99

by Al Strachan

  To Wayne Gretzky, this development was nothing short of torture. He was thirty-three, still in the prime of his hockey life, and he couldn’t bring himself to sit idly by while the future of the season—if there were to be one—was debated by lawyers.

  He considered organizing a goodwill tour of Europe with a hand-picked team of friends. He didn’t want an NHL all-star team because it was his intention to tour Scandinavia playing against established club teams and he didn’t want to steamroll the European teams or make them look inept in front of their fans. He just wanted to stage some exhibition games—his team against theirs—and promote the NHL in Europe.

  He started to think of the concept as a reality, but a ray of optimism on the labour front changed his mind. He let it slide. Then, as negotiations dragged on, he considered it again. Once more, the prospect of a settlement seemed better. He dropped it again.

  But when an agreement continued to be elusive, he finally decided to stage the tour.

  For some now-forgotten reason, he and I and Mike Barnett, who was his agent at the time, were flying to Los Angeles and sitting together at the back of an almost-deserted business-class cabin. “You can’t write about this yet, Strach,” Gretzky said, “but we’re going to make a European tour and I want to ask a bunch of guys to come along. They won’t get paid, but we want to make sure everybody has a good time.”

  We started to put together a list of names, a fairly easy task. There were plenty of candidates who either were, or had been, Gretzky’s teammates. Then we added veteran players who would be good draws in Europe. Sergei Fedorov was on that list. So was Al MacInnis. Russ Courtnall was another. And Steve Yzerman.

  Doug Gilmour was on the original list too, but as it turned out, he went to Europe on his own and joined the Swiss team Rapperswil.

  We were well into the proceedings and had washed back a couple of beers to help accumulate a pretty comprehensive list. The beers necessitated a washroom dash, and while I was there, I ran through a few more names in my head. Suddenly, for some reason (definitely not related to the surroundings), I thought of Mario Lemieux.

  He was out of hockey at that point and no one knew if he would ever return. As a result, no one had thought of considering him.

  When I went back into the cabin, I said, “What about Mario?”

  “Wow, I hadn’t thought of him,” said Gretzky. “Do you think there’s any way he can play?”

  Lemieux had been plagued by injuries and illness. In early 1993, he had been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a form of cancer. That year, he missed two months of action. Then, in the summer of 1993, he underwent his second back surgery and, during the course of the subsequent season, missed fifty-eight games as the back problems continued. As a result, in the spring of 1994, when the Rangers were making their march to the Cup, Lemieux announced that due to the cumulative effect of his ailments—the back problems and the fatigue associated with the chemotherapy treatments he had undergone to deal with the lymphoma—he was taking an indefinite leave of absence.

  That was why neither Gretzky nor Barnett had thought of him. But as soon as I mentioned him, they were enthused. After all, he wouldn’t be facing the rigours of the NHL. In a Scandinavian goodwill tour, he was unlikely to be checked. He could come along and have a good time, playing only when he felt like it but adding so much to the tour’s impact by his mere presence.

  Lemieux’s name almost completed the first draft list of potential players, so while Gretzky and I chatted, Barnett got on the phone and started working his way down the list.

  Actually, it’s incorrect to say he worked his way down the list. The first call he made was to Lemieux, whose name was near the bottom.

  Lemieux considered the idea, but felt that he needed rest and recuperation. Therefore, it would be best if he stayed home. Also, there were some logistical issues that could not easily be resolved.

  Those were the days of twelve-dollar-a-minute air-to-ground telephone calls, and for most of the flight, Barnett was on the phone.

  “He’s using my credit card for this,” said Gretzky. “I hope they settle the lockout soon so I can pay this bill.”

  Then he laughed. “My dad would be proud of Mike. My dad used to work for Bell but now that he’s retired, he’s involved in so many things that he’s on the phone all the time. He says his Bell bill now is bigger than any paycheque he ever got from them.”

  Over the next few days, the concept came together. Doug Messier, a hockey lifer who also happened to be Mark’s father, was to be one of the coaches. Mark himself was to be an alternate captain. The head coach—although that categorization elevates the status of the post somewhat—was Doug Wilson who was a year into retirement after an outstanding NHL career that included a Norris Trophy.

  Eventually, when all the calls had been made and all the willing participants had agreed to go, the group gathered in Pontiac, Michigan, for an exhibition game against the Detroit Vipers, an International Hockey League team. Right after the game, Gretzky’s group boarded a bus for Detroit Metro Airport and the charter flight to Europe.

  When we arrived at the airport, we greeted three Detroit Red Wings who had been waiting on the plane for forty-five minutes and had sat out the game to avoid creating any unnecessary animosity with the NHL—Fedorov, Yzerman and Paul Coffey. The rest of the Gretzky and Friends team boarded the plane as a lively, spirited group.

  Half a day later, tired, bedraggled and disoriented, they disembarked 4,500 miles away in Helsinki, Finland. But they were no longer a formless group. Now, they were a team with a sense of purpose.

  Mark Messier had already let it be known that he was something less than happy about the 4–3 loss to the Vipers. Even though he fully understood that he was embarking on an exhibition tour aimed at spreading goodwill, Messier had no intention of being embarrassed in the process. “Well, that was our last loss,” he announced to his teammates with a somewhat ominous note of finality.

  Nevertheless, Gretzky and Friends knew that on the ice, they wouldn’t have an easy time of it in Scandinavia. Simply getting to Europe had proved taxing. The flight on their Boeing 727, chartered for their two-week tour, was gruelling, even by Los Angeles Kings standards.

  The first leg got them into Goose Bay, Labrador, at 3:15 a.m. Eastern time and at 6:40, they touched down in Keflavik, Iceland. Finally, at 11 a.m. Detroit time, they dragged themselves off the plane in Finland. It was 6 p.m. in Helsinki.

  From the airport, they went straight to the rink for a quick skate, then headed back to the hotel for a 9 p.m. charity dinner before finally heading off for some long-overdue sleep. There wasn’t time for a lot of rest—the opening faceoff of the first game of the tour was scheduled for 3 p.m. in Finland (8 a.m. in Detroit).

  But the players all accepted it with equanimity. On a long flight of that nature, a kinship builds. Players who have known each other only on the ice strike up friendships. Players who have been close friends rekindle relationships that have ebbed during the course of the summer and the two-month lockout.

  As they flew through the night, stories were exchanged, card games sprang up, camaraderie grew and the realization developed that this was to be an experience of a lifetime. Going on a barnstorming tour with Wayne Gretzky would be a chance that would probably never come again. It would be to a hockey player what touring with Babe Ruth would have been to a baseball player.

  Gretzky himself saw the chance to fulfill a long-held dream and grabbed it. Looking out the window during the first refuelling stop, he said, “If you’d told me in June that I’d be in Goose Bay in December, I’d have said you were crazy.”

  The players were all aware that once the rigours of the NHL resumed, they would get back into their regular uniforms and those friendships would be put aside. But for the time being, they were hockey’s ambassadors, taking the game back to a region that provided many of its elite players.

  For the opening game against Jokerit, tickets were sold out within an hour. “We
could have sold fifty thousand tickets,” said a team official.

  The arrival of the Gretzky team stirred up a sizeable local dispute.

  Many fans wanted to see a reunification of Gretzky and his longtime linemate, Jari Kurri, the most revered player in Finland. Many others wanted Kurri to remain in the Jokerit lineup and play against Gretzky.

  After heated debate, fans were given a vote—not an option Bettman and the NHL governors were considering back in North America as the lockout dragged on. Helsinki’s hockey fans opted to see Gretzky and Kurri together. To add to the nostalgia, Messier became the third member of the line.

  With Kurri playing for the Ninety-Nines, as the team was calling itself now, Gretzky and his friends breezed to a 7–1 victory over Jokerit. Even so, they needed a spectacular performance from goaltender Grant Fuhr. “It could have been 7–5 without Grant,” said Teemu Selanne, the other elite player on the Jokerit roster. “Some of our guys were nervous about playing against stars. They wanted to get autographs before the game.”

  In Europe, all was well. But back in North America, bitterness was starting to surface.

  A minor squabble was started by Gretzky’s former teammate Luc Robitaille whom the Los Angeles Kings shopped all over, with an extra push in the direction of the Canadiens and Quebec Nordiques, before finally unloading him on Pittsburgh.

  Robitaille was critical of the tour, telling a French-language newspaper in Montreal that Gretzky was anti-Québécois because the team had no French Canadians. In fact, the first person Gretzky and Barnett called on to join the team was Mario Lemieux, whose insurance agreement ruled him out. The first goalie Gretzky called was Patrick Roy, who turned him down because he had a chance to play golf with Fred Couples.

  Gretzky then asked Kirk Muller about the availability of Vincent Damphousse, but Muller said Damphousse was committed to a team in Germany.

  Therefore, the team had no French Canadians.

  As for Robitaille himself, Gretzky said, “Montreal and Quebec didn’t want him, so why would I?”

  A much more relevant attack came from New York, and it had implications for years to come. Up to that point, Gretzky and NHL commissioner Gary Bettman had coexisted peacefully. But Bettman’s response to the Scandinavian tour marked the beginning of the ill feelings between the two that grew and grew over the years.

  It was no accident that, more than a decade later, after Gretzky stepped down as coach of the Phoenix Coyotes, he stayed out of hockey and was not offered an NHL job, not even as a roaming ambassador.

  The Ninety-Nine All Stars Tour was a huge boost to the NHL’s presence in Europe, but the head-office bigwigs, who like to be in the forefront of everything hockey-related and usually screw it up, decided that rather than lend support, they would go on the attack.

  “They have done everything in their ability to stop us,” said defenceman Marty McSorley, who, later in his career, was handed the longest suspension in NHL history by Bettman. “I think the NHL was desperately hoping that this tour wouldn’t happen.”

  Gretzky and his close associates had been trying to avoid the subject, preferring to keep the tour on a totally positive note, but once McSorley made his views public, they didn’t have much choice in the matter. One by one, they told me that they found the NHL’s actions “shameful,” “a disgrace” and “despicable after all Wayne has done for the game.”

  It became evident that players had nothing but scorn for the people who were running the league. Their derision even extended to the ones who weren’t New York lawyers, such as then NHL vice-president Brian Burke, a Boston lawyer.

  Chuckled one long-term NHL veteran, “I talked to Brian Burke for an hour and found out I didn’t know anything about hockey.”

  “It’s not a question of who’s right and who’s wrong,” said Gretzky diplomatically. “It’s a question of the people, the public, the fans. They just want to see the best they can see. I’m disappointed about the story that someone is leaking out now that the players are trying to delay negotiations to get this tour in. That’s definitely not true. I’ve told them all along that if they get a deal, we’re coming back home.”

  The story to which Gretzky referred had surfaced in a newsletter distributed by Stan Fischler, the New Yorker the NHL had intended to hire as a PR man a couple of years earlier until a storm of protest from team public-relations executives forced a sudden reversal.

  Fischler was a strong backer of Bettman and his regime, to put it mildly, even to the point of writing that the United States’ contributions to hockey over the years have been just as significant as Canada’s.

  The NHL also sought to minimize the impact of the Gretzky tour by forcing TSN to keep the Scandinavian tour’s games off the network in Canada. At that time, TSN was trying to get a foothold in NHL telecasts and acquiesced to the league’s demands. League executives also told Hockey Night in Canada that they didn’t want any Gretzky games to be shown, but HNiC, being much more established than TSN, ignored their demands. NHL brass then approached the prime sponsor, Molson Breweries—with the same result.

  NHL teams were told by the league in writing that absolutely nothing was to be done to accommodate the Gretzky goodwill tour. As a result, the players had to supply everything from equipment to trainers.

  In order to make sure the players had the best of attention, Gretzky offered to pay the salaries of trainers and administrative personnel while they were on tour, thereby relieving the clubs of the obligation.

  It wasn’t a terribly intelligent move on the league’s part to withhold NHL trainers, even though the ones who were brought in from other professional sports were extremely competent. Still, the league’s vitriol was at such a level that common sense was ignored.

  McSorley, who was a vice-president of the NHL Players’ Association and was therefore privy to information that might not be widely disseminated, said that two high-ranking NHL executives, one of whom was vice-president Steve Solomon, even travelled to Europe to try to scuttle the tour by threatening the teams who were to provide the opposition.

  NHL executives also tried to force Rene Fasel, head of the International Ice Hockey Federation, to withhold his sanction, but Fasel reluctantly refused to do so, more for political reasons than out of any sense of fair play. He wanted NHL players to participate in the 1998 Winter Olympics, and at that point, the matter was very much up in the air.

  It is widely conceded that, were it not for Gretzky, there would be no NHL teams in Anaheim, San Jose, Dallas, Miami or Tampa Bay. In fact, there are even those who say that without Gretzky’s arrival in southern California in 1988, the Los Angeles Kings would have packed up soon and gone elsewhere.

  Gretzky was always a first-rate ambassador for the game. He was easily the most accessible team-sport superstar in the world and he gave his time freely for the game he loves.

  There had been times when Gretzky had flown coast to coast to have his picture taken for a magazine cover at the league’s urging. He had made a promotional video for the NHL cause. He had appeared on countless sports-interview shows in the United States on his own time.

  But the vindictive bottom-liners who ran the NHL—and in some cases still do—chose to reward him for his years of devotion by sabotaging a pet project that he had tried to initiate on two other occasions.

  Little wonder that Bettman’s approach to the tour gave birth to an animosity that has never been overcome.

  Throughout the Scandinavian tour, Gretzky always remembered its overriding purpose—to take the game to those who love it but might otherwise never be exposed to it. He and the other players spent time with local hockey officials, attended functions, played their games with a sense of ambassadorial sportsmanship and, most important, spent as much time as possible with the kids.

  Wherever the team went, hockey was a popular local sport and the sporting-goods stores were full of NHL paraphernalia. In Stockholm, for instance, it was much easier to buy a Mighty Ducks sweater or a Blackhawks hat th
an a Djurgarden sweater.

  Gretzky himself was mobbed. Whenever the tour arrived in a city, he was greeted by two new bodyguards (always dubbed Hans and Franz) who flanked him until he boarded the plane for the next city.

  Gretzky would have preferred to handle the crowds himself, and he repeatedly frustrated the guards by stopping to sign autographs, but the crowds were such that, for his own safety, he needed support. By the end of the first week in Europe, it had become abundantly clear to the players why the NHL worked so hard to sabotage their road show.

  The players were quickly finding out what the NHL had known all along: that Europe was wealthy, hockey hungry and on the verge of a communications explosion. Those three factors add up to a potential bonanza, and the NHL owners wanted to make sure they were the ones who hit pay dirt. The longer they were able to keep the players in the dark, the better. Negotiations on a new collective bargaining agreement were under way, and in the years to come, labour-management battles were going to be an ongoing feature of the NHL landscape. On the table would be revenues from European TV rights and international events—the Olympics and visits from NHL teams, for instance. As far as the NHL was concerned, the less the players knew about the lucrative aspects of these areas, the more likely they would be to make European concessions at the bargaining table.

  That’s why they did everything they could to prevent Gretzky’s tour from taking place, and that’s why their disinformation machine sprang into action with stupid stories about the tour forcing an extension of the lockout and Gretzky being the prime beneficiary of the spectacle.

  Prior to the trip, NHL players had only suspected they could be popular abroad. Now, they saw it first-hand, and the magnitude of their popularity astonished them.