to be good people. For every Reichel, there are ten Pattersons or Peplinskis. For every Glenn Anderson, whose relationship with the Edmonton press was always a tad strained, there was a Gretzky, whose generosity knew no bounds. Like in this very book, Gretzky’s words lent gravity to all of our columns over the many years. He knew that, and always had time to answer a question.
In turn, for a guy like Maki, watching Gretzky’s final shift at the Saddledome is a moment he’ll never forget.
“When Gretzky came through Calgary with the Rangers in 1999, there was this sense that this was it. This was the last time he’d be coming through the Saddledome,” Maki recalls. “He went for a faceoff, deep in the Calgary end. The crowd starting cheering, cheering … Now they’re standing and applauding. And the Calgary centre skated away [from the dot]. Gretzky looked like he was going to do something, and a linesman skated over, and you could see he was telling him, ‘Just enjoy it.’
“Gretzky acknowledged the fans, and eventually they resumed playing. But after all these years—and no one knew for sure that he was retiring—it was very nice. Everybody knew, this was the last time they would see him.
“The Battle of Alberta had changed.”
7
The Battle’s Most Hated Villain
“I figured it out: if they do something stupid, and I don’t fight them, then they’ll do something even more stupid.
“Neil Sheehy is on the phone, trying to characterize how—among all those villains over all those years—the black hat of the Battle of Alberta had found his head.
“So here’s the thing,” he explains. “I was there to be a pest. To be an annoying SOB, okay? Listen, I understood why the guy [Wayne Gretzky] would despise and hate me. Because I was an annoying prick, you know? Okay?”
Of all the players that people loved to hate in the Battle, it was Neil Sheehy—“The Butcher of Harvard” —who became Gretzky’s personal hate valet. He would be the first man in the Battle to introduce turtling as a successful survival strategy, and upon his retirement Sheehy would have the nerve to write a position paper—entitled “The Systematic Erosion and Neutralization of Skill and Play-making in the NHL”—on how players who play the game the way he had were ruining the game of hockey.
It took a lot of nerve, in the big picture, to take on the role of trying to eliminate The Great One from the game when an arena full of fans and hundreds of thousands across the country had tuned in to see Gretzky entertain. On a micro scale, Sheehy had no shame. He would stir up as much trouble as possible, refusing to fight his battle the way we had become used to seeing it fought.
And the worst thing of all? His shtick worked. It actually worked very well.
“Neil saw an opportunity to make a bit of a name for himself, to get under Gretzky’s skin,” said former Flames defenceman Jamie Macoun. “I’m sure if you talked to Wayne, he hated Neil Sheehy. He was always buggin’ him. Then, because it was the Battle of Alberta, the media built it up. Suddenly you had all these Neil Sheehy stories about Gretzky. It just took on a life of its own. But everything about Calgary and Edmonton took on a life of its own.”
Over the years, Calgary general manager Cliff Fletcher and coach Bob Johnson had devised as many schemes as they could to neutralize Gretzky, and few if any had worked. Until one day in 1983, when Flames assistant coach Pierre Pagé walked into Team USA’s pre-Olympics camp to take a look at a centreman named Joel Otto.
“Joel and I used to do battle drills in front of the net, and Pierre liked that,” Sheehy recalls. “We practised and battled every day together.”
“Neil Sheehy was a big man,” Macoun said of his teammate. “He reminded me of that picture of Bobby Hull. The one with his shirt off, throwing the bale of hay? Neil Sheehy had big shoulders, big arms—he was a thick man. If you went to fight him, you had yourself a tangle. He could grapple with ya.”
He arrived on the scene like an old-time wrestler. He had attended Harvard and told everyone that he’d been the heavyweight champion of the Harvard boxing team. You almost expected him to knock Gretzky out one day by pulling a foreign object from his trunks or bashing him over the head with a folding chair.
“First of all,” said former Calgary Herald columnist Al Maki, “there was no Harvard boxing team.”
“There was a club,�
�� counters Sheehy. “But it was educational. They learned how to box, but they didn’t really box per se. Was I the heavyweight champ at Harvard? Yeah. But how many boxers go to Harvard?”
He was a character unlike any other in the Battle, and the rivalry was richer for it. Looking back, it must have taken a near genius to figure out how to eke 379 career NHL games out of the meagre level of talent with which Sheehy was blessed.
“He was a very bad hockey player. Like, barely-able-to-play bad,” said veteran Calgary sports writer Eric Duhatschek. “But why Wayne still let him get under his skin, I don’t know.”
Sheehy did not arrive in Calgary earmarked to be Gretzky’s personal irritant. He evolved into the role, the same way a tasty leftover roast beef can evolve in the back of the fridge into a green, smelly mess. “On the ice,” Sheehy observed, “our relationship was one of hatred, on his side. On my side, it was a love affair. Because he was the reason why I had an NHL career.”
Sheehy, whose choice of colleges would earn him the nickname “Harv,” was yet another of those undrafted NCAA gems unearthed by the Flames, their counterpunch to Oilers chief scout Barry Fraser’s out-of-his-mind drafting run in the early 1980s. Sheehy’s older brother Tim had actually played three seasons for the WHA Oilers in the mid-1970s, alongside then player/coach Glen Sather.
Neil was the last of nine children born to Larry and Kathleen Sheehy, who lived in International Falls, Minnesota. When the town’s hospital closed down, the last seven of the Sheehy kids were delivered in the hospital about a mile and a half away, up in Fort Frances, Ontario.
He was a border baby whose dad sold real estate, ran a gas station, was a mechanic, sold insurance … whatever it took to keep the groceries rolling in to feed a family of nine. But merely feeding those kids wasn’t Larry’s only goal.
