by Mark Spector
For players like Lowe, at that point thirty years old and eight hundred games into his NHL career, or Patterson, also a thirty-year-old veteran of the wars, watching that fight was somewhat of a seminal moment. It was a three-day process that played out in front of an entire province of hockey fans, readers, and viewers. Everyone had an opportunity to save Grimson the kind of beating that most thought would end his career that day, but the thought of doing so had occurred to no one.
“Stu had hurt his hand in the [Sunday] fight,’ Patterson said. “Looking back, we probably shouldn’t have played him. Unfortunately, the next fight didn’t go as well. It is what it is. It was like Stu wasn’t expecting the fight to happen right then. I don’t know why he wasn’t thinking that. Dave Brown was thinking that way.”
“That was as wild a moment … Top five for me, for sure, in hockey,” said Lowe, who would go on to enjoy a career spanning nineteen seasons and 1,468 games, including playoffs. “It was just a beatdown. But the whole building, it went from excitement to dead still, to quiet, to almost a sickening feeling to the people in the building. Including us.
“Your body, your mind—you go through the whole range of emotions. It went from, ‘Get him, Brownie! Get him!’ Then, ‘I hope he’s doing well …’ Then, ‘Holy shit, stop, Brownie!’ Then it was, ‘Oh my God … He just killed that guy.’ It was almost like premeditated murder.”
Nobody played more meaningful games in the Battle than Lowe, on either side. He joined the Oilers in 1979–80, the year before the Atlanta Flames relocated to Calgary, and played for Edmonton through all five Stanley Cups before leaving for the New York Rangers after the 1991–92 season. By then, the Battle was cooling, on its way to what it is today.
The retribution. The machismo. The utter hatred of that opposing sweater and the disregard for the health of those inside of it. Did it all go too far that night at the Saddledome?
“When guys get hurt like that? For sure,” said Lowe. “Everybody’s view of a beatdown is that a guy gets knocked to the ice. He gets up right away, and it’s, ‘His feelings are hurt, but he’s not hurt.’ When it gets to that extent, that’s too much.”
Grimson awoke the next day in a Calgary hospital bed in rough, rough shape. As is the custom in hockey, a young Flames teammate named Marc Bureau arrived at his bedside. They had been called up from Salt Lake together, and the two were roommates at the Calgary Westin. The morning after Grimson’s surgery, Bureau was among the first visitors to the Calgary hospital room where Grimson lay resting.
“He brought my shaving kit, and some of my personal effects from the hotel,” said Grimson, laughing at the memory. “He walks into the room and saw me after I had reconstructive surgery on my face. He took one look at me, and he started crying. I must have been really in rough shape because he’s sitting in a chair beside my bed, and I’m holding his hand and patting it. I’m saying, ‘Frenchy, it’s going to be all right. I’m going to be okay.’ This hockey player, he’s weeping. Honestly, I looked like a truck had backed up over my face.”
For Grimson, as you might guess, January 9, 1990, was a life-changing moment—but in a positive way. He recovered from his injuries, rejoined Salt Lake City later that season, and would forge a tidy career of his own, playing another 725 games over thirteen seasons for Chicago, Anaheim, Detroit, Hartford/Carolina, Anaheim again, then closing it out in Los Angeles and Nashville. He logged another 2,091 minutes in penalties in his career, and fought all the big boys along the way. Even fought Brown again.
About the only thing that Stu Grimson did not do after that fateful meeting with Brown was play another game for the Calgary Flames. His chapter in the Battle had closed, and Grimson moved on. He went to camp the next fall in Calgary and was put on waivers by the Flames. The Chicago Blackhawks picked him up.
The insecure heavyweight has always been one of hockey’s great ironies, and in the end, Brown was just another in a long line of them. We look at men like him, Grimson, Semenko, Hunter, Probert, John Kordic, Brian McGrattan, and we see physically imposing, take-matters-into-their-own-hands men who have quite literally carved a lucrative career out of kicking ass. They should be at ease, right? Confident and comfortable in their own skin.
Today, with the gradual extinction of the heavyweight position in hockey, one can understand if some job insecurity is creeping into the picture for those whose sole job is to protect their more skilled teammates. But even back before the instigator penalty, the more heavyweights I met, the more I could see it is a generally insecure breed—worried about what their teammates thought of them more than any other position on the team.
Think about it: if the top centreman goes through a couple of scoreless weeks, he might get demoted to the second line, or perhaps be furnished with different wingers to perk up his game. It is traditionally couched in terms like “mixing things up” or “putting the lines in the blender.” The process involves a support network comprised of coaches and teammates working together to help the struggling player out of his slump. He’s never completely alone in his troubles.
When a heavyweight starts to slip, there’s nowhere to fall—except for off the roster completely. Losing fights at this level—as Grimson will testify—isn’t a whole lot of fun. There is no good luck or hard work that can to help you out of a fighting slump the way a player can have a point shot bounce in off the seat of his pants or get teamed up with a red-hot player on a real good run, where there are easy points to be had.
When you consider how seldom these guys really fight, the role of the enforcer becomes more of an emotional or cerebral thing. He must retain his teammates’ belief in his abilities to protect the tribe. It is an unspoken yet well-known element within the team.
“All Brownie wanted to do was contribute to the team, be considered a consistent, reliable player—especially in the defensive zone,” Stafford said. “That’s the kind of player those guys are. Semenk, McClelland—they want to be considered hockey players first, and that they can be relied upon by their coaches and their teammates. Davey Brown was no different.
“He was an old-school player. No coach ever had to tap him on the shoulder. He knew his job very well. His number-one priority was … looking after his teammates.”
Brown had been sat down for a few games and could see his value to the team waning. Then he got back into the lineup and lost to this Grimson kid. It explains his singular focus for that forty-eight-hour period between the two scraps. He was a twenty-seven-year-old heavyweight who had just lost a fight to a virtual nobody. Brown’s career, in his mind, was literally on the line.
“For me, the most important thing of all was what the rest of your teammates think of you in the room. I always wanted everyone to think I was doing my job for the team, and that’s probably what motivated me the most to go out and do what I did there,” he said.
“I didn’t want to be the guy sittin’ in the room with everybody thinking I didn’t do my job. I wanted everyone to think that I was doing my part. If I wasn’t, that made me sick to my stomach. That’s what drives you the most. Everything outside the dressing room, it doesn’t mean much. Are you doing your job for the team? That’s what mattered. The team.”
The guys. The room. The camaraderie. It’s what they all talk about when their careers are over and you ask them what they miss the most.
Said Brown, “To play hockey in the NHL was fun, man. You’d play forever if you could.”
Brown played another six seasons, returning to the team that drafted him and employs him today, the Flyers. He is as well respected a hockey man as there is in the game, soft-spoken and humble. He has never gloated about a fight won, or an opponent he bested, and in fact took considerable cajoling to recount this particular chapter in the Battle of Alberta. Talking about a one-sided win is simply out of character for big Dave Brown.
As for Grimson, well, from great depths begin heroic rises, and Grimson couldn’t have been any lower at that point in his career. He was a twenty-five
-year-old heavyweight who had just failed the Big Test in a young heavyweight’s career. That damned silicone had meant he couldn’t even tie Brown up and play for the draw, and it wouldn’t surprise anyone if Grimson had just faded away into obscurity. Maybe follow in his father’s footsteps, enroll in the academy.
It’s almost fortunate that such an injurious event had been inflicted on a man bright enough to process it all. Before earning a law degree in his post-hockey life, Grimson weighed the evidence of that January 9, 1990, altercation, and somehow found a way to turn it into a positive experience.
“It’s kind of peculiar, but it was a turning point for me, personally and professionally,” Grimson said. “That was a bad beat—make no mistake about it. That’s as bad a beat as a guy doing what I did could take. But I kind of came to a place in my mind: ‘If that’s the worst I can suffer, and if I can bounce back from that, then I’ve got nothing to fear.’ It turned into a liberating thing for me.”
Liberating. From where most people sat, the only liberating element of Brown versus Grimson II was when Dave Brown liberated Stu Grimson of his senses. Grimson is a religious man, however, and a scholar. Two key recipes to turning this life experience lemon into lemonade.
“I came to that realization that, if I can bounce back from something like this, then I have nothing left to fear. This isn’t going to cause me to pack it up and play a different game. Or terminate my attempt to find a niche in this league. It’s only going to reaffirm that this is what I’m going to do. I chose the tougher path, I guess,” he said. “When you face trials like that, but you’re able to grab yourself by the boot straps, move through them, and come out the other side, it steels you as a person. It galvanizes your character. There’s no question: Being able to move past something like that made me stronger as a human being. Without question. I think it was Shakespeare who said, ‘Whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.’ That certainly was true in my situation.
“There is nothing more exhilarating than being able to confront your fears. And fear number one for me was the heavyweight champion of the NHL, Dave Brown. Regardless of the outcome.”
14
Flame Réjean Lemelin versus Oiler Grant Fuhr
“We made kick saves, we made glove saves.
We were not on our knees trying to stop everything with our chest. It wouldn’t have worked anyway.”
It was autumn of 1974 in Philadelphia.
The Flyers’ Dave (The Hammer) Schultz would embark upon the NHL’s single-season record for penalty minutes (472) that still stands today. The Broad Street Bullies would pound their way to a second of back-to-back Stanley Cups in the spring of 1975, the last ever Cup-winning roster comprised solely of Canadian-born players. And after two years of the Flyers’ reign, the sport of hockey would reach its nadir, marred by the bench-clearing brawls and violent punchups that would manifest itself on the Hollywood screen in the Paul Newman classic Slap Shot.
In downtown Philly, a little Denis Lemieux lookalike named Réjean (Reggie) Lemelin was settling into his first pro hockey job as a goalie for the Philadelphia Firebirds of the North American Hockey League (NAHL). This was the league from which the Slap Shot movie was derived, and Lemelin was playing in a town where hockey had morphed into hooliganism, in the process producing two Stanley Cup championships.
It was tough, goofy hockey played in the old Philadelphia Convention Hall and Civic Center, a 1930-built, art deco landmark where Martin Luther King, Pope John Paul II, and Nelson Mandela had delivered speeches and The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Jackson 5 had performed.
“There was a lot of fighting [in the NAHL]. The bus rides, the fan clubs … There were plenty of similarities to the movie,” said Lemelin, who would go on to backbone the Calgary Flames in the early 1980s. “I barely spoke English when I got there. And when you don’t speak that well, and you’re trying to figure out what’s going on in that place … Well, it was a bit crazy.”
If you watch the movie, you’ll see a scene where Newman’s Charlestown Chiefs are playing against the Firebirds. The little goalie in Philly’s net is wearing a mask and pads that are identical to Lemelin’s. “They used all of our replicas. We had to sign releases and everything,” he said. You couldn’t blame him if, at the time, Lemelin might have thought that he was watching his five minutes of fame play out on that movie screen in Philadelphia, where he and his teammates gathered on an off day to watch the movie about their lives.
“It was Philadelphia’s second minor-league team, basically,” Lemelin began. “It was more of a veteran league. Guys in their later twenties, just trying to hang on to the game. We had Dave Schultz’s brother [Ray], Rick MacLeish’s brother [Dale] … It was a bunch of misfits, basically. I’m just a nineteen-year-old kid, and I show up there and get paired up with an older, washed-out goalie named Danny Sullivan. A real good guy. I didn’t know anything. I was kind of lost.”
But there was an ember of hope for our little Denis Lemieux lookalike. “I ended up winning the Rookie of the Year in the league.”
Lemelin’s Firebirds came with their own personal Reggie Dunlop behind the bench, a former minor-league lifer-turned-coach named Gregg Pilling. In thirteen years of playing and coaching—all but one spent below the American Hockey League level in the nether regions of professional hockey in the 1960s and 1970s—Pilling’s only championship would come during Lemelin’s second pro season in Philly.
To say Pilling is a barrel of laughs is to say that Wayne Gretzky was merely a decent player. If someone wrote a book on characters in the game, “Pill” would get at least a chapter. If only he was more handsome, he’d get the cover.
When Pilling runs across one of his old goalies today, he greets them all with the same salutation. “Hey, ya leaky bastard! How the hell are ya?” he’ll say. “You know what? They all answer when you say that.”
Pilling was coaching a team of second-tier Flyers prospects, with a handful of guys who couldn’t make their WHA clubs tossed on the heap. He’d brought along Sullivan—a five-foot-nine goalie from Kimberley, B.C., whose career apex would consist of two WHA starts—from their time together in the soon-to-be-defunct Southern League, pairing him up in the Firebirds crease with Lemelin.
“You never knew what you were going to get from the parent team. Sometimes you’d get saddled with their financial mistakes,” Pilling said. Other times, as he was finding out in Philly, you’d get the older brothers of the team’s NHL stars, as a favour to Rick MacLeish and Dave Schultz. “I had a goaltender I knew could play in the Southern League [Sullivan], and I had Reggie. Didn’t know too much about Reggie.”
That made for an even start to their relationship, considering Lemelin did not have a hot clue what to think about this Pilling guy either. He was a wildcat of a hockey man who realized that there wasn’t going to be a lot of money down this minor-league hockey trail, so he might as well have as many laughs as possible.
Lemelin recalls Pilling walking across the ice to the bench for the third period wearing a ref’s striped jersey, shades, and holding a hockey stick taped white, like a cane. Another time, Pilling flipped the guy inside the mascot suit a few bucks to borrow his costume, and thrilled the folks in Lewiston, Maine, when he pulled the Bear’s head off during a ceremony to reveal who was inside. Another time, Pilling sent the entire team to the penalty box to serve a bench minor he had been assessed—just to further rile the referee. “You’re gonna call penalties on all my guys all night? Then here. Have ’em all. I’ll save you some time!”
Still another time, Pilling decided he would switch his goalies every shift. “He said to me, ‘You’re going to start the game, but on the first faceoff I’m going to pull you and I’m going to put Danny in,’ ” Lemelin remembered. “So he pulls me, then I go back in. He pulls me, I go back in. Then there’s another faceoff, and he pulls me again! That’s three times now. So, the next shift I’m on my way out to the goal, I say to Danny, ‘He wants to play this game? I’m comin’ o
ut on the fly. So get [bleep]in’ ready.’
“So we break out of our own end, there’s a long pass up to centre ice, and I’m comin’. Danny jumps the boards and he goes flyin’ into the net, and now I’m on the bench. Pill comes storming down the bench, like he’s gonna beat me up or something. He says, ‘That was fucking great!’
“I don’t think there were ever goalies who changed on the fly in professional hockey, but we did it,” said Lemelin. “Pill? He was nuts, but guys played for him so hard because he was such a great guy. He was a players’ coach. But that’s also why his career never went anywhere, because he did too many goofy things like that. No one wanted to hire him.”
Lemelin was, as it turns out, the Accidental Goaler. He grew up in a little town north of Quebec City, Orsainville, which has since been swallowed up by the Quebec capital. About twelve thousand people lived there, but to Lemelin’s good fortune, one of them was a kid named Réal Cloutier, who would become one of the greatest goal scorers of his generation. Cloutier would score ninety-three goals in his final junior season and pot seventy-five one year for his hometown team, the Quebec Nordiques of the WHA.
“We were awesome because he scored four, five goals every game, and I could stop the puck. We had a small population, but we did some good things,” Lemelin said of his childhood teams. Lemelin would give up on being a goalie after his pee wee season. “In Quebec, once you got to bantam you had to go back outside to play your games. I didn’t want to play goal outside, so I went back to forward for a couple of years.”
Eventually talked back into goal by a junior scout, by the time Lemelin was draft eligible in 1974 he would become the first goalie drafted out of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League that season. “I was kind of proud of that,” he admitted. It would be the beginning of one hell of a journey for the man who would spawn “The Reggie Lemelin Pool” along the scribes in the press boxes of the Battle nearly a decade later.
