Anniversaries IV: The First Gretzky Sale

Thirty years ago today, on November 2 1978, the hockey landscape in Edmonton changed forever.

The World Hockey Association had begun its seventh and ultimately final season under the usual cloud of controversy. The previous summer overtures at a merger with the NHL had been rebuffed, and the Rebel League's struggling southern franchises responded with an unprecedented raid of underage talent. in 1977-78 the Birmingham Bulls had signed Ken Linseman as an underage test case, but now the gloves were off. The Bulls signed goalie Pat Riggin, defenders Craig Hartsburg, Rob Ramage, and Gaston Gingras, and forwards Michel Goulet and Rick Vaive. The Cincinnati Stingers snapped up Mike Gartner. And the Indianapolis Racers snagged the biggest prize of all, the 17-year-old wunderkind Wayne Gretzky, fully three years before he was eligible to be drafted into the NHL. The Racers' flamboyant owner Nelson Skalbania penned "the Kid" to a seven-year, $1.75 MM contract that shook the hockey world.

Gretzky was already famous for his scoring exploits as an amateur, coming to national attention at a very young age by posting unbelievable totals during his minor hockey days. The previous year he had taken the OHA by storm, scoring 70 goals and 112 assists in just 63 games as a 16-year-old, finishing a close second in league scoring just behind 19-year-old Bobby Smith, who would go on to be the #1 draft in the NHL. Gretzky was almost singlehandedly responsible for raising the profile of the fledgling World Junior tournament with a dominant performance, leading the tourney in scoring as its youngest player with 8 goals and 9 assists. A superior Soviet squad won a critical showdown en route to the gold medal, with 19-year-old captain Slava Fetisov personally responding to the challenge of shutting down the young Canadian star.

Despite the addition of the young hotshot, the Racers struggled out of the gate and at the gate. Gretzky had a slow start, but famously scored his first professional goal in a home game against the Oilers, and added a second just eight seconds later. (I still remember Rod Phillips' description from Market Square Arena.) The Racers were not scheduled to visit Edmonton until November 17, a date I had circled on my pocket schedule the day it was released.

Out of the blue on November 2, the incredible happened. Word filtered down that the Oilers' owner Peter Pocklington had completed a major deal with his former partner Skalbania to acquire Gretzky along with teammates Ed Mio and Peter Driscoll for the princely sum of $850,000. It was an out-and-out purchase with no players going the other way.

Such one-sided transactions were not uncommon in the Rebel League. Financial difficulties, bad debts and folding franchises were the rule rather than the exception throughout the league's turbulent history. Two years earlier the Oilers had briefly acquired seven members of the Minnesota Fighting Saints (a.k.a. the "Folding Saints") including Dave Keon and Johnny McKenzie, only to have the deal mostly fall through when the famous vets turned up their noses at Western Canada and forced a second deal to New England Whalers. So while the first reaction to the Gretzky purchase was overjoy, the second was trepidation; would Edmonton be snubbed yet again?

By the suppertime news, Gretzky was already in town, after an eventful charter flight in which the destination was unknown while Skalbania dickered with Michael Gobuty of the Jets (who famously chickened out of a game of backgammon) before closing the sale with Pocklington. Eddie Mio paid for the flight on his own credit card ... such was the precarious state of finances in the WHA.

The following night Gretzky made his Edmonton debut, scoring his first Oiler goal in a game I was obliged to miss due to a prior commitment which took me out of town. The Oilers themselves then went on the road, returning, ironically enough, for that game against the Racers that I had been so eagerly anticipating. To see the hotshot in the home whites was too good to be true.

I couldn't take my eyes off the Kid that night, in fact I quickly fell into the long-term habit of keeping an eye on him every moment he was on the ice. He did odd things, standing off to the side of puck battles and then pouncing on the loose biscuit, or occupying traditional dead zones of the ice and picking off stray passes and shootarounds. His anticipation was otherworldly, his stick skills magical from the get-go. His skating, not so much. But you could see from the stuff that he tried, that when he got stronger on his feet he would be hard to stop.

The Oilers cruised to a 4-0 first-period lead against the overmatched Racers, with Gretzky popping a garbage goal on a rebound. From there the game became a desultory 6-1 affair, with one shining exception. Attacking my end of the rink on a second period powerplay, the Oilers were going precisely nowhere and the Racers iced the puck again and again. Gretzky was growing frustrated and his face flushed (something my season ticket buddies and I soon learned was a VERY good sign). By the second or third icing Gretzky, playing the point, turned on the burners and raced down to his own end to retrieve the puck. He slapped his stick on the ice a couple of times to encourage Dave Dryden to simply leave the puck for him, and by the time he circled back with it he was in top gear. Crossing the Racer line he encountered the two penalty killing forwards, slipped the puck past them and avoided a check by leaping and spinning in the air, a move which I don't think I ever saw again. (Turned out he had a few others.) Landing on his feet and through the hole, Gretzky took a couple of steps, wound up and leaned into a slapshot which found the top corner of the net. I will never forget the the moment of silence that it took the people in the crowd to process what they had just seen, not just the whizzy move but the end result, the puck in the net, the red light on, just out of nowhere. Then the place, all 8 or 10,000 of us, erupted with a frenzy of cheering unlike anything I had experienced to that point. What a moment.

Gretzky went on to score 110 points, finish third in WHA scoring and decisively win the Rookie of the Year award against a bumper crop while leading the Oilers to a first place finish and a berth in the Avco Cup finals. While some NHL chauvinists ascribed his success to weak competition, fact was those 110 points remained the Great One's lowest output as a professional until 1992-93.

One other highlight of that first game didn't come into focus until much later. After trading three major assets to the Oilers the Racers had holes to fill on the roster. One of the newcomers was another 17-year-old, a local lad named Mark Messier. Thus I had my first view of the two most famous Edmonton Oilers on the very same night.

The unpolished Messier did little that night to really catch our eyes. He was lightly enough regarded that he lasted into the third round of the following year's NHL Entry Draft, long after his WHA contemporaries Ramage, Gartner, Vaive, Hartsburg, Goulet, Gingras and Riggin were selected. Indeed the WHA itself finally gained entry into the NHL that summer, as merger negotiations were finally successful. Gretzky himself avoided the draft altogether, having been signed by the crafty Pocklington to a personal services contract, and finessed into the NHL as an Oiler. Within five years Gretzky, Messier and Pocklington completed a rapid ascent to the ultimate goal, the Stanley Cup. But that's a story -- more than one actually! -- for another day.

Anniversaries III: The Man in Black

Not all memorable occasions are happy ones. They tend to run the gamut of emotions, something reflected admirably in our iconic national sport.

Some occasions can run that gamut all on their own. Such was the case twenty years ago yesterday when The Great One made his first appearance at Northlands Coliseum in the guise of The Enemy. By the fluke of the schedule there had been no Indianapolis-at-Edmonton game in October, 1978 (thirty years ago this month, in the scant days before the First Gretzky Sale). A decade later, The Kid cum Great One had played over 500 games in the Coliseum wearing the home whites of the Oilers or, occasionally, Team Canada, but never once in opposition silks.

It was an almost surreal event, and as a result (?) my memories of the details of the game itself are rather more shadowy than usual. I remember more the richly complex overtones of resonant emotions. It was a visual confirmation of the Worst possible news, namely the Second Gretzky Sale that had gone down ten weeks earlier. An annual rumour involving the Rangers had become a harsh reality involving, of all teams, the Kings. Since the last time I had spotted Wayne in the flesh, receiving the Stanley Cup and the Conn Smythe Trophy and beginning the tradition of the team photograph, I had seen -- all on TV -- the wedding to the Hollywood actress, the tears at Molson House when "I promised Mess I wouldn't do this", the happier donning of a (thankully, renovated) Kings jersey hours later, his first game in his new home in which he scored on his first shift and set up three later goals in a laugher over the Wings. I was laughing too ... when I wasn't crying. My loyalties were now divided more than at any time since the WHA Oilers and the NHL Leafs vied for my support. I had been and remained (and remain) a huge Gretzky fan. Having seen virtually every one of those 500+ home games I am convinced he is the closest thing I have personally witnessed to pure genius, in any walk of life.

So I looked forward to October 19, 1988, as the first in a suddenly dwindling supply of remaining opportunities to witness this genius in the flesh. I felt compelled to the rink early, went down to the Kings end in plenty of time to witness the pregame skate, and was astonished to find the whole lower sections full, everybody standing, everybody gawking, everybody seemingly silent and expectant as if the high priest was about to enter. The cheer when the Great One emerged was the loudest I had heard in a pregame warmup since unlikely hero Andy Moog led the 1981 Oilers out of the tunnel with an equally unlikely 2-0 series lead over the Montreal Canadiens. Every eye in the house followed Gretzky as he circled around, obviously a little uncomfortable in his erstwhile home, looking very out-of-place in black. For a few minutes Gretzky hunched by the boards just on the Kings side of centre, and a few Oilers -- Messier, Kurri, Fuhr -- "happened" to take turns doing the same.

The game started at a frenetic pace, several minutes without a stoppage with spectacular end-to-end action. The crowd oohed and ahhed with the intensity of a Stanley Cup game or one of that era's "exhibition games" against Russians. After a number of near misses/great stops at both ends, Glenn Anderson -- ever one to rise to the occasion -- scored a beauty to open the scoring, and give the Oiler faithful a chance to express who they were really cheering for. The roar shook the building.

The Oilers new captain, Mark Messier, was never one to shrink from an occasion, and he dominated the game with (IIRC) 2 goals and 2 assists, leading the Oil to an entertaining 8-6 victory. He also landed a relatively gentle but no less meaningful body check that bounced the Great One on his great ass.

Gretzky himself had what I considered a below-average (for him!) performance, nonetheless garnering 2 assists, a magic trick I had seen him perform many times before. No doubt having his old linemates Jari and Esa on the line defending against him was a difficult new challenge for Wayne, but my impression was that his own rich blend of emotions on that occasion left him feeling relatively ambivalent towards that particular game. I certainly felt that way.

During the first intermission I was briefly interviewed by a roving reporter from the Edmonton Journal (could have been Staples for all I know) who was polling fans for their impressions. My take: "Have you ever experienced one of those unsettling dreams, the ones that are correct in almost every detail, but somehow something is not quite right?"

After its explosive start, the game on the ice became secondary to The Game, the one that had changed forever with the stateside departure of the van Gogh of hockey. On this night at least he was Dali, his apparition as surreal as a soft watch. I felt a deep sense of personal loss, even as I valued tonight's game featuring Gretzky as a visitor. For fans almost anywhere else, I realized, that was as good as it ever got. We still had four home games a year against the Kings, and the two teams were to meet in the playoffs for the next four years running until the Oilers roster became unrecognizable. And I knew I would always have my memories of his remarkable contributions to one of hockey's great dynasties, memories which I (mostly) cherish to this day.

For me it took a full year to let go, a remarkable year that included Edmonton hosting the 1989 All-Star game with Gretzky naturally the captain of the home Western Conference team and almost as naturally copping MVP honours; the Kings eliminating the Oilers in the playoffs with Wayne himself scoring two goals in Game 7; the unveiling of the statue before a partisan Coliseum crowd in the summer of '89; and the 1851 game that October detailed here. All were bittersweet, perhaps none more so than that unreal night twenty years ago when hockey's greatest hero returned wearing a black hat.

Anniversaries I: A special time

As the Oilers celebrate their 30th anniversary (sic) season, this is as good a year as any to reflect on our local franchise's storied past. Hey, it's not like we old geezers need much of a reason to remember the Good Old Days (TM). Especially an old geezer with a new blog.

This week marks a number of important anniversaries in the Oilers NHL history, several of which involve the two gentlemen pictured above. The two are irrevocably linked, from their start in the World Hockey Association (that’s a Cincinnati Stingers uni in the upper left pic) to the glory days scoring, breaking records, and winning together in Edmonton (clockwise from upper right :) to winding down their careers in Manhatten to their current status as the top two scorers in the history of the NHL. WHA prehistory notwithstanding, those points starting counting for keeps in October of 1979.

October 13 : It was my best birthday present ever. I had followed the NHL closely since the age of 7, but circumstance had precluded my ever attending a single NHL game, so what was a first for my adopted home of Edmonton was a first for me as well. Any doubts that the NHL was Really Here were instantly dispelled at the familiar sight of the elegant red-and-white unis of the visitors. The Detroit Red Wings were a fitting opponent whose own storied history had been intertwined with Edmonton's, as the Edmonton Flyers of the Western Hockey League had been a feeder team of the Red Wings for many years. In the year of my birth, both Red Wings and Flyers had won the "double", champions of both regular season and playoffs in their respective leagues. That Flyers' squad featured the likes of Glenn Hall, Al Arbour, Norm Ullman, Johnny Bucyk and Bronco Horvath, perhaps the greatest team to grace the River City. Until now.

But the new hometown heroes were no longer a farm team in a lower tier, they had entered the League as equals and ended the night with a 3-3 tie to prove it. Goals by personal favourite B.J.MacDonald staked Oilers to 1-0 and 2-1 leads, but the Red Wings rallied late and were poised to send the crowd home disappointed. Lightning struck late in the third, when the Oilers' 18-year-old rookie Mark Messier made a centring pass which glanced off the skate of a Wings defender and past the helpless goalie, giving the Oilers a well-deserved split in the points. It was the first goal of Messier's NHL career, and already one more than I had expected from the loosey-goosey youngster at the start of training camp.

October 14: After waiting 24 years for my first NHL game, I only needed wait 24 hours for my second, when the Oilers faced a new geographic rival, the Vancouver Canucks. The emotions and pageantry of opening night had worn off to some extent, but dammit even the Canucks were an NHL team and it was never too early to start laying the beat on them. In a wide-open, sloppy affair the Canucks took a 4-3 lead into the late stages, but this time the Oilers' "other" 18-year-old rookie, the ballyhooed Wayne Gretzky, emerged as the hero, scoring on a backhand from the edge of the crease with the goalie pulled to knot the count at 4-4. It was Gretzky's own first NHL goal, one day later but seven days younger than Messier. The official time of the goal was one of those spooky coincidences of foreshadowing: 18:51.

October 15: Flash forward 10 years and a day, to October 15, 1989, nineteen years ago today. In an impossibly-short period Gretzky had overtaken the mountainous career scoring totals that had taken the fabulous Gordie Howe 26 seasons to compile. As karma had it, the Great One – now a member of the Los Angeles Kings – was scheduled to visit his old stomping grounds early in the new season, just as he was poised to shatter Howe’s mark. Mister Hockey himself was in the building to witness history.

In the first period Gretzky tied the record with an unremarkable second assist on a powerplay goal, but he remained stuck on 1850 for the rest of the game. As time wound down with the Oilers leading by one, the loyalties of this fan never felt so divided. I wanted the Oilers to win, as always, but dammit, I wanted to see that of all records. I had personally witnessed close to a thousand of those points; I wanted to see the big one.

It unfolded like déjà vu, with Gretzky emerging as the Ultimate Hero, scoring on a backhand from the edge of the crease with goalie pulled to knot the count at 4-4. Many/most in the crowd rose from our seats in the manner of champagne corks, putting the event in its proper perspective as an Historic Moment ahead of the outcome of an early regular season game. It was only fitting that it truly be a Big Goal.

The game was stopped right there on the knife edge, tied in the last minute of the third period. A red carpet unrolled at centre ice for an official ceremony which included Mister Hockey himself. Representing the Oilers was their captain, Mark Messier, a great player in his own right who would go on to win the Hart Trophy and the Stanley Cup that eventful season. But nobody in the building would have guessed that the centre ice ceremony involved what would become the top Three scorers in NHL history. The durable Messier ultimately eased past Howe in the final year of his own colossal 25-year career, and to this day is the only NHLer within 1000 points of Wayne Gretzky.

Remarkable to think that both scored their first NHL goal on consecutive nights in my first two live NHL games. That each was the biggest goal of the respective games was the cherry on top … those goals meant a lot at the time, and they still do today. The Impossible Dream was off to an amazing start.