The Soviet hockey bosses moved the 1988 WJC from Leningrad to Moscow. The decision to take the tournament to the capital might have been a matter of logistics, Leningrad lacking the resources to host the tournament. Or it might have been a purely strategic move—Moscow being the least friendly setting for other teams in the field. Moscow made it a home game for the Red Army players who filled most spots in the Soviet juniors’ lineup. If it had been a strategic ploy, it failed. Canada won its third gold in seven years—its third in six tournaments if you throw out the DQ in ’87.
Canadians made up half of the tournament all-star team: forward, Theoren Fleury; defenceman, Greg Hawgood; goaltender, Jimmy Waite. All returning players. Chris Joseph, last seen rolling around the ice at the start of the brawl against the Soviets, took up a place on the Canadian blue line again. These four had been just eighteen in Piestany. Others from the ’87 squad would have been eligible, including Pierre Turgeon, Brendan Shanahan and Glen Wesley, but they were already on NHL rosters.
The returning foursome made the most of a second chance. Fleury wearing desire all over his face, instantly upping the pace and energy on every shift, furiously forechecking, causing havoc—not quite the same havoc as Piestany, but havoc nonetheless. Hawgood rushing the puck, working the point, leading all Canadian scorers, looking for the world like a shorter but no less effective Brad Park. Waite reprising—transcending—the game against Sweden the previous winter, stealing victories, giving teammates the confidence that comes only with the knowledge that goaltending will give them a chance. Joseph following Steve Nemeth’s lead, coming over with the Olympic team’s program, waiting for the junior squad in Moscow after the Izvestia tournament, bringing international experience into the room.
“Piestany was a huge motivation for us,” Hawgood says. “It also made us smarter about the international game, more focused. I don’t want to say Piestany was a good thing, but there was some good we took away from it.”
Piestany wasn’t a huge motivation for the CAHA, though. No, Piestany was a huge piece of baggage, one that the organization couldn’t put behind it quickly enough. Piestany gave Hawgood, Fleury, Waite, and Joseph want. For the CAHA Piestany imposed need. “Looking back on it, Moscow in ’88 was the most important world junior tournament for Canada, ever,” CAHA President Murray Costello says. It could all have come apart very easily for the program if we didn’t ice a quality team and quality players.”
“There was three times the pressure on us putting this team together,” says Dave Draper, back for a second time as chief scout. “Coaches, players, everything—we just felt like we couldn’t afford mistakes.”
By the fall of 1987, hockey executives at all levels were concerned about the image of the game. Piestany was a famous case, but just part of it. Even the 1986 Stanley Cup final between Montreal and Calgary was marred by a bench-clearing brawl. Before the 1987-88 season, the NHL instituted tough new rules—automatic ten-game suspensions for the first guys off the bench—that effectively put an end to bench-clearing.
The CAHA cleaned up the image—from one year to the next it couldn’t have been more different. Dennis McDonald recruited “the right kind of people.” The CAHA brought in Dave Chambers—a career varsity coach—to work behind the national juniors’ bench. Dave Draper had known Chambers for years, going back to their days at St. Michael’s, the Toronto Catholic high school and elite hockey program. Draper knew Chambers was as far away from Bert Templeton (and the Dirty Bert image) as could be. Chambers: York University, players making it from mid-terms to games, young men bound for white-collar jobs down the line, young men knowing that their competitive hockey careers were going to end on campus in the school colours. Templeton: North Bay Centennials, players catching buses to games all over Ontario, boys who dream that they’ll play in bigger arenas, juniors is just a stop on the way. Dave Chambers wasn’t a cleaned-up version of Bert Templeton. The difference between them was the contrast between new school and old school—even new school and no school. The CAHA wanted something as close to Father David Bauer as possible. Someone who offered a values-based approach. Someone who was a diplomat, an ambassador. And the fact is, both Draper and Chambers had played for Father Bauer.
Chambers was so unlike many previous coaches of the Canadian juniors that it unsettled Murray Costello. “He was so low key, I didn’t know what to make of it,” Costello says. “I asked Dave Draper, ‘When’s this guy going to snap out of it?’”
The players were just teenagers but they knew all about optics and politics. “Even at nineteen I wasn’t so naïve that I didn’t know what the CAHA was doing when he was named coach,” Hawgood says. “It had nothing to do with the quality of coaching—I don’t know if anyone would say [Chambers] was a better hockey man than Bert Templeton. The CAHA wanted to put some distance between Piestany and the program.”
Dennis McDonald pushed for the changes. He drew up the blueprint. The short-term tournament setting needed a different approach—it was one thing to build a team, as most junior coaches do, over the course of a season or more; another to do it over three weeks. It seemed like every waking moment was accounted for, micromanaged. It wasn’t the old-time-hockey approach, going with gut and instinct. The coach wouldn’t make it up as he went along—he had to be an organization man. “Dennis McDonald doesn’t get the credit he deserves for his contribution to the program,” Hockey Canada president Bob Nicholson said years later. “He came up with a lot of the ideas that we’ve put into place and refined over the years.”
The Canadian teams that dominated the WJC in the late ’80s and early ’90s—winning gold in seven of eight tournaments—looked a lot more like the Canadian squad in Moscow than the Bad News Bears from Piestany. “We had to go back to look at everything we did with those players,” McDonald says. “Just like we couldn’t have them run their own practices, we couldn’t—and ethically shouldn’t—let them manage themselves off the ice. We had to give them the right guidance and support to give Canada the best chance of winning.”
Some thought it was a little touchy-feely. McDonald thought it better to err on the side of over-managing. He thought that what worked in a usual junior hockey setting wouldn’t work in a short, intense tournament with players and coaches unfamiliar with each other.
None of the Canadian juniors knew Chambers, not even by reputation. Chambers left them scratching their heads at the start. They were still scratching their heads about the coach when they were being presented the gold medals at centre ice. It was their first and only brush with “the old college try.” The Canadian players had hated Templeton during the ’87 tournament, though they came to respect him afterward. Still, they had fed off negative energy. They had played for hard-asses—if not with their junior clubs, then somewhere else along the line. They weren’t used to being inspired, being mentored. They were used to being pushed, being driven. They might bitch and moan about coaches like Bert Templeton, but it was the Bert Templetons who had the players on the pros’ radar. College players coached by tenured faculty didn’t go to the NHL. Guys who had been browbeaten by junior coaches either resigned to, or resentful about, their lot riding the buses—those were the players on the NHL’s radar.
“He seemed like a nice guy, but he didn’t swear the entire tournament,” Fleury says. “He would go, ‘gosh’ or ‘darn.’ He wasn’t like any other coach I ever had. He would say, ‘We can’t be out there doing that … stuff.’ Then one of us would stand up and say, ‘We’re playing like shit.’ I thought [Chambers] was gonna faint.”
For Fleury, from one year to the next, between his eighteenth and nineteenth birthdays, life had changed. This unfamiliar coach was the least of it. Things had changed in hockey. He had been undrafted in 1986. Calgary picked him in the draft on the basis of his play in the 1987 WJC and to the continued amusement of all other NHL franchises. Things changed away from the arena. He became a father. He looked like a big brother to his son. “I had to grow up fast,” Fleury says. “I had responsibilities to look after. Maybe it made me more desperate to make it. I’d always wanted to make it [to the NHL] for myself. It’s another type of pressure when you’re not doing it for fun but to put food on the table for your kid and your wife.”
Some CAHA officials were opposed to selecting Fleury for the 1988 squad. They thought he was just too volatile, no matter what skill he possessed. Dave Draper fought hard to get him in the line-up. “I wasn’t sure myself,” Draper says, “but I went out and interviewed him a couple of times at least, just to get a read of him. I got a sense that he desperately wanted to redeem himself.” Others were won over by Fleury’s play and his commitment. Chambers named Fleury team captain—one of the few things that the CAHA ever did that didn’t amount to scapegoating the players from Piestany. Fleury felt it was a message. He felt it was a way to bring him back to earth. He felt it was an emotional challenge. “I realized that I always played with an edge but that I couldn’t cross a line,” he says. “I couldn’t be selfish and do something that would hurt my teammates. I had to think real hard about that wearing the C. And really, it was good for me and good for the team. It was a lesson that I learned, and I think other guys learned, from Piestany.”
Hawgood says that it felt different the next year, a different team dynamic. Maybe things were a little more subdued. Or focused on playing. “Piestany was something that we knew couldn’t and shouldn’t happen again,” Hawgood says, “even if we weren’t wrong in doing what we did. That was just the reality. And I think we had a different type of team.”
It was like being back in grade school, when teachers told them to behave on class outings because they were “representing the school.” Chambers took the team on cultural day trips. To museums. To the Moscow Circus. To historical landmarks.
There was no Animal House back at the team’s hotel. No making the floor their own private clubhouse. Then again, there wasn’t the same sort of claustrophobia. “We couldn’t even think of doing it,” Hawgood says. “It was the biggest hotel I’ve ever seen. Thousands of rooms. Hundreds of rooms on our floor. The hotel was so big that all the other teams in the tournament were staying there and we never saw them the whole time, not in the lobbies or the lunch room.”
The roster of the team that went to Moscow was deep in talent: Joe Sakic, Mark Recchi, Adam Graves and Eric Desjardins. All went on to significant NHL careers. It was their first turn in the spotlight—guys who would play in Stanley Cup finals. That Theoren Fleury played a bigger role than them is no surprise. That Greg Hawgood and Jimmy Waite were leaders would years later have come as a surprise to hockey fans. And Greg Hawgood and Jimmy Waite were arguably more valuable members of that team than was Fleury.
“I felt like I was playing for something that I should have already had,” Hawgood says.
“I didn’t think like that because at eighteen or nineteen you think you’re going to play forever and play for Stanley Cups,” Jimmy Waite says. “I tried to have a good time as well as a good tournament. I remember our hotel was right next to Red Square and we went on a tour there.”
Hawgood didn’t go, though. Not to Red Square. Not on a couple of other tours that the program arranged—probably less for educational purposes, probably more as a way of breaking up the pressure and monotony. Monotony suited Hawgood. He stayed in his room a lot. He played solitaire. He looked out the window. He looked at his food long and hard before he ate it.
“I just went to Moscow for one reason, and maybe having done it once before, it took something out of it,” Hawgood says. “Not the goal or the pressure. Not the satisfaction. But this wasn’t the first time. I think the other guys going through it might have been more excited about it—maybe they had more fun. It wasn’t about fun for me, though.”
It was about results. For Hawgood. For the other returning players. For the Canadian team’s executives, too. And it was about results that were impossibly narrow, and got progressively narrower.
Fleury scored the goal that made the score 4–1 in the third period. Waite stopped 18 of 20 shots.
Fleury scored the winning goal midway through the third period. Waite raised his game, stopping 24 of 26 shots.
Fleury and Hawgood set up Canada’s fourth goal, scored by Dan Currie. Waite stopped 31 of 35 shots for an outplayed Canadian team that managed less than half that number of shots on the Finnish net.
Fleury scored a goal. Joseph scored the winner. Hawgood picked up two assists. Waite stopped 21 of 25 shots, turning back a late rally by the Americans.
Fleury scored the opening goal, which Joseph set up. Hawgood picked up an assist. Waite put in a performance that a capsule summation would do no justice to.
It was a familiar theme. Waite would have been the goaltender of the 1987 WJC if Canada had not been tossed out of the tournament. He was the goaltender of the 1988 WJC in Moscow and had no serious challengers. He was the player of the tournament, just as indisputably. Canada winning without him? Canada winning with any of the goaltenders who had come to the tournament before? Unthinkable. That’s what Sherry Bassin says.
“That’s no knock against the guys who played for me at world juniors—they were great—but there’s no doubt Jimmy was the best goaltender that we sent to [the under-20s],” Sherry Bassin says. “In either of those tournaments you can make the case that he was the best, and there have been a lot over the years—like Roberto Luongo or Jose Theodore.”
Craig Button, the veteran scout and former Calgary Flames general manager, goes beyond Bassin’s estimation of Waite’s performance. “That game against the Soviets in 1988 was the single greatest one-game performance by a goaltender I’ve ever seen. He was not going to be beaten. Even the Soviets knew that after a while. You could look over at the bench and see them sag. They poured in all over him—it’s not that they stopped or gave up. They knew that they were a vastly superior club to the Canadians, one of the best teams ever. It was one guy who really beat them.”
Two games remained, but they were likely the most anticlimactic in the history of WJC. They had all the suspense of a coronation.
Canada took 50 shots. No further explanation necessary.
Canada took 52 shots. Ditto.
Fleury hadn’t dispelled all doubts about his ability to play in the NHL, but he was sure he’d make it. Like many scouts, though, he was even more sure that the other Canadian members of the 1988 WJC all-star team were going to have major NHL careers. “I was sure that Greg Hawgood would have been a fifteen-year NHL player,” Fleury says. “He was the best nineteen-year-old defenceman in the world—you’d figure he’d be in the NHL forever. And Jimmy was incredible. I was amazed when I had a chance to play on a Stanley Cup winner the next season but I thought Jimmy was going to win Stanley Cups, Vezinas, whatever. Nothing would have surprised me about Jimmy, the way he played for us in the tournament. There were guys you just knew would play in the NHL—for us, Joe Sakic, for sure. The U.S. had Mike Modano. The Russians—nobody knew if they’d ever come to the NHL, but you figured Mogilny and Fedorov were going to win gold medals and be the world’s best for a long time.”