“It was always the seventh game of the Stanley Cup final.”
That was hockey for Marty McSorley. Every game—whether it was as a boy on a frigid winter day rushing to get his skates on and hustle down to play on the canal that cut through his family’s three-hundred-acre farm or any one of the 1,076 National Hockey League games in which he was a participant—was Game 7. Always Game 7. You competed every day like the Cup was on the line. He was the fifth of ten children, and the fourth son, born to Bill and Anne McSorley. “There was no crying,” he remembers. McSorley men were tough. His blessed mother was tougher. “I remember her up in the haymow with a baby on one hip, dragging bales.” He shed no tears and avoided no battles in the NHL either, accumulating 3,755 penalty minutes along with 225 official fights. He was a kid who fought his way to professional hockey, became a well-known bodyguard to one of the all-time greats and evolved into a quality NHL defenceman. He became a Stanley Cup champion. For all of that, he paid a price, a fearsome price, one he breathes and feels every day.
At fifty-four, still with a full head of hair, he looks good decked out head-to-toe in black, just like in his Los Angeles Kings days after the team had dumped its traditional purple-and-gold for something more menacing. He has the same wide, mischievous smile and the same excited earnestness that makes him an effective debater when it comes to causes or ideas he believes in. He oozes personality, just like a lot of players who earned reputations as tough guys during their NHL careers. Often the enforcers were the most quotable players on their teams, the most engaging, and McSorley certainly was always that. They had a hard, frightening job, and many were insecure about how they were perceived as hockey players. It was as if, by being participants in the daily hockey conversation, they could feel more a part of it. Or they just had more to say about it.
McSorley has arrived ten minutes late at a stylish restaurant in Manhattan Beach. He orders two glasses of a favourite California Pinot. “But only if it’s been opened today,” he says, also asking if the tomatoes on his swordfish are fresh. The Cayuga, Ontario farm boy with a touch of LA style. He’s been at his nine-year-old daughter’s basketball game near Hermosa Beach, where he and his family live. Did she score any points? “A lot,” he says. “You know, this is a crazy gene pool here. There are all kinds of former NHL players, NFL players, the best volleyball players in the world, they all live here. The kids’ sports are amazing.” He’s married to a former professional volleyball player himself, and they have three children under the age of ten.
Life is mostly good. He’s in touch with lots of old hockey friends, helps organize alumni games, and gets to relive the old battles and victories. But getting up from a chair is often difficult. Painful. Remembering things, like this appointment, can be a challenge. “I had to leave two Post-it notes and get my wife to remind me,” he says, “or I would have been sitting at home when you called wondering where I was.” The conversation leads to his physical well-being, to all the injuries he incurred in years of playing in the NHL, wearing a helmet that offered little protection and shoulder pads that were designed for quickly sliding off after the gloves were dropped. He suffers from severe arthritis in his right wrist. The fist that mashed the cartilage in many a nose now has barely any grip strength. The left wrist pops freakily out of joint. Both hips are untrustworthy, which means when he rides his bike, as he did tonight, he needs to use the curb to get on and off. His left arm, badly dislocated at the shoulder once, can’t be lifted above his armpit, and he has to sleep every night on his right side. He pays $30,000 a year in health insurance but can’t get the brain scan he wants to give him confidence he’s going to be okay in the years to come. He’s been fighting an ongoing battle over workers’ compensation.
All this takes time, patience and energy, and some days McSorley just doesn’t have enough of any of those commodities. He likes to get up at 5 A.M., go for coffee and try to play Sudoku or do a crossword puzzle. Sometimes he can; sometimes he can’t. Through all the challenges, he still remains upbeat and articulate, loves to talk hockey and remember the big games and the big fights, loves to talk about when he was one of the best big men in the game. “I loved to play,” he says. “I’m proud that I was a hockey player. I played with the best players in the world for seventeen years. I got to play with the best player in the game.”
Today, what McSorley was, the role he played, no longer exists in the NHL. He is now, in effect, a fossil from an old world that used to be the NHL, one in which a player capable with his fists and willing to fight every night, and sometimes more than once, could get drafted, signed and gradually develop the skills necessary to play either a regular shift or even become a star. For his entire career, fighting was accepted not only as a feature of hockey but something integral to the sport. It mattered, the players always insisted it mattered, even as critics suggested it shouldn’t be part of the game, and players who did it well could be part of very good teams and earn a very good living.
Teams actively sought that kind of player regardless of what other skills they might have, and many became household names. It came fairly naturally to McSorley. It was in his blood. He had a grandfather nicknamed “Box” because he liked to scrap. He had brothers, and they solved their disputes on their own. He was essentially a big, raw-boned tough without refined hockey skills when he entered the league with Pittsburgh in 1983.
He was so raw, he wasn’t even drafted. But five years later, after having moved on to Edmonton, he was included in the famous trade that sent Wayne Gretzky to Los Angeles specifically to make sure Number 99 had adequate protection as he spread the gospel of the NHL in Southern California. Hollywood happily embraced a new, colourful sheriff in town. From there, McSorley developed into a very good defenceman, with offensive flair and boldness, albeit one who still earned hundreds of minutes in penalties every season. His years in Edmonton with the high-flying Oilers had helped him acquire skills that many players with his job description never had an opportunity to develop. He grew to the point where he could dominate a game with his talent, not just his fists, a player with offensive confidence and patience who could collaborate with the very best hockey players on the planet.
Today, the type of prospect he was when he started wouldn’t even get his foot in the door. The enforcers of yesterday have all been replaced by faster, more skilled players in the faster, more skilled NHL. Fights rarely occur in the modern NHL. The game moves too fast for those who need it to stop before their real skills kick in. “We don’t fight in hockey anymore,” says Gretzky. “And I think that’s a good thing.”
McSorley and others who played the role of NHL “policeman” were themselves a product of the NHL’s evolution. For the first four decades of NHL competition, there was lots of fighting, but players usually fought their own battles when avenging a perceived grievance. There were tough customers and dirty players, players you’d best steer clear of, but no designated enforcers. Gordie Howe and Rocket Richard didn’t need their teammates to fight their battles, so teams saw no need to employ such one-dimensional types. By the 1970s, however, the Boston Bruins had developed a tough team with multiple fighters to surround Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito. Part of Boston’s game plan became intimidation, daring other teams to stand up to the “Big Bad Bruins.” Orr could handle himself, but he also had many teammates willing to fight each other’s battles and start trouble if it needed starting. It became a group thing. The Philadelphia Flyers took it to a whole other level, using fighting, goonery and intimidation as tactics to help win the Stanley Cup. They didn’t have the stars the Bruins had, but they had even more muscle, players who otherwise wouldn’t be in the NHL. They dared the league to call even one-quarter of the fouls they committed. Dave “the Hammer” Schultz was the first specialized, high-profile enforcer. Schultz had been a scorer in junior hockey with Swift Current, but he all but abandoned that element of the game once he turned professional. He could fight, and did so with great enthusiasm, and he would seek out the best players on the other team and terrorize them. When Borje Salming arrived in the NHL with Toronto in 1973 as one of the first European players, Schultz sought out the highly skilled Swede in one of his first NHL games and gleefully pounded him with his fists. Salming learned how to fight back, but his fellow Swede Inge Hammarstrom was less inclined to do so and was mocked by his own owner, Harold Ballard, as a player who could go into a corner with a pocketful of eggs and come out without a single one broken. Schultz and other Flyers—Don Saleski, Bob Kelly, Mel Bridgman, Andre Dupont—protected Philadelphia’s best player, Bobby Clarke, and other teams had to find similar players to protect their stars.
All teams eventually had one enforcer. Then two. Sometimes three. Massive players, players with cement hands less useful for scoring goals than for delivering a concussion, even punching a player’s head into the ice as he lay on his back. That might not exactly have been accepted as fair or honest, but it happened. As the NHL grew and then faced competition from the World Hockey Association, there was even more call for such players. That was the professional world McSorley stepped into as a nineteen-year-old in 1983. Fighters had become a necessary element on any successful team, and McSorley had the skill set to thrive.
When McSorley played, when he was in his prime, the role of enforcer mattered. A lot. Those who did it well were celebrated. They became enormously popular and sometimes were given colourful nicknames. Dave “Charlie” Manson. Dave “Tiger” Williams. Stu “the Grim Reaper” Grimson. Ken “Bomber” Baumgartner. Tie Domi. Bob Probert. Mick Vukota. Those with enough skills to score goals or play regularly, like Williams, Manson, Probert and McSorley, were extremely valuable. In the 1980–81 season, Dave Williams led the NHL with 343 penalty minutes and was fifth in the league with sixteen fighting majors, but he also scored thirty-five goals for the Vancouver Canucks. Only twenty-seven NHL players scored more that season. Probert was the NHL’s heavyweight champion and also played on Detroit’s power play. Manson and McSorley could kill penalties, play the power play and take regular shifts. They could be trusted to be on the ice in the final minute of a game or wear a letter for their team and also to fight the toughest player on the other team.
The game was structured in such a way that even less talented tough guys could be difference-makers because of their muscle, not liabilities limited to playing only a few minutes a night because they couldn’t keep up. Violent, illegal play was either punished lightly or not punished at all. To a significant degree, the league left it to the players to maintain order. Suspensions were rare. Bench-clearing brawls were frequent. Most games had at least one fight, and many had three, four or more. Enforcers and tough guys could abuse opposition players unwilling to pay the same physical price. Meanness was a valued commodity. All fighters were useful in that environment, but fighters who could contribute in other ways were doubly useful. Long before concerns emerged about concussions, chronic traumatic encephalopathy and the dangerous self-medication of NHL fighters, these players were glorified, and there was no broad debate over whether what they did was “good” for the game.
Many hockey fans adored them, thought these policemen were what was best about the game. Many fans believed they injected a sense of manliness into hockey, and also personal honour. People didn’t see them as bullies, particularly if they played for their team. They saw them as proud, brave gladiators who would do what others lacked the guts to do. In a split second, these players could change a game, and often did. If a game was lost, they could still inflict pain or injury on the opposing players to soften them up for the next game. Intimidation did play a role, mostly because it was a tradition, but also because hockey—including the NHL—permitted it to be that way. The menacing presence of enforcers also created an undeniable dramatic tension.
McSorley was a classic member of this fraternity. At his very best, he could carry a team, even one with Gretzky, on his broad shoulders. He could change a game, and he was happy to pay the physical price to do it. “Yeah, it was worth it,” says McSorley. “My only regret was playing through injuries when sometimes I shouldn’t have. But there’s no crying in hockey.”
MAY 1993 HAD BEEN a steamy month in Toronto, with temperatures as high as 28°C pushing the limits of sixty-two-year-old Maple Leaf Gardens, which had no air conditioning. Just blocks away was the state-of-the-art SkyDome with its revolutionary retractable roof. By comparison, the Gardens, at the corner of Church and Carlton Streets, was a quaint relic of a bygone era. The yellow-brick building, built in a hurry during the Depression, was unremarkable, even ugly. The marquee at the front seemed old-fashioned. Yonge Street, to the west, once seedy and crime infested, had been cleaned up by the cops years earlier after the awful murder of a twelve-year-old shoeshine boy. Jarvis Street, to the east, was home to streetwalkers, and another block farther, well, there was trouble there if you were looking for it and sometimes even if you weren’t. But the Gardens sat safely and comfortably enough in the downtown core, surrounded by parking lots that suggested the real estate around the famous arena wasn’t as valuable as you might think. You could walk to Bigliardi’s for a postgame meal and maybe run into a hockey celebrity or two. One of Canada’s most famous musicians, Gordon Lightfoot, often ate there. He was a huge Leafs fan. Meanwhile, the favourite watering hole for players, P.M. Toronto, was across the street. Leafs players were known and protected there. They could mingle, or they could retreat to an area behind a velvet rope.
It was a time when many arenas still oozed history and personality. Leafs captain Wendel Clark believed he could identify a rink just by standing at centre ice with his eyes closed, because each had its particular smell. The Montreal Forum. Boston Garden. Chicago Stadium. They didn’t have corporate names or luxury boxes. The revenue they generated came from selling seats, and organizations would try to build a team that fit their home rink. The Bruins, with a rink that held only 14,500 spectators and ice that measured nine feet shorter and two feet narrower than the NHL standard, realized there was no point trying to be overly fancy. In a rink originally constructed with professional boxing in mind, the press box hung over the ice, making reporters feel they were looking straight down at the players, and fans seemed to be on top of the action. Sure you needed a few stars, but a team dominated by bangers and grinders could create a hostile atmosphere for any opposing side. By contrast, when Edmonton entered the NHL in 1979, their Northlands Coliseum was a large, expansive arena with the best ice in the league. Speed and skill made sense there and became Oiler trademarks. The next generation of NHL arenas, which would be more generic in design, was years away. Maple Leaf Gardens, at least the ice surface, didn’t have distinguishing features like the Boston Garden. The place was more of a shrine to the sport, the scene of past glories. It was a hockey museum that represented tradition. NHL players, coaches and executives, particularly those who had grown up in Toronto or Southern Ontario, had a special connection with the Gardens, either from watching on television or playing there.
As the Toronto Maple Leafs and Los Angeles Kings prepared to contest the 1993 Clarence Campbell Conference final, many on both sides felt the Gardens was a unique and special place. “I thought it was the greatest arena. Ever,” says Gretzky. He’d gone there as a six-year-old with his grandmother, sitting in the last row of greys to watch the Leafs beat the Oakland Seals, and played there as a peewee when his team from Brantford, Ontario, was invited to use the rink before a Toronto Marlboros junior game. Later, as a teenager playing minor hockey, he lived in Toronto for two years and would go down to watch Marlies junior games on Saturday afternoons with a buddy from West Humber Collegiate. “It was one dollar for standing room, and there was an old gentleman who would always save me a spot,” he recalls. “I did that pretty much every Saturday for two years.” He played his first NHL game at Maple Leaf Gardens on November 21, 1979, registering two goals and two assists for Edmonton in a 4–4 tie. Later that season, on March 29, he came to the Gardens again as an Oiler and had two goals and four assists in an 8–5 victory. The rink, not to mention the competitive state of the bedraggled home team, fit his game. Going into the series against the Leafs in the spring of ’93, Gretzky had played twenty-one NHL games at the Gardens and recorded an incredible twenty-five goals and thirty-five assists. Over the course of his NHL career, the only visiting rink he scored more goals at was the Winnipeg Arena. “Maple Leaf Gardens was definitely an arena, other than my home arenas, that gave me more enthusiasm than any arena in the league,” he says. “The atmosphere and the history behind it was matched only by the Montreal Forum. It was really a special place for me.”
On the Leafs side, assistant coach Mike Murphy had grown up in the west end of the city and attended his first game at the Gardens in 1957. “We went with my dad. Ed Chadwick was in goal, and I shared a seat with my older sister, Patricia. They let us both in on one ticket. They were playing the Rangers,” Murphy says. “My dad always had season’s seats, so I was a regular. I would wear dress pants and a nice shirt, and my dad would often wear a tie. My dad had a parking spot three blocks away where he could park for free.” Murphy went on to play there regularly as a member of the Marlboros, the junior team Gretzky would later watch on Saturday afternoons. “It was hallowed ground. Almost like a sanctuary. It was a place you revered,” says Murphy. “I dreamed about playing for the Leafs there. It was a magnificent place for me. The slanted hallways, all the little cubbyholes, the different ways you get around the building, the small dressing rooms. In time, I came to know everybody there.”
In the spring of ’93, the fabled Gardens looked much as it had for years, with old blue-and-white tiled floors, painted cinder-block walls and black-and-white photos on the walls of Leafs heroes and famous athletes from bygone eras. The photos were cheaply mounted, and over the years they had faded and their surfaces had bubbled. It was cleaner than the Boston Garden or the Chicago Stadium, though. Fewer rats, too. But lots of closed doors led to dark places. It was a rink filled with hidden secrets. The door to the coach’s office, just past the corridor that led to the rink itself between the two benches, was heavily lacquered, shiny wood, like it had been covered and re-covered many times over the years as the inhabitant of the office changed, something that had happened with alarming frequency over the previous twenty-five years as the Leafs regressed from Cup winners to losers to national laughingstock. A turnstile might have been better than a door.
Change, however, had started to arrive at the Gardens by the fall of ’93. Smoking, for example, was no longer allowed in the rink. After years of cigarette and cigar smoke so thick in the corridors you could chip a tooth visiting one of the crowded washrooms between periods, the air now stank only of mildew, faded memories and regret. For the first time, beer was being sold in the building, $4.25 for a fourteen-ounce plastic cup, a welcome change now that the early heat and humidity of May had engulfed Toronto. Baseball fans in the city had been able to drink beer at games for fifteen years, but arcane provincial alcohol regulations had prevented hockey fans from doing so. Shortly after legalizing Sunday shopping in Ontario the previous summer, however, the provincial government also announced it would permit beer sales at all professional sports stadiums, including the Gardens. “Toronto the Good” was being allowed to let down its hair, although not so much that Mayor June Rowlands could refrain from banning an act called the Barenaked Ladies from playing at City Hall. She deemed the band’s name offensive to women.
Being able to sell beer came at a perfect time for the Leafs. Two years after the death of long-time owner Harold Ballard, who had been adamantly opposed to selling beer in the Gardens, the Leafs had put together the biggest payroll in team history, and they needed ways to pay for it. The Gardens had been called the “Carlton Street Cashbox” for years, but in reality very little had been done in the Ballard era to maximize potential streams of revenue. Ending the tradition of a dry Gardens was one way to increase proceeds, perhaps by as much as $3 million a season. Back then, that was only about $1 million less than the entire payroll of the Ottawa Senators. The price of tickets for Leafs games had also been jacked up by 25 percent. The Leafs and the Gardens were a sleeping financial giant, and local millionaire Steve Stavro, with one eye on history and the other on winning a battle for control of the famous hockey team, had already aggressively started the awakening as the new man in charge. This wasn’t the personal toy of a crazy old man anymore. Three years had passed since Ballard had been declared mentally incompetent and unable to run the hockey team, igniting a bitter legal battle between his three children and his long-time companion, Yolanda. But those days were long over. Maple Leaf Gardens was going to be a money-maker, and the new owner was going to cash in.
By the time the Maple Leafs and Kings stepped on the ice for Game 1 of their best-of-seven playoff series on May 17, the temperature had eased somewhat but not the sense of anticipation. Outside on Carlton Street, as the streetcars of the Toronto Transit Commission squealed past, scalpers hawked tickets at inflated prices and the delicious odour of chestnuts being roasted by street vendors hung in the air.
In Toronto, the playoff season had started with very modest expectations, but now anything, even a Stanley Cup, seemed possible. The city crackled with hockey talk, even as the Toronto Blue Jays, 1992 World Series champions, shook off a so-so start to take two of three from the New York Yankees at Yankee Stadium. The Jays were the hottest ticket in town, selling out the fifty-thousand-seat SkyDome for each and every home game. But the Leafs were coming to life after two decades of ruinous Ballard ownership. With a new star in Doug Gilmour and a new head coach in Pat Burns, the disciplined, hard-hitting Leafs had surged to a ninety-nine-point season, good enough for third place in the Norris Division, known to many as the “Chuck Norris Division.”
Nicknaming the division after a famous martial arts expert and film star was a good fit, for the division had earned a reputation more for brawling and bench-clearing fights than for superb hockey. That fancy-dan stuff was left to the Alberta teams in the Smythe Division or the Pittsburgh Penguins of the Patrick Division. In the Norris, you manned up. You might find a degree of success without much skill in the lineup, but you couldn’t survive without being tough. If you were tough enough, the division allowed you to make the playoffs by winning only twenty-five of eighty games, as the Leafs had done seven years earlier. Teams wore membership in the division like a badge of honour even though Cup contenders only occasionally emerged from that group. Priorities were a little different in the Norris.
As recently as two years earlier, the Leafs had been one of the worst clubs in hockey, seemingly sentenced indefinitely to be a punch line in the annals of Canadian sports even if they were a Norris Division member in good standing. But with Burns at the helm and general manager Cliff Fletcher pulling off blockbuster trades, the Leafs had won more games than they’d lost for the first time since the 1978–79 season. A run all the way to the ’93 Stanley Cup final still looked somewhat over-ambitious. Unthinkable, really. This was a hockey team used to being made fun of by other cities and called the “Laffs.” Just a few seasons earlier, fans had worn bags over their heads and thrown team jerseys on the ice in protest. Yet here, apparently out of nowhere, were the ’92–93 Leafs, just four wins away from getting to the final, a gritty team of personality and, perhaps, destiny.
The Kings rolled into town for the series opener with their own compelling story to tell. With the peerless Gretzky, they had become one of the NHL’s biggest attractions over the previous five seasons, with a host of high-profile stars acquired by team owner Bruce McNall. The Kings had never gone beyond the second round of the playoffs, before Gretzky or after. But finally they were in the conference final against the Leafs. Toronto was trying to regain the hockey world’s respect. The Kings had never really had it. They had certainly never earned it. They were led by a rookie coach, Barry Melrose, who looked like a character out of a Hollywood screenplay, with a carefully groomed mullet, a gold watch, fancy ties and $2,000 suits. The costume seemed designed to dress up a more basic, hardnosed, take-no-prisoners hockey mentality rooted on Canada’s Prairies. Melrose, like his cousin Wendel Clark of the Leafs, was from Kelvington, Saskatchewan, a place where referees were there to drop pucks and get out of the way while hockey players kept the peace. Or created the mayhem, if necessary. The Kings had surrounded Gretzky with a crew of tough hombres led by McSorley, hockey’s Darth Vader in his black helmet and uniform. They were the NHL’s most penalized team and would have been a good fit in the Chuck Norris Division. Few teams fought more than the Kings. McSorley had led the league with 399 minutes, but his teammate Warren Rychel actually fought more often. If the Kings couldn’t beat you, well, they had other options.
The Leafs, once English Canada’s team, had emerged again as a club worth respecting after being quickly remodelled by Fletcher, one of hockey’s most respected executives. They now had a chance to get back to the Stanley Cup final after a twenty-six-year absence. It seemed disrespectful, almost impertinent, that the cocky Kings had arrived with Gretzky, Canada’s national treasure, to block Toronto’s path. So it was Hollywood versus Hockey Night in Canada, even though the Leafs were the team with the better script—Gilmour played by Tom Cruise?—and Gretzky had been a featured performer on Canada’s traditional Saturday night hockey broadcast for years. There were good guys in this scenario, and they weren’t the boys who had flown in from California wearing black. “I was from Ontario, and I couldn’t believe how much the people in Toronto hated us,” recalls Kings forward Dave Taylor.
The Leafs had sentiment on their side, but otherwise the series looked even, a collision between two teams that didn’t have a lot of history, friendly or otherwise, between them. Toronto had the better regular season record and had Burns at the helm, surely with a decided advantage over the younger, less experienced Melrose. LA did have Gretzky, who looked sharp, having put up twenty-three points in twelve playoff games. Only Gilmour had more. Gretzky was thirty-two years old, but the numbers suggested he was still a dominant force in any series and still could lead a team to the Stanley Cup.
Montreal had already earned a 1–0 series lead on the New York Islanders in the Prince of Wales Conference final, but the Canadiens-Isles series was almost an afterthought to many hockey fans in Canada and the United States. Goaltender Glenn Healy, the hero of the Islanders’ second-round upset of the two-time Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh Penguins, confessed that many of the combatants in the New York–Montreal series were transfixed by the Toronto-LA series. “We made sure we watched it, because it was riveting,” says Healy. “It was must-see TV for the players. The Leafs. Gretzky. That series had everything.”
Gretzky understood many fans were already looking ahead to a historic showdown for the Cup. “Everyone was hoping for a Toronto-Montreal final. That was the talk of the country,” he says. Montreal needed three more wins to hold up their end of the bargain, while the Leafs were just getting started. They needed four.
The beer, still a novelty for hockey fans in Toronto, was flowing as Game 1 got under way. With no air conditioning, the Gardens was a sweatbox, much hotter on the ice under the heat of the bright television lights. It was the most anticipated playoff game at the Gardens since the Leafs had faced the Canadiens in the NHL semifinals fifteen years earlier. That Montreal team was a powerhouse, and it swept Toronto. This looked much more winnable to Leafs fans. It almost seemed like the hardest part of the job was already done. Their team was no longer the plucky underdog it had been in the first round against Detroit. Now, against an LA team with a poorer regular season record, they just needed to keep playing well.
The Leafs dressed twelve forwards and six defencemen, using centre John Cullen and defenceman Dmitri Mironov sparingly. LA went with eleven forwards and seven defencemen, employing veteran rearguard Tim Watters mostly to kill penalties. Michael Burgess, the Canadian star of the stage musical Les Misérables, sang the anthems. During “O Canada,” Gretzky, showing a faint goatee, sang the words. Clark, with a thick, dark beard, glared upwards at the Canadian flag waving electronically on the video screen. His face betrayed neither nervousness nor fatigue. He’d learned over the years his body wasn’t as stout as his heart. Now, he just wanted them to drop the puck. Gilmour’s eyes darted around as if he were looking for friends, or sizing up the situation. Leafs rookie goalie Felix Potvin took his mask off; Kings goalie Kelly Hrudey kept his on. Other players grimaced, shifting in their skates. When Burgess was done, fireworks exploded over top of the score clock. Broadcaster Bob Cole, calling the game from the gondola that Foster Hewitt had made famous, pronounced it an “unlikely matchup.” “But here they are,” he said. “A high-scoring Kings team, and a Leafs team that looks to defence. Something has to break, right?” Cole said he had walked into the Gardens before the game with Gretzky, and the star player “looked as good as he ever has.”
FROM THE START OF THE GAME, Melrose set the tone by scrambling his forward lines as if he were using a blender. Gretzky started the game between fourth-liners Pat Conacher and Dave Taylor, but during the first period skated on eight different units as the LA coach sought to prevent Burns from matching either Gilmour or his checking line of Bill Berg, Peter Zezel and Mark Osborne against Number 99. Gretzky’s old Edmonton teammate Jari Kurri had been shifted to centre during the season, and he started there against the Leafs. Gilmour started the game between Clark and another ex-Oiler, Glenn Anderson. Both teams were anxious to get a sense of how the series would be played. Winning Game 1 could be huge, but neither team had been given much time to prepare. Toronto had finished off St. Louis only forty-eight hours earlier. There was some familiarity from the regular season, and the rest they’d have to figure out on the fly.
On the first shift, Clark took a run at Gretzky around the red line, but Gretzky twisted away, as he almost always did. It had always been difficult to get solid body contact on Number 99. In an era of violent hockey, he seemed to have a sixth sense of how to avoid trouble, and the presence of a watchful McSorley helped deter many. Clark, the Leafs captain, wasn’t easily put off. By charging at Gretzky, he was sending an early message that he was aiming to get a body on his Kings counterpart. Unfazed by his miss, Clark set his sights on LA rookie rearguard Alexei Zhitnik and decked him with a monstrous hit, losing his own helmet in the process. It was the first of many hits the young Russian would absorb in that game, and the series. Clark had started the ’93 playoffs slowly, but he had gotten stronger and stronger with every game. Right from the start against the Kings, he looked like a hungry grizzly demolishing a campsite in search of food. Clark had two scoring chances before Burns even had an opportunity to make his first line change of the night.
McSorley, naturally, took the first penalty of the series. He was tied up with Berg as the linesmen blew the play dead for an icing call. Berg, as was his way, yapped something at the big LA blueliner. Zezel skated behind McSorley, chirping as well. As Osborne skated past, he changed his route slightly to brush past McSorley’s shoulder. McSorley lifted his right glove and stuck it in the veteran winger’s face. It was a nothing moment thirteen minutes into the game, hardly worth a penalty, particularly compared to the hooking and interference already going on in every shift. But referee Dan Marouelli called one anyway. McSorley looked disgusted as he sat down in the box. He pointed to the number 33 on his left bicep as if to suggest Marouelli was punishing the reputation, not the actual act.
The visitors killed that penalty off, but they were back on their heels. The pace was frenetic, with, by today’s standards, shocking amounts of interference and stickwork. “I had started wearing padded things underneath my elbow pads, like a sleeve,” recalls Berg, a hardnosed checker. “Literally, you’d have track marks from sticks down your forearms. You’d rope and ride. You’d be riding the gauntlet if you had the puck, but they’d always get you. The blade of their stick would tear your skin. That’s how it was. That’s how you played. Wooden sticks, man. They hurt. I’d rather give than get, but I got a lot too.”
The goalies, Hrudey for the Kings and Potvin for the Leafs, wore relatively slender upper body padding which exposed them to bruises and welts over the course of a season. Potvin was a lean, unimposing goalie, and his equipment roughly reflected his body type. He liked to play deep in his crease, almost hiding under the crossbar, an expression of his shy personality, the confidence he had in his reflexes and the new style of NHL goalkeeping. Only twenty-one, he was just a few months removed from playing for Toronto’s farm club before a few thousand fans in Newfoundland. Hrudey wore tiny thirty-two-inch goalie pads, cut down from the thirty-four-inch pads he received from the manufacturer to give him more mobility. They came to just above his knee. He wore a black Jofa helmet, one favoured by European skaters, and slightly more protective than the flimsy Jofas Gretzky and McSorley wore. Hrudey wore his with a wire cage attached. A blue bandana, which was really a strip of fabric torn from a hockey undershirt, stuck out the back. He wore a mismatched set of gloves, a white blocker and a black catching mitt, and loved to roam outside his crease to challenge shooters or play the puck. Like their teams, Potvin and Hrudey looked starkly different from each other, and played differently.
The first goal came at 17:19 of the first period, and not surprisingly it came off the stick of Gilmour, who had been brilliant in the first two rounds of the playoffs after a career-best 127-point regular season. The puck skimmed up the left boards in the LA zone, past Gretzky to Leafs blueliner Bob Rouse at the right point. Rouse’s shot went towards the front of the Kings net. Gilmour worked himself around the big body of defenceman Rob Blake and redirected the puck past Hrudey for a 1–0 Toronto lead with less than three minutes left in the period. The marquee matchup was Gilmour against Gretzky, and Gilmour had fired the opening salvo.
The Kings had scored fifty-nine goals in twelve previous playoff games. They figured to get at least one on this night, so giving up the first one didn’t seem decisive. For the Leafs, it was the start they wanted. The Toronto fans leapt to their feet. Following the Game 7 triumph over St. Louis two nights earlier, it was the seventh consecutive Leafs goal they’d cheered without having seen one from the opposing team. If there was any doubt that this magical spring could continue against Los Angeles, that goal dispelled it.
The Kings came out in the second period with greater confidence, and the game turned in LA’s favour. Melrose got momentum-swinging shifts from the small, speedy line of Tony Granato, Mike Donnelly and Corey Millen. At one point, Donnelly and Granato had a two-man break on Potvin after Rouse whiffed on a bouncing puck at the LA blueline, but Potvin shut that opportunity down with a sprawling poke check that kept the visitors from tying the game.
With just over five minutes left before the second intermission, Potvin made another series of stops but then was finally beaten with the line of Gilmour, Dave Andreychuk and Nikolai Borschevsky trapped well up ice in the Kings zone. It was the kind of mistake that would make the positionally conscious Burns fume. The puck was flipped out to Gretzky, who was moving through the neutral zone, and Gretzky made a delicate backhand saucer pass to Pat Conacher that was so perfectly timed it allowed the speedy winger to slice between Rouse and Dave Ellett. Conacher wasn’t a prolific scorer. He had managed only nine goals in eighty-one regular season games that year, but the Alberta native deftly lifted a backhand off the right post behind Potvin to deadlock the game 1–1. The assist extended Gretzky’s playoff streak to nine games with at least one point. As the Kings surged on the mushy Gardens ice, the Leafs wilted. The Gardens had never been known as a particularly noisy rink, and Toronto fans were often criticized for sitting on their hands rather than getting behind the home team. When the Leafs weren’t playing well, they got quiet, almost pensive, and they’d done it again tonight.
When the game resumed for the third period, it appeared that the Kings would not give up the momentum they’d established. Melrose’s team kept pushing and pushing, forcing the Leafs to ice the puck. The game seemed to have temporarily lost the breathless speed with which it had started. LA’s young defence was holding up well. Blake and Zhitnik were usually paired together. Darryl Sydor, who had won a Memorial Cup junior championship the year before with the Kamloops Blazers of the Western Hockey League, had turned twenty just four days earlier, but he had the poise of a veteran. It was his more seasoned partner, Charlie Huddy, who whiffed on a hip check attempt that allowed Anderson, his former Edmonton teammate, to spring free for a good scoring chance. Hrudey then blocked a Clark blast, standing up and squeezing his pads together, a goaltending technique that was soon to become extinct.
All over the ice, players committed infractions without being penalized, dragging each other to the ice, elbowing each other in the face, raking their sticks across their opponents’ hands. McSorley and Blake, both bigger than any defenceman for the Leafs, used their sticks and bodies to mete out punishment in the LA zone. “There were no fucking rules,” says Gilmour. “Nobody knew what penalties were. My boys watch it now, and they die laughing.” In the 1980s, coaches had actually started to teach players to use their sticks to lock on to opposition players and not let go, and that had created a different type of game. Using the stick to hook and hack at the puck-carrier was just accepted as part of the sport, as the gauntlet skilled players had to walk to score goals. If you wanted to score, you had to put up with it. The area in front of the net, meanwhile, was viewed as a place where the rule book didn’t apply. It was the game’s no-holds-barred zone, where you could do things that weren’t allowed anywhere else on the ice. “To clear out the front of the net, you were pretty much allowed to do anything unless someone was decapitated,” says Rouse. “You wanted to play right up to the line without drawing a penalty.”
This was the kind of contest Game 1 was until, suddenly, it changed into something else entirely. And so did the series. In the ninth minute of the third period, Gilmour came in low with what replays showed was a clean hip check on Zhitnik. Perhaps, if you were a Kings fan, you would have thought it was a half-steamboat late. The Russian rookie flipped into the air, rolled and landed heavily on his head. He’d taken the Clark hit in the first without much problem. Now, he left the ice clutching his left knee. Apparently his head could take anything.
Less than a minute later, with the fans still murmuring over the hit on Zhitnik, the Leafs jumped ahead 2–1 on a goal by Anderson from Gilmour. While being pitchforked to the ice by Sydor, Gilmour put a pass from behind the Kings goal to a wide-open Anderson cruising into the slot. The Kings had been playing an erratic defensive game all season, very different from the Leafs, a team built on the defensive tactics Burns had relied on as head coach in Montreal. “We weren’t playing defence,” recalls Hrudey. “We were trying to out-score the other team, and I was cool with it. I found it fun. I found it enjoyable.” On this play, the LA defensive shell split wide open. Both Gretzky and left winger Luc Robitaille were turning away from the LA net as the puck came to Anderson, and both of LA’s defencemen were behind the end line. Anderson ambled in untouched and beat Hrudey with a backhand. All that work the Kings had done to deadlock the game after giving up an early goal and then earn the edge in play on the road had vanished in one careless sequence.
Just sixty-six seconds after that, the Leafs jumped ahead by two. It was Gilmour again. His second goal of the game concluded a wild sequence in the Kings zone as the game lost all semblance of orderliness or predictability. It looked more like professional wrestling, a feature Sunday night attraction at the Gardens for decades. Zhitnik, back into the fray, tripped Gilmour, then kicked Borschevsky’s skates out from under him. In front of the LA net, Blake grabbed Andreychuk by the front of the jersey and yanked him to the ice. McSorley might have had the bigger reputation, but Blake was serving notice he could be just as mean, and even dirtier. The absence of any effort by Marouelli to enforce the NHL rulebook was almost farcical. As they did in those days, he seemed to decide that because it was the third period he wasn’t going to call penalties unless absolutely forced to. As bodies littered the Kings zone, the puck skittered back to Leafs defenceman Jamie Macoun at the left point. Gretzky was behind him, having leaked out into the neutral zone looking for a cherry-picking opportunity. Macoun’s low shot was stopped by Hrudey, but Gilmour, back on his feet, corralled the rebound, spun and fired the puck home to give the Leafs a 3–1 lead.
As soon as the Leafs had their third goal, they surged forward in search of a fourth. For seven minutes, they roared, ultimately building a 22–1 shots-on-goal advantage. Berg stuck his foot out on Granato to take a penalty at 13:12 but then jumped out of the penalty box to accept a brilliant no-look pass from Gilmour, who had stolen Millen’s errant pass in the LA zone. Just as Gilmour fed the puck back to Berg, he was hit in the head by a flying elbow from Zhitnik, eager to avenge the hit of earlier in the period. Berg partially fanned on his shot, but the puck still eluded Hrudey, and the Leafs had a 4–1 lead.
With more than five minutes left in the third, the game was clearly in Toronto’s control. In those days, that often meant trouble. The philosophy was that if a game was out of reach, it was important to “set the tone” for the next one, which frequently meant starting fights, usually by the team that was losing. In this case, not satisfied with just winning the game, the Leafs decided they wanted to inflict some pain on their opponents and possibly generate some casualties. Clark was like a wrecking ball looking for Kings to hit. He would miss one, then find another and connect. This was classic Clark, showing the spirit and recklessness which had long endeared him to Leafs fans. It was one of those nights when he had one setting: full speed ahead.
LA, HOWEVER, WAS IN no mood to accept what the Leafs were shoving down their throats. It was enough that they had already lost the game. Granato delivered a flying elbow into the side of Rouse’s head along the glass in the Leafs zone, and an enraged Rouse set off in hot pursuit. He grabbed the nearest King, which happened to be Donnelly, and started pummelling him. A massive pileup of ten players ensued at the red line. Neither team was going to be deterred by the fact that new NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, just three weeks earlier, had appeared to establish a new draconian approach to NHL violence by hitting Washington’s Dale Hunter with a twenty-one-game suspension for his late hit on Pierre Turgeon of the New York Islanders. It was abundantly clear that the potential was in the air for something similarly ugly to happen between the Kings and Leafs.
McSorley had been relatively quiet most of the night, partially because no Leaf had been able to lay a glove on Gretzky. The game had been rough, but McSorley had teammates capable of handling themselves. Now, with the game out of reach, the big LA bruiser had seen enough. Quietly finishing the game wasn’t an option. His DNA wouldn’t allow it. Meekly surrendering just wasn’t the way you’d do it back on the farm in Cayuga. His team wasn’t playing well, and he detected that the heat, the noise of the building, the Leafs’ surge and the hostility of the Toronto crowd were getting to some of his teammates. Not all the Kings had experienced the kind of on-ice mayhem he had, particularly during his days in Edmonton, when the “Battle of Alberta” against Calgary wasn’t for the faint of heart. McSorley was keenly aware that many players on the Kings roster hadn’t been this far in the playoffs before and faced this kind of difficult situation, and he believed the game had become so one-sided it threatened to carry over into Game 2. “It was 4–1 for the Leafs, and our young guys were intimidated,” he says. “In a lot of ways, I was a leader on that team. Charlie Huddy led in his way. Wayne led in his way. But in that game, we had to push back. We couldn’t accept the way that game was going. We really hadn’t played well. I was on our bench, and I thought, Well, it’s time to kick the hornet’s nest. I wasn’t going to leave that game quietly.”
With 2:35 left in the third, Gilmour crossed the LA line at the right boards, dropped the puck for Anderson and swerved into the middle of the ice, the proverbial “trolley tracks,” as veteran NHL observers still call that route to open ice. The idea is that once you get locked into that path, there is no escape route. Most of the time, cutting into the middle is perfectly safe. But when a player gets it wrong, it’s like steering right into the path of an oncoming train.
After a half second, Gilmour quickly looked up as if realizing his mistake. He knew he’d momentarily lost his concentration and put himself in jeopardy. Sure enough, the six-foot-three, 235-pound McSorley was bearing down, with gloves and stick and elbows high. McSorley’s right elbow crashed into the right side of Gilmour’s face as he turned away, lifting his helmet up. Gilmour always wore his chinstrap loose, and the force of the collision yanked it up hard against his throat. His stick went flying twenty feet away as if it had been ripped from his arms. Marouelli, who had watched the nastiness increase over the course of the game, shot his right arm upwards to call a penalty. But as Gilmour writhed in pain on his hands and knees, it was immediately clear this was out of the referee’s hands. No one familiar with the NHL game had any doubt what was coming. You could almost feel the crowd flinch as one before it roared in outrage. McSorley knew exactly what he’d done and what was going to happen next. He wanted it to happen.
Clark saw the hit, glanced over his right shoulder to see if there had been a call, and then made a beeline for the much bigger McSorley. Call or no call, he had business to conduct. His gloves were off before he arrived. That’s how he fought. He didn’t wait. He wanted to land the first punch, and he wanted it to hurt. In the first round of the playoffs against Detroit, Clark had been specifically told he could not fight Bob Probert, one of the NHL’s nastiest heavyweights. But he’d received no such instructions for the Kings. “By the time the McSorley thing happened, nobody could tell me I couldn’t fight him,” Clark says now. McSorley wore a wide-sleeved jersey like those worn by goaltenders. As was his style, he started to shake off his jersey, shoulder pads and elbow pads as the fight began, to the delighted screams of the Gardens crowd. Clark continued to fire away at him in fury. One, two, three. McSorley absorbed them all, then started to gain an edge. He’d taken Clark’s best shots, and now it was his turn. The crowd came to its feet. Their gladiator was fighting for justice against a formidable opponent. Just as it appeared Clark was in trouble, that McSorley would get all his gear off and begin to assert his physical superiority, linesmen Ray Scapinello and Swede Knox, who had been circling a few feet away, intervened.
The scrap lasted thirty-eight seconds, less than half the length of McSorley’s longer bouts, although many remember it as a marathon. “Once I got my jersey off, they broke up the fight,” recalls McSorley. “Wendel gave up twenty pounds to me, but he was a good fighter. I was trying to get my arm loose and get my jersey off. You can look at my longer fights against guys like Sandy McCarthy and Stu Grimson that went much longer. I have long arms. I didn’t wear big shoulder pads. Getting my jersey off was my whole strategy. Why did they break it up? It wasn’t a good fight! It didn’t last long enough! They had no business breaking that fight up.” Clark had a different interpretation. “Marty was the kind of fighter who wants it to go all day. Wants a war of attrition. That’s his MO. My MO was the other way. I don’t think there was a winner. But it started the whole series off at another level.”
Afterwards, Clark confided in assistant coach Mike Kitchen. “Clarkie said to me, ‘When I hit him with that first punch and he didn’t go down, I knew I was in trouble,’ ” says Kitchen. Clark says he could have taken a different approach after McSorley had decked Gilmour. “They went after our best player. What if I’d just gone over and one-punched Wayne? Then there would have been a bench-clearing brawl! Can you imagine? But I wouldn’t do that.” McSorley, however, had been more than willing to do to Gilmour what Clark would never do to Gretzky. The LA defenceman’s brazen assault on Toronto’s best player, and his fight with Clark, had dramatically revved up the level of emotion. “It’s heated up to a boil already!” said Hockey Night in Canada commentator Harry Neale.
The drama wasn’t over. As the fight between McSorley and Clark ended, Gilmour, cut over the bridge of his nose, was standing in front of the LA bench in a challenging stance. He was the new darling of the Leafs, of Hockey Night in Canada’s broadcasts and particularly of iconic commentator Don Cherry, who was from Gilmour’s hometown of Kingston, Ontario. But the Kings weren’t about to give Gilmour special treatment. Tomas Sandstrom and Luc Robitaille leaned over the boards barking insults, while Sydor jabbed at Gilmour’s legs with his stick. It was getting personal, and the two teams had progressed to this point in the playoffs because they were filled with players unlikely to back down. The hit on Zhitnik and the three quick Leafs goals had been the kindling and the logs, and McSorley’s thunderous hit on Gilmour and subsequent fight with Clark had been the lighter fluid and match.
McSorley got five minutes for elbowing and a fighting major, and as he left the ice surface he put his hand over the television camera trained on him, still annoyed that the fight had been, in his opinion, interrupted prematurely. Clark got an instigator minor and a fighting major. As they sorted out the penalties, the TV mic caught Gilmour saying very clearly to Marouelli, “That’s fucking bullshit.” Years later, his point of view was very different. “My fault,” he says. “Absolutely. I always cut into the middle. But I knew the guys I had to worry about. McSorley was one of them. I was watching my pass. You don’t do that. Clean hit. He got me. But it didn’t feel good.” McSorley’s intent was clear. “Was I trying to take Gilmour’s head off? No. Was I trying to stir it up? Yes.”
While all this was going on and players milled around the ice, Hrudey was trying to find shelter under his net as cups of soda and beer rained down. He knew something important had just happened. “We weren’t fully committed to Game 1 until then,” he recalls. “We had just won against Vancouver and were feeling pretty good. But we were not fully engaged with the Toronto series yet, and we were getting kicked squarely in the teeth. Marty knew that. He had to change that, and he did.”
For Barry Melrose, it was a slightly awkward, if familiar, situation. Clark, after all, was his cousin. Clark’s grandfather and his grandmother and were brother and sister. They’d grown up together in the same small town, although the older Melrose was closer to Clark’s brother Donn. They’d all played baseball on the local squad during the summer, along with other NHLers like Trent Yawney, Kevin Kaminski and Kelly Chase. Melrose was a prodigious home run hitter. Clark’s dad, Les, ran the local ice rink, and Melrose’s dad, Jim, later took on the job. Melrose knew his cousin could handle himself. “I’d seen Wendel fight enough.” Actually, he also knew it from personal experience. Clark and Melrose had played against each other in the NHL and had been at the centre of a bench-clearing brawl at the Gardens seven years earlier, when Melrose was playing for Detroit. “Barry and I started it,” says Clark. It had been a fight-filled game, and late in the third Clark flattened Melrose with a high hit as his cousin came to bodycheck him. Leafs defencemen Gary Nylund and Bob McGill skated in from the blueline to join the fray, then Lane Lambert led the Wings off the bench, ostensibly under orders from Detroit coach Brad Park. It was a bizarre scene, with seven fights going on at once. Little Leafs forward Miroslav Ihnacak fought Wings goalie Eddie Mio. Probert dropped the gloves with McGill, and after McGill’s helmet came off, Probert viciously head-butted him. “I probably saved somebody’s life that night,” says Melrose. “I stayed with Wendel and we just hung on, or he would have killed someone.”
Seven years later, here were the cousins again involved in a situation that threatened to get out of hand. This time, someone else had started it. Somebody threw a crutch, of all things, onto the ice near the Kings bench, adding to the mayhem. There were arguments in the stands near the LA bench. Burns looked over at Melrose. Melrose looked back and decided to throw a little more kerosene on the fire. He inflated his cheeks like a blowfish. “Pat was a little chunky then,” he says. At the Gardens, the distance between one team bench and the other was literally five steps, no Plexiglas between them. It was a clear path separated only by a short row of seats. Scratched or injured players might watch from there. The medical staff might stand there. A police officer or two, perhaps. But there was no physical barrier.
Burns came charging across the aisle and was intercepted by team doctor Simon McGrail and a police officer before assistant coach Mike Kitchen pulled him back. Melrose stared straight ahead. Burns never got close enough to throw a punch at Melrose, not like he had with Ron Lapointe in a memorable junior hockey dustup one night, not like that time back in ’78 when Eddie Johnston, coaching Moncton’s AHL team, and Pat Quinn, coaching the Mariners, actually went out on the ice and exchanged punches. This seemed a little more comical than actually threatening, like Burns was saying, “Let me at him!” while being restrained, knowing he couldn’t actually reach the LA coach. Melrose was a younger, bigger man only six years removed from his playing career. But Burns was an ex-cop. He knew how to fight, and fight dirty if necessary. It was great theatre, and fans and media saw it as evidence that there was simmering bad blood between the coaches. Maybe it had to do with Burns’s contention, repeated many times to the Toronto media, that the Kings’ first choice as coach the previous summer had been him, not Melrose. Leafs general manager Cliff Fletcher went down between the benches to keep the peace. Neale, providing the commentary, observed, “Cliff Fletcher’s down between the benches, I’m sure to talk Burns out of going behind the LA bench. It was last year when he was offered the job. They don’t want to give it to him this year!”
After a long delay while the penalties were sorted out, the Leafs were handed a four-on-three power play, and Gilmour was right back out there. Obviously, the McSorley hit hadn’t shaken him up too badly, but the Leafs and Burns were determined to make the Kings pay for standing up for themselves in the way they, and their coach, had. With the fans chanting “nah-nah-nah-nah, nah-nah-nah-nah, hey-hey-hey, goodbye!” McSorley was fuming in the Kings dressing room, but other LA players could still express their frustration and a few Leafs still had scores to settle. Hrudey viciously chopped at Kent Manderville’s legs twice in front of the net. In the dying seconds of the game, Rouse took a run at Granato at centre, trying to get even for the earlier elbow. By modern standards, at least two and possibly three of the hits in that game would have been deemed head shots worthy of possible suspension. Back then, they were just hits that created a thirst for revenge. “I think we’re in for a long, bitterly fought series,” said Neale on the game broadcast.
The Leafs had won the opener 4–1, but the Kings’ vigorous response in the third had diminished the victory, or at least reduced the tone of Toronto’s victory celebration. LA was a tough team with one of the greatest players in NHL history, and the Kings had demonstrated they weren’t going to be cowed by the hostile environment, by Hockey Night in Canada, by historic Maple Leaf Gardens or by the sense of fate in some quarters that the Leafs were destined for a collision in the Stanley Cup final with the Canadiens. The McSorley hit altered the narrative of the series and became the headline from Game 1. He had done what enforcer types could do, take a game that was lost and make it seem like less of a defeat. To hell with sportsmanship or accepting defeat gracefully. This was the NHL, and that was how things were done. The Kings also realized that their priorities had to change. “At the start, the game plan was to stop Gilmour,” says Melrose now. “But five minutes into the first game it became evident that Wendel was the key. Wendel was virtually unstoppable. He was physical. He was just awesome. We had to stop him or we weren’t going to win the series. I don’t think Wendel ever played better than he did in that series.”
In just sixty minutes, expectations for the series had already been exceeded. New plot lines had been established. Newspaper columnists had more than enough fodder to feed the beast. The stars had their names on the scoreboard, the hockey had been ferocious, violent and explosive, and all the main characters on both sides had interjected themselves early into the story. After just three periods, this already felt like a series to remember.
MCSORLEY ORDERS A CUP of tea and the restaurant’s “bark” dessert: toffee and chocolate on a graham cracker. But he doesn’t touch it. He has it boxed up. “For the kids,” he says, smiling. He hardly seems the villain who intentionally delivered a head shot to Gilmour and had a bare-knuckle scrap with Clark that people still talk about twenty-five years later. He’s quiet and reserved. There’s still a fire there, but it’s tempered by maturity and the fact that his body is breaking down and wouldn’t allow him to be that character today, on or off the ice, even if he wanted to be. He’s still articulate, likeable and funny, but these days he’s worried, apprehensive about what the future has in store. He fondly remembers the 1992–93 season as his best NHL campaign, when all his body parts worked and he could talk the talk and walk the walk, when his combination of skill, courage and pugilistic talent made him an impact player and one of the most colourful characters in hockey. “I think we had the ability to have a lot more personality back then,” he says. He had won two Stanley Cup rings with Edmonton, but LA gave him a new audience and the chance to grow and become not only one of the best-known players in the league but a player who could alter the course of a game at its most important juncture. “For me, LA was a little different than my years in Edmonton. In Edmonton, they didn’t need me to be front and centre. In LA, I felt like I needed to be front and centre. It was time for me to lead.”
He can’t tell you how many concussions he accumulated in his long NHL career. Hundreds, he imagines. He knows they have taken their toll. “I’ve been driving and had to pull over and call my wife because I can’t remember where I’m going,” he says. “Sometimes, I have trouble remembering the plot of a children’s movie, or remembering the story after fifteen pages of a kids’ book.” But he remembers the hockey battles. Most of them anyway. Of all the fights in his career, he’s asked about that thirty-eight-second bout with Clark the most. “People come up to me and say, ‘Boy, Wendel really gave it to you.’ And I say, ‘Did you watch that fight?’ ” The fireworks he initiated late in Game 1 showed the impact players of his type could have in those days if they were willing to push hard enough. “Did it work? Absolutely,” says McSorley. “Look what happened in Game 2.”