by Mark Spector
“When you’re young, you don’t think that way. You just want to win at any cost. Certainly that’s an admirable trait, but from that day forward I always had a sense of cheering for everyone. I never wanted anyone to have the day that I had that day. And that’s something I have stuck to pretty closely for a long, long time. I am a much more positive person now than ever.”
How much courage does it take to relive a moment, a period of his life, that was as painful as this was? Smith generously spent forty-five minutes on the phone for the interview, baring his twenty-three-year-old self, then extrapolating those emotions on to the man he is today. It would have been so much easier just to bury the experience. Not to pick up the phone.
“It’s something I’ll always be remembered for,” he said, “but it certainly doesn’t define me as a player or as an individual. That, I can tell you for sure.”
Most of his teammates will say that they’ve never spoken to Smith about “The Goal.” In a professional dressing room, unearthing negative feelings or experiences is taboo. Digging at a wound is something you might do to an opponent, but never, ever to a teammate.
Did anyone ever reach out to Smith? Did he receive any counsel on how to deal with that experience?
“No,” he said, after thinking for a while. “No, to tell you the truth. There was not, other than the support from my family. My father and I, my brothers and I, were very, very close.”
His family was bitter toward an Edmonton media that was not nearly pragmatic enough in dispensing blame for a Stanley Cup reign that had been snapped. Smith, mature beyond his years, could have become bitter toward the media, like Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Steve Carlton or NHL goalie Tom Barrasso.
“I spent a lot of time trying to take that portion away from [his own psyche],” he said. “Guys were reporting what they were reporting. In my mind it was a different story, but that was irrelevant. It made me a more humble person, and quite frankly adversity, when dealt with correctly, certainly makes you a better person. It makes you a better player and makes you stronger as you go forward.
“Would I look back and say I wish it never happened? Absolutely. But that can’t be changed, It doesn’t define me. It was just part of my history.”
We all know that part of Steve Smith’s history. But I bet you didn’t know of this little addendum to that goal in 1986:
After 1986, every visit to the Saddledome was like a string around Smith’s finger, reminding him of that clearing pass that never cleared in ’86. Every time Smith gathered a puck behind his goal, lifted his head, and looked up-ice, Flames fans would yell in unison: “Shooooot! Shooooot!” It had long since ceased to be funny, yet it was a tradition that Flames fans just felt compelled to uphold.
One day, several Septembers into his career, Smith rolled into Calgary for a preseason game, an established defenceman with more skill than you’d expect from a D-man with that much sandpaper. He’d heard it from Flames fans for long enough, and knew he’d be hearing “Shoooot!” again that night. So before the game he wandered over to goaltender Bill Ranford’s dressing room stall. Smith had a plan.
“I said, we’re going to have a power play at some point tonight, and I’m going to carry the puck up-ice. If no one is around me, I’m going to swing around at the blue line, I’m going to turn around, and I’m going to take a slapshot.
“Then I said, ‘And you’d better fuckin’ stop it.’ ”
And that’s exactly what Steve Smith did. After all he’d been through, he did something you might never see in a lifetime of watching hockey.
“I came out of the zone, I turned around, and I fired it,” he says, smiling at the memory. “I put my stick up to the fans and waved, and the whole place stood up and gave me a standing ovation. It was kinda cool. For the most part, they left me alone after that.”
10
Reffing the Battle of Alberta
“You couldn’t give those games to a rookie.
You had to have a guy who had experience.”
Kerry Fraser was across the ice at the old Chicago Stadium penalty box, leaning in to speak through that little bank-teller hole in the glass to inform the official timekeeper of his latest penalty call.
“The Oilers are getting spanked in Chicago, and with a couple of minutes to go Kevin Lowe, frustrated as hell, took a pole axe shot on a Blackhawks player. I gave him a penalty for slashing,” Fraser recalls.
The clichés about a ref being blind, or needing glasses, always omit the fact that a good official exercises all of his senses when he’s working a game. It is not only about what you see but also what you sense, what you feel, and, on this occasion, what Fraser heard. A rise in the Stadium crowd told him there was something going on behind him that required his attention, and so he spun around to see the Oilers amassing at the rear of their bench area, trying to get at a fan or fans seated on the other side of the glass.
“All the Oilers players, and Glen Sather, were standing up on the Oilers bench. The players all have their sticks raised, and they’re clubbing at the glass, with a fan. And I’m thinking, Aw, ——!”
Referees are like cops. They’ll hand out a ticket, or a minor penalty, with relative ease. It’s about maintaining control of the situation, a tenet of both refereeing hockey and policing in general. But when you start talking match penalties and game misconducts, well, it’s like the difference between a warning and taking a suspect in for booking.
The latter comes with a lot of paperwork, and really, these guys didn’t get into the business to become secretaries.
“From my end, I just want to get this game over with, and I didn’t want to have to write reports about players and coaches going after this fan. That’s a lengthy process after a game, and we want to go for a beer,” Fraser says. “So I skate over, I tug on Slats’s pant leg, and I get his attention.”
Fraser told him to rein in his players, and Sather did so immediately.
“He was like a symphony conductor. He raised his arms and had all his players sit down. Like an orchestra,” marvelled Fraser. “I said, ‘Glen, you want me to get security and get this fan out of here?’ And he says to me, ‘Naw, we’re okay, Kerry. The guy said that the penalty you just gave Lowe was a horseshit call, but we stuck up for you.’ ”
There was a third team in the Battle of Alberta, and to them, the games were every bit as special as they were to the players.
For a Theoren Fleury or a Glenn Anderson, they would know they were going to play against their arch rival eight times a season, a couple or few times in the pre-season, and perhaps six or seven more times in a playoff series. For an official, however, it was completely different.
“When you received a game of that magnitude in your assignments,” said Hall of Fame referee Bill McCreary, “you knew that you had the respect of your peers. And that [the head of officials] had enough confidence in you to handle one of those hockey games.”
The temperature ran pretty hot in the Battle of Alberta, but it wasn’t the only rivalry in the NHL. Boston–Montreal was good, or Habs–Nordiques. St. Louis–Chicago, Islanders–Rangers, or Rangers–Philadelphia—all were divisional foes in a much more violent time in the game, when stickwork was not only more prevalent but also, to a certain extent, within the rules.
The difference was, none of those other rivalries were producing a Stanley Cup finalist every year for eight years running like the Battle did. So, as the years passed, the pedigree of official required to work the games was upped as well.
The late John McCauley was the referee in chief for much of the 1980s, succeeded in 1989 by Bryan Lewis, who had come off the ice after a refereeing career that spanned from 1967 to 1986. It was back in the day of the one-referee system, and clearly not a place for a nervous person.
“You couldn’t give those games to a rookie. You had to have a guy who had experience,” said Lewis. “I used to call them ‘the any referee.’ Any game. Any time. Any place. Anywhere.
“He could do
Philadelphia–Washington. He could do Philadelphia–New York Rangers. Chicago–Minnesota in those days. Chicago–St. Louis. And then you had Calgary and Edmonton.”
Denis Morel was one of those “any refs,” and he got the call in Montreal to come out west and work some of those games. He’d done his share of the Battle of Quebec during the season. How much tougher could Edmonton–Calgary be?
“When I was coming back to Quebec, they would always say to me, ‘Oh, that rivalry between Quebec and Montreal. You guys have a lot of pressure.’ I would say, ‘Pressure? When you go out west, between Calgary and Edmonton, the pressure is double.’
“You’d do the first or second round between Edmonton and Calgary, it was like doing the Stanley Cup final.”
The officials were the transient members of the Battle. A referee would never worked both ends of a regular season back to back, though the linesmen team of Randy Mitton and Swede Knox—who both lived in or around Edmonton —did so frequently. The intensity of the Battle commanded that only the top referees drew the assignments, so the cast of referees didn’t change much come playoff time. The linesmen, however, were always sent to the other conference in the post-season, so Knox and Mitton never got to work the Battle when it burned the hottest in April and May.
One by one, however, the various zebras forged the relationships during the regular season that would be counted on when the sticks hit the fan come playoff time. And it worked both ways—a Battle of Alberta game in January was like a playoff preview for any official assigned to the game.
“Simply, it was just mean. They were mean, and they really hatred each other with a passion,” Mitton recalled. “But the people from Edmonton hated the people from Calgary. And vice versa. It was just mean, and it was scary. There were obvious bench-emptiers from teams that weren’t rivals, per se. But this was different. This was just meaner than anything else. I don’t know how else to describe it.”
“As a referee,” Lewis said, “our assignments were always done by game numbers. So if you got game No. 312, and you looked it up and it was Edmonton and Calgary, you knew. You didn’t need [former referee in chief] Scotty Morrison to call you and say, ‘You’d better be ready.’ The style of game alone said, you’d better make sure you got to town early. You’d better make sure you got your rest. You’d better have a half-decent pre-game meal, and then get a good rest before the game. Because you knew: You were going to have three hours of hard work.
“So, when I started doing the assignments, I had to have the same mentality. I couldn’t give that game to a lesser experienced guy. I had to give that game to a Kerry Fraser, an Andy Van Hellemond. A Bill McCreary. Because they were an ‘any ref.’ ”
As a fan, or a viewer, we tend only to see the interaction between officials and coaches, or officials and players, when a contentious issue has arisen that requires direct communication. Then the camera pans in. Those moments tend to unfold predictably: the player or coach wants a call to go in favour of his team, and the referee is either mediating or explaining the situation.
What a referee will tell you, however, is that if you wait until a moment like that to have to forge a relationship with a coach or a player—when everyone is hot and a referee’s call is about to have a major impact on the game—you’ve waited too long. It’s when the camera is trained elsewhere that the respect between coach and zebra is earned or lost.
Linesmen and coaches don’t talk a whole lot. But it behooves both the referee and the head coach if they can see things eye to eye. It’s funny, not every referee I interviewed for this chapter had the same opinion of the various characters inside. It is a simple fact that some guys get along better than others, and that’s no different inside an NHL game than it is in the dressing room of your beer league team.
Kerry Fraser and Glen Sather seemed to find that middle ground. For them it became a battle of wits, the veteran referee and longtime Oilers coach each trying to get the last laugh.
“He was the coach with the most wit I ever saw, and it was fun to try to match wits with him,” said Fraser, who refereed more than two thousand NHL games in total and thirteen Stanley Cup finals. “Slats had this unmistakable voice. It was squeaky—a voice that was very high-pitched, especially if he got excited. Glen was like a father to those young guys, but he could also be one of them, a child with them. He was a pretty modern-thinking guy as an older man coaching boys.”
One night at Northlands, Fraser was readying for the puck to be dropped by one of his linesmen, poised in that universal position of the zebra—bent over, hands on his knees, head forward in full observation mode. His back was to the Oilers bench.
“I heard Slats yelling at me. I just rotated my head and upper body, and I put my fingers to my lips. Like, ‘Hush.’ He plays innocent. Puts both his hands up like he’s saying, ‘I surrender.’ His eyebrows are raised, and he says, ‘Kerry, it wasn’t me.’ And he points at a photographer who’s shooting between the benches.”
The next night the Oilers are in Vancouver, and so is Fraser. So before the game begins, as the anthem singer is leaving the ice and the arena staff are picking up the red carpet, Fraser skates over to Edmonton’s bench.
“I skated over to him, and I said, ‘Listen, Glen, before I start this game tonight, I wanted to know if we were going to have any trouble with that photographer tonight?’
“And Glen says, ‘No, we left the sonofabitch at home. He couldn’t keep his mouth shut.’ ”
Then there was Denis Morel, who had a completely different viewpoint when it came to Sather.
“Glen, he was a tough cookie, and in those years, the intimidation was working with some officials, no doubt about that,” said Morel. “When you stepped into that building, it was a different feeling. But if you didn’t stand up in front of Glen, Glen would chew you up. Chew you up very well.”
It was no different being a referee, as it turns out, than being a reporter. Sather’s act was to break in anybody with whom he wanted an edge. It was like you were a newly saddled horse, and his power and position provided Sather with the necessary intimidation. The solution for the referee was the same as it was for us reporters:
“If a referee let him go an inch, he’d take a foot. Then a yard. Then after that, who knew? You were losing control,” Morel said. “If you were willing to face him, he would back off. This guy, he was willing to do anything to win. He’d play with the rules, and if you let him go, he’d take even more. If you prove you can stand your ground, he was okay with that.”
Fraser was, as we said, one who loved the debate. In that classic Game 6 in 1994, when the New York Rangers captain Mark Messier scored the hat trick after guaranteeing a win at New Jersey, there is a fascinating close-up of Fraser debating Rangers coach Mike Keenan about a call. Coming out of the commercial, the game is literally delayed while Fraser and Keenan go back and forth in heated, but respectful, dialogue.
Though Flames coach Bob Johnson appeared to take part in the gamesmanship less, the Oilers coach was always ready to test a zebra’s courage in conversation.
“Slats had an amazing personality,” said Fraser. “He could be sarcastic in his comments, but he was a needler. He enjoyed the banter, and if he could pull a referee into his world with his banter and maybe get him a little bit off his game, make him think about maybe owing him one, that was his win.
“I loved it, the game within the game that Slats played.”
Behind the Flames bench, the scholarly Johnson was far less animated. It was as if he’d concluded that tactics when the puck was still moving were the ones on which he would focus his attention. Once the whistle blew and the puck stopped moving, it wasn’t Johnson’s time. Johnson’s Xs and Os were superior to Sather’s, but he did not possess the intimidation game that Sather had.
“Bob was so calm. He’d never say much behind the bench,” said Morel. “But he was in the game, you could feel it. The old Badger, he’d talk to you smoothly. Like (speaks slowly), ‘What do you think ab
out that call, Denis?’ He’d say calmly, ‘I think you made a mistake there, Denis.’ ”
For Mitton and Knox, Northlands and the Saddledome were equal parts their home rink. They’d do thirty or so games a year—about 40 percent of their season—between the two Alberta cities. But where the referees interact with head coaches, captains, and players who feel they’ve been wronged by a penalty call, the linesmen have a completely different perspective. They deal with the centremen when they’re dropping pucks for faceoffs, forwards who find themselves frequently going offside, and defencemen on icing calls. And they’re the ones grabbing the puck out of a goalie’s glove after he’s made a save or hauling it out of the net after a goal has been scored.
The difference was, where the referee is mandated to interact, a linesman can—for the most part—keep his mouth shut and quietly do his job.
“I never got too close with any of the players or staff. I didn’t care if they liked me, as long as they respect me and the job I did,” said Knox, the latter thought echoing almost to the word what Mitton and other officials have said. “I don’t think you can do that job if you’re worried about who likes you. Every call you make, someone is going to be pissed off at you, right? Fifty percent of the people are going to be pissed off at every call you make.”
Let’s face it, though: working on the same sheet of ice over all those years, opinions form. You like some people who you work with, while others … Let’s just say, not all of these guys are Facebooking each other when their birthdays roll around.
“[Craig] MacTavish and I simply didn’t get along,” Mitton said of the former Oilers centre and key faceoff man in the latter half of the 1980s. “He never did a faceoff cleanly, even once, in his career. He was the biggest cheater. And he simply didn’t like me at all. He hated me. Thought I was crazy. But he had to do what he needed to do, and I had to do what I needed to do. And that was conduct a faceoff properly.”
