BRIAN SUTTER had joined the team as head coach in 1997. I was ready for a big change after two years of Pierre Pagé, but things ended up being not quite what I expected. We didn’t have a great team—we had a lot of young, young players—so Brian had to do tons of teaching. I hated defensive drills. Basic, basic stuff. Start in our own zone, then the neutral zone and then backchecking. Throw the puck in the corner and the defenceman contains you and doesn’t let you get back to the front of the net with the puck. Hickory dickory dock. Plus, Brian brought in his own system, which we had to learn from scratch. I wasn’t having a whole lot of fun relearning all of this. Practices were long, two to three hours, and he used quite a lot of video. Because I was one of the team leaders, I had to buy into what he was selling to the young kids. It was very stressful for a vet. Think of it this way: say you had a Ph.D. in physics and you had to go back and take Grade 9 math.
We weren’t going to be a great offensive team, so we were going to have to win games 1–0, 2–1, 3–1. In order to do this, we had to be defensively solid in our own zone. I was a high-tempo, offensively minded player, so my favourite practices were run that way too. Lots of emphasis on skills—shooting, passing, not too physical. When I first came to the Flames in 1989 we had a really talented team and it was exciting and fun. Practices with Crispy were always short and sweet.
Half the time, Sutter’s practices were fuckin’ Looney Tunes. There would be two or three fights every time. But he was lovin’ it. He had this gravelly General Patton voice—“That’s it, boys, that’s the way to fuckin’ go at it.” Because so few had experience, Sutter wanted us to practise as if we were actually playing a game. He was trying to instill an in-your-face work ethic. Every day, we were beating each other over the head with sticks. Michael Nylander and Jamie Huscroft went at it all the time. Mike was a skilled centre and Jamie was just kind of a slug. So Mike would be doing spins in the corner and scooting around with the puck, and finally Huscroft would take his stick and—wham!—connect with Nylander’s helmet. Then there would be a fuckin’ brawl, which everyone would jump in to try to break up. After a while, that gets old for a guy who has been in the league for ten years. Plus, I had all the other shit going on.
Another thing that drove me crazy was that, for all eleven years I was with the Flames, we flew commercial economy. Even after every other team in the NHL had their own charter planes and took care of their players. Why? ‘Cause the boys who owned the team were having to write cheques to cover losses at the end of every year, and they didn’t like doing that. So they cut corners where they could. We used to say, “Anyone can fly on the Calgary Flames charter if they have 250 bucks.” It was ridiculous.
There were rumours all the time. The team was getting sold or going to fold. I always thought, “How is that possible when we have eight owners who are some of the richest people in Canada?” If they hadn’t gutted the team they would have filled the seats. And if they had filled the seats, they wouldn’t be threatening to move the franchise someplace else. We won games we had no business winning.
In 1995, we were on an eastern road trip and had to get from New York to Boston. We started out at Kennedy Airport, then bused forty minutes through heavy traffic to LaGuardia, where we waited around before getting on a plane to Logan International in Boston.We couldn’t land there because of a snowstorm, so we turned back to LaGuardia, landed and took a bus to Penn Station, near Times Square, and waited for a train.
While we were waiting at the station, we said, “Fuck this,” and went to a nearby liquor store to stock up on booze. During that train ride, we got just hammered. We arrived in Boston at around 10 p.m., drunk and tired after travelling for more than twelve hours. So Al Coates told everyone, “Okay, we’ll buy you dinner tonight.” This was supposed to be a big deal because we got a per diem. Mine had been gone after the first day in New York—some stripper had it. Anyway, we all sat down in the hotel dining room and ordered. Steve Chiasson, who had joined us that season, was really pissed off at how cheap the Flames were. He said, “I’ve never fuckin’ seen anything like this.” He’d played for Detroit for seven years and they treated the team great. So Chiasson asked for ten lobsters and went to bed. Never touched ‘em.
The next day, before the game, we made up these business cards that said, “Calgary Flames Travelling Fucking Circus.” We kept them in our wallets. Can you imagine what would have happened if the media got hold of them?
It is so unfortunate that Steve died in that car accident in 1999. I was sad about it. He had two sons, Michael and Ryan, and a daughter, Stephanie. His ending could easily have been mine. He was a smalltown kid too—he grew up in Peterborough, Ontario. When he died, he was playing for the Carolina Hurricanes. The way I understand it, the team took a charter flight back from Boston, where they had just lost the quarter-finals to the Bruins. When you fight a long, bloody, bruising battle, you don’t just wave and say, “Okay, well, see you next year.” You tip back a few together and talk about how it could have been. They landed at about 1 a.m. and he probably figured, “Well, the kids and the wife are asleep anyhow,” so he went with a few of the guys to Gary Roberts’s house for a couple of beers. Then, about 4 a.m. he figured he’d better get going, so he said he was taking off. Kevin Dineen was there, saw that Steve was a bit blasted and said, “Wait a minute, I’m going to drive you,” and went to get his keys. But when he came back, Steve was gone. Steve was probably thinking, “What the fuck? I can make it. It’s only five miles.”
Anyway, he hopped in his truck, not wearing his seat belt, and booted it home. He was driving more than seventy miles an hour on this winding road, flipped the truck and was ejected. Some workers spotted his vehicle up on its side against a water treatment plant with the signal light flashing. Dineen had to go and identify the body. Dineen, who is now head coach of the Buffalo Sabres’ farm team, the Portland Pirates, was charged with drunk driving in 2006 after a night out with his coaches and players two days after the team was eliminated from the American Hockey League playoffs. (In the end, he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of driving to endanger and received a sentence of two days and had to pay a $750 fine.) I have heard it said he was next in line to coach in Vancouver and the incident totally fucked up his career. Bonding with your teammates is important, but there are only so many bowling alleys you can go to. For a lot of the guys drinking is a way to unwind after the games.
The list of drunk drivers in the NHL is long. Former Oilers coach Craig MacTavish was a 26-year-old forward for the Bruins when he killed a young woman. Former Chicago Blackhawks defenceman Keith Magnuson was killed with one of my former teammates—and former Toronto Maple Leafs captain—Rob Ramage at the wheel, and now Rob is appealing a four-year sentence. Alexei Zhamnov got a DUI when I was with the Hawks. Ex-Oiler Dave Hunter has three impaired-driving convictions. Bob Probert was arrested five times for impaired driving. Pelle Lindbergh died when his car hit a wall after a team party. Tim Horton was driving drunk when he was killed. Other drivers that have been charged or convicted are Peter Worrell of the Florida Panthers, Sergei Fedorov, Eddie Shack, Dominik Hasek, Chris Pronger, Bobby Hull, Paul Holmgren, Mike Keenan, Petr Klíma, Mark Bell and Miroslav Fryčer. You think it doesn’t happen today? You think some players on every team in the league don’t go out and smoke dope or drink and party and get behind the wheel? Maybe in an alternative universe, but not in this one.
We won the game against the Bruins, 1–0. I scored. That is how it was with the team at that time. I took it upon myself to win, and it was really tough. The Flames had traded away every star player from our Stanley Cup team. I was the only guy left, and now I was playing with bargain-basement Europeans. There were a few times I lost it on the guys in the dressing room, trying to get them to buy into the system we were playing. But for the most part I tried to lead by example on the ice. It wasn’t their fault we were so shitty. It was management’s responsibility for drafting poorly and getting clowns who were not capable. For instance, they drafted Niklas Sund-blad. They claimed he was the Wendel Clark of Sweden. When he came over here, absolutely everybody kicked the shit out of him in camp to see how tough he was, and he folded. He never became the player they thought he was and skated in only two NHL games. Jesper Mattsson, another guy from Sweden, never played a game in the NHL. Like fuck, I don’t understand it, unless the scouts were drinking while the games were on. If I were running an NHL team I would draft only guys from Canadian major junior hockey. That’s it. No college guys, no Europeans. My team would all be juniors. They are tough. They get it.
We banked on Trevor Kidd being a superstar, but Kidder was never in very good shape. He didn’t eat well, and even though he was six foot two and 190 pounds, he played like a little goalie instead of a big one. He put himself out of position all the time. He should have looked at Patrick Roy and how he played and copied his style. Kidder could have been great, because he had fantastic talent. He had one of the best glove hands I have ever seen. If we’d had an overachieving goaltender in those days it might have made up for the shortage of talent elsewhere.
Kidder was a different bird. We were roomies and we got along—both from Manitoba. Once during the playoffs, Kidder and I were in San Jose and some morning DJs somehow got through to our room and woke us up at around 8 a.m. They were screwing around and said they were with the hotel and that there were two midget hookers in the lobby, and could they come up. We both thought that was pretty funny.
I was close to Al Coates. I love Al Coates, and to this day he is really the only guy who still calls me to see how I am doing. At the time, I told him straight out what Graham did to me, and on a personal level he said, “Well, if I can help in any way …” But I was very happy that Brian came out publicly and said, “Fuckin’ leave this guy alone. He’s had enough shit without having to deal with you guys.” That helped me turn the corner. I got through it. It died down. Sheldon took most of it on himself with the trial.
The police didn’t approach me, never questioned me, nothing. I don’t know what I would have said. I probably would have ‘fessed up, because I needed to. I needed to tell as many people as I could, because that’s where the healing is.
One night in a drunken stupor around the fall of 1996, I did make my way over to Shannon’s at about four o’clock in the morning. I sat her down and finally told her the entire story. She was in complete shock because she had leaned on Graham to help her through our breakup. She considered him one of her best friends. When I left a couple of hours later, I signed her guest book. “I was here and only you know who I was.” It was true, she knew who I was before I was anything.
I KICKED into survival mode. Drinking and partying. When I was having fun, I wasn’t hurting. You can ask anybody, and they’ll tell you partying with me is probably the most fun you’ll ever have in your life.
I had a routine. Monday night was Smugglers, Tuesday night was Claudio’s, Wednesday was Cowboys, Thursday was Ranchman’s, Fridays and Saturdays after games we went anywhere, because every bar was packed on the weekend. And then, just like the Bible says, Sundays were a day of rest.