The Battle of Alberta

by Mark Spector

  How many fights did Knox and Mitton break up in the Battle? Who possibly could have kept track?

  “The big guys were one thing, but sometimes the small guys were the worst ones,” Knox said. “The guys who very seldom got into fights, when they get in one they’d go cuckoo. Grimson, Semenko, Brown, they were all pretty good. They knew their job and they did it.

  “[Paul] Baxter? He never stopped talking,” Knox continued. “The other guy was [Theo] Fleury. As talented as he was, he was just a shit disturber. He’d come in and start mouthing off, then everyone would congregate and all of the sudden you don’t see Fleury anymore. Now it was all the big guys.

  “He was ‘Yap, yap, yap, yap.’ And not just to the opponents. To us too. But he had a job to do. He made our job more difficult, but he was doing his job too. Constant talking, constant bickering. But he was one of the best at that.”

  I won’t lie to you. When you sit down over a cup of coffee with a guy like Mitton—who worked 2,109 regular season games, 156 playoff games, the 1987 Canada Cup, two All-Star games, and a Cup final—the memories all haze together a bit. I’m asking him about things that happened thirty years ago, and it’s no surprise that some of the dates have slipped through the cracks. What is amazing, though, is some of the minutiae that he does recall. And he remembers like it happened last week.

  On Theo Fleury: “When Theo was going through his issues, there was a period later on in his career [with the Rangers] when he was thrown out of six out of ten games, or something like that. I had the game in Edmonton, and he got into it with a referee and he was going right off the wall. I took him right off the ice because he was thrown out and he was going to try to get back. He wasn’t that big, and I’m not either, but I had a good hold of him.

  “So I said, ‘Theo. Don’t make it worse.’ And he looked at me and he said, said, ‘Okay, Mitts.’ And he went off.”

  The Fleury Whisperer. Who knew?

  Or this one, on a faceless linesman’s relationship with the great Wayne Gretzky:

  Mitton recalled a game in which Gretzky had taken a long pass, and as he crossed the blue line he left the puck sitting right on the line. Then Gretzky went deep into the offensive zone, knowing that Jari Kurri would be coming to gather up the puck he’d left behind. Of course, the entire puck has to be over the entire line for the play to be onside. Mitton knew this. Gretzky, strangely, did not.

  “Maybe two seconds passes, and Kurri picks up the puck and brings it over the line. So I blow the whistle: offside. It’s an easy call,” Mitton said. “Gretzky comes by and he’s screamin’ at me, givin’ it to me, and I give him an unsportsmanlike conduct.

  Well, afterwards in my town, [the Edmonton suburb of] Leduc, people are saying, ‘How can you give Gretzky an unsportsmanlike conduct?’ It’s easy. He yelled at me and he embarrassed me.

  “Well, some days later we’re in L.A., and we used to drink—players and officials—in a place called The Melody Bar [an old haunt from the days of yore. Drank there myself]. Gretzky was around the other side, and I walked around to talk to him. I told him that story, and he said, ‘I didn’t know the entire puck had to be inside the zone?!?’ He sent over a couple of beers and it was all good.

  “Gretzky reacted to the officials but not maliciously. He did it because he was so intense,” Mitton said. “Other guys, they were just jerks. Mario Lemieux? I don’t really remember him ever saying anything. Joe Sakic? What a gentleman. Dave Semenko? I don’t even remember what Dave’s voice sounded like. He just never said anything.”

  The officials never had any trouble remaining impartial. Honestly, I have met and drank with many an official, and I’ve never met a ref who cared —or remembered for more than a day—what the final score was in a game. The toughest part, sometimes, was not breaking out in laughter when one player really burned another with a verbal shot.

  The choicest remarks were seldom if ever aimed at the striped shirts. Why waste a good line on an official when there was an Oiler or Flame on the other side of the faceoff dot to spend it on?

  There are ten skaters on the ice at any one time, give or take the power plays, and sometimes the tough guys and the skills guys would discuss things. Dave Semenko, for instance, is known to be one of the wittiest former Oilers, his dry sense of humour emanating from behind a serious mask. It makes for the perfect delivery, from a truly sharp and funny guy. To this day, with Semenko serving as a pro scout for the Oilers, fellow scouts who join Semenko at the pre-game meal or for an intermission coffee almost always walk away with a joke to be told a few nights later, in another press box in another NHL town.

  Flames tough guy Nick Fotiu was another who was as quick with a verbal jab as he was with a left hook. He was a sharp-witted WHA survivor, who still carried the accent one gets by growing up in Staten Island, New York. He would end up with more than sixteen hundred penalty minutes as a pro, and lose one testicle to the Battle, an excruciating story he told me about one day long after.

  (“Pain?” Fotiu asked in his New York accent. “Fuggedaboudit …”)

  “He was a big guy who didn’t play very much,” Fraser began. “And he always caked his face with Vaseline [so the punches would slide off]. There was a scrum, it was in Calgary and right in front of the Flames bench. Glenn Anderson was involved, and he was down on the ice. When Andy got up, Nick Fotiu stood up on the bench, right in front of him. He was taunting Anderson.”

  Anderson’s nickname was “Mork,” from an old Robin Williams character in a sitcom from 1978 called Mork and Mindy. Mork was from outer space, and in many ways, so was Anderson, it seemed. He didn’t fit the mould of the everyday hockey player—he wasn’t the ultra masculine type and spoke with a bit of a lisp. He was obviously a hell of a player, and the king of the “accidentally on purpose” high stick delivered to the chops of some opponent. But in this culture, at that time, if you didn’t conform to the group, a player would hear all kinds of things that would be considered totally unacceptable today.

  (For instance, Morel, one of the top refs of his day, was fondly nicknamed “Kermit” by his fellow zebras.)

  “Now, Anderson, there was speculation that he was a bit of a different sort,” continued Fraser. “He had that lisp when he talked. So Anderson said to Fotiu, in the crowd of players with me and the two linesmen around him, ‘Aw, Nick. Why don’t you just go put some more Vaseline on your face?’

  “So Fotiu, right out of the hopper says, ‘Well, at least I don’t shove it up my ass, Anderson!’ That’s the kind of stuff that went back and forth. It’s not politically correct, but everybody laughed. And Anderson laughed as well.”

  If it was a different time when it came to political correctness, so was it a different era of NHL officiating. First off, it was the one-referee system. Secondly, it was that era when coaches would yell, as an opposing puck carrier moved through the neutral zone, “Get a stick on him!” The era of the great rodeo was about to begin, as coaches like Jacques Lemaire devised systems that slowed the game down to a crawl. In fact, Johnson’s “left wing back” system is seen by many as the forebearer of the left-wing lock.

  “The standard,” as officials refer to it, was in a totally different place in the 1980s than it is today. Early on, Edmonton was allowed to skate, and they dominated the NHL. As Johnson figured out how to slow them down, so, too, did every other coach demand that their team clog up the neutral zone and hook and ride every chance they had against competition with superior skill.

  Everybody began to figure out that if you let Paul Coffey hit your blue line in full stride, you were dead, so eventually the hooking and holding began. When the Battle really started cooking in the playoffs, that meant a referee would make more “non-calls” that affected a game than actual calls.

  “You were rewarded for non-calls that helped to control the hockey game,” explained Bill McCreary. “You were still challenged to make the calls that kept the game fair and safe. That’s the way I always reffed a game: if you kept the gam
e fair and safe, the players would respect that.”

  Billy was a true pro, and he learned along the way from the best in the business. I’ve known him for a long time, and he was one of those guys: If he says it, and it’s about refereeing a hockey game, you can take it to the bank.

  “You were never told or directed [by his superiors] not to call penalties. I don’t know where that fallacy ever got started, but it wasn’t true,” McCreary said. “But, you were credited with controlling a hockey game without calling marginal calls. Without interrupting the flow of the game.

  “John Ashley [a Hall of Fame referee from the 1960s and 1970s] used to say, ‘If the team of horses is getting away on you, you have to pull the reins in a bit.’ Matt Pavelich [the first linesman ever inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame] used to give direction: ‘Don’t let it get out of control on you in the first period because you’ll never get ahead of it by the time the third period starts.’

  “Frank Udvari [a referee from the 1950s and 1960s] used to say, ‘If you’re going to make a call in the first period, make sure you’re willing to make that call in the third period.’ He always talked about consistency. So there was a lot of direction to make strong calls but not marginal calls. Nobody wanted a marginal call. Coaches didn’t want them, general managers didn’t want them, and the players didn’t want them.”

  Bill McCreary, like those select few players in the Battle, would become over the course of his nearly two-thousand-game career the singular best referee in the game. He was chosen to work the Olympic gold medal games in 1998, 2002, and 2010, and also was assigned to four separate Game 7s in the Stanley Cup finals over the years.

  When he thinks of the games he worked in Alberta between the Flames and Oilers, “I think of mean, I think of tough,” he said. “I think of a game that would border on mayhem. Right away, I think of Joel Otto, Lanny McDonald, [Jim] Peplinski, [Mike] Vernon, [Jamie] Macoun, Hakan Loob, Fleury. And on the other side, it wasn’t just Wayne and Mark. It was Charlie Huddy, Randy Gregg, Dave Lumley. They had a cast of characters who could play the game.”

  In a one-referee system, and before the help of video replay on goals, there was simply no way to be cognizant of what the puck was doing and also keep complete track of what was happening behind the play.

  “First of all, you tried. Second of all, it wasn’t possible,” he said. “It became a trust factor. From a trust factor comes respect, and is the players respected you, how far would they go until you had to get involved in it and slow it down?

  “Could you catch everything? Absolutely not.”

  Like the time Marty McSorley speared Mike Bullard in Game 3 of the 1988 series. Kerry Fraser was working that game. He saw it and issued McSorley a spearing major and a game misconduct. That didn’t mean it was such a big deal though.

  “I saw the spear, and it was pretty solid. Didn’t come out the back end of him, but it was put in there pretty good,” said Fraser. “When I first started, I was about twenty-one, and we had a rules session at training camp. Scotty Morrison was going through the rules, and back then we had the ability to call a two- or a five-minute penalty for spearing. I asked Lloyd Gilmour, ‘What’s the difference between a two-minute spear and a five-minute spear?’

  “He said, ‘Well, kid, if they stick the stick in, that’s two. If it comes out the back, that’s five.’ ”

  Gilmour worked games for nearly two decades in the Slap Shot years, retiring in 1976. He’d worked such games as the time the Soviet Red Army visited the Philadelphia Spectrum to get absolutely beat up by the Flyers, a disgraceful day for North American hockey when Bob Cole coined the phrase, “They’re goin’ home! They’re GOIN’ HOME!!”

  The violence had gotten a little sneakier by the time the mid-1980s rolled around. But that just meant a ref had to have his head on a swivel that much more.

  “A guy like Kevin Lowe, you’d have to watch. He was vicious with the stick,” Morel said. “Paul Baxter, you never know what could happen when Bax was on the ice. He’d use his stick or throw a punch for no reason. Start a brawl for nothing. Hunter, he was a guy who was ready to fight at any time …”

  Working the Oilers and the Flames, as we’ve stated, meant you were one of the best. And for Morel in the 1988 Stanley Cup final, that meant working “the blackout game” at the Boston Garden. It was a Game 4 in which the power went out in the old Garden, and the two teams had to come all the way back to Edmonton for the Oilers to complete their series sweep.

  “Boston was my first final,” Morel remembers. “Andy Van Hellemond said, ‘Imagine a first-year referee seeing the Stanley Cup [get awarded].’ And when Edmonton scored the goal to make it 3–3, I thought, ‘Oh boy! We will see the Cup tonight!’ We knew Edmonton was too strong for Boston that year. And when they scored that goal, I said, ‘All right. I will see the Stanley Cup on the ice.’ Then I’m ready to drop the puck, and poof! Lights out.

  “[Bruins general manager] Harry [Sinden] pulled the plug. He didn’t want to see the Cup there.”

  There was justice, however. Morel worked Game 6 in 1989—when Calgary became the first-ever visiting team to win the Cup on Montreal Forum ice.

  11

  Like Trying to Hug Fog

  “This is art. Hockey history right before our very eyes.”

  “It’s the best goal I’ve ever scored.”

  When Wayne Gretzky is saying that, you know there is more to it than simply a nice shot or a deke that left the goalie sprawled four feet from the puck and a wide-open cage to accept the puck. To be Gretzky’s all-time favourite from more than 1,000 regular-season and playoff goals, it would have to have come at an important moment, against a championship-calibre team, in a game that had some gravity.

  Clue No. 1: There is a slim chance that there would still be snow on the ground when Gretzky’s all-time favourite goal was scored. Clue No. 2: It is a pretty fair bet that the Calgary Flames would be his victim. Both were true of the slapshot he unleashed on April 21, 1988, at the Saddledome, the one you’ve seen so many times on that Hockey Night in Canada intro.

  It was a game-winner in overtime, scored short-handed. A rare, blistering slapshot by No. 99, labelled for and perfectly delivered to the top-right corner over Mike Vernon’s left shoulder. Why wouldn’t that be Wayne Gretzky’s favourite? If any of us had ever scored a goal like that, even in our beer league, it would be our favourite, for sure.

  “The one thing I was really never known for was being a guy with a hard shot who could score from the wing very often,” Gretzky said. “I will say, it was one of the hardest shots I have ever taken. I picked my spot once I got over the blue line. I knew exactly where I was shooting it. In my mind, I’ll say it again, it was the best goal I ever scored in the National Hockey League.

  “Or, it’s my favourite goal I’ve ever scored in the National Hockey League.”

  If there was one tangible element inside the Battle that exemplified why Calgary was so often in the chase position, it was Wayne Gretzky. The Flames had plenty of fire power, but so does a small Eastern European country. It doesn’t mean they take on the United States in battle.

  “Edmonton played hockey the way you’re supposed to play hockey. It was just ‘Let ’em loose, Bruce,’ ” said Mike Bullard, who had a 103-point season for Calgary in 1987–88, his best NHL season. “Gretzky, Messier, Coffey, Anderson, Simpson … What it came down to was, their top guys were better than our top guys, when you looked at the stats. And we had big stats. But my 103 points to Gretzky’s [149 that year]? Sorry. Just a little off. Gretzky was just in his own world.”

  Gretzky was, truly, on a higher plane than everybody else. There were only two seasons during Gretzky’s nine NHL seasons with Edmonton—from 1980 to 1988—that the Flames’ leading scorer came within ninety points of Gretzky’s total. In five of those seasons, Gretzky’s seasonal production surpassed the combined total of Calgary’s top two scorers.

  It was on the back of these seasons—from his entry with the
Oilers into the NHL in 1979 until Gretzky was traded/sold to the Los Angeles Kings on August 9, 1988—that Gretzky’s ownership of the NHL record books was built. His sixty-one NHL records and four Stanley Cup rings all came from the same place: his prime, spent in the blue, white, and orange silks of Edmonton.

  It was incredible to see, the most gifted offensive player in the history of hockey, reeling off the feats that would make him a legend. Scoring ninety-two goals in 1981–82, including a never-to-be-matched fifty goals in thirty-nine games. Fifty in forty-two games the next season. Fifty in forty-nine games the next year …

  He set the record for assists in a season in 1980–81 with 109, then proceeded to break his own mark in each of the next four seasons, finally settling on 163 in 1985–86. He broke his own record for points in a season twice as well, and along the way, Gretzky could turn a Tuesday night in Hartford into a game you’d be telling your grandchildren about forty years later.

  “There were times when we would sit back, maybe one in ten games, and say, ‘Here we go!’ ” said trainer Barrie Stafford. “This is art. Hockey history right before our very eyes. The other nine games he’d get a goal and two assists, or whatever. But I mean, the guy had a hundred points at Christmastime in 1985.”

  Craig MacTavish arrived just in time for Gretzky’s greatest season, his 215-point campaign in 1985–86, slotting in behind Gretzky and Messier as Edmonton’s No. 3 centre. That meant he was almost never on the ice with Gretzky, other than the odd penalty kill. What MacTavish saw from the bench on a nightly basis, however, he still marvels at to this day.

  “Incredible drive. Unreal drive,” said MacTavish, who would go on to be the Oilers head coach and then general manager. “A lot of guys in today’s era, if they had three points and there are ten minutes left, you’re up by four [goals], they don’t care if they don’t play. Wayne had his foot over the boards. He wants four [points]. Always looking to get one more goal or one more assist. He was never, ever satisfied.”