Wayne Gretzky's Ghost Page 10

  “I don’t know,” Hammarstrom says. “I just can’t explain it. Borje is different—more different than all the players I’ve ever known.”

  On the other side of Church Street on another day, a dozen youngsters gather around the Church and Wood streets entrance to Maple Leaf Gardens: again it is noon. They are waiting for the end of hockey practice, standing in the special tryst where worshippers and their gods have met for all of the Gardens’ forty-five years. They are the dreamers come to touch their dream, and with the Leafs it has so often been a dream of innocence, for the team has produced some remarkably humble stars: Joe Primeau, a man so reserved and modest they called him “Gentleman Joe”; Syl Apps, who never drank or smoked or swore, went to church regularly and was named Canada’s Father of the Year in 1949; Red Kelly, who, when violently aroused, might let slip a “hang it.” There have been other Primeaus and Appses and Kellys, but today the kids are waiting for one Borje Salming, who can out-humble the best of them. But this latest edition of Maple Leaf innocence is not the same as the others. This one not only doesn’t believe in God, but commits the far greater blasphemy of having never, ever dreamed of one day playing in the National Hockey League.

  Yet this matters not to those who wait. Two girls in denim and Bay City Rollers tartan begin to squeal as they catch sight of Salming through the plate-glass doors. He is wearing new jeans and a wine-coloured Scandinavian sweater, snowflakes but no reindeer. The closer he gets to the door the more he resembles someone who has been drawn by a sixth-grader for a fall-fair competition: all straight lines and sharply mitred joints, the face too long, the teeth too straight, the shoulders too wide, the hands too low. He opens the door and steps into a wild hedge of waving books and papers, and patiently—for Salming, who usually seems petrified of adulation—he signs about half and even waits while the two girls arrange Instamatic memories of their finest moment; they cuddle up to Salming’s arms as he stands ramrod straight, stiff as an unpackaged Big Jim doll. “No more,” he says finally. “I have to go.” Across Church Street and into one of two Volvos that are provided free for his use (the other he keeps in Sweden) and then he is gone.

  “I write autographs as long as I can,” he says, a day later. “I consider it a part of the job. But I don’t know if I’d do anything else.”

  Up above Church Street, in the Maple Leaf offices, the letters are stacked eight inches thick, letters that have come to Salming over the summer, when he wasn’t even in the country. He has suddenly grown as popular as Leafs captain Darryl Sittler, perhaps more popular, and Gardens publicist Stan Obodiac says the two of them may well be more popular than any Leafs of the past. Certainly they are the best paid, with Salming making more than Sittler, more also than the $200,000 a year usually referred to in the newspapers—possibly the $250,000 a year one Gardens official mentions.

  Once every couple of months Salming comes and picks up his mail and answers his letters himself with an autographed picture. This type of thing he can also do, for it doesn’t require that he talk to anyone; letters are private, and in his own time. It’s also a pressure he can cope with; some others, such as a bad game, often cause him to sit up until dawn, unable even to escape into sleep.

  “He’s like so many Swedes,” Hammarstrom says in the Maple Leaf open kitchen. “He gets impatient when people want his time. Even in Sweden he was known as a lazy person outside of the rink.”

  Salming’s first reaction to an interview request is to imitate a ten-year-old whose mother has just reminded him it’s time to leave for his piano lesson. He asks a member of the Gardens staff whether or not he’ll be paid for the interview, which is often a European practice. But finally, and reluctantly, he does agree. Tuesday, however, he is simply too busy. The Canada Cup series has just finished and everyone wants his time. He agrees to Wednesday, refuses Wednesday, agrees to Thursday, can’t be found Thursday, promises Friday, but can’t make Friday because Margitta, his wife, has just gone into labour, makes Saturday definite, and that date he keeps.

  Not that all the waiting was worth much. A lot of “I dunnos” and “maybes” later—around strangers he is still disturbingly insecure about his English—a session with Borje Salming adds up to little more than talk about the upcoming exhibition game against Chicago, when the two most impressive players of the Canada Cup tournament, Salming and Bobby Orr, will meet for the first time this season. Salming is often embarrassed by his popularity; Salming likes living in Toronto; Salming gets homesick around Christmas … Just about what you expected to hear.

  To uncover anything else about him you go to other people, like Gerry McNamara, the tall, gold-toothed scout for the Maple Leafs, who discovered Salming almost by accident. It was Christmas 1972, the Leafs were having goaltending problems and general manager Jim Gregory dispatched McNamara to Sweden to check out a goalie named Curt Larsson. But when McNamara arrived Larsson was hurt and not playing, which left McNamara in Stockholm with nothing to show for the cost of his trip. Determined that he’d better at least see some hockey games, he checked the papers and found that his old senior team, the Barrie Flyers, were in Sweden playing and that night were due to play a team called Gavle Brynas in a nearby town; as well, he’d been told that Brynas, the top team in Sweden, might have some players worth looking at, so McNamara went along hoping that his old friends might cheer him up.

  They couldn’t, but two Brynas players did. By the end of the first period it was 5–1 for Brynas: Inge Hammarstrom had four goals and Salming had one. Salming was also doing what Swedes weren’t supposed to do—fighting back. “They ran at him all night,” says McNamara, “and he never gave an inch.”

  Nor would Salming give in to the referee. A call toward the end of the game upset Salming and he punched the referee in the head, which led to Salming’s immediate expulsion from the game.

  “I saw my chance and ran,” says McNamara. He chased Salming all the way to the dressing room and, forcing his way in, handed the Swedish player his card.

  “Do you speak English?” McNamara asked.

  “A little,” Salming exaggerated.

  “I think you could play for the Toronto Maple Leafs in the NHL next year,” McNamara said. “Would you be interested?”

  “Yah.”

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  The game was over and the team was coming off the ice, so McNamara left, but not before he had also given Hammarstrom a card and got roughly the same answers.

  Salming heard nothing until March, when the world championships were being held in Moscow. One afternoon he was awakened in his hotel room by McNamara and the Leafs’ head scout Bob Davidson knocking at the door. Hammarstrom, whose English is excellent, was also there, and translated: Yes, they would both go, but not until their season with Brynas back in Sweden was over. Two-year contracts for $60,000 each sounded pretty good to them. “They were vague about money,” recalls Davidson, “but after they’d seen their lawyer they came back with much higher figures.” Later in 1973, Salming’s Stockholm lawyer got the defenceman a two-year contract with the Leafs worth between $60,000 and $80,000 a year. In addition, the Leafs had to pay $100,000 to the Swedish team that lost the two. So they hardly came cheap.

  Salming has often said he had to have a job as a machinist just to make a living in Sweden, but now he will admit, “I’ve never worked a day in my life.” It was not as bad for him there as he has let on, certainly. He refuses to talk money, but Anders Hedberg, the affable Swedish star with the Winnipeg Jets of the WHA, says the best players there made a good living—“enough that a real star can live on hockey alone.” Playing in the world championships can be worth $1,000 to $1,500; other European tournaments are worth comparatively less. Players have all expenses covered and many receive a stipend of $45 a day in lieu of money they might have made working while tournaments were on. A win during regular-season play might be worth $75, and Hedberg says he played eighty games in his last Swedish season.

  “All that money is taxable,�
� says Hedberg. “But most of the money comes under the table.” This, done to preserve the players’ “amateur” standing, would include such things as a free apartment—which Salming admits he had—and such fringe benefits as cash payments for playing with a certain make of hockey stick. Ulf Nilsson, another Swede now with the Winnipeg Jets, admits he had two apartments (one he gave to his sister) and received about $3,000 a year from a stick manufacturer. Nilsson thinks Salming received much more, but Salming will say only that he had such a deal, not how much.

  When Salming and Hammarstrom returned to Sweden from an investigative trip to Toronto in the spring of 1973—during which they were wooed with, among other things, a sightseeing car tour to Niagara Falls—they announced they had decided to join the Leafs, and this did not go over well with the Brynas team officials. Disgusted that their main stars had fallen to materialism, they refused to let Salming and Hammarstrom even dress with the rest of the team for fear they’d “contaminate” the others. For a month the two dressed and rested between periods in a small room by themselves.

  That was the insulting end to the Salming Legend, Part I. He was twenty-two in 1973, Sweden’s top hockey star. And now they were phoning him and calling him a traitor. He had been Sweden’s Bobby Orr in more than hockey talent, for just as all Canadians know the story of Parry Sound and Orr, most Swedes knew by heart how Borje Salming had come out of the wasteland of Kiruna, a city so far north that the winter sun barely manages to elbow its way along the southern ledge for a few hours each day, a city where you either stay and work the mines or you take your hockey equipment and skate to freedom.

  His father had worked in the Kiruna mines until he died, when Borje was five. For the next six years, until his mother began living with another man, the family lived through hard times, poor on the money she made as a waitress. He does not clearly remember those years, so it may not have been as a waitress, but he does think he was terrible at school and wonderful at hockey, and at twenty he followed his brother, Stig, south to the city of Gavle and the great Brynas team. Where the Orr story and Salming story differ is that, unlike Boston in the sixties, Brynas awaited no saviour: they were already champions.

  “There is a story told about Salming when he came to Gavle,” says Peter Wannman, a Swedish journalist. “When he was due at the railway station, the town sent a delegation to greet him. They were all set up and this kid gets off in old jeans and an old jacket, with his skates slung over his shoulder, and walks right by them. That was Salming.”

  That shyness, says Anders Hedberg, is simply a symptom of the place he’s from. “Most people from Kiruna are that way, soft-spoken and solid,” says Hedberg. “Kiruna produces lots of hockey players—it’s Sweden’s Flin Flon—and they’re all like Salming.”

  “He had no style as a boy,” says Peter Wannman, “and now he has no style as a man. All he knows to do is play hockey.”

  There was some doubt of that when he arrived in Toronto. At first he didn’t live up to his billing. “The guys were all suspicious,” says Jim McKenny, a Leaf who has since become one of Salming’s closest friends. “He was so incredibly quiet and had no English. None of the guys knew how to take him. They said he had a bad back, which is one of the best injuries to have—who can really tell? But we weren’t long in realizing he has a lot of balls.”

  By the time Salming’s first three NHL seasons were through, the people were also through with doubt. He fell in front of shots until a lung bled, revitalized the poke check and, in his second and third years, even emerged as a considerable scoring threat. With his forlorn, apron-string boy’s face he became the darling of the Toronto media, even though most of the press have found him impossible to deal with; the city, having not seen such humility and shyness in many years, was amazed that Salming lasted three years and seemed to grow rather than diminish. “I’d be surprised now if anything changed his personality,” says Leafs general manager Jim Gregory.

  Salming was also the fondest wish come true for Toronto lawyer Bill McMurtry, whose inquiry into violence in hockey began the great hockey-violence debate of the past two years. “The thesis I always had in mind was that there are better ways of proving your courage than high-sticking and fighting,” says McMurtry. “And Salming perfectly emulates that thesis. He was the greatest thing that could have happened to my report.”

  Naturally, one day Salming had to be tested. It has always been held true in the NHL that it is possible to be a great player and not fight, provided it was known you could fight well if necessary. Bobby Hull, Orr and Syl Apps earned their reputations that way, but Salming’s fighting ability was unknown until last spring’s Stanley Cup playoffs when Philadelphia Flyers rookie Mel Bridgman easily defeated Salming and received an assault charge for his troubles.

  Conn Smythe, the original owner of the Maple Leafs, believes that the fight—even though Salming lost—didn’t do him any harm. “Nobody’s bothered him since,” says Smythe. “So he won. He’s like Britain—doesn’t win the battles but always wins the war.”

  The non-violent face Salming wore in Canada was not always his choice in Sweden. Once, when his Brynas team went to play against Timra, Salming reacted to a spoken insult by attacking a Timra player and knocking him out cold. The police had to be brought in to escort him to the dressing room and then out of the arena. “The crowd really wanted to lynch him,” remembers Margitta Salming.

  When they first arrived in Canada she was Margitta Wendin and, like Salming, had her problems. She’d been going with him only a year, but when he came to Canada he asked her to leave her job as a restaurant cashier to go and live with him. Their lack of a marriage licence obviously didn’t suit all of the other Leafs, especially the older ones. “Nobody really said anything,” she remembers, “but you could feel it. I wasn’t considered one of the wives, just a girlfriend, and I felt very insecure about it.” In the following summer, though, she married Salming and had a son, Anders. Salming says the child was his present to her, to make her less lonely.

  Today, though, there is a second baby, a girl, Teresa, born very early Saturday morning and premature enough (five weeks) to be placed in an incubator. Salming has had very little sleep, and at the Saturday-morning practice he appears sluggish and haggard, a far cry from the day before when he was laughing and kidding on the ice, skating up to a fallen Mike Pelyk, who has recently come from the WHA, yelling “Hey, Pelyk”—the English clear and the manner easy and confident—“it’s tougher in this league, you know. You’d better watch it here or even a Swede will beat you up.”

  Today, though, the man they all call “King” (short for “King of Sweden”) is standing by the bench with his head down and calling loudly and impatiently for one of the trainers to bring him glucose tablets. (Though the image is shy and gentle, Salming can at times be curt, and has even clashed angrily with Red Kelly in the past.) He washes down a half-dozen or more and then returns to the practice, and fifteen minutes later, with manufactured energy running through him, Salming is once again, as usual, the hardest worker in the Leafs practice.

  At the Saturday-evening game he is still the best Leaf, and though Chicago’s Bobby Orr is obviously the main attraction of the first period, the second and third periods belong to Salming. Chicago, having taken a 1–0 lead when Salming was off for holding Orr, quickly lose it as Salming breaks in alone and takes a Darryl Sittler pass for a Leafs goal, and the inspired Leafs go on to win, with Salming setting up two more goals. Salming is chosen a game star over Orr for Round 1 of the oncoming season.

  When Orr and Salming play against each other, it is a competition between Orr’s anticipation and Salming’s reaction, for though Orr is easily the purest thinker hockey has produced, Salming may well be the game’s best reflex player. His is not as awesome a hockey talent as Orr’s, but it has its own beauty, and it is little wonder that recent praise for Salming’s play ranges from seventy-three-year-old King Clancy, who says Salming is the Leafs’ Orr, to twelve-year-old Bjorn-Erik
Eklund, who was born in Luleti, close to Salming’s Kiruna, who saw first-hand Salming’s greatness in the Canada Cup series and who calls Salming “the biggest hero in the whole world.”

  Certainly, inside the Leafs dressing room you would get that impression. An emaciated, waxen Salming sits in his athletic support and soaked T-shirt and concedes that yes, it was a very good day—a baby, a goal and a star. But he softens it by saying what people expect him to say: that Bobby Orr will win the Norris Trophy this year as the NHL’s premier defenceman and that “Salming will never win it.” There are smiles and shaking heads: such humility, such an innocent lie.

  Outside, in the corridor, Enrico Ferorelli is still pacing, checking his schedule against his airline ticket to see if he dare stay over until Monday and still meet his deadline, wondering why Borje Salming had to happen to him.

  Borje Salming played seventeen seasons, leaving the Maple Leafs in 1989 for a year with the Detroit Red Wings and then winding down his career with three seasons back in Sweden playing for Shellefteå AIK. He played a total of 1,148 NHL games, scoring 150 goals and setting up another 637. In 1996 he became the first Swede elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame. Salming successfully went into the underwear business when he returned to Sweden to live.

  THE THROWBACK: BRYAN TROTTIER

  (The Canadian, 1976)

  It’s a long way, and not just in miles, from the struggling Saskatchewan farm, the frozen river, and the father who pulled the rest of the family into part-time work to keep things afloat. Bryan Trottier could go home again—will, in fact, this summer—but it’ll never be exactly the same. No more Rowdy, for one thing: the dog died about the same time Bryan’s life changed forever. Even the farmhouse isn’t the way it was, all fixed up now and proudly insured by the father for many times what it was worth when Bryan still spent winters there. And the father these days has his own brand-new four-wheel drive for the rough weather and a big Chrysler New Yorker for the good days, which now seem more numerous. Both vehicles are gifts from Bryan. Even the farm itself is no longer the same: it’s a business now, a working operation with a couple hundred head of cattle, new machinery and those pesky loans cleared up. All thanks to Bryan.