99

by Al Strachan

  It was typical Sather. He was smart enough to realize that his own players still held Gretzky in awe, and with a best-of-seven-game playoff series looming, he wanted to change that attitude. He had been taking occasional shots at Gretzky all season long, but now he accelerated his attacks. He made reference to Gretzky “sitting by his pool, sipping mint juleps.”

  He also said, “Over the years, he has developed an aura, a mystique. Much of it is crap, but his teammates believe he can do anything.”

  Offering his view that the November interview had been given out of spite, Sather asked, “Why would he go through all that trouble to cause aggravation and then go out and play golf with our guys?”

  The answer to that one was simple: Gretzky wasn’t upset with the Edmonton players; he was upset with Pocklington and Sather.

  Gretzky had heard all the innuendoes and said nothing. But when the matter came to a head with Sather’s remarks about his desertion of the Oilers and the implication of an oversized ego, he shot back.

  He had always tried to let the Oilers off the hook by publicly conceding Pocklington’s claim that he was backed into a corner. Not this time.

  “They say I had them over a barrel,” he said. “That’s not true. I wanted to stay in Edmonton. I offered to sign an eight-year deal. All they had to do was agree to a non-trade clause. They wouldn’t do it.”

  Once the series opened in Los Angeles, the war of words abated. Sather was now free to make a more tangible contribution by out-coaching Ftorek, which he did throughout. Gretzky was free to make his contribution by providing stellar play, and he made the most of his opportunity.

  From the Kings’ point of view, the series started with what the cynics saw as two setbacks. First, a debilitating flu bug attacked a pair of key players, Hrudey and John Tonelli. Second, the flu bug left Ftorek alone.

  The loss of Hrudey was especially significant, not only because his backup, Glenn Healy, had a record of 0–4 since Hrudey’s arrival in a February 21 trade, but also because the Kings were an offensively minded team and Hrudey was a far better puck handler than Healy.

  When Hrudey was in net, the Kings knew that a puck dumped into their zone would be properly handled. (In this era, the goalies were free to play the puck anywhere in their end.) After Ron Hextall, Hrudey was the best puck-handling netminder in the NHL. Like Martin Brodeur after him, Hrudey was excellent at firing the puck up the ice to a breaking forward, thereby starting the attack and trapping the opposition’s fore-checkers. Healy’s puck-handling was something of an adventure.

  Healy played well in the opener, and with Gretzky contributing about twenty minutes of ice time, the Kings built a 3–2 lead after two periods. But then Ftorek decided to limit Gretzky’s time, sat him on the bench for a six-minute stretch at one point, and the Oilers rallied to win 4–3. The Oilers got their fourth goal with twenty-six seconds left in the game. Even after that, Ftorek left Gretzky on the bench.

  Because the media tend to interview the winners, Gretzky was mostly ignored after that game. But when the Kings evened the series in the next game, Gretzky faced wave after wave of reporters who, in one form or another, asked the same question: How did he feel about having to go to Edmonton to face the Oilers?

  Gretzky danced around the question a few times, then finally said what everyone knew was the truth but wanted him to confirm: “The cheering is over. The formalities and the friendships are over. They’re the enemy now, and they expect to be the enemy. The guys over there feel the same way.”

  Strange as it may seem so many years after the fact, Gretzky’s admission, while clearly not a revelation, was something Canadians didn’t really want to hear. As long as he had continued to chat with his buddies on the Oilers, go golfing with them, and say how much he had loved life in Edmonton, the fact that he had left Canada, probably forever, was somehow diminished in importance. But now the issues could no longer be avoided.

  Gretzky could only hope that the situation might work in his favour. “Maybe I’ll be a distraction,” he said. “Maybe they’ll be so busy looking at me they won’t be looking where they should be looking, and it will work to our advantage. Who knows?”

  It was a nice theory, but it didn’t come to pass.

  With Ftorek mismanaging the defence, the Kings lost both games in Edmonton, but then, with Doug Crossman back in the lineup, the Kings started to play well defensively and came back.

  Crossman had been a regular on the Philadelphia Flyers team that had advanced to the 1986 Stanley Cup final. In 1987, he had been by far Team Canada’s best defenceman in the Canada Cup. But in 1988–89, he fell into disfavour with Ftorek because he wasn’t a bone crusher. As the season progressed, Ftorek had used him less and less, and then finally scratched him from the lineup on a regular basis.

  He did not dress for the first three games against Edmonton and played sparingly in the fourth. But he played the rest of the way as the Kings stunned the Oilers by bouncing back from a 3–1 deficit to win the series.

  In the seventh game, Gretzky got the Kings started with a goal only fifty-two seconds into the game, and he continued to rally his team even though the Oilers kept fighting back.

  Three times the Kings took the lead. Three times the Oilers tied it. But finally, the Kings went up by two with a pair of power-play goals, and then Gretzky scored short-handed to finish what he had started.

  For Gretzky, there was some vindication, but he did not feel any of the ebullience that he had anticipated before the series began. He let it be known that he had been aware of the public statements that Pocklington had made. “Mr. Pocklington said after Game Three that people had told him it was a good trade,” he said. “We’ll see what they say tomorrow.”

  But that was all the gloating he did. Before the series, he had envisioned fist-pumping and taunts of “I told you so.” But when the opportunity arose, he couldn’t even come close to bringing himself to do it. He was delighted that his Kings had come out on top, but he was also saddened by the fact that they had done so at the expense of all his close friends in the Edmonton organization.

  “I didn’t enjoy the series at all,” he said. “It wasn’t fun for me. We spent fifteen days or whatever it was in the series. I saw those guys every day and we had no words at all. That’s not what life is supposed to be all about. You’re supposed to be able to talk to your best friends.”

  Edmonton defenceman Kevin Lowe was so devastated by the loss that he wouldn’t even go back into the dressing room with his teammates. Still wearing his full uniform, including skates, he slumped down on one knee and leaned against the wall.

  Gretzky wasn’t surprised to learn that Lowe took the loss badly. “Those guys are champions,” he said. “No one takes losing harder than Mess and Lowe. That’s why they’re champions. But long after hockey is over with, no matter who got the fifteen million dollars, those guys and me will still be buddies.”

  Gretzky even had some good words for Sather, who, along with co-coach John Muckler and assistant coach Ted Green, had walked out onto the ice after the game and shaken hands with all the Kings.

  The barbs that Sather and Gretzky had tossed back and forth were now in the past. “Every time I picked up a paper,” Gretzky said, “I read something from Edmonton about Wayne Gretzky, and it got to the point that I had to say something. Glen takes losing as hard as anyone, but he has a lot of class.”

  Sather too tried to be conciliatory. “In my opinion,” he said, “Gretzky is the best player in the world. When any team has that, you can never count them out.”

  The next series against Calgary was nowhere near as pleasant for the Kings. They lost the opener in overtime, then got soundly defeated in the next game. The score was 8–3, and Crossman, who was by far their best defenceman, managed to come out of the proceedings with a plus rating despite the lopsided score. So, for Game Three, Ftorek sent him back to the press box.

  “It’s great for us,” said Calgary defenceman Brad McCrimmon, a former teammate
of Crossman, in a quote that was unattributed at the time. “I feel bad for Crossman because I know how much he wants to play, but we love it when he’s not in the lineup.”

  As the series progressed, Ftorek started to make desperate moves that didn’t work.

  In Game Three, for instance, he used Gretzky with no fewer than fifteen line combinations. With five minutes left and the Kings trailing 3–2, he started sending out units of four forwards and one defenceman. That move produced a predictable result. The Kings gave up two more goals.

  “Why would he do that?” asked a former NHL coach. “There was about five minutes to play. That’s lots of time in a one-goal game, too much time to start that sort of thing.”

  The Kings lost the series in four games, and not long afterwards, Ftorek was fired. No one was surprised.

  By June 1, the Kings had hired Tom Webster to be their new coach, although they went about it in curious fashion.

  Webster was probably the best candidate on the open market, but the Kings didn’t get him because they used a regimented search-and-evaluate process but because Phil Esposito decided it was a good idea.

  Top-flight teams in search of a coach usually approach a number of candidates. Then they bring in the prospective coaches and interview them. That way, they can make an extensive evaluation of each candidate. Perhaps more importantly, they also get to hear what insights he might have, not only with regard to maximizing the talent of the team in question but also with regard to innovative methods of coaching. To put it another way, they pick his brain.

  The Kings, on the other hand, approached no one. Colin Campbell, then assistant coach of the Detroit Red Wings, approached them, so they flew him in and talked to him. He said he felt afterwards that they had done so just as a courtesy and that at no time was he under consideration.

  Webster, who had been coach of the New York Rangers until an ear ailment prevented him from flying, also approached them and was interviewed. Esposito, the general manager of the Rangers, then called Vachon and not only told him Webster was the man for the job, but also negotiated Webster’s contract.

  That was it. No secondary interviews. No extensive screening. No background checks. Just a call from the old-boy network and the new coach had been hired.

  Had the Kings gone through the normal process, they probably would have ended up with Webster anyway. He left the Rangers only because of a health problem that had since been rectified. He had been a successful junior coach with the Windsor Spitfires and had handled Canada’s entry in the most recent world junior championship.

  But by interviewing no one else, the Kings missed out on a lot of hockey knowledge that might have been useful—to Webster, if to no one else.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Calendar years run from January 1 to December 31. Hockey years run from one Stanley Cup presentation to the next.

  Gretzky’s 1988–89 hockey year had been a veritable maelstrom of activity. He had skated around the Edmonton ice holding aloft the Stanley Cup, and in the victory, had earned his second Conn Smythe Trophy. He had been traded to Los Angeles. He had got married. He had seen the birth of his first child. He had been benched for the first time in his NHL career. He had seen a seven-foot statue erected in his honour outside Northlands Coliseum, the home of the Oilers. He had instigated hockey fever in Los Angeles and been the driving force in the team’s surge from fourth-worst in the NHL to fourth-best. He had led the Kings to a playoff victory over the team that had cast him aside. And all this was done while his own coach was working to minimize his efforts.

  Almost unnoticed while all these other events were happening was the fact that he was closing in on a major record. When the new “hockey year” began, he was only fourteen points away from becoming the National Hockey League’s all-time leading scorer.

  Records, like everything else in sport, come in varying degrees of importance. Some have merit. Some don’t. Some are well known. Some are obscure.

  But there is always one ultimate record that can endure for generations. It may even last forever if the sporting establishment grants it permanent status and begins a whole new era of record-keeping. This is the record that says the man named below was simply the best ever. Whatever the aim of the sport in question might be, this man accomplished it more often or better than anyone else.

  In hockey, the aim of the sport is to score. When the 1989–90 season opened, no one in hockey had racked up more points than Gordie Howe—801 goals and 1,049 assists for 1,850 points in twenty-six NHL seasons.

  Gretzky was fourteen points behind that total. He had played ten years.

  Howe’s last NHL season was Gretzky’s first. It was an occasion that marked the end of one era and the beginning of another. The long-held beliefs that wingers should always stay in their lanes, that goalies should never leave their feet and that forwards should never skate backwards, not to mention a host of other tenets of the Howe era, were either starting to be discarded or had already gone.

  Before Gretzky, no one had averaged more than 1.4 points per game. As Gretzky closed in on Howe’s record, his points-per-game average was 2.37.

  Before Gretzky, the record for assists in a season was 102. Gretzky had a season with 163.

  Before Gretzky, the record for goals in a season was 76. He got 92 in his third year in the NHL.

  Before Gretzky, the record for points in a season was 152. Gretzky had already racked up seasons of 215, 212, 208 and 205.

  Now he was nearing the all-time record, but this was new territory even for Gretzky. “Longevity records were something I never really thought about a whole lot,” he said. “I just played year to year. I never really thought about getting five hundred goals or a thousand points or the 1,850 figure, but now that it’s getting close and everybody is talking about it, I look back on my career and it gives me a chance to realize that I’ve been pretty consistent.”

  In the NHL, consistency is a rare trait. With its schedule of eighty games or more from coast to coast, a one-month training camp and then, for the better teams, the rigours of the playoffs, the NHL grind does not lend itself to consistency. Players get worn down. Also, for many of the years in which Gretzky played, there was such a great disparity between the good and bad teams that on many nights, the outcome was all but predetermined, and players performed accordingly.

  But Gretzky never floated or produced a lackadaisical performance. Bernie Nicholls, who prior to Gretzky’s arrival as a teammate had not been able to make that claim about his own play, was amazed. “You look out there in practices or in games and you see that the best player in the history of the game is always working hard,” he said. “You say to yourself, ‘If he’s working that hard, how can I not work just as hard?’ ”

  Gretzky agreed that he always took a totally dedicated approach. “I think that I do it just for the love of the game,” he said. “I love to play. Every time I step on the ice, if I don’t have a good shift, I’m disappointed in myself. I feel I’ve let myself down, the team down and the fans down.

  “My dad always told me that people come out to watch me play and they might only see me once. It’s like a Broadway play. For me, it happens every night, but for the audience it might only happen once. I owe it to them to give them a good performance.”

  Gretzky had set more than forty NHL records to that point, but the one he was nearing was going to be special, not only because of its magnitude, but also because of his relationship with Gordie Howe.

  As a child, Gretzky had idolized Howe, and most fans have seen the famous picture of Howe jokingly hooking a stick around the eleven-year-old Gretzky’s neck. Gretzky doesn’t remember a lot from the occasion, but he does remember that Howe told him to practise his backhand. He cherished that advice.

  It had always been Gretzky’s dream to break some of Howe’s records, and over the years, the two had become steadfast friends.

  After Gretzky picked up six points in his first three games of the season, McNall, ever the p
romoter, invited Howe to come to Los Angeles and stay with the team until Gretzky broke the record. Needless to say, McNall would pick up the tab.

  Gretzky was absolutely delighted that Howe not only showed no resentment at seeing his all-time mark surpassed, but encouraged Gretzky at every step.

  The media were delighted to have Howe on hand and asked him the standard questions. Did he remember the night he set his record? “Sure,” said Howe. “I was there.” Did he feel bad about losing his record to Gretzky? “If I did, I wouldn’t be here.”

  Those may sound like flip, disdainful responses, but they weren’t. They were delivered with a little grin, a twinkle in the eye and an aw-shucks tone.

  At one point, a woman told him she’d had a dream about him. “How was I?” he responded with a chuckle. He told me that story, then added, “You know, since I’ve been around the kid, I’m starting to feel young again.”

  The kid was just as delighted to have him around. Even though Gretzky had a superb relationship with his own father, and Howe was on equally good terms with his own sons, Howe often referred to Gretzky as his “adopted son.”

  The two were almost inseparable during that stretch, and Gretzky, who seemed more relaxed than he had been in a year, started sprinkling his conversation with items that began, “Gordie was saying the other day that …”

  “This is great,” said Howe with his ever-present grin after watching Gretzky get three more points in a loss to the New York Islanders. “I saw a good game and got to go out in Los Angeles. It’s a paid vacation.”

  Gretzky and Howe had briefly played against and with each other in the long-defunct World Hockey Association. Gretzky was with the Indianapolis Racers and then the Oilers. Howe and his two “non-adopted” sons played for the New England Whalers.

  Gretzky and Howe were linemates in the 1979 WHA All-Star Game (with Mark Howe as the other forward even though he starred as a defenceman in the NHL) and, as usual, the sweater they gave to the skinny kid wearing number 99 was far too big. Gordie grabbed a needle and thread out of the trainer’s box and sewed tucks in the sides to make it fit better.