The Battle of Alberta

by Mark Spector

“My dad was one of twelve,” begins Neil. “He grew up during the Depression, in a town called Cass Lake, Minnesota, and quit school so he could support the rest of his family. When he married my mom, who was a college graduate, he said he wanted all of his children to go to college. We all worked summer jobs, we took loans, and each and every kid funded their own way. It was expected: ‘You’re going to go to college. Nothing comes easy—you’ve got to work for it.’ That’s what each and every one of us did.

  “I had a brother and sister go to Marquette University. I had a sister at University of Minnesota. I had three brothers at Boston College. I had a sister at St. Scholastica College in Duluth and another one at St. Cloud. I was the ninth one, the baby of the family, and I chose Harvard.”

  Sheehy’s route to an Ivy League school was really the same gravel road that he would travel throughout his journeyman NHL career. But Harvard? Here was the ninth of nine kids, paying his own way, and he picks an Ivy League school?

  “I was contacted by an alum who told me to think about Harvard. And when I was contacted, I thought, ‘Harvard? Well, I could never do that.’ Then I got my chest up and I said, ‘Wait a sec. Why can’t I do that? How cool would that be?’ My brothers were at Boston College and they told me, ‘You ever get the chance to go to Harvard, you go.’ So, when I got the chance, I took it.”

  Sheehy is clearly intelligent, possessing the grades to gain entry into Harvard and the wherewithal to graduate with an economics degree. He would attain a law degree after hanging up his blades, and today he is part-owner of ICE Hockey Agency, which boasts of such clients as Ryan Suter, Matt Niskanen, Nate Prosser, and Lubomir Visnovsky, among others. In 1983, however, Sheehy was a mangy-looking twenty-three-year-old long shot who showed up at the Calgary Flames training camp as an afterthought.

  “He’d gone to training camp in his first year,” said Duhatschek, who had moved from the Calgary Albertan to the Calgary Sun in 1983 and would complete the circuit when he worked at both the Herald and the Globe and Mail. “There were seventy-one players invited to the camp that year, and he was given sweater No. 71. He knew right from the beginning what he needed to do to make an impression, so he went and beat up a guy named Greg Meredith.”

  As we’ve said of Sheehy, he was no dummy. He knew that Meredith had come out of Notre Dame, so he hadn’t fought much. And he also found out that Meredith didn’t have a lot of backing in that training camp—very few friends, if any—so there would be no residual effects from Sheehy’s challenge.

  “Meredith was a cerebral guy on a team of rockheads, and Neil found out that he didn’t have a lot of friends on the team, anyone who would stand up for him,” Duhatschek said. “So he beat Meredith up. He knew he was going to have to make an impression because he was wearing No. 71.”

  It would be a theme that Sheehy would live by: Look like you’re making it up as you go along when in reality there was a plan afoot.

  “In order to play, I had to have a certain amount of madness, but what I had was a method to my madness,” Sheehy said. “I was never a guy who lost control. I never lost my head. There was always a purpose for what I was doing.”

  In the Battle, Sheehy would convince a goodly part of the hockey world that he was some slug whose only worth was to subtract the skill and speed from any given hockey game—particularly against the high-flying Oilers. He was, in the end, a lot smarter than we all had thought. He was of average skill, at best, notching just eighteen goals in a career that spanned 379 games. He was never drafted, never wore a letter, and his presence likely never sold a ticket to an NHL game in any of his stops through Calgary, Hartford, Washington, and then Calgary again before it ended unceremoniously on a Slovenian League team, cavorting through Eastern Europe with former Flames teammate Colin Patterson.

  “When I got to Calgary, I was going to make it by being a rough-and-tumble-type guy. I knew, the only way I was going to play was if I brought toughness to the lineup. The game changed in the 1990s, where you just had your nuclear warhead; your big guy who just goes out and fights the staged fights. [Back then] I was a guy who added to the team toughness. I could fight if I needed to fight or stand up for other players who were getting taken advantage, but back then you had to go out and play. Nobody got to sit on the bench for all but two minutes then go out and fight, like what happened after they brought in the instigator rule.”

  As was a theme in the Battle, Sheehy’s weight class and structure within the rolling of lines landed him a fairly regular dance partner in orange and blue. Sheehy was a tad small for Dave Semenko, and didn’t find himself on the ice as much against Mark Messier. Somehow Kevin McClelland became his opposite number, which could have something to do with Sheehy’s pacifist leanings as the Battle waged on.

  “We were always trash-talking each other, and he’s saying to me one night, ‘C’mon, Neil. Let’s fight,’ ” Sheehy remembers. “I say to him, ‘Kevin, if I fight you, I’ll get fined.’ So he says, ‘I’ll pay it. Let’s go!’ ”

  It was during his many hostilities with McClelland, a very tough and plenty eager middleweight who patrolled the wall as a third-line right winger for Edmonton, that Sheehy realized a higher calling in the Battle.

  “I fought him several times. But then I realized, I didn’t have to fight these guys,” he said. “If I just kind of poked and prodded Wayne, they would have to fight me. I knew what my job was, so I figured it out: if they do something stupid, and I don’t fight them, then they’ll do something even more stupid.

  “I always knew I would get hit in the face, and did so every game several times. But my hope was, it would draw two or three penalties, and we had the best power play in the league.”

  Sheehy wouldn’t fight when the Flames were ahead or when the momentum was in their favour. Why would he? He only had that momentum to lose. But if the Oilers were ahead and he could stir things up, well, the Harvard boxing champ would step into the ring. “I was more of a situational guy, an analytical guy. Like, ‘How do we gain from this situation?’ ”

  It was always about orchestrating a scenario that was favour-able for Sheehy. Give him credit—he knew that if he relied solely on God-given talent, his career would have been a short one. So he created this persona that set him apart, beginning with the Harvard boxing club shtick.

  “When you’re in the Battle of Alberta, the whole thing is about hype,” he said. “If your competition has any doubt about who you are and what you are about, that can be an advantage. And Calgary needed every advantage because—let’s face it—those Oilers teams were great, great teams, and we were just trying to close the gap. When Bob Johnson showed up in Calgary, we didn’t have a team that was even close to Edmonton. Then we started signing those undrafted college guys, who had unfettered enthusiasm. Guys who were willing to sacrifice for the unknown. Well, at that time, the unknown was beating the Oilers.”

  If that was “the unknown,” then the unheard-of was getting Wayne Gretzky off his game. He either made you look silly when you tried to hit him, or if you did catch him, you had to deal with one of the Oilers looking to punch your lights out.

  Sheehy, always searching for an angle, analyzed Gretzky from the bench for a few games, then realized what The Great One could do for him. Ice time! That’s what Gretzky turned out to mean for Sheehy.

  “What happened was, I watched [Flames defenceman] Paul Baxter. He was the guy who was always out against Gretzky, and whenever he would get physical with Gretzky there would be fights, and guys would come after him. But then I’d always see in the paper where he was being praised for getting to Gretzky. Then he got a lot more ice time.

  “I just said to myself, ‘I need to get ice time.’ ”

  Against Edmonton, Sheehy would take a short shift to throw off the rotation of the defencemen. Eventually he’d find himself on the ice with Gretzky, even if that hadn’t necessarily been the game plan of assistant coach Bob Murdoch. But when opportunity came knocking for Sheehy, he answered the door with plent
y of preparation on hand.

  “I always knew that he would be by himself in the opposite corner, and I knew the Oilers had a tendency to rim the puck around the boards and the puck would come to Gretzky on the opposite side all alone,” he said. “Rather than stand in front of the goal and cover nobody, I’d just go stand by where he was in the opposite corner. Then, when the puck was rimmed around, I was standing there.”

  But wait, as they say in those Slap Chop commercials. There’s more!

  “Now, I knew that I would get a penalty if I did anything cheap. So I’d keep my hands down low and I’d slam him into the boards. If I came up to the chest area, I’m getting a penalty every time. Because the league would protect Gretzky. So I’d push him, then right away the big guys would come after me. I’d say, ‘What are you going to do to me?’ and then I knew the punch was coming.

  “As they caught me, I would turtle.”

  Sheehy became more effective the less he fought, something never before seen in the Battle. This was the psychological warfare, and at that point in the Battle, the Flames needed all the help they could get.

  So the pest was born, and despite the fact that Edmonton had a player like Ken Linseman on their side, the role of the pest is always more valuable to an underdog. As Shakespeare taught us, what’s the point of having a protagonist if there is no antagonist?

  “Their big guys, they wanted to kill me,” Sheehy laughs. “I just recognized, if I didn’t fight the top guys and they took penalties, it drove the skill guys nuts. Because I wasn’t being accountable. There is always supposed to be accountability in the league, so if you touched one of their skill guys, you’d end up fighting one of their tough guys.

  “When I broke in, I fought their tough guys, and after analyzing things, I realized there was a better way. That I could hurt them more by drawing penalties. Now, the only way that strategy works is if you have a great power play, and at the time Bob Johnson always had the best power play in the league.”

  That was another factor here —the Calgary power play. Johnson was such a magnificent tactician, and the one place where a coach can really put his stamp on a hockey team is on special teams. In interviewing for this book, I can’t tell you how many times I heard someone say, “If Badger had Gretzky, Coffey, and the boys to work with, that power play would have won Stanley Cups by itself.”

  And so Johnson’s power play became Sheehy’s bodyguard. He could ply his trade, turtle when he wanted to, and the fear of that Calgary power-play unit was like police protection for Sheehy. And Lord knows, he needed it.

  “Kevin McClelland was constantly trying to get him, and Sheehy would do his thing,” said Edmonton heavyweight Dave Semenko. “That was the agitating thing about him—he wasn’t going to fight anybody. Mac would go after him, and he’d end up taking a penalty. Mac tried, but it wasn’t happening, so it became personal. I’m sure I made my attempts, but he was just going to skate away or cover up. You were just going to take a penalty.

  “I probably should have gone after one of their small players, but I couldn’t see myself purposely running over one of their players. Just didn’t sit right for me. If someone else did it, then I could get involved,” mused Semenko. “But [Sheehy] frustrated not only the star players but also the guys who were supposed to prevent it. He just said, ‘I’m not going to fight you guys, but I’m still going to do this …’ ”

  It was the act of a marginal player who had found a niche that would earn him an NHL paycheque, and he was ready and willing to exploit that. No different than the fighters—I mean, does anyone really want to bare-knuckle fight on skates for a living?—Sheehy was doing something distasteful because it worked.

  “Most people didn’t want to take punches to the head, or get suckered by guys. I was willing to do that,” he said. It was about the cause, about the Battle. Guys did things in Calgary versus Edmonton that they wouldn’t necessarily do for Washington–Pittsburgh, or Detroit–Minnesota. “During the 1980s in the Battle of Alberta, we hated each other,” Sheehy said. “It was tale of two cities, and Edmonton–Calgary hated each other, and that carried on to the ice. Back in the day, when we went into a bar and there were any of the Oilers in there, we just turned around and walked out. We’d go somewhere else.”

  Eventually, Sheehy earned the nickname “The Butcher of Harvard,” which he loved. And, yes, he even earned the grudging respect of Gretzky, who finally met a player who had taken up residence in his kitchen. “It must have been frustrating for Gretzky, that somehow he couldn’t shut out this ten-minute-game defenceman,” Maki said. “There were points in a game when Gretzky would just slash him on the ankles. Or Semenko would come over and step in.

  “Was it really working? On some nights, yes. On others, Gretzky was just going to dominate, and you were just going to watch.”

  And when the Battle was over, Sheehy versus Gretzky waged on elsewhere.

  “He took two separate roughing penalties on me in the same game once, in Washington. He was playing for the L.A. Kings and I was playing for the Washington Capitals,” laughs Sheehy today. “But the one time, I was walking out of Northlands Coliseum, and Gretzky was right behind me. We had just beaten them [in 1986], and he was very gracious. He just said, ‘Great job, congratulations, and good luck the rest of the way.’ He was such a class act.”

  Sheehy also took his circus act with him when he left.

  “Neil was the last player to wear No. 0 in the NHL [with Hartford in 1988],” said Maki. “He figured, if Gretzky was 99, I was one better. Zero.

  “I asked him once, ‘Why do wear the number 0?’ He says, ‘It’s for my family. Our original name was O’Sheehy.’ Of course it never was.”

  Today they all look back with a smile. The punches don’t hurt anymore, the comments have long since ceased to dig in.

  “I say this with a great deal of respect,” Gretzky said, “that the guys I hated playing against the most were the guys I wanted on my team. He was a smart player with tremendous mobility for a big guy, and he knew how to get under the skin of myself and a guy like Jari Kurri. He did it as well or better than anyone in hockey.

  “So, when you’ve got a guy who wants to win and will do anything, at all costs, to become a champion, as Neil Sheehy wanted to, then you become fearless. Neil Sheehy played against us fearlessly. He knew that if he was going to run myself or Jari … he’d have to deal with a guy like Semenko, or McSorley, or Dave Hunter. He took those hits. He didn’t back down. The fact he played with that emotion, and that kind of guts, made him a tough guy for our team to compete against. He did that job as well as anybody.”

  As mentioned, Sheehy would go on to become a successful player agent in Minnesota, the State of Hockey. He walked away from hockey after that 1993–94 season in Slovenia, but somehow ol’ Harv still had something to say. This Ivy Leaguer had more thesis paper in him, and so he penned a treatise called “The Systematic Erosion and Neutralization of Skill and Play-making in the NHL.”

  That’s right, folks. Neil Sheehy, decrying the fact that pluggers were neutralizing the superstars and taking the skill out of the game. “I am writing this article knowing that I will be criticized for having the audacity to write it,” was how Sheehy opened his paper, going on to decry how the league had handicapped the Oilers by changing the rule that once saw coincidental minors result in a four-on-four situation, changing it so that teams played five-on-five hockey instead.

  “Coaches,” he wrote, “want their players to agitate opponents and draw penalties. ‘Agitate, but don’t fight,’ they say. This was a novel idea in the ‘80s, but now it is the norm and our overall game is suffering because of it. It neutralizes skill and frustrates the very players that make hockey the greatest game in the world.”

  Huh? Really?

  Thirty years later, Neil Sheehy is still agitating.

  8

  The Flames Capture the 1986 Battle

  “It was the Stanley Cup for Calgary, it really was. Unfortunately, ther
e happened to be some teams left. Bastards.”

  In their own minds, the Calgary Flames were making up ground on Edmonton in 1986. They had scored the second most goals in the NHL that season, behind Edmonton, and Calgary had the second most points in the Campbell Conference, behind Edmonton. The 1985–86 Flames were finally tapping on that glass ceiling that had seen them finish second to the Oilers in the Smythe Division in three of the past four seasons.

  Calgary could beat everyone else, but their primary issue remained: Calgary still couldn’t beat Edmonton. So on April 4, 1986, as the teams arrived at the Olympic Saddledome for a meaningless Game 78 of the eighty-game regular season—Edmonton and Calgary cemented in the one–two spots in the Smythe, a chasm of thirty-two points between them in the standings—the season series did not exactly reek of parity. In the seven games played thus far that season, Edmonton had gone 6–0–1, outscoring Calgary 37–24.

  Wayne Gretzky would end up with twenty-four points in eight meetings between the teams that season, and these hollow, late-season affairs were right up his alley. In that final meeting on April 4, he would register point No. 213, breaking his own mark from four years prior en route to that famous 215-point season that still stands today as the most productive campaign in NHL history.

  Normally, NHL players began to dial it down this close to the post-season when the two points really didn’t matter. There was nothing to gain and plenty to lose if someone got injured a week away from Round 1—especially for two teams planning on a two-month run through the post-season. In this game the new kid, Mike Vernon, would be in goal for Calgary, after Edmonton had scorched Reggie Lemelin for five consecutive losses in 1985–86. The teams hadn’t seen each other in two months … Really, this one was a formality for both sides, right?

  Well, as it turned out, it depended upon what side you were on.

  Something happened that night in Calgary that gave pause to the Battle. The Flames, after having beaten Edmonton—wait for it—just once in the previous twenty-four regular-season games, crushed the Oilers 9–3 that night.