by Al Strachan
In 2013, I asked Gretzky about it as well. “Did I have any problems with Mike? No. To this day, Mike and I are still really good friends. He did a lot of good things for me as a hockey player. I didn’t agree with everything he said or did, but he was the coach and I understand that. There’s no animosity between Mike and me, no.”
The two had their confrontations, but Keenan locked horns with all his players. That sort of challenge wouldn’t stop Gretzky from playing for Keenan or anyone else. He had some extremely nasty confrontations with Glen Sather in Edmonton as well. He saw that as a coach’s job.
“I always considered myself lucky to play for Glen in Edmonton,” Gretzky said in 2012. “He really pushed players. He would often tell guys, even at the age of twenty-two or twenty-three, ‘Listen, I’m really pushing you because one day, you’re going to be a Hall of Famer.’ Players don’t think about that at that age, but Glen did.”
“Obviously, you communicate with a player of that ability a lot, which I did,” Keenan said in 2012. “The only star player I ever had a tough time dealing with was Brett Hull. Other than that, I got along with all of them. They love the way I play them. They get all the ice time.
“And also, Wayne was the type of guy who would walk around the world twice to avoid a confrontation. He liked to win, so he didn’t care if you pushed him hard.”
The problem between Gretzky and the Blues was financial. Blues vice-president Jack Quinn, armed with the lucrative contract that he would have presented to Gretzky before the trade if the Kings had given him permission, was not expecting any problems. The Blues were willing to give Gretzky a three-year contract for $22.5 million in salary, a $1 million signing bonus, a 1-per-cent ownership of the team, 1-per-cent ownership of the Kiel Center, a corporate box and a few other perqs. But the deal was never consummated.
“What happened as far as I know, and as Jack explained it to me,” said Keenan in 2012, “was that Wayne’s financial advisor [Ron Fujikawa] asked for half the money in a signing bonus. Today, that’s nothing, but back then, it was unusual.
“Jack said, ‘What am I going to do if Wayne breaks his leg in the first game and I’ve already given him half the money? Then I’ve got no explanation for the owners.’ That became the stumbling block. They could never resolve it.”
The mention of the contract produced a chuckle from Keenan. “I was mad at myself because when I got fired there, they came in with security guards and escorted me out of the building,” he said. “The day before, I’d been going through my desk, and I came across the proposal for Gretzky’s contract. If I’d taken it home, I would have had it, and it would have made a nice memento. All these years later, I’m still mad at myself.”
After his contractual battles with the Kings and seeing the team go bankrupt, Gretzky wanted financial security. The Blues, on the other hand, were not a rich team and felt that a signing bonus of eleven million dollars was too much of a gamble to take.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
A few weeks after contract talks with the St. Louis Blues collapsed—on July 1, 1996, to be precise—Wayne Gretzky became a free agent. He was up for auction, and a number of teams privately expressed interest while telling the public they were not in the market.
One such team was the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim. President Tony Tavares tried to sign Gretzky, but insisted that his general manager, Jack Ferreira, be kept in the dark about the negotiations. In public, however, Tavares said that Gretzky had called the Ducks, but the team had no interest.
Gretzky himself wanted to go to Toronto. He had grown up as a Leafs fan, considered Maple Leaf Gardens to be a hockey shrine, and dearly wanted to come back to what was more or less home, only commuting distance from Brantford. He also got along well with Toronto general manager Cliff Fletcher.
“Toronto was my first choice,” he told me in 2009. “It was really where I wanted to go.
“We called Cliff and asked if he was interested. He said he was, but if I was looking for big money, it was not going to happen. The owner was trying to save money and put it towards a new arena.
“So I said, ‘Just put together a reasonable offer, and we’ll see what we can do. He came back with a deal for three million dollars a year with some money deferred. We said ‘Okay, we like that.’ ”
“But Cliff came back and said he had taken it to the owner [Steve Stavro] and the owner nixed it.”
Fletcher had been elated about the prospect of getting Gretzky for what was one of the rare decent Toronto teams of that era, and he thought that Stavro would jump at the opportunity.
But Stavro, a cash-strapped grocer who had taken ownership of the team through a succession of moves that met with widespread disapproval in many circles and were considered by some to be outright illegal, concerned himself only with the bottom line.
“How many seats will that sell?” he asked Fletcher.
The answer, of course, was zero. The Leafs always sold out no matter how bad they were, and Stavro wasn’t about to add Gretzky to the payroll, even though Gretzky was offering a hometown bargain price.
But Gretzky was still in demand elsewhere. “Bob Gainey called from the Dallas Stars,” recalled Gretzky, “but I felt I’d already played in the southern United States, and I didn’t want to do that again. At that time, Dallas wasn’t as established as it became later. Bob gave me a firm offer and it was a good deal, but I’d been through the thing of building a team in the south and I just wanted to go to a team that was more established.”
The next offer was from Vancouver, a team that was reconfirming the interest it had shown a few months earlier. When Gretzky was still with the Kings, the Canucks, like everyone else, knew that he was on the market. With the Kings having recently declared bankruptcy, Canucks owner John McCaw Jr., a Seattle billionaire who was listed on the Forbes magazine list of the 400 wealthiest Americans, tried to acquire Gretzky in the old-fashioned way. He tried to buy him.
NHL commissioner Gary Bettman vetoed the deal, saying that if Gretzky were to move, it had to be a trade, not a purchase.
But once Gretzky became a free agent, a trade was no longer necessary. Now McCaw was free to buy him.
Accordingly, Gretzky met with Canucks general manager Pat Quinn in Seattle and discussed the nature of his potential involvement with the team. Quinn was in a foul temper because he had been on vacation in Singapore when McCaw called him and demanded that he return to North America to sign Gretzky before he went somewhere else.
Both Quinn and Gretzky favoured a style of play that used speed as a weapon, and both were totally opposed to the neutral-zone trap used by many teams.
In its basic form, the trap is an easy defence to utilize. You set up your three forwards like a diagonal picket fence so a team trying to move the puck out of its own zone is channelled towards the boards between the blue lines. Once the puck carrier gets there, he’s trapped. Hence the name. The puck carrier’s best option is to dump the puck into the offensive zone before the trap snaps shut. Then the other team tries to move the puck up ice against the trap, and the whole process is repeated. It’s not exciting hockey. In fact, both Gretzky and Quinn felt that the trap would kill the sport if it weren’t eliminated, either by legislation or by smart coaches finding ways to make it ineffective.
With so much accord between the two sides, it seemed inevitable that Gretzky would join the Canucks. All day long, Gretzky’s advisors, Barnett and Fujikawa, met with Quinn and assistant general manager George McPhee.
Gretzky and McCaw, meanwhile, sat in an outer office and chatted amiably about all kinds of topics. Every so often, their functionaries would emerge to bring them up to date, then head back into the office; and McCaw and Gretzky would resume their discussion.
“He’s a great guy,” said Gretzky of McCaw. “I really liked him. We got along great.”
As midnight approached, the talks were continuing, and Gretzky headed back to his hotel. The negotiations were progressing well and were in the hands of those
he paid to perform such functions. There was no need for him to stick around.
Shortly afterwards, the Canucks added a year to their proposal, making it a three-year deal, and bumped up the money to about five million (U.S.) dollars a year. Gretzky’s advisors then went back to the hotel bearing the offer, and the three agreed they would accept the terms and sign the contract in the morning.
But all of a sudden, the phone rang. The Canucks wanted an immediate answer, and if it was in the affirmative, they required an immediate signature. Quinn wanted to get back to his vacation, and McPhee disliked and distrusted Barnett.
Gretzky told them he would accept the offer, but he was going to bed. He gave them his word that he would do the deal, but the formalities would have to wait for the next morning.
That was not good enough for Quinn. He told Gretzky he had to take it or leave it. Immediately.
Apparently, the Canucks felt that Gretzky intended to use their offer as a lever to force a better deal from the New York Rangers. Once again, it was an instance of people attributing their own ethical standards to Gretzky, not realizing that his word is his bond. Once he had said he would sign, he would sign.
He had no plans to use the Canucks’ offer as leverage, but once he was delivered an ultimatum that clearly implied a lack of trust, he balked. He decided that he had no intention of playing for a team that opted for confrontation over conciliation. And the Canucks under Quinn were notorious for being such a team.
Gretzky very much liked and admired McCaw; he liked Vancouver and wanted to play there. But when the team put a gun to his head for no good reason, he decided that life would be a lot easier elsewhere.
In New York, the Rangers, captained by his old buddy Mark Messier, were still an option, and it was a city where star power is paramount. It was a logical place for him to play, even though the salary was lower than the St. Louis offer.
“My instincts were that maybe money wasn’t all that important,” he said when he got to New York. “What tipped the scales was to play with Mark and with a team focused on winning a championship. I wanted to come here and I’m thrilled they wanted me.”
He added with a laugh, “I’m probably the only free agent to come to New York for less money.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The 1996 World Cup was to be more than just another international tournament. It was to be a changing of the guard, a passing of the torch.
After having been so instrumental in creating the Canadian legacy, Gretzky was now going to be instrumental in making sure that it was perpetuated.
The old Edmonton Oilers–based order, so capably led by Gretzky and staffed by stalwarts like Mark Messier, Paul Coffey, Bill Ranford, Grant Fuhr and the other heroes over the years, was going to stand down. It was time for rising stars like Eric Lindros, Ed Jovanovski, Keith Primeau, Scott Niedermayer and Martin Brodeur to become not only the core of the 1996 team but also the core of Team Canadas over the next decade.
The World Cup also marked a transitional phase in international hockey, because it was the first time this name was used for what was essentially the latest instalment of the Canada Cup.
The Canada Cup, which involved all the world’s top hockey-playing nations, had been held every three to five years since 1976, but there was widespread feeling that a name change to the World Cup would elevate its status, especially among Europeans who held soccer’s World Cup in such high esteem.
The last Canada Cup had been played in 1991, but because of the 1994 lockout that killed half the season and created a high level of animosity among the various factions involved, the first World Cup was delayed.
The Canada Cup had always held a certain mystique in the eyes of North American hockey fans because it was the only time they would get to see players from the Iron Curtain countries. But by 1996, the Iron Curtain had gone. Now, Russians, Czechs, Slovaks, Latvians, Ukrainians and other formerly inaccessible players were displaying their skills in the NHL.
As a result, there was some concern in the media that such a tournament was irrelevant in that it no longer opened any doors. But that feeling was nothing more than a reflection of the unfamiliarity of hockey fans with the concept. It was no more irrelevant than Wimbledon would be to tennis fans or the British Open to golf fans.
“It’s more of a show now than a learning process,” conceded Gretzky. “I think that the trade-off that we used to get from ’76, ’81 and ’84—where we would learn from the Soviets and Europeans and they would learn from our game—was to the benefit of all countries.
“Now, let’s face it, this is really an NHL tournament. Most of the guys on most of the teams are from the NHL, and now what we’re doing is selling the sport.
“That’s why they changed the name from the Canada Cup to the World Cup. It’s hard for Canadians to accept, because we know the Canada Cup tradition and the history of it. That’s special in Canada, all the way back to the ’72 Summit Series, if you want to count that.
“The name change was a stepping stone to selling the game. It benefits the owners and benefits the players.”
By 1996, Canada’s first fully professional foray into the Olympics was only two years away, and hockey was becoming increasingly important on the world stage. It was time to create a legacy and establish a heritage.
As was always the case, Canada was at or near the top of the international rankings, but no matter how good a country might be, it can’t win every time. There will be bad bounces. There will be off-years.
Still, even if you’re not unbeatable, you can create a legacy of being the single dominant hockey country in the world. That was the goal pursued by Team Canada ’96.
It was also the goal pursued by coach–general manager Glen “Slats” Sather, who, like the veteran players, was part of the transition. Just as this was to be the last Team Canada to be built around the Edmonton Oilers dynasty, it was also the last to be managed by Sather, the man who built that dynasty.
For that reason, even though Brodeur was only twenty-four, he was named to the team to back up Curtis Joseph because his NHL performances had indicated that he was to be Canada’s goalie of the future. By playing for Team Canada at that age, he would learn the international game from the best. He would get involved with guys who had been through it all before and knew what was required.
Had Sather made the easy choice of Patrick Roy, who was almost the same age as Joseph, Canada would have been faced with the problem of breaking in two internationally inexperienced goalies in the not-too-distant future. Had Paul Kariya not been injured, he too would have been one of the younger stars in the lineup.
Said Sather, “All these guys who are here now are going to learn from the older guys. That’s why they’re here. They’re going to learn truckloads from these guys. By hanging around them. By osmosis. It’s wonderful.”
The veterans knew what was expected of them and acted accordingly. When Messier, Coffey and Gretzky went golfing in the afternoons, they took Lindros along to make up the foursome.
When the team got together for dinner, one of the regular topics of discussion was Canada’s hockey heritage and how it was the responsibility of the younger guys to perpetuate it. Sather used the veterans as teachers. Sometimes the lessons were major; sometimes they weren’t. “There was a small thing the first day,” said Sather a few days after camp opened. “I said, ‘Who wants to lead the exercises?’ When Mark started, he would have said, ‘I will, but show me some exercises.’ This time, he said, ‘Okay,’ and he had half a dozen stretching exercises that he already knew all about.
“He’s an experienced, veteran guy who jumps in and takes over the leadership. Only the veteran guys can do that stuff.”
Sather also set up the accommodation list so that veterans roomed with youngsters. He set up a stall arrangement in the dressing room that sandwiched first-timers between veterans. During practices, seniority had no relevance in the determination of linemates.
“From the point of v
iew of planning of the team’s future, there has been a lot of that,” Sather said. “We’re trying to get the young guys incorporated into the same philosophy that some of the older guys have had—the feeling of the importance of the team, of having the same mental attitude that Mark has, the feeling that’s going to be carried from the tradition of all these guys who have been so great for the last ten or twelve years throughout their careers, and passing it on.”
Gretzky was totally in favour of the concept. “You’ve got to be excited about playing for your country,” he said. “That’s the first thing to pass along. I honestly feel as much excitement now as I did back in 1981.
“The next thing you have to do, you have to show players that when you come here, it’s hard work, and that you have to be dedicated for the time that you’re here.
“Through that, too, you get to know the other people. But I think the biggest thing of all is dedication and what it takes to win because it’s imperative as Canadians that we win.”
There was no gradual ramping up in that tournament. The players arrived in game-shape condition at the training camp in Whistler, British Columbia, on Wednesday, August 14. That evening, ice was made available for a light skate, but the concept of a light skate was quickly forgotten. Even though many of the invitees were still en route, the earlier arrivals engaged in a full-tilt, high-speed scrimmage.
This was a new approach for Team Canada. In previous tournaments of this nature, forty-five or fifty players would show up at the beginning of August. Then, over the following two weeks, a training camp would be held to serve the dual purpose of eliminating half the players while allowing the others to get in shape.
This time, there was no surplus, and every player on the squad was told to be ready to go when he got to camp, partly because the players had said, through their NHL Players’ Association leaders, that they wanted to play for their country but didn’t want to give up two weeks of their summer only to get cut in camp.
