99

by Al Strachan

  “People often ask me about my favourite record,” Gretzky said in 2013, “and I tell them that that’s the one. I know that records are made to be broken, and that’s one of the attractions of sport, but I think that one will be the hardest to break.”

  Gretzky was already the dominant player in the game by the time of that accomplishment, even though he was only twenty. He had tied (at least) for one scoring title, run away with a second, and was off to another hot start. Going into the December 30, 1981, game against the Philadelphia Flyers, he had forty-five goals in thirty-eight games and already, the coveted fifty-goal target was in his sights.

  “I felt sure that I was going to get fifty in fifty,” he said, “but I didn’t think I was going to get to fifty that night. You don’t go into a game thinking you’re going to get five, but I did feel that if I got an early goal, I could get two or three and then be really close to fifty.”

  At that time, the Flyers were a strong defensive team, and their goalie, Pete Peeters, was one of the league’s best. Although the Edmonton fans were always optimistic about Gretzky’s chances, it seemed likely that he’d have to wait until 1982 to break the record.

  “I did get an early goal, and it was kind of fluky,” Gretzky recalled in 2006, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the feat. “The puck took a strange bounce off the boards and came right to me. Pete Peeters hadn’t expected it, and all I had to do was put it on the net. The strange thing is that if I’d been really sharp, I could probably have had eight or nine goals that night. After I got the fourth and was at forty-nine, I had about three or four really great chances, and each time, I thought I was going to get the fiftieth, but Peeters made great saves.

  “Once I got the fourth, I was sure I was going to hit fifty that night, but then, as the game went on, I was starting to wonder.”

  Despite all the attention being paid to Gretzky and his record, there was still a game going on. In the last minute, the Oilers led 6–5 and, naturally, the Flyers pulled Peeters for an extra attacker. The Oilers were in their own end when the puck came to Gretzky on the right side. With the Flyers pressing for a goal, they were using a forward, Bill Barber, on the left point. A defenceman might have been able to stop Gretzky, but Barber had no chance.

  Gretzky gathered up the puck and roared into the middle of the ice as Barber tried to keep up and block him, but to no avail. Gretzky gained the blue line with Barber still unable to get in front of him and slid the puck into the empty net. Fifty goals in thirty-nine games!

  Maurice Richard had been the first to score fifty goals in a season when he did it in fifty games in 1944–45, but with so many NHL stars serving with the Canadian forces in the Second World War, the level of competition was not what it might have been.

  The only other player who had scored fifty goals in fifty games was Mike Bossy of the New York Islanders. He did it in 1979 on a powerful team that in the subsequent season started its run of four consecutive Stanley Cups.

  But Gretzky scored fifty goals in thirty-nine games on a team that was in only its third year in the NHL and was stocked with kids and cast-offs. Furthermore, although few people realize it now, the ice in the Northlands Coliseum, where Gretzky played half his games, was horrible. Later on, to make sure that his stars could exhibit their skills fully, Sather got the ice upgraded, but in the early years, in an attempt to save money, the Northlands management insisted that the old, inferior system remain in place. Gretzky and his mates were forever fighting bouncing pucks.

  The hockey world duly took notice of Gretzky’s fast fifty, but by that time, his amazing performances were becoming almost commonplace. In his second year in the league, he had broken the single-season point record that had been held by Phil Esposito. He also broke Bobby Orr’s single-season assist record. He was clearly on his way to breaking Esposito’s record of seventy-six goals in a season. As it happened, he ended up with ninety-two and added 120 assists, thereby becoming the first NHL player to crack the two-hundred-point barrier in a season.

  Over the course of his career, Gretzky had four seasons with more than two hundred points. No other player has ever reached two hundred.

  Gretzky’s phenomenal achievements instilled confidence in his teammates—perhaps too much confidence. The Oilers gained a reputation as a brash, cocky team. In many ways, they deserved that reputation. Gretzky himself was never arrogant or cocksure. He worked hard not to appear to belittle his opponents, but not everyone followed his example.

  It was understandable. The old veterans who had made up much of the original expansion team had been replaced. Now the team was composed mostly of youngsters who, partly because of their NHL status and partly because of their intimate association with Gretzky’s feats, were idolized wherever they went. Swelled heads were inevitable. How many of us can say that, at that age, in that situation, we would be any different?

  Coach Glen Sather did an excellent job of keeping the young players more or less in line. He developed a close association with the Edmonton police department so that misdemeanours that might embarrass the team could be cleared up and hidden from the media. He also developed a tame media corps so that if a reporter did stumble upon a story, he could probably be convinced to keep it to himself.

  It must be made clear that in this area, Gretzky, who was always meticulous about maintaining an immaculate reputation, gave Sather no trouble. There were no hidden stories involving Gretzky’s misbehaviour because there was no Gretzky misbehaviour.

  Most of the time, he ate dinner at home—often with Mark Messier, who, for four years, lived in the same apartment building. When Gretzky went out for dinner and had a drink, he never drove. Whenever he was out in public, he always made sure there was someone around who could corroborate his side of the story, should there be an accusation that he had done something wrong. From the beginning, he has been acutely aware that he is always in the public eye and therefore in the media spotlight. He also knows that if the media latch on to a story that becomes a case of one person’s word against another, the allegation never goes away, even if it is later proved to be unfounded.

  In trying to keep his young team under control, Sather was always walking a tightrope. On the one hand, he wanted to convince them that they could take no opponent lightly, but at the same time, he was trying to instill a swagger that gave them enough confidence to win the Stanley Cup. In sports, when the matchup involves boys against men, the boys rarely win.

  After all, while Gretzky’s records were admirable and the players were having a great time running up big scores, the Stanley Cup was still the goal.

  After only three seasons of existence, the Oilers finished second in the regular-season standings and appeared to be well on their way to that coveted Cup. The much-heralded five-year concept appeared to have been a far too pessimistic projection.

  But the road to the Stanley Cup is not a freeway. It is a bumpy, grinding, demanding track. The Oilers had learned a lot of lessons about regular-season play, but as Gretzky pointed out much later in life, “I always say that there are four NHL seasons every year. First, there’s the exhibition season. Next comes the regular season, which is a lot tougher. Then there’s the playoffs, which are played at a whole different level. Then comes the finals, and that’s another thing altogether.”

  In 1982, Gretzky hadn’t learned that lesson. He was about to.

  By the time the playoffs opened that year, the Oilers had emerged as Canada’s team. The Toronto Maple Leafs and Montreal Canadiens still had fervent followers from coast to coast, but the Oilers were the darlings of fans whose allegiances weren’t as deeply ingrained, a whole new wave of followers.

  There was no official survey to prove this point, but those of us who bounced around the country covering hockey in all its venues couldn’t help but notice that in the shopping centres, in the schoolyards and on the streets, there were more of the blue-orange-and-white Oilers sweaters than any other kind.

  The country was going through difficu
lt economic times in 1982, and for adults, the Oilers provided a brief escape from reality. For youngsters, the Oilers were a team with dash and flair—the new kids on the block to whom the next generation could relate.

  Much of this, of course, had to do with Gretzky. The Oilers were led by a born-and-bred, truly Canadian superstar whose image was squeaky clean and whose record-shattering performances were so remarkable that they almost appeared to be the stuff of fiction.

  The rest of the Oilers, for the most part, were a group of kids who not only played the game with speed and grace, but clearly were delighting themselves in the process. They roared around the arenas of the National Hockey League scoring more than five goals a night on average and showing such exuberance that there was no doubt that they were having great fun.

  They hadn’t been in the league long enough to get involved in the peripheral issues. Fans heard only about the Edmonton players, not their agents, their lawyers or their accountants.

  There was no hint of dissension, and often Sather’s biggest problem at practice was that the players were fooling around too much. They did their usual hockey drills but also liked to stage contests amongst themselves. Who could shoot a puck that would knock a rolling puck off the dasher board? Who could shoot from centre ice and hit the crossbar? Who could balance a stick vertically on his nose the longest?

  By virtue of their second-place finish, the Oilers were to open the playoffs at home with a best-of-five series against the fifteenth-place Los Angeles Kings. The Oilers had lost five games at home all season. The Kings had won only five road games.

  The Oilers were thirty-one games over .500. The Kings were seventeen games under. The Oilers had earned 111 points, the Kings sixty-three.

  The series started off exactly as expected. The Kings tried to intimidate the Oilers, a strategy which resulted in their being down 4–1 before the game was ten minutes old. To that point, the Oilers had made the Kings pay for their transgressions and remained poised.

  Suddenly, that poise and discipline disappeared. Although the Oilers could hardly have foreseen it at the time, that was the high point of the series for them. Sather made tactical errors; the players ignored the game plan; the confidence that had served the team so well in the regular season and made them believe they could score enough goals to compensate for mistakes backfired. Even Gretzky had a bad series.

  Not long after the Oilers built that early lead, Dave Semenko made an awful play, and Sather benched him. Sitting down your toughest player in a game where the opponents have clearly shown an inclination towards intimidation is a questionable strategy. “That was the best thing he could have done for us,” chuckled star forward Charlie Simmer of the Kings afterwards.

  Over the course of the game, Los Angeles scored four power-play goals and was up 9–8 late in the third period. It was not exactly a demonstration of the tight playoff hockey for which the NHL is known. Then Gretzky caught the contagion of ineptitude. He had a clean breakaway with ninety seconds left but flubbed the shot, dribbling the puck towards goaltender Mario Lessard. An empty-netter made the final score 10–8.

  In Game Two, the Oilers gave every indication that they had learned their lesson. This time, they did everything a playoff team should do. The intensity was there. The goaltending was sound. The discipline was unparalleled. Even though the Kings were playing inspired hockey, Gretzky gave the Oilers a 3–2 victory in overtime.

  The series moved to Los Angeles, where the Oilers went right for the jugular and rolled to a 5–0 lead after two periods. Kings owner Dr. Jerry Buss went home claiming he didn’t feel well.

  Los Angeles forward Dave Taylor didn’t blame him. “I wouldn’t feel too well, either, if my team was down 5–0 after two periods,” he said.

  But Buss missed the team’s greatest moment under his ownership: the famed Miracle on Manchester, named after the street on which the Fabulous Forum was located.

  Even L.A. coach Don Perry hadn’t expected what was to come. “I just told them to go out and play like it was 0–0,” he said. “Play a good period and maybe it would carry over to the next game. I never thought we could win. I’ve never seen anything like this in all my years of hockey.”

  What he saw was a five-goal outburst by the Kings, the fifth coming with five seconds left in regulation time after Gretzky, of all people, lost control of the puck deep in his own end. Then, in the overtime, the Kings needed only 2:35 to win it on a goal by Daryl Evans.

  Gretzky scored twice and added two assists in the 6–5 loss but saw himself as one of the culprits. “It was stupid hockey,” he said. “Wasn’t it bad enough that we killed so many penalties in the first two periods without being stupid enough to take more? We were stupid enough to think it wouldn’t catch up to us. It did.

  “This series should be over now. We blew a 4–1 lead in Game One and a 5–0 lead tonight. We should be catching the plane home now instead of going into Game Four with our backs against the wall.

  “Now there are five or six of us who are a game away from having to go to Europe [to play for Team Canada in the world championships] instead of being two series away from the Stanley Cup final.”

  For all their flash and glitz, the Oilers had not learned to deal with playoff hockey. Even today, the referees tend to be lenient in the post-season, but at that time, the lone referee ignored incidents that would have earned penalties in February. In playoff overtime, nothing short of an axe murder would earn a penalty.

  The Kings were clearly trying to intimidate the Oilers, but instead of shrugging off the infractions and waiting for power plays that would inevitably come—although perhaps not as often as they might have liked—the Oilers retaliated.

  Of the five goals the Kings scored in that fateful third period, two were scored while the teams were playing four on four and two were on the power play.

  Gretzky, unused to such treatment, had fallen prey to the tactic like everyone else. He had taken thirteen minors in the entire eighty-game season, but had four in the three playoff games.

  The Los Angeles players were trash talking. They told him he was gutless because he wouldn’t get involved in the many scrums. They told him he was a crybaby. They told him he was spoiled. Jay Wells, the Kings defenceman designated to neutralize Gretzky, was especially caustic. “He thinks he’s too good to do anything but score,” he told the media after one game.

  When the jostling started, the Forum fans tended to join in with their chant of “Kill Gretzky! Kill Gretzky!”

  But Gretzky was doing what Sather had demanded. On one occasion in Game Three, nine players charged into a melee. All were given penalties ranging from five minutes to the duration of the game. Gretzky stayed out and was not penalized.

  When I asked Gretzky if he wanted to respond to Wells, he said he didn’t. “Jay Wells is a nobody,” he said, which seemed a pretty good response from somebody who wasn’t responding. “I just go out and do my job on the ice, and hopefully, he’ll do his job, whatever his job is.”

  The Oilers won the fourth game, but they were no longer the confident, swaggering kids who had steamrolled the NHL in the regular season. They were playing desperate hockey, a concept that, prior to the playoffs, had been foreign territory. Instead of being loose, they were tight. Instead of playing with confidence, they were playing scared, getting rattled, and, as a result, taking stupid penalties.

  They took an ill-advised penalty early in the deciding game, and the Kings went in front. The Oilers came back but took yet another stupid penalty, and the Kings scored again. This time, they stayed in front, and the Oilers, the prohibitive favourites, the darlings of Canadian hockey, were out of the playoffs. Gretzky and a few of his teammates were heading to Europe.

  The only bright side was that valuable lessons had been learned. After three years, the Oilers had started to progress down the four-stage path to the Stanley Cup that Gretzky had spelled out: exhibition hockey, regular-season hockey, playoff hockey and Cup final hockey.

 
The exhibition season didn’t really matter, although throughout his career, Gretzky played in every game because he knew that fans had paid to see him, even if it was the preseason.

  When I asked him about that in 2013, he chortled. “Strach, every year I played fourteen exhibition games,” he said. Players of Gretzky’s calibre usually play no more than six exhibition games. “One year, we went to the Stanley Cup finals—we beat Philly that year in seven games. I played in the Canada Cup—beat the Russians in three games, and Slats gave us four days off, and then I played in twelve exhibition games. Then we went to the Stanley Cup finals again that year and beat Boston.”

  “Slats was really good about it,” Gretzky continued. “It was a choice of staying after the morning skate and staying for an hour or playing in the game that night. I’d rather play.

  “Mess and I were the same way. We’d play every game. We didn’t care. We just played. That’s what we do. It didn’t bother us at all.

  “The Oilers would go into places like Dallas and Tampa Bay and Miami and Atlanta—places that didn’t have teams in those days. They just wanted to make money, and we didn’t care. We enjoyed it. What else are you going to do? You might as well play.

  “The crazy thing was that Slats would play those games like they were playoff games. He’d double-shift guys and have you killing penalties and be out on the power play. It wasn’t like he was rolling four lines. He always played to win. He wouldn’t know how to not do that.

  “I remember we were playing an exhibition game in Dallas in September when they didn’t have an NHL team, and Mess and I were double-shifting!”

  Sather had played for the Montreal Canadiens when Sam Pollock was the general manager and had picked up one of Pollock’s commandments: When you’ve got the sweater on, you always play to win, no matter what the stakes might be.

  The 1982–83 Oilers clearly knew how to win in the regular season, and after the Los Angeles humiliation of the previous spring, they knew through bitter experience the kind of hockey that was needed to win in the playoffs.