“To know the person that [Mark Messier] is and how he conducts himself on a daily basis, it’s not just The Guarantee, it was everything he said from the beginning of the season. He made us feel like every night was a guarantee. If we came to work hard, paid the price, took care of ourselves, then there would be many nights where we’d win. We believed him. We believed in how he believed in us. He was our leader. He was the guy we leaned on the most.”
—Nick Kypreos, New York Rangers (1993–96)
The pucks banged off the boards a little louder than usual in Rye, New York, on Tuesday, May 24, 1994. The skates, too, carved the ice with a little more animus than a regular Rangers practice at their Playland facility.
Maybe that’s because there was no background noise to drown them out.
Indeed, things were eerily quiet as Mike Keenan put the Rangers through their paces that day. Suddenly facing elimination against an upstart rival from across the river, this team was in a hole not many thought they’d ever be in, first of all, and now that they were in it, many of those same critics gave them no shot at getting out.
The Presidents’ Trophy, the No. 1 overall seed in the league, the Atlantic Division title, heck, even the six wins over New Jersey in the regular season—none of that mattered anymore. These Rangers were down 3–2 to the Devils, of all teams, and had one game, three periods, to save this magical, momentous season.
“That was a task in itself, obviously, but to win that Game 6 in Jersey only meant that they’d have to win another one,” said analyst Al Morganti, who worked the series for ESPN and had a front-row seat to it all as the rinkside reporter. “And the way things were going, it didn’t look good.”
Morganti wasn’t alone in his view. Everybody in that facility on that day—and most everyone in and around the series in general—could feel it. The Rangers—a collection of high-priced superstars who waltzed through some 90 games with hardly a hiccup until New Jersey arrived on their playoff doorstep—were dying on the vine. And the dark, grey cloud that hovered over them for 54 years was back…and had never been bigger.
“They surely had some great teams in New York in the past,” Kevin Lowe said, “but it was like Mark Messier said to me when I first became a Ranger: ‘There are so many demons lurking in the Garden, you have no idea.’ They’re in every corner, and we had to slay each and every one of them before we could get it done. There were no shortcuts. It had to be done that way. It was a lot of pressure, playing in New York, and I understand now how difficult it was for past teams to not make it as far.”
But this team was so much better than so many of those other shoulda, coulda, wouldas that ended up in the basement of the Garden, devoured deliciously by those aging demons. This team had it all. Or, at least, it did.
And it was Messier’s job to get it back.
So, at the end of practice, in a glum locker room filled with media types anxious to write, broadcast, and deliver the 1994 Rangers’ obituary, Messier took a stand.
“There might have been 15 people around him in a semicircle,” said Mark Everson, the Rangers beat writer for the New York Post. “A few cameras. Everyone was waiting for him to come out and talk. It seemed normal enough. Another day in the series.”
Until Messier started talking, of course.
“He came out,” Everson said, “and I just asked him, ‘Well, Mark, what has to happen here?’”
And ever so simply, in Messier’s patented monotone, with a stone face and a sure delivery, he uttered the phrase that penetrated through the notebooks, the tape recorders, and the eyes and ears of the journalists in front of him:
“We’ll win.”
Short. Sweet. Succinct.
This wasn’t the cocky, look-at-me proclamation offered by Joe Namath, author of the most famous guarantee in New York sports history. Messier simply said, “We’ll win.” Nothing more. Nothing less. And certainly nothing close to the former New York Jets quarterback and his guarantee of a Super Bowl III victory in 1969, one he ultimately made good on with a 16–7 win over the Baltimore Colts in Miami.
This was different. This was merely a captain trying to save his ship.
“My memory was, What else is he going to say? It wasn’t like he called everyone over, stepped up on a box, and said, ‘I have an announcement to make,’” said Larry Brooks, who was covering the Devils for the Post at the time but now covers the Rangers. “It wasn’t that way at all. The Devils were the better team at that point, and with all the turmoil, guys getting benched, and things like that, Mess had to do something. So, he did.”
After just one point and three shots on net in the previous two games—both Rangers losses—Messier authored a promise, a pledge to his teammates, his coaches, and Rangers fans worldwide, that this team, starting with him, would not go gently into that good night.
“We know we are going to go in there,” he said as he finally elaborated, “and win Game 6 and bring it back to the Garden.”
For the veteran journalists in the room—Everson, Brooks, then–Post columnist Jay Greenberg, and others—it wasn’t a “Stop the presses!” moment. At least not yet. There were other questions to be asked, and there was a process to run through. There weren’t even a ton of glances between the assembled journalists, something that often happens in media scrums where a writer may flash a “Can you believe he just said that?” look at one of his brethren.
“It was a nothing-to-lose situation,” said Stan Fischler, a legendary hockey author, historian, and television analyst who covered the series on the Devils’ side for SportsChannel. “You were going back to Jersey, down 3–2, and he, who was always exuding confidence, had to say something. That’s what made him such a leader in Edmonton and New York, that confidence. And to me, he was a better leader, the real guts of that Oilers team. It was Messier, not [Wayne] Gretzky. So, same thing here. He was the leader. He was the confident one. And he did what he felt he had to do as motivation.”
The interview carried on to other matters of importance from that point on. The Devils, what they were doing, Martin Brodeur’s prowess in net, the Rangers’ injury situation, how was Messier going to get back on the scoreboard, things like that, as the reporters finished up and moved on to the next player.
But make no mistake: Messier knew what he had said and done. While he may not have been a mainstay in the New York media market, he was intelligent enough to know that his two little words were going to make waves in print and on the air. So, as he left the facility and prepared to ride back into Manhattan with Lowe, Brian Leetch, and Mike Richter, he turned to Lowe as they slowly walked through the parking lot. Messier figured that was the best time to let his longtime friend know what he might be up against over the next 24 hours.
“He looked at me, and there was a bit of concern on his face. It was one of those rare Messier moments,” Lowe said with a laugh. “He turned to me, and said, ‘Well, I think I may have just created a bit of a stir for tomorrow.’ And I didn’t know what he was talking about. Like I said, there was a look on his face that I didn’t often see. So, I responded, ‘Well, what did you say?’ And he told me, ‘Well, I kind of guaranteed that we’d win.’ And we looked at each other for a second, one of those silent pauses…and then we both just chuckled. We got in the car, and I just said, ‘Well, boys, we better get our hard hats on, and go out and do this. Mess has left us no choice.’”
Most of the Rangers shared in Lowe’s nonchalant attitude toward Messier’s words. Did the pledge raise the bar for this crew? Yes. Did it put more pressure on the team overall? Sure. But they had to win the game either way. So, to them, it was business as usual.
“It didn’t really faze our preparation or anything,” Leetch said. “We had no choice but to go out and play well no matter what he said, so that’s how we treated it. We had to get on him a little bit. I remember seeing it in the paper the next day; I always used to grab the paper on my way to the skate. And when I saw him, I had to give a sarcastic smile. ‘You really got us into it now,’ I told him. ‘Thanks a lot, Mess.’”
Across the river, though, it was a different story.
In East Rutherford, as the Devils were preparing to clinch their first berth in the Stanley Cup Finals, there were no smiles. Some players, when they first saw the morning papers, brushed it off. Others weren’t so happy about it. Either way, there were no jokes to be made.
“I was kind of surprised, to be honest,” Bill Guerin said. “All I can remember saying to myself, was, ‘Is he serious? What’s he thinking?’ Well, he’s wrong, and we had to show everyone that. But, can I say the guys were throwing the Post around the room and slamming doors? No. We just wished him luck.”
If nothing else, it was a headache the Devils didn’t need. Here they were, having won consecutive games by a combined 7–2 score and about to host an elimination game on home ice. And Messier had to mess with their mojo and bring New Jersey’s inferiority complex back into the equation. For the first time in this series, and for first time this season, the Devils should have been the story. They led the series. They were the better team. They were on their way to the Stanley Cup Finals.
But all anyone wanted to talk about was the Rangers.
“It was huge that morning,” Brooks said. “Huge. At the Devils’ skate, they were annoyed. People were asking [Scott] Stevens, I remember, about it, and it was an annoyance. ‘We don’t do that over here,’ he said, or something to that effect. They were really annoyed. And you really got the sense that they were going to go out and play like it.”
Every media outlet reported on Messier’s words, but the biggest head turner, clearly, was the Post, which splashed the story across the back page in true New York tabloid fashion:
Captain Courageous’ bold prediction: WE’LL WIN TONIGHT
The headline was wrapped around a Messier photo with perfect symmetry. It was a determined pose, on the ice, in his home uniform, and the shot fit the words perfectly.
“That was a run where we had a pretty standard system each night. There was a playoff game—Rangers and Knicks—almost every night, and so for the early edition, we’d usually go with the advance of the next game for the next day, on the back page, and then for the later editions, we’d go to the live game,” said Pat Hannigan, the night sports editor at the Post. “Well, on that night, the Knicks were playing Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals against the Indiana Pacers, and it was just a Game 1. The Rangers, though, were facing elimination, they were going to Jersey, and it was now or never, do or die for a team that had to win that year. It seemed all along that this was their year, and this was it, they were up against it.
“So, that played into our thinking, and then, of course, Messier said what he said, and it was pretty easy for us that that was the way to go. Now, normally, like I said, that would have been swapped out for later editions because of the live game, but this was big enough, and it was Messier, and it was the Rangers facing elimination. You only have those moments so many times in New York sports, so really, that was the way to go.”
The Knicks weren’t forgotten, of course. They defeated the Pacers 100–89 in Game 1 and received a headline at the bottom of the back page with a photo of coach Pat Riley off to the left. But on this morning, as commuters stopped by their local newsstands on their way into the office in the big city, they didn’t see the Knicks in the prime position. They saw Messier.
“I wasn’t there on hand when Mess made The Guarantee, but you know how those media scrums go. It just wasn’t one of those bold proclamations,” said Neil Smith, New York’s always-colorful general manager. “The questions were going back and forth, and Mark Everson asked the question, and Mess replied. There’s no question that Mark Everson and the New York Post turned that into The Guarantee. And then it took on a life of its own. It didn’t start out that way, though. But this was the New York media, after all.”
It had already been an interesting series for Everson. He had one unpleasant phone conversation with Keenan regarding an article calling attention to the Rangers’ injuries and Keenan’s decisions to bench some stars, namely Leetch.
“Oh yeah, that was something,” Everson said with a laugh. “He benched Leetch, and said ‘He was hurt.’ The next day, over at Rye, [Rangers media relations executive Barry] Watkins came along, and said, ‘Mike will talk about all the injuries, and he wants it off the record.’ And I said, ‘Barry, it can’t be off the record. All of the other guys said okay to it being off the record, and I’m not going to.’ Watkins then said, ‘Okay, you can come in, and just don’t quote Mike directly.’ Well, Mike calls me the next day, and he went…ballistic. I attributed these things in my story—dubious statements as they were—to him. Not direct quotes. But, whatever. So, next morning, he calls me up, and—perhaps he was told this was going to be off the record—and he went ballistic on me. But he got over it.”
Ahh, the New York media. Without it, to a certain extent, this series might not have been what it was.
“I think it was a product of the media a little bit, but we ran with it and tried to use it as best we could,” Richter said of The Guarantee. “When you break it down, though, Mark is so disciplined about the message that he has for fans, for the team, and for ourselves, and so we all just took it in stride. That was Mark. He does those things, but he does it in a good way. He’s a machine, and everything he did was to make us better as a team. He always did the right things at the right time, but he usually backed it up with his actions.”
Either way, one of the more memorable New York back pages was born as a result.
“To me,” Brooks said, “it’s the most famous back page in the history of the Post.”
That’s saying something.
“Whether he gathered everyone around, stepped up, and made a proclamation, that didn’t really matter to us,” Hannigan said. “It didn’t really matter how he said it, it was the fact that he did say it, and all that went with it. It was a simple phrase, but definitely enough for us to go with it.”
But, as the city buzzed with talk of the promise—Was he smart? Was he stupid? Would he sink or swim?—Messier just went about his day. He took the good-natured ribbing from his teammates, digested it, and got to work.
“I think he made The Guarantee because we had been through so much adversity that year, and there was a lot of building into the tank of confidence. He wanted us to get the feeling back, confidence-wise, that we could bounce back, get it together, win a big game in New Jersey,” said Adam Graves. “He wanted everyone focused, and wanted to take some of the pressure off some of the other players, and put it on himself. And that’s why Mark is Mark, and that’s why Mess is Mess, and that’s why he’s arguably one of the greatest leaders hockey has ever known.”
For Messier, even years later, he is as simple and straightforward with his explanation of The Guarantee as he was with the delivery way back on that May Tuesday in 1994. It was a matter of pride and passion. Nothing more.
“Putting on the jersey, to see the No. 11, to see the ‘C,’ there’s no question there’s something to that. The players that play in New York, there is a lot of pride. I know I had it,” he said. “There’s a lot of pride in the work that you put in to become a Ranger, and obviously, there’s more pride in the work you put in to stay a New York Ranger.”
Graves concurred.
“For me, he could show that pride in so many ways, and The Guarantee was just one of them. He never asked us to do anything he wouldn’t go in and do himself, too,” he said. “To take the pressure off the team, which he did, and put it all on him, really allowed us to just go out and play and do whatever we needed to do.”
In a way, it did seem to take some of the pressure off the Rangers. For the first time in a long time, people weren’t talking about the team’s struggles. They were talking about Messier’s confidence. They were talking about The Guarantee.
“To this day, I still can’t believe he did that,” ESPN’s Barry Melrose said. “But that’s Mess for you, and that’s what that series did to people. The Rangers were in a bad place, and their year was hanging in the balance. Jersey was playing so well.”
But even the New York media members probably could not have predicted the long-term ramifications of their efforts. Regardless of how the game would turn out in East Rutherford, Messier’s pledge remains one of the most famous moments in NHL history. Even 17 years later, the effects lingered. In fact, during in the 2011 Stanley Cup Finals, Boston forward Mark Recchi uttered a memorable phrase prior to Game 6 at the TD Garden in Massachusetts.
The Bruins trailed the Vancouver Canucks 3–2 on June 13. Boston needed to win at home, and then jump back on a plane to Canada for a Game 7. Fresh off a 1–0 loss in Game 5, a reporter asked Recchi at the morning skate if he was prepared to guarantee a win in Game 6, or better yet, guarantee two wins and a series victory.
Recchi, 43 at the time, began his career in 1988 and took on Messier many times in his long and storied tenure. He simply laughed and lightened the mood in an otherwise tense locker room. “I’m not pulling a Messier, boys,” he said.
And in this new technology age, where social media rules the day and everyone has a handheld information tool in his pocket, who could even imagine what another “Messier” might have become. In the end, of course, it didn’t matter to Recchi and the Bruins, who won the next two games and lifted the Stanley Cup two days later in Vancouver.
But perhaps that’s what made The Guarantee so memorable back in 1994. It was one of those things that comes around once in a lifetime, and win or lose, it was going to be a part of Rangers and NHL lore forever.
“Clearly, it was a different day, and a different era,” Messier said. “Who knows what it would have become in today’s day and age. Back then, though, it was what it was. It was a big moment for us. What more can you say?”