99

by Al Strachan

  The real hero of the occasion was still on the bench.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  No matter how tired he might have been after the Kings’ triumph in Toronto, Gretzky was rejuvenated and more than ready for the 1993 Stanley Cup final when it began in Montreal.

  During the NHL playoffs, the schedule is such that teams customarily play every other day. But in this case, the league had inserted an extra dark day; so, after defeating the Leafs on a Saturday, the Kings opened the final on the subsequent Tuesday—June 1, to be precise.

  In theory, the two teams were fairly evenly matched. The Canadiens could reasonably expect to get slightly better goaltending, since Patrick Roy was at the top of his game, but throughout the post-season, the Kings’ Kelly Hrudey had been superb.

  Montreal also had more depth. It wouldn’t have caused Canadiens coach Jacques Demers any great anguish if he were forced to scratch an entire forward line for non-productivity, whereas Melrose certainly had no such option.

  The Canadiens were also the deeper team when it came to defence. Any one of the Montreal defencemen who routinely sat out—Sean Hill, Donald Dufresne and Rob Ramage—would have been regulars in the Kings’ lineup.

  And for those who believe in such things, it almost seemed as if the Canadiens were predestined to win the 1993 Cup. Anyone looking at the list of unlikely circumstances that had preceded their arrival in the final would almost have to believe that this was to be one of those years when everything was ordained to go in their favour.

  For one thing, the Canadiens were by no means the cream of the crop in the Wales Conference that year. Based on regular-season performances, the Boston Bruins, who had eliminated the Canadiens in each of the three previous seasons, were a far better team. The Pittsburgh Penguins were the best team in hockey. But the Canadiens didn’t have to face either one. Both were upset by lesser lights.

  Even the Quebec Nordiques were better than the Canadiens. But Montreal beat them in the first round when Quebec goalie Ron Hextall allowed goals on some astonishingly soft shots.

  The Buffalo Sabres were kind enough to eliminate the Bruins in a major upset. However, the guy who was by far their biggest star, Pat LaFontaine, hurt his ankle so badly that he was totally ineffective in his team’s subsequent series against Montreal which the Canadiens swept.

  Then the Canadiens got to face the New York Islanders, who had gone toe to toe with the Penguins and had to start the series on the road against a rested Montreal team only thirty-nine hours after finishing Game Seven.

  And so it went in a year that marked the Stanley Cup centenary. It almost seemed as if some Supreme Hockey Being had decreed that in such a momentous year, they had to win.

  But the Kings had on their roster their own being who tended to be supreme in the hockey world: Wayne Gretzky.

  Although the Canadiens had some high-quality forwards, such as Kirk Muller and Vincent Damphousse, they had no one who came remotely close to matching Gretzky’s level of excellence. As the Leafs had become painfully aware, Gretzky was fully capable of single-handedly lifting his team and winning a game that, on paper, should have been lost.

  In the series opener between Los Angeles and Montreal, it appeared that the Gretzky factor would outweigh all the other considerations. Gretzky scored one goal and assisted on three others as the Kings rolled to a 4–1 victory.

  The Kings were every bit as dominant as the score would suggest. They crashed the crease at will, a tactic that did nothing to promote camaraderie between Roy and his defencemen; they finished their checks all over the ice; they used their size to go wherever they wanted; and they set up scoring chance after scoring chance.

  It was widely conceded that even though the series was only one game old, the Kings were in charge. If they were able to win Game Two in Montreal and take a 2–0 series lead back to Los Angeles, the Canadiens’ march to the Cup would end, hundredth anniversary or no hundredth anniversary.

  The Canadiens looked lost. Perhaps because they had cruised through the earlier rounds in fifteen games while the Kings were battling every step of the way, they didn’t appear crisp. Prior to the series opener, they had played only nine games in thirty-three days.

  But following their lethargy in Game One, they didn’t do a lot to help their cause in Game Two. They took no fewer than eight penalties that were either stupid, selfish, unnecessary or all of the above.

  With only 1:45 left in the game, they were trailing 2–1. The prospects of a Stanley Cup for Los Angeles had never been brighter.

  But then it happened. A moment that will live in infamy. A decision that every hockey fan of that era remembers with stunning clarity.

  Demers called for a measurement of Marty McSorley’s stick. It was one of the most dramatic coaching decisions in the history of the game. If Demers proved to be wrong in his assessment that the curve on McSorley’s blade exceeded the prescribed limit, the Canadiens themselves would get a penalty, and the Kings could be expected to easily kill all the time left on the clock.

  “They had to have measured our sticks somewhere,” said Melrose in 2012. “You don’t just make that kind of call unless you’re absolutely sure. They had to have had someone in our dressing room.”

  When the stick proved to be illegal, the Canadiens not only had a power play, but Demers pulled Roy to give his team six skaters against four. With Kings defenceman Rob Blake frantically trying to dislodge John LeClair, who had both feet firmly planted well inside the crease and was blocking Hrudey’s view, defenceman Eric Desjardins scored on a shot from the point to send the game into overtime.

  The overtime didn’t last long. Only fifty-one seconds in, Desjardins scored again. Was this more predestination? It was a hat trick for Desjardins who, prior to that game, had only two playoff goals in his career.

  Instead of heading home with a 2–0 lead, the Kings were deflated and were never able to recover. After that, all the turning points swung in Montreal’s favour. In Game Three for instance, the Kings fell behind 3–0, came back to tie the score, and appeared to deserve a penalty shot when the Canadiens’ Guy Carbonneau covered the puck in the crease in the dying seconds. But the penalty shot was not awarded—a mistake later admitted to by the referee—and Montreal scored again in overtime. In Game Four, the Canadiens had more good fortune. Overtime again. A shot by LeClair banked off the leg of sliding Kings defenceman Darryl Sydor and into the net. It was the Canadiens’ tenth consecutive overtime win.

  Heading back home with a 3–1 series lead, the Canadiens had little trouble wrapping up the series and, in the process, becoming the last team to win a Stanley Cup with a roster composed solely of North American players.

  That defeat was the most heartbreaking Gretzky ever endured, but he bears no grudges against McSorley. At least, not now.

  One of the players on that team told me that Gretzky spent the entire intermission between the third period and overtime shouting at McSorley, but Gretzky won’t confirm that, and McSorley denies it.

  In 2012, Gretzky spoke about the incident. “We won Game Seven in Toronto, and then we went into Montreal and played unreal in Game One,” he said. “Kelly Hrudey was excellent and outplayed Patrick. We went into Montreal that first night and won 4–1 and we were winning 2–1 after the second period in Game Two.

  “I turned to Luc [Robitaille] and I turned to Marty and I said, ‘I can tell you guys right now, somebody has been in this locker room either yesterday or this afternoon and measured the sticks.’

  “It really wasn’t that big a secret.”

  It wouldn’t have been a secret to Gretzky because he had spent years in the Edmonton organization where the practice was commonplace. It is the custom in the NHL for the home team to supply the locks for the visitors’ dressing room, and Glen Sather, the Oilers’ general manager at the time, kept one key for the use of his own trainers. In the afternoons, when the visiting team was back at the hotel having a nap, one of Sather’s employees would routinely go into the room
and measure the curves of sticks that appeared to be illegal.

  “We knew back then in those days which guys on which teams had sticks with illegal curves,” Gretzky said in reference to the 1993 incident in Montreal. “Even though somebody was in there measuring, which we all thought was the case, we still talked about it after the second period. Marty happened to be the guy that got picked, but he was one of three or four guys that could have been picked. He happened to be on the ice at that time.”

  In fact, Robitaille, McSorley and Alexei Zhitnik had no legal sticks at the time. When the game resumed, they continued to use illegal sticks because the NHL rules of the day did not allow a team to call for a stick measurement in overtime.

  Gretzky took the view that any error in judgment that McSorley might have made on that night was more than compensated for by his earlier contributions to the cause.

  “Had we not had Marty, we would never have beaten Toronto,” he explained. “Wendel Clark and Marty McSorley in that series played seven of what may be the most physical, hard-fought games I’ve ever seen two guys play against each other. If we didn’t have Marty in that series, we would never have even got past Toronto, so you live and learn.”

  Gretzky was not the only one who held that view. Leafs coach Pat Burns was fully aware that McSorley not only negated Clark but also took his star forward, Doug Gilmour, off his game. “Dougie has to understand he’s our best hockey player,” said Burns in explaining why he had called in Gilmour for a one-on-one discussion after Game Three of the Kings–Leafs series. “He can’t be taken off his game by Marty McSorley. That strategy of theirs has worked perfectly to a T.”

  In most sports, teams tend to be highly secretive. National Basketball Association practices are closed to the media, for instance. In the National Football League, representatives of visiting teams are banned. But hockey tends to be a bit more accommodating. Practices are usually open not only to the media, but also to scouts, agents, friends of management and even members of the opposing team. All manner of people wander in and out of dressing rooms.

  “I talked about this many times to our guys,” said Gretzky. “Why do we allow guys from the other organizations into our room during the Stanley Cup finals? In those days, every team used to supply a visiting-team locker-room guy. It was our own fault. I remember saying that we don’t need anybody. We were travelling with everyone in our organization, including John Candy. We had enough people to look after our own locker room.

  “It was our own fault. It was nobody’s fault but our entire team and our organization. The Canadiens didn’t do anything illegal. They just bent the rules a little bit. In saying all that, I don’t want to sound like I’m saying that’s why we lost the Stanley Cup. The better team won the Stanley Cup that year. It’s as simple as that. Montreal had leadership from Guy Carbonneau, Kirk Muller and Mike Keane.

  “Mike Keane didn’t play Game One, I believe. He was hurt. He came back in Game Two, and he really gave them a pickup. John LeClair played as well as he ever played. We lost. That’s all.”

  That was as close as Gretzky would ever come to winning another Stanley Cup.

  Even though the Kings lost in the Stanley Cup final, they had risen to a level that the franchise had never before experienced. But as it turned out, it would be nineteen years—long after Gretzky had gone—before they took the final step.

  In his era, the team was never again as dominant on the ice. Off the ice, serious trouble was brewing.

  Near the end of the 1993–94 season, Gretzky was asked to drop by the office of his friend Bruce McNall, the owner of the Los Angeles Kings. This was not at all unusual. The two often travelled together. They often dined together. They shared business enterprises, including racehorses and the Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League. They shared speculative purchases, including a rare baseball card.

  They even worked together to end the 1992 strike by the NHL Players’ Association. They flew back from a round of talks in New York in McNall’s plane and went verbally toe to toe about the issues. McNall finally told Gretzky that if he could get the players to make the concessions they had discussed, then he could get the owners to make the concessions Gretzky sought as well. The season, which had appeared to be in jeopardy, was resumed shortly afterwards.

  For the six seasons Gretzky had been in L.A., Bruce McNall always seemed the same. He was rotund, cheerful and affable. But on this day, he was different. “Two days before the season was over,” recalled Gretzky, “I said, ‘How are you doing?’ He said, ‘Bad. Very bad.’

  “He had me come into his office for a whole day. He explained what had happened and what was going to happen. He didn’t mislead me at all.”

  For McNall, it was the beginning of the end of a meteoric rise that had been followed by an equally rapid descent. In Los Angeles, and indeed throughout the hockey world, McNall had become almost as famous as Gretzky himself. He’d so impressed the other owners that they had made him chairman of the NHL’s board of governors. No major event in Los Angeles was complete without McNall’s presence. Hollywood stars flocked to the Fabulous Forum and dined at his table.

  It was, of course, a facade. McNall was never really what he appeared to be, at least financially. That was what he told Gretzky during that daylong meeting. All his assets were either gone or going.

  According to documents subsequently filed in United States Bankruptcy Court, McNall owed no less than $244.5 million.

  By the spring of 1994, McNall was in full retreat. He had sold 72 per cent of the Kings and had been forced to resign as chairman of the NHL’s board. Fraud charges began to be filed against his employees, and a succession of guilty pleas insured the sale of the remaining 28 per cent of the team, as well as McNall’s eventual downfall.

  “I was never a good businessman,” McNall told me. “I never viewed myself as a businessman ever and that’s probably why I got myself in all this trouble. A tough, hard businessman doesn’t do all the stupid things I did. They’re tight with the dollars. They’re watching everything. They’re not allowing their people to do whatever they want to do without having a firm hand on it all.”

  He was sentenced to sixty-two months in prison for bank fraud and wire fraud, and it was tough time, most of it spent in maximum-security institutions across the United States, not at all like a Club Fed in Canada.

  He did time in solitary confinement. He was shackled and transported around the country chained to a seat in a decrepit, converted school bus with no air conditioning. He was sometimes locked up for twenty-three hours a day, and because of the kind of resentful mentality that exists in prisons, he was occasionally made to suffer because others were jealous.

  But wherever he went, he received regular visits from Gretzky. Even those happy moments had their drawbacks.

  “To have a friend who shows up when it’s not popular is really remarkable,” McNall told me after his release. “Wayne Gretzky is clean living itself. His whole life is based on that. For him to maintain the friendship and loyalty that he did, it was just amazing.

  “When he came to visit, it was like a zoo, except the guards were all asking for autographs. It was great.

  “And I got blamed for it, by the way.”

  Still, the calls were worth the aggravation and Gretzky visited again and again, even though McNall was moved from Lompoc in California to Safford in Arizona and then to Milan in Michigan.

  On one occasion, Gretzky’s visit had just begun when the penitentiary went into a lockdown. McNall was taken away and three hours elapsed before he returned to the visiting area. Gretzky was still sitting there, waiting.

  Many of those McNall had considered to be friends deserted him. Not many of the players went to visit him, but some did—including Rob Blake. I tried, but journalists were never allowed to visit, so we stayed in touch through the mail.

  In 2002, when Gretzky had his number, 99, retired by the Kings, there were many who wondered why it had taken so long. The answer
was simple: Bruce McNall.

  “It’s just remarkable that Wayne waited like this and held it up until I was available,” McNall said. “That’s Wayne. Friendship is something that’s a rare commodity in the world, especially when things are not going well. Wayne was always right there, always the first there.

  “I kept saying to him, ‘Wayne, what about retiring your jersey?’ And he said, ‘No, I’m going to wait. It’s not right yet.’

  “And finally, when they announced that they were going to do it, he said, ‘I wanted to wait until you were available.’ It was very heartfelt. I was very taken by it all.”

  At the gala dinner that was part of the retirement ceremony, McNall was one of the speakers and thanked Gretzky for sticking by him. “It means a lot more to me than you can imagine,” he said.

  In typical fashion, Gretzky shrugged it off. “It’s a lot better visiting you here than in Lompoc,” he said with a laugh.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  In 1994, the New York Rangers won the Stanley Cup for the first time in more than fifty years and the National Hockey League was suddenly a red-hot commodity on the United States sports scene.

  Like it or not, the New York media dictate the agenda for the whole continent, and with the Broadway Blueshirts on top of the hockey world, the sporting intelligentsia were all but unanimous that the NHL was finally poised to make the breakthrough it had sought for so long.

  Rangers captain Mark Messier was the hottest name on the New York sporting scene and the media could hardly wait for the 1994–95 season to begin.

  So Gary Bettman locked out the players.

  The owners needed a better deal, he said, and until one could be hammered out, there would be no season.

  By the time baseball staged its World Series in October, the dream of hockey’s ascension into the American sporting Valhalla was nothing more than a bitter, distant and faded memory. The New York media—not to mention the city’s sports fans—had shunted hockey aside once again. And since New York called the tune, hockey interest was fading rapidly all over the United States.