99

by Al Strachan

  “I didn’t realize how light it was,” said Dave Semenko with a grin.

  “I almost dropped it that time,” chuckled Gretzky years later, “but by the fourth time, I was really good at it.”

  That triumph saw the beginning of what is now a tradition—the players taking turns with the Cup over the course of the summer. “Glen came in the room,” recalled Gretzky, “and he said, ‘You guys won it. You take it.’ It saw all of Edmonton for three days.”

  The Cup was sweet vindication for Gretzky. As he sat in the room in his champagne-soaked underwear, he said, “All the stories written about us, even the nice ones, have always said, ‘But they have never won the Stanley Cup.’ Now I won’t have to read that again.”

  But he could read about one of the few successful five-year plans in hockey history. The Oilers had just completed their fifth year of NHL existence.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Wayne Gretzky was only twenty years old when he first wore a Team Canada sweater at the professional level. The occasion was the 1981 Canada Cup, a tournament orchestrated by Alan Eagleson for the usual two reasons: First, to make money for Alan Eagleson; second, to give Canada an opportunity to claim dominance in international hockey.

  It was successful in the former aim, but less so in the latter, and as for being a learning experience for Gretzky, it mostly involved learning mistakes to avoid.

  In the years to come, this maturity proved to be beneficial to Canada. By the time the next Canada Cup rolled around, in 1984, Gretzky was far and away the best player in the world, and his views were given serious consideration by management. The longer he stayed in hockey, the more this was the case. His exposure to the pitfalls of international tournaments allowed him to be influential in helping organizers avoid them in the future.

  But in 1981, he was just a kid, too young to go into bars in the United States. He was in awe of many of the players on the team and, like most players of any age, scared stiff of Scott Bowman, the coach.

  Gretzky quickly learned that when a team represents Canada, politics can never be avoided. The players had to scrap their CCM Team Canada practice jerseys because Quebec law didn’t allow any form of advertising that did not include French in larger letters. Since CCM had no Équipe Canada sweaters, the Team Canada sweaters had to go. After all, NHL players wearing unilingual sweaters while they practised could do irreparable damage to the status of the French language in Quebec.

  Gretzky also learned that most high-level players hate training camps—and for that matter, tryout camps. Those concepts were to disappear in the years to come, but in 1981, both were firmly entrenched.

  The players arrived in Montreal for the camp a full two weeks before the first exhibition game, and on most days, they practised twice. Even for the NHL season, players showed up only four or five days before the first exhibition game. There was no shortage of grumbling.

  Furthermore, half the players who sacrificed part of their summer break to come to the camp didn’t make the cut. To elite players, many of whom had never failed to make a team in their lives, this was an acute embarrassment, and it subsequently became clear that this process was not the ideal way to form a national team.

  But as usual, Gretzky was focused on the positive aspects, and when he learned that Guy Lafleur was going to be his linemate, he was ecstatic. Even though Gordie Howe had always been his biggest hero, Lafleur was high on the list. At the same time, he saw absolutely nothing wrong with the concept of having Steve Shutt as the third member of the line.

  Shutt, Lafleur and Jacques Lemaire had been the dominant line in the NHL until Lemaire left for Switzerland two years earlier. Having Gretzky replace Lemaire seemed like an excellent idea.

  “We talked about this as far back as May,” said Gretzky. “It’s quite an honour. I’m going to listen to what the other two have to say, and then we’ll go through the process of getting used to each other. I’ve got to see where each one goes under different circumstances.

  “I’d like to let Guy or Steve do most of the puck carrying,” he said. “I rarely carry the puck between the blue lines. I let the good puck handlers do that.”

  Lafleur wasn’t sure he agreed with Gretzky’s assessment of his own puck-handling abilities, but he had no objection to the strategy.

  “Wayne is a specialist once he’s inside the blue line,” he said. “Once he has control of the puck, they can’t get it off him. He just waits and waits until he can see somebody open, then he gets the puck there.”

  Lafleur also liked the idea of Gretzky taking charge once the line established possession in the offensive zone. “He’s always in control,” he said. “He’s not a mad dog out there. He knows where he’s going, and that’s very important if the line is going to be successful.”

  The last time Lafleur and Shutt had played in a meaningful game, they had been victims of Gretzky’s wizardry. In what was a stunning upset, the fourteenth-place Oilers, who had barely squeaked into the playoffs, had swept the mighty third-place Montreal Canadiens in the best-of-five first round.

  Even before that, Gretzky had opened the eyes of a lot of hockey fans, having won the Hart Trophy as the league’s most valuable player in each of his first two seasons. He had just won the scoring title, and there’s no doubt that his name was certainly well known. But it was that upset of the Canadiens that made most Canadians aware of his talent. In that era, communication was not what it is today. The Oilers’ games were rarely televised in Edmonton, let alone anywhere else. Hockey fans had seen the numbers that Gretzky had been putting up, but most of them had no idea how he did it.

  Then, in 1981, as the Oilers faced the Canadiens on Hockey Night in Canada, amazed fans saw a player who dominated the game from behind the net, of all places. This wasn’t the way hockey was supposed to work. You were supposed to come down your wing and stay in your lane. If you had to go behind the net, you got back out front as quickly as possible.

  “Usually, I go into the corners or behind the net,” conceded Gretzky. “That’s basically my style. But we’ll have to work on learning each other’s style. If the line is going to be successful, everybody has got to be in there making plays.”

  Lafleur was willing to give it a try. “I’ve played with Steve for so many years now that he always knows what I’m going to do,” he said. “He knows if I turn this way, I’m going to drop the puck. He knows if I turn that way, I’m going to shoot. I think what Steve and I have to get used to is those plays Wayne makes behind the net. We’ve never practised that sort of play with the Canadiens and I don’t really know whether to stay on the wing or go to the net.

  “But we’ll work it out, and I’ll tell you one thing: it’s sure a lot better to play with him than against him.”

  He almost did neither. Gretzky, who has always been a very cautious driver, relied on others for rides around Montreal during training camp. When Lafleur offered him a ride to the suburban hotel and said he was fine to drive, Gretzky went with him. He idolized Lafleur, and if Lafleur said he was fine, Gretzky wasn’t going to argue.

  But Lafleur—who nearly killed himself driving home alone later in his career—lost control of his car and spun it on a Montreal expressway. Fortunately for Canada’s two greatest stars of the day, not to mention for the hockey world, the pair escaped harm.

  “He didn’t roll it, but it spun out in a 360,” said Gretzky in 2013. “It was wet that night. You know how when you’re going up a hill and you give it more gas and the wheels spin? We were driving back to the hotel and it did a full 360 almost twice. My goodness, we were so lucky. It was a busy highway. We were so lucky that no one hit us. I thought we were done. It was only about six or seven at night, so the road was still busy, and I still don’t like to think about it. I thought it was over.”

  Astonishingly, the story never got into the papers. In Quebec, a wayward sneeze by a hockey player is enough to warrant a three-page spread, but this one stayed under wraps.

  Clearly, to this poin
t in the Canada Cup tournament, Gretzky’s first professional international exposure left something to be desired.

  Although he and Lafleur worked well together, Bowman wanted more from the left winger, so he replaced Shutt with Gilbert Perreault. Now, the expected dominance of the line became evident in the exhibition games. In the opening game of the tournament, Gretzky, Lafleur and Perreault racked up a total of ten points, and Canada beat Finland 9–0.

  But in the fourth game of the tournament, Perreault, who had already accumulated nine points, broke his ankle. In another blow to Canada, goalie Billy Smith suffered a broken finger. Smith was also at the peak of his game. He had led the New York Islanders to the Stanley Cup three months earlier and, two years afterwards, won the Conn Smythe Trophy as the most outstanding player in the playoffs.

  Even so, Canada rolled through to the final game undefeated. But that was just a prologue. Now they were to play the Soviet Union head to head. The winner would get the Canada Cup.

  The Soviets had a powerful team. For the most part, this was the team that had embarrassed the NHL all-stars in the 1979 Challenge Cup, winning two of three games and taking the final game 6–0. But it had also suffered the embarrassment of losing to the United States at the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics in the “Miracle on Ice” and was eager to make amends.

  The Canadians started well, with almost total territorial domination in the first period. They outshot the Soviets 12–4 but couldn’t beat goaltender Vladislav Tretiak, who was nothing short of magnificent. Five days earlier, in a round-robin game that was basically meaningless, Vladimir Myshkin had been the Soviet netminder, and the Canadians put the puck past him seven times. But now Tretiak was in the net, and any confidence the Canadians might have felt quickly evaporated.

  The teams traded goals in the second period, but then Ray Bourque—who, like Gretzky, was only two years into his NHL career—bobbled the puck in front of his own net and handed it to Sergei Shepelev. Soviets don’t miss chances like that, and the Canadians were on the slippery slope.

  By the end of the period, the Soviets led 3–1, partly because they were playing exactly the way they needed to play to be successful. They were atoning for their weaknesses while the Canadians weren’t. Marcel Dionne had stepped into the breach to replace the injured Perreault, but the Soviets evaluated the situation and reacted accordingly. They opted for blanket coverage of Lafleur and Gretzky and left Dionne alone. The result was that Dionne had four great chances and missed all four. Gretzky and Lafleur were kept off the scoreboard.

  With both teams, the weakness was the defence corps, mostly composed of young players. At the slightest hint of pressure, the Soviet defencemen slammed the puck down the ice or flipped the puck into the stands. In those days, a team was free to pursue either tactic. You could change personnel after an icing and there was no penalty for putting the puck over the glass. The Canadian defencemen tried to be more creative and got burned.

  In the third period, Canada unravelled. When they went down by three goals, they clearly saw their fate. The Soviets, never ones to throttle back, kept coming and scored three more goals in the last five minutes. The final score was 8–1.

  Canadian goalie Mike Liut was never the same afterwards, but he really hadn’t played that badly. He didn’t make any sizzling saves, but the blame for the lopsided score should have been shared more than it was.

  The nation was outraged. It was asserted that Bowman had been outcoached, even though he had won five Stanley Cups. Liut was vilified. The players were judged to be overrated and lazy. Eagleson muttered something about never staging another Canada Cup.

  The next day, the prime minister staged a ceremony to honour the team. After all, they had done their best for Canada, even if they had lost a game. Only two players had the good grace to attend. Gretzky was one of them.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Gretzky hardly had time to catch a breath of summer air after winning his first Stanley Cup in 1984 before he was back in the rink—this time in Banff, Alberta.

  Alan Eagleson had decreed that it was time for another Canada Cup, another attempt to prove that Canada was at least the equal of the Soviet Union on the hockey rink. Similar quests had come to naught in the 1979 Challenge Cup and the 1981 Canada Cup, but thanks to Gretzky and the Oilers, North American hockey had changed. The Oilers had shown that their primarily Canadian brand of hockey was better than anything the rest of the National Hockey League had to offer. Now, the Oilers’ top players, along with some other stars from the rest of the league, hoped to show that the Canadian brand of hockey was even better than anything the rest of the world had to offer.

  Glen Sather, the man who managed and coached the Oilers, was selected to do the same for Team Canada. And in a remarkable coincidence, Banff, where Sather had a summer home, was chosen as the site for the initial training camp. Calgary and Edmonton, the two closest NHL cities, were selected as the sites for all the important games.

  A little clarification is needed for the claim that Sather was selected as coach and manager. He was selected as coach and one of the members of the managerial team. But it was always clear that he had more clout than others in the group, which included David Poile of the Washington Capitals, Serge Savard of the Montreal Canadiens, Emile Francis of the Hartford Whalers, John Ferguson of the Winnipeg Jets, Harry Sinden of the Boston Bruins and Bill Torrey of the New York Islanders.

  When Team Canada got off to a sluggish start, Sather staged a coup. He fired all the other managers, thereby confirming his status as the GM. His position was further confirmed by Eagleson. “Sather has had carte blanche since day one,” he said.

  Some of the departing GMs were miffed; most accepted their dismissal. Sather was his usual brash self. “What were we supposed to do,” he asked, “meet after every game and talk about line changes? Did they seriously think we could run a team by committee?” Apparently, they did. That’s why the committee was formed. But after the members gave their input, it was Sather who made the decisions.

  “I don’t want to make a big thing of this,” said John Ferguson. “I want Team Canada to do well. That’s why I got involved in the first place. We still see ourselves as part of the team, and I don’t want to say or do anything to hurt their chances.”

  What Sather wanted from his team was clear. He wanted an offence that was built around Gretzky, and he wanted a skating game that would allow Team Canada to beat the Soviets. The former was a foregone conclusion; the latter came as a surprise to many. Ever since the opening minutes of the famous 1972 Summit Series, Canadians had conceded that the Soviets were superior skaters. In subsequent head-to-head battles, Canadian strategy had been built on beating the Soviets in many areas, but not always legally and certainly not in the area of skating.

  Sather was convinced that times had changed. The Oilers’ high-tempo style, as exhibited not only by Gretzky, but also by Paul Coffey, Mark Messier and Glenn Anderson, had proved to be superior in the NHL. Now, the Edmonton stars were to be complemented by speedsters like Doug Wilson and the core players from the New York Islanders dynasty, including Bob Bourne, another strong, fast skater.

  At first, the concept showed every sign of being a dismal failure. Three games into the tournament, the Canadian record stood at 1–1–1. The win was against Germany, hardly a challenging opponent. Next came a tie with the United States, a team that in those days was pretty much on a par with Germany. Then came the loss to Sweden.

  In the post-game dressing room, with only one game left in the round-robin stage, Sather delivered a blistering verbal attack on his players, pulling no punches and naming names along the way. Gretzky’s was one of them.

  “You don’t like to hear it,” said Gretzky, “but you know he’s right. We were awful. It’s not just one or two guys, it’s all twenty. If we play like this again, we won’t make the playoffs.”

  The problem was a fairly simple one to identify: the team was not playing as a team. Instead of being united for a common
cause, three factions were going their separate ways. There was an Islanders group, an Oilers group and an everybody-else group. In any team sport, nothing will be accomplished if there is no sense of common purpose.

  After the loss to Sweden and with elimination looming if Canada lost the next game to the Czech Republic, Larry Robinson took charge.

  Later, Robinson would become Gretzky’s coach in Los Angeles, but at this point, Robinson was just an unhappy player. He had five Stanley Cups to his credit and was two years away from his sixth. Furthermore, he was generally conceded to be the toughest guy in the league. He was universally respected. And he was not the least bit pleased with what he saw.

  Accordingly, he stood up at a team meal and, like Sather, named names and pointed fingers. He said he had worked hard to establish his reputation and he had no intention of being part of a team that wound up embarrassing Canada because its players cared more about petty squabbles than national pride.

  If Canada failed, he said, fans wouldn’t blame it on the Islanders or the Oilers; they would blame it on the individual players. He wasn’t ready to accept that blame, and he didn’t want to be on the ice with anyone who did.

  The result followed a plotline that Hollywood would love—if Hollywood cared about hockey. Spurred by Robinson’s speech, the Islanders and Oilers played together as a unit. To show that he had received the message, Sather started a line composed of Islanders—rather than Gretzky’s line, which had started every other game. The Canadians handily defeated the Czechs and then went on to the semifinal against the Soviets, which turned out to be one of the best games ever played.

  “It wasn’t just the Larry Robinson speech,” recalled Gretzky as we reminisced about the series more than two decades later. “That was the big one, but before that, we were going along in our merry way, and as players, especially the Oilers guys, we didn’t realize or know there was any kind of friction between the Islanders guys and the Oilers guys. We honestly didn’t. We were just playing.