MY LAST SEASON with the Flames, 1998–99, began with another trip to Japan—this time to Tokyo. The Olympics in Nagano had raised hockey’s profile, and the league was trying to build some goodwill and secure sponsorships with some of the big Japanese companies. So we went halfway around the world to open the season by playing a two-game set against the San Jose Sharks.
This time, I had a lot of fun there—I think. All I remember is being in some fuckin’ strip joint in a place called the Roppongi district. Well fuck, why not? It was full of drugs, booze and hot South American women. I never had sex with any of them. I was so fuckin’ high and wasted, there was no chance of that happening. But I loved hanging out with them and partying. I remember being just stoked when we landed in Tokyo. We had a couple of days off to explore before we played. I said to the concierge, “We are just looking to go have some beers and have some fun. Can you help us?” And he told me to go to the Roppongi district. A couple of guys from the team came along, and sure enough there was a ripper joint. This group of girls was hanging around at the front. Every one of those girls was good-looking. A little hard around the edges, you know, but hey. This particular strip club was a shady place, full of tourists. The Japanese people were more into geisha, not hookers. I walked in, picked one and tipped her a thousand bucks. Money was not an issue. I liked the company. I needed the company. I was number one on the team, the most famous and the most alone. I was at the top and I fucked it all up because I had no idea what to do once I got there.
Each night I would choose a different girl, but we would have the same conversation. “Where are you from?” “Oh, I’m from South America.” “Well, what do you do down there?” “My father is a fisherman.” “Why are you here?” And she would tell me her story about how she was a victim of some kind of abuse, neglect or abandonment. Every one of them would tell me about the kid she’d had back home when she was in her early teens. How was she supporting that kid? By being a stripper. It is great money.
I have a theory as to the reason I could not stay out of strip joints. Finding the hottest girl and keeping her beside me all night, and then adding booze and cocaine to the picture, made me feel like a rock star.
Except for game nights, my routine in Japan was to arrive at the club after dinner and make sure to be back at the hotel by 6 a.m. I was so fucking loaded that whole trip that I hardly remember it. The first night, I went right from partying to practice, wasted. Two days later, we played and tied. In the next game, I scored a hat trick. I was on fire—high and drunk and I was incredible.
In fact, I was having a great season. By Christmas I’d scored 17 goals and 20 assists in 33 games. On January 24, at the 49th NHL All-Star Game in Tampa, Mark Recchi and I were wingers on a line with Wayne Gretzky. The format matched North America against the rest of the world. Our line combined for seven points in the 8–6 win for Team North America. Gretz talked to me about the Rangers, told me how he loved living in New York and that I should think about going there when I became an unrestricted free agent that summer.
On February 20, I scored two goals and assisted on a third in a 6–3 victory over the Anaheim Ducks at home. That night, I passed Al MacInnis to become Calgary’s career points leader. It was weird—I had played almost eight hundred games in the NHL, yet that night I had butterflies. I tied Al with an assist in the first period, and then, fifty-two seconds into the second period, after picking up the puck in my own end, I cut through the neutral zone, made it past their defence and slapped one in. That gave us a 3–1 lead and my record—824 career points (362 goals, 462 assists in 787 games), including 28 goals and 35 assists to that point that season. As the puck went in, the crowd went nuts, and for a minute and a half, the game stopped as everybody stood up and yelled and whistled and clapped and cheered. I circled at centre ice, pumping my right arm up and down. It was a rush that is hard to describe. The feeling that comes over you when sixteen thousand people are screaming your name is unbelievable. Most of the rest of the world will never know what it is like, but trust me, it is addictive.
After setting the record, I waited for the other shoe to drop. There was no one else left from the Stanley Cup team. It’s tough to keep a good team together, especially on a tight budget. You could see the same thing happening with the Pittsburgh Penguins in 2008–2009. They are going to have to make some tough decisions about who to keep and who to let go, because they have got too many good, young, talented guys who are going to need to go elsewhere to get their money.
At the very beginning of February, Harley Hotchkiss, one of the owners, called me in and basically asked, “Is there any chance you would take less than market value when you become an unrestricted free agent at the end of the year?” He offered me $16 million over four years, an average of $4 million per year. I said, “Look, I think this is below my market value. But I will take $25 million for five years, or five million per year.” In NHL terms, we weren’t far apart. And as it turned out, I was already leaving millions on the table with my counteroffer, but Harley said no.
I picked up the paper the next day and the headlines screamed that I had said no to five years and twenty-five million. I felt fuckin’ sick to my stomach. It wasn’t true and made me look bad to alienate my fans. I saw the writing on the wall. Three weeks before the trade deadline, I sat down with Coatsie. I said, “Veronica wants a new house, and the one she is looking at is across the lake from where we are in McKenzie. Coatsie, I am not buying a new house if I am getting traded this year. So what the fuck is up here?”
“No, Theo, we are not trading you,” he reassured me. “We definitely are not going to trade you.” So I said, “All right, I am buying her the house.”
Our friends came over to move us. You might wonder why, making millions of dollars a year, I’d be asking my friends to move me. Why not just phone a moving company? Because of who we really were—we were small-town kids, and moving was just something friends did for each other. You can change your location and salary, but you can’t change who you are. Chuck and a few of the boys helped me push my hot tub across the frozen lake. We just had a blast doing that, skidding it across. It took us the better part of the weekend to move.
Fast-forward to Sunday morning, February 28, 1999. My buddy Chuck Matson and his wife, Elaine, were sitting having breakfast and their phone rang. It was Al Coates. He asked if Chuck had my new address. Chuck figured it out right away. “Coatsie, you prick, you’ve traded him!”
“Listen, Chuck, I need you to do me a favour,” Coatsie said. “Don’t call him. Don’t say anything for an hour. I owe it to him to talk to him in person. What is his address?”
I was at home, getting ready to go to practice, when I saw Coatsie’s champagne-coloured 1943 BMW pull up into my driveway. He’d never been to my house before, ever. I knew then and there I’d been traded. I think it was tough for him. I could see it in his eyes, which were watery, and hear it in his voice, which was cracking. He said, “This is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. I traded you today.”
My heart was pounding so hard I was afraid he could hear it, but I just shrugged. “Okay, cool,” I said. He said, “Theo, I made sure I traded you to a place you have a chance to win a Stanley Cup—Colorado.”
I started to feel excited, because Colorado really did have a chance to win. Coatsie left and I called Chuck. “These bastards just traded me,” I said. “I know,” he said. “You’re going to Colorado.” There was a silence while I took this in. I said, “How do you know that?”
I GET FRUSTRATED when I hear the Flames and the Calgary media make comments like, “Poor Theo. He got traded because he wanted too much money and went to the big city and his life went downhill.” I was always a very loyal employee and felt I had earned the right to stay in Calgary. At that time salaries were skyrocketing and there was a lot of pressure on me from the Players Association not to consider a hometown discount. Nobody wanted that kind of precedent. But in reality, I was so messed up the Flames probably saw a huge problem about to happen. On the other side of the coin, when I was there, if the Flames had invested in me, Calgary wouldn’t have had so many lean years.
At the time of the trade, the Flames were two points out of a playoff spot. I was proud of where we were as a team, considering we had a shortage of talent. Basically, there was me and Phil Housley. Coatsie was quoted as saying, “We know Phil is a one-dimensional player, but it’s the dimension we don’t have.” German Titov was a great guy, but as I said, he drove a tank for four years in the Russian army. They just picked him up late in the draft and he turned out to be a pretty good player. Michael Nylander was skilled, but he was young and he was hit-and-miss. They traded him in January. We had Cale Hulse and Derek Morris, and Iggy was a comer, but he was inexperienced. For us to be that close to making the playoffs, and to have them fucking pull the rug out from under me and trade me, I was pissed off. The team left me out on my own for five fuckin’ years, answering the journalists’ three million fuckin’ questions, and with no talent on the ice, and here we were, about to turn it around … and what did they do? Traded my sorry ass out of town.
I WAS UP AND DOWN. One minute, I was looking forward to the opportunity that playing in Colorado presented. The next, I was devastated, absolutely devastated. I called Chuck back a little while later and said, “There’s a news conference at 2:30 p.m., and then I’m on a 5:00 p.m. flight to Colorado. You have to come with me.”
“Bones,” Chuck said, “I’ve been running around with you so much, I’ve been neglecting business.” He called me “Bones” because I used up a lot of energy, and if I didn’t eat enough I lost weight. One time he stood back and looked at me and said, “Holy cow, you are skin and bones!” And that was what he called me from then on.
“No, Chuck, I need you. I don’t just want you to come. I need you to come.”
So Chuck agreed. We went down to the news conference, which turned out to be a terrible time. So many emotions went through me. I tried to be strong and hold it together, but I lost it at the first question. I couldn’t hold back the tears. Up until that time, it hadn’t hit me that I wasn’t a Flame anymore. The Flames were the only team who had given me the opportunity to be who I was. In the next twenty-four hours I would experience every emotion a human being can feel. And the next day, when I put on the Colorado Avalanche jersey, it was an out-of-body experience.
I was traded for René Corbet, a forward, defenceman Wade Belak and future considerations. Belak was huge—six foot four and 225 pounds. He played in 72 games over two years, racking up just three assists but 224 penalty minutes. In February 2001, the Flames put him on waivers, and the Toronto Maple Leafs picked him up.
When Corbet hit town, he told the papers he wasn’t going to try to be me, and he kept his word. He scored 9 points in 20 games the rest of the ‘98–99 season, and 14 points in 48 games in 1999–2000 before they traded him to Pittsburgh.
The real value for Calgary in the trade was the “future consideration,” a big (six-three, 230) defenceman named Robyn Regehr. He was Colorado’s first-round pick, nineteenth overall, in 1998 and an all-star in the WHL. His tenure as a Flame got off to a rough start. He was riding in a car when another car crossed the centre dividing line and hit him head-on. Both his tibias were broken, and he had to work his ass off to rehabilitate his body. And he succeeded—he played 57 games for Calgary in 1999–2000. I heard Regehr is a good guy. His parents were Mennonite missionaries in Brazil and Indonesia who ended up in Rosthern, Saskatchewan, about a six-hour drive from Russell. Anyway, he is one of my favourite Flames today, a hardworking horse with talent.
Eric Francis later told me that at that press conference he was thinking, “Theo will be back here and play one or two more seasons, because this is where he became famous. This is where he became rich. This is where it all started.”
That would have been a happy ending.