The Battle of Alberta

by Mark Spector

  Down Highway 2, the Calgary Flames coaching staff were burning the midnight oil trying to game-plan against Gretzky. That exercise was equal parts utterly impossible and absolutely necessary, but what the Flames didn’t know was, Gretzky’s own teammates were dissecting his game as well—off the ice. Mark Messier, for one, was doing his reconnaissance, almost from the first day he laid eyes on the kid from Brantford, born just eight days after Messier in 1961.

  “In a funny way, we all watched Wayne,” Messier said. “We were all the same age, but he was so far ahead of us from a preparation standpoint and a mental standpoint. I was asking myself the questions ‘Why? Why is he this good? What is he doing that makes him this good?’ You were always looking at the established, veteran guys. But here was this phenom … and you quickly realized he was good for a reason. He was the hardest-working guy and putting the most into it out of any of us.”

  Part of what Messier saw was what we all could see: the God-given, Walter-cultivated talent that Gretzky displayed nightly. “Never go to where the puck is; always go to where it’s going to be,” as his father, Walter Gretzky, taught. But Messier knew to look deeper. That, as with his own father, the well waters swirled far below the surface. Messier watched Gretzky when the spotlight was turned off. When Gretzky, like any great artisan, was preparing, working ahead. Tending to the minute details that would allow the talent to flow when the TV lights flicked back on.

  “The obvious was there for everyone to see,” Messier said of Gretzky. “What people didn’t see was the commitment. The drive to be the best. When you were with Wayne every day and saw how committed he was to be the best, to carving his name into history, the drive was incredible. It was a message for all of us: If you wanted to be the best, there was a price to be paid. And here was the best, paying’ that price. It was easy to follow Wayne.”

  Of course, Gretzky was ahead of the play. He has been under the microscope since well before he scored 378 goals as a ten-year-old in Brantford—in a single season.

  “I always knew the players were looking at me. I knew I had to be as hardworking in practice as anybody, and my preparation for a game or a series had to be as sincere, as strong as each and every guy on the team,” Gretzky says today. “So there were no shortcuts with our team. The one thing we always had which was overshadowed: we were a good, talented team … but it was a group that was extremely dedicated to becoming a successful, unselfish team. I always felt it was most important that the captain show the team that winning was most important, and that being unselfish was the key to the success of any group. That was the key to being the captain of that team.”

  There was a special set of rules for Gretzky, which goes against the accepted tenet that everyone on a team should be subject to the same set of regulations. The reality was, Gretzky quickly became a superstar, and the NHL needed to “borrow” him from Edmonton once in a while. The rigours of fulfilling those obligations—lengthy off-day travel, very few days spent completely away from the sport—usually took more of a toll on Gretzky than did the practices he missed on his Oilers teammates.

  Messier, who had been indoctrinated with the realization that even the best player on the team had to think of others before himself, soon learned that there would be times when the team had to support their superstar.

  “We learned that Wayne was a special player. He needed special attention, and needed to be treated differently,” Messier said. “It was for the benefit of the team, so nobody ever looked at it like he was being treated differently than the team, or that it was a burden. In fact, it was, ‘How can we contribute to the process?’ And that is not always the case [on other teams].

  “There were more demands on him. His schedule was different. We’d go on a twelve- or fifteen-day road trip back then and he would fly home with the team on a seven a.m. flight, then fly back to Toronto to do some selling of the game. Sometimes after games he would fly with [owner] Peter [Pocklington] somewhere to do something. No one ever looked at it like he was getting preferential treatment. It was necessary.”

  The one ritual where Gretzky was neither given any preferential treatment, nor did he request any, was when it came time to play the Calgary Flames.

  Toughness was a prerequisite in the Battle, and often there was so much mayhem out on the ice that there simply would not be enough time to defend the skill players like Gretzky whenever a liberty was taken. His teammates tried, but there were times when their hands were full, and the skill guys would just have to figure it out themselves.

  “We knew we were a pretty tough team, with Semenko, and McClelland, and Donnie Jackson, and Messier and McSorley, and Lee Fogolin. And they were tough, with guys like Peplinski, Baxter, Tim Hunter, Sheehy …,” Gretzky said. “We had sort of an unwritten rule in our locker room. If the tough guys were going to be tough, if they were going to battle all of these guys, then guys like me, and Kurri, and Coffey had better take hits to make plays.

  “I remember Kevin Lowe saying one time, how much he had hacked and whacked that Hakan Loob, and how Loob just kept coming back. It was like nothing had happened. What made the series intense was, not only were the tough guys tough, but the so-called elite guys understood their responsibility of getting their noses to the grindstone also. Because if you didn’t, you weren’t going to be part of the group. You’d be weeded out.”

  There was, it seems, a proportional line drawn between how much offence one produced in the Battle versus how much of the fisticuffs one would be expected to partake in. Translation: Score more, fight less; Score less, fight more. Gretzky, of course, wasn’t expected to fight at all. Nor was his trigger man Jari Kurri, or Loob and Nilsson on the Flames end. Messier voluntarily opted out of the equation. But the spirit of being in the fight spiritually was as important as being in one literally, as MacTavish noted, “Everybody had their toughness challenged. That’s what it was all about. Peplinski was a very tough guy, and he challenged Mess. And Mess was a very tough guy. McSorley–Sheehy, Hunter–Semenko …

  “It’s a good game to reflect on,” MacTavish said with a wry smile, “but not so good to prepare for. But the last thing you wanted was to be in a dressing room at the end of a game where everybody was into it but you.”

  That last line sums up a hockey team. Being the only guy in the post-game dressing room without need of an ice bag was a poor visual. A scraped-up face from a fight was no different than a bruised hip that came from taking the hit to make a play. The Battle was no place for a perimeter player—even when your last name was Gretzky. No one wanted to be that guy who was deemed “unwilling to pay the price,” especially in those early years before 1986, when the Battle was still a fairly lopsided series. That meant early Oiler leads and games that inevitably eroded into confrontation.

  “I think they [the Flames] knew themselves, over an eighty-game schedule, chances were that we were going to finish first and they were going to be second,” Gretzky said of the pre-1986 Flames. “But they were gearing up for that second-round matchup, that seven-game series. [Flames general manager] Cliff [Fletcher] brought in a coach in Bob Johnson who really was one of the best Xs and Os coaches who ever lived. They built a system, a strategy, for their group that would work against the Edmonton Oilers.”

  That meant building a system that could control Gretzky. Good luck.

  There was an old line: “You can only hope to control Gretzky, but you’ll never totally shut him down.” I don’t know which coach said it first, but they all did eventually. It has become a cliché in Alberta press boxes, trotted out now when a Luke Gazdic or Deryk Engelland somehow puts together a two-point night. “You can only hope to control Luke Gazdic” some smartass scribe will say to get a laugh from the ink-stained. It is said in jest today, but not when Gretzky played.

  Wayne Gretzky retired with a career average of 1.9 points per game, higher, of course, than anyone who ever played the game. His production was even higher, however, during his Edmonton years. As an Oiler, Gretzky av
eraged an astounding 2.4 points per regular-season game, settling at 1.9 points per playoff game. So, if the Flames could figure out a way to hold Gretzky to only two points a game, in theory they were keeping his performance needle below “average.”

  “You never had total success against Wayne Gretzky,” said Johnson’s assistant Bob Murdoch, with a variation on the old theme. “In all fairness, he was so good, you could never really neutralize him. We did to a point, comfortably enough so we could play, and try to get the game so we could still win it.”

  Calgary’s biggest problem was that there were so many places and situations from which Gretzky could derive offence. His “office” behind the net, of course, was the place that drove opposing coaches the most crazy.

  “He’d go behind the net with the bloody puck, and he’d have two defencemen chasing him there. He’d just dish it out in front and the guy would tuck it in,” said Murdoch. “If you took away all his receivers, you had a chance of shutting him down. Wayne Gretzky behind the net wasn’t dangerous. It was the two defencemen and two wingers who were dangerous. Again, take away his targets to eliminate him.”

  Of course, that often meant you would have a ninety-two-goal scorer walking out from behind the net with the puck, lending a new meaning to that old hockey tenet “leave the shooter to your goalie.” But it illustrates what Johnson and the rest of the Flames coaches went through in the film room. No coach, since the day Gretzky played his first game at age six on a team comprised of ten-year-olds, had figured out how to stop Gretzky. Very few even slowed him down, in his prime.

  “Hit him every chance you get!” was an oft-chanted mantra that has followed Gretzky all the way up from pee wee hockey. Brad McCrimmon, the Flames defenceman from 1987 to 1990 who died in 2011 in the tragic plane crash of the Lokomotiv Yaroslav hockey club (he was the team’s head coach), had some advice for those who thought that possible.

  “Trying to hit Gretzky,” McCrimmon once said, “is like trying to hug fog.”

  “People always say, ‘Why didn’t you hit him?’ ” said long-time Flames winger Colin Patterson. “Well, the one thing that made him great was his lateral movement. He wasn’t the fastest guy, but he had the best lateral movement of anyone. And smarts. He moved the puck before you could hit him. It was always too late, he was by you anyways, and you’re making a fool of yourself. Stuff you could do against a normal player, you couldn’t do against him.

  “He and Jari Kurri, and whoever they had on that line. They were lethal. A match made in heaven.”

  Murdoch was Johnson’s assistant coach in the early days of the Battle, but even before that he had been an NHL defenceman himself, manning the Flames blue line in Atlanta and Calgary during Gretzky’s first three NHL seasons. “If you overplayed him, he would just make a fool of you. He saw the ice so well, he would draw two or three of you in and dish it behind you because you’d left your position to chase him. Kurri or whomever would be there, and they would just pick you apart.”

  As odd as it sounds, the Flames’ plan was to force the game’s best one-on-one player into one-on-one combat. “Try to isolate Gretzky after you’d taken away his receivers,” Murdoch repeats. “Gretzky didn’t like to try to beat you one on one. He just lured you out of position, the bugger. You had a better chance of shutting down Wayne Gretzky one on one,” than giving him outlets to pass to.

  When Johnson and his staff went for dinner on the road, the table was inevitably cleared and the salt shakers and ketchup bottles would be used as markers in a defensive scheme meant to beat Edmonton. When he went to bed at night, Johnson lay awake thinking on how to “climb the mountain” against Edmonton. Of course, containing Gretzky was Johnson’s base camp.

  Sometimes, in the ebb and flow of the Battle, Calgary would enjoy some success, gain some territory. And so it would be the turn of the Oilers coaching staff to ask for more from their troops. It was a constant back and forth, a small Flames gain countered by an Oilers push. Then the playoff series would come around, and the added intensity would mix with those strategic moves like fire and gasoline.

  “Some of the greatest meetings that we ever had as a hockey team, whether they were organized by management, the coaching staff or the players, all happened in Calgary,” MacTavish remembers. “The most dramatic moments I remember in the dressing room happened in Calgary. There would be probably, three of those.”

  The one that Gretzky recalls was in 1984. The Oilers had walked over Calgary in the 1983 Smythe final 35–13 in the five-game series. A year later, there they were in the visiting team’s “bath house” at the Saddledome, as former Edmonton Sun beat writer Dick Chubey liked to call it, packing their bags for a Game 7 showdown back home.

  The Oilers had jumped to a 3–1 lead in the series, but rather than fold as they had right from the start in 1983, the Flames punched back. They won Game 5 in Edmonton, costing the Oilers a nice playoff break before Round 3 had they won the game, and then Calgary had the audacity to win Game 6 on a goal just 1:04 into the overtime period. “Lanny McDonald,” Gretzky remembered correctly.

  “Glen held a meeting after that game. It was a ‘Come to Jesus’ meeting.”

  Most coaches will tell you that words spoken immediately after a game are more often wasted. Players are in wind-down mode and emotions are high. Many general managers forbid themselves to trade a player within twenty-four hours of a loss, while just as many coaches will save their spiritual gathering for the morning light, when cooler heads are present.

  Glen Sather was both coach and general manager of the Oilers, not to mention president of the club as well. He had seen his team lose the 1983 Stanley Cup final to the New York Islanders, then claw its way back into position for another chance at the dynastic Isles. Suddenly, just getting out of the Smythe Division had fallen into question. In case his players had not been aware of the gravity of the situation, Sather would drive that very serious topic home with a sledgehammer that night in Calgary.

  “It was a pretty emotional meeting,” remembers Gretzky. “But I think what put pressure on the team was that Calgary had built their team for a playoff run. They didn’t build their team to get 120 points in a season. [Note: In 1983–84, Edmonton won the Smythe Division with 119 points. Calgary was second with 82.] They weren’t really concerned about that. They knew they were going to get into the playoffs, and Bob Johnson was such a positive motivator that he’d built his team to beat us in a seven-game series. Simple as that.”

  Sather’s sermon was a powerful one that night, marking another milepost in what would become a classic match of two coaching fortes: Johnson’s Xs and Os versus Sather’s ability to motivate the very best performance out of his admittedly superior players. In Game 7, back at Northlands Coliseum, the game was played on Edmonton’s terms. Gretzky had a goal and two assists, Kurri had a pair of goals, and Edmonton broke open a game that was tied at four late in the second period, winning 7–4.

  Remember: that Oilers team had not won anything yet. We think of them as a dynasty today, but in the spring of 1984 they were still trying to figure out exactly what it took to win. The Islanders had swept the Oilers in the 1983 Stanley Cup final, and now Calgary had improved to the point where getting out of the division was more than just a little problematic.

  It would be no different when they next met in 1986, a series so memorable that we’ve reserved an entire chapter for it in the book. Then again, in 1988, when the one Wayne Gretzky goal that still finds it way on to your television screen today—more than any other—was scored.

  Gretzky and the Oilers had gone on to win their first Cup in the spring of 1984, with Messier winning the Conn Smythe Trophy as the most valuable performer in the playoffs. It was a seminal moment, as the balloons rained down on the Northlands ice surface with seconds still ticking off the clock in Game 5 of that final. It must not have felt that way in Calgary, however, where Flames fans watched their bitter rivals celebrate. But the fact was, the Stanley Cup would reside in Edmonton tha
t summer, the first time in Alberta hockey history that had happened—and only five years after the province’s first NHL team had arrived in Edmonton.

  The Oilers would win again in 1985, and we would see a disturbing trend begin that saw the Calgary Flames actually lose their first-round series to the Winnipeg Jets in both 1985 and 1987. Somehow, the team that was built to beat the Edmonton Oilers had found its second-greatest challenge in that other, quietly strong Smythe Division team, the Jets.

  In 1984–85, the Jets had in fact finished two points ahead of Calgary, riding home-ice advantage to a first-round win. Edmonton, Winnipeg, and Calgary had finished one–two–three in the Campbell Conference, now known as the Western Conference, that season, and in the league’s overall standings, Edmonton finished second behind Philadelphia while Winnipeg was No. 4 and Calgary No. 5. That’s how strong the Smythe Division was in those days.

  You might think that because Sather had patterned his young Oilers after the creative, high-flying Jets team that won the final Avco Cup in the WHA, the Jets would be a tough matchup for Edmonton. In fact, the opposite was true. The Oilers beat Winnipeg for fun in the playoffs, with Gretzky and Kurri racking up huge numbers. Through five playoff meetings between Edmonton and Winnipeg in the Gretzky years, Edmonton never lost a series. In five series meetings, Edmonton won by an aggregate of eighteen games to one.

  It was a Game 3 win in the opening round of the 1988 playoffs where the Jets finally beat Edmonton, with Daniel (The Bandit) Berthiaume tending the twine for the Jets. But Edmonton quickly won out, while in Calgary the Flames were disposing of the Los Angeles Kings in five games. It would set up a scenario that nobody recognized at the time: How could they have known that, four months later, Oilers owner Peter Pocklington would sell Wayne Gretzky to the Los Angeles Kings and owner Bruce McNall?