THE OLYMPICS IN 1998 were the first time that NHL players were allowed to participate. Canada hadn’t won a gold medal since 1952, so everyone expected that we would build a dream team and just cream the competition. The roster was going to be announced on national television on November 29, 1997. It was like the Oscars. Every NHL player in the country was sitting on the edge of his seat. Well, almost every player. Patrick Roy, Gretz and maybe Eric Lindros would have been sleeping just fine.
The night of the big announcement, the Flames were scheduled to play Anaheim, and I had to get to the rink, but I was glued to the TV in my McKenzie Lake house in Calgary along with the rest of my family. My mom and dad were there, Josh, Veronica and Beaux. It was a big family gathering. There were TV and newspaper reporters set up in my living room. The whole city was so supportive.
I had been playing mind games with myself for weeks. I know I belong on the team, but what if I’m not picked?… There’s no way they’ll go with a guy from the Flames, the worst team in hockey … Yeah, but that might work in my favour, and I’m from the west—they need a guy from the west… I performed at the World Cup last year… Yeah, but we didn’t win… Wasn’t my fault—if Slats had played me… Yeah, but he had Gretz and Mess and there are so many guys who belong on the team …
When my picture appeared on the screen, everyone was cheering so loudly we didn’t even hear my name. Joshy was always a pretty cuddly guy, so he had his arms tight around me and his head buried into my neck, squeezing hard. He was my best buddy, my biggest supporter, just a great kid. It was a huge relief. I’d never been cut from any team, except when I was sent down for half a season the first year in Calgary, and even then I wasn’t really cut. To be considered one of the best twenty-three hockey players in all of Canada was incredible. It was something I dreamed about as a kid. I’ve played for my country at least nine times in my career, put the maple leaf on my chest and gone out to win for Canada. It’s a huge deal, a big honour. Not everybody gets to experience what I’ve experienced, that’s for sure.
That night, I went out and scored the goal that broke Joe Nieuwendyk’s team record for career goals scored. Quite a night.
Knowing I might be drug-tested, I had taken myself off everything a full month before we left for Japan. Well, not alcohol—they don’t test for beer—but I did slow it down. The whole team met in Vancouver, and we travelled on the Rolling Stones’ private jet to Nagano. It was pretty cool. A huge plane—it had a bedroom upstairs. Every seat was first class.
THE GAMES OPENED on February 7, 1998. The Japanese don’t do anything small-time. They had built a cherry blossom-shaped stadium just for the Olympics. There were seventy-two nations participating. We arrived the day after the opening ceremonies. There was tight, tight security around us, because of the bombing at the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta and the terrorist killings in Munich in 1972. The Japanese government did not want any of that kind of bullshit to disrupt their Olympics. I remember reading an article about the Nagano police asking local high schools to lock up their baseball pitching machines because they shot balls at ninety miles an hour and that meant they could be used as weapons. All three thousand of us athletes were under twenty-four-hour guard and there were metal detectors everywhere.
The NHL had shut down for two and a half weeks to allow us to compete. Eight lesser hockey countries played in a preliminary round, and the best two—Kazakhstan and Belarus—joined Canada, the U.S., Russia, Sweden, Finland and the Czech Republic in the run for the medals. We played a three-game round robin to determine the seedings for the medal playoffs. Canada went undefeated, winning 5–0 against Belarus, 3–2 against Sweden and 4–1 against the Americans. We beat the Kazakhs 4–1 in the quarter-final, extending our win streak to four.
So what happened? One word: Hašek. He did not let in more than two goals in any game he played. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen him play, but he looks like he’s having some kind of seizure when he stops the puck. You could not score on him on a breakaway. If it were not for him it would have been 25–0 for us. Instead, we ended up in a 1–1 tie. Jiří Šlégr scored first, and Trevor Linden got it back for us with 1:03 left in regulation. A ten-minute overtime settled nothing.
Which set the stage for a fuckin’ shootout. The game—which had repercussions on the medal standings—was decided by an individual skills contest. My point is, how can you decide who wins a team sport by the actions of one or two individuals on slushy ice? The Czechs basically played just for that shootout—they did not forecheck. Once they got that 1–0 lead, they just lined up at the blue line, and when we tried to enter their zone they were like a fucking brick wall.
I was the first player called out to shoot. I came in on Hašek, and not to take anything away from him, but it was so frustrating because the ice was totally shitty. I could not get the puck to lay down. If you expect to score, the puck has to be lying flat on the ice. When the ice is hard and cold, you can control it and it has speed, but when the ice is soft the puck bounces and rolls all over the place.
In the end, the Czechs won the shootout and the game. They went on to beat the Russians, 1–0, in the gold-medal game. The Finns beat us, 3–2, to take the bronze.
I think that Nagano was the first time things started to change on the ice for me. You cannot drink and do drugs and then suddenly stop and not have it affect you. I wasn’t as fast as usual, and when I shot the puck it didn’t always go in the net, which would drive me fuckin’ crazy. I was used to shooting the puck and have it go in the net, now it took me two or three shots. And rage was starting to affect me, not just off the ice. When someone came near me, I wanted to stick him in the face, or cross-check him in the neck or spear him in the stomach. I didn’t because it was the Olympics, but I was starting to get really frustrated.