The Battle of Alberta

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The Battle of Alberta Page 21

by Mark Spector


  “Most times, if it was an Edmonton–Calgary playoff series, it was the Stanley Cup. Because the team that won it went on to win the Stanley Cup. Edmonton did that five times.”

  That spells out another dichotomy in the Battle, where members of the Oilers have five Stanley Cup rings while the Flames players have one. Having watched every minute of that rivalry, there isn’t a chance that the Oilers were that much better than Calgary in the big picture. They were just a little bit better in every season but one, and most years, after getting past the Flames, the heaviest lifting was over for Edmonton.

  Finally, the hockey gods had conspired to give the Flames their due, paving a path that did not include the Oilers that spring, after Edmonton had blown a 3–1 series lead to the Gretzky-led Kings. The Flames learned from 1986, the same way the Oilers had learned from their defeats at the hands of the Islanders, and given a chance to make it right, Calgary pretty much powered through those playoffs—after a Round 1 hiccup that required a Game 7 overtime goal against Vancouver.

  “Hunts, Lanny, Peppy Joel Otto, Al MacInnis—those guys had been through it all. But it was as much for the city,” Crisp said. “Our city was so desperate because up the road the Edmonton Oilers had won. It was the City of Champions, and all that. And Calgary finally broke through as a team and as a city to get one. Finally.”

  For Peplinski, who lives in Calgary to this day and has a very successful auto leasing business, it took him about thirty seconds to realize how much that Cup meant—and would mean—whether he’d been on the ice in that Game 6 or not. It’s a spiritual thing for these guys, to finally get their hands on Big Stanley after a lifetime in the game. And as soon as he did, Peplinski’s mind went back to all the times he’d played for that Cup in minor hockey rinks across Ontario as a kid.

  “The thing that came together for me, at that moment, was the number of people who no one would know the names of, who were instrumental in my hockey and personal development,” he said. “I was so friggin’ lucky, over the course of my career, to have teachers, coaches parents … I remember at the moment, thinking about a lot of those different names, and calling a bunch of them afterwards to say, ‘Thank you.’

  “Then that moment passes, and I remember thinking on the plane home: ‘I wonder, what now?’ It’s time to move on.”

  Peplinski took a couple of aborted, six-game runs at extending his NHL career over the next few years, but his heart was never really in it. It would almost have seemed like he was pushing his luck, after all the game had given him—and all the city of Calgary had given him—to try to squeeze more out of the game than he’d already enjoyed. Today, he is a product of what he calls “the notoriety that that Stanley Cup provided for each and every one of us for the past twenty-five years.”

  “I think back to guys who were with the team the year before and didn’t stay with the team. Guys who could have just as easily been part of the success,” he said. “I think back to getting lucky against Vancouver, arguably [in Round 1]. To different things that could have derailed that one championship, and all of the sudden your entire career isn’t near the success that you want it to be just because you won the last series you played in.

  “Thirty years later I am still amazed at how winning a Stanley Cup has defined our careers. I am still incredibly appreciative of just how lucky I got, and the fact that I ran into Al MacNeil, Pierre Page, and Bob Johnson, and then I got to room with Bob Murdoch, and then I met guys like Lanny McDonald, and Joey Mullen, Timmy Hunter and Hakan Loob and Doug Risebrough …

  “I just have got very, very lucky in my career.”

  As for Lanny McDonald, he was never tempted to lace ’em up again in anger. Let’s face it, he didn’t have a whole lot left anyway. And after crafting an ending like he’d penned that night in Montreal, all a few more games might have done was mess up a good story.

  “Well, [Gretzky] had mentioned Jean Béliveau before,” he said when I asked him if he’d known that Game 6 would be his career finale. “And I was always disappointed I didn’t have a chance to play against Jean Béliveau. He retired after they had won a Cup, and he could have probably played another two or four years. But he walked out the door on top, winning a Cup, and I always thought, ‘Boy, that would be a pretty cool way to say goodbye.’

  “When we won it, it was, ‘Thank you very much. I am out of here.’ ”

  13

  The Night the Battle Went Too Far

  “Don’t be leaving for coffee.”

  Stu Grimson was the son of a Mountie, never a good recipe for putting down roots or forging lasting friendships. Staff Sergeant Stan Grimson spent thirty-one years in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and Stu, like so many kids of so many cops, quickly figured out that joining a hockey or football team was the surest way of meeting friends and fitting in quickly.

  “We bounced around all over B.C., and Kamloops is as close to a hometown as I’ve got,” Grimson said. “My earliest memories were skates on my feet pushing a chair around a pond somewhere. Learn how to skate, then chase a puck around.”

  Grimson was like every legitimate heavyweight you’ll ever meet. Slow to grow into his frame. Gangly. A clumsy-looking gait as a teenager, like a baby moose on a frozen spring lake. But he was big, and that size bought him an extra second or two with the puck—and the ability to take it away from a smaller opponent that other players did not enjoy. When the coach needed what he brought to the table, Grimson would make the team. When they didn’t, well, it was British Columbia, Canada. There was always a team that would have you. “There were years when I made the travel team, there were years I did not,” Grimson said now, without any hard feelings.

  It was the early 1980s, a time when even the best level of minor hockey player didn’t play fifty games in a winter. It was the end of those healthy days before sport exclusivity, where kids played hockey in the winter, baseball in the summer, and, when you were Grimson’s size, football in the fall. The spring hockey or three-on-three camps that ensure a young Canadian male can play hockey for twelve months a year? They did not yet exist. It was a wonderful time.

  There was no bantam draft in the Western Hockey League then either, the way there has been since 1990. A team would just “list” a player on a scout’s say-so, and so it was that a local bird dog named Glen Dirk was behind the wheel one evening when Grimson was out with a few of the boys from Sa-Hali Secondary School.

  “Glen Dirk happened to be driving by the Kamloops movie theatre one night when I got into a scrape with some drill rig guy from out of town and kinda mopped up the street with him,” Grimson recalled, chuckling. “Glen thought, ‘This would be an interesting guy to have on our team …’ ”

  Grimson, a well-built middle linebacker for the Sa-Hali Sabres, was walking in that familiar secondary-school pack of boys, all wearing their leather-sleeved football jackets, talking a big game on a midweek night. They epitomized strength in numbers, but as so often is the case, when push came to shove it was the biggest and bravest who were called upon to represent. Of course, Grimson did not have to be asked twice. Some roughnecks started mouthing off at these younger boys, all dressed alike in their team jackets. They were younger, less experienced, and, the drillers figured, probably afraid of a bunch of rig pigs with five o’clock shadows and pockets full of oil money.

  “Some guys were mouthing off,” Grimson recalled, “so I sorted through the crowd, grabbed one of these guys, and cracked him in the face. I was always kind of aggressive by nature growing up.”

  A couple of provinces to the east, Dave Brown was a similarly sized kid growing up in Saskatoon, the son of Phil Brown, a respected mechanic at the local Co-op Farm Implements dealer. His mom, Eleanor, was the secretary of maintenance and planning at the University of Saskatchewan, organized and fastidious. Neither of them had any idea that young Dave, who inherited a work ethic as strong as both of his folks, would one day inhabit a dressing room stall next to the great Mark Messier. For now, he was just trying
to stick on the Junior B Saskatoon Westleys.

  “I wasn’t a real good player,” Brown said now, looking back through eyes that belong today to the head pro scout of the Philadelphia Flyers. He was sixteen years old, in a Junior B league that allowed six twenty-year-olds on every roster. It was the 1978–79 season, the year that Boris Fistric (father to NHL defenceman Mark) led the major-junior Western Hockey League with 460 penalty minutes—more than seven minutes per game played.

  Some perspective: the penalty minutes leader in the NHL for the 2013–14 season was Vancouver’s Tom Sestito—with a piddly 213 minutes. Only three players amassed more than 200 minutes in penalties that NHL season. In the 1978–79 Western Hockey League, the tenth-ranked PIMs leader was Dirk Graham, with 252. The NHL plays eighty-two games, while the WHL played seventy-two games that season.

  Now, a team comparison: the Philadelphia Flyers led all NHL clubs with 1,180 PIMs in 2013–14. In the 1978–79 Western Hockey League, the Portland Winter Hawks were the most pacifistic of the twelve teams, amassing a conciliatory 1,728 PIMs. Portland averaged 24 PIMs per game, Philly 14, and while seven of thirty NHL teams eclipsed 1,000 minutes in 2013–14, there were seven teams with more than 2,000 PIMs in the Western League in 1978–79. Again, with ten fewer games played in junior.

  So, these were violent times in hockey. The tail end, actually, of hockey’s most violent period —the Slap Shot years —when bench-clearing brawls were a weekly occurrence somewhere in the hockey world. In the Western League, a couple of tough guys from the home team would sneak out early for the pre-game warmup, commandeer the other’s team’s net, and slide it to the corner in their own zone. When the visiting team skated out for warmup, they had two choices: either go through warmup like a bunch of pussies with no net or wade, en masse, into the home team’s end, inviting a pre-game brawl.

  Eventually, the men who governed junior hockey would outlaw such foolishness and mandate separate warmups in the WHL and elsewhere. But before Brown would reach the WHL, he would play senior hockey in Saskatchewan as a sixteen-year-old, facing off against men four years his senior. Tough men who liked to throw down, and Brown was big for his age. Looked more like eighteen than sixteen. As Johnny Cash sang in “A Boy Named Sue,” Brown knew he’d have to get tough or die.

  “We had fights every game. It was a tough league,” said Brown, who found his calling as a hockey enforcer in that Saskatchewan Junior B league. “That’s when I realized this is how you’re going to have to play. You’re going to have to play tough, if you’re going to make it. It kind of made me grow up a little bit.”

  Like Grimson, Brown —a left-hander—also found that his ability to fight bought him extra time with the puck. He was destined to be a Flyer. He was big, aggressive, and played the game in a straight line. But first he would serve a couple of seasons in the Western League, a cup of coffee in Spokane, and then the entire 1981–82 season with the Saskatoon Blades. Grimson would not arrive in Regina until the following season, by which time Brown had moved on to minor pro.

  “The Western Hockey League back then was probably the craziest it ever was. It was a wild time, man. A wild fuckin’ time,” Brown remembered. Led by Al Tuer’s 486 minutes, the Regina Pats set the record for most PIMs as a team in 1981–82, a record long since broken. The intrepid Bill LaForge, whose teams always fought like caged wolverines, was the Pats’ coach.

  “We used to go in there and fight with them all the time,” Brown said. “Must have brawled them five or six times that year ’cause we played them sixteen times a season. By the end, they didn’t want to fight us anymore, but LaForge would send them out anyhow. Al Tuer? He had almost five hundred penalty minutes. He would have beat the record, but he got suspended.”

  Imagine that.

  I’ve asked many a heavyweight this question over the years, and some—almost exclusively men who still had years left in the game —have lied when they answered. Brown, who was fifty-one when we spoke, his fighting days long past, easily answers the question: “Did you ever really enjoy fighting?”

  “To a certain point you’ve got to enjoy it ’cause it’s a tough thing to do if you don’t,” he reasoned. “You’ve got to enjoy wanting to win ’cause it can be tough if you’re not winning fights, man. And at that point, I didn’t have my sights set on the NHL. I didn’t ever think I’d get there.”

  It was a silicone spray. The kind you’d find at any hardware store. There was also some everyday spray-on glue, perfect for keeping a hockey jersey locked on to a pair of shoulder pads. And a trainer’s sewing kit, just to ensure there was nothing loose to grab on to.

  The Oilers’ head medical trainer, Ken Lowe (older brother to Kevin), had spent more than seven years working for the Edmonton Eskimos of the Canadian Football League. So when a young call-up nicknamed “The Grim Reaper” had successfully tied up Dave Brown’s lethal left hand in a Sunday-night fight at Northlands Coliseum—on January 7, 1990—Oilers head equipment man Barrie Stafford wondered out loud if there was any way they could help Brown in the inevitable rematch.

  “We should call Dwayne,” advised Lowe. That was Dwayne Mandrusiak, the Eskimos’ equipment man since 1971, and Lowe’s buddy to this day. Football trainers have forever doctored equipment, with linemen on both sides of the ball requiring skintight jerseys so they can’t be grabbed on to and manhandled in the trenches. There isn’t a trick in the trade that Mandrusiak hasn’t plied at one time or another, and so he arrived on a Monday morning to the back room behind the Oilers main dressing quarters, where Stafford doled out hockey gear and life lessons over a desk surrounded by skate sharpeners, a sewing machine, and riveting tools.

  Stafford’s favourite life lesson was known as The Six P Principle, and he passed it along often: “Proper Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance,” he’d say with a smile, index finger raised. Well, the night before, the Oilers had lost 3–1 at home to Calgary. That never sits well, but what they liked even less was how they’d lost. Edmonton expected not only to win the games against Calgary but the fights too. And on this night a young buck who had been called up from the International League’s Salt Lake City Golden Eagles had made his mark on the Battle.

  His name was Stu (The Grim Reaper) Grimson, joined in the Flames lineup that night, according to then Edmonton Journal columnist Cam Cole, by Ken (The Grim Skater) Sabourin.

  “I did not have a great sense of the broader picture,” began Grimson, who still bears the scars of this particular chapter in the Battle. “I got it that [Tim] Hunter was there by himself. Lots of teams had a couple of guys my size, and he could use the support. I guess I kind of got that, but I was more focused on my own personal situation. It didn’t have to be communicated to me: ‘Stu, if you’re going to stick here, of course we want you to play five-plus minutes a night, but we need the physical attributes. We need you to bang people for us, to go to the net for us, and we need you to shake your gloves off when appropriate and help establish a physical presence for the group as well.’ I got that. I knew I had to provide that if I was going to stick as an NHLer.”

  Every NHL heavyweight will tell you about the ritualistic perusing of the week’s schedule and the torturous mental process of linking buildings and/or opponents with upcoming bouts. In that particular season of 1989–90, a trip into the Met Center in Bloomington meant that big Basil McRae would be there, rolling out the welcome mat. The dark, dingy Cap Centre in Landover, Maryland? Alan May, a game journeyman whom I grew up with in Edmonton, who had taken the long road to his job with the Washington Capitals. Marty McSorley had been dealt alongside Wayne Gretzky to Los Angeles, working the old Fabulous Forum on Manchester Boulevard. Bob Probert, who would tally up 3,300 PIMs and several convictions in his long and storied career, policed Joe Louis Arena in the Motor City.

  But this was the Battle of Alberta, and Grimson didn’t have to buy a program that Sunday morning to know what time the movie started that night and who would be his co-star. “I knew, if was going to stick in the
NHL, especially being a member of the Calgary Flames, all roads led through Dave Brown. I knew in the first game I suited up against the Oilers, Brownie and I were going to have to go.”

  Grimson was twenty-five, a veteran of just two NHL games. He’d broken his maiden the season before in Buffalo, on a line with Hunter and Joel Otto. He fought Kevin Maguire that night, then went back down to the minors for the rest of the year. He scarcely recalls that scrap. His next two, however, he would remember.

  Now, after years of seemingly having one fewer heavy than the Oilers every night, Calgary had Grimson alongside Hunter, out there warming up in the most hallowed building of that NHL era. Four Stanley Cup banners hung overhead amid the laundry line of Presidents’ Trophy, Smythe Division, and Campbell Conference pennants—with a fifth but a few months away.

  All of that trivia, plus about six bucks, would have bought Grimson a Northlands beer that night. He probably could have used a belt or two, knowing what awaited him, dressed in the Oilers home whites.

  “It was a pretty daunting proposition because in my estimation, that was the toughest, baddest, meanest man on the planet back then. The toughest man in the NHL back then, by most accounts. He was a big, tough guy,” Grimson said. “I remember watching him looping over my side of the ice during the warmup, and I could hardly muster up the saliva to spit on the ice I was so nervous.

  “We fought twice that night.”

  Now, of all the things that are fuzzy in the memory of a hockey player over the quarter-century between that scrap and today, the winner of a fight between a beloved teammate and a despised enemy perhaps tops the list. Teammates almost always give the decision to teammates.

 

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