Grant Fuhr had seen an oncoming forward bent on mayhem hundreds of times in his 15 NHL seasons. It came with the territory of the blue paint. But the outcome of the scrum in front of the St. Louis net in Game 2 of the 1996 Western Conference semi-final would be anything but routine. With a possible sixth Stanley Cup ring in sight that spring, Grant had staked the Blues to a 1–0 games lead in their playoff series against Toronto. Eight minutes into the second contest, however, agitator Nick Kypreos of the Maple Leafs crashed Grant’s net in search of the puck. The Blues defenceman, six-foot-five Chris Pronger, quickly moved to clear Kypreos from the crease, using his bruising physical style to shove the Maple Leafs forward.
It was actually just a routine shot from the side that kind of got knocked into the front of the net. There was a little bit of a scramble. I got down to cover up the puck. There was the usual push-and-shove, push-and-shove with Kypreos and Prongs that you get all the time in the playoffs. Next thing you know, Kypreos kind of turned and leaned over and fell on my leg, which just happened to be in a vulnerable spot. I had somebody’s stick or leg caught under my leg, so it couldn’t get flat. I knew as soon as he landed on it something was wrong, but I had no idea what. I’d had Timmy Kerr fall on me before that, a lot bigger than Nick was. But this was different. We weren’t very happy for a couple of months afterwards.
That would be an understatment. St. Louis coach Mike Keenan outright accused Kypreos, a journeyman tough guy, of attempting to injure his star goalie, who now had a torn anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), a torn medial collateral ligament (MCL) and a torn meniscus as a result of the play. “[Kypreos] deliberately tried to make contact with [Fuhr],” Keenan claimed after the game. “He wasn’t pushed into him as everybody thought he had been. In fact, our defenceman tried to push him away from the goaltender. But he made direct contact, and it resulted in a season-ending injury to a very key player on our team. It’s unfortunate that he decided … maybe his coach did, I don’t know … to take out a premier player on our team. There’s no excuse for it.” Years later, Keenan was no less certain. “Absolutely he fell on him,” he recalls. “Every time I see the tape of the play I come to the same conclusion.”
“He didn’t fall on him. He jumped on him,” says Blues teammate Geoff Courtnall. “On purpose. Grant had the puck in the crease and he tore out his knee. Of course, I can’t say I haven’t ever hit a goalie, either.”
Grant was no less steamed when he finally talked to reporters after the game about the slo-mo Kypreos tumble. “If a guy drives the net I have no problem with that. It’s a good, honest play. But if there’s a pileup and a guy jumps on a goalie, that’s a joke. The job is tough enough trying to dodge those linebackers bumping into you left and right. There’s no mystery what Kypreos was thinking … If I get run into again I’m taking someone with me. I lost one knee. I’ll take a head if it happens again.”
The loss of Fuhr for the rest of the playoffs (and who knew how long into the next season) was a major blow for both Grant and the Blues. With his old Oilers teammate Wayne Gretzky now on board to join Brett Hull and the defensive duo of Pronger and Al MacInnis, there had been hope—and a considerable economic stake—in a sustained run at a first Cup in St. Louis. “Here’s the thing,” recalls Courtnall. “That year we had a great team. Wayne was there. Hully was there. Pronger was great. We were deep. Mike had put together a really good team. We had a chance. Without Grant we took Detroit to overtime in the seventh game, and I think if he’s healthy it would have made the difference, we win that series and maybe go the whole way.”
Considering the acrobatic, flexible nature of Grant’s goaltending style and his age (34), a surgically reconstructed knee raised major doubts about his ability to continue what he’d built in 1995–96. The Fuhr/Kypreos crash became the biggest story in the early rounds of the 1996 NHL playoffs.
The fact that Grant was in a position to be a major storyline in an NHL playoff season might have come as a surprise to many hockey observers just a year earlier. After reaching rock bottom in Los Angeles the previous summer, when Grant had resolved not to sign again with the Kings, it had seemed that the injury-plagued goalie was now a scrap-heap option, washed-up and nothing more than backup material. But he and his agent Mike Barnett believed there was still a place where Grant could carry the load as a No. 1 starter. “It was a matter of finding the right place for him,” says Barnett. “There was still plenty left in the tank as far as I was concerned.”
I wanted to go home to Edmonton that summer, just sit and weigh my options. Mike Barnett thought he could get me an offer to be a No. 1 guy somewhere. I just told him I wanted to see what offers there are, if any. At that time, Mike Keenan was trading everybody in St. Louis. He had decided to trade Curtis Joseph to Edmonton. Keenan was in Edmonton for the 1995 draft, and I remember him calling me, saying, “If I gave you a million dollars, would you come to St. Louis and play?” “Yeah.” That’s a no-brainer of an idea. He says, “Do you have a fax?” I’m like, “Yeah.” “I’m going to fax you a contract.” “Okay.” Sat and waited. Sure enough, he faxed me a contract for a million bucks a year. That’s how I ended up going to St. Louis.
With Keenan heading into the second season of a three-year tenure in the Gateway City, the Blues’ roster was changing rapidly. He wanted to win, and he wanted to win now. The former Philadelphia Flyers and New York Rangers coach had overhauled the look of the Blues by signing free-agent veterans such as Shayne Corson, Dale Hawerchuk, Brian Noonan and Geoff Courtnall. Keenan had also traded the Blues’ beloved power forward Brendan Shanahan to Hartford for a still-green defenceman named Chris Pronger. He then planned to shuttle Joseph (who was a contract holdout) to Grant’s former team in Edmonton for two first-round picks.
With Cujo gone, the door would suddenly be open for Grant to grab the job as Keenan’s No. 1 starter. The two men were hardly strangers: Keenan had not only coached Fuhr in the 1987 Canada Cup but, as an opposing coach, had seen what Grant was capable of when his Flyers had been beaten in two Cup final meetings with the Oilers. “At the top of his game he was the best goalie in the world,” says Keenan. “I’d seen it first-hand.” The only question remaining was what was left in that body and mind. Could Grant do it again?
The answer came when Keenan, visiting in New York City in the summer of 1995, had a chance encounter with Wayne Gretzky and his wife, Janet. “I was sitting having as drink at an outside patio when, all of a sudden, a taxi pulls up to a stop and out jumps Wayne,” recalls Keenan. “I asked him if he could stop for a drink. He says, I’ll be back in an hour. Sure enough, he and Janet show up an hour later.” Over a glass of wine, a curious Keenan asked the Gretzkys whether there was anything left in Fuhr. Absolutely, Wayne and Janet chimed in. He just needs a little confidence right now, said No. 99. He’s just waiting for another chance. In the mercurial Keenan, Fuhr had found the believer he needed to jump-start his illustrious career.
Back in St. Louis, Keenan’s long-simmering contract squabble with Curtis Joseph had led to the seemingly locked-in goalie holding out. While Keenan was not afraid to spend his owner’s money, he dug in on Joseph. Rather than acquiesce to his star goalie, Keenan cobbled together a replacement plan in the form of a couple of once highly regarded netminders. Grant and Jon Casey would take Cujo’s place while Joseph was dealt to Edmonton in August of ’95 (where he continued to hold out until he got a deal he liked in 1996). To justify the trade, Keenan explained to reporters that Joseph was out of shape, but when the decision was announced, most thought it was more impulsive “Mad Mike” than Iron Mike. The hockey world scoffed at the idea that a washed-up Grant Fuhr was the answer to anything—let alone a substitute for Joseph. But after the endorsement from Gretzky, Keenan was defiant as usual. Fuhr was going to be his man and lead the Blues into the playoffs.
Grant soon discovered that he was walking into a hornet’s nest.
I didn’t realize that Curtis had just come off being the most popular player in St. Louis. I had missed that news somewhere along the way. I got to St. Louis, and we’re already behind the eight ball. The most popular guy on the team had gotten shipped out, because Mike said he wasn’t in good enough shape. Turns out Curtis was in better shape than I was.
I got to training camp there in what I thought was okay shape for me. I was about 212. I thought I could do what I always did: play myself into shape. Mike wanted to see it a little bit differently. Mike had played with the scale a little bit, so the numbers he reported were a little different.
“The truth is Grant showed up maybe 20 pounds overweight, marked his weight down on the sheet and then went up to his room,” says Geoff Courtnall. “Keenan looked at the weight he’d marked down and said, ‘Go get Fuhrsie.’ I was right there. They went and got him out of his hotel room and weighed him again. And Keenan sent him home and told him when he gets in shape he can come back. But you know, it probably revitalized his career from that point.”
Keenan reported that Fuhr had come in at 219 pounds and had failed to finish the VO2 bike-riding segment of the pre-season physical exam. Grant offered reasons for the failure: his left knee had bone spurs that prevented him from taking the bike test, and the pins inserted surgically in both his shoulders ruled out the military-style bench press. Keenan was unmoved and suspended his newly acquired saviour. People around the Blues who’d been counting on a chiselled Grant Fuhr to lead their team took a big gulp. “Anyone who tells you they weren’t in a panic at that point is a lying sack of s—,” Blues forward Brett Hull told SI.
I got shipped home after a week and decided I was just going to go play golf. When I flew home to Edmonton, a friend picked me up. We went over to the university hospital to get weighed. I mysteriously lost seven pounds on the flight home. There was something a little amok. Which was fine; it was Mike’s way of saying hello.
While I was suspended I went to Boston to play in a golf tournament. Meanwhile, the rest of the guys just happened to be playing an exhibition game in Boston, and Mike found out about it. My fault for being out golfing instead of being back at camp. I got told that I should get back to St. Louis and be ready to play. I got back and we had a conversation. “I won’t say anything bad about you, if you don’t say anything bad about me.” It was little late: I’d already been getting roasted in the paper for a week. There wasn’t much more bad that could be said about me.
Mike says, “Here’s how it’s going to work. Play, and I’ll tell you when to stop.” I’m like, “Okay.” At Christmas it was, “You tired?” I’m like, “Nope.” “Good. Just play.” I’m like, “Okay.” February: “Are you tired?” “Nope.” “Fine. Just play.”
Rather than risking Keenan’s ire again, Grant decided he might try to be more vigilant about his physical conditioning. Blues trainer Ray Barile hooked him up with famed St. Louis–based track and field trainer Bobby Kersee, whose wife Jackie Joyner-Kersee was the world record holder in the heptathlon at the time. Kersee, who had a reputation as a taskmaster, took one look at the tires around Grant’s waist and designed a stretching and conditioning program for him. He also issued a fatwa on Grant’s diet of junk food, urging him to eat healthier.
I was in the habit of eating munchies late at night in front of the TV. All that had to go. I wasn’t a fanatic about it: we still put cream in my coffee in the morning. I still ate a burger once in awhile. But the rest of the time it was good stuff. I became good friends with Bobby, because he would push, and push, and push—which some days you needed. Some days it just hurt, and it wasn’t very much fun, and it was pretty easy to lose the focus on what you’re trying to do. He made it fun. Or as fun as that kind of stuff can be.
Pretty soon, Keenan was boasting about Grant’s body fat level dropping almost as fast as his goals against average. But it wasn’t all good news. Grant’s pre-season home debut went awry as the rusty goalie allowed five goals on just 12 shots before being yanked in the second period for Bruce Racine—to the cheers of fans at the Kiel Center. But the Blues coach/GM and his streamlined goalie got the last laugh. Setting records for goalie activity, Grant appeared in 79 games that season, all but three of the Blues’ contests that year. If it weren’t for a strained knee in a game against the Wings on March 31, he could conceivably have started every single game for St. Louis that year—a feat never accomplished in the 82-game NHL. He broke the NHL record for consecutive games started within one season by going 76 straight (prior to that the record had been 70, last accomplished in 1963–64 by the Bruins’ Eddie Johnston). It was the comeback effort of the decade, with Grant posting career bests in just about every category, topping his old save percentage by four-tenths with a .903 mark and posting his first sub-3.00 GAA (a 2.87 average in the 79-game haul). He also led the league in shots faced (2,157) and saves (1,948). “When I coached Grant in St. Louis he was an absolute workhorse [for us],” Keenan recalls. “I won’t say I expected him to play every game, but I knew he could handle the work. He was a great athlete who was able to master his position as a goaltender with incredible stamina, reflexes and instincts for the position.”
Much of this was accomplished in front of a putrid offence, making every goal Grant allowed a crucial one. To win the Stanley Cup, Keenan knew he needed more than a stingy defence. In March, the Blues struggling offence got a jolt when Keenan pried Wayne Gretzky out of L.A. with a massive trade (when the Maple Leafs declined to acquire him). Gretzky joined Grant and fellow Edmonton alumni Glenn Anderson, Charlie Huddy and Craig MacTavish on the Blues. The acquisition of “The Great One” was necessary for St. Louis to make the playoffs, as their vaunted offensive talent hit a major power outage in 1995–96, scoring just 219 times (43 of those goals provided by Brett Hull alone). Only the Devils and Senators scored fewer. In fact, eight of the 10 non-playoff teams produced more goals than the Blues that year. Still, with 80 points they snuck in past a few teams to claim the fifth seed in the tightly bunched Western Conference.
By that point, Grant had won over his coaches and teammates. “Almost every night he’s been one of our top players,” Blues assistant coach Bob Berry told reporters. “We used to sit on the bench and say, ‘Damn, did you see that save?’ ” said St. Louis defenceman Al MacInnis, Grant’s former rival in Calgary. Without Grant, said Brett Hull, “We’d have won five games, maybe seven, honest to god.” In spite of the heroics, Grant finished sixth in Vezina voting. He also finished sixth in the Hart Trophy contest. Curiously, his Hart vote total (taken by the media) ranked him ahead of all five goalies who’d finished ahead of him in the Vezina vote (according to the GMs who voted).
You can’t put too much attention in that sort of thing. Maybe I’d been a little harder on general managers than on the media by that point. Who knows? It’s all good now.
In Game 1 of the Blues’ Western Conference opening series with Toronto at Maple Leaf Gardens, Grant marked his return to playoff hockey after a three-year absence with a 31-save performance. (He was beaten only by an old nemesis and teammate, Doug Gilmour, on a power play.) Based on his dominating performance in front of a national TV audience on Hockey Night in Canada, Grant looked ready to supply championship goaltending to a team loaded with stars—not a team that had just finished with a mediocre 80-point season. With Gretzky and Hull supplying offence while Grant made like a brick wall, there was hope entering Game 2. Enter Kypreos and the dying swan dive. The good vibes surrounding Grant and the Blues snapped along with Grant’s ACL and MCL when the Leafs forward fell on his leg during Game 2 of the opening round.
I was pretty mad at Nick for a while. Now we laugh about it when we see each other. These things happen in the playoffs. He was just trying to help his team, not hurt me. Anyhow, I went back to St. Louis and they took an MRI of the knee. Not so good. I decided that, okay, the ACL’s gone. The MCL’s gone. If I put a brace on, can it work?
For Keenan—still livid at Kypreos and Toronto coach Pat Burns—even a remote chance to keep his goalie in the net was worth exploring. “We’re going to explore every possibility—if Grant wants us to, and I think he does,” Keenan told reporters.
I went out to one morning skate and thought, “Well, it’s not hurting a whole lot.” Standing there, I was fine. I was like, “Maybe I can do this.” As soon as I went down, though, we were stuck. Didn’t realize you actually have to have ligaments to get back up. The knee bent in a funny spot and it wouldn’t unbend. No stability, nothing to push on—that was a problem. So I had to have a lovely four-and-a-half-hour surgery. I’d never had a major surgery before this. It had just been minor stuff, cleaning things up. In those days, they’d do an ACL repair and an MCL repair in separate surgeries. But I had an ACL, MCL and meniscus completely done at once. Which, for the two days afterwards, I could feel in its entirety. It had my undivided attention.
With Jon Casey replacing Grant in net, the Blues subdued Toronto in six games, but then fell in seven to Detroit. Game 7 went to double OT before Steve Yzerman’s famous long shot beat Casey and sent Detroit to the next round. It was one of the most dramatic goals in playoff history, and the heartbreaking finish only made Grant’s knee feel worse. There was just one way to ease the pain.
I decided I was going to make it back, and told them I wanted to make it back for training camp. They said, maybe by Christmas, but I wanted to be back before that. I never would’ve gotten back as soon without Bob Kersee. Not a chance. Maybe I might not have gotten back at all. Bob pushed the flexibility and strength, and every time you felt like you were hitting a wall, he would push you through that wall. Then you’d sit there and shake your head trying to figure out what happened.
I think that the pain was part of it. Every time you thought you got to a certain point, he’d take it away from you so there was nothing to focus on, and you’d have to go back to the start and push again. The way he pushed Jackie, though—I think I got the lighter end of the deal. I could leave him there at the end of the day. To train with him, one, it was a lot of fun; two, it was a learning experience to see what he and Jackie went through every day for her to be best at what she did.
Grant arrived at Blues camp in September 1996 ready to prove that his rehabilitation was complete. Typically, he downplayed the pain and anxiety of the summer’s gruelling work with Bob Kersee. An insouciant Grant told the Blues beat reporters, “It’s been a four-month vacation. I think it’s been long enough.” Keenan was hopeful but knew the history of recovery from such knee problems. “I knew if anyone could do it, it would be Grant. But at his age I knew there were no guarantees.”
I had decided the first day of camp I was going to skate. I went to kneel down and felt something sharp in my knee and was like, “That’s not going to work.” One of the heads of a screw was kind of sticking out a bit in the front of the kneecap. We had to run over to the doctor’s to get that taken out. He kind of opened it up, took a Black & Decker drill out and just backed out the screw. Yeah. They just put a little local freezing in it. I was kind of hoping for something advanced and elaborate, but he just backed it out like [it was in] a piece of wood, which I didn’t find very amusing.
With the screw fixed and the knee stable, Grant launched into a remarkable comeback that made his Iron Man show the previous season look pedestrian. Showing the resilience that defined his career, Fuhr recovered from what could have been a career-ending injury to post a nearly identically superb season. Ironically, 1996–97 was to be Grant’s first—and last—year free of major health woes since the Canada Cup/Stanley Cup double in 1987–88. Playing with renewed confidence, he was again a workhorse for Keenan, appearing in a league-high 73 games while posting a career best 2.72 GAA. “Nothing Grant does surprises me,” remarked Gretzky, who had left the Blues for the New York Rangers as a free agent that summer. “They counted him out in Edmonton, in Toronto, in Buffalo and in Los Angeles. But he came back. I knew if there was any way possible for him to come back from that surgery last spring, Grant was the one person who could do it. That’s why he’s so great in goal; he never gives up. He thrives on proving people who say he’s finished wrong. He’s a special player. Some might say he’s the comeback player of the year. To me, Grant Fuhr has been counted out so many times that he should be the comeback player of the decade.”
Grant, meanwhile, was his laconic self about all the fuss. “I think sometimes people lose sight of the fact that it is a game, and they take it too serious,” he told reporters. “If you happen to give up a goal, you’re not going to die from it. If you just relax, enjoy it and remember it’s a game, you can survive in this game a long time.”
With his knee healthy, Grant was left alone by Keenan, who was now coming under pressure himself for his dramatic and costly moves—ones that hadn’t gotten St. Louis to the promised land. He also had his hands full with some of his other players, such as the famously irascible Brett Hull.
Mike just left me alone and let me play, which was awesome. He was too busy with Hully; he and Hully were having their feud. Brett and I were at the rink together every day, played golf together every day. He had his own theories on the world at that point, Mike had his, and they were not in the same universe. I sat beside Al MacInnis, who I played against all the time when I was in Edmonton, and we looked at each other and said, “It’s not like that in Calgary and it certainly wasn’t like this in Edmonton.” Mike and Brett would yell at each other, but it kept life pretty entertaining. My best Hully story is probably when he and Mike had an argument one night in the middle of a game. Hully stomped into Mike’s office between periods and you could hear Hully kick his desk, and Hully came limping back out screaming, thinking he’d broken his foot in between periods of the game.
Making Grant’s successful return particularly special was his ability to adapt his game to a changing NHL. The freewheeling league he joined as a rookie in Edmonton was quickly morphing into a league dominated by defence and coaches obsessed with video. The average goals-per-game in the league was dropping quickly from a peak of eight in the early ’80s to under six. Equipment changes were also making life very different for goalies brought up in an earlier era: butterfly coaches such as Francois Allaire (and his prized pupil Patrick Roy) were pushing goalies to be enormous walls of padding—not lithe acrobats like Grant.
When I started in Edmonton it was athletic. We moved around a lot, because the game moved around a lot. Then it became very positional, where everything taught was about angles, taking away space. It wasn’t so much you had to go get the puck—you just took away space and let the puck come to you.
The change in equipment started with goalies such as Rejean Lemelin going to new, lighter Aeroflex leg pads. They were cut square and filled with foam instead of horsehair, and their weight was almost half that of the old pads. What at first seemed strange and uncomfortable soon became the standard for young goalies entering the league, and the classic leather pads vanished within a few years. Similar innovations in gloves and body armour followed.
You couldn’t go on with less equipment and guys shooting the puck at the same speed. That leaves marks, so the changes were good in that respect. But I really didn’t go for the full switch. The new pads they wore kind of kicked out the puck. I wanted the puck to stay near; I didn’t want it jumping all over the place. I tried some of the different pads over the years and didn’t like the control they gave me, so I had a combination of the old and the new stuffing. It’s the same with gloves: I always wore a small catcher’s glove all the way right through to the end, just because I wanted to catch the puck and be able to control it. If the glove is too big you lose touch with the puck. Knocking it down doesn’t do you any good; it means you’ve got to be able to find a rebound somewhere. By the time I retired, I was getting too old to try and chase it around, so you wanted to control it.
I was always taught that you’re in control if you can catch the puck. You make it easier on your defencemen, more than anything.
The other innovation changing the sport was the use of video to analyze the tendencies and strategies of opponents. Roger Neilson—who coached seven different NHL teams—was the pioneer in the use of tape. Instead of coaches relying on their gut, they were now checking the video in between periods to improve their team. That also meant analyzing goalies such as Grant for ideas on where to shoot and how to distract him.
One of the major distractions for Grant the year before, of course, had been Kypreos. But this time there would be no Nick Kypreos to haunt him in the playoffs. Grant would get to start all of the Blues’ games. Unfortunately, there wouldn’t be that many of them. The first, however, was stellar: a shutout that stunned a Detroit crowd expecting their Red Wings to roll over the inferior Blues. Detroit outshot St. Louis 30–27 in that opening game, but they couldn’t make a dent in Grant’s defence. In the third period alone he turned aside 15 shots, including a full short-handed situation with two minutes to end the game. Detroit goalie Mike Vernon kept the game close, but he wasn’t able to keep the Blues off the scoresheet.
Said Blues coach Joel Quenneville, after coaching his first NHL playoff game, “[Grant] made a couple of saves that were unbelievable. I don’t know how he did that.” Grant was more matter-of-fact. “Defence wins playoff games,” he said. “We’re playing good defense right now.”
Grant’s second shutout of the series was a 4–0 win at home in Game 4, which knotted the series at 2–2. Grant stopped all 28 shots from the powerful Red Wings offence led by Steve Yzerman, Sergei Fedorov and Brendan Shanahan. This was no ordinary Detroit team; it was a club embarking on the first of two straight Stanley Cups. So while Detroit rallied to win the next two games (and the series), Grant’s play against the eventual champions was yet another example of how, even at age 35, he was still a goalie who saved his best for the big games. He posted a sparkling .929 save percentage in the series and a 2.18 GAA while recording two of his six career playoff shutouts. The Blues’ inability to score on Detroit doomed the team—and Keenan. Now the only opponent who could get the best of Grant was Father Time.