The Battle of Alberta

by Mark Spector

  “Vernon was the young phenomenon coming through, a local guy, and he took them to the Cup. Which was great,” said Lemelin. “I played in the building years, but you go through what you go through. I’m proud of what I accomplished, to set the path. Unfortunately I wasn’t there when it all happened (in 1989), but I went to Boston and we went to the Cup twice, in (1988 and 1990). Of course, it was against Edmonton again. I still live here [near Boston], my family was raised there … You can’t be upset because the Flames won after you left. It’s no big deal.”

  Was Vernon a better goalie than Lemelin? Well, he played four more seasons (19), nearly 275 more games (781), had nearly 150 more wins (385), and won two Stanley Cups to Lemelin’s none. But when it came to the Battle, Vernon surely had a stronger team in front of him. As Murdoch pointed out, his was a team that truly believed it could beat Edmonton, where Lemelin’s was not.

  15

  Theo Fleury’s Anger Pours Gas on the Battle’s Fire

  “[MacInnis] looks up at me and he says,

  ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ ”

  By 1991, the Battle had been waged for more than a decade since Calgary had become the second Alberta city to get an NHL franchise in 1980. The two clubs had met in the playoffs four times—in 1983, 1984, 1986, and 1988—with one more vicious, memorable series about to begin. It would turn out to be the last playoff meeting between the teams, and in 2014 the prospects of both clubs making the playoffs at the same time and meeting in a series seemed almost like science fiction.

  By 1991, Lanny McDonald and Jim Peplinski were gone from Calgary’s lineup, as were Wayne Gretzky, Jari Kurri, and Paul Coffey from Edmonton’s. Doug Risebrough was now coaching the Flames while John Muckler had succeeded Glen Sather behind the Oilers bench. This would mark the final Battle of Alberta for Edmonton’s great tandem of Mark Messier and Glenn Anderson, as the dismantling of a dynasty was in full gear in Edmonton.

  Alas, 1991 would also become the first year since 1983 that neither Calgary nor Edmonton would represent the Campbell Conference in the Stanley Cup final. Gretzky and his Los Angeles Kings had walked away with the Smythe Division that regular season for the first time in team history, the first time in eleven seasons that somebody other than the Oilers or Flames had stood atop the Smythe standings heading into the post-season. So, in the spring of 1991, it was No. 2 Calgary hosting No. 3 Edmonton in that Round 1 series, another first in the Battle of Alberta, and a sign that the glory years of these two franchises were drawing to a close.

  Calgary had finished twenty points ahead of Edmonton in 1990–91 and were the prohibitive favourites.

  “Look at it on paper,” said defenceman Jeff Beukeboom, who was wading into his first Battle as an everyday, top-six defenceman for Edmonton in April 1991. “Their top-three centremen were [Joe] Nieuwendyk, [Doug] Gilmour, and [Joel] Otto. They had [Gary] Roberts, [Theoren] Fleury … [Al] MacInnis and [Gary] Suter on the points. [Mike] Vernon in goal. They were stacked and we were the underdogs. We knew it, but we didn’t care. We were battle-tested from before, and the guys who weren’t—such as myself—we were ready for the challenge, and knew what it took.

  “This was eight, nine years in the making.”

  And it did not disappoint.

  “Best series I have ever covered—anywhere, any time, between any two teams,” said veteran Calgary hockey writer George Johnson. “What I remember the most was how visceral it was. Beukeboom was Nieuwendyk’s cousin. Well, he must have broken ten sticks over his cousin’s back. This wasn’t the new, ‘we’re-looking-after-your-health’ NHL. This was out-and-out tong warfare.

  “There were guys who’d been on those earlier Calgary teams, when the Oilers had just kicked the hell out of them. They remembered. That’s what made the Battle so great. It built to this point.”

  Even though the Oilers were the defending Stanley Cup champions from 1990, with Gretzky in L.A. and Mario Lemieux and his Pittsburgh Penguins about to win their first of back-to-back Stanley Cups, it would have taken the most rednecked Albertan to argue that the Battle still contained the two best teams in the game. Sure, the Oilers and Flames had won six of the past seven Stanley Cups. But the page was turning, and turning fast.

  There was one big difference, however. Edmonton still had its two true heart-and-soul leaders through all the years: Mark Messier up front and Kevin Lowe on the blue line. Calgary, well, ever since that Oilers sweep in 1988 there had been some question as to who —if anyone —really made this team tick. They’d won their Cup in 1989, sure. But the Flames had been a better regular-season club than Edmonton for some time now, and the book on the Flames was that they’d never have the intangibles to fulfill their promise on a grander scale.

  They had boatloads of skill, but in hockey parlance, the Calgary Flames needed more guts. Enter Theoren Fleury, an angry, petulant, five-foot-eight winger raised in Russell, Manitoba, who, we would learn later, had every right to be pissed off at the world. He’d been a victim of sexual abuse by former junior coach Graham James, carrying that secret with him through an alcohol- and drug-fuelled NHL career.

  We didn’t know about any of that in 1991, however. All Beukeboom knew about Fleury was this: “He was a rat.” It was, in fact, a kinder description than Fleury uses today to describe his on-ice persona then.

  “It had started with him long before,” began the big Oilers defenceman, who at six-foot-five and two hundred and thirty pounds had nine inches and fifty pounds on Fleury. “I think it was a pre-season game that year. I was going up ice and got two-handed on the back of the legs by him. Whack! Then, later on, there was a pileup in the corner, after Simmer [Craig Simpson] had taken out their goalie, and Fleury was running his mouth. ‘You guys suck. You can’t skate, you big —s.’ He’s on top of me, but when we come out of it together, I’ve got him. Now he’s saying, ‘It’s okay. I’ve got you. No problem.’ Like, now he’s being a nice guy.”

  So, what did Beukeboom do? Exactly what Fleury would have done.

  “I suckered him. Cut him open for stitches,” he said. “It was one of the few times Muckler paid me a compliment.”

  With the series set to open, Edmonton Journal columnist Cam Cole described Fleury as “a healthy heartbeat on a screen full of flat-liners.” He referenced Fleury’s long-standing feud with Beukeboom, and Fleury told Cole, “It’s been going on ever since that pre-season game when he suckered me. Then he was mouthing off in the paper, how it was such a great feeling and all this stuff.”

  This from the man who, as a junior, was part of the famous “Punch Up in Piestany.” When Czech officials turned the lights off on that 1987 World Junior brawl between Canada and Russia, what did Fleury do? “I went out there and tried to punch as many Commies as I could,” he once said.

  Ah, a true patriot indeed. In fact, Fleury was exactly what the Battle needed. He was a fresh new antagonist. A match to ignite the fumes of history. A straw to stir the drink or to deliver the cheap shot that would take everyone’s emotions over the top.

  Fleury had arrived in the NHL, fittingly, with much agitation. An eighth-round draft pick out of the Moose Jaw Warriors, there were folks at the Flames’ own draft table who didn’t want any part of him.

  “Al MacNeil went nuts,” Flames former general manager Cliff Fletcher said of his assistant general manager. “He says, ‘How can we draft a little guy like this?’ But we had one of the real great amateur scouts, one of the legends in the scouting business, Ian McKenzie. And Ian said, ‘You’ve got to draft this guy. He’ll play in the NHL. He’ll play for us.’ ”

  Fletcher, as many general managers will do, gave that late-round pick to his top junior scout as a sign of allegiance. If McKenzie felt that strongly about Fleury, then Fletcher would reward his bird dog for all of that bad arena coffee, all of those ice-cold drives between prairie junior rinks, by donating an eighth-round pick.

  “In my own mind, I took the middle road,” Fletcher admitted today. “I thought, ‘Even if he doesn’
t play in the NHL, he’s going to really sell tickets in the American League.’ So we drafted Theo in the eighth round.”

  When a player is still available that late in a draft—the way Detroit snapped up Pavel Datsyuk at No. 171 or Henrik Zetterberg at No. 210—not even the team that picked him can say they truly knew he’d turn into even a decent player. Any one of twenty-one teams could have had Fleury, who ranks eighth in NHL games played from that draft, despite being chosen at No. 166. Only one took a flyer on him.

  “I didn’t think he could play. Thought he was too small,” said Oilers chief scout Barry Fraser. “He was a good skater, not an exceptional skater. But one thing about him I’ve got to give him credit for, he has a big heart. He worked his ass off all the time. As miserable an asshole as he was back then—and he was a real prick—nobody liked him. His own teammates didn’t like him.”

  Now, his teammates didn’t mind Fleury in 1990–91 when he became the smallest man in NHL history to score fifty goals. But being liked was never high on Fleury’s priority list.

  “He came in with a lot of fanfare, playing extremely well in the minors,” recalled Lanny McDonald of Fleury’s entrance three years earlier. “He comes in and promptly told us our troubles were over. He was here. He was a cocky, brash little pepperpot.”

  Fleury had joined the Flames midway through a 1988–89 season in which Calgary was stocked and ready to win its first Stanley Cup. His act didn’t go over particularly well —especially with an old hand like Lanny, who hadn’t won a Cup yet in seventeen NHL seasons and knew his days were numbered.

  “We very quickly, as a leadership group, tried to make him understand: ‘You can be cocky, you can be arrogant. But you still have to find a way to fit into the team concept, and the team philosophy,’ ” McDonald said. “This was not all about him. This was about finding a way to win.”

  What the old moustachioed ex-Maple Leaf didn’t know was that his relationship with Fleury went back farther than McDonald knew. When Fleury was a kid, his team won tickets to a Winnipeg Jets game, where McDonald’s Colorado Rockies happened to be on the visiting team that same night.

  “My parents couldn’t rub two nickels together—we were always poor,” Fleury began, “but I managed to get enough money together to buy a program in Winnipeg. So I got this program and I went down to where the Colorado bench was during warmup, and sure enough Lanny is coming off the ice, so I got his autograph.

  “Fast-forward to my first NHL training camp. The rookies usually dress in the bowels of the rinks, right? But, for some reason, I was in the main room for camp. I get into the main room and I’m looking for my stall, and sure enough I’m sitting next to Lanny McDonald. I remember saying, ‘Hey, been skating a lot this summer?’ He’s like, ‘No. First time I’ve put my skates on.’ I’m thinking, ‘Shit, I like this guy!’

  “Eighteen months later, him, I, and the rest of the team are carrying the Stanley Cup around the Montreal Forum.”

  Fleury’s reputation preceded him. He was called up on New Year’s Eve of 1988 from the Flames farm team in Salt Lake City, where he’d racked up seventy-four points in forty games. “The Flames were in a mini-slump. They’d lost, like, one game in a row,” laughed Fleury. “But they call me up. So the next day I walk into Flames dressing room for practice, and I’m walking by Al MacInnis.

  “He looks up at me and he says, ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t really know at this point …’ Nice way to greeted by one of the veterans, eh?”

  It didn’t take long to discern what Fleury had been called up to do. He played thirty-six games in that first season and had thirty-four points. The next year he scored thirty-one goals. The next, fifty-one. Fleury also had a firm grip on what the Battle meant inside that Flames room. Even a guy like MacInnis had to respect him for that.

  “I knew how big this Edmonton–Calgary rivalry was, and I knew that if I played real well against the Oilers it would go a long ways to me making the Flames as a regular,” Fleury said. “I scored my first two NHL goals on Hockey Night in Canada against Grant Fuhr, against the Edmonton Oilers.

  “From that moment on, I played some of my best hockey against the Oilers.”

  Fleury was very good. Extremely quick and creative, and wholly unafraid for a man his size. He had been told since he was a pee wee player that he was too small and shouldn’t bother trying to play in the NHL. He’d never make it, they said, and with each evaluation the chip on Fleury’s shoulder grew bigger and bigger.

  That chip became as valuable as his scoring touch, prompting his coach, Doug Risebrough, to say this leading into the 1991 series against Edmonton: “I would say that the day Theoren is comfortable, that all the questions have been answered, will not be a positive thing in his career. The challenge at one time was to play pro, then to play in the NHL, then be a regular in the NHL. Now, he’s in another dimension.”

  Fleury, we know now, was a troubled young man. He had the inner drive to prove everyone wrong, which meant he refused ever to back down. But he also harboured an anger that Graham James was responsible for. A confusion, no doubt, about how to deal with what had happened. The burden of not revealing what James had done was clearly a heavy one, a statement borne out when you see his transformation from a dark, troubled, drug-abusing NHLer to the fabulous role model and positive influence Fleury has become since admitting that he was victimized.

  “I hadn’t started using those street drugs back then. I was still partying and drinking, like everyone else was,” he said. He was angry, but he’d been angry all the way up through juniors. He had to be.

  “I realized it somewhere along the way, maybe it was when Dave Manson hit me when I was in Prince Albert, one of my first games in the Western League,” he said. “I thought my collar bone was on the other side of my body when he hit me that night, and I realized right then and there that, if I was going to make it, I was going to have to set myself apart from every other small guy that’s ever played the game. I just never backed down from anything or anybody.”

  Manson’s nickname was “Charlie.” Today he is a mild-mannered father of the Anaheim Ducks defenceman Josh Manson, but back in the day the moniker suited Dave. He was not only one of the toughest, meanest players of his day, but in his early days he was also known as what hockey people call “a snapper.” He had become a more gentle, polite person whom I got to know and quite liked when he played for the Edmonton Oilers back in the early 1990s. But in his prime, when Charlie snapped, nobody wanted any part of him. That much was a fact.

  “He was fuckin’ scary in junior, let me tell ya. And his defence partner was Ken Baumgartner!” Fleury recalled, laughing. “So I went up to P.A. with Moose Jaw. I was five-foot-three, a hundred and twenty-five pounds, playing in the Western League my first year.”

  That Manson hit framed Fleury’s career. It left him in deep pain, and deep in thought as to how he was going to survive in a bigger man’s game. “You’d better figure out how you’re going to protect yourself,” Fleury challenged himself. “How you’re going to get room out on the ice here because this can’t be happening much more. Otherwise, I’m not going to make it.”

  Not unlike Stu Grimson and Dave Brown, Fleury was well served to have apprenticed in the pre-politically correct WHL. It toughened him up, and when you were Fleury’s size, it honed your survival skills. “[Craig] Berube, Manson, Baumgartner, Wendel Clark … There were tough guys everywhere in the league. So in order to get room out there, I had to become this fuckin’ hatchet man,” Fleury said. “And I had no problem fuckin’ cutting your eye out. Wouldn’t have bothered me a bit.

  “Hey, you’re trying to fuckin’ kill me? This was survival. It was that unpredictability that allowed me to have the room that I had.”

  The 1991 Battle of Alberta began with a 3–1 Oilers win in Calgary. With that, home-ice advantage had been eliminated by Edmonton. The Flames won by the same score two nights later, then two nights after that, at the Northlands Co
liseum, a tight 4–3 Oilers win on a goal by Joe Murphy with fourteen ticks left on the clock. Edmonton also won Game 4, and in the first game that had not been a one-goal affair until late in the third period, the usual fisticuffs ensued.

  It was in this game that Oiler Dave Brown administered a beating on Jim Kyte—exactly fifteen months and one day after his fight with Stu Grimson—in which Kyte ended up lying on the ice face up with Brown straddling his chest. Kyte made the poor choice of throwing a punch or two from his back, prompting Brown to fire up the left hand again from his perch atop Kyte. The sequence prompted sportscaster Darren Dutchyshen to proclaim, “There goes Brownie! He’s startin’ the lawnmower on Jim Kyte!”

  The series shifted back to Calgary for Game 5, the Flames’ lives on the line. It was then that Tim Hunter did his best Billy Graham impression, which lacked only a “Hallelujah!!” or a “Praise the Lord!” to have been fit for a Sunday-morning service.

  “We’re going to win this series,” Hunter promised the Calgary press on the off day. “We have twenty believers in this room, and if we have any disbelievers, they’re not going to go out on the ice.”

  Three hundred kilometres to the north, they were asking Brown about his fight with Kyte. “It was self-explanatory,” he said.

  Calgary would win Game 5 with their best effort. Off the ice, the series was heating up, to the point where Flames’ goalie coach, the Hall of Famer Glenn Hall, attacked a reporter who he claimed had misquoted him. “You writers are out to get us. I’ll teach you a lesson!” the fifty-nine-year-old Hall shouted before gripping Herald reporter Gyle Konotopetz’s melon in a python-like headlock. “Fight, you yellow —! Fight!”

  On the ice, the series had also become brutal. It was still the one-referee system, and if they were to make a video about why the NHL switched to two referees, they could have begun with footage of the lumber being swung in the 1991 Battle of Alberta.