It’s a cold but sunny day in early April, a few degrees chillier down by Lake Ontario, where Bill and Wendy Berg live on land that’s been in Wendy’s family for three hundred years. They built their house at the turn of the twenty-first century, and filled it with wooden furniture in simple farmhouse style. Today is a perfect day to set off on their bicycle made for two, custom fitted with disc brakes after an unfortunate braking incident some time ago. They laughingly call themselves “country bumpkins” and enjoy taking trips to Disney World in Florida, just the two of them. It’s a simple, fun life, far from the madding crowd.
On most days, they can see across the lake to the city that once made Bill Berg one of hockey’s household names. Twenty-five years ago, Berg was part of the most famous checking line in the world. He went from nobody to somebody just by being placed on waivers by the New York Islanders and getting picked up by the Toronto Maple Leafs at a time when Toronto was awakening from a long, deep sleep and again becoming the most important hockey city on the planet. For Berg, it was going from obscurity to fame in a heartbeat just because one NHL team didn’t want him and the Leafs did.
But now, reviewing his roots in the game and the joy it once brought him is a little more complicated than peering across a frigid lake. The sport that gave him a career and a degree of fame has turned on him. It’s ripped his family apart. He was a traditional grinder when he played. He was an everyman, the player non-NHLers could look at and imagine they could be, if only a coach had liked them, or they hadn’t busted a shoulder at the wrong time. Berg was also a little more open-minded than most, a little more willing to question hockey orthodoxy. When he played, he accepted that orthodoxy to be a good team player, but that didn’t mean he believed in it. On the ice, he was a valuable role-player. Off the ice, he was upbeat with a ready laugh, an NHL player without pretence who could laugh at himself, an athlete capable of introspection. Interviews would often stray into different topics. Life. Finance. Other sports. He remains that same person today. Still curious about things other than sticks and pucks. But now, to some, to the mob that sees any challenge to hockey’s group-think as betrayal, he’s an outlaw, the guy who wants to help wreck the game.
His son, Sam, is challenging the very foundations of hockey in Canada. Once a hockey player with dreams of following in his father’s footsteps, Sam is the lead plaintiff in a controversial, high-profile class action suit against the Canadian Hockey League demanding minimum wage for major junior players in Canada. He was an aspiring prospect with the Niagara IceDogs of the Ontario Hockey League but now wants to change the system he feels did him wrong. Bill Berg, who played in that junior system, is fully behind his son’s efforts, even though he knows former teammates and coaches shake their heads at Sam’s attempt, as they see it, to bring down a system that has brought hockey fame—and wealth—to so many. A quarter century after it was found that Alan Eagleson had lied to hundreds of hockey players over more than two decades as head of the National Hockey League Players’ Association, many players still believe you stay quiet, do what you’re told and just assume the powers that be and the hockey world are working in your best interests. Don’t step out of line. Don’t question tradition. Just accept that’s the way it is, because that’s the way it’s always been done. It’s best to keep the questions to a minimum.
That’s apparently how Bill’s dad feels. For three years, Bill Berg Sr. hasn’t spoken to his son, his daughter-in-law Wendy or his grandchildren. Like many family troubles, it’s complicated, but it stems from a nasty family argument over the lawsuit and the Berg patriarch’s contention that if his grandson is successful, the result will destroy junior hockey in Canada. He worked a blue-collar job at General Motors in St. Catharines, Ontario, for years in order to support his family, and thinks his son and grandson should back off and quit challenging the traditional hockey industry. He found what his grandson is doing to be an embarrassment for him in the community.
Bill Berg Jr., who played junior with the Toronto Marlboros and 546 NHL games for four different teams, remains popular enough with Leafs fans that he still gets fan mail, some of it sent to his parents’ house. They’ll open it, drive down to Bill’s house and put it inside the front door and leave. The family rift has become that distant, that unfriendly. All because of hockey. Bill’s father and mother might attend his daughter’s hockey game at Brock University, but they will leave before speaking to her or their son. “It’s their choice. They chose that they didn’t want us around or in their lives,” says Berg. “We didn’t have to make that choice. They made that choice.”
The business of hockey, of the game Bill Berg loved, has created this unhappy division in his family. The game he loves, the game for which he was once willing to do almost anything to be a part of at the highest level, no longer seems to love him back.
LOSING GAME 3 OF the 1993 Clarence Campbell Conference final didn’t materially change the situation for the Maple Leafs. They’d already frittered away home-ice advantage, and they knew that to win the series they’d have to win at least one game in California. Toronto head coach Pat Burns knew his team well despite the fact that it was his first season with the Leafs. He’d picked up the pieces left after the team’s years of losing, discarded a few of them and hammered the rest into a tight, cohesive team in remarkably short time. They played the game the way he wanted it or they didn’t play. There was no confusion as to who made the calls about what this team did or didn’t do.
In this case, instead of practising on the day off between Games 3 and 4, he told his players to relax and stay away from the rink. Walk down to the famed Santa Monica pier. Grab a bite with a teammate. Losing a playoff game while giving up two short-handed goals might have prompted many coaches to put their team through a hard, detail-oriented practice, but not Burns. Not on this day. He sensed fatigue. He sensed that seventeen games in thirty-four days had drained his team of the energy they needed to take on a deep, motivated squad like the Los Angeles Kings. He also had the confidence to do what he believed was right for his team rather than what the outside world might expect.
But one day off was all they had. After Canadian rocker Burton Cummings played the electric organ and sang “O Canada” and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the Leafs got right to work the next day. For Game 4, they had a slightly depleted roster. Dave Andreychuk was back after being ejected from Game 3, but Peter Zezel was unable to play. He’d suffered a concussion in the first round against Detroit, and now a high hit against the end boards in Game 3 from Alexei Zhitnik had sent him back to the infirmary. That’s what playoffs do. It’s usually not just one spectacular crash but a series of bruises and sprains that wear the athletes down.
Kent Manderville, one of the pieces picked up in the blockbuster Doug Gilmour trade, got the call to replace Zezel on the team’s usual checking line between Berg and Mark Osborne. Zezel was an excellent faceoff man and reliable defensively, and he usually killed penalties with Berg. As a unit, the Leafs checking line had been one of the key elements Burns had sewn together during the season to make Toronto a much more difficult team to play against. The trio had a reputation as a group Burns could use during difficult situations or play against the best enemy scorers. They didn’t expect power play time, their value wasn’t determined by their statistics and they could play their game as well on the road as they did at home. They might even chip in the odd goal, as Berg had done in the third period of Game 1.
Zezel was the general of the group, with Berg and Osborne usually free to roam, forecheck and lay out big bodychecks. So Zezel’s absence left a significant hole in the Toronto lineup. Manderville was twenty-two but still a rookie, and he’d played most of the year in the minors. That meant Berg and Osborne would have to adjust their games to make sure they were covering for the tall youngster out of Cornell University. For defensive zone faceoffs, meanwhile, Burns simply substituted Gilmour for Manderville.
Defenceman Dmitri Mironov sat again, as Burns decided to go with five defencemen and reinserted Mike Foligno and Mike Eastwood. He just didn’t have faith in the big Russian. And Manderville, Foligno and Eastwood were all big bodies as well. The Leafs were a more imposing team for Game 4, and Burns hoped they’d have some fresh legs too.
Dave Taylor had scored the key insurance goal in LA’s Game 3 triumph, and a turnover by Leafs defenceman Jamie Macoun early in the first period of Game 4 gave him a golden opportunity to score again. But Felix Potvin confidently turned it away. After that, the Leafs took over the period. With just over two minutes gone, Gilmour corralled the puck behind the LA net, a place where he was always dangerous. With Marty McSorley waiting for him in front, Gilmour relied on his superb stickhandling skills and ability to play with his head up to evaluate his options. Andreychuk came cruising in from the side with Kings winger Tomas Sandstrom water-skiing on his back, his stick locked into Andreychuk’s body. Andreychuk slogged towards the net anyway and right into McSorley, effectively blocking him like an offensive lineman on a running play. Gilmour seized his chance. He jumped out the other side of the net and tried to jam the puck under Kings goalie Kelly Hrudey. Hrudey made the stop, but the puck bounced into the slot. Wayne Gretzky was in perfect position to clear, but he hadn’t noticed that Leafs defenceman Bob Rouse had quietly sneaked past him from his right point position. No one was expecting Rouse to pinch like that. If he was pinching, it meant the leash was off all Leafs defencemen and Burns was looking for more aggressive play. Rouse grabbed the puck and backhanded it through Hrudey’s legs, and the Leafs had their first lead since the opening period of Game 2.
LA coach Barry Melrose, with the last change always given to the home team, had decided to play Gretzky head-to-head against Gilmour. Despite the Rouse goal, he stuck with that matchup. Less than four minutes later, with Gretzky out again, Burns managed to change the matchup, calling Gilmour’s line to the bench on the fly and quickly getting out the line of Eastwood between Wendel Clark and Rob Pearson. Clark took a big hit from Gary Shuchuk just inside the Leafs zone to move the puck ahead to Eastwood. The Leafs captain had made a similar play early in Game 3, but it hadn’t resulted in a goal or a scoring chance. Still, it was the kind of selfless play coaches wanted to see from their leaders.
Eastwood was moving through the neutral zone with speed. Kings defenceman Rob Blake was caught flat-footed. He twice tried to hook Eastwood, but the big centre kept on motoring to create a two-on-one break with Pearson. At the last moment, Eastwood tried to pass the puck to his teammate, but the puck hit the back of Zhitnik’s left skate blade. Hrudey reacted to the pass attempt by stretching to his left with his left pad. That opened up his five-hole, and the puck bounced through his legs and in. The Forum crowd went silent. The announcement of the goal echoed around the arena. The Leafs had a 2–0 lead in a game they had to win to keep their Stanley Cup hopes alive.
THIS WAS BURNS AT HIS BEST. First, the decision to give his players the day off had given them jump for an important game. And he’d shuffled his lineup again, just as all season he’d moved different pieces around, getting contributions from different players. Finally, his ability to play the matchup game and make a quick in-game reaction had paid off handsomely. His best quality as a coach, the quality that ultimately landed him in the Hockey Hall of Fame, was his ability to quickly read the readiness of his players early in a game and make adjustments based on which ones had it that night and which ones didn’t.
The Leafs hadn’t had a confident, experienced coach like Burns in a long time. The ex-policeman had taken Montreal to the 1989 Stanley Cup final, losing to Cliff Fletcher’s Calgary Flames, and won the Jack Adams Award as coach of the year. His reputation and marquee value were even greater than his actual accomplishments in four years of coaching in the NHL. But after the Habs were swept by Boston in the first round of the ’92 playoffs, ending Burns’s fourth season in Montreal on an extremely sour note, he suddenly became available. Well, first he told media people in Montreal he would never quit. Then he went to Jamaica for a week and came back convinced he couldn’t stay on. He pointed his finger at the media, specifically the French-speaking media, as a problem. “I don’t consider myself a quitter,” he said. “When you’re criticized openly, like I’ve been for the past two weeks, it’s tough to take. When the wagons circle and the arrows start, it’s tough.” Habs GM Serge Savard said he would stand by Burns if he wanted to stay but wouldn’t block his way if he wanted to go because the job had become unbearable. “When he tells me he can’t function anymore in Montreal, should we deal with that problem now or in October?” said Savard. “I told him he could talk to anybody he wanted.”
The Habs could have demanded compensation, like the Philadelphia Flyers had done when Fred Shero bolted for the Big Apple in 1978. The Rangers coughed up a first-round draft pick to get Shero. Nine years later, New York traded a first round pick to Quebec for the right to hire Michel Bergeron as coach. The Nordiques used that draft pick to select Joe Sakic. Generally speaking, coaches—at least those not named Pat Quinn—didn’t walk out on contracts and just go sign with another club unless they’d been fired first. But the Habs wanted to move on from Burns. His agent, Don Meehan, negotiated a settlement for Burns with Montreal, then quickly brokered a new opportunity for him in Toronto.
On May 28, 1992, Burns announced his shocking “resignation” in Montreal, and just hours later he was at a news conference in Toronto being introduced by Fletcher as the new head coach of the Leafs, the proud owner of a freshly signed four-year, $1.7-million contract. Just like that. One moment Burns was the widely criticized coach in Montreal, the next he was a saviour in Toronto, with just enough time in between for lunch and a nap. It was a bit mysterious and certainly unprecedented. Most saw it as a step down. “It’s clear that the Leafs wanted a high-profile coach, which is what Burns always had been,” wrote legendary Montreal Gazette columnist Red Fisher. “He has an uncanny talent for attracting attention, and there’s a rich field for it in Toronto. Getting attention is what Burns is very good at.” Canadiens forward Brian Skrudland wondered if changing NHL times had caught up with Burns. “When Pat first came [to Montreal] he was the type of coach who played the players he thought would win, it didn’t matter if they were making $40 or $1 million,” Skrudland told reporters. “But times have changed for every coach in the sense of salary.” Montreal newspaper columnist Michael Farber said Burns simply saw the writing on the wall and wanted to move on before he got fired. “Eventually he would end up a chalk outline on the Atwater sidewalk, splattered like the stiffs he used to see in his previous career as a policeman,” wrote Farber in the Gazette. “There was too much history in Montreal for Burns to continue here. Too many sour players, too many enemies in the media, too many skeletons in the closet and ultimately not enough goals and certainly not enough playoff victories.” There were also those rumours of interest from the Kings. “I wasn’t interested in going to practice with sandals on,” Burns quipped. Gretzky was close with Burns from their days together in Hull, Quebec, when Gretzky owned the major junior team and Burns was his coach. He doesn’t know if LA seriously pursued Burns. “I have no idea. Nobody ever said to me, ‘Hey, we’re going to meet with Pat Burns.’ I never heard that,” he says.
Fletcher says the Leafs became aware Burns was going to become available long before he quit as Montreal coach. Meehan was a Maple Leafs season ticket holder and close with Fletcher, whose son, Chuck, worked for Meehan’s company, Newport Sports. Fletcher didn’t pursue any other coach. He says now he was never led to believe the Kings were interested in Burns.
The previous spring, head coach Tom Watt had almost got the Leafs into the playoffs after the blockbuster deal with Calgary, but he’d been reassigned to another job in the organization almost four weeks earlier. Terry Crisp coached the Flames to the Stanley Cup in ’89 and might have interested Fletcher, but Tampa Bay had hired him to be that franchise’s first coach the month before. “For a while, it felt like all roads were kind of leading to me,” says Mike Murphy, an assistant coach under Watt, who had NHL head coaching experience. “I thought I might have a chance of getting the job.”
Fletcher’s search for a coach lasted less than a month before Burns fell into his lap like manna from heaven. Like Gilmour from Calgary. In less than six months, the Silver Fox had landed a star centre, the first since Darryl Sittler, and a star head coach, the first since Red Kelly in the 1970s. Like Gilmour, Burns brought lots of baggage with him, not to mention a satchel full of superstitions. But in Toronto, a city that hadn’t seen a truly competitive hockey team since before the NHL-WHA merger in 1979, all that baggage seemed to evaporate. Nobody seemed bothered by the question of why Burns had left Montreal, or the peculiar circumstances of his departure, or wondered if he would be a good fit in Toronto. The Leafs couldn’t win many on the ice, and getting Burns seemed like a victory, just like trading for Gilmour had made the Leafs seem triumphant over Calgary, one of the NHL’s strongest franchises. Any sign of progress or indication the Leafs were no longer a laughingstock was greeted positively. That was perfect for Burns. The same gripes and insecurities that had caused him to leave Montreal would eventually resurface in Toronto, but for now he was, like Fletcher, a top hockey man who wanted to work in Toronto. That was enough.
Burns certainly knew how to play the media game, which gave him an advantage over many of his predecessors in Toronto. He could be blustery, he could be grumpy, he could be philosophical. He could be a bully or he could be playful. He could be an invaluable off-the-record source. He might blast his players in a media scrum then defend them the next day. He was superstitious to a fault, down to the ties he wore or the pen he might use before a win. He could complain to a reporter on the side about a player, then bawl out the same reporter the next day for putting the nugget in the paper even when that was exactly what he’d wanted. He could promote his image as a would-be biker and country music guitar player, and the media would lap it up. To say Burns was perfect for Toronto would be to exaggerate the point. He was an outsider, after all. But he was perfect for Toronto in the fall of 1992, when the Leafs needed someone with the confidence to lead. For the first time in more than a decade, here was a coach who could set a course and handle the attention, a coach with a game plan, a coach who could run a dressing room and convince (or force) players to accept certain roles and less playing time, a coach with the ability to make tactical decisions and judge how well a player was going to perform that night on his first shift. Burns had worked with Mike Keenan on Team Canada’s staff at the 1991 Canada Cup. He was viewed across the sport as one of the game’s elite coaches, and given what he was inheriting with the Leafs, he would need to be.
When Burns arrived, the Leafs hadn’t made the playoffs since 1990 and hadn’t had a winning record in the regular season since 1979. They had only pieces of a quality team. Both Murphy and Mike Kitchen had served as assistant coaches under Watt the season before, and despite not knowing either of them, Burns decided to keep both. Kitchen had played three seasons at the Gardens as a junior with the Marlies, a team that captured the Memorial Cup, and had an NHL career that lasted 474 games. Four years after retiring, Kitchen proposed to Leafs GM Gord Stellick that he could help coach the organization’s minor league team in Newmarket, Ontario, but instead Stellick offered him a position as an assistant coach of the Leafs. He lasted through George Armstrong, Doug Carpenter and Watt, and Burns was officially the fourth Leafs coach he’d worked for.
So Burns had his assistants, and there was Gilmour, who had already demonstrated in forty games under Watt that he could be a number-one centre. Clark was an admired captain, but he had played only 187 games over the previous five seasons because of injuries. Glenn Anderson and goalie Grant Fuhr had been added in a trade with Edmonton the previous season, but they weren’t the stars they’d once been. Anderson was happy to join the exodus of players leaving Edmonton for better financial opportunities elsewhere, but he remembers walking into the Gardens dressing room to find a completely different culture than what he had left behind with the Oilers. “The players were beaten down. They had no belief,” he says. “It was a shock. I went from the best dressing room in hockey to the worst dressing room. I know things are awry when I can’t sleep, and I couldn’t sleep at night.” Anderson scored twenty-four goals for Watt’s team but saw big change coming when Burns took over.
The blueline looked to be the most solid part of the team. Macoun had come over from the Flames with Gilmour, and the Leafs also had Dave Ellett, Bob Rouse and Todd Gill as incumbents on the back end. “Everyone respected [Burns] right away,” says Rouse. “You could see the parts they were putting in place. He made everyone accountable.” Osborne and Zezel were veteran forwards with an ability to check. Mike Krushelnyski and Foligno had been good offensive players, but they were on the downside of their careers. Pearson was a strapping forward who had been Eric Lindros’s winger with the Memorial Cup–winning Oshawa Generals team, and he’d scored fourteen goals in his first NHL season the year before. Eastwood was a hulking centre out of Western Michigan University who didn’t play particularly big but could skate. He’d only played nine NHL games. Manderville could skate and had size, but no one was sure of his position or role. Of the team’s three top prospects—Potvin, defenceman Drake Berehowsky and centre Brandon Convery—none looked ready to be NHL regulars.
Two Russians, Mironov and winger Nikolai Borschevsky, had been drafted over the previous two years and were known for having been part of the gold-medal-winning “Unified Team”—from the remnants of the old Soviet Union—at the Winter Olympics in Albertville, France six months earlier. Their value as NHL players was unclear. Only a few of the Russians who had come to the NHL over the previous five seasons after hockey authorities in the USSR began allowing players to leave had made an impact. Fletcher had lured one of the first players to come, forward Sergei Priakin, when he was running the Flames, and Priakin had been a total bust.
Another player in that ten-player blockbuster trade with Calgary nine months earlier, defenceman Ric Nattress, had bolted as a free agent to Philadelphia in late August just before training camp. Toronto acquired twenty-four-year-old Sylvain Lefebvre from Montreal to take his place. He’d played for Burns, but that didn’t make him immune to Burns’s tough love. “Pat would walk down the bench, say five words [to Lefebvre] in French, and Lefebvre’s game changed just like that,” says Kitchen, snapping his fingers. Lefebvre gave Burns one player who already understood his coaching methods and objectives.
Fuhr and Mironov both reported to camp heavy and out of shape, hardly the champing-at-the-bit attitude Burns was looking for. Fuhr, the highest paid player on the team at $1.6 million per season, was the biggest disappointment. “He’s not in good shape at all. I’m disappointed a bit,” said Burns, whose only other option in the crease appeared to be another veteran acquired in the Flames trade, Rick Wamsley. “We expect [Fuhr] to play a lot of games this season and we need him to be in good shape.” Fuhr admitted he hadn’t been on skates since the Leafs were eliminated from the playoffs the previous spring. “It’s more habit than anything,” he told reporters. “The bottom line is that I’ve got to be ready for the first game October 7 and this has worked every other year.”
Fuhr, aged thirty, had been a central piece of Edmonton’s championship teams, and his dazzling reflexes still made him one of the NHL’s best goaltenders when he was healthy. He just wasn’t healthy very much of the time. He had a happy, upbeat personality, helpful for a team in a high-pressure market like Toronto, and he seemed to be the Leafs’ only real option in net. Wamsley had never been a full-time starter, while Potvin was only twenty-one. Potvin had won top goalie and rookie-of-the-year honours in the American Hockey League the previous season as the St. John’s Maple Leafs—the “Baby Leafs”—coached by Marc Crawford, charged all the way to the Calder Cup final. But he had shared the job with Damian Rhodes most of the season and only had forty-nine professional games under his belt: thirty-four AHL regular season games, eleven playoff games in the minors and four NHL games with the Leafs. Not much to bet on. Fuhr, by contrast, had played 423 NHL regular season games going into the ’92–93 season and 112 in the playoffs. He had five Stanley Cup rings and had backstopped Team Canada over the Soviets in the spectacular three-game 1987 Canada Cup final. He was no longer the durable goalie who five years earlier had played seventy-five games for the Oilers, but it still seemed likely he would be Burns’s clear choice for his starting goalie that season.
All in all, it was clear that while the Leafs had some good veteran players, they weren’t close to being a set team when Burns took over. It was a team with many question marks. The Leafs were winless in three to start the season, but then went on a 5–1–1 run to create a flutter of excitement.
Fuhr’s health, however, became an immediate problem. He hurt his knee October 18 in a 5–1 loss to Minnesota and required arthroscopic surgery. With Wamsley also injured, Burns was forced to turn to Potvin. Potvin, nicknamed “The Cat,” was making just $145,000 a season. He had appeared in four games the previous season, three in November and one in April, losing two and tying one. “There was not a chance in the world I thought I’d be making the team that year,” Potvin says. “I thought I would be going back to St. John’s. Unfortunately for Rick, he got hurt, and I came up. Then Grant got hurt. The door just kind of opened for me.” Potvin picked up his first NHL victory on October 20 against Ottawa. He made eleven starts before Fuhr returned, winning seven of them. He surrendered seven goals in a loss to Detroit, but otherwise the youngster was rock solid, giving up three or fewer goals in nine of those starts. He had a cool, unflappable demeanour and the same butterfly style that Patrick Roy had used while starring for Burns with the Canadiens.
Potvin grew up in Montreal, but he wasn’t coached to play the butterfly. He just started dropping to his knees naturally while stopping shots from his father in the family’s driveway. He didn’t have specific coaching for playing goal until he reached junior with the Chicoutimi Saguenéens of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League and long-time trainer Rénald Nepton started giving him tips. At the time, older goalies in the “Q” like Jimmy Waite and Stephane Fiset were starting to use the butterfly, undoubtedly influenced by Roy. Potvin was drafted by the Leafs in 1990, the third goalie taken in the draft behind Trevor Kidd of the Brandon Wheat Kings and Martin Brodeur of the Saint-Hyacinthe Laser. At that time, goalies like Hrudey, Fuhr, Ed Belfour, Mike Richter, Tom Barrasso, Mike Vernon and Bill Ranford were prominent, all playing either the traditional stand-up style or some form of hybrid.
Roy was the outlier, and the Quebec junior goalies were following in his path. “The biggest difference with me was the depth I was playing at. I always played very deep in my net,” says Potvin. “That’s how I felt comfortable. I could rely on my reflexes.” He was six feet tall, big for a goalie at that time. He’d learned passable English while in the minors in Newfoundland, but the Leafs assigned Lefebvre to be his roommate on the road to give him a francophone veteran to talk to. Burns started to get used to the idea Potvin might be able to fill the void if Fuhr couldn’t play.
Clark was, as usual, the centre of attention, both for Burns and for NHL rumour mongers. He was the most popular player on the team, displaying a rugged, no-nonsense approach to the sport that had first appealed to Toronto hockey fans at a time when Harold Ballard’s destructive ways of running the franchise had left many feeling hopeless. The Leafs had made Clark the first overall pick in 1985 out of the Saskatoon juniors. Michigan State forward Craig Simpson had made it well known he did not want to be drafted by the Leafs, but Clark was happy to come east, endearing him to Leafs fans before he even set foot in Ontario. He had a low-key attitude and avoided inflammatory quotes to the media, but he had a big presence around the hockey club. Even before he officially became captain, succeeding Rob Ramage in 1991, he was the unquestioned leader.
For a franchise run by a blustery owner for years, Clark was a different force, a player who said little but played the game with substance and heart. At times, it almost seemed as if he had been born too late, that his style of play and his unquestioning attitude and loyalty would have been more suited to earlier, simpler times in hockey history. By October 1992, his number 17 still accounted for 50 percent of the team’s jersey sales. He was the best-known and most popular athlete in town, even counting stars like Joe Carter and Roberto Alomar from the world champion Blue Jays. He became the natural successor to Johnny Bower, the most beloved Leafs player from the glorious ’60s.
Still, by the fall of ’92, Clark had never played on a Leafs team with a winning record, and he was damaged goods. Team doctors had told him several years earlier that he should consider quitting hockey because of a serious back problem, and he spent long hours rehabilitating injuries, particularly the troublesome back. The team had become so wary of Clark’s availability that all his contracts were based on the number of games he played. He got so much if he played forty-five games, so much for sixty, and so on. For the ’92–93 season, his salary would rise from $600,000 to $825,000 if he managed to play sixty-five games. “Every single contract I had, if I didn’t get the numbers, I didn’t get the cash. Every single one,” he says. That hardly inspired confidence for either side of a tricky player-team relationship, no matter how much Clark was admired by the Toronto hockey public for his toughness and loyalty. It was as though he played with a giant question mark attached to his uniform. The team was generally mediocre or worse as the eccentric Ballard failed to spend to develop a quality hockey organization, and the conversation often seemed to revolve around whether things would improve once the injured Clark returned from one of his absences. “I never asked for a trade,” Clark says. “I was always just dealing with health issues. Maybe I would have thought differently if I hadn’t had health issues. But most of the time, I was just worried about playing the next day.”
Clark wasn’t a disciplined player, particularly defensively. He’d never had elite coaching as a pro. His helter-skelter style seemed like a poor fit for a team coached by Burns. In those days, with three papers in Toronto responsible for much of the league’s trade speculation, other teams were happy to offer tidbits to Toronto sportswriters that might motivate the Leafs to make moves. It had been that way for years. Or perhaps media folks keen on generating interesting rumours put two and two together on their own. Either way, the Clark trade rumours multiplied. Fletcher had already demonstrated a willingness to move out young players who the Leafs had previously acquired high in the NHL entry draft, having dealt Luke Richardson, Vince Damphousse and Scott Thornton to the Oilers to get Fuhr and Anderson, and then Gary Leeman, Jeff Reese and prospect Alexander Godynyuk to Calgary in the Gilmour trade.
It was logical that Clark could be next, and the likeliest destination again appeared to be Edmonton. Winger Joe Murphy was rumoured to be the key piece coming the other way. One scenario had the Leafs offering Clark and Pearson for Murphy and veteran winger Esa Tikkanen, but then there was talk the Oilers wanted Brandon Convery, the Leafs first-round draft choice the previous June. No deal ever happened, and Fletcher insists the rumours were fictional. “The first time Wendel’s name ever came up was in a deal for Mats Sundin [in 1994],” Fletcher says now. “He was such an integral part of the team, the heart and soul of the franchise. [Edmonton GM Glen Sather] and I had a history going back to my days in Calgary. We’d made the Fuhr trade. But we weren’t exactly close friends.”
Clark’s fragile relationship with Burns was no rumour. Either Burns didn’t like what he was seeing, or he saw the Leafs captain as a useful scapegoat. Right from the start of the ’92–93 season, Burns declined to give Clark ice time with Gilmour and instead used him more in a third-line role. He also publicly criticized his captain. When the Leafs dropped their home opener to Washington 6–5, Clark failed to cover Kevin Hatcher on the winning goal. “That’s a mental mistake,” said Burns. “That’s what I call bad-habit hockey. Those are things players maybe have gotten away with all their life, but they won’t get away with anymore.” When Clark scored his first goal of the season, Burns told reporters, “Anything out of him now would be good.” Clark slumped, managing only one goal in sixteen games at one point while getting little power play time. Then he went down with another injury. When Clark went to the Caribbean over the all-star break while still injured, Burns complained that his captain should have been back in Toronto rehabilitating his injuries. The head coach quietly fumed over his captain’s various health woes. “Burnsie hated to walk in and see guys lying in the trainer’s room with acupuncture needles coming out of them and stuff,” says Murphy. “He thought it was bad for the team to see that.”
Clark says anti-Burns sentiment often united the team as it searched for an identity. “I was the guy he could pick on,” says Clark now. “Everybody rallied around it. No matter who Burns picked on, it was, ‘Fuck you, Burnsie.’ It was about us. Everybody felt for the other guy who was getting it. That was his coaching style. Those kind of coaches know what they have to do for them to win. They know they’re done in three years. Of course, it pissed me off. But as I often explain to people, your players are twenty. Your coach is fifty or whatever. You never see eye to eye. In real life, how many twenty-year-olds hang out with fifty-year-olds? They don’t.”
Murphy had to talk to players, tell them to shut up, take the verbal abuse and work on their games. “There was a gravitational force among that group against Burnsie, definitely,” says Murphy. Gilmour would just “get the look” when he wasn’t playing well, but he would support teammates who were getting the full Burns treatment. “Burnsie wanted us to be mad at him. He knew how to pull the strings, who to piss off,” said Gilmour. Clark believes Burns knew he could be critical of his captain, knowing Clark would respond with farm-bred stoicism. “He knew what he was doing. He knew I wouldn’t say anything, that I’d just take it,” says Clark. “Then, when the next guy was getting heat, he’d think, Clarkie didn’t say anything, so I guess I’m not going to say anything. Did he make me a better player? I’d say yes. He’s there to win. He might push buttons wrong, but he’s there to push buttons. It was the first time I’d played for a coach where the team got coached. Properly. We had more talent in 1986 than we did in 1992. The thing with a coach is he has to get everybody on the same page. Burns did that for our two-year window.”
The Leafs sputtered in November, and Fletcher looked elsewhere to try to find players to help Burns and improve the team’s depth. After first acquiring centre John Cullen in a deal, Fletcher picked up the twenty-five-year-old Bill Berg on waivers from the Islanders. Cullen was the more high-profile acquisition with the bigger salary, but Berg, despite being picked up for nothing except the waiver fee, would prove to be by far the more influential player. After the blockbuster deals he had made to bring in Gilmour and Fuhr, even Fletcher couldn’t have known the significance of the acquisition he had made.
Burns sure wasn’t impressed. He grumbled to reporters he wouldn’t know Berg “if I drove my truck over him.” Berg had been given a termination contract by the Islanders and was thrilled to go to the same city in which he played junior hockey, about an hour from his hometown. He and his wife jumped in their truck and headed north the same day after being picked up by the Leafs, listening as they drove to a radio broadcast of the Leafs losing a game to Chicago, Toronto’s fifth defeat in six starts. As they drove along the Gardiner Expressway into downtown Toronto the next day, Wendy read aloud the newspaper quote from Burns about her husband. Berg shrugged. He was used to not being treated as a very important player. “This was my sixth year pro. You got kicked in the nuts all the time,” Berg says.
He showed up to the Gardens and was greeted by an old friend, trainer Brian Papineau. “I knew him as ‘Pistol.’ His dad had only one arm, but he used to pitch fastball in St. Catharines. I used to run around Lancaster Park, because my dad played fastball too. So I meet with Pistol. The guys start coming in, and I knew some of them who I’d skated with in the summer. So we start with a stretch, and right away somebody chirps, ‘Look out, Bergy, don’t be in the parking lot in fifteen minutes.’ Burnsie comes into the dressing room, looks at me and says, ‘Hey, come.’ So I go into his office. He said he’d never seen me play. Nothing positive was said. I came to learn the sky is black after a loss with Burnsie.” To try and break the ice, Berg tried a little chit-chat. “I said, ‘Al Arbour said he knew you.’ And he said, ‘I don’t know Al.’ He says, ‘Cliff says I shouldn’t have said what I said, and I should apologize….So, go get ready for practice.’ He never did apologize! But that was Burnsie.”
Burns quickly recognized the value of his newest team member, however, and Berg became a reliable “glue” player for the Leafs, a team that surely needed glue. Soon, Burns placed Berg on a line with Zezel and Osborne, and the fit was perfect. On teams in less prominent NHL markets, checkers would barely get noticed. In Toronto, they could be heroes. In a remarkably short time, this new checking line became beloved. “I remember Mike Foligno telling me, ‘Don’t be surprised if people congratulate you on finally making it to the NHL,’ ” Berg says. “And it happened!”
He was given number 10, the number once worn by Armstrong, which tells you how the Leafs treated their former stars in those days. Berg had a breezy personality, but on the ice he could be a royal pain in the butt. He loved to trash talk and chirp at opposing players, particularly the tough guys and enforcers. In general, he was a pest, something the Leafs didn’t have, and fearless. Zezel was an experienced centre, and Osborne was a big man who could hit and had a heavy shot. For Burns, who liked to match lines, the checking line was a crucial element to add to his team. “I was a good skater, and I could anticipate the play. I could move the puck, although I couldn’t score to save my life,” says Berg. “Oz was a good skater, and he could score. He’d scored when he was with the Red Wings. Zez was so strong, and he could move the puck. My thing was just to get in there with speed and create havoc.”
After six years of never knowing whether he’d be in the NHL the next day, Berg suddenly found himself a regular. “I was shocked how I was used. For the first time in my career, I knew I was going over the boards every shift. I’d never had that. It was incredible.” Berg had enjoyed playing for Al Arbour, a four-time Stanley Cup champion. But he saw Burns as just as good a coach. “Burns was so, so good at teaching. He was the best teacher of the game I’d ever come across,” he says. “The way Burns taught and the repetition, every day. You knew what you were supposed to do. You knew your role and exactly how we were going to forecheck. He said to me, ‘We play different.’ He said, ‘It’s going to take you a couple of weeks, but then it’s going to be just like second nature, like you should have been playing that way all of the time.’ And he was right. He would say these simple things. Burns would be teaching us how he wanted us to forecheck, and he would say, ‘See that forward? He’s busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.’ He’d always have these sayings. And they would stick in your mind! And we would practise them over and over and over. Repetition, repetition, repetition.” Berg, like Clark, had to get used to Burns and his acerbic approach. “I didn’t like it at the start. And I didn’t get it. Al would come in and rip the team, but he very rarely went at individual guys,” he says. “Burnsie would go at you in front of everybody else. He didn’t have a problem with that. To me, it was shocking. He’d go after anybody. He’d go after Glenn Anderson, who had how many Cups? He’d go after Pearson. He’d go after Manderville.” Only Potvin, among the young players, seemed to escape Burns’s wrath. When Burns did speak to Potvin, it was in French. “I think he liked to practise his French once in a while. But I didn’t have a lot of long conversations with him,” says Potvin. “He let goalies do their stuff. I could feel the confidence he had in me without him having to tell me.”
Not surprisingly, there was a great deal of grumbling in the dressing room. “There were lots of guys that didn’t like Burnsie,” says Berg. “But I honestly believe he understood his role, and that was he’s gonna call you out if you’re not playing good. He was the taskmaster. He understood he had to be that way to get the best out of the guys. And that was the closest team I ever played on. I’d never gotten along with guys that way. It was just great. Oh, we’d go at it in practice. There’d be fights in practice, but that was because Burns would whip the practices up to a fever pitch, and we all loved to compete. But not in the dressing room.”
By the winter, Berg was a key member of Burns’s Leafs. “Berg was one of the leaders of that team,” says Murphy. “He brought the bottom half of the team together. Said the right things, did the right things, practised the right way. People didn’t realize what he did for our team.”
With the checking line in place, the Leafs became a more difficult team to play against, a team with an edge. The line became as big a part of the team’s identity as Gilmour or Clark. Berg loved to get under the skin of opposing players by chirping at them, while Osborne, a born-again Christian, could be more emotional. “So we’re playing in Edmonton. The benches are close. We’re leaning over the bench and just yakking, just giving it to Dave Manson on their team. ‘You’re terrible! You’re fucking garbage!’ Stuff like that,” Berg says. “So Oz starts chirping, ‘Hey, Manson, you wouldn’t even make our team!’ And Scott Mellanby from the Oilers bench leans over and says, ‘Hey, Oz, that’s not very Christian-like.’ Oz says, ‘You’re right,’ and sits back down. We’re like, ‘That’s all it takes to shut you down, Oz? Really?’ ”
That Christianity theme could work both ways. “We were playing St. Louis, and [Osborne] was getting into it with [Garth] Butcher. Butch was dirty. I mean, really dirty,” Berg says. “So we’ve got a faceoff in our own zone. It’s to the right of Cat. Butch is giving it to Osborne at the faceoff, saying stuff like, ‘You fucking born-again this and that.’ Just laying into Oz the whole time. Zez wins the draw, and they ring the puck around the boards to my side. As the puck’s coming around, I know Butchie’s coming. So I make it look as though I’m watching the puck coming, and at the last moment I just turn and drive my shoulder through him. Just kayoed him. His own stick came up and got him in the face and he was down. Oz skates by, leans over and says, ‘See what happens when you mess with the Lord?’ and skates away. Zez and I were just killing ourselves laughing.”
Around Boxing Day, the Leafs started to roll. They won ten and tied two of their next fifteen games, including an emotional 5–4 triumph in Montreal on Burns’s return to the famed Forum. “After Christmas, the group came together,” Clark says. “Everybody was playing the way [Burns] wanted them to play. Hardest thing for any coach to do. Everyone playing their role and happy about it. I was the same sort of player but more controlled. When you play on losing teams, it’s way harder. A winning team is the easiest team to play on. Just do your piece. On a losing team, every player does that, and a bit more. And a bit more puts you out of position.” It was clear this was a very different club. “We were changing the culture of a sports franchise,” says Anderson. “That’s what made it unique.”
Still, Fletcher wanted to improve the roster more. Specifically, he searched for another winger to play with Gilmour. Borschevsky had been a pleasant surprise playing on the right side, but it had been harder to find a left winger. Conveniently, the Buffalo Sabres were looking for a goaltender. The Sabres had lost in the first round of the playoffs for five straight years, three times to Boston and twice to Montreal. Left winger Dave Andreychuk, six foot four with great hands that compensated for his awkward skating style, had scored thirty or more goals for the Sabres seven times. But he had also been criticized as a prolific scorer during the regular season who couldn’t find the net in the playoffs. In those five first-round losses, he had contributed only seven goals. Some called him “Andrey-choke” for his spring disappearances. “They were getting frustrated with Andreychuk,” recalls Fletcher. So, in another whopper of a trade, the Leafs peddled Fuhr and a fifth-round pick to Buffalo for Andreychuk, backup goalie Daren Puppa and a first-round pick. “There was a fair bit of risk for us, because that meant we were anointing Potvin as our number-one goalie,” says Fletcher. “We didn’t know how he’d stand up to the pressures. But Andreychuk sure helped us.”
Gilmour had enjoyed success in St. Louis and Calgary with wingers like Mark Hunter, Greg Paslawski and Joe Mullen, and he clicked immediately with Andreychuk, who he had played against in junior hockey. “As soon as we got together, I said, ‘Dave, just go to the net,’ ” recalls Gilmour. “He said, ‘That’s where I’ll be.’ ” The Leafs now had a strong first line with the addition of Andreychuk, a sturdy checking unit that had added Berg, a rock solid blueline corps and a standout young goalie in Potvin. “No disrespect to Grant, but I was excited when he was traded,” says Potvin. “Then you realize you’re the goalie for the rest of the year, and you have a chance to stay in the NHL. So that day, I was thrilled.” Still, just to be sure, the young goalie continued to rent an apartment behind the Gardens on a month-to-month basis before moving in with Sylvain Lefebvre and his wife when the playoffs began.
The team was close and unified, and an incident in San Francisco in late February demonstrated that. On February 23, two days before a game at the Cow Palace against the San Jose Sharks, the Leafs held their annual rookie dinner. The idea was to go out, have a big meal with lots of expensive drinks, and make the first-year players pay for it. Many teams did something like it. “Our rookie meals with the Islanders were sort of tame,” Berg says. “Well, this was a blowout. Guys were throwing food around the room, the drinks are flowing. I’m a lightweight; I cut it out after a while and went back to the hotel.” Gilmour went to a pub with a few teammates. Ellett took Mironov and Borschevsky to a karaoke bar. Sometime after midnight, as the players returned to the Westin St. Francis hotel, spare defenceman Darryl Shannon somehow lost his jacket and money when he was jostled outside the hotel. The details are murky. Shannon was apparently told that a person down an alley had his possessions, and when Todd Gill found him there, he was barely conscious and bleeding after being mugged. He was taken to hospital by ambulance. Clark learned what had happened and set out on the streets around the hotel to retrieve his teammate’s wallet to get his identification back, giving out $100 bills to various homeless people.
It must have been a bizarre scene. The captain of the Leafs prowling the alleys of San Francisco like a detective looking for informants. Against the odds, he returned with Shannon’s empty wallet. “See, if I put the problems out, then Cliff and Burns don’t have to put the problems out,” says Clark. “And if Cliff and Burns don’t have to put problems out, then we don’t have problems. If you can solve things in the dressing room before the GM and coach have to, then the team doesn’t get in big shit.” Clark had a straightforward philosophy he applied to being captain. “My buddies are the dressing room. It didn’t matter what team I played on. That was my circle of friends,” he says. “Everybody was looked after. Nobody was ever left out.”
The team assembled for practice the next day, and Shannon had to answer questions from the media about his battered face. “Shanns looks like he’s been dragged across a parking lot,” recalls Berg. “Burnsie comes in, and all he says is, ‘Guys, you win and it all goes away.’ We went out and kicked the shit out of San Jose, and it all went away.” The rest of the regular season, the Leafs were arguably the best team in the NHL. They had come together. They may not all have loved Burns, but they loved winning hockey games.
AFTER STRUGGLING IN Game 3 of the ’93 conference final, the Leafs, having earned the early 2–0 lead, were again a strong, unified team in Game 4. The Kings, meanwhile, just didn’t look like the confident squad they had been in Game 3. It was that kind of series, back and forth, and would continue to be.
Gretzky tried to get his group going, retrieving a loose puck around the Leafs net during an LA power play and backhanding it high over Potvin at 12:22 of the first period to make it 2–1. It was Gretzky’s first goal of the series and the 104th playoff goal of his NHL career. But soon after, Number 99 couldn’t clear the puck high in the LA zone, and Gilmour moved it deeper into the zone to Foligno. The former Buffalo captain backhanded a short pass to Krushelnyski and headed to the net with Kurri trying to prevent Foligno from getting there. Kurri couldn’t, and Foligno tapped Krushelnyski’s return pass home at 14:52 to put the Leafs ahead 3–1. Foligno followed the goal with his characteristic two-footed leap, an enthusiastic postgoal celebration that never failed to get a chuckle from his teammates. The thirty-two-year-old veteran had supplied energy and a goal, vital ingredients Burns had been looking for when he decided to dress Foligno after he had watched the team’s listless performance in Game 3 from the press box.
Always a team that played with more confidence when it had the lead, the Leafs settled into a familiar hard-checking pattern in the second period. Burns could match lines more effectively, and he put Berg, Osborne and Manderville out against the LA line of Corey Millen, Mike Donnelly and Tony Granato, a unit that had been causing the Leafs all kinds of problems with its speed. The Leafs checking line could cycle the puck, and they forced the Millen line to play defence rather than attack. Early in the second, Berg picked up a puck behind the LA net, and when no Kings player came after him, he stepped out in front and fired a low shot that Hrudey had to stop. By the third, Melrose was trying to get the Millen line away from Berg and company.
Once more, it was apparent how the NHL game at that time was designed to allow checkers to stop offensive players simply by lassoing them with their sticks. Body position was not as important for defensive players. Using the stick to reel in an attacking player or making him take one hand off the stick was a great equalizer, even for offensive players like Gilmour and Gretzky. It was an ugly style of hockey in many ways, but to be successful a team needed players willing and able to play that way.
While the NHL had been a high-scoring league that season, this style of play could produce a slower game, and it gave a big advantage to teams able to establish a lead. The Leafs, coached by Burns, were that kind of team. Led by players like Berg, Osborne, Foligno and Krushelnyski, they started to grind on the Kings, taking away time and space, retreating and looking for counterpunch opportunities. The Leafs didn’t need any more goals; they just wanted the game to turn into a total bore, without the kind of high-scoring play preferred by the Kings, who had averaged almost five goals a game in the first two rounds of the playoffs.
The Leafs got another goal anyway to jump ahead 4–1. It came just after the Kings had a great chance to cut the lead. Pat Conacher’s wraparound attempt bounced into the slot, and it appeared McSorley was going to get a point-blank chance. At the last moment, Rouse poked it away, and Lefebvre swatted it out of the zone to send Eastwood on a clean breakaway. Hrudey stopped his shot, and the puck landed just beside the net. Sandstrom had a chance to clear, but he flubbed it, and Pearson jumped on the loose puck and banged it into the open net with Hrudey well out of position.
After that, the game got chippier and bogged down further, just the way the Leafs wanted it. Gretzky set up Blake for a goal with 9:01 left in the third, but that was it for offence from the home team. With four minutes left, the Leafs got one of those classic shifts from their checking line in which the three forwards actually possessed the puck for only a few seconds but killed an entire minute of action. Berg took a run at Zhitnik at the left point, and the puck bounced down the ice. The dedicated Leafs checker doggedly pursued the play and tried to line up Blake in the corner. He missed, but Blake angrily hooked at him. Manderville broke up a Kings rush inside the Toronto blueline, then Berg took a run at McSorley in the neutral zone. Trying to come back against that Leafs team once it had a comfortable lead was like trying to wade through a swamp while being swarmed by mosquitos.
In the final minute, the Kings pulled Hrudey for an extra attacker. Kurri had a chance, but he couldn’t settle a bouncing pass from Gretzky. Berg, on his wrong wing deep in the Toronto zone, backhanded the puck to safety. When LA tried to make one more rush, it was the reliable Berg again who cleared the zone. When the final buzzer sounded, the disgruntled Kings fans no doubt felt that they’d just witnessed a boring game and their team had been lifeless. It wasn’t pretty, nothing you could celebrate in glorious prose, but Burns loved it, as his troops had totally frustrated the Kings with a nearly perfect road game.
The Leafs had received goals from Rouse, Eastwood, Foligno and Pearson, and the line of Clark, Eastwood and Pearson had given them a second offensive threat. Manderville had filled in capably for Zezel. The Leafs were again a team that was about more than just its star players, more than just the sum of its parts. Home-ice advantage had been recovered by Burns and his squad, with two of the next three games scheduled for Maple Leaf Gardens. Toronto’s improbable Stanley Cup dream was alive again.
THE LINE OF ZEZEL, Berg and Osborne became famous that season. They seemed like an unbreakable unit to Leafs fans, like they’d walk together forever. But forever lasted only until May 2009, when the forty-four-year-old Zezel died after years of battling a serious blood disorder, haemolytic anaemia. His health problems left him bloated, no longer the handsome, charming athlete who had once landed a bit part alongside Rob Lowe and Patrick Swayze in the 1986 hockey film Youngblood. Zezel’s death came as a shock. “He stopped by here one day when he was sick. He was on his way to Niagara Falls, but I didn’t believe he was that sick,” says Berg. “That was Zez. He let you in, but just a little bit. Always had a kind word. But you never really knew what he was thinking.”
Berg and Osborne see each other occasionally. “But once we get together, it’s immediately like old times,” says Berg. Both have tried a little bit of everything in their post-NHL lives. Osborne did some radio, working on postgame Leafs broadcasts, and became a pro scout in the Los Angeles Kings organization. Berg got his securities licence, owned a bottled water company, worked in media, including radio and television, did some part-time scouting for the Minnesota Wild for six months and coached hockey at a private high school for three years. These days, he and Wendy own two low-rise apartment buildings near Beamsville, Ontario. They have twenty-one tenants and more than a few hair-raising stories about drug addicts and fraudsters. The tenants probably don’t realize the guy clearing the snow on a nasty January day used to be on their television set every Saturday night on Hockey Night in Canada. “I dabbled around all the hockey stuff,” he says. “It’s not that easy to stay in the game. Now I enjoy dealing with tenants, doing the fixes, doing the bookwork. It’s something different all the time, and I don’t have a boss.”
Then there are the complications of Sam’s controversial lawsuit. It’s a worry, and it drags on, but Berg has no doubt he’s doing the right thing supporting his son. Sam’s story is both simple and complicated. He was drafted in the fourteenth round of the OHL draft in 2012 by the Niagara IceDogs and was also taken in the United States Hockey League draft by Muskegon. Sam went down to Muskegon, Michigan, made the team and was committed to going there until he got a call from IceDogs boss Marty Williamson saying they wanted him. On behalf of his son, Berg demanded four years of guaranteed payment for tuition and books at a Canadian university from the IceDogs as a condition of leaving Muskegon. He wanted an iron-clad commitment. “My thinking was that it would be like in the NHL when they have to choose between a one-way contract and a two-way contract,” says Berg. “They’re more committed to the one-way, so it always wins out.” The two sides agreed to terms. “I made sure I read the contract carefully. I had just lost twenty-five thousand dollars in a bad real estate deal.”
Sam started the season with the IceDogs but soon wasn’t playing much. After only one month, the team wanted to send him to St. Catharines Junior B or to another USHL franchise. Ultimately, he reported to the Junior B team then was traded to another club, where he injured his shoulder. After Christmas, he quit. But the OHL said it never officially approved his deal with the IceDogs, and the team refused to honour it. Instead of suing the team, Sam decided to become the lead plaintiff for the class action suit that alleges the Canadian Hockey League “conspired” to force young players into signing contracts that break minimum wage laws. The suit seeks $180 million in outstanding wages, vacation, holiday, overtime pay and employer payroll contributions. “Our position is our players are amateur student-athletes,” said CHL president David Branch. “It’s important that we defend this, because it could have a huge impact on all amateur sport in this country.”
The court battle could go on for years. Berg sees the $50 or $60 a week a junior player receives along with other benefits as just one example of a larger issue. He mentions the US women’s hockey team fighting USA Hockey before the 2017 world championships for a living wage and the ongoing debate in the NCAA over the question of paying student-athletes while coaches get multi-million-dollar contracts and lucrative shoe deals. Decades after the death of “amateurism” as an Olympic ideal, some sports organizations and leagues are still trying to keep the concept alive rather than compensate their athletes. “They’re all swimming in the same pond,” Berg says of so-called amateur athletes.
Berg isn’t involved in hockey at all anymore, other than to cheer on his daughter, Annie, when she skates for her university team. Sam no longer plays. Berg admits that his post-hockey career hasn’t always been easy after years spent “scratching and clawing every day as a pro, wondering every day which jersey I was going to be putting on.” As a civilian, like a lot of former NHL players, he has searched for the keys to a new existence. “Some days, Wendy would think I wasn’t happy with her,” he says. “I would tell her, ‘I just can’t get going today.’ When I played, there was such meaning to train all summer, to go to camp, to win my spot on the team. After so many years locked into that, to be so intense, so focused, once you got into the wilderness, you wonder where’s the meaning.” His career ended at age thirty-one. Somewhere along the way, the dream died. “I felt like maybe I could have possibly played a little longer. But I realized my lot in life, at best, was to be a third-line player. Well, I didn’t grow up thinking I’d only ever be that.”
If he doesn’t fit in the hockey business now, he certainly did back in ’93. He figured out the hockey life well enough to get drafted into the NHL as a defenceman, switch to forward as a third-year pro and then find a role in the world’s best league on its most high-profile team as an irritating, difficult player to skate against. For a time, while he was a Leaf, doing that job made him famous. That’s hockey. In Toronto, you could become extremely well-known for doing the same things that wouldn’t get noticed on teams that weren’t in the same media spotlight. In general, stars always get the most attention, but in hockey, there’s always an appreciation for the muckers, the players who do the grunt work. They’re often seen as “honest” players, athletes who play the game the right way, and do it with passion and intensity every night.
That was Berg. When he was in hockey, banging bodies, trash-talking his opponent and checking like a fiend, he was in all the way. He personified the hardness of that Leafs team. “I was ready to do anything to get ahead,” he recalls. “I wanted it so bad.”