by Al Strachan
In fact, it was clear to Gretzky that in some areas, Lemieux’s skills were superior to his own. Accordingly, once the tournament got under way and a detrimental tendency began to appear, Gretzky felt the need to lay down the law. Although he and Lemieux weren’t always on the ice at the same time, they played together often enough that an understanding was necessary. On one occasion, they had generated a break and as they closed in, Gretzky set up Lemieux. Lemieux passed the puck back to Gretzky.
Afterwards, Gretzky announced the future strategy: he would make the passes; Lemieux would take the shots.
Gretzky tries to avoid confirming that he told Lemieux how to play. At first, he put it this way: “All I ever said was, ‘Just watch Mess and me. Be the first guy to practice. Practise hard.’ It was not so much what we told him. We just said, ‘Watch.’
“If Mike said, ‘We’re going to do twenty-five minutes of skating,’ we’d say, ‘All right. Let’s go.’ Don’t say, ‘Aww, jeez.’ ”
Gretzky says the message was “Watch.” But the implicit message was “Watch, learn and copy.”
Others involved in the tournament say that, as the camp progressed, Gretzky became increasingly unhappy with Lemieux’s behaviour. The team’s home base was Montreal, and Lemieux, on familiar turf and away from the rigours of league play, was enjoying himself—perhaps a bit too much.
Finally, at practice one day, Gretzky exploded.
He told Lemieux he had too much talent to be wasting it this way. He told him that he was letting everyone down—the coaches, his fans, his family and his teammates. He told him that together, they could form an unbeatable tandem, but they could do it only if Lemieux dedicated himself to the game.
That story circulated for some time without corroboration, but finally, more than a decade later, Keenan confirmed it. “I saw that happen on the ice,” he said. “I saw Wayne give it to him.… That’s when Mario became a player.”
It was in the following season that Lemieux, for the first time, showed the domination that everyone knew had been lurking in the background and won his first scoring title.
As expected, the Canadians and the Soviets met in the finals. There were some missteps for Canada along the way, including a 9–4 loss to the Soviets in a pre-tournament exhibition game, but by the time the final rolled around, no one really cared about the run-up. When Canada and the Soviets had met in the round robin, the hockey was delightful and the result was a 3–3 tie. A spectacular best-of-three final series was widely anticipated by the fans, and that’s exactly what they got.
The opener was played in Montreal, and although the Canadians fell behind 4–1 in the second period, they stormed back and Gretzky scored to give Canada a 5–4 lead with less than three minutes remaining in regulation time.
But Andrei Khomutov brought the Soviets back thirty-two seconds later, and then, 5:33 into overtime, Alexander Semak took a shot that banked off Gretzky’s skate and careened past Grant Fuhr to give the Soviet Union the win.
Merely reciting the scoring plays doesn’t come close to recreating the drama and the excitement. The entire game was played at breakneck speed, yet there were still crunching checks and glorious defensive plays that matched the calibre of the offensive play.
“That was probably the last of the Russian dynasty,” said Bourque. “It was the best hockey I’ve ever been a part of. The pace was incredible.”
Even in overtime—what there was of it—neither team withdrew into a defensive shell, and, as had been the case in regulation time, Keenan was using Gretzky as much as possible.
Walter Gretzky had no problem with how many times his son went on the ice in that game. But he was less happy about how many times he came off. “My dad was really mad at me,” said Gretzky years later, when we were reminiscing about that game. “He said, ‘Don’t you ever do that again!’
“That’s really something, when you’ve just lost a game, and your dad is blaming you for it. He said I had stayed on the ice too long in overtime, and I was on the ice when they scored the winner.
“I’ll never forget it. I had asked Mike if my dad could go on the charter from Montreal to Hamilton, and Mike said, ‘Sure.’
“So we’re getting onto the bus and my dad says, ‘How are you feeling?’
“ ‘I’m a little tired,’ I said.
“He said, ‘No. I mean how are you feeling?’
“I said, ‘What do you mean?’
“This is what his exact words were. He said, ‘You lost the game.’ That’s what he told me.
“I said, ‘What?’
“He said, ‘You stayed on the ice too long on the fifth goal, the one to tie it. You shouldn’t have been out there.’
“I’m thinking, ‘Oh yeah. This is going to be a nice flight.’
“I said, ‘I’ve just got you a ride on the charter and you’re telling me that?’ ”
Wayne always took his father’s criticisms to heart. There’s no doubt that he was determined that his father would have no cause for complaint after Game Two. The result was, by his own estimation, “the greatest game I ever played in my life.”
He had other great games, but they weren’t a patch on this one. “Second is not even close,” he said.
There could hardly be a better time to produce it. The Canadians had already lost one game in the best-of-three series, and they were facing what was indisputably one of the greatest teams in the history of the sport.
“I think at that time, the Russian team was the best team in the world,” said Gretzky years later. “The level they were at, they could have beaten any NHL team. You always go against the level of the team you’re playing against, and that was twenty great players. I didn’t get a goal, but that was the best game I ever played.”
No, he didn’t get a goal. He did, however, get five assists.
Canada came out blazing and had no fewer than fourteen clear-cut scoring chances in the first period. Many NHL games don’t produce fourteen scoring chances, even if you combine the efforts of both teams. But the Soviet team was no NHL team. It had the ability to weather the storm and fight back to create chances of its own. Once again, regulation time ended in a 5–5 tie, and once again, the two teams had put on a magnificent display of hockey.
In overtime, the end-to-end play and the glorious scoring opportunities kept coming, but the goalies were equal to the task, and halfway through the second overtime, the score still stood at 5–5.
Gretzky was rarely off the ice. Keenan kept sending him out, and Gretzky, ever obedient to a coach’s desires, kept going over the boards. Years later, he told me he was so dog-tired that he was sitting on the bench and no longer had the strength to control his bladder. He started to urinate. “I didn’t have enough energy to stop,” he said.
“Mike kept going, ‘Gretz, are you ready?’ I said, ‘Mike, I just sat down.’ ”
But Keenan was ruthless. He kept sending Gretzky out, and finally, at 10:06 of the second overtime, the now-established strategy came into play. Gretzky could shoot or he could pass to Lemieux. He passed. Lemieux shot. Game over.
It was Gretzky’s fifth assist of the night and Lemieux’s third goal.
Clearly, barring a disaster in Game Three, this was destined to be a series for the ages. Gretzky was exhausted, and after the game, he sank back into the passenger seat of his dad’s car. He was going to spend the night in his boyhood home in nearby Brantford.
“We were driving home and my dad says, ‘What time do you want to get up?’ and it dawned on me. I said, ‘I can’t believe it. I’ve got to go to practice in the morning. Mike is having us practise.’ My dad says, ‘I’m going to call him.’ ”
As a father, Walter wanted to shelter his son. But as a hockey coach and the man who had instilled so many admirable qualities into that son, he knew the response. Wayne told him to do no such thing.
“Getting up for practice after a game like that was unusual back then,” he recalled. “But Mike was ahead of his time. Nowadays, the
way we analyze sports, it’s better for you to get up and just go and do a light workout. You’ll feel better the next day than if you sleep in and lie around all day.”
It seemed that the entire country was caught up in the excitement surrounding Game Three. This was fifteen years after the famous Summit Series and a whole new generation of hockey fans had grown up listening to stories of the “greatest series ever.” Now it appeared that accolade was to be passed on.
The players were as ebullient as the fans. “The energy in the room was incredible,” said Keenan decades later. “I’ve never felt it before or since in any team I’ve ever coached. The Stanley Cup team that I had in New York in 1994 was a special team, but with that Team Canada in 1987, you’re talking about the elite of the elite, and the energy in the room was unbelievable.
“It was kind of like you couldn’t walk on the floor almost. You were above it. But they were very quiet, very serious. They had this rhythm going, this energy getting ready.”
Keenan paused, then smiled. “Then we came out and we were getting smoked.” Eight minutes into the game, the Soviets were up 3–0.
Looking back, Keenan was able to take that development lightly. But he certainly didn’t take it lightly at the time.
Was it to be a repeat of the Challenge Cup embarrassment, when the two teams split the first two games, and then the Soviets won the third 6–0? Was it to be a repeat of the 1981 Canada Cup embarrassment, when the Soviets beat Canada 8–1 in the final game?
This game had hardly started, but already, Keenan had been double-shifting Gretzky. He was exhausted. “He said, ‘I need a break.’ I could see it anyway,” said Keenan. “He was gaunt. He had played his best hockey and it was a super-exhilarating pace, and he said, ‘I need a break.’
“I said, ‘You’ve got it.’ That’s why I changed it up a bit.”
Instead of going to his finesse players when the team needed a lift, he went elsewhere, sending out Rick Tocchet, Brent Sutter and Dale Hawerchuk. “I said, ‘You guys go out and change this whole game plan because these Soviets are used to finesse and skill. They aren’t used to people hammering them and grinding them.’ That’s when the grinders went out.”
They did their job. Tocchet, at the end of a long shift, scored, and Canada was back in it.
Gretzky remembered Keenan’s change in tactics well. “We were down 3–0 and I looked at him,” he said, “and he sat us down a little bit and played a whole bunch of different guys. That was what made that team great. Rick Tocchet scored. Brent Sutter scored. Those guys got us back in the game.
“People forget we were out of it. I was sitting on the bench thinking, ‘We came all the way back in that game two nights ago and now we’re going to lose like this?’
“Grant Fuhr shut the door. Brian Propp was playing great. He scored, too. All of a sudden, we’re back in the game again and away we went.”
The grinders did more than score. They set the tone. The end-to-end hockey was still there, but now it was being punctuated by Soviets being plastered against the glass or flattened against the boards. In the crucial area behind the net, the Canadian forwards were especially effective, and the longer the game went, the more that region was ceded to Team Canada. In fact, of the five goals Canada scored that night on the way towards the apparently mandatory 5–5 tie in the late stages, four started behind the Soviet goal. “It was fierce, the infighting in that trench area,” recalled Keenan. “That’s where they won those battles to come out and stuff the puck into the net. They weren’t pretty, but it didn’t matter.”
Now the stage was set for more heroics. The clock was ticking down, and with less than two minutes to play, the Canadians set up for a potentially dangerous faceoff in their own end. “The little bit of a surprise,” recalled Keenan, “was that everybody thought I was going to send out Mess to take the faceoff because it was in our zone.”
Instead, he sent out Hawerchuk.
Keenan liked to go with the hot hand. Hawerchuk was having a good night, and Keenan knew his capabilities well. He had coached him in junior hockey. The other two on the line? Who else but Gretzky and Lemieux?
“I was sitting at the cottage back in July,” said Keenan. “I was thinking even then that this would be the matchup in the finals.
“I thought, ‘We’ve got to have something ready for this team we’re going to be playing in the finals, and the thing I thought about was the combination of Wayne and Mario with Mario playing right wing for Wayne, but I wouldn’t show it until the end of the tournament because I didn’t want anybody to pre-scout us before that and get an idea of what was coming. We had only a few things that would make a difference, and that was one of them.”
Then came The Goal. With the exception of Paul Henderson’s famous goal in the 1972 series, probably no goal has ever been shown so often on Canadian television.
Hawerchuk justified Keenan’s hunch by pushing the puck ahead as Lemieux moved into the circle. “Mario came across with the big reach and tipped it,” said Keenan, “and away they went.”
Lemieux squeezed between two Soviet forwards to get the puck, and as they lunged, they knocked each other down. Before they could get up, Lemieux lured another Soviet out of position by chipping the puck past the pinching defenceman.
Now the puck was out over the blue line and the Canadians were flying towards the Soviet end in possession of the puck. To be specific, Gretzky was in possession of the puck, having picked it up when Lemieux chipped it.
Somehow, defenceman Larry Murphy was in front of both of them, spearheading the attack. When Gretzky crossed the blue line, Murphy went to the net, pulling the Soviet defenceman with him, but he was still open for a pass.
Gretzky knew what he had taught Lemieux: I pass; you shoot.
Lemieux took the perfect pass in the high slot, cruised a few feet and snapped a wrist shot that goalie Sergei Mylnikov waved at but had no hope of catching. Canada was up 6–5 with only 1:26 remaining.
“Mario did what Gretz had told him,” said Keenan. “He had told Mario, ‘Don’t pass it back to me. You bury it.’ Murph was a good decoy, and Mario buried it.”
Many years later, Gretzky confirmed what he wouldn’t admit at the time, but many people knew. He had indeed told Mario the tactical approach he wanted from him.
“You know what I remember most?” Gretzky asked as we reminisced about that tournament. “We were playing the Czechs, and Mario and I had a two-on-one. You know me. I made the pass, and Mario passed it back to me and I missed.
“So we go to the bench, and I looked at Mario and I said, ‘Mario, don’t take this the wrong way.’ I said, ‘I know I have more goals than you, but you’re a better goal scorer than I am. You’re a natural goal scorer. When I give you the puck, just shoot it. That’s why I’m giving it to you. You’re stronger. You’re bigger. You just shoot it. I’m going to give it to you at the last second to make the play.’
“He said, ‘Okay.’
“That’s what I remember about that last goal. We got the puck. Larry Murphy might as well have been my dad. He was never going to see the puck. But in fairness to Larry Murphy, not everyone would have done what he did.
“He went to the net. How many times in practice do you say, ‘First guy go to the net’? If he doesn’t go to the net, there’s no play.
“So Larry Murphy, he does exactly what he needs to do. He goes to the net. I give it to Mario and I’m thinking, ‘Shoot it. Don’t give it back to me.’ And actually, when I passed it to him, I went like this.” Gretzky pulled his hands up towards his chest. “Like I don’t have a stick. I don’t want it back, because I know Mario can shoot the puck better than anybody in hockey. He put it in the perfect spot.”
“I was doing my part,” laughed Murphy when we spoke at his 2005 induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame. “I was a decoy. That’s what they get for worrying about me. Mario made them pay.”
The Canadians hung on for the final eighty-six seconds, and the 1987 Canada Cup w
as theirs.
It was a magnificent series, not only for Canada but for hockey lovers everywhere. The skill level was astonishing, the action was relentless, and big leads came and went.
But it was an especially sweet moment for a new generation of Canadian fans, coming fifteen years after the Summit Series. Perhaps there’s something to that number. The next seminal moment in Canadian hockey was to come a further fifteen years later, when Gretzky, by then an executive, built the team that won the gold medal at the 2002 Olympics.
But as a player, 1987 was his finest hour. He was named the most valuable player. He led the tournament with eighteen assists—Sergei Makarov was second with eight. The goal-scoring leader was Mario Lemieux with eleven.
During Lemieux’s career, there were often suggestions that he and Gretzky were not close. Those suggestions invariably came from people who knew neither man.
When Gretzky retired in 1999, his final game was against Lemieux’s Pittsburgh Penguins. “I almost cried a couple of times,” said Lemieux. “I caught myself, but I remembered the way I felt in Pittsburgh when I skated around and thanked the fans and everybody that had been a part of my career.
“To see Wayne on the ice and to see him cry the way he did, it was very emotional. But I was very happy for him, that he’s doing what he’s doing.”
Lemieux was both gracious and lavish in his praise of Gretzky. “He’s such a great ambassador,” he said. “He has been a great gentleman for as long as I can remember.”
He went on to speak of that fateful 1987 Canada Cup series, when Gretzky pushed him to become better, and confirmed Gretzky’s impact on his development. “I think that in 1987, playing with him in the Canada Cup and having a chance to play and practise with him for six weeks, was a great thing,” Lemieux said. “He really showed me how to be a winner, how hard you have to work to become the number-one player in the world. It certainly doesn’t come easy.
