The Battle of Alberta

by Mark Spector

  How would the Oilers approach Game 7? “Scared to death, I hope,” Gretzky said back then. “The fact we came back from down 3–2,” Lowe remembers, “we were really confident. ‘We’re on home ice. We’re going to win.’ I would think, maybe we were overconfident.”

  The Flames, meanwhile, would travel north without centre Carey Wilson, who had to have his spleen removed after Game 6. Bleated general manager Cliff Fletcher, “It was a direct result of him being skewered [by Steve Smith]!”

  It was a style of bygone days, to be sure, as no edition of the Battle was complete without a couple of honest spears. “There were a lot of other spears in that game,” Johnson told the travelling press. “They speared more than we did.”

  The Flames showed the video of the Smith spear that would leave Wilson holed up at the Holy Cross Hospital, and the printed response was, “It didn’t look that vicious.” It was simply the way hockey was played back then, and with the Flames pushing the Oilers to the brink, it was expected that the level of violence would run concurrent with the level of desperation. Later, we would discover it was a Charlie Huddy crosscheck that cost Wilson his spleen, not Smith’s spear. There was so much more stickwork in those days, who really could tell which infraction was responsible for the removal of which organ?

  Game 7 would be, looking back over all the games played between these two rivals, the single most memorable of them all. It was played under a fog of nervousness in Edmonton, with Hakan Loob scoring the lone first-period goal and Peplinski adding another early in the second period. As they had the entire series, the Flames were calling the tune in Game 7.

  Edmonton got equalizing goals from Anderson, now shifted up to play next to Gretzky and Messier, who had spent the last two games with Kurri on his right side. That’s how messed up the Oilers were, courtesy of Johnson and the Flames. Sather had split up the two most dominant forward duos in the NHL because somehow that was supposed to help the Oilers beat Calgary.

  It did not.

  Just past five minutes into the third period Perry Berezan dumped a puck into the Oilers zone and went for a change. Smith pulled up behind the Oilers net, gathering up a puck left for him by Grant Fuhr. The Oilers defenceman took one stride to his left and rifled a pass back through the empty slot aimed at Krushelnyski, who was touring up along the right-side boards.

  The puck never made it to Krushelnyski. In fact, it never made it through the Oilers crease, catching the back of Fuhr’s skate and ricocheting into the Edmonton goal. The Oilers had three-quarters of a period to right that error, and they could not. In the end, the shots were 6–6 in that final frame, and with just a few ticks left on the clock, one final faceoff in Calgary’s zone lay between the Flames and the top of their mountain.

  “I still remember the faceoff, to the left of Vernon, with about four or five seconds left,” said Maher. “They dropped the puck, and Kurri’s shot went just wide … That’s when I yelled out,’ ‘Yeah, baby!’ for the first time. ‘The Flames have climbed the mountain!’ ”

  “They’d caught up,” said Maher’s counterpart, Edmonton radio man Rod Phillips. “Smitty’s goal is what people remember most from that series, but the Oilers had a lot of opportunities to win that hockey game and they didn’t. The last shot of the game, Jari had a chance to tie it up and he missed by that much. The clock ran down, Calgary won the series, and I think they deserved to win. They played better than the Oilers in that series.”

  Said Lowe, “It just seemed we didn’t have it. You know? We didn’t have it. We didn’t have the horsepower, the next gear we’d always had against them previously.”

  The celebration at Northlands was one of those visitors’ parties where you could hear the whoops and hollers of the thirty-man Flames contingent above the silent disbelief of 17,498 patrons. It was no different than when Calgary would win the 1989 Cup at the Montreal Forum or Edmonton’s celebration in 1990 at the old Boston Garden.

  Inside the CBC’s mobile unit, however, another battle was being fought, this time between John Shannon and his superiors in Toronto. It was a time when the sanctity of The National news program took precedence over the revenue-generating Hockey Night in Canada. CBC, in the same wisdom that would have host Dave Hodge tossing a pencil in the air a year later (they left an overtime game for the news that night), wanted Shannon to get off the air so the news could start on time.

  “We had a rule at that time at the CBC, where you had to be off the air four minutes after a game,” said Shannon. “Well, the Flames win, and the celebration on the ice alone is three minutes. You had commercials to run, the network is demanding that I get off the air, and I’m saying, ‘I’m not going off the air until we get a Flames interview, an Oilers interview, and the handshakes.’ ”

  Shannon had watched the Battle from the time he started producing games as a twenty-three-year-old in 1979, when Edmonton emerged from the World Hockey Association. He was a kid from the Okanagan who had not been touched by the Toronto bug, despite his employer’s leanings. So on the most historic night of the Battle of Alberta, Shannon put his job on the line for the sake of the story—as any good journalist would (or should) do.

  “We got Lanny right after the game, and he was bawling,” he recalled. “Then I got suspended for the next two games. At the end of the playoffs that year I was relieved of my duties. Because they ‘couldn’t control me.’ I was right, to this day.

  “Give me better television than that.”

  When Shannon finally relinquished control of the airwaves, CBC switched Alberta viewers to the all-important alternative to the Battle of Alberta. An episode of Star Trek.

  While Shannon was having a good day, anyone associated with the Oilers was watching their dynasty crumble. Remember, this was the day of the true dynasty. The Montreal Canadiens had won four straight Stanley Cups from 1975–79. Then the Islanders took over, winning the next four. Now Edmonton had the baton, and they’d just watched their two-year run come crashing to a halt.

  “I threw up in a garbage can after the game. I was so sick, so wrapped up, so sick to my stomach,” said equipment man Barrie Stafford. “Losing to Calgary, of all teams. It was devastating.”

  “I’m not sure that our psyche was as strong as Calgary’s in that series, at that point in the series,” Gretzky said. “You looked at the paper, and you’d finished eighteen or twenty points ahead in the regular season [actually thirty]. All of the sudden you’re in a Game 7, and you’re thinking, ‘How can this be?’ Well, Calgary was simply a better team than the regular season indicated. They had a better coach than the regular season indicated.

  “Maybe, after two straight Stanley Cups, going into that third period of Game 7, maybe we didn’t have the same hunger or fight that they did. It’s not to say we didn’t want to win. But maybe their fight was a little bit harder, their energy a little bit higher than ours was in the third period of Game 7. That’s all it took.”

  The story had ended the same way for so many years, on so many nights. The Big Break had always fallen north of Red Deer, whether that break was being the first to get a new rink in 1974, thanks to money from the Commonwealth Games, landing Gretzky, or drafting a raft of Hall of Fame players while Calgary built in the same incremental fashion as all the other teams. Edmonton always got the Big Break.

  On this Wednesday night, April 30, 1986, when Steve Smith went back to retrieve that puck, and Grant Fuhr nonchalantly retook his position in the Oilers crease, the Hockey Gods smiled on Calgary. Maybe for the first time ever in the Battle.

  “Preparation,” Otto said. “All of the sudden we got put in a position [to succeed]. Guys were blockin’ shots, doing whatever it took. Could have been the Hockey Gods. I don’t know.”

  Smith would become the scapegoat, but not a single player or management type I’ve ever spoken to who was involved in this series has ever subscribed to that theory. Stafford summed it up best: “I see that picture of him on his knees, by the net, and it put chills on my back now. How
devastated that poor guy was, and how bad he felt about letting the entire organization down. We still had time to win. We could have come back.

  “But in the tradition of a great franchise and great players, Steve Smith faced the music. He took responsibility, he stood in front of the media. He took the heat.”

  I was still working for the University of Alberta’s newspaper, The Gateway, that spring, and thanks to the generosity of Oilers PR director Bill Tuele I had been accredited with a pass for the entire playoffs. I was in the Oilers room that night the moment the door was opened and I witnessed Smith’s fate. The Calgary room, much smaller and immeasurably more jubilant, was another scene I will never forget.

  By the time I made my way down there, the interviews were well underway. The visiting team’s room is always more cramped than the home team’s room, and there was a table in the middle, further limiting the room to manouevre. Two things I remember: Cliff Fletcher, finding me blocking his way as he roamed the room, put both arms around me from behind and steered me to the side of his path with a huge smile and a bear hug. He did not have a clue who I was at that time.

  And Jamie Macoun. By the time I arrived in the Flames room, the real newspaper reporters from the Calgary Herald and Sun, and the sidebar guys from the two Edmonton papers, had worked the room pretty hard. I was catching up, and with no real deadline the next day, I’ll admit it, I was really just in there for my own personal experience. I saw Macoun sitting in his stall, with faraway eyes, looking like a man who couldn’t even hear the din that was going on all around him. He was lost in thought, in the realization that he was sitting there at that moment. In Edmonton. A winner.

  I approached him for an interview, and he very politely said, “Would you mind if I just enjoyed this for a moment?”

  I let him be.

  One thing I did not see that night, nor have I ever witnessed in all the playoff series I have since covered, was something that has been obscured by history: an unheard-of visit into the Flames room by Oilers owner Peter Pocklington and coach Glen Sather.

  “Slats and Pocklington walked into the Flames dressing room after Game 7, and the place went as silent as a grave,” said Calgary Herald scribe George Johnson. “It was like, ‘What are you two doing in here?’ But you know what? That was real classy. All this Slats’s arrogance, with the smirk and everything. He came into the other army’s bunker, and who does he bring with him? Pocklington! We’re doing the interviews, and we all stopped mid-sentence. I thought I was hallucinating.

  “It kind of humanized the Battle. Because before that, Sather was this ogre who had been kicking their rump all the livelong day. And he went in and said, ‘Congratulations. You guys deserved this.’ To have the two of them walk in there, with all the bad blood built up between those two organizations, was really something.”

  “They were very polite,” confirmed Fletcher. “They came in and shook hands with us, congratulated us for winning the series. Both of them.”

  Truly, this was Upside-Down Land for the Flames. Everything they’d known about the Battle had changed, and every emotion they’d felt when playing Edmonton in big games was now completely opposite. From the feeling in the post-game dressing room, to walking out the bay doors to the waiting bus on the ramp, the Alberta spring night was a breath of fresh air after a sweaty, steamy dressing room.

  “I remember so many games, walking out of Northlands and having lost 7–0. Six to one,” Maher said. “That’s what I remember about that night, leaving Northlands in 1986, thinking, ‘How many times have we walked out of this building having lost by an overwhelming score? Tonight we’re walking out of here, and we’re on top of the world.’ ”

  Of course, there was the little matter of a Campbell Conference final to be played, with Game 1 against the St. Louis Blues scheduled for the night after next. That’s right—one off day to enjoy the greatest victory of many of these players’ NHL careers thus far—and then they strapped their gear back on and faced the Norris Division champs from St. Louis.

  Sadly for the Flames, there would be no memory created that spring that would surpass April 30 in Edmonton, even though they eked out a seven-game win over St. Louis and finally brought the Flaming C to a Stanley Cup final against Montreal.

  “We had finally built a team that could beat the Oilers, and we thought we were finally able to win a Stanley Cup,” Murdoch said. “But the Stanley Cup was almost secondary to getting through the Oilers. We’d already won our Stanley Cup. When we went on to play the St. Louis Blues, we should have finished those guys off in four games. Montreal had finished [the New York Rangers] off in five games, and they were waiting for us.

  “We beat Montreal the first game, then we lost in overtime the second game. After that, you could have taken a cattle prod and you couldn’t reach our guys. Our guys were so goddamned exhausted, so mentally and emotionally spent, they had nothing left. They’d left it in Edmonton.”

  Speaking of leaving Edmonton, that’s exactly what the Oilers players did. You’ve heard of getting out of Dodge? Well, Lowe and Coffey were on a plane to Phoenix the next day, bruises and all. They’d heal up in the Arizona sun—anywhere to get away from what had transpired against the Flames.

  “I went into hiding. Didn’t want to be seen anywhere,” Lowe said. “Not that I felt shame, I just didn’t want to talk about it. Got to Phoenix as fast as possible. It was as if the season was over for everybody because it was over for us.

  “You would get out of town, put two or three weeks between the loss and the next time you’ve got to face someone, you know?”

  What do two guys do when they’re alone in Phoenix, tired, worn down, and looking to avoid running into anyone who may know them?

  “We were in the back of a bar shooting pool, no one else was there. The TV was on, and the Flames game came on,” Lowe said. “I couldn’t … None of us could bear to watch hockey—and even more so if it was the Flames playing. And I suspect they felt the same way about us.

  “Coff went over to the TV, and he pulled the plug.”

  9

  Oiler Steve Smith’s Unforgettable Goal

  “It was human error. I guess I’ve just got to live with it.”

  “I got good wood on it,” Oiler Steve Smith said moments after that fateful Game 7 that he would wear like a tattoo for the rest of his playing days. “I thought the puck went in fast.”

  Not an hour removed from what remains today the worst experience of his life, Smith was having a laugh at his own misfortune. Why not? A young defenceman’s first playoff run isn’t supposed to end that way, but on a team full of future Hall of Famers, Steve Smith—born on April 30, 1963, twenty-three years to the day before his errant breakout pass snapped Edmonton’s run of Stanley Cups—was never supposed to play a leading role in the Battle. He hadn’t ever dreamed that he might one day become a chapter in the book, and really, Smith never was the kind of guy whose game was meant to stand out.

  Smith was the personification of why the Oilers and the Flames managed to stay on top for an entire decade: another mobile six-foot-three defenceman who could fight and play coming out of an Edmonton farm system that—as barren as it has been in the 2000s—simply belched talent in the early 1980s. He had arrived on the scene after a couple of years seasoning in the American League, a gangly, twenty-two-year-old defenceman who took nothing for granted. He wasn’t good enough to feel any entitlement as he walked into the dressing room of a team coming off back-to-back Stanley Cups in 1984 and 1985.

  “I felt there was an opportunity, but my road to junior and the NHL wasn’t an easy one,” Smith said. “It wasn’t like I was a highly touted [prospect]. I was the last guy to make my junior team. I was never drafted in junior.”

  Smith was born in Glasgow, Scotland. He was two and a half years old when he and his parents packed up and came over the pond, typically with not much more than what was on their backs and in their pockets. They settled in Cobourg, Ontario, a blue-collar town that lies a
n hour and a bit up the 401 from Toronto, along the shores of Lake Ontario.

  The Smiths settled into some rich Ontario Hockey League country, with Oshawa, Peterborough, and Belleville each within an hour’s drive. But Rae Smith had to find work before his boy Steve —and the two brothers who would soon arrive —would play any hockey.

  “My father came over, and on my birth certificate it still states that he was a ‘lorry driver.’ A lorry driver is a truck driver. Says it on the bottom of my British birth certificate,” Smith chuckles. Rae Smith only drove truck for a short while, though, before finding himself working at a juvenile home in Cobourg known as the Brookside Training School. “He was responsible for juvenile delinquent kids who needed counselling. It was a social-work type thing, for kids who had been in trouble with the law.”

  You can imagine that the Smith boys stayed on the straight and narrow. Or at least young Steven kept his disobedience to the hockey rink, where he was good enough to get an invite to the London Knights camp. As he said, he wasn’t drafted, and that first season, even on a team that would post a mediocre 20–48–0 record, head coach Paul McIntosh wasn’t sure about the Smith kid from Cobourg.

  “My first year, everyone else was put into billet homes early on. I remained in a Motel 6 until just before Christmas, before they finally got me off Cheeseburger Row and moved me in with a family,” said Smith. He was doing anything he could to stay with the Knights, playing right wing on a line with Basil McRae and Dave Simpson, the older brother of Smith’s future teammate in Edmonton and current Rogers hockey analyst, Craig Simpson.

  There are some players who arrive in junior knowing that the NHL lies in their future. There are a lot more, however, who secretly can’t believe they’ve made a major junior roster and do not even dare to dream of a lucrative career in the professional game. For those players, there is often a moment—a singular accomplishment or occurrence —when they realize, “Wait a second here. I might actually be good enough to do this.”