by Al Strachan
Burns rhymed off the reasons for Gretzky’s unique status.
“Number one, he has broken so many records that he is the best player by far in the history of hockey.
“Secondly, he is so well represented that anyone who wants to do business doesn’t have to play games when he calls Barnett. He is open to talk to anybody, and so many of the sports representatives are the opposite of that.
“Third, Gretzky is just a total gentleman. He is very polite with the press. He is considerate of the little people. Many of the top stars simply do not have those qualities. He has gone out of his way to remember that he owes something to his fans. Those are the qualities that put him on the same level as the top baseball names and the top football names.”
Gretzky’s qualities had not escaped the attention of the important people at Coca-Cola. Stone Roberts, an executive with the ad firm that had the Coca-Cola account, said, “There’s no question that his innate talent is attractive as an image driver to all people. In addition to his talent, his image is crystal clear.
“His image as a leader and a clean liver has really made the community embrace him, and that’s what we find particularly attractive for Coca-Cola. We’re in it for the long haul, and he’s the perfect marriage for our image and how we position our products for our clients.
“There’s no better illustration of his acceptance in the United States than what he has done for the Kings.”
By that time, the Kings had sold more authorized products—sweaters, hats, jackets and so on—in Gretzky’s first year with them than in all the team’s previous years of existence combined.
In the NHL’s 1987–88 season, the year before Gretzky arrived, six of the nine smallest crowds turned out to watch the Kings. At an average 77 per cent of capacity on the road, the Kings were last in the NHL’s attendance standings. The next season, with Gretzky in the lineup, they became the league’s best draw at 98 per cent. It is the only time in NHL history that a team was last in NHL road attendance one season and first the next.
Gretzky’s contributions to the NHL and its image during the eighties were monumental. He had changed the face of the league. But there was still more to come in the nineties.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
To a player like Wayne Gretzky, whose life was hockey, Maple Leaf Gardens was his hallowed hall, his Valhalla.
It was where he had seen his first National Hockey League game. Growing up, he watched Hockey Night in Canada every Saturday, and with very few exceptions, those games were played in Maple Leaf Gardens. (There were no regional telecasts in those days and definitely no double-headers.)
In his mind, as a child, the famed backyard rink in Brantford wasn’t Wally’s Coliseum as much as it was Maple Leaf Gardens. That was where he was scoring all his goals in seventh-game Stanley Cup final overtimes.
Had he been a baseball player, the Gardens would have been Gretzky’s Yankee Stadium. Had he been a soccer player, it would have been his Wembley. But he was a hockey player and it was no coincidence that, throughout his career, he invariably put on a show in Maple Leaf Gardens.
His first visit to the place he refers to as “a sacred building” came when he was a transfixed, awestruck six-year-old, sitting in the back row with his grandmother, watching the abysmal Oakland Seals.
“We sat in the last row of the greys,” he said. “We got there an hour early and I don’t think I moved the whole time. I think the first time I got out of my seat was when they announced the three stars.”
Only twelve years later, he was back, not just as a player but as the brightest young star in the game, astounding hockey fans everywhere but especially when he played in Toronto. “The easiest thing in the world is to get up for a hockey game in Maple Leaf Gardens,” he said with a laugh.
It had been his lifelong ambition to take part in a playoff series in Maple Leaf Gardens, and it was in that special place in 1993 that the Toronto Maple Leafs and Los Angeles Kings staged the major part of a series that remains memorable to this day.
A Stanley Cup final in Toronto would have been Gretzky’s ultimate fantasy come true, but it was impossible at the time because the Leafs and Kings were in the same conference. Playing in Maple Leaf Gardens for a berth in the Stanley Cup final was a close second.
For the Kings, it represented an achievement that wouldn’t be matched for almost two decades. In the time between that series and their improbable Stanley Cup victory in 2012, the Kings won just one playoff series.
Leafs fans, on the other hand, usually refer to the 1993 aggregation as their last great team. Granted, some of the subsequent Toronto teams had success. They advanced to the conference final again the following season but never seemed likely to win. “We were all worn down by then,” explained general manager Cliff Fletcher. Their other conference final appearances were in 1999, against the Buffalo Sabres, and in 2002 against the Carolina Hurricanes, but those, too, came to naught.
But that 1993 team with Doug Gilmour, Wendel Clark and Felix Potvin captured Leafs fans’ imagination more than the others, perhaps because of the heroics along the way.
In the first round, they lost the first two games to the Detroit Red Wings, then won four of the next five—two in overtime—to win the series. The second round was a seven-gamer as well, this time against the St. Louis Blues. On two occasions, the score was still tied after one period of overtime, and both times, the Leafs won in double overtime.
Now the Kings were all that stood between Toronto and a one-series crack at the Stanley Cup, a trophy they hadn’t won since 1967. The Kings’ run to the conference final hadn’t been as dramatic, but it did have its intriguing moments. Having finished only four games over .500 and third in their six-team division, the Kings were doomed to face teams with better records in every round of the playoffs.
But rookie coach Barry Melrose, a disciple of positive thinker Tony Robbins, had his team believing that they could overcome every obstacle.
After knocking off the Calgary Flames in six games, the Kings next had to face the Vancouver Canucks, not an appetizing prospect.
“Going into that series, we had played Vancouver nine times and lost seven out of those nine times,” recalled Gretzky. “Then, we didn’t just lose Game One, we were awful. We got outhit. We got outshot. We got out-everything. We only lost 5–2 but that was a flattering score.
“Barry came into the room after the game and talked about all the positives. He went over all the good things again and again. By the time his speech had finished, it seemed like we’d won and we were up one game to nothing instead of being down 1–0.”
With Gretzky leading the way, the Kings bounced back, defeated the Canucks in six games and waited for the Leafs and Blues to finish their seven-game series.
“Players always say they don’t care who they play,” Gretzky said, “but I think that’s because it’s easier to say that. I think you root for the team that you might have an easier time with. We felt in that particular series that there wasn’t much to choose between the two teams.
“The only real difference was Dougie Gilmour who was having a great playoffs. He was exceptional. I had a great deal of respect for Dougie Gilmour. We felt that Toronto was a little bit bigger than the Blues, but St. Louis was a shorter flight, and in the west, you always think about that. Still, there was lots of emotion in that series for different reasons. My favourite arena always was Maple Leaf Gardens.”
Against Toronto, the Kings once again got off to a poor start.
“My whole life, I wanted to play at least one series in Maple Leaf Gardens,” Gretzky said. “I got an opportunity, and I was really excited about it. Then we lost 4–1 in the opener and I was minus-three. I didn’t have a very good game, and I remember talking to Janet about it and she said, ‘Sometimes you’ve got to be careful what you wish for because it might come true.’
“I was pretty depressed.”
But the Kings bounced back in the second game to temporarily gain home-ice adv
antage. It didn’t last long. Each team won a game in Los Angeles.
In Game Five, there were more heroics from the Leafs. Once again, they won in overtime and needed only one more win to head to the finals.
“After we split the first four, we knew we were going to have to win one game in Toronto,” said Gretzky. “It was going to have to be Game Five or Game Seven. At first, you think you don’t want to be in a Game-Seven situation, but when you really think some more about it, you realize that in Game Seven, there’s more pressure on the home team.
“If the home team wins, everybody says, ‘Well, of course they won. They were at home.’ But if they let the visiting team win, everybody gets down on them, so they are under a lot of pressure.
“So, going into Game Six, we just said, ‘Don’t worry about the next game. Just take care of this game, then we’ll worry about Game Seven.’ ”
Game Six was the one that still brings complaints from Leafs fans. In the second period, Gretzky took a shot from the faceoff circle that was blocked by Jamie Macoun. Just as the shot was released, Gilmour skated in from an angle, hitting Gretzky’s stick, which slid up Gilmour’s arm and clipped Gilmour under the chin.
When Leafs fans talk about it today, they tend to make it sound like an axe murder committed in front of three blind officials. Referee Kerry Fraser didn’t see Gretzky’s stick hit Gilmour. Neither did either of the two senior linesmen handling the game—Kevin Collins and Ron Finn—both of whom had the authority to call a major penalty for high-sticking.
For that matter, neither did Hockey Night in Canada announcer Bob Cole. Here’s his description: “Gretzky’s moving towards the net now. The shot. That’s blocked. It hit Gilmour. He blocked the shot. It hurt him. He fell.”
Under the rules of that era, Gretzky should have been penalized and ejected from the game. Similarly, in an earlier game in the series, Gilmour should have been ejected for head-butting Marty McSorley.
Hockey has a lot of unwritten rules, and one of them—especially in that era before the league’s approach changed following the 2004–05 lockout—required officials to be a lot more lenient in the post-season, particularly if a star player was the culprit.
There were many examples. One of the more notable incidents was Pavel Bure’s blind-side flattening of Shane Churla with a vicious elbow in 1994. Churla was knocked unconscious, but no penalty was called. Bure was the star of the Vancouver Canucks; Churla was a workmanlike player for the Dallas Stars.
As Churla said afterwards, “If it was the other way around, I’d be gone for fifteen games at least. People would be calling me the biggest goon in hockey.” But in that 1993 Leafs–Kings game, Gretzky went on to be the star, something Churla was never likely to do.
“I can’t speculate on what would have been or what would have happened if Kerry had made that call,” Gretzky said years later when asked about the incident. “The reality is that if I had gotten the penalty, we still may have won anyway. To hypothesize like that is like me saying we would have won the Stanley Cup had Marty’s stick not been caught. [McSorley was assessed an illegal-stick penalty in the subsequent series.] That’s probably not true.
“Of course the fans are frustrated at that time, and they wanted it to be a penalty, but I wasn’t the referee. And I don’t think it was a question of Kerry not wanting to call it. I think he didn’t see it.
“I didn’t do it on purpose. I didn’t even know it had happened. After the game, everybody was showing it to me and telling me, so that’s when I knew, but obviously, I didn’t do it on purpose.”
Once again, the game went into overtime, and Leafs fans were expecting the magic to strike again. It was the sixth overtime of the post-season for the Leafs, and they had won the first five.
When it didn’t happen, the Leafs had no one but themselves to blame. In the first minute of overtime, Tomas Sandstrom took a pass from Alexei Zhitnik at his own blue line and went end to end unmolested. With the path to the net blocked, he took the puck into the right corner, and the Leafs finally decided that they should take some action. No fewer than three of them converged on him.
When the puck squirted out to Luc Robitaille, who was standing beside the scrum, there was no one left to stop him coming out of the corner all alone. He looked to the far side of the net, and there was Gretzky, left totally uncovered by Bill Berg, who was watching the play from a distance. Robitaille sent the puck to Gretzky, and Felix Potvin had no chance.
“To me, that was the sweetest game I played in my career,” Gretzky said. “I hadn’t played that well in the series, and there had been some criticism.”
That’s putting it mildly. Bob McKenzie of TSN, then a columnist for the Toronto Star, wrote that Gretzky had been playing as if he had a piano on his back. McKenzie wasn’t the only critic. Many observers had opined that Gretzky could play better, but none had put it quite so forcefully.
Gretzky has always been acutely conscious of his image. “If we had lost that game,” he said, “we would have been eliminated in six, and a lot of people would have looked at my career and said, ‘Yeah, but they lost to Toronto with a chance to go to the finals, and where was Wayne Gretzky?’
“That goal kept us alive, so even though I accomplished a lot in my career, it was one of the most special goals I ever scored.”
As it turned out, there were three more to come in the very near future.
Game Seven created a virtual perfect storm for Gretzky. All the factors fell into line, fed on each other and led to what he admits was “one of my two favourite games that I’ll always remember.” (The other was an international game, so simple deduction tells us that this was Gretzky’s favourite NHL game.)
There was his love of Maple Leaf Gardens and his burning desire to add his own episode to the lore of that fabled building. There was the determination to override the criticism of McKenzie and others who had seen his performance thus far as something less than excellent. There was the desire to get another Stanley Cup to answer Peter Pocklington. Whenever Pocklington was asked about his sale of Gretzky, which was often, his smug response, usually delivered with a smarmy smile, was, “How many Cups has Gretzky won since we traded him?”
And there was another incident that came to light only recently and was told to me by a teammate of Gretzky’s. In the warmup, he recognized that Gretzky was upset—and not by the circumstances. The pressure of an important game doesn’t get to people like Gretzky. The nervousness is there, but it doesn’t affect their game.
The teammate skated over and asked Gretzky what was wrong. Gretzky said he was fine. Gretzky’s teammate tried a second time and got the same response. After the third query, Gretzky conceded that his afternoon nap had been interrupted by his wife, who, at the insistence of actor Mike Myers, was calling to ask for tickets to the game.
“So that’s it?” said the teammate. “You missed your nap?”
“No, that’s not it,” said Gretzky. “Look at him.”
He pointed to the seat he had acquired. It was occupied by Myers wearing a number 93 Doug Gilmour Toronto Maple Leafs sweater.
“G was so mad at that,” said the teammate, “that he got all fired up. He was up for that game to begin with, but this pushed him to the limit.”
“I felt real good going into that game,” said Gretzky. “It was a Game Seven in Maple Leaf Gardens and we scored first. I gave the puck to Marty McSorley, and Marty had a good chance, but he made a great play and gave it right back to me. All I had to do was put it into the empty net. Then we got a quick goal, and all of a sudden it was 2–0 and things were looking real good.
“But anything can happen in hockey, and they got a couple to make it 2–2.”
Through all the years and through all the glory, Maple Leaf Gardens has probably never been louder than that. The Leafs’ fans, so starved of success for so long, saw the Kings reeling, their own team charging, and a Stanley Cup berth heading their way. But Gretzky was not to be denied on this night. He seemed to be a
lways on the ice, always in control and always dangerous. Not long after the Leafs had tied it up, Gretzky scored again, this time with a screaming slapshot that was in the net and back out again before Felix Potvin had a chance to move.
“I think that was a big goal,” he said with a smile he was unable to contain. “It stopped their momentum.”
The Kings went up 4–2; the Leafs came back to narrow the gap to 4–3. But in a goal reminiscent of the classic that Gilmour had scored against Curtis Joseph to win a game in the series against the St. Louis Blues, Gretzky came out from behind the net to bounce the puck off Toronto defenceman Dave Ellett’s skate and past Potvin to complete the hat trick.
“That one turned out to be important as well,” he chuckled. It certainly did, because the Leafs had not yet given up. With only forty seconds left, Ellett scored for the Leafs to make the score 5–4. Was another miracle finish in the making?
Melrose wanted to make sure that there wasn’t. He called for the line that he felt could put a cap on the proceedings: Pat Conacher, Jari Kurri and Wayne Gretzky.
“It was the only time in my career that I didn’t go on when I was asked,” said Gretzky. I remember Barry saying, ‘Conacher, Kurri, Ninety-nine.’
“I said, ‘No, Barry. I can’t go. I’m too tired. We’ve got to win this thing.’
“I didn’t want to go out there and make a mistake because I was too tired.”
For Gretzky to say this, he must have been absolutely exhausted. The fact that he turned down Melrose’s request shows how much he had already put into this game.
Instead, Melrose called on Gary Shuchuk, whom the Kings had picked up as a rare Group VI free agent—a player who had been in the minors so long he had earned his release.
Shuchuk was twenty-five when he joined the Kings that season, but he had scored an overtime goal earlier in the playoffs. Even though the Leafs buzzed all around the Los Angeles end in the final seconds, he did the job and was one of the heroes on the ice when the game ended.
