CHAPTER FIVE

It took fifty years and the entry of Wayne Gretzky into the NHL for the possibilities of the forward pass to be realized. Passing had been at the centre of the Soviet game, but the Soviets were newcomers to hockey. Canadians were hockey’s creators—and we were the best—so our way of playing, not theirs, must surely be the best. It only followed. The Soviets had looked impressive during the Summit Series and in their smattering of games against NHL players during the rest of the 1970s, but faced with a full NHL season, Soviet players would never be able to stand up to the test. Their way wouldn’t work, Canadians knew, because it wouldn’t work.

Born in 1961, Gretzky grew up in Brantford, Ontario, as a hockey prodigy. He spent endless hours on a backyard rink his father had built, learning the game’s basic skills and much more. He took the game that he saw on TV and learned to think it, imagine it, and make it his own. Lots of kids dominate when they are young, especially when they are among the oldest in their age category, because they are bigger, more practised, and more mature than their teammates and opponents. But when age-related advantage begins to matter less, they get shuffled back into a pack they aren’t familiar with and don’t know how to handle.

Gretzky was a little taller than most kids, but he was skinny. He was a quick skater, but his stride was choppy and awkward enough to make coaches and scouts wonder. But Gretzky, even then, was able to stand back from the hype around his game to see himself. He realized that he wouldn’t be able to dominate in the way his hero Gordie Howe had done—by power and force. Gretzky was a good puck handler, but with the puck on his stick his opponents could converge on him, slow him down, bump him, outmuscle him, and make him ordinary. He needed open ice, and he would only get that if he passed to teammates, then skated to open ice himself so they, in turn, could pass to him. “I skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been,” Gretzky famously said. In other words, it is the players without the puck who determine where the puck is going, by going there themselves. This was how the Soviets played. For years, after the Summit Series, Canadian coaches and players had been able to ignore the Soviet philosophy, but Gretzky was one of our own.

Because of his own personal limitations, Gretzky uncovered other possibilities in himself, and he forced his teammates—Mark Messier, Jari Kurri, Glenn Anderson, Paul Coffey, even the Oilers’ lesser skilled players—to do the same. By playing the way he did, he pushed them to skate faster, pass better, and shoot more accurately. And out of opportunity and necessity, they discovered they could.

In the 1980s, scoring in the NHL increased dramatically. Ordinary players compiled the point totals of superstars of the previous decades; outstanding goalies carried the stats of sieves. If passing were to be the focus, hockey’s patterns had to change.

For its first century, hockey had moved in straight lines, forward and back. There was a right winger and a left winger, a right defenceman and a left defenceman. Those on the right stayed on the right; those on the left stayed on the left. Only the centre roved from side to side. For a winger, there was little worse than having a coach admonish, “Stay on your wing! Stay on your wing!” Yet with blue lines, a red line, and an offside rule which those generated, forward passes were difficult to complete. A pass in your own defensive zone was often too risky; in the offensive zone it was in territory too congested to succeed. Only the neutral zone, between the blue lines, offered promise—less risk, more opportunity—but there, players quickly ran out of space or needed to slow down, both of which defeated their purpose. To pass successfully, therefore, players needed to go to wherever there was open ice—on the right, on the left, it didn’t matter—and skating diagonally across the ice offered a player more space to pick up speed without going offside. With Gretzky and the Russians, hockey changed from an end-to-end “north–south” game, to a side-to-side “east–west” one; from a game focused on the puck-carrier to one focused on everyone else.

A player wearing skates on a surface of ice had always had the capacity to go fast. The rule that prevented a forward pass had slowed him down; the rule change that allowed such a pass gave him the opportunity to go faster. The rule preventing substitutions, and the rule change that allowed them, had similar effects. A regulation that increased the number of players permitted to dress for a game enabled each player to play fewer minutes—and so enabled them to put more into each minute, to go faster, creating the need to be in better shape, to train off-ice and off-season in order to go faster still. Even Broad Street Bully–style intimidation as team strategy couldn’t slow down this evolving game.

Those who grew up in the 1950s remember that decade as the NHL’s tough old days, “when hockey was hockey and men were men.” But they are mistaken. In the 1950s, the team that led the league in fights each season averaged only about one fight every three and a half games. The “Big, Bad Bruins” in the late 1960s pushed that number to slightly more than one every two games; the Flyers to one fight per game a few years later. By that time, the league’s other teams—at first just trying to survive against the Flyers—learned to fight back. In the 1978–79 season, Philadelphia led the league with 74 fights, but Detroit had 71, Toronto 68, Chicago 66, Washington 64, St. Louis 62, and Boston 60. Of the league’s seventeen teams, twelve had 50 fights or more. These numbers increased again during the high-scoring Gretzky years, peaking in 1986. That season, Detroit had 154 fights, almost two per game.

More offence usually leads quickly to more defence, but in the 1980s it led only to more offence. The players, realizing they could score, suddenly seemed addicted to scoring—and their coaches seemed powerless to stop them from trying. Even the goalies had no answer, until they began to increase the size of their equipment, but that came later. It wasn’t until the 1990s that coaches and players started to adapt to the high-scoring game, and they did it with more hooking and holding, more clutching, grabbing, and obstruction—and for some, a team strategy called the “neutral zone trap”—to slow the game down. But the players were getting bigger; and the game, whether by passing or by forechecking, was always on the go. Collisions became more frequent and forceful. And while helmets, in an attempt to bring greater safety to the more dangerous game, had become mandatory for every new player in the league in 1979, they would turn out to have little effect.

Even with Gretzky’s arrival in the NHL, the early 1980s were an insecure time for Canadian hockey. There was more fighting; the game seemed messy and out of control. In Gretzky’s first season, only 4 per cent of the NHL’s players were developed in Europe—twenty players were from Sweden, five from Finland, two from Czechoslovakia—but sixty-nine were now from the U.S., more than 10 per cent of the league. There were no Soviet players—they were still winning championships, believing in something bigger, and solidly behind the Wall—but their presence was felt everywhere. In February 1979, they had defeated the NHL All-Stars (a team that included three Swedes) in the three-game series known as the Challenge Cup. Two years later, they obliterated Team Canada, 8–1, in the final of the Canada Cup in Montreal. The Soviets, with their off-ice and off-season training, motivated by dedication not money, seemed to be going where the future was headed.

Canada seemed stuck—as a hockey power, and even as a country. After the heady years that had followed its centennial in 1967, and the early promise of Pierre Trudeau’s government, Canada, it appeared, had returned to its historic backwater, and nothing embodied the country’s disappointment in itself more than Canadian hockey. This was the perfect moment for Don Cherry.

Cherry had grown up in a working-class family, developed into a player of working-class skills, and become the coach of a team with a proud working-class identity, the Boston Bruins. As a coach, he was successful, cranky, and funny: a character; a blustering, ranting, syntax-challenged street kid who spoke basic truths. That was his schtick. After leaving the Bruins in 1979 for a big-money job to coach a bad team, the Colorado Rockies, he discovered that he couldn’t live with losing, got fired, and moved from coaching to what became his Saturday night soapbox, “Coach’s Corner” on CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada. It was 1982. In all the decades of radio and television before, it had been the play-by-play announcers—principally Foster Hewitt and Danny Gallivan—who had defined hockey broadcasts. Now it was Don Cherry. More than thirty-five years later, it is still Cherry.

Many Canadian hockey commentators at the time were dumping on Canadian hockey; many Canadian opinion-makers were dumping on Canada. But if you’re a working-class kid, whining doesn’t work and irony is too clever; pride is all you have going for you, and Cherry was proud. He spoke to the “deep in the bone” feelings of Canadians—the pride they had for their kids and families, their communities and hometowns; their loyalty to, solidarity with, and belief in their companies, organizations, and teams, in hard work and doing things together, in the jersey and the uniform and everything emblematic of the country. While others trashed Canadian hockey, Cherry stood up for it, and he struck a chord. His hockey was the stereotypical Canadian game of the time: all stitches and missing teeth, and rough and tough players; hockey that was “Rock’em Sock’em,” as he called his bestselling annual videos; a game of the heart and spirit, not of science and the brain.

But Cherry also struck a reverse chord. Many people hated him. To them, his view of Canada was unsophisticated and simplistic, too much of a time that no longer existed. A Canada of Saturday-morning-at-the-hockey-rink/Tim-Hortons-coffee-drinking Canadians—not of the highly educated, eloquent, global moderns his critics were and wanted Canadians to be. Cherry embarrassed them.

In his early years on “Coach’s Corner,” European players and the way they played were more threat than reality. It wasn’t until the early 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that the Russians arrived in the NHL in important numbers. Quickly—along with other European players—they became stars, and began winning the NHL’s biggest individual awards—most valuable player; top point-getter, top goal scorer, top goaltender, top defenceman, most outstanding rookie—in numbers almost equal to Canadians. The Europeans had come from nowhere to a very significant somewhere in the NHL, and to many Canadians this trend was very disturbing. Cherry fought back even harder than he had before. To him, everything about Canadian players was right; everything about European players was wrong. Good guys can only do good things; bad guys can only do bad. And loyalty means friends are always right.

Cherry overstated his own case, and he probably knew it. He had always respected talent—his favourite player was Bobby Orr, and as much as he had reason to hate the Montreal Canadiens, he didn’t, because he knew that as talented as they were, like Orr, they were tough, too. And like other lunch-pail Canadian players he loves, Richard, Howe, and Gretzky are also Canadian. Cherry’s fans accepted much of what he said about European players, laughed and rolled their eyes at the rest, and loved him all the same. They knew that as much as his rants seemed to be about Canadian hockey, they were really about Canada. Don Cherry believed in Canadian hockey, and he believed in Canada even more.

Don Cherry began on Hockey Night in Canada in 1980, the same year the Montadors bought their house on Avonbridge Drive, in Mississauga, the same city Cherry moved to two years later. Steve began playing hockey during Cherry’s early years on “Coach’s Corner”—in the basement family room, on the backyard creek, and in the circle at the end of his street. Steve grew up to embody the ethic and spirit that Cherry espoused. He was tough, hard-working, and hard-trying; he stood up for his teammates and himself; he did whatever his team needed whenever it needed to be done; he never backed down, never quit. He was under-noticed and underappreciated. He was an upper-middle-class kid and a working-class player. He was an underdog. He was the kind of guy Don Cherry loved.

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Athletes are willing to commit everything. It’s what being an athlete is. Hockey players had always been willing to commit more, and Canadian hockey players the most of all. They had a reputation and an identity to live up to, and they had their pride. But by the 1980s, NHL players were also being paid masses of money. They didn’t need to bleed Leafs blue or Canadiens red—except for the years they were under contract to the Leafs or Canadiens. Then, as free agents, they could bleed Flyers orange or Penguins black. Fans had always given their all to their team; with all this money, they were less sure that the players were doing the same, and they were looking for evidence of some equal dedication. What defined everything continued to escalate.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, as Steve was growing up in Mississauga and playing minor hockey, everything for an NHL player was eighty games and four rounds of playoffs that continued until the end of May (in 1992, the playoffs extended into June for the first time). Everything was 110 games, preseason included. It was off-ice and off-season training. With more teams and more players, it was a longer career, more money, and more wear and tear. It was still injuries to the face—cuts and lost teeth—but more damagingly, because of the greater speed and increased collisions, it was injuries to shoulders and especially to knees. Once retired, this generation of players would be undergoing knee and hip replacements in much higher numbers, and at a much younger age.

Equipment was becoming more protective. After all, why should a player feel the pain of the ice, the boards, the glass, a puck, a stick, or an opponent’s body if he didn’t have to? Pain distracts and slows a player down. So why not play with abandon? With better equipment, why not hit with the same force with less pain, and hit more often; or with greater force but with the same pain? Why not do everything that is in you, with no compromise of performance for safety?

Head injuries, except for visible ones to the face, didn’t seem much of a problem even at this time—and almost every player now wore a helmet. Some helmet-skeptics had argued for decades that head protection made a player more, not less, vulnerable. Without a helmet, a player can sense danger even from behind; with a helmet, it’s as if his radar is jammed. But most of the skeptics just didn’t like helmets. Fans identify with their heroes and want to feel for them, but when everyone wears a helmet, everyone looks alike, they argued. Fans can’t see that look of triumph or disappointment on a player’s face. When Guy Lafleur started up ice with the puck, fans could see his hair flip up then stream out behind. They could feel his speed. With a helmet on, some of that excitement was gone.

The helmet would have much less of a protective effect than everyone imagined, a fact that wouldn’t come to be known until recent years. Helmets lessen the risk of a fractured skull, but do almost nothing to prevent concussions. Hockey still remained a compromise between performance and safety—even if most believed that both were possible pursued to their fullest, and compromise was no longer necessary.

Fighting had changed, too, but again our collective memory is dangerously wrong. The legendary tough guys of the 1950s—Gordie Howe, Lou Fontinato—fought a total of only four or five times a season—and that’s against all opponents, not just against each other. The fighters of the 1960s—John Ferguson, “Terrible Ted” Green, and Reggie Fleming—fought seven or eight times a season, again in total. But in the 1970s, players like Dave “the Hammer” Schultz, Garry Howatt, and “Tiger” Williams routinely fought twenty-five times or more each year (Williams had thirty-four fights in the 1977–78 season).

One of Howe’s unique legacies as a player is commemorated in a special category of achievement, the “Gordie Howe hat trick”—a goal, an assist, and a fight, all recorded in a single game. Including regular season and playoff games, and his years in both the NHL and WHA, Howe scored nearly 1,100 goals, had over 2,400 penalty minutes, and played more than 2,400 games. In that time, Gordie Howe had two Gordie Howe hat tricks.

Before the 1970s, the game was played to a different set of understandings. NHL players looked to earn a reputation for toughness so they didn’t have to fight. That changed dramatically with the Broad Street Bullies. The league’s total fighting numbers stayed at similar high levels in the 1980s, but more player-fighters contended for the league’s lead in fights. Yet, with a few exceptions, they were still light-heavyweights—players who had to become good enough as players to get onto the ice to fight. But for fighters, giving everything was about to require a whole lot more.

Players had always needed to win, but in recent decades, they needed to win even more. The stakes were even higher. NHL franchises cost more money to buy; they were no longer just “hobby” investments for the local rich, but a significant percentage of their financial holdings. Most franchises were not located in traditional hockey areas. They had local competition from other sports teams and other activities. Spectacular success and spectacular failure were both possibilities. Serious money could be won or lost. The players became more important and more vulnerable. Everything, in terms of winning, had escalated as well.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, there was little to hold hockey back. The impact of the big changes that had been implemented throughout the century was just ahead.

In February 1993, Gary Bettman became the first commissioner of the NHL.