A hockey man with deep hockey roots, Kerry Fraser drives through the back roads of suburban New Jersey three days after Christmas, taking his brother-in-law to a traditional Fraser family gathering: a hockey game. This one is at Johnny Gaudreau’s long-time home rink in Hollydell Ice Arena in Washington County, where one of Fraser’s ten grandchildren, fifteen-year-old Garrison, is scheduled to play for St. Augustine Preparatory School.
With an annual tuition fee in excess of US$18,000, St. Augustine is unlike anything from Fraser’s own gritty hockey upbringing in Sarnia, Ontario. There, he skated for three years for the hometown Bees under the watchful coaching eye of his father, Hilton, known by his friends as “Hilt.” Fraser’s brother, Rick, was on that team as well and soon graduated to the Junior A Oshawa Generals. Kerry, just five foot seven, didn’t have the skills or overall package to move on. He played a physical game despite his size and often dropped the gloves to protect his teammates. “My dad was a pretty tough guy,” says Fraser. “He had played in Europe, the IHL and Ontario Senior A Sarnia Sailors. He taught me how to fight in my kitchen, knocked me down a number of times. Ted Garvin, who changed my diapers when I was a baby, later went on to coach the Detroit Red Wings. He once told me that, pound for pound, my dad was the toughest player he ever saw. I was a little guy, but I wasn’t afraid. I had fast hands and I was left-handed.”
In 1971, Fraser turned to officiating. He was picked out of a tryout camp by long-time NHL referee Frank Udvari, who coincidentally had been involved in an incident years earlier in which Hilt Fraser had punched him during a game. As punishment, the elder Fraser was suspended a game and fined $5. Udvari obviously didn’t hold that against the son, and by 1973 Kerry Fraser was already a member of the National Hockey League Officials Association. In 1980, he refereed his first NHL game and went on to officiate 1,904 regular season games and thirteen Stanley Cup finals.
At the age of sixty-five, as he watches his grandson play, his knees ache from five different surgeries. He has another procedure in the offing to fix torn cartilage suffered in his final NHL season. He’s also in his third week of taking a chemotherapy pill designed to treat essential thrombocythemia, a rare chronic blood condition with which he had been diagnosed several months earlier. The pill is designed to reduce his platelet count and the risk of heart attack or stroke. Ever since going public with his health issues, Fraser has tried to put a positive spin on his condition, encouraging others to get checked by their doctors. That’s his personality. Chipper to the point of seeming a little over the top. Brimming with ideas and stories. Energetic and creative. Still besotted with the game without an ounce of bitterness or regret. He’s written one book on his career, and thinks he has enough ideas for another. All those personality traits are now funnelled into his illness. He tells the story of Bill Lochead, a former linemate in Sarnia and NHL first-round pick (ninth overall, 1974) now working as a hockey agent in Germany. “When I was diagnosed, he sent me an email saying three months earlier he had been diagnosed with the same thing while getting a new hip,” Fraser says. “It’s actually really cool. You end up with a network of reconnections.”
For years, he was the NHL’s most recognizable referee. He was small, which made him stand out, and he always had perfect hair. Not a strand out of place. His secret was a hair product called Paul Mitchell Freeze and Shine. He remembers walking to the officials’ room after a game in Buffalo when he was confronted by a woman. “In a very aggressive tone, she said, ‘Kerry, I have a question for you!’ I thought, Oh no, she’s pissed off because the Sabres lost. So I said, ‘Yes, ma’am, how can I help you?’ She said, ‘Kerry, I have real problem hair, and I can’t do a thing with it. You skate around the ice a hundred miles an hour and your hair never moves. What is your secret?’ ”
He refused to wear a helmet until the last couple of years of his career. Vanity? He says no. “I had developed a sense of awareness similar to the great players in the game,” he says. “I felt that heightened awareness was inhibited or restricted by wearing a helmet. Without wearing a helmet, I was cut in the face or head only three times, all by deflected pucks, during those years.” By happy coincidence, it also meant no helmet to interfere with his legendary hair.
While he felt he was less likely to be hurt without a helmet, there were other injuries. Lots of them. There was the time in 1982 when he refereed an entire game on a broken ankle after being struck by a Paul Coffey slapshot. “Didn’t know until I took my boot off after the game, and the foot just blew up,” he says, laughing.
There were thousands and thousands of calls, and hundreds of controversial moments. Like the time Fraser whistled Quebec forward Paul Gillis for interfering with Montreal goalie Brian Hayward during a contentious Battle of Quebec playoff game in 1987, erasing the potential game-winning goal by Alain Cote. Just fourteen seconds after that call, Ryan Walter scored the game-winning goal for the Habs in Game 5 of the series. Afterwards, Fraser heard chatter that a Quebec group was going to launch a lawsuit accusing him of “prejudice” against the Nordiques.
No Fraser call reverberated louder or had a greater impact on his professional legacy than the one he made on May 27, 1993, in Game 6 of the Clarence Campbell Conference final between Toronto and Los Angeles. It’s one that can still get hard-core Maple Leafs fans in a hot lather a quarter century later. Kings fans, and players, remember it quite differently, naturally. And Fraser? “The ship went down with me that night,” he says. “The country of Canada vilified the referee Kerry Fraser. And I couldn’t blame them.”
AFTER TORONTO’S THRILLING overtime triumph in Game 5 on Glenn Anderson’s winner with forty seconds left in the first overtime, the two clubs made their third plane trip in six days across the continent back to California. It was a gruelling schedule. The Leafs, drained from nineteen games in thirty-eight days, needed one more win to get back to the Stanley Cup final for the first time since 1967. They had two chances to get it, starting with Game 6 at the Fabulous Forum. The Leafs were weary but confident. “We felt we had momentum,” says assistant coach Mike Kitchen. “Wayne had been a non-factor to that point, so we felt good about that. A lot of it was team defence, being aware when he was on ice. And we were really focused on taking away that area behind the net from him.” Momentum was a funny thing for hockey players. They felt it in their bones, loved the sense that the wind was at their backs. Some things made hard things easier. At the same time, they were keenly aware it often didn’t carry over from game to game, or even period to period. But talking about momentum made them feel more confident, and this was a series that had been filled with players who looked supremely confident at one moment and uncertain the next.
It was certainly true that Gretzky had not had a memorable series. He’d had one goal and four assists in the first five games, and he was starting to draw unusual criticism for it. Toronto Star columnist Bob McKenzie had written after Game 5 that Gretzky “looked as though he was skating with a piano on his back.” There was criticism in LA as well, suggesting Gretzky had become too “Hollywood” and wasn’t as competitive as he once had been. Gretzky heard it all. He had a reputation for being more than aware of things that were said and written about him. Often, he’d responded to criticism with excellent performances. “Gretz had been very quiet,” recalls former Leafs GM Cliff Fletcher. “We read the articles and said, ‘Shit, we better get ready.’ ” Other Kings players noticed and thought the criticism was unwarranted and disrespectful. The criticism hadn’t come from the Leafs, but LA players still felt they could use the media reports as “bulletin board material,” clippings and articles that could be cut out and used to motivate a team. “He was being questioned and doubted by people in the media. Whoever was bringing that up was giving us extra incentive,” says Tony Granato. “When someone doubted Wayne, you had an entire city, an entire locker room and entire fan base of Wayne wanting to prove those people wrong. I know I rallied around that. I was almost embarrassed that someone would actually think that or say that.”
For his part, Gretzky remembers trying not to be too critical of his own play. He didn’t like beating himself up when he was unable to be at his best. “When you’re playing in the NHL, you’re playing against the best players in the world. And great coaches. If you’re an offensive player, they’re going to devise a system, and they’re going to do things to shut you down. That’s the name of the game,” he says. “So sometimes, it might take you one game, it might take you three games. You’ve got to figure out what you can do differently as a player that’s going to offset how they’re trying to check you or shut you down. Sometimes, it just takes longer than other times.”
Gretzky was also carrying a secret. The hockey world knew he had missed the first half of the season with a back problem. He’d come back strongly, playing the final forty-five games of the regular season and registering sixty-five points. What fans and reporters didn’t know was that Gretzky was playing against the Leafs with a broken rib. Against Calgary in the opening round, he had been cross-checked by hulking six-foot-four Flames centre Joel Otto after a faceoff. Gretzky’s rib cracked. He didn’t miss a game, but from that point to the end of the playoffs, he required an injection of freezing before every game and wore a protective flak jacket as well. “Before every game, they’d come in after warm-up and put a needle in my leg,” recalls Gretzky. “It didn’t really hurt unless I got hit. So in practices, nobody really came near me, because I wasn’t frozen. In the games, I didn’t really feel the injury. I used to tease the doctor to make sure the freezing goes up, not down, because if my leg falls asleep I’m in trouble. We were able to keep it as quiet as possible.”
It hadn’t noticeably affected his production, as twenty-three points in twelve games in the first two rounds were excellent by anyone’s standards, even his own. “Once they froze it, it was like nothing,” Gretzky says. “Nothing to stop me from playing.”
It’s the perfect example of why teams don’t like to disclose injuries at playoff time. If the Leafs had known about the broken rib, they might have targeted him more. That said, even with their star, Doug Gilmour, taking a nightly pounding, they’d shown no interest in subjecting Gretzky to any physical abuse. Certainly nothing like Otto had delivered. So perhaps the broken rib wouldn’t have made any difference at all.
Gilmour had enjoyed more success than Gretzky in the series, but all the ice time was starting to wear him down, the Kings were leaning on him every game, and his lean frame had begun to betray him. Intravenous treatments after games were helping, but nothing could keep the weight on, and he dropped to around 160 pounds. His haggard face and dark circles around his eyes made him look like a walking cadaver.
Five other referees had called the first five games of the series. Fraser, rated as one of the top three NHL referees that season, drew Game 6, the first potential series-ending contest. Veteran linesmen Ron “Huck” Finn and Kevin Collins joined him. The series had cooled since the red-hot beginnings of Game 1, with players conscious of what was at stake, how a foolish error in judgment at the wrong time could cost everything they worked towards over the previous nine months. Many small feuds had festered during the series, but both clubs were laden with veterans who understood how to tuck grievances away for revenge at a more suitable time and what it took to earn a berth in the Stanley Cup final.
The hockey had been vicious and sometimes ugly, with black eyes, broken teeth, nasty cuts and concussions. There weren’t the stick-swinging fights of the 1960s or the bench-clearing brawls of the 1970s and 1980s, but there was a meanness to the game and a sense that making a physical sacrifice counted as much as having the skills to score a big goal. “I loved the game. I thought it was pure. You had to have courage to play,” Barry Melrose says. “It was fast. It was before the trap, so you didn’t have five guys waiting for you in the neutral zone. Skill guys had room to make plays. Defence could join the rush. Goaltending wasn’t nearly as good, so more goals were scored. I liked the intensity of the games then. We took care of the problems ourselves. We didn’t expect the referees to supply courage. We supplied our own courage.”
Fraser had refereed games where he’d let a lot of quasi-legal plays go uncalled, and he’d refereed games where league officials had urged him to crack down, call a lot of penalties and reel in the players. Like most of the better referees of his era, he viewed the rule book as a general guide but gave himself a lot of latitude to interpret it differently on different nights. With only one referee, it was guaranteed things would be missed. The hope of any referee was that he wouldn’t miss the crucial stuff, the things that decided games.
Every chance he got, Fraser had been watching the Leafs and the Kings all series. He’d seen Marty McSorley’s hit on Gilmour, the subsequent McSorley-Clark fight, the Gilmour head-butt on McSorley, the incessant elbows and cross-checks from players such as Granato and Jamie Macoun. He’d seen Alexei Zhitnik drill Peter Zezel into the boards with a high hit in Game 3, and Zhitnik rammed head first into the end boards by Sylvain Lefebvre and left uncertain what day it was. He’d seen Rob Blake and Dave Andreychuk working on each other with sticks and elbows in front of the Los Angeles net. If a referee were to strictly enforce the rule book, Blake and Andreychuk would have spent entire games in the penalty box. Other than Gretzky, who at times had not been noticeable, it seemed like no player in the series had been spared along the way. Even LA goalie Kelly Hrudey had been run over by Leafs winger Bill Berg in Game 5.
“Oh, yeah, I was aware what had gone on during the series. If you weren’t working, you were watching,” says Fraser. “I loved being in that situation. The tougher the game, the better I liked it, I welcomed it, I embraced it. For me, it was all about preparation. Staying calm. I found, if you were over-revved, your emotions could run out of control and nervousness would creep in.”
After a breezy day of scattered clouds in LA with temperatures around 20°C, the Thursday night atmosphere at the Great Western Forum was tense as local session musician Warren Wiebe, wearing a white Kings home jersey, sang “America the Beautiful” to the celebrity-filled audience of sixteen thousand. It was yet another sellout for a team that a decade earlier had rarely filled the building.
LA owner Bruce McNall sat against the glass alongside actress Goldie Hawn and her family. He hoped his Kings could survive to play one more game. Canadian hockey fans were already feeling closer to the longed-for historic Leafs-Habs matchup after Montreal had dusted off the New York Islanders in five games. Two of the Habs’ four wins had come in overtime, giving them seven straight overtime victories in the postseason. They’d already been home resting for three days, waiting patiently for an opponent and more than happy to put their feet up and watch the Leafs and Kings beat the snot out of each other. Hockey Night in Canada wanted an all-Canadian final too, and for obvious reasons. That series would be a ratings bonanza. “The Leafs with a chance to go on to the Stanley Cup final against the Montreal Canadiens. On Tuesday at the Montreal Forum,” said Hockey Night in Canada play-by-play announcer Bob Cole, as Fraser prepared to drop the puck for the opening faceoff.
The Leafs welcomed back winger Mark Osborne, who had missed Game 5 to be present at the birth of his child. Head coach Pat Burns dressed only five defencemen again. It was becoming an increasing burden for those five. The Kings, on the other hand, went with seven defencemen, dressing veteran Mark Hardy for the first time since Game 1. Several of the LA back-liners, notably Zhitnik, were banged up. Veteran Tim Watters, who’d had two teeth knocked out in Game 5, had spent the day off in a dentist chair getting root canals. “Watters was a noble warrior,” says Melrose. “He had played for a long time for a chance to win the Stanley. Cup. He wasn’t going to miss the game.” So both Zhitnik and Watters were out there for Game 6, but Hardy gave the Kings some insurance.
Each club was hoping this would be the game when its top forwards would break out. Clark had been a beast in the series, so Melrose wanted his top defensive pair of Zhitnik and Blake out against him as much as possible. It had worked to some degree. Clark had yet to score a goal. But the fact that he hadn’t scored wasn’t fooling his cousin Melrose. Melrose knew Clark could break out at any moment. On the day of Game 6, however, Clark’s chronic bad back flared up on him, and by game time it had become much worse. If it had been a regular season game, he wouldn’t have played. Clark had been dealing with back issues for six years, and in 1987 he had been told he probably should quit the game. Instead, he usually did four hours or more of therapy a day just to be able to play. Sometimes, even that wasn’t enough. He skated in the warm-up and felt worse than he had in weeks. But like Watters, there was no chance he wouldn’t play in a game in which his team was hoping to make history.
On the other bench, Kings winger Luc Robitaille, who had served as LA captain when Gretzky was out for the first half of the regular season and had enjoyed his most productive season ever with sixty-three goals, had also been struggling to find the net. Robitaille had been barely a rumour, mostly drifting on the periphery. But in Game 5, he had generated his best scoring chances of the series and assisted on a goal by Gary Shuchuk. Maybe he was starting to find his game.
THE LEAFS STARTED THE game with Gilmour between Andreychuk and Glenn Anderson. On their very first shift, LA winger Tomas Sandstrom committed a terrible blind giveaway to Gilmour at the left circle in the Kings zone. Gilmour knocked the puck down with his glove and moved it to Anderson in the slot. Anderson partially whiffed on a one-timer attempt, but the shot hit Zhitnik’s skate and slid under Hrudey’s left pad with only fifty-seven seconds elapsed, stunning the Kings and the LA crowd. It was an unimaginably good start for the Leafs.
The visitors almost doubled their lead a few minutes later when another Kings veteran, Dave Taylor, also gave the puck away, this time inside the Toronto zone. That created a two-on-one break for Gilmour and Anderson. Anderson, blowing past a back-checking Gretzky, accepted a pretty feed and was in alone against Hrudey, but he didn’t get a hard shot off and the Kings goalie made a stick save. The Forum fans exhaled.
The Leafs had a chance on the power play just past the seven-minute mark when Warren Rychel was sent off for high-sticking, but they couldn’t score, leaving their extra-strength unit at an anemic 4 for 29 in the series. It had become a big problem, largely because the six-foot-four Andreychuk was struggling to score. In just thirty-one regular season games with the Leafs after arriving in the trade with Buffalo, Andreychuk had scored twelve power play goals and then another four in the first two rounds of the playoffs. If his magical hands were working, the Leafs power play could be deadly.
Against the Kings, however, he had not scored at all, at even strength or otherwise. His specialty was parking himself near the net to look for deflections and loose pucks, and he would work on those skills endlessly at practice. But the size of the Kings defence, notably Blake and McSorley, had rendered him less effective. Normally, Andreychuk had a physical advantage over most NHL defencemen, but not in this series. It seemed like every time he went to the net, Blake or McSorley was standing in the way, and it was difficult to score with Blake wrapping you in a headlock or McSorley cross-checking you in the neck.
Diminutive Russian winger Nikolai Borschevsky, who had joined the Leafs as a twenty-seven-year-old rookie that season, had also been a key power play contributor. He’d scored thirty-four goals in the regular season, twelve of them on the power play. In the first game of the playoffs, he had collided with Vladimir Konstantinov of the Red Wings and suffered a broken orbital bone below his right eye. He’d missed a few games but was back for Game 7 and he tipped home Bob Rouse’s point shot in overtime to end the series. It was a dramatic goal that ranked with Lanny McDonald’s overtime winner against the New York Islanders fifteen years earlier as postseason highlights for the Leafs during the team’s long Stanley Cup drought.
Since that historic moment, however, Borschevsky had been silenced. He looked wary, almost timid. The orbital bone injury had been a severe one, which might have made him shy of contact, and these playoffs had been more vicious than anything he’d experienced before. In the series against the hard-hitting Kings, he had gone from ineffective to rarely used. With Andreychuk and Borschevsky both unproductive, the power play had become a liability for the Leafs. In Game 3, they had surrendered two goals to the Kings with LA short-handed.
The Leafs still had a 1–0 lead. But Hockey Night in Canada analyst Harry Neale detected one promising development for the home team, something that would have worried Leafs fans. “In my opinion, Gretzky is moving better tonight than in any of the previous five games,” said Neale, who noticed Melrose was double-shifting Gretzky early in the game. “He’s taken quite a bit of abuse in the LA press for his lack of productivity. If Wayne Gretzky ever comes up with a vintage performance, it’s either because he’s nearing a record or has something to prove. Maybe tonight.”
Right from the start it was clear the game was going to be a challenge for any referee to call, particularly with the style of play in the NHL at that time, filled with interference, hooking and holding. “There were only so many things the hierarchy wanted called, especially in the playoffs, when everything was ramped up,” Fraser says now. “You wanted to provide an entertaining flow. Successful referees were the ones who could get the players to play on their terms without actually having to put the hammer down and call so many penalties. That was our objective.” Game 5, particularly the third period and overtime, had at times resembled a football game with players being tackled around the opposition net, and it seemed likely Game 6 would be similar. The challenge for Fraser, or any referee under that style of officiating, was to be able—and willing—to make an important late call if necessary after letting so much go earlier in the game.
LA tied the game at 10:32 of the first period on a goal that should have been disallowed. During a delayed penalty call on Rouse for hauling down LA forward Mike Donnelly, Kings rookie defenceman Darryl Sydor found himself behind the Leafs net with the puck. He tried to centre it, but the puck hit his teammate Corey Millen, who was falling to the ice. The puck bounced back to Sydor, who again tried to get the puck to the front of the net. At the same moment, Granato, a thorn in Toronto’s side all series, drove directly towards the net from the slot. “I was small. I was somebody who had to play bigger and act bigger and tougher than I really was,” says Granato. “That was part of why I was able to play and able to have some success.” He drove his shoulder into Rouse, then fell into Potvin at the precise moment Sydor’s centring effort was getting into the blue paint of the goal crease. The Leafs goalie was kneeling on his goal line when Granato crashed into him, and the puck crossed the goal line. Fraser called it a goal, and then the play went to replay review.
The Forum didn’t have a traditional hockey press box. The media occupied about a dozen rows halfway up the darkened stands, as did league officials. The replay review officials were essentially stationed in the middle of the crowd with access to two monitors. They were at the mercy of whatever replays the television broadcaster could provide. At times, home broadcasters would even deny access to incriminating footage of their team simply by saying they couldn’t find it. In the case of the Granato play, the two league officials looked at the play and also ruled it was a good goal. Maybe that’s what they saw. Maybe that’s all they could see in the dark. Maybe that’s what their interpretation was in the middle of a raucous, impatient LA crowd. The game was tied, and the Kings had benefited from what would be the first in a long list of controversial calls. The Leafs and their fans were right to feel the call had been wrong and the review unjust. The best they could hope for, like all teams, was that the calls would even out. Either way, it was 1–1.
As the series had worn on, Blake had become an increasingly significant presence. Of the three young Kings defencemen, Sydor and Zhitnik were very effective, but Blake, a fourth year player, stood out as a tower of strength, particularly in a physical way. In Game 6, he made big hits all over the ice, some legal, some not so legal, some during the play, some after the whistle. It was the beginning of a Hall of Fame career that would see him win the Norris Trophy five years later, and he was clearly not intimidated in any way by the challenges and pressures of the Stanley Cup playoffs. The three young LA blueliners had gone on the road in the playoffs to hockey-mad Canadian cities, first Calgary, then Vancouver and then Toronto. By Game 6, they weren’t kids anymore. They’d proven to themselves they could perform on the big stages of the sport. “Had we got Toronto in the first round, it might have been a different lot of younger guys,” says Gretzky. “By the time we got to the third round, they’d lost that deer-in-the-headlights look.”
The final minutes of the first period got a bit crazy. Potvin made a spectacular save on Rychel. Gilmour was flattened into the side boards by Shuchuk and responded by charging across the ice to hit the LA forward. Shuchuk had shown a willingness to make Gilmour pay a price and distract him, as Granato, Rychel and McSorley had done earlier in the series. The hits on Gilmour just kept on coming.
Rouse, a player who played a more physical brand of hockey in the postseason when the stakes were higher, went off with McSorley for roughing at 18:39. But with ten seconds remaining before intermission, Blake made another big play. Berg and Macoun found themselves on a two-on-one break against the LA defenceman with a chance to give the Leafs the lead again. Blake waited and waited, then executed a perfect sweep-check, knocking the puck to safety. “Blake was unbelievable,” Melrose says. “He really came into his own.”
The Kings outshot the Leafs 13–8 in the first period, but then ran head first into the freight train they’d managed to dodge for five games: Wendel Clark. He finally scored his first goal of the series. Leafs defenceman Dave Ellett just chipped the puck out to centre to clear the zone. Toronto forward Mike Krushelnyski got his stick on it and banged the puck to teammate Mike Foligno, who stretched and directed the puck forward into the Kings zone down the middle of the ice.
Clark took over from there. It was a foot race between him and LA defenceman Charlie Huddy, and Clark had more speed. He got to the puck first, and with Huddy harassing him from his left, the left-shooting Clark used his leg to shield the puck while he moved it to his backhand, not his preferred offensive weapon. He had a big slapshot and a terrific wrist shot that could bruise an NHL goalie or beat him from forty feet, but the Leafs captain hardly even practised his backhand. Huddy dove to dislodge the puck at the last moment but couldn’t reach around Clark’s body as the Leafs captain steadied himself, then lifted a backhand over Hrudey’s glove at 3:57 of the second. The Leafs were ahead again, and their gritty captain was finally on the scoreboard. With a 3–2 series edge and the lead in Game 6, that date with Montreal the following Tuesday beckoned.
But instead of inspiring the visitors, Clark’s goal seemed to make them sag. Even worse, their veterans started making bad decisions. Just as it seemed Fraser had tucked his whistle away for good, he started sending a parade of Leafs to the penalty box, and in quick succession three LA power play goals were on the board. The Kings, and their stars, demonstrated to the Leafs what a crucial element an opportunistic power play could be in a tense playoff series.
It all started with Blake getting behind Macoun to accept a perfect lead pass from Gretzky for a breakaway on Potvin. At the last second, Macoun dove. He might have got a piece of the puck, but he certainly took Blake’s legs out from under him. Fraser’s arm, however, stayed down. At the least, it should have been a penalty, and quite probably a penalty shot. But the veteran referee was unmoved despite the outrage of the Kings and their fans. Chants of “Fraser sucks! Fraser sucks!” filled the Fabulous Forum.
Soon after, Foligno was whistled for interfering with Taylor, and the LA power play pounced. Robitaille moved the puck to Sandstrom behind the goal line. Sandstrom spun and put a perfect pass onto McSorley’s stick in the slot. The big blueliner had managed to sneak in unnoticed from the point—Gilmour was the nearest Leaf—and he pounded home a high shot in one motion to tie the game 2–2. The Forum no longer felt that “Fraser sucks.”
Macoun took a stupid slashing penalty at 10:05 when he retaliated after being bumped by Rychel. Just seventeen seconds later, Sydor swiped at the puck from forty-five feet along the boards, producing a fluttering, dipping shot. Potvin saw it all the way but missed it, a rare bad goal for the young netminder in the ’93 playoffs.
Five minutes after that, it was Foligno taking another retaliation penalty, this time for whacking Shuchuk across the back of the helmet after a hard hit against the boards. LA had a third straight power play. Potvin made several huge saves, keeping the Leafs close, including one on a rising Kurri blast. But at 16:27, the pressure paid off, and this time it was Robitaille finally finding the net.
Robitaille been a King since the 1986–87 season, when he, Jimmy Carson and defenceman Steve Duchesne had taken Los Angeles by storm with impressive rookie seasons in the year Pat Quinn started the season as LA’s head coach and Mike Murphy, now the Leafs assistant, finished it. Robitaille, like Clark with the Leafs, had stayed through all the changes. He’d been extremely important to the Kings that season, particularly in the first half, when Gretzky was out. “We learned not just to count on Wayne all the time,” says Robitaille. “We learned to play as a team. We had to survive without Wayne for half the season.”
Robitaille’s relationship with Melrose during the season had at times been contentious. Back on March 28, the Kings were leading a game at Winnipeg in the third period until Jets centre Alexei Zhamnov tied it late. Afterwards, LA media reported an audible shouting match between Melrose and Robitaille from inside the visitors dressing room that could be heard in the halls of the Winnipeg Arena. “You’re a selfish player,” said Melrose. “No, I’m not,” said Robitaille. “You are too!” shouted Melrose.
Melrose later played down the incident to reporters, saying he and Robitaille were “discussing fishing spots in Northern Quebec.” Today, he admits it was a nasty fight, one that surprised even Cap Raeder, his assistant coach. “Cap said, ‘Wow, haven’t heard one like that in a while,’ ” says Melrose. “I demanded a lot from Luc. He was a leader, and I needed more from him. That’s what happened. I challenged him to be a better leader. It got pretty heated. But it was never mentioned after. If you have the right type of relationship with players, you can do something like that.” Robitaille had never had a coach he could argue back and forth with. “He let me vent. He had a little smirk on his face while I was doing it,” recalls Robitaille. “I think Barry liked it. He wanted guys to stand up for themselves. He wanted guys to fight for the right to play.”
It had taken Robitaille more than five games against the Leafs to do what he did best: score. But he finally did. The play started with Zezel in control of the puck in the Toronto zone, but he couldn’t clear it past Blake at right point. The LA defenceman hammered a shot towards the net that hit Robitaille in the hip and dropped right at his feet. In one quick motion, the high-scoring winger dunked his first of the series into the open side. For Robitaille, the goal was a massive relief, and LA had suddenly opened a two-goal lead, 4–2. LA was destroying Toronto with its extra-strength unit. The Forum crowd had been waiting for Robitaille to get involved, and it exploded with joy when he finally did.
Game 6 was turning out to be a classic—wild and very physical, with lead changes, great goaltending and big goals—and the Inglewood crowd was loving every minute. All the storylines first introduced in Game 1 were now being brought to a boil like sap from a Canadian maple. It was not a game for the faint of heart. With five seconds left in the second period, Granato cruised across the ice and hit Krushelnyski square in the numbers, sending the Leafs forward headfirst into the boards. Granato received a minor penalty. He didn’t care that it was a dirty play. “I didn’t worry about what people thought of me. I knew if they liked me, I probably wasn’t doing my job or what I was supposed to do. I’m not proud of the fact some of the things I had to do weren’t some of the nicest things, but that’s what my job was.” The Kings took their two-goal lead to the dressing room for the second intermission.
By the start of the third period, Gretzky had still not been a major presence on seventeen shifts, skating fourteen minutes and fifteen seconds of playing time. Sure, the Kings were winning, but what was he waiting for? He almost seemed to be holding back. Gretzky says the broken rib was annoying but it wasn’t hindering his game. He just couldn’t find the openings. He was, however, a master at biding his time. “In Edmonton, John Muckler used to say to me all the time in the playoffs, ‘Gretz, we’d love you to get three or four goals, but we need you to get big goals. We need a big goal, we need a big play. That’s what we need out of you,’ ” recalls Gretzky. “Guys like Gordie Howe did that, and Bobby Orr. I always remembered that when I played.”
The Leafs fought back in the third, forcing Hrudey to make a brilliant diving glove save on Anderson, and then an acrobatic left foot save on Foligno. Still two goals behind. Clark, a stone-faced, smoldering presence all series, was the player the Leafs were looking to, the player who could pounce on the right counterattack opportunity. For years, when he was healthy enough to do it, he had always been a player who could lift the Leafs, even when they were awful. He was more than willing to take the lead. He didn’t need to wait for others.
At 11:08 of the third period, the Leafs captain got his second goal of the night to cut the Los Angeles lead to 4–3. Clark took a lead pass from Rouse. With only McSorley between him and Hrudey, Clark cut inside and snapped a hard, low rocket past Hrudey’s left foot from thirty feet, using that glorious, penetrating wrist shot that was the envy of NHL forwards. Hrudey was at least ten feet out at the top of his crease, and still he couldn’t handle the velocity of the shot. “Our best player was Wendel Clark,” says Anderson. “It was like he was shot out of a cannon. He did it all.”
The Kings, still leading by a goal, tried desperately to add another as insurance. Gretzky and Sandstrom had a two-on-one break but couldn’t connect. Gretzky, starting to make more of an impact, then set up Granato with a perfect lead pass with less than two minutes to go in regulation. Granato beat Ellett to the outside, but Ellett turned and hauled him down with a hook to the chest. No call from Fraser. The Leafs had got away with one. The Kings weren’t at the finish line yet.
Toronto roared the other way, and Potvin charged out of his net to the Leafs bench. Leafs defenceman Todd Gill moved the puck to Gilmour in the corner to the right of Hrudey. Millions watched as the Leafs’ most skilled player cradled the puck and surveyed the possibilities. All eyes were on him. The Kings were drawn to him magnetically, desperate to smother this final threat. Then, out of nowhere, their worst nightmare materialized. They were watching the wrong Leaf. When Potvin had arrived at the Leafs bench, Clark had vaulted over the boards. Now he was roaring down the ice and into the LA zone. Unmarked.
Gilmour saucered a slick pass into the slot, with the puck landing perfectly flat. The kind of pass great playmakers make. Clark took the pass and in one motion ripped another of his patented wrist shots. The puck rose in a straight line over Hrudey’s catching glove and into the top of the net to tie the game with 1:21 remaining.
The crowd, on its feet thinking victory was at hand, was silenced. Players on the Leafs bench jumped up and down, pounding each other on the back. It was Clark’s third goal of the game. It was one man against the Kings, and now the contest was deadlocked. It also may have been the greatest game of Clark’s career. “The puck just seemed to follow me that game,” he says. “That must be what Wayne feels like every night!”
It seemed all those bad penalties in the second, that terrible penalty killing and the punchless power play, weren’t going to stop the Leafs after all. But as the clock ticked down, Blake was fighting with Gilmour for the puck behind the LA net. As Blake turned, Anderson charged in and hit the LA rearguard squarely in the back with his right shoulder, knocking him headfirst into the boards. The Kings defenceman lay on the ice for several moments. It was similar to the hit on Krushelnyski that Granato had been penalized for in the second period. But everyone knew that what was a penalty in the second wasn’t usually a penalty in the third.
And yet it was. Fraser called Anderson for boarding. “Never should have been called,” says Clark. “[Blake] got up.” There were just twelve seconds left in regulation time, which meant the Kings would have 1:48 of power play at the start of overtime. Anderson had a reputation for being reckless, usually with his stick. He was famous for his “excuse me” slashes after being hit. But he insists he just “bumped” Blake and that the defenceman took a dive. “He totally embellished it,” says Anderson. “I barely touched him. With twelve seconds to go in the game? Are you kidding me? With how that series had gone and the way the game was played back then?” He was wrong in that it was more than a bump. He hit Blake hard, and dangerously. But in terms of how penalties were assessed in the NHL at that time, he wasn’t wrong. Players in this very series had got away with worse. The emotion for the Leafs was similar to Game 1, when they won the game but saw McSorley alter the atmosphere with his hit on Gilmour. This time, Clark’s heroics had pumped up the Leafs, only for the team to find they would start overtime short-handed.
Then, in the first minute of overtime, came The Call.
As overtime started, Zhitnik shot the puck into the Leafs zone, and Gretzky snared it in the corner. He worked his way back up the boards, absorbed a two-handed slash to the hands from Macoun and moved the puck back to Blake at the right point.
Fraser was positioned on the far side of the ice. Blake returned the puck to Number 99 just above the hash marks along the right boards. Gretzky waited, and when Gilmour, the nearest penalty killer, didn’t move towards him, he stepped towards the net, wound up and fired a slapshot. The puck hit Macoun in the leg and bounced directly to Gilmour. The two stars, Gretzky and Gilmour, converged on the puck. As the Leafs centre leaned over to play it, Gretzky tried to lift his stick and instead pitchforked Gilmour on the chin with a barely detectable flick of his stick. With thirty-seven seconds elapsed in overtime, Gilmour fell to the ice like he’d been shot.
It had all happened so quickly. Gretzky’s shot, Macoun’s block, the bouncing puck, the flick of the stick by the quickest hands ever to play the sport.
Fraser had a clean line of sight on the play but appeared to be either looking at the net or searching for the puck. From where he was standing, the net was at eleven o’clock, Gilmour was at one o’clock. “I did not see it. If I didn’t see something, I didn’t want to guess. But something didn’t smell right. It’s just an instinct you develop,” Fraser says.
Gilmour was cut. He wasn’t spurting blood, but he was cut on the chin. “When I went to Gilmour, I said, ‘Doug, tell me what happened?’ He said, ‘Wayne shot the puck and the follow-through hit me in the chin.’ I said, ‘That’s not a penalty, then.’ He said, ‘Okay.’ ” Following through on your shot and hitting an opponent was not a penalty. But it had all happened so quickly even Gilmour didn’t have it right. It hadn’t been Gretzky’s follow-through. Television replays clearly showed he had jabbed Gilmour’s chin with his stick when both were reaching for the loose puck.
Gretzky sheepishly circled far away from the referee, which seemed suspicious to Fraser, who was used to Gretzky trying to argue calls. “He always wanted to sell or tell,” says Fraser. Gretzky knew what he’d done, but obviously confessing was out of the question. Fraser called the linesmen together to confer. Millions watching on TV knew what had happened even if the referee didn’t. “Wouldn’t this be something if Gretzky was thrown out for a high stick!” said Neale on the Hockey Night in Canada broadcast.
It wasn’t just up to Fraser. Either Collins or Finn could have called a penalty. Linesmen had that power, but they also knew that if they did report that they’d seen a high stick, Gretzky would be booted out of the game. You couldn’t blame an official for not wanting to be part of that ugly scene. “Neither linesman was sure. So I had to eat it,” says Fraser. Three officials on the ice, and not one of them saw the high stick? It seemed dubious. “Clearly, as the replays showed, Gretzky should have been penalized,” says Fraser. “There’s nothing worse, believe me, than the helplessness of feeling something happened and you didn’t see it.”
Clark argued briefly with Fraser. But the Leafs captain had never been one for long-drawn-out beef sessions. He’d say his piece then accept the verdict with the stoicism of a farmer. He knew there was no changing Fraser’s mind. The game went on.
With less than ten seconds left in the power play, the visitors had defended effectively, not giving up a chance. It looked like the Anderson penalty would expire and the two clubs would get back to playing at even strength. But then Rouse, Zezel and Ellett all ventured below the goal line behind Potvin to battle for the puck with Robitaille and Sandstrom. Three Leafs, two Kings.
The odds were on the visitors coming up with the puck. But it was Robitaille who burst out of the pack with possession. He circled out and looked for a teammate. Gretzky had started at the far boards, waiting for the right moment, staying away from the play, drawing no attention. It was his David Copperfield moment. He’d scored 871 goals in the NHL to that point, including regular season and playoff competition. He’d won nine Hart Trophies as league MVP. Yet somehow he’d managed to make himself disappear in overtime of an elimination Stanley Cup playoff game.
Gretzky waited until Robitaille circled out of the corner with the puck before breaking for the net. Berg, the fourth Leafs penalty killer and one of Toronto’s most conscientious forwards, didn’t notice him, and he also didn’t shift down closer to his own net to protect against a goalmouth pass. Why would he? He didn’t think a Kings player was around.
Gretzky slid into the open spot by the Leafs post unchecked. Robitaille’s pass was perfect, and Gretzky redirected it in one motion. The puck headed towards the middle of the net and hit Potvin’s right knee, but then it bounced high into the net at 1:41 of overtime. In a wild, controversial finish, the Kings had a 5–4 victory, and the series was going back to Toronto for Game 7.
The Call quickly became the focal point of the game and the series. Leafs fans felt they’d been robbed, that Gretzky had got away with the flagrant high stick just because he was Gretzky. The postgame scene was chaotic. Both teams quickly began to pack their gear and prepare to head back to Toronto.
Celebrities milled about. Cindy Melrose, Barry’s wife, carried a sign in the hallway between the two dressing rooms—just forty feet apart—that read KINGS CHEER WHILE CHERRY WINES and noisily taunted Hockey Night in Canada personality Don Cherry for his pointed criticisms of her husband. She’d become a regular on a popular LA morning radio show during the playoffs and wasn’t afraid to make her opinions known. Loudly. “She was a cheerleader for the Cincinnati Stingers when I first met her back in 1978,” recalls Melrose. “She’s no shrinking violet.”
In the Leafs dressing room, things were a little ugly. “A lot of the guys looked like they were down and out. Things were said that pissed me off, things that, to be a championship team, you just don’t say,” Anderson says. “It would have never happened in a different room. It was just guys frustrated. Maybe they didn’t play as much as they wanted to. But the timing was wrong in my opinion.” The veteran winger felt some of his teammates were pointing the finger at him for his penalty late in regulation. “I know they were blaming me. They were looking for an excuse,” he says. “I just kind of let it slide. I didn’t want to stand up and say, ‘Shut the fuck up and get ready for the next game.’ The game was over.”
Anderson’s penalty had been a major mistake, and it had cost the Leafs. At the same time, he had been one of the best Leafs forwards all series. And he was right: good teams pick up their teammates when mistakes are made. If the goalie whiffs on one, it is up to his teammates to pick him up. That’s the mentality good teams have to have. The problem was the Leafs had only been a good team for a matter of months. They didn’t have the scar tissue from years of being in the heat of playoff competition. “We should have been oozing with confidence because we’d already won two Game 7s in the playoffs,” says Anderson. “One penalty should not be able to beat you.”
Referee-in-chief Bryan Lewis went in to confer with Fraser, Finn and Collins afterwards. “He shook our hands and said, ‘Good job, boys,’ ” says Fraser. “He told us there was a report that Hockey Night in Canada may have a replay showing that Gretzky high-sticked Gilmour. We explained our perspective. I hadn’t seen it, the two linesmen couldn’t help. And I told him what Gilmour had said, that it was a follow-through of the shot.”
The next day, Fraser flew back home to southern New Jersey, and called his father, who for years had recorded all the NHL games his son officiated. “My dad said, ‘Well, we had a little excitement here last night,’ ” says Fraser. His father had fallen asleep in his favourite chair, and at about 3:30 A.M. had woken to a commotion outside. He had a little motor home parked out back, and he looked out the window to see a car ramming into the trailer hitch of the vehicle. The car then backed up and rammed the motor home again.
Dressed only in his underwear, Hilt Fraser whipped open the patio door, grabbed an axe he had at the back door for splitting wood and chased the car down the street, delivering a few solid blows before the car drove off into the night. On hearing his father’s story, Fraser called NHL security, and a few days later he got a call from league security boss Al Wiseman. “They’d found the car in a body shop in Kitchener [Ontario] getting repairs for damage from an axe,” he says. “They questioned the man. He was a Leafs fan from Kitchener, and he was pissed off at my call and had gone to my hometown looking for my family home.”
It didn’t stop there. Fraser’s mother, Barbara, kept getting obscene phone calls from irate Leafs fans. “My mom was probably tougher than my dad. She was a real hockey mom,” says Fraser. “So I gave her one of my whistles, and like a good hockey mom, she tied it onto a skate lace and hung it on a hook by the phone. As soon as an obscene phone call came in, she had the whistle, and she would blast it into the phone. So the obscene phone calls stopped.” Almost two decades later, long after Hilton Fraser had passed, Barbara began to suffer from dementia and moved into a senior’s residence. When her sons went to clean up the family home so it could be sold, they saw some things remained unchanged. “By the phone in the house, the whistle was still on the skate lace,” says Fraser.
A QUARTER CENTURY LATER, the Call is still being hotly debated. Members of the Kings dismiss it as meaningless, certainly not the moment that decided anything. “Yes, Gretzky high-sticked Gilmour,” says Hrudey. “But so what? To me, it was a non-issue. They still had Game 7 at home.” McSorley points to all the other calls that weren’t made in the game, like Blake being hauled down by Macoun on a partial breakaway. “When it was all over, there had been seven games, and we could talk about several instances that could have changed the series,” he says. “Gilmour head-butted me. No call. With that [Gretzky] high stick, people in Toronto are not looking at anything in context.”
Gilmour doesn’t blame Fraser. “I don’t think Kerry saw it. I think one of the linesmen did. All they had to do was say to Kerry, ‘Say you saw it,’ and give him two minutes, or a double minor. Otherwise, the way the rules were in those days, if the linesman called it, he would have been out of the game,” says Gilmour, who needed eight stitches to close his cut that night. “At the time, it was heated. People still talk about it. But do I have any remorse or regret? No. Who wants that job of being a referee? And look, I wasn’t a clean player. You know that. I’d cut your eye out if I was playing against you.”
The truth is that it was a crazy, wild, entertaining, nasty game. A game people still talk about, still agonize over. Still get angry over. A number of obvious fouls in the game weren’t called, many of them committed by the Leafs, including one by Ellett on Granato that allowed Clark to tie the game. It really was a night of a thousand crimes, and a few were called. The Call, however, occupies a central place in Leafs mythology. If Fraser had made the right decision, Gretzky would have been in the Kings dressing room and never would have been on the ice to score the winning goal. That’s just a fact. A high stick that drew blood wasn’t a subjective call, like tripping, boarding or holding. If detected, it was an automatic penalty. In this case, the Leafs would have been on the power play, with a chance to win the game and advance to play Montreal in the Stanley Cup final.
So The Call cuts right to the core of being a Leafs fan, and being a fan in general, that belief you carry in your heart at the beginning of every season that this is going to be a good one. It’s not based on logic. It’s based on emotion. To some, the emotion of that moment is as powerful as when your first child is born, or seeing that child walk down the aisle one day. For Leafs fans, their team, such a doormat for so long, was tantalizingly close to getting to play for the Cup again. You couldn’t blame them for feeling aggrieved, for feeling that a terrible injustice had been done. You still can’t.
From a more detached point of view, The Call didn’t decide the series. Fraser didn’t miss it out of mendacity. He just missed it, like Bill Buckner booted the ball in the ’86 World Series. Like Steve Smith put the puck in his own net. Like Jim Marshall ran the wrong way. Fraser whiffed. He missed the call and burned the biggest fan base of any team in hockey. That made the error seem so much worse. Still, the Leafs lost Game 6 because they took thoughtless penalties, and the LA power play scored four times. In losing Game 6, they didn’t lose the series. That’s also a fact.
Clark delivered a heroic performance, and he’d done it while gritting his teeth through awful back pain. “You could probably say it was one of the best games of my career if we had won,” says Clark. “But we didn’t, so it didn’t matter.” Potvin made brilliant saves, but so did Hrudey, and the Kings got more from more players. Robitaille finally scored, and he set up Gretzky for the game-winning goal. Gretzky finally made a big play. LA didn’t win because of an edge in play or technical superiority but through the will and personalities of a group of individually great players. On a chaotic night, they handled the chaos just a little better. The talents of two future Hall-of-Famers, Gretzky and Robitaille, shone through, although neither had played particularly well in the series. How could Gretzky have been left alone to win the game? That was part of his genius. In a violent sport filled with violent men, he never seemed to get hit. And when it was time to make the difference, it was as though he had his own cloaking device.
Fraser, for his part, doesn’t mind chatting about the Call, telling his side of the story. That’s good, because he’s been reminded of it constantly ever since by media and hockey fans. That incident, and his hair, are his NHL legacy even more than the record number of NHL games he officiated. When he announced in 2017 that he had cancer, many of the media reports noted he was best known for the non-call on Gretzky in ’93. “Hey, I’m part of hockey history, and a big part of Leafs history,” he says. “I’m a big boy. I wear big boy pants. It was the worst call that I never made, one that I would want back.”
Fraser had faced harsh criticism many times. He remembers a checking-from-behind call he made on Calgary’s Mark Hunter for a hit on Montreal’s Shayne Corson in Game 5 of the 1989 Stanley Cup final that led to the winning goal by the Canadiens. “It had to be a penalty. Otherwise, I might as well go into the dressing room and watch the game on TV,” he says. “I got ridiculed by the media, by Don Cherry. But my MO was that I wasn’t afraid to make the tough call.” In this case, however, it was a call he hadn’t made, and it was easy for his critics to read a lack of courage into his decision. Unfair, but easy.
It’s not as if he was a lousy ref. He was one of the best in NHL history. In a 2005 poll, Fraser was named the NHL’s most consistent referee. Some fans saw him as a pretty boy with pretty hair who had never felt the pointy end of an elbow to the face, but the truth was Fraser was a hockey man from a hardnosed hockey family. Nobody pushed Hilt Fraser’s kid around. He understood the game and its roots, respected the tough guys, understood the traditions and the history of the game, loved the personalities of the sport and wasn’t reluctant to be one himself. Yet there are still some, mostly Leafs fans, who believe it came down to fear, that Fraser was afraid to make the tough call on Gretzky, afraid to give one of hockey’s greatest players a penalty at such a critical moment of an elimination playoff game. A generation later, people remember the game and definitely remember the referee.
Fraser blames himself for not seeing Gretzky’s high stick. “I replayed it and replayed it, over and over. I should’ve moved my feet better,” he says. “I think I stayed focused on Macoun when he blocked the shot and didn’t refocus back to where the puck went. It happened so quickly. But even Killer didn’t fully understand what had happened. He got it as wrong as I did.”