by Al Strachan
This time, the Canadians intended to be ready to produce whatever would be needed, whether it was offence or defence. They intended to be ready for any team in the tournament, not just one.
The four players who rounded out the early selection list—Lemieux, Joe Sakic, Paul Kariya and Owen Nolan—further illustrated the intentions of Gretzky and the management team.
No goalies were named because at that point, there were too many good candidates, the top five being Patrick Roy, Martin Brodeur, Roberto Luongo, Curtis Joseph and Sean Burke.
All summer long, Gretzky worked on getting a summer camp, and eventually he got his way—but it wasn’t easy.
He started by calling players on the list and asking if they considered an August training camp to be acceptable. It’s a simple fact in the hockey world that the respect for Gretzky is such that no player would turn him down. They all said, “Sure, Wayne, no problem. We’ll do it.”
However, some of them called the NHL Players’ Association and said, “I’ve just told Wayne Gretzky I’ll go to a summer camp. How can I say no to a guy like him? But there’s no way I want to be there. You have to help.” Accordingly, the NHLPA issued a public denunciation of an August camp.
But as the summer passed, there were quiet negotiations. Gretzky learned that it was the date of the camp that was unpalatable, not the concept. If he held it immediately before the NHL teams opened their camps, he discovered, there would be no problem.
As one of the players said, “At that stage of the summer, we’d be going full speed if we were back in our hometowns. We’d be skating with a group of guys and getting into the final stages of preparation for training camp. We’re skating every day anyway, so why not do it with the best players in the world?”
So that’s when it was held.
Along the way, the NHLPA quietly pulled out of the proceedings. Naturally, there was no news release on the matter. But those conversant with the hockey world knew that as soon as the players withdrew their objection, there was no further reason for the NHLPA to intercede.
And the ban on “tryouts or practices”? Gretzky had found a way around that too.
It transpired that Canadian officials had never got around to signing the agreement between the International Ice Hockey Federation, the NHLPA and the Canadian Hockey Association that covered participation in world championships and the 2004 World Cup.
The document that had been signed was a letter of understanding from the CHA to the NHLPA and the NHL. It had four clauses relating to training camps, one of which said that teams were allowed an “optional orientation meeting that will occur over a forty-eight-hour period, excluding travel time.”
That was the clause Canada used to stage its training camp.
Did it matter? Well, consider this: the camp was held in Calgary, and when Simon Gagne reported, he was nursing a previously un-reported injury; so a last-minute call was made to Jarome Iginla, who lived in Edmonton.
“I’d watched the first day of camp on TV,” said Iginla, “and I’d seen the highlights on all the sports channels. I went out to dinner with my brothers and my dad. My wife—my fiancée at the time—called me, and she said, ‘Wayne Gretzky just called and he’d like you to come down to camp.’
“I said to her, ‘Are you sure it was Wayne Gretzky? I can just see some guys playing a prank on me.’ I said, ‘What are the chances?’
“I told her there were some guys who thought it would be a pretty good joke to have me go in there with my equipment bag and everything. When I get there and they ask what I’m doing there, I’m supposed to say, ‘Oh, I want to try out.’ ”
Iginla was so sure he was the victim of a practical joke that he refused to call the number Gretzky had left. Instead, he called Kevin Lowe, who assured him that his presence was indeed required.
He got up at dawn the next morning, drove to Calgary, and was so impressive, despite his shortened exposure to the selectors, that he made the team. In the Olympic tournament, he was one of Canada’s best players and scored two goals in the gold-medal game. Without that training camp, Iginla would not have been on the team.
The evolution of the team seemed to be progressing smoothly, but in November, Gretzky faced a major setback. Patrick Roy, by that time the odds-on favourite to be the first-string goaltender, called Gretzky at his Los Angeles home to tell him that he would not participate. He wanted to rest.
Roy had been Canada’s starting goalie in the 1998 Olympics in Nagano and had played every minute of every game. He compiled a 4–2 record with a 1.46 goals-against average.
But this time around, Roy prioritized his commitment to his NHL team, the Colorado Avalanche. “My reasons are simple,” he said. “I wanted to take the time to prepare myself to have a good playoff and finish the season strong.” Roy was thirty-six at the time, and because of the Olympics, the 2002 playoffs could run until June 20. He felt that the grind would be too much and that the Avs, who were paying him $8.5 million to do the job in goal for them, would be cheated.
Gretzky tried to put the best possible face on the development. “I respect his decision,” he said. “Obviously, he was one of the goalies that we were looking at, but the other goalies we had in camp are very capable as well. He showed a lot of class. He showed up in Calgary, and he participated and worked hard. He played in the Olympics once, and it’s his decision that he doesn’t want to do it this time. I can accept that.”
The positive side of the announcement was that, by making up his mind in November, rather than after the twenty-three-man roster had been named, Roy allowed Gretzky ample time to fill the gap.
Nevertheless, the development gave Gretzky a hint of what was to come. The entire nation, it seemed, was suddenly in an uproar, partly because of the usual unsubstantiated observations that emanate from radio panel shows and partly because of a newspaper report in New York, of all places.
The urban myth that spread everywhere said that Roy had been mistreated—“dissed” in the jargon of the day—by Gretzky, and that’s why he had pulled out. The newspaper report said that Brodeur might not be named to the team. The fact that there was not the slightest evidence to support either assertion seemed to trouble no one.
For the first allegation to be true, Roy would have had to lie publicly about his reasons for leaving the team. But Roy had never shown the slightest aversion to being forthright, as anyone who remembered his days with the Montreal Canadiens would have known.
In fact, Gretzky had approached the matter this way. First, he told Roy he would be named to the team. Then he told him that he would have the inside track to the first-string job—that it would be his to lose. And he told him that another goalie would play one of the qualifying games.
That was an eminently sensible approach. After all, if Gretzky unequivocally promised the full-time job to Roy, what would he do if Roy were in a slump in February? The Olympics are a single-game elimination tournament, after all.
As for Brodeur, it turned out that he had not been removed from the list of those being considered for the team.
But the level of hysteria that arose because of those two unfounded assumptions was ominous, to say the least.
As the deadline for naming the twenty-three-man roster drew close, Gretzky’s decisions became even harder—not because of a shortage of players, but because of a surplus of quality players combined with a number of short-term injuries. Lemieux was the perfect example. He wanted to play, but he had a wrist injury. Clearly, he had to be on the team if he was healthy, but if it turned out that the injury didn’t heal as expected, a roster spot would have been wasted. Other players—notably Derek Morris and Ryan Smyth—were in similar situations.
And what about players whose track record was good but whose recent play wasn’t?
These were the kinds of decisions that Gretzky always knew he would face, but they were made more difficult by the Olympic bureaucracy, which created unrealistic deadlines and imposed needless rules.
Finally, the management group, led by Gretzky, assistant executive director Kevin Lowe, director of player personnel Steve Tambellini and head coach Pat Quinn, reached a decision.
“It kept coming back to the same thing,” Gretzky said. “Just take the best players.”
In the end, that’s what they did. There wasn’t always unanimity. Gretzky himself thought that Burke belonged on the list of the three goalies, along with Brodeur and Joseph, but around the room, the sentiment favoured Ed Belfour. So Belfour got the call.
“It got down to the fact,” Gretzky explained, “that these are the three goalies the coaching staff was very, very confident with.”
Any disagreements that did arise were minimal and within well-defined boundaries. Gretzky and his support staff had worked hard over the preceding year to whittle down the options—so much so that when they met in a Toronto hotel room to finalize the team, they needed only ninety minutes to do so.
After the goalies came the defencemen. There were the three named the previous spring plus MacInnis, Adam Foote, Eric Brewer and Ed Jovanovski. In addition to the five pre-selected forwards, Gretzky added Smyth, Iginla, Theoren Fleury, Eric Lindros, Mike Peca, Brendan Shanahan, Joe Nieuwendyk and Simon Gagne.
“We wanted speed,” said Gretzky. “We wanted size. We wanted emotion. We really wanted emotion.
“Everyone loses. Everyone makes mistakes. But we wanted our mistakes to be made out of caring, out of wanting to do well. We wanted that to really be a part of our team.”
Peca exemplified the concept. Despite missing the previous NHL season in a contract dispute, he had gone to Germany to play for Canada in the world championship, suffered a shattered orbital bone on his first shift, but continued to play and was named the game’s most outstanding player.
“That kind of attitude, that kind of atmosphere, is what we really want,” said Gretzky, “because it’s a disease that spreads through the team and you want that. You want guys feeling that, ‘I’m so happy to play for this country, and I’m proud to be on this team.’ Those are the kinds of guys we wanted from day one, and I think we really established that.”
Making the personnel decisions didn’t end the meeting—far from it. For four more hours, the brain trust talked about every aspect that could possibly become relevant. They discussed possible line combinations. They worried about the ratio of right-handed shots to lefties. They debated the pairing of roommates. They considered the most recent (and probably not final) IOC edict regarding practice times. They pondered possible matchups against other teams. They worked out hypothetical defence pairings. They talked about the advantages and disadvantages of moving certain players to unaccustomed positions.
And on and on it went. “We really turned over every stone throughout this whole process,” Gretzky explained.
But that was the Gretzky way. He tried to consider every possible scenario that might arise and how to handle it. It was the way he had played; it was the way he intended to run Team Canada.
In a task of that nature, the commitment has to start at the top, and if the gold medal did eventually find its way into Canadian hands, it would be because, along the way, every aspect of preparation had been done as thoroughly as possible.
Even then, with the team named and the tournament nearly two months away, it was not clear sailing. Once again, the rumour mill sprang to life. As stories spread like wildfire from coast to coast, an unmerited authenticity accrued to them as they were told and retold.
One such rumour had the Olympic organizers being on the verge of dumping Eric Lindros and Theoren Fleury and replacing them with Joe Thornton and Keith Primeau. Again, the stories appeared in print and were discussed on radio, even though they made no sense. “We would never do that to anyone,” said Gretzky. “We have no intention of embarrassing any players. Those guys have been named to the team, and everyone named to the team will stay on the team unless they are genuinely injured. We won’t be dropping anyone.
“These guys have pride and they have agreed to play for their country. We would never do something like that to anyone. It just wouldn’t be right.”
Those rumours had hardly been put to bed when another cropped up. This time, the organizers allegedly were determined to find a way to add Joe Thornton to the team. An emerging star at the time, Thornton had solid fan support, but once again, the rumour made no sense.
When the organizers made their original selections, they were fully aware of Thornton’s ability. They had also spoken at length to Boston Bruins general manager Mike O’Connell. They knew exactly what Thornton would bring to the team. But they didn’t select Thornton in December, and they weren’t going to do it in January.
On paper, Canada had the strongest hockey team in the Olympics, but Gretzky knew that meant nothing. Canada was probably the strongest team in the 1998 Nagano Olympics as well, but they lost a shootout. If nothing else, that fact illustrated the potential importance of a single goal in the Olympic format. One more goal during regulation time against the Czech Republic in 1998, and Canada would have gone on to play for gold, a game it probably would have won.
In 2002, Canada intended to be ready for all eventualities. The preparation in 1998 was good; in 2002, the preparation was meticulous.
The simple fact that the Canadian professionals had one Olympic experience under their belts was seen as a big advantage. The Europeans were comfortable with the Nagano format, having been through it so many times. For Canada, it had been a novelty.
Another advantage would be the time and effort that the key people in Canadian management had devoted to preparation. Gretzky had, in effect, made the gold-medal quest his full-time job, whereas in 1998, most of the decision-makers thought about the Olympics only when they found some slack periods in their NHL workload.
Also, the assistant coach in charge of developing strategy in 2002—the “Xs and Os guy,” in hockey terminology—was Ken Hitchcock, who was conveniently fired as head coach of the Dallas Stars fifty games into the season. That left his plate clear to concern himself with Team Canada’s Olympic tactics.
But when the Olympics finally opened, there was no visible evidence that Canada had done any preparation whatsoever.
In the opening game, they got thumped 5–2 by Sweden, and if Gretzky and friends had thought there was an unreasonable uproar when Roy opted out, they came to realize that the country’s reaction to a decision by one player was a drop in the ocean compared to the country’s reaction to a decisive loss.
According to letters to the editor, talk shows, columnists (and not only sports columnists) and even unsolicited emails sent to media members covering the event, it was a disgrace. It was a national tragedy. It was an embarrassment. It was an outrage. Goaltender Curtis Joseph should be sent home immediately.
It was certainly an embarrassment. The players agreed with that. The rest of the criticism was well over the top, including the venom directed at Joseph. He hadn’t been great, but he hadn’t been bad, either.
Nevertheless, in the next game, Gretzky made the decision to go with Martin Brodeur. In theory, it was a group decision, but Gretzky led the way.
“Don’t read into this that we’re blaming Curtis for the loss,” he said. “That’s not the case at all. We didn’t lose the game because of our goaltender. I don’t care who was in net, we were not going to beat that team with the chances they had and some of the things they did.
“Their goaltender [Tommy Salo] made some key saves early in the game, and that seemed to be the difference. But I wouldn’t blame our goaltender. I’m still not concerned about our goaltending being the weak link in this hockey team.”
Judging by the reaction, he was the only Canadian who wasn’t.
Two days later, Canada beat Germany 3–2. That did nothing to quell the uproar. The German team wasn’t star-studded, to say the least, and a victory by such a small margin was not what Canadian fans wanted. Brodeur allowed two goals on twenty shots, but only seven were from NHL players.
Now, Gretzky had to make another difficult decision. Coming in, the plan had been to play Joseph—who, in the weeks before the Olympics, had been the better goalie—in the first and third games. Did Gretzky go back to Joseph? Or should he now reverse that decision and stick with Brodeur to see him against the Czechs, who represented much better competition than Germany?
He opted for the latter and was proved right. Brodeur was outstanding. Canada got a 3–3 tie and, in the process, qualified for the elimination round.
Had Gretzky let the matter end there, he would certainly have faced another storm of criticism. A loss, a tie and a one-goal win over a weak team didn’t come close to satisfying the nation’s demands for the three-game opening round, even though Quinn had been saying for months that, as far as he was concerned, those games were nothing more than a training camp for the subsequent elimination round.
But when that anticipated storm of criticism broke, it was dwarfed by the reaction to Gretzky’s outburst after the Czech game.
In an uncharacteristic tirade during the postgame press conference, he blasted, among other things, stick use by the Czechs, inconsistent officials and American rumourmongers.
An incident late in the game was the flash point. Theoren Fleury, one of the smallest players in the Olympics, had absorbed a vicious cross-check from the lumbering Roman Hamrlik. The incident went unpenalized.
“I think the guy should be suspended for the rest of the tournament,” fumed Gretzky. “If it was a Canadian player who did it, it would be a big story. A Czech player did it and it was okay.”
He was rolling now. There was no slowing him down.
“I’m very proud of all the players in our locker room, and it makes me ill to hear some of the things that are being said about us.”
He paused briefly, but there was more. “Am I hot? Yeah, I’m hot, because I’m tired of people taking shots at Canadian hockey and when we do it, we’re hooligans. When Europeans do it, it’s okay because they’re not tough or they’re not dirty. That’s a crock of crap.”
