The Battle of Alberta

by Mark Spector

  Everyone remembers the outcome of the fight that would take place two nights later in Calgary, but the Grimson–Brown scrap that happened at the 11:24 mark of the first period on that Sunday evening in Edmonton? Well, Grimson won, we know that. How badly? That is up for debate.

  “Grimson was this young guy,” recalled Oilers defenceman Kevin Lowe, “and he wasn’t causing a lot of shit.” But he fought Brown, “and the papers the next day had it as a Grimson victory.” Flames trainer Bearcat Murray: “Grimson just kicked his ass, which we were very proud of. And in Edmonton!”

  Dave Brown: “I’d been hit a couple of weeks before. Took a puck [above] the eye. It hit Gravey’s [Adam Graves] skate and hit me in the face. I’d just got the stitches out, and it was tender. [Grimson] hit me there in the fight and cut me open. He might have got a little bit the better of me, but I think the fight was pretty close. He might have hit me a couple of extra times …” Stu Grimson: “The first shift we were on the ice, I kind of elbowed him right off the draw, we dropped our gloves. I think he missed me with two or three left hands above my head. I finally got ahold of his left, and I clocked him twice and laid him out.”

  I finally got ahold of his left … Grimson would only wish he could say the same thing two nights later in Calgary. But Brown had something up his sleeve. And on his sleeve. And under his sleeve.

  There was no doubt about it: this young stud from the farm in Salt Lake City had felled the mighty Dave Brown that night. They could argue over the scorecard, but not over who left Northlands Coliseum with the championship belt. In just the third game of his NHL career, the cop’s kid from Kamloops had taken down the champ, but like the old Stampede Wrestling shows that played across Alberta, the same group of men would hit the same mat two nights later in Calgary. The only difference was, these results were not scripted the way they were in Stu Hart’s Stampede Wrestling shows.

  “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” Grimson said now, a wry smile on his lips. “You knew you were going to have to answer for it eventually. We did fight again later that [first] night, but I’d clocked him twice pretty good [in the first bout], and I think he was a little wobbly. He came back for more, but he didn’t have much. It wasn’t much of a fight, though it was a different story Tuesday night in Calgary.”

  If what happened on Sunday and Tuesday night epitomized the Battle of Alberta for some people, for others it was the media circus that ensued in both cities at Monday’s practices that made the Battle stand alone.

  Had it been Gord Donnelly or Shawn Cronin of the Winnipeg Jets that had dusted Brown that night, the Oilers enforcer would have been just as miffed, but it would not have been the cause célèbre it was for the hockey writers in Alberta that Monday. L.A.’s Jay Miller and Vancouver’s Garth Butcher were divisional foes, but Brown and the rest of the Oilers didn’t see red when they looked at those players the way they did when Grimson rose from that fight with a triumphant swagger. It was a swagger he would come to regret.

  “You and I both know, it doesn’t matter who you are. Sooner or later you’re going down,” said Stafford, who had a front row seat for the first bout and would play a decisive role in Round 2. “[Grimson’s post-fight behaviour] was less of a celebration than a release. He got up and shook his fist. Like, ‘Yeah!’ Well, Dave Brown was very, very upset.”

  You could imagine the tension release, the adrenalin rush, that coursed through Grimson’s body when the fight was over and he had defeated the man he had thought of as “the toughest, baddest, meanest man on the planet.” And he had hurt his hand in the fight, so shaking it came naturally—even if the Oilers had not seen it that way.

  “It was a tough balance,” Grimson recalled. “A snot-nosed rookie, feeling pretty good about himself, having shown well against one of the very best in the league. But at the same time, trying to keep yourself grounded, knowing that you’re going to face the same guy a couple of nights later.”

  Alas, it wasn’t the same guy. Dave Brown wasn’t the same guy at all. Brown arrived at the rink for practice the next day without a word. He dressed in silence, practised the same way, a focused stoicism guiding him, his clock set to puck drop in Calgary the following night.

  “Well, don’t be leaving for coffee,” Brown told the Edmonton media that day in a short, impatient interview. In Calgary, the press rushed to the Saddledome to introduce their new, young enforcer to Flames fans. “You only have so many chances to make an impression. I think we both knew what was going to happen,” Grimson told the media that day. “He’s a tough guy. One of the more legitimate heavyweights I’ve faced.”

  More legitimate. It probably didn’t sound as cocky on Monday as it looked in print on Tuesday morning. Grimson was in a tough spot. There wasn’t a thing he could say that would not pour fuel on the coals burning inside Brown’s belly. But as a young newcomer, he wasn’t really in a position to blow off the media either. He had to say something. The day off, he would later deduce, did not serve Grimson well. Both in what was said and what was brewing into the old bull up the highway, whose career as the king was suddenly in jeopardy.

  “I had a couple of days to stew about it. I was pissed off,” Brown recalled. “I wasn’t pissed off because of the fight. I was mad because [the media] tried to make it like he’d really beat me up. I was really pissed off. It was just the thought that people may have thought I lost. Simple as that. He was just trying to come up and make a name for himself. There was no disrespect. It was just the fact I never ever wanted to lose. Then you’ve got to hear about it from other people? I didn’t want to hear that. I was pissed off. Pissed off.”

  Mandrusiak arrived during practice that morning, entering through the back hallway into Stafford’s open office. When Brown was off the practice ice, his gear hanging to dry in his dressing room stall, Stafford retrieved Brown’s shoulder pads, the skimpy non-protective shoulder pads of a fighter. Built more for falling off than stopping pucks. There was an old trick that Mandrusiak had picked up from a colleague in the National Football League, where they would apply a spray-on glue to a player’s shoulder pads, then slip the jersey overtop. Once the glue set, it was impossible to grab the jersey.

  “The player just sneaks into the shoulder pads from the inside,” Stafford said. “Then Dwayne said, ‘You know what we also do? We silicone-spray the outside of the sweater.’ So, not only did we spray his shoulder pads so that they were skintight to the jersey—he could hardly get his sweater on it was so tight—but we siliconed the shit out of the whole front of his sweater and his left arm.

  “It was a very competitive world. We’re trying to help our players, whether they’re scoring goals or winning scraps. And I’m sure Grimson had help on his side.”

  “I watched the game on TV, and I was laughing,” said Mandrusiak. “It was neat that I was able to help. We’re all friends, Spark, Barrie, Kenny, and I. It was a nice collaboration.”

  Brown, meanwhile, was in a catatonic state.

  “I don’t think he slept for two days, according to his wife, who has since passed away,” said Kevin Lowe. “We flew down the day of the game, and me, Mess, and a bunch of guys at the back of the plane, it was like, ‘Holy Christ …’ He wasn’t looking at anybody, he wasn’t talking to anybody. He was just sitting in his seat, kind of rocking. It was like an assassin, or a guy walking into a shootout at the O.K. Corral. He knows that either he’s inflicting damage or there is going to be damage inflicted on him.”

  “I don’t remember any of that stuff, no,” Brown said now. “I didn’t hardly talk for two days. I knew what was going to happen. I was pissed off. I was pissed off, man. I was ready. Ready for whatever was going to happen.”

  Rod Phillips, the radio voice of the Oilers, travelled every inch of the way with the team. From the team flight, to the bus, to the hotel, and back on the bus to the rink. While other media walk into the Saddledome, say, sixty to ninety minutes before game time and head straight to the press meal, Phillips rode
with the team from the hotel, and his stature and position as the hometown radio voice allowed him to hang around the dressing room for some time after arrival.

  “I go down into the equipment room in Calgary,” recalled Phillips. “Barrie Stafford is there, Brownie has his uniform on already, and they’re in the back. Barrie is sewing the left sleeve of Brownie’s jersey, sewing it really, really tight. Nothing to grab. Then they smeared over it with Vaseline, after that.

  “I remember I said, ‘Wow, you’re really going after him.’ And big Brownie looked at me, and he said, ‘Rod, I’m gonna hurt him.’ ”

  “It was like he had a polio arm,” said Stafford’s right-hand man in the Oilers equipment room, Lyle (Sparky) Kulchisky. “He had one regular arm, and the other one was just so tight. I don’t know how they didn’t see it in warmup.”

  All hockey players have their rituals, but go to ice level some time for a pre-game warmup and you’ll see that the fighters’ rituals naturally must involve the opponent. So where Gretzky could go through his pre-game routine without incorporating the opponent in any way, it only figures that the only way to be an intimidator is to find an intimidatee.

  “It was shaping up much like it did two nights prior,” Grimson said. “Warmup, Brownie does his traditional looping across my side of the red line. It became clear, even before regulation started, that he and I were going to go at it again.”

  Brown’s stare would bring a normal person to their knees. He is big, imposing, and if he wants them to be that way, his eyes can be dead. Like a shark. Meet him today, and they are friendly, welcoming eyes, as he extends his hand for a shake. Beat him in a scrap, and you get the Dave Brown that’s all business. And his business, that night, involved dealing with this young kid who’d come up from the minors.

  Many accounts of the fight have Grimson somehow not ready for what ensued, though that seems hard to believe. Even his trainer, Bearcat Murray, had weighed in that day. “I talked to Stu in the morning,” Murray said. “I said, ‘You’ve got to be alert. You embarrassed the hell out of him up there. Please be alert.’ I begged him. But he didn’t seem to pay attention to me. I said, ‘Stu, I’m serious.’ ”

  This wasn’t anything that every one of these hockey people hadn’t seen before. Hell, this was the Battle of Alberta, its very existence built on the back of copious fisticuffs. Hunter–Semenko, Jackson–Peplinski, McClelland–Sheehy. Grimson versus Brown was just another in a long line of anticipated rhubarbs, and the truth was, on so many nights of the Battle when an excess of violent behaviour seemed inevitable, sometimes even imperative, those were usually the nights when nothing much happened.

  On this night, Grimson was right. It was unavoidable, and his memories of the warmup douse any theories that he wasn’t ready for the scrap. The officials were expecting the worst, as referee Kerry Fraser recalls.

  “As I came in to Calgary for the game the night before, I checked the papers the next morning, and all the hype was around this rematch,” Fraser said. “I remember talking about it in the dressing room before the game. It was like, ‘Listen, guys, we’ve got some bad blood here tonight, and this is going to be a rematch. Let’s be ready for it. They’re two big guys, and they’ve got a job to do. Let’s not rush in there.’

  “For me, I don’t condone fighting, certainly now. But back then I felt like, if the inevitable was avoided—if it was somehow put on hold—the game tended to get chippier. It was, ‘Let these guys go, and if they’re standing up throwing punches, let ’em go right to the end. Don’t rush in there unless some guy is really getting throttled.’ Two big guys. They’re gonna go. And when they do, let’s let it happen. And it should be over for the rest of the night.”

  Really, it didn’t matter much what those zebras said to each other in that officials room, deep in the bowels of the Saddledome. “There was nobody who was going to get in Dave Brown’s way to get to Stu Grimson on that first shift,” Fraser admits. “The intensity that he brought on to that ice, in his demeanour, in his focus. Wherever the puck went, it didn’t matter.”

  Don’t be leaving for coffee.

  “I knew it was going to happen,” Brown said. “I was going after it. I felt a little embarrassed … I was going to set it straight. That’s what I did. I just threw my gloves off and went after him. Went straight to him. It’s more of a blur now. I don’t remember a lot about the fight, from punch to punch. I was focused on what I needed to do, and I don’t know. Maybe it was over and I [intentionally] forgot. I just did what I needed to do.”

  “I remember it quite vividly,” began Grimson. Of course he did, the way one recalls the unfolding of a horrible car wreck or a high-speed ski crash that landed them in the hospital. The way that memory of the deer slows down as the front end of your truck buckles its ribs at 110 km/h.

  Grimson had plenty of time to recount the evening, as it would be his last NHL shift that winter. Even the coaches, John Muckler and Calgary’s Terry Crisp, would follow protocol and allow the fight to be attended to early, so that the game might play out afterwards.

  “Less than five minutes into the game. Faceoff in our zone. Muckler sent Brownie out, and Crispy sends me and my line out. The puck was dropped, and it was a matter of seconds before Brownie and I got into it.”

  Linesman Randy Mitton: “They dropped their gloves, and we were kicking the gloves and the sticks out of the way, when we really could have got in the way and broken it up. But everyone wanted to see this, and it would have [happened eventually] anyway. We ended up getting in trouble because of kicking the gloves out of the way. Grimson ends up getting badly hurt, and we were in trouble from the league. We were ‘promoting the fight.’ ”

  Bearcat: “Brown just annihilated him. Destroyed him. He was a mess. Everyone was just down. Quiet. Amazed. It was such a vicious fight. I was just tore to pieces because of it, because I knew it was going to happen.”

  It happened with clinical precision. Like a professional pickpocket, but with more pain. Brown went straight to Grimson along the right-wing boards as the puck drifted into the left-wing corner, herding Grimson to his fists like a cutting horse directs a calf.

  “I remember I was kind of late getting my gloves off. I groped for his left hand, and I just wasn’t able to find it on this night,” Grimson said. Brown landed a few hard shots, and Grimson again slowed the piston enough to take a second run at grabbing that left arm. But it was impossible to get a grip. There was just nothing to grab on to, and Brown began raining lefts down on Grimson.

  “I know now, Brownie and his trainers spent a lot of time siliconing the sleeves of his jersey and tightened it up so it was impossible to get ahold of it. Missing the left hand, groping for the left hand, and he tagged with about three or four left hands. He clipped me pretty good.

  “Put me down, not out. But I remember as I was down on the ice, taking my right hand and wiping under my right eye, because I thought surely there has got to be a cut under there. Then I felt this really distinct impression under my right eye. I thought, ‘I’ve never felt anything like that before. That’s kind of peculiar.’ Then I skated over to the penalty box, we served our majors.”

  What follows is a testament to how tough these guys are, and how much pain they can withstand. Sometimes, when hockey arrives in one of commissioner Gary Bettman’s new Southern markets, the locals just assume that the fights aren’t real. That bare-knuckle chuckin’ would be too painful to actually occur in earnest. Well, on this night Grimson served his major penalty with several broken bones in his face, sitting, aching until the gate opened and his ambulance was accessible.

  “When I first sat down [in the penalty box], I thought, ‘This guy embarrassed me in my own building. I’ve got to set it straight; I’ve got to go out there and fight him again.’ But the longer I sat there, the heavier my head got. And this really, dull, throbbing sense of pain started to become pretty significant.

  “By the end of my major I skated over to the other side and I said, �
�Bearcat, I’d better see a doctor because I think there is something fairly seriously wrong with my right eye. I had broken my cheekbone and fractured my orbital in three different places. I had to have reconstructive surgery to square it all away.

  “Straight to the hospital, had surgery that night. I was recuperating by the next day.”

  Typically, Brown’s account of his victory was short. Like almost every heavyweight I’ve ever known, he’ll talk about the ones he lost far longer than the ones that went his way. When they lose, the other guy was super tough. When they win, it was mostly luck, really.

  “I never gloated about what happened,” Brown said. “That could have been me. He was coming up, a young guy, lookin’ to make a name for himself. He was doing what I was doing for my team, standing up for your team and being a tough guy. At that time, I didn’t know him. That could easily have been me on the losing end.”

  In the papers the next day, Grimson became labelled The Grim Receiver. That’s how fleeting it can be, when your reputation rides on bare-knuckle fighting on skates.

  How many scraps had the Battle witnessed, from the big boys like Semenko and Hunter to the middleweights like McClelland and Sheehy? Nobody ever got seriously injured in these fights. Until this one.

  “In all of those battles, no one really got hurt,” said Calgary winger Colin Patterson. “You might have got hurt, but not to that degree, although Jamie Macoun broke his jaw when Messier hit him from behind. The number of times I saw Tim Hunter and Dave Semenko fight, it wasn’t like when Stu and Dave Brown fought. Kudos to Stu. He came back, and that could have crushed a guy’s career.”

  Even the Oilers felt a certain sympathy for the new kid from Calgary that day. The blood feud had always spilled a little bit of the red stuff, but ironically, Grimson didn’t bleed at all that night. The bones under the skin on the right side of his face, however, were cratered. The Battle would not endure much further into the 1990s, and that night a decade of tough hockey had climaxed with a fight that truly scared everyone in attendance. It was, perhaps, a time to take a step back.