FOR A DECADE, the Flames had been a team that could usually finish with 90 or 100 points in the standings. But in 1995–96, we began a long run as a team that obviously wasn’t good enough to make the playoffs very often. That year, by some fuckin’ miracle, we finished a point ahead of Anaheim and ended up facing off against Chicago in the first round. We didn’t have a prayer.
The series opened in Chicago, and we lost 4–1. Two nights later, Kerry Fraser was the ref, and I seriously wanted to kill the guy. In the third period, we were trailing 3–0, and Fraser kept us two men down with penalties to Trent Yawney and Ronnie Stern (a double minor) about a minute apart. Yawney’s penalty had just ended—we were still on the kill—and I was going for a puck in the corner when Murray Craven absolutely fuckin’ ripped my helmet off with his elbow. I looked around, but no penalty was called. I guess Fraser was busy thinking about his plans for dinner or something. So what did I do? I took my stick and started tenderizing Craven. Of course, that caught Fraser’s attention and he called me for slashing. This put us back to a three-on-five for another three minutes.
I just lost it on him. “I’m gonna fucking kill you! I don’t care who you fuckin’ think you are. Let’s meet outside in the parking lot, you fucking shitbag asshole!” He immediately gave me a ten-minute misconduct, throwing me out of the game. It was too much. I took my helmet off and threw it at him.
Eddie Belfour shut us out in game two, and the Hawks continued to dominate in the early stages of game three. By the three-minute mark of the second period, they were up 5–0. I scored at 12:24, and again about a minute and a half into the third. We also scored the next two, so we were back in, but ended up losing 7–5. Game four was scoreless until Iggy slipped one in during the second period, but Jeremy Roenick tied it up with just nine seconds to go. We went into triple overtime and at about the ten-minute mark, Trent Yawney came back for the puck, got hold of it behind the net and turned back. Meanwhile James Patrick lost Murray Craven, who came up from behind, caught up to Yawns and slipped his stick in between his skates, loosening the puck and chipping it up to Joe Murphy, who was in the slot: 2–1. It still stands as the longest overtime game in Flames history—fifty minutes, ten seconds.
Most years, I would give my brother Travis a heads-up before the season ended. “You might as well fly in ‘cause I’m gonna take the team golfing for a couple days out in Kelowna.”
We would rent Winnebagos and recruit a couple of volunteer drivers. Travis did not drink. He had developed a serious habit when he was a teen, and by the time he was 20 the doctors were telling him he’d be dead within a couple of years if he kept it up. He had lost a lot of his stomach lining, so he gave it up. My dad was sober too. He made up his mind to quit drinking after he almost killed my younger brothers Trav and Teddy. The last year I played junior in Moose Jaw, he drove Teddy, who was 14, and Travis, who was 11, up for the year-end awards banquet. As usual, he stayed out all night and partied and then climbed behind the wheel with the boys in the car. When they were about thirty miles outside of Regina, he pulled the car over and looked at Teddy. “I can’t go anymore,” he said. Teddy and Travis were scared. “What are you talking about, Dad?” Teddy asked. But my dad was so out of it he made Teddy get behind the wheel. Later, when he sobered up, he realized they could all have been killed, so he quit. Just like that.
I had a cabin at Shuswap Lake in British Columbia. The lake has about 620 miles of shoreline and is considered one of the most beautiful glacial lakes in the world. People go there to water-ski, houseboat and camp. It really is something to see.
In 1996, twelve guys came with me up to the cabin to go golfing. We spent five days and had a blast. Word got out and the next year, 1997, there were sixteen of us. Travis, Teddy and my dad were our drivers again.
The night before we left, I called the Molson rep and said, “I need beer.” “How much do you need?” he asked. “As much as you can give me,” I said. So we picked up twelve flats of twenty-four. We also picked up a Texas mickey—one of those 66-ouncers of whisky—and I found a source who sold me a bag of weed the size of a toddler.
Anyway, the idea was to go to Invermere, which is 238 miles from Calgary, to golf and then to my cabin at Sicamous in the Shuswap that night. We went golfing as planned, but by the time we got to the lake, which is only four hours from Invermere, all the liquor was gone. Two hundred and eighty-eight beers and the mickey. That was just the start. For five days we were baked.
My dad would look at me, shaking his head, going, “What the fuck is wrong with you?” When you are sober, it is hard to remember how much fun it is to be drunk. By the end of the trip, as we hit Calgary city limits, we rolled the last joint and smoked it.
The third year, there must have been twenty of us, including Dwayne (Rollie the Goalie) Roloson, Cale (Hulser) Hulse, Jason Wiemer, Todd Simpson, Jarome (Iggy) Iginla, Joel Bouchard, Rick (Tabby) Tabaracci, Chris (Dinger) Dingman and Dave (Gags) Gagner. Generally, if players were married they weren’t on the trip, and there were no Europeans allowed.
On our way home, we stopped at a lake. We walked along the beach and there was a buoy a hundred yards or so offshore. Iggy was a second-year player and the boys made a bet with him. They said, “We’ll bet you whatever we’ve got in our pockets that you can’t swim out to that buoy and back.” It was April and the ice had just melted, so the water temperature was about 40 degrees Fahrenheit, absolutely freezing. Before we knew it, Iggy was buck-naked and running into the water. He started swimming out.
I was laughing at him and yelling, “You are going to make thirty million bucks someday and out there swimming around for a hundred bucks, you idiot.” Obviously, he made it back. I remember he got out of the water and his skin was absolutely white. The boys only had about three hundred bucks between them. Iggy was disappointed. He thought he was going make at least two grand, but we were tapped from partying for days. It was pretty funny.
Next stop was a go-kart track. I gave the owner a little cash under the table and we all grabbed a car. It was more of a demolition derby. We had a blast. Somebody T-boned Chris Dingman. Dinger is a huge guy, six foot three and 250 pounds. What a kid he was. I asked him one time, “Dinger, how did your year-end meeting with the coach go?” He said, “Fuck, I dunno. It was pretty bizarre. I went into Sutter’s office and I was sitting across the desk from him, and he gets up and points his finger in my face and goes, ‘You know what, Dingman? You’re either fuckin’ stupid or you’re fucking scared!’” Dingman looked at me confused. “I didn’t know what to do, man. Sit there, or fight the guy?”
I almost pissed myself laughing. He was cocky, despite the fact he was so bad. He needed a pail to carry the puck. He was a tough guy and had been a really good junior player. He was captain of the Brandon Wheat Kings and when they won the WHL championship in 1996. In junior, he scored 83 points in 66 games one year. And to give him props, he has two Stanley Cup rings now—from 2001, with the Colorado Avalanche, and 2004 with the Tampa Bay Lightning. But in 1997–98, his rookie year, all we got out of him was three goals and three assists in 70 games. Yet if he scored three or four in a row during a shooting drill, he would get really pumped and say something like, “Fuck, I’m on fire!” Yeah, okay Dinger, now do it in a game.
Anyway, Dinger’s go-kart spun around and skidded into a stack of tires. He hit them hard and they flew everywhere. I will never forget the sight of that great big moose in a teeny little car, spinning through those tires.
My buddy Chuck Matson was one of our Winnebago drivers that third year. He used to say that hockey players are so coddled in life, they have no idea how to do anything mechanical or physical. We came back into Calgary very late at the end of the week, after playing golf in Kelowna all day. Most of us were sound asleep after four days of vigorous activity. We had all been drinking and using the head in the Winnebago. The whole way back, Hulser kept bending our ears about how he was going to help with emptying the sewage. Another thing he had boasted about was that he hadn’t vomited since he was 15 years old. He must have said that about a hundred times. We pulled into a Shell station on the edge of Calgary and Hulser climbed out with Chuck and Jason Wiemer to watch them work the hose into the sewer. Hulser’s nose was right in there like a dirty shirt when Chuck opened the valve to start it draining. The hose began bouncing a little bit and Hulcer asked Chuck, “What’s happening there?” And Chuck said, “That’s all of Theo’s shit going down the hole there, buddy.” Hulcer started gagging. But to this day he claims he never puked, so his record is intact.
My dad said something funny to me that year when it was all over. “Son, you can party, but you couldn’t drink what rolled off the end of my chin.” And you know what? That was true. When he was partying, he could go harder than anyone. His capacity for alcohol was endless. Once, when I was two years old, we were living in Williams Lake, British Columbia, a real cowboy town. The population is around fifteen thousand. The town is famous for its rodeo every July 1 weekend. My dad had a job managing three Indian cowboys on the rodeo circuit. Well, it was fall and the rodeo tour was over, so he dropped the cowboys off where they lived, in Vernon, B.C. Meanwhile, he had made a whole bunch of money—enough to cover us for three months or so. He called my mom and said, “I’ll be home in four hours.” Then he headed for the liquor store and picked up twenty-four 26-ounce bottles of whisky and a case of beer for the drive. We didn’t see him for four days until he pulled up in front of the house and cracked the last beer.
AT THE END of 1997–98 the Flames were out of the playoffs, but we had a couple of regular-season games left, including one in Los Angeles on March 28. When we touched down, Brian Sutter gave us the day off. He said, “Make sure you are here on time for practice tomorrow and be ready to fucking play hard.”
The weather was outstanding. L.A. in March is usually pretty nice, about 71 or 72 degrees, but 1998 was the hottest year in the country’s history, so it was almost 80 with a light, warm breeze. Ironically, nine days earlier on St. Patrick’s Day, Calgary had had its worst snowstorm in 113 years—about a foot and a half fell in my back yard. I remember going out and plunging my boot into a drift and it came up to my knee.
I turned to the boys on the bus and said, “Who wants to go golfing?” And about sixteen guys raised their hands. I called a golf course up in Newport Beach and booked four tee times. We rented a big Budget van, and when we got off the plane from Calgary we drove straight to Newport from L.A. International Airport. We had a great day playing and getting wasted on beer and whisky then, we headed back. I was at the wheel, and we were passing through Orange County about half an hour from our hotel. I had just merged onto Highway 73 and was headed for Interstate 405 when out the window we spotted John Wayne Airport. Suddenly Iggy, who was sitting way in the back, piped up, “You don’t have the balls to go to Vegas!”
I had two credit cards, with $50,000 limits. I could go anywhere I liked, and I liked Vegas. I didn’t even respond—I just cranked the wheel and the whole fucking van took a mean right tilt as I crossed eight lanes of traffic. Everyone was wired from nearly biting the big one as we pulled into Budget Rent-a-Car. The guys were buzzing—each had a comment for me as they piled out. “You fuckin’ fucker, I thought we were dead. Seriously.” “I swear to God, I saw the light.” “I bent over to try to kiss my ass goodbye, but I couldn’t reach it so I kissed Iggy’s ass instead.” Six guys headed back to L.A., while the other ten of us boarded a flight to Vegas. We got there and took a limo to the Hard Rock Hotel. Andrew Cassels was my roommate at the time. He and I sat down at a Caribbean Stud table, got just hammered and played cards all night long. I like the game because it is mindless but exciting. You get five cards, and if you have a pair of twos or better you’re in. I can’t say what anybody else did, but we all showed up at the airport at 8 a.m.
Unfortunately, the flight back to California was cancelled. This was not a good situation. I looked over, and people were boarding at the next gate, so I asked the agent, “Where are you going?” “LAX,” she said. “You got room for ten hockey players?” “Sure,” she said, “come on over.” We exchanged our tickets and got on the plane. When we landed, we got the taxis to boot it to the hotel and we pulled up just as the bus to the Staples Center was loading for the pre-game skate. We won 5–2 that night. Fuckin’ A.