Chicago Blackhawks

by Mark Lazerus

  On the way back to Toronto to catch their flight back to Chicago, the players grew hungry. Their first choice, Dairy Queen, was closed, so they had to settle for a small-town McDonald’s. Burish insists that Toews pushed for McDonald’s because they were running a promotion that included hockey cards of Toews and Kane in the Happy Meals, and their faces were on the walls and on the cups and on the wrappers.

  “The manager behind the counter was overwhelmed,” McDonough says with a laugh. “The staff stopped in their tracks. Everybody recognized them.”

  This was before camera phones were ubiquitous, of course. But the story started circulating in an anonymous email that was forwarded to various media outlets a couple of weeks later. Eventually, it became a national feel-good story in both the United States and Canada.

  “Everyone on the team felt galvanized that night,” McDonough says. “I don’t know if it was any one person’s idea, but everybody was ­completely on board with it. We did the right thing. It wasn’t the Chicago Blackhawks that were there. It was people who cared about Dale.”

  Despite all the work Tallon did to bring the Blackhawks together, things ended badly. Following their run to the Western Conference final in 2009, the Blackhawks missed the deadline to tender ­qualifying offers to their restricted free agents, which meant those players would become unrestricted free agents. Versteeg was among those free agents, and he wound up landing a three-year, $9.25 million ­contract that he never would have gotten as a restricted free agent. The snafu cost the Blackhawks millions, as well as ­millions in ­salary-cap space. Tallon took the blame—“It shouldn’t have ­happened, and I took the heat for it,” he says now—and a week later was demoted to senior advisor, with Stan Bowman taking over as general manager.

  Internally, players were angry. And former Blackhawks winger Martin Havlat, another Tallon acquisition who had just signed with the Minnesota Wild, spoke for a lot of them when he tore into the Blackhawks in an interview with TSN. He said McDonough was jealous of the credit Tallon was getting for the Blackhawks’ success, and that McDonough was looking for any reason to dump Tallon.

  “The players loved Dale, and they are with him,” Havlat told TSN. “Every single player on that team is with Dale. I still talk to the guys all the time. Hockey players know a phony when they see one.… I am really disappointed Rocky Wirtz would let something like this happen.”

  McDonough and Tallon both brushed aside Havlat’s comments, but it was clear Tallon’s days were numbered. He ended up taking the Panthers GM job during the Blackhawks’ sweep of the San Jose Sharks in the 2010 Western Conference final. And that’s how he ended up on Bill Torrey’s couch, watching the team he built realize the ultimate dream.

  For years, Tallon had told his players—when he drafted them, when he signed them, when he traded for them—that he had been sober for years, and that the next drink he would take would be from the Stanley Cup. It had been 16 years by the time the Blackhawks won the 2010 championship. And after making that call from the locker room in Philadelphia, a few Blackhawks gave Tallon another call during their epic celebratory pub crawl through Chicago. They told him to come to Chicago. To meet them at a hotel. At the rooftop bar. His name would be on the list.

  “And I met them, and I got hammered with them,” Tallon says. “It was quite a group of guys.”

  2. 2009–10: Young, Dumb, and So Much Fun

  Turning the Corner

  Looking back on it now, it was the height of arrogance—an unthinkable breach of hockey protocol, which values humility above all else. “One game at a time” isn’t just a cliché in hockey, it’s a ­mandate. A way of life. An ethos.

  Yet here were Patrick Sharp, Dustin Byfuglien, and a couple of other Blackhawks sitting around over drinks in the dog days of ­winter, a modest couple-game win streak behind them, talking about what they were going to do on their day with the Stanley Cup.

  “It might come across the wrong way, but it wasn’t in a cocky or arrogant way,” Sharp insists. “We were just talking. ‘ What are you going to do on your Cup day? What kind of party are you going to have? How are you going to give back to your city?’ Looking back on it now, to be 26 or 27 and sitting there talking about what you’re going to do with the Stanley Cup before you’ve even won it? Man. But you don’t know any better.”

  It took the city of Chicago—burned so many times in the past, and turned off by Bill Wirtz’s archaic policies and penny-pinching ways—a little while to catch on. But within the organization, that sense that the Blackhawks were on the verge of something ­special was palpable. The arrival of Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane changed everything.

  Andrew Ladd arrived as a trade-deadline acquisition in late February of 2008. A third-year pro with a Stanley Cup already on his résumé, it didn’t take him long to realize something special was ­happening in Chicago.

  “I remember going to practice the first couple of days, and I’m going, holy shit, these guys are really good,” Ladd says. “I’ve played with high-end players—Eric Staal and Rod Brind’Amour in Carolina—but the things that we could do on a daily basis with Jonny, Kaner, Dunc, Seabs, and Sharpie, you just didn’t see that every day. They made it look pretty easy every day. For me, I noticed the potential really early.”

  The Blackhawks missed the playoffs by three points during that 2007–08 season, with Kane winning the Calder Trophy with 72 points in 82 games, and Toews posting 54 points in 64 games. The city was starting to take notice, and the Blackhawks were starting to develop that little bit of arrogance that eventually would carry them to greater heights than many imagined.

  The breakthrough moment for Toews was the Winter Classic at Wrigley Field on January 1, 2009. It was before the Blackhawks’ omnipresence at outdoor games left players and fans alike jaded on the process, and it was a sight to behold. The Blackhawks lost 6–4 to the rival Detroit Red Wings—a harbinger of things to come that spring—but the event was a watershed moment for the franchise.

  It was basically a wakeup call to a dormant hockey town.

  “That was definitely a moment of high excitement, to start to get a glimpse of what this team and what this franchise could be in Chicago,” Toews says. “I don’t think anyone plans on winning three Cups over the next six or seven years, but I think there was a lot of hope and a lot of energy. And we knew we had talent. I mean, it would be impossible to foresee what we were going to do, but we knew good things were coming.”

  Kane always says the Blackhawks were too “young and dumb” to know any better back then. And ignorance can be bliss.

  “Maybe that’s what helped us be a great team,” Sharp says. “We felt we were good. We felt we were capable. We weren’t afraid of expectations. And maybe that’s what pushed us over the edge. Who knows?”

  By the middle of the 2009–10 season, when those guys were dreaming about a summer of love, just about everybody knew. At least, everybody in Chicago. After years of toiling in anonymity, of begging strangers in subway stations and schoolyards and banks to take free tickets off their hands, of playing before a few thousand fans and zero television viewers, of being nobodies on a nothing team, the Chicago Blackhawks were the toast of the town. The surprising run to the Western Conference final in the spring of 2009—a run that ended with the Blackhawks, in Jonathan Toews’ words, “falling on our face” in a five-game loss to the Red Wings that could best be described as educational for the young squad—had fully awoken the sleeping giant.

  Suddenly, tickets were hard to come by. Suddenly, TV ratings spiked. Suddenly, the Blackhawks were celebrities.

  Suddenly, the Blackhawks had sway.

  “It really picked up between that year we lost to the Red Wings in the conference finals and into that next year,” says Dave Bolland, who fell so hard for the city that he stuck around each summer. “Going into that next year, it was starting to get a little buzzier going out. People noticed you. It
was a little weird, because for years, we’d go out in downtown Chicago and nobody knew who the hell we were, and it was tough to get in anywhere. Then it all blew up and you couldn’t go anywhere.”

  It was a fine line to walk for the young and, let’s say, fun-loving Blackhawks. Part of the appeal of being a pro athlete is the ­celebrity status, to be showered with love wherever you go. But with fame comes potential pitfalls, as Patrick Kane, Kris Versteeg, and John Madden found out that fateful night in Vancouver.

  “It was nice in some ways, and in other ways it wasn’t so nice,” Bolland says. “When you’d go to a restaurant, there was always a table open for you. But you go to a club and do something stupid and get caught, everyone knew who you were, and you didn’t want that. But it was awesome.”

  After years of feeling as though the organization was going out of its way to alienate them, by 2009–10, Blackhawks fans had rediscovered their passion for the team.

  The pros far outweighed the cons, and those who got a taste of what life was like in Chicago during the dark ages appreciated it even more. Early in the 2008–09 season, Colin Fraser, Troy Brouwer, Dustin Byfuglien, Kris Versteeg, and some of the other Blackhawks who came up together through Rockford regularly went out in ­massive groups—wives and girlfriends included—after games for a drink or a late dinner. Joe’s Stone Crab was a frequent spot, as many of the Blackhawks lived a couple blocks away. And even in throngs of 15 or so people, the Blackhawks blended right into the crowd.

  That changed in the spring of 2009, and really changed during the magical 2009–10 season. During the playoffs, in between the first and second rounds, a group of Blackhawks went to Joe’s for Jonathan Toews’ 22nd birthday. An unknown group of fans sent a bottle of wine to the table, with a note that read, “Good luck in the playoffs.”

  When the group got up to leave, the entire restaurant started applauding.

  “Standing ovation,” Fraser says. “The poor girls, oh, my god. They had their jackets over their heads, they were so embarrassed. But we thought it was great. Two years ago, nobody knew who the hell we were. Now we’re getting standing ovations in restaurants. It was crazy.”

  Years later, Brouwer discovered that the fans who had sent that bottle of wine over was the family of future NHL defenseman Connor Carrick’s girlfriend. Carrick and his girlfriend were just high-­schoolers at the time and not even dating yet. She insisted her dad send over the wine; the Orland Park natives were huge Blackhawks fans. Brouwer and Carrick wound up as teammates with the Washington Capitals during the 2013–14 season.

  “He asked me if I remembered that,” Brouwer says. “Of course, I did. That was the point where people started to recognize you in town. That hadn’t happened before.”

  Carrick wasn’t at that dinner, but he remembers everything changing around that time. There weren’t a heck of a lot of hockey players on the South Side of Chicago, so once the Blackhawks started generating a little buzz, Carrick became a go-to source of ­information for a new generation of fans just starting to discover the team and the game.

  “It was amazing how fast everything changed,” Carrick says. “Kids would come up to me in class and ask me what I thought of the game the night before, because I was the token hockey guy. Kids would ask me questions, ask what I thought of a play or a goal. You saw more jerseys at school, more billboards when you went ­downtown. The team just exploded.”

  Chicago was in love. And it was the best kind of love—young love. And unlike so much new love, this one lasted.

  “Chicago’s such a great city,” Brent Seabrook says. “The fans ­recognize you and you can hear some whispers, and sometimes they’ll ask for a quick photo or an autograph, but they sort of leave you alone and let you do your thing. The fans have been so great all these years.”

  It helps that the Blackhawks gave them a lot to love. Starting with that magical spring of 2010.

  Friends Become Enemies

  As Patrick Kane got into position on the right wing for a faceoff during a preliminary-round game in Canada Hockey Place—the temporary name for the Vancouver Canucks’ arena during the 2010 Winter Olympics—he looked over to the other side and saw a ­familiar face in an unfamiliar sweater. It was Duncan Keith, who looked back at Kane and smiled broadly (he still had all his teeth at this point). It was weird. It was funny.

  It was a lot different when it was Jonathan Toews on the other side.

  The Kane-Toews sibling rivalry reached new heights during the 2010 Olympics, as two of the top players on two of the top hockey nations in the world were on opposite teams for the first time since they first met as 12-year-olds. And while they were like brothers off the ice, they were like brothers on the ice, too—relentlessly competitive, endlessly driven to be better than the other guy.

  “There was always a competitiveness between them,” Adam Burish says. “They would cheer each other on, but they also wanted to outdo each other. They were both first-round draft picks, and they both wanted to prove themselves. It was healthy, it was good, it was never spiteful of each other. They were friends and they got along great. But if Kane had a goal, Toews wanted to score a goal. And if Kane had 60 points and Toews had 59, Toews needed to get 60 that night. They both wanted to be the star, which only made the team better.”

  And only made the Olympics more heated. While Kane and Keith shared a smile, Kane and Toews shared an earful. Neither is sure who started it during that preliminary game on February 21, but both of them escalated it. It started as good-natured ribbing but reached a fever pitch at the end of the first period, with the United States clinging to a one-goal lead. It even got personal. And when you’ve been close friends and roommates with a guy for three years, you have plenty of ammunition.

  “We were chirping each other back and forth pretty hard,” Kane says. “Pretty serious, too. I don’t even remember what it was about, it was something stupid. But he said something, and I said something, and when you do that, you’re going to trigger something. It’s funny how that happened with Tazer, but with Duncs, it was just funny­ seeing him on the other side.”

  Kane and the Americans won that game 5–3, striking some fear into the hearts of Canadians who wanted to win the men’s hockey gold medal at their own Olympics more than just about anything ­imaginable. And when the two teams met again for the gold medal, the nation came to a standstill.

  Kane and Toews had been on big stages before at World Juniors and other tournaments, and had been in the Western Conference final a year earlier, and of course went on to play in unimaginable pressure situations during their Stanley Cup runs.

  But to this day, that might be the most pressure-packed game either of them have ever played.

  “That was a pretty important game for Canada, and the game of hockey,” Toews says. “There was record viewership for that gold medal game in the U.S., but it was more life-or-death north of the border. The whole country was hanging on every moment.”

  Toews struck first, staking Canada to a 1–0 lead and releasing some of the building tension inside the arena. Corey Perry made it 2–0 midway through the second period, and Canada was starting to celebrate. But Ryan Kesler scored for the Americans later in the ­second off an assist from Kane, and Zach Parise left an entire nation stunned into silence when he scored the equalizer with 25 seconds left—with Kane picking up another assist.

  “The adrenaline was ridiculous,” Kane says. “We all thought we were going to win, especially during that overtime intermission.”

  But Sidney Crosby—maybe the only Canadian more popular than Toews these days—scored the golden goal 7:40 into overtime, and bedlam reigned.

  For Kane, the loss stung. But the memory of that game lingers, and with time it has become a special one.

  “We were obviously disappointed,” he says. “But I remember ­lining up waiting to get our silver medals, and looking into the crowd, and seeing grown men cr
ying and hugging each other. It was a really cool experience to see how excited Vancouver was, and Canada was, that they won the men’s ice hockey gold. I know it was terrible that we lost, but it was a cool atmosphere to be around.”

  Kane dutifully waited for the celebration to taper off, then went through the handshake line, pausing an extra moment to congratulate Toews and to tell him he was happy for him. Whatever tension had built up during that preliminary game melted away. They were back on the same team, and there was work to be done.

  “Especially early in our career, Kaner and I had a more ­competitive air toward one another,” Toews says. “Since we’ve won Stanley Cups and established ourselves in the league, that’s definitely ­subsided. But no doubt, early on, you always wanted another thing to hang your hat on, and to have over your buddy and your teammate. That was a big one.”

  The Last of a Dying Breed

  On January 22, 2010, a Friday night, Patrick Kane, John Madden, and Kris Versteeg found themselves in the back of a limousine with some young women. Kane’s and Madden’s shirts were off. Kane’s belt was unbuckled. Madden was photographed flexing his bicep with a champagne flute in his hand. Beers were everywhere. The photos, as such photos do, quickly found their way to the Internet, and ­controversy ensued.

  Kane apologized and said it was maybe time to “grow up a little bit.” It was one of those incidents that reporters love to deem a “black eye,” and the word “embarrassment” certainly got thrown around.

  But here’s the thing. That night wasn’t so much the exception as it was the rule.

  “They just got caught,” Adam Burish says with a laugh. “It was the same thing every night in almost every city.”

  Those Blackhawks teams were the last of a dying breed—a group of kids who genuinely enjoyed each other’s company and who spent nearly every off night (and then some) painting the town red. They were modern-day throwbacks—hard-drinking, hard-living, hard-working, seemingly invincible twentysomethings who came along just before Twitter and Instagram put the fear of God into every ­athlete and celebrity.