Wayne Gretzky's Ghost Read online

  This will only be Bourque’s third final in those twenty-two springs. In 1988 and 1990 he led the Boston Bruins, the team he played almost twenty-one seasons for, to the final against the Edmonton Oilers, but both times the Bruins were easily defeated. This, he feels, is his best chance—and likely his last—to accomplish the one great dream of his life.

  All hockey players, of course, have that same dream. None, however, may dream it as intensely as Bourque, the shy, reserved young kid who grew up in Montreal during the Canadiens’ last great dynasty, and who used to skip school to watch what seemed to him the annual Stanley Cup parade. He has been to the Hockey Hall of Fame to stare at the trophy. He has, on several occasions, drawn close enough to read the names on it.

  He has never, however, touched the Stanley Cup. He has had chances but never reached for it, never believed he had the right to hold something he had not earned. Bourque—who once said he would both retire and die a Bruin—came to Colorado for one reason only, to have that final chance to win his final game of a long hockey season. It was supposed to be last year, but the Avalanche fell unexpectedly to the Dallas Stars in the Western final. This year, the “Win One for Ray” theme has only been heightened by the fact that he is one year older and the Avalanche, this time, made it to what Colorado goaltender Patrick Roy likes to call “The Big Dance.”

  “It would be nice,” Roy said earlier this week, “for him to touch the steel.”

  It is a feel-good story that, it must be said, not everyone feels equally good about. The swaggering, rich Avalanche sometimes feel like hockey’s version of the New York Yankees, and some find it difficult to cheer for Bourque if it also suggests that Stanley Cups can be bought by bringing in late-season, very expensive additions like Bourque a year ago and defenceman Rob Blake at this year’s trading deadline.

  Bourque himself has always been dutiful in his dealings with the public and the press, but his reserved personality has also meant not everyone warms to him. There is, as well, some lingering resentment among older players toward Bourque’s perceived “softness” in dealing with the Bruins on contracts, a matter some agents will argue cost all elite players in that hockey bargaining is done through comparison shopping. Bourque, however, is hardly suffering. He made, and saved, tens of millions with the Bruins and is currently on a one-year, $5.5-million deal with the Avalanche.

  Most fans would applaud a Stanley Cup to cap off one of the game’s greatest careers. Great athletes who never win the championship—baseball’s Ernie Banks, hockey’s Marcel Dionne—seem to carry an asterisk about with them, and Bourque would prefer not to enter the Hall of Fame with anyone whispering, “He was great, but …”

  Each day when Bourque drives down Peoria toward the Avalanche’s suburban practice facility, he passes by a long line of such reminders. John Elway, the great Denver Broncos quarterback, was destined to go down in sports history as the superstar who could never win the big one until, at the end of his long career, he suddenly won back-to-back Super Bowls. Today, Elway’s name graces a long string of affluent automobile dealerships along Peoria, proof that a name without a “but …” has extra currency long past retirement. Bourque admits no one cheered more than he did when Elway finally won the championship that seemed destined to elude him.

  He calls his own championship chase “Mission: 16W.” Sixteen wins, four rounds of successful best-of-seven series, and the Cup would be his to raise. He even had baseball caps made up to hand around the dressing room and the notion has caught on to the point where they are beginning to sell the caps to the public. It has even been noted that “16W” also stands for the exit off the New Jersey Turnpike that will take Bourque and his teammates to the Continental Airlines Arena for Games 3 and 4 and, if necessary, Game 6.

  “A good omen,” says Bourque, “… I hope.”

  He finds the story quieter this year than it was last, when he became the surprise trading-deadline deal that so many presumed meant a second Cup for the powerful Avalanche and a first one for Bourque. It was a trade he had requested from Boston toward the end of what had become one more frustrating season of coming up short.

  “There came a time in that season where I knew it wasn’t going to happen,” says Bourque. “And if I hadn’t made the move, I really don’t know if I would still be playing. I might have just packed it in and retired.”

  The idea of not retiring came to him from an unlikely source, Chris Chelios, another aging defenceman, who had left the Chicago Blackhawks for the Detroit Red Wings and seemed, to Bourque, to be thriving.

  “We had a nice little chat,” Bourque remembers. “It looked like he was really enjoying himself. He was in a situation that was similar to mine in terms of being in a place where they weren’t being very successful. You’re playing a lot of minutes, tough minutes, and really not playing up to the level that you’re used to. When I saw him move and then the way he was playing in Detroit, I talked to him about it. And I certainly thought about what it would mean to me to move somewhere else and what kind of effect it would have to have me playing my game again.”

  He talked it over with his wife, Christiane, and their three children, Melissa, Christopher and Ryan, and when he had their approval he decided to “go for it.” The effect turned out to be astounding, considering his years. Bourque was an instant success in Colorado last season and one of their best playoff performers in what ultimately turned into another disappointment. This year he began slowly, but soon was playing his regular thirty minutes of hockey a night and impressively enough to be named a finalist, once again, for the Norris.

  He slipped again early on in these playoffs, but is again healthy and playing like he once did when his playoff beard was red to the roots. “It’s been a great move for me,” he says. “Last year, we made it to the semis and this year to the finals. That’s what it’s all about. You forget that feeling and how good it feels, and it’s good to feel it again.”

  Other players on the team say it is an “inspiration” to see Bourque working so hard to win the Cup they all want. “You hear about guys in this game who have passion,” says Blake, who is often paired with Bourque on defence, “but to give so much to one team and one organization for so long and then to make a change late in your career and to have that same outlook, that’s a passion for the game not many guys have.”

  Blake, who came to Colorado from Los Angeles in February, says his game has picked up since he’s been playing with Bourque. “I don’t think you ever stop learning during your years in the NHL,” Blake says. “I still have a few years left in my career, but I can learn so much from Ray. He’s going to help me from now until I retire.”

  Bourque’s own retirement is a subject that comes up as often as the missing Cup. He candidly admits to being “in denial” about his age—“You don’t want to think about that”—and believes he is in good enough shape to play several more seasons if he really wants to. But that decision he will put off until this coming summer. “I’m going to wait,” he says. “I really don’t know when, or how I’m going to go about it.”

  Summer, however, is still a few weeks off, weeks in which it will be decided whether or not a man with a grizzled beard will actually get to raise the Cup of his dreams or one more time be left staring at the one prize neither he, nor fate, has ever allowed him to touch.

  At the moment, there is only one thing he knows for certain: “I’m running out of time.”

  Ray Bourque finally got to raise the Stanley Cup that spring. He was the first player captain Joe Sakic handed the prize off to. He then retired, having played 1,612 games and recorded 1,579 points—and another 180 in 214 playoff games. The Hall-of-Famer’s two sons, Christopher and Ryan, have both been drafted by NHL teams. He returned to Boston to live and work for the Bruins.

  THE QUIET PERFECTION OF PAUL KARIYA

  (Ottawa Citizen, April 30, 1996)

  There is a curious off-ice game being played here at the world championships between Canadian goaltender C
urtis Joseph and Canadian sharpshooter Paul Kariya. They take the overnight summaries from the NHL playoff games—who scored, when they scored, and how they scored—and the one holding the summary will ask the other to describe, without knowing, exactly how the goal was scored. The only information the other is given is who shot and who was in the net. Nothing else.

  “Joe Sakic.”

  “Low to the stick side.”

  “Right!”

  It is not unusual for a goaltender to know so much of players’ habits and styles, but most unusual for a player—especially a twenty-one-year-old in only his second NHL season. Most unusual. But then, Paul Kariya is a most unusual young man. To improve his eye-hand co-ordination, he taught himself to juggle. He used to spend so much time sitting quietly before a game “envisioning” exactly what would happen this night that he would actually “get all screwed up” when games did not go precisely as imagined. He has read every word that has to do with Wayne Gretzky, and the way a player should prepare and behave. He has studied the films of Bobby Orr, who retired when Paul Kariya was two years old, to understand better the values of surprise acceleration. He will spend his summer sitting alone, quietly thinking about others playing their game—Joe Sakic, low to the stick side—and how he might take from them and give more to himself.

  “I’ve never seen a player so focused,” says Team Canada general manager Pierre Gauthier, who three years ago drafted the Vancouver youngster when Gauthier was still with the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim. Gauthier, like everyone else, respected Kariya’s fanatical devotion to bettering himself. Unlike many others—several of them NHL general managers—Gauthier did not think Kariya lacked the size or the strength to play in the NHL. Three general managers went before Anaheim and took, in order, Alexandre Daigle (Ottawa), Chris Pronger (Hartford, now with St. Louis) and Chris Gratton (Tampa Bay).

  Kariya has quickly emerged as the crown jewel in what was supposed to be the richest draft in years. In only his second year, he scored fifty goals for the Mighty Ducks. He has already scored four times for Canada at the world championships and is, head and shoulders, the best Canadian on the ice—even if he only comes up to some of the other players’ shoulders.

  He never played junior. He went from British Columbia to the University of Maine on a scholarship and, in his freshman year, was given the Hobey Baker Award as the best player in college hockey—but still he never imagined he would one day be an NHL star. “I never thought about the NHL,” he says. “I was perfectly prepared to be a businessman or a teacher.”

  He stayed away from the NHL for a year and played, brilliantly, for the Canadian national team—he missed the shot in 1994 that gave Olympic gold to the Swedes; he won a world championship two months later—and then signed a huge contract with the Ducks that pays him $3 million a year. Disney, obviously, saw a future star in the making.

  On the ice, it has worked out beyond even Disney’s dreams. Paired with Finnish forward Teemu Selanne, Kariya is now half of the most exciting pair of wingers in the game. With Wayne Gretzky thirty-five and fading, the spotlight is shifting, and Paul Kariya can feel it coming. Off the ice, it has not been such a simple matter. He is only twenty-one, and they say he is cool. Aloof. In a recent Southam poll of Canadian hockey writers, his name surprisingly was on a list of those few players in the game who are generally considered “jerks.”

  This early and unexpected image problem has perplexed and, in some cases, angered those who know him best, the officials who have worked with him and the players who have played with him. Gauthier considers him “one of the nicest kids I have ever met.” Canadian Hockey Association people find him dedicated, loyal and selfless. While several Canadian stars bailed out on the world championships, claiming everything from tiredness to lack of contract, Kariya immediately said yes, despite the fact that he had just spent ten hours in a dentist’s chair getting repairs to four broken teeth.

  The focus is hockey, and it leaves very little room for anything else. He doesn’t read the papers or listen to the radio, and one suspects it is because he has not trusted what can be said about celebrity in a world that both craves and criticizes it. “I don’t go out and try and create an image,” he says. “I’m a pretty quiet person. You’re not going to get an outrageous quote from me.”

  But what you will get is an insight into the game that only Gretzky before him has been able to offer. Gretzky once said he didn’t go to where the puck was, but to where the puck will be. Kariya says: “Hockey is a lot like chess. You have certain moves that are always repeated and, knowing that, you can plan your next move.”

  He is convinced that hockey prowess is a learned, rather than an inherited, ability. “My father never played the game,” he says, “so you can’t say it’s natural. It’s all learned.” He studies hockey as a scientist might study cultures. He talks to players and builds mental scouting cards on what everyone might do in a certain situation, just like baseball managers will study the opposition. He studies film to see how Gretzky would attack, how Lemieux will pass. When he discovered Bobby Orr on film, he found the secrets of acceleration.

  “You’re going to be a lot more effective,” he says, “if the defence has your speed pegged at seventy–eighty and then you can suddenly jack it up to a hundred. Bobby Orr had four to five speeds. I’ve only got two.”

  So far. But he is also twenty-one, and on the verge of hockey superstardom. He will need to acquire more tricks of the trade, both in Bobby Orr acceleration and in Wayne Gretzky’s renowned ability to pull out of something that seems to be spinning out of control.

  Gretzky in fact met with Kariya, by arrangement, at the NHL All-Star Game in Boston, and they talked about image and responsibility and being ready for the spotlight when it finds you. Teemu Selanne, perhaps hockey’s friendliest star, has been brought to Anaheim both to help Kariya score points and to help him adjust to being in the limelight.

  There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that this slight twenty-one-year-old who never imagined he would even be here is being groomed to become the game’s next big star. Paul Kariya did not have a Walter Gretzky to warn him that he’d be on display all his life, with people watching for every mistake. He didn’t have that because he was never a ten-year-old phenomenon, and his father did not understand that world of hockey. He did, however, understand responsibility.

  “What my parents taught me,” he says, “is that it doesn’t matter what you do in life. Whether you’re a businessman or a garbage man, you’ve got to be a good person.”

  And that, he believes, will have to be enough.

  Any assessment of Paul Kariya’s career would have to take bad luck into consideration. He left the Ducks before they won the Stanley Cup in 2007, playing for the Colorado Avalanche, Nashville Predators and St. Louis Blues. Kariya was supposed to be the key to Canada’s 1998 entry in the Nagano Olympics but had his hopes crushed by a vicious cross-check to the head when Chicago’s Gary Suter reacted to a Kariya goal. Kariya missed the Olympics and the rest of the season with post-concussion syndrome. He was concussed again when hit by New Jersey Devils defenceman Scott Stevens during the 2003 Stanley Cup finals, which the Devils won. He sat out the entire 2010–11 season with post-concussion syndrome. With 989 points in 989 games, his record remains remarkable, despite the harsh realities of head injuries.

  A FLOWER FOR ALL SEASONS: GUY LAFLEUR

  (Maclean’s, October 16, 1978)

  I retired in 1971, the same year Guy arrived, and he came to me and asked me what I thought about him taking my sweater number. “If you want it, take it,” I told him. “But don’t you think you already have enough on you? Why don’t you pick another number and make it famous yourself?” —Jean Béliveau

  The new smell of Quebec is known by its trademark: No. 10. The odour may be appropriately described as flowery as it rises this fall out of pre-shave, after-shave, cologne, deodorant and the true saviour of Christmas, soap-on-a-rope. The same number can be found pushing automobiles, skate
s, sticks and yogourt. No. 10 surfaces on the binders, pencil cases and exercise books the children carry to school. Even the company is called Number 10 Promotions Inc., and the president—for those without programs—is Guy Lafleur.

  The company Guy Lafleur keeps as a hockey player, however, has narrowed down year by year until today there is only himself. While the National Hockey League launches its sixty-second season this week, there are only the long-shot mutterings of the insane left. Will Lafleur’s team, the Montreal Canadiens, which has already won more than one-third of all NHL championships, somehow fail to win yet another? Will Lafleur himself—most valuable player over the past two seasons, scoring champion over the past three—outdo even his last year’s feat of sixty goals? The answer is already with us, lying in a sealed envelope in a suburban office outside Montreal. Inside is written Guy Lafleur’s annual prediction for his coming season, and the hint is that—despite a broken nose suffered at the end of the exhibition schedule—he will indeed do better.

  It is Lafleur’s enormous gift that makes him special, certainly not his walk—the steps too long—nor his face: greaser soft, it is more the look of someone who should be topping up your battery. The eyes, however, brown and shimmering, seem to ransack the immediate area about him. Not in fear—though that was once the case when undercover detectives took every step he took—but in simple anticipation. Everywhere, even in the USSR, where customs agents asked for his autograph, they know the man who, like Bambi’s skunk, is proud to be called “Flower.” Crossing Maisonneuve Boulevard, the eyes intercept a sultry woman who steps sideways just long enough to kiss Lafleur on the lips. Out of a hydro manhole two workers rise and call his name. A woman brings her son forward for a laying on of his hands. Those who don’t want just to touch would like to give. A man promises a new suit, a girl a present. An unnamed European country this summer offered a butler, a housekeeper, a villa on the water, a new luxury car and a hockey lord’s ransom, all tax-free. To collect it, he only had to change his sweater.