Even now, the crowds are there. The expectations and the crowds. It’s more than forty years, maybe even forty-five, since they first started to gather. Wayne Gretzky never chose the crowds any more than he chose to have sublime mental and physical talents that made him perfect to play the sport of hockey. He accepted both, one a blessing, the other a duty. He instinctively understands what others want from him and has almost always delivered. So there have never been stories out there about Gretzky snubbing a kid, or behaving badly in public, or sticking a hand in a cameraman’s lens. He sees dealing with his public as his responsibility, almost like a royal. He gives back to the game. He doesn’t complain, at least not within earshot of anyone but family and close confidantes. He always says the right thing. The one time he didn’t, thirty years ago, when he called the New Jersey Devils a “Mickey Mouse organization,” it followed him like a bad smell for years. He has never made that mistake again. The next time he created a storm of controversy with his public remarks, at the 2002 Winter Olympics when he cited “American propaganda” and said the hockey world “hates Canada,” it was an intentional effort designed to divert attention from the troubles of the Team Canada squad he had put together as executive director.
When Gretzky arrives, he does so quietly. Bobby Orr can light up a room, make everyone feel special with his jokes and smiles and back slaps. You know he’s there. Gretzky is just Gretzky. Unassuming. If he picks you out in a crowd, steps away from a press conference and walks over and asks you a personal question or gives you a snippet of his insight, it feels more like he’s being considerate, bringing you into his confidence, his circle. He’s always been just as comfortable stepping back and observing while somebody else is speaking. He’ll always wait his turn. He accepts the spotlight and the crowds, but has never seemed to need either.
But these crowds he’s anticipating are different. This week, he’s outside his element. He’s a golfer at one of the world’s most famous courses, Pebble Beach, in California. The crowds haven’t come to see him. Not exactly. But a crowd is a crowd, right? And in golf, you can’t get lost within a team. When you step to the tee, the focus is on you. This is the prestigious AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, an event that attracts the stars of the PGA and celebrities from all walks of life, and he’s playing alongside his famous son-in-law Dustin Johnson, who is married to his oldest daughter, Paulina. Gretzky’s a better than average golfer. His drives still require a walk of 250 yards or more before hitting his second on a good day. That leaves him just 100 yards behind Johnson. “The crowds are hard for me, because first of all, I’m not that great. The expectation of people is because you’re an athlete, you’re supposed to be a really good player,” he says. “That makes it tough. But I’ve played enough with Dustin that I know if I hit a bad shot, or if I’m out of the hole, I can pick up my ball. It’s not going to affect anything for him. I know, no matter what I do out there, it’s not going to affect what he does or how he plays.” These crowds are even bigger than usual, as the Gretzky-Johnson tandem is paired with Jordan Spieth and country music star Jake Owen. You want pressure? Try being one of the greatest hockey players of all time standing on the tee at number 8 at Pebble Beach, with the waves of the Pacific Ocean crashing into the spectacular jagged rocks on your right, just begging you to lash your drive there, as three or four thousand people watch along with your pro golfer son-in-law. That’s pressure. “I’m a legitimate twelve or thirteen handicap, so I can hit some good shots, I can hit some bad shots,” says Gretzky. “But Owen is a two handicap, so I’m the fourth best player in the group. We’ve played enough times you learn to battle through it.” You get the sense that after being the best, Gretzky doesn’t mind being less than that. Just one of the guys. It would be perfect if it were just the guys. No crowds. But duty calls.
Golf is his game now, although he dabbles in tennis with his youngest daughter, fourteen-year-old Emma. She’s an aspiring young player who is coached by former Canadian Davis Cup team member Philip Bester. But it’s mostly golf he plays, and definitely never hockey, which can make the old back woes roar to life again. He admires his son-in-law’s deep love for the sport. “He really has a passion for it, you know? The year he lost in the U.S. Open in Seattle [2015], when he missed that putt to win, we were all going to Idaho as a family for a while,” Gretzky says. “They came for three weeks, and he played golf every single day for twenty-one days. You either have it in you, you either love it, or you don’t. I couldn’t imagine losing Game 7 of the Stanley Cup final and getting up the next day and playing shinny hockey with a bunch of buddies. Just couldn’t have done it. But he played every day for twenty-one straight days.” Maybe he couldn’t imagine losing a Game 7. He could certainly imagine that kind of dedication to a sport. That was him a long, long time ago.
It’s 2018, and twenty-five winters have passed since the last major peak in his career, the 1993 Stanley Cup playoffs with the Los Angeles Kings. Most of those winters have been spent under the palm trees enjoying the warm temperatures of La-La Land, very different from his early days in Brantford, when he would be the one spending hour after hour, day after day, learning to play hockey in frigid temperatures on a backyard rink, dedicating himself to the pursuit of excellence in his sport.
Hockey, at least as a player, exists in his past, not his present. But he loves being a time traveller. He gets asked about many of his exploits in the game, including that series against the Maple Leafs in the ’93 Clarence Campbell Conference final. He never seems to tire of the stories, either his own or those of the players and coaches he played with. His memory is excellent, and he tells the stories with gusto, not as if by rote. He’s got opinions, some strong ones, but never speaks ill of the game. He particularly enjoys telling stories that give credit to others. Like Orr, and the late Gordie Howe, there’s always a humbleness about him, an absence of the kind of ego you might expect and accept from an athlete who scaled the heights Gretzky did.
Gretzky chats for an hour about the Leafs series, then texts a couple of other memories, then calls back to add a little more. He talks enthusiastically about what it was like to play at Maple Leaf Gardens, where he’d first gone as a six-year-old with his grandmother. It was a twenty-six-year journey from that point to Game 7 against the Leafs, about the same amount of time that has elapsed since. Draw a timeline of Gretzky’s extraordinary life in hockey, and Game 7 against the Leafs at the Gardens comes almost smack dab in the middle. “I remember Game 7 from the night before to the morning of,” he says. “I remember everything about it.”
IT WAS CLOSING NIGHT. All the main characters had assembled for the dramatic conclusion of the series between the Leafs and Kings. If it was an Agatha Christie novel, Hercule Poirot would have been there, prepared to name the murderer. No matter how good the overall performance would be, and it would surely have to be something to top the previous game, this was closing night. All that was known for sure was it had to come to an end, one way or another.
Bruce McNall sat up high in what passed for a “luxury” suite at aging Maple Leaf Gardens, close to the spotlight he craved, joined by Hollywood celebrities John Candy, Peter Guber, Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell. McNall had become a Kings fan in the 1970s when nobody else had been, and now he was on the verge of getting to the Stanley Cup final as owner of the team. For a few hours, none of the things that had happened in between mattered. Not on closing night.
He could just cheer for the Kings.
His Leafs counterpart, Steve Stavro, was there in the directors box behind the penalty benches with his key lieutenants. Stavro thought of himself as a great Canadian, and here he was, running the Leafs as they attempted to return to the Cup final for the first time since 1967. The Greek immigrant had made it to the inner sanctum of Toronto the Good. Cliff Fletcher, the man Stavro wanted to fire, who had orchestrated the building of this Toronto team, was in the press box. He’d brought in Doug Gilmour and Pat Burns, both of whom had been front and centre in the series since Game 1, since Gilmour got whacked by Marty McSorley, and since Burns had charged across the aisle to get at LA coach Barry Melrose. Kelly Hrudey and Felix Potvin, goalies from different generations, were again set to backstop their respective teams. Hrudey’s mid-season problems were all behind him. He’d been just a bit better than Potvin in Game 6.
Bill Berg and his mates on the Leafs checking line, Peter Zezel and Mark Osborne, were prepared to try and shut down the star-studded LA attack for one more game. Burns might not have known Berg at all just a few months earlier, but now he was a key Leaf. McSorley, his black jersey so oversized it looked like it should belong to a three-hundred-pound man, prowled around the Gardens ice, itching to get going.
Then there was Gretzky. All but silent for five games, he had scored the winning goal in overtime of Game 6 on a perfect pass from Luc Robitaille. He seemed to be finding openings that hadn’t been available to him earlier in the series. Number 99 hadn’t been in a Cup final since leaving Edmonton five years earlier, since scoring the Cup-winning goal at 9:44 of the second period at Northlands Coliseum to sweep the Boston Bruins four straight. The Oilers had won without him in 1990, and now this was his chance to show he could win without the Oilers.
A few blocks away from the Gardens, the acclaimed musical Miss Saigon had opened a few days earlier at the new Princess of Wales Theatre on King Street to the largest box office advance in Canadian theatrical history. But there was only one show in town this night. “I remember going out for warm-up in Game 7 and thinking, This is one of those events that is going to be big in the history of the NHL,” says LA winger Mike Donnelly.
It was the seventieth Game 7 contest in NHL playoff history, but curiously only the fourth at the famed Gardens. Previously at the Gardens, there had been Game 7s in the ’42 Cup final, the ’64 Cup final and the second round of these 1993 playoffs against St. Louis. The Leafs had won all three of those Game 7s by a combined 13–1 score. In fact, Ottawa-born Syd Howe of the Detroit Red Wings had the distinction of being the only visiting player ever to have scored a goal in a Game 7 at the Gardens. Howe scored the opening goal in the ’42 final, but the Leafs scored the next three to complete a magnificent comeback from being down 3–0 in the historic Cup final.
The narrative between the Leafs and Kings had been building for thirteen days. Game 1 had the dramatic fight between McSorley and Clark. Game 2, the Kings bounced back. Game 3, thirty-seven-year-old Dave Taylor scored a key short-handed goal to give Los Angeles a 2–1 series lead. In Game 4, the Leafs reclaimed home-ice advantage. The fifth game at the Gardens was ended by Anderson’s dramatic overtime winner, concluding a terrific goaltending battle between Hrudey and Potvin. Game 6, arguably the most thrilling game of the series, would always be remembered for The Call by referee Kerry Fraser, the decision not to penalize Gretzky in overtime.
Now it was time for Game 7. The Montreal Canadiens were waiting to battle the winner. They’d been waiting for five days. Hockey Night in Canada had already held planning meetings about how they might best approach a Toronto-Montreal final, a matchup that would surely grab the attention of the entire nation. The weather had cooled since hitting 25°C mid-month, and now it was a comfortable 17°C. Nice and dry, too, for fans parking their cars or walking along Carlton Street with tickets in their hands. As the two exhausted teams prepared for one final joust, beer sales were brisk in the Gardens, and scalpers demanded ten times the face value of tickets and even more.
Gretzky arrived hours before game time, just like another NHL superstar had once mentored him. “Guy Lafleur taught me when I was younger—and I guess Bobby Orr taught Flower—that the sooner you get to the locker room, the sooner you can focus on the actual game,” says Gretzky. “Nobody can call you, nobody can talk to you. I left for the Gardens about five hours before the game. I get there, have a coffee with the trainers. In those days, it was more of a locker room, not like a lounge. Just a training table and a little TV. You’d sit there for a few hours. I do remember I was scrambling around trying to get tickets. Friends had wanted seats, and friends of my family wanted seats. I knew the scalper out front, who’d been there forever. The clubhouse boy would go out and say, ‘What do you need for four tickets?’ And I’d trade three signed sticks and a jersey and maybe a pair of gloves so I’d get what I needed.” The training staff knew Gretzky liked to have four sticks ready for every game, each with sticky black tape lightly covered in talcum powder. He used two-piece Easton aluminum sticks, which took a little longer to prepare.
If the game itself didn’t have enough significance, Gretzky knew his beloved father, Walter, would be on hand. Walter Gretzky had suffered a near-fatal brain aneurysm in 1991, just five days after his fifty-third birthday. It was only a year and a half later, and he was still very much in recovery mode. “It was a hard time for my entire family,” says Gretzky. “At that time, he wasn’t that aware what was going on, because they had him on a medication that was really a downer, protective against a heart attack. So we knew we wouldn’t get a true reading of where he was at until we started weaning him off of this drug that kept him a little comatose, for lack of a better word. But we knew he was making progress. We also knew we had time on our hands and where he was at wasn’t the final result. It was a blessing he was there.”
Gretzky was still wearing the flak jacket and getting a pregame painkilling injection for the broken rib suffered in the first round of the playoffs. But given that nine months earlier there had been fears his career was over, the rib seemed like nothing. “By the time we got into the playoffs, I was feeling like a young kid again, energetic and excited,” he says. “Those forty games I missed were probably important in my career in that it showed me how much you miss the game when you can’t have it.”
Friends and family of Kings players and coaches were girding for a hostile welcome at the Gardens. It had been that way since the ugliness of Game 1. For Game 7, Donnelly’s father, Mike Sr., courageously decided to wear an LA Kings jacket to sit in the middle of an arena filled with Leafs fans. He sat beside Dave Taylor’s wife and the wife of Kings broadcaster Jim Fox and decided the easiest way to calm the Leafs fans sitting around them would be to play bartender. He started buying beers, making friends and easing the tension before the opening faceoff.
In the Toronto dressing room, the Leafs were trying to get their collective energy up for a game they wouldn’t have dreamed they’d be playing back at training camp the previous September. They’d won a pair of Game 7s to get here, beating Detroit in overtime in the first round of the playoffs, then whipping the Blues to end a hard-fought series. They needed one more Game 7 victory to get to the Cup final, but they were running on fumes. Gilmour had continued to get intravenous fluids after every game. Potvin was losing six to eight pounds every game in the heat of the Gardens and the Forum and spent most of his time on the off-days trying to eat and drink as much as possible.
The Game 6 loss been deflating. Berg was still blaming himself for not rotating down to take Gretzky on the overtime winner. Clark had played the greatest game of his career and it was still not enough. Potvin had got his pad on Gretzky’s winner but just failed to keep it out. Anderson had felt like his teammates blamed him for his late-game penalty in Game 6 and was trying to shake it off. Among all the Leafs forwards, he had the most significant reputation as a clutch playoff scorer. He had eighty-seven goals in 164 playoff games going into Game 7, two more than the great Islanders winger Mike Bossy and fewer than only his three former Oiler teammates Mark Messier, Jari Kurri and Gretzky.
The Toronto defence, in particular, looked worn out. Burns had used only five defencemen most of the series, while the Kings had rotated six, sometimes seven, as they would again in Game 7. In particular, Burns had leaned heavily on twenty-nine-year-old veteran Dave Ellett, his best all-around defender. Ellett—born in Cleveland near the end of the long minor league hockey career of his father, Bob—was tall, good-looking and talented. His teammates called him “Roy,” as in Roy Hobbs, the hero played by Robert Redford in the baseball film The Natural.
Advancing to the Cup final seemed like it would be the next step in a natural progression for Ellett. He’d been part of an NCAA championship team in 1984 with Bowling Green University, a title won in quadruple overtime over Minnesota-Duluth at the Olympic Center in Lake Placid. He’d graduated to the NHL and the Winnipeg Jets, and soon scored twenty-two goals as a flashy offensive defenceman with a big shot. He’d already known defeat at the NHL level. His power play goal against Edmonton in the 1990 playoffs had given the Jets a 3–1 series lead. The Oilers had roared back to win the series, but Ellett’s goal was still regarded as the biggest postseason goal in the team’s history. Like his close buddy Clark, he had been around and had paid his dues. This seemed like his time, perhaps his chance to play hero again. “Ellett wasn’t an emotional player on the ice, but he was an emotional voice in the room,” said assistant coach Mike Kitchen. “He supported Clarkie. He made everyone accountable. He took on so much ice time for us in those playoffs.”
Since Gretzky and Gilmour had faced off in Game 1 to start the series, 1,381 minutes and one second of action had taken place. Each team had three wins. Each team had won once in overtime. Each team had won once on the road. The Leafs had scored nineteen goals, the Kings had scored seventeen. It had been as close and hard-fought a series as a series could be. Gretzky had two goals and four assists in the first six games, while Gilmour had accumulated four goals and six assists. So far, Number 93 had out-produced Number 99 in the ’93 conference final.
Anderson had scored four of the Leafs goals and Clark had three, which meant the three Leafs—Gilmour, Anderson and Clark—had combined for more than half of Toronto’s offence in the series. The Kings hadn’t received more than two goals from any one player, and thirteen different LA players had scored. The Leafs had received two goals from their defencemen, while the Kings had five from their blueliners. The numbers didn’t lie: for six games, LA had been getting more offence from more players and using more defencemen to share the burden, while the Leafs were relying on a smaller group to carry them to the next round. “At that point, it’s really about mental endurance, the strength you hope you have as a team,” recalls Leafs assistant coach Mike Murphy. “Well, the Kings had chipped away at a little bit of ours.”
LA’s victory in Game 6 had buoyed the Kings. Both teams carried the weight of their respective history, and a deciding game like this came with intense pressure for both clubs and all the players involved. Hockey players, by habit, liked to feel more of the pressure was on the other team, that they could just play free and loose without the same consequences. It eased their angst and pre-game jitters. It didn’t matter what was actually true. It mattered what players believed. “By the time we got on the ice, we honestly felt the pressure wasn’t as much on us as it was on them,” says Gretzky. “Everyone was hoping for a Toronto-Montreal final. That was the talk of the country.”
Both teams needed to be better. Toronto’s power play had gone south, and they’d given up four LA power play goals in Game 6. The Kings, meanwhile, had blown two-goal leads in Games 5 and 6. They were making things unnecessarily difficult for themselves by not being sound defensively.
As the fans filed into the Gardens, many were wondering if Dave Andreychuk or Nik Borschevsky would ever score again. They’d both been reliable scorers all season but had come up dry against the Kings. For the fans, it had been so long since the Leafs progressed this far in the NHL postseason it was hard to have any expectations. This playoff run had been a surprise, a pleasure, but now that it was coming to an end, Toronto supporters didn’t know whether they should be thrilled at what had been accomplished so far or hungry for more. It all seemed a little unreal.
THE LEAFS STARTED GILMOUR between Clark and Anderson, and they immediately sped away on the attack but were then whistled for offside. Seconds later, Leafs defenceman Jamie Macoun, who had taken two slashing minors in Game 6 to put LA on the power play, was penalized for cross-checking. With only fifty-nine seconds gone, the Kings already had the man advantage again. The line of Gretzky between Tomas Sandstrom and Luc Robitaille, and Corey Millen between Tony Granato and Mike Donnelly, both generated excellent chances. The Kings top skill players had lots of open ice early, and they were flying.
Granato suffered a nasty cut to his face while being driven into the end boards as part of a four-man pileup involving himself, Donnelly, Bob Rouse and Sylvain Lefebvre. “Lefebvre had a chance to get me back after something I’d probably done to him,” says Granato. “I expected that.” Donnelly says it was actually his stick that cut his teammate as he tried to take a hard run at Lefebvre. Regardless, Granato was bleeding profusely from the jagged cut to his upper lip and cheek. “I was trying to stop my upper lip from hitting my nose as I skated,” he recalls. Trainer Peter Demers just taped the cut together and Granato returned to the fray, re-taping the ugly wound after every shift.
Soon after, Mike Foligno jumped to try and get his glove on a puck flipped high through the neutral zone. Like a defensive back cutting down a receiver, Tim Watters low-bridged the Leafs veteran, who landed on his head. Foligno wore a bowllike Northland “dome” helmet, one of the ugliest buckets in the history of the game. But it might have saved him from serious injury on that occasion. He crouched in pain on the Leafs bench as trainers Chris Broadhurst and Brent Smith attended to him. As he rose to his feet, three fans squeezed by, trying to leave their seats for the concession stands. The Gardens was that intimate, and the players were afforded that little room on the benches. Foligno didn’t even look surprised or irritated that he had to make room for the fans to pass.
At 8:45 of the first, the Kings were caught with too many players on the ice, the kind of dumb mistake that tends to be costly in big games. As McSorley was trying to get off the ice and Rob Blake was trying to get on, Alexei Zhitnik touched the puck in front of the LA bench. After a series in which so much ugliness had gone unpunished, it seemed like a minor offence.
But it was the visitors and not the home team, that capitalized. McSorley had danced around Macoun for a good chance earlier in the period, and even though the Kings were short-handed, McSorley jumped into the play again. “Barry kept telling us, ‘You can’t be afraid to play,’ ” says McSorley. Not that McSorley had ever been afraid. But after arriving in the NHL as an enforcer-in-training he had become a versatile rearguard capable of playing at both ends of the ice. He could play offence with the most skilled players in the world.
Leafs defenceman Dmitri Mironov, who had reported to camp nine months earlier out of shape and had been in and out of the Burns doghouse all season, was back in the Toronto lineup after being scratched the previous three games. It was a signal Burns knew his defence corps was dangerously tired, but he didn’t trust Mironov much. For the power play, however, Burns decided he would give the big Russian a shift. There shouldn’t have been as much risk with the Leafs holding a man advantage. But there was.
Gilmour turned the puck over to Kurri just inside the LA blueline and the Kings took off on the rush. Todd Gill hit Kurri hard into the Leafs bench, but Gretzky was following the play and grabbed the loose puck. McSorley joined the rush, giving the Kings a two-on-one break, with Mironov back. It was exactly the same scenario as Game 3, when Mironov had faced McSorley and Kurri on a break, and he played it just as badly.
Mironov positioned himself between Gretzky and McSorley, taking away neither the shot nor the pass. Gretzky slipped the puck across to McSorley who, instead of firing it into the yawning net, passed it back to Gretzky. Mironov, spinning like a top, didn’t cut that off either.
McSorley’s pass wasn’t a good one. It was behind Gretzky and into his skates. Most players in that tight to the net couldn’t have made the play. Gretzky, of course, wasn’t most players.
He deftly turned his right skate out, redirected the puck to his stick and coolly shot it into the Leafs net at 9:48 of the first period with Potvin sitting on his rump at the far post. It was classic Gretzky, a difficult play he made look routine. Only a few players could make it. “No other player in the world could react that quickly,” says Hrudey. The Kings had killed the Leafs with their power play in Game 6, scoring four times, and now they’d scored a short-handed goal to get the all-important first goal of the game. Gretzky, assisted by former Oiler teammates Kurri and McSorley, became only the second visiting player in NHL history to score in a Game 7 at the Gardens.
It was the third short-handed goal of the series for the Kings, and short-handed goals tended to have more impact than any other kind. Teams on the power play were never supposed to surrender a goal. Ever. When they did, it was a massive breakdown. The Leafs liked to use Gilmour short-handed to create that opportunity. The Kings often sent out Kurri and Gretzky, two of the greatest scorers in NHL history, knowing they might score short-handed and deal a demoralizing blow to the opponent.
With three minutes left in the period, the line of Gilmour between Andreychuk and Borschevsky, so important in Toronto’s second-half success that season, had a terrific shift, creating several chances in the LA zone. The puck skittered into the corner, and then the Kings broke out of their zone with an emboldened McSorley again leading the rush down the middle of the ice.
McSorley moved the puck to Gretzky on his right, and the LA superstar found Sandstrom alone in the slot. Sandstrom fired a low shot past Potvin’s blocker and the Kings had a 2–0 lead. The Gardens was in shock, as were the Leafs. “I thought we were heavy. Things weren’t coming easy,” recalls Anderson. “It felt like we were still on the plane, and we weren’t bouncing the way we should. We had the momentum going into Game 6, but it was taken away and we didn’t know how to get it back.” McSorley’s offensive aggressiveness was paying off, and Gretzky had more room to make plays than he’d had in the whole series.
The Leafs, however, had become a hard, tough team since first assembling as a mishmash of veterans and unproven youngsters the previous fall. Just as they had in Game 6 while trailing 4–2, they fought back with all they had. On the power play to start the second period, they got off the mat and delivered a heavy blow of their own.
Andreychuk attacked on the right wing, not his usual left, and drove around Watters, who sprawled to the ice. Not known as a playmaker, Andreychuk normally would have either taken the puck to the net or shot, and Blake came across to try and thwart either play. Instead, the big winger drove around the net, his head up the whole time. Nobody noticed Clark cruising into the slot. Andreychuk put a pass right on the stick of Clark, who buried it past Hrudey to make it 2–1 at 1:25 of the second. The Leafs were on the board, and the game started to pick up speed.
Ellett went to retrieve the puck behind the Toronto net and Shuchuk tripped him, causing Ellett’s left knee to bang hard into the boards. He took a few moments to get up, and the Leafs were on the power play again. The Kings killed that off, but they had to spend more time in their own zone to do it, adding to the sense the rink was tilted. Off a faceoff in the Los Angeles zone, Gilmour ended up with the puck in the corner and Corey Millen holding him with both arms, having dropped his stick. The Leafs centre kept his feet moving, squirming loose. Anderson, reading the play, bolted for the open ice between Donnelly and Watters, and Gilmour found him with a perfectly timed pass. Anderson barely touched the puck before shooting it off the post and in, tying the game 2–2 at 7:36. It was his eighty-eighth career playoff goal. Game 7, like Game 6, was turning into a contest in which the Kings could build leads but couldn’t protect them. Mike Krushelnyski almost scored a minute later on a pass from Borschevsky, and suddenly it was the Kings who appeared to be tiring. Melrose called a timeout, desperate to get his team to regroup and regain its composure.
Still, the Leafs pressed furiously. Osborne hammered McSorley with a heavy hit along the boards in the Kings zone, sending the LA tough guy flailing to the ice. Manderville, the Leafs rookie, jumped on the ice with Zezel and Osborne, spelling Berg. Burns was trying to find more bodies to help the cause. Melrose, seeing inexperience on the ice, spotted his opening. He sent Gretzky over the boards. Sandstrom carried the puck down the right boards over the Leafs blueline ahead of Gretzky, who was trailing the play.
One of Burns’s key defensive tenets was to always check for the trailing player on the rush. Leafs assistant coach Mike Murphy shouted at Manderville from the bench to do just that as the play moved down the ice. Lefebvre had Sandstrom, Rouse was close enough to Robitaille to check him and Manderville’s job was to come across and take Gretzky, the trailer. The Leafs were in perfect defensive position.
But when Sandstrom made the drop pass, Manderville tried to sweep it away with one hand and missed it. Gretzky grabbed the puck, stepped inside and took a slapshot from twenty-five feet, beating Potvin clearly on the glove side. It was a mistake by Manderville. Then again, it was also a mistake by Burns, who had a rookie out against the greatest scorer in league history. “That goal was just vintage Wayne Gretzky,” says Robitaille. “I felt we were going to win when he scored that.” The Kings had absorbed a second-period haymaker from the Leafs, and not only had they kept standing, they had jumped ahead again, 3–2, with Gretzky suddenly the most dominant LA player on the ice with two of the three goals and an assist on the other. “We were climbing a mountain, and it seemed like there was a lot of sand at the top,” says Anderson.
The two clubs adjourned to their respective dressing rooms after forty minutes, unsure if they had one more period to play in Game 7 or if the series, for a third straight game, would go to overtime. The visiting dressing room at that time was incredibly small, an L-shaped room with one urinal and one toilet stall. Hrudey had his routine between every period of taking enough of his gear off so he could urinate. He went to do so only to find his way blocked. “John Candy and Mike Myers were around a lot,” Hrudey recalls. “So I had to wait, because they were using the toilets. I remember thinking, How absurd is this?”
The third period began with the Leafs behind 3–2, but once again they tied it, and once again it was Gilmour and Clark doing the work. Clark was hacked to the ice in the Kings zone and for a moment lay stretched flat out, spinning on the newly cleaned Gardens ice surface. But he jumped to his feet as Gilmour retrieved the puck behind the LA net. Watters tried to get to Gilmour but caught his leg on the side of the Kings net. Gilmour delivered a pass nearly as perfect as that with which he had found Anderson in the second period, and Clark drilled home his fifth goal in two games to again tie the game, 3–3, at 1:25 of the third. There was bedlam at the Gardens. The Leafs simply wouldn’t go down and stay down, and it seemed like the two clubs were determined to produce an even higher level of entertainment than they had in the classic Game 6 contest. The intensity and passion the Leafs and Kings had brought to the competition was off the charts.
Neither team wanted victory more than the other. Neither appeared to be decisively better than the other. There were plenty of potential heroes on both sides, plenty of players toughened by years of playoff experience. But only one team could advance to the Cup final.
After six goals had been scored in less than forty-two minutes, suddenly the well dried up for both clubs. The game stayed tied 3–3 for five minutes, then ten minutes, then twelve minutes. An agonizing eternity. Waiting. Wondering. Overtime loomed again.
With just over ten minutes left, Berg shrugged off an LA checker at the left boards and took the puck hard to the LA net. He went flying over a diving Kings defender, but the puck stayed out. Zezel stole the puck outside the Kings zone with eight minutes and stepped into a slapshot, but Hrudey came fifteen feet out of his crease to stop the shot. Andreychuk took a pass from Gilmour but shot the puck over the net. Gilmour was knocked down from behind, then Blake knocked him down again.
The Kings line of Millen, Donnelly and Granato raced back the other way. Granato crossed the Leafs line with the puck and moved it across the ice to Zhitnik as Donnelly headed for the net. Donnelly, a native of Livonia, Michigan, had come out of Michigan State University as an undrafted player despite having scored fifty-nine goals in forty-four games in his senior year, out-duelling Brett Hull of Minnesota-Duluth for the NCAA goal-scoring crown. He’d also scored the winning goal against Harvard in the 1986 NCAA championship game. As an NHLer, first with the New York Rangers, then the Buffalo Sabres and now the Kings, he’d never been put in an offensive role. “I was always driven to score,” he says. “I wanted to score. I knew I could score more in the NHL than I had.”
Zhitnik lost control of the puck for an instant, then slapped it towards the net. It hit the leg of Rouse and glanced directly through the slot, past Lefebvre, to Donnelly at the right post. Potvin had no chance whatsoever as Donnelly swept the puck into the open side to give the Kings their third lead of the game, 4–3. “I’ll never forget it,” says Donnelly. “It was just a broken play, and the puck came right to my stick. There was no chance I was going to miss that one. It was the biggest goal I ever scored in my life.” Donnelly raised both arms in celebration, then jumped into the arms of McSorley and both Kings crashed to the ice. After fourteen minutes and forty-four seconds, the tie had been broken. It was the third goal scored against Gilmour and his line. But with 3:51 left, there was still time for more heroics from the Leafs.
Still time to change history.
On the next shift, Melrose sent out Pat Conacher and Dave Taylor, who he liked to use to start games on the road immediately after a goal had been scored by either team. Seeing the night Gretzky was having, Melrose sent him out as well. “That’s one of the things I learned when I played with great players, guys like Borje Salming and Darryl Sittler in Toronto,” says Melrose, a Leaf from 1980 to 1983. “They never played enough. I had no problem with Gretz going out with the fourth line. He was smart. He didn’t expend a lot of energy all the time.” The Leafs countered with the unusual threesome of Anderson, Krushelnyski and Borschevsky. It was almost a random selection of players. No Gilmour, no checking line.
Four Kings defended, while Gretzky lingered just outside the visiting team’s blueline. Taylor, falling to the ice, chipped the puck past Ellett to Gretzky, who reached behind him with his right hand on his stick and pulled the puck forward to himself. Hounded by Gill, Gretzky skated down the right side, around the right corner of the Leafs zone and behind the net. He was alone, not a teammate in sight. Ellett, Borschevsky, Anderson and Krushelnyski had skated back hard and were in position. The rest of the Kings were changing.
Ellett, confident Gill had Gretzky under control, turned counter-clockwise away from the Kings superstar, looking for any other LA players. There were none. Gretzky flipped a backhand pass to the front of the Toronto net. “One of the things that Barry had drilled into everybody’s head all year long was one guy high and one guy go to the net hard, especially when an offensive guy has the puck,” says Gretzky. “I was just throwing it to the front of the net. Fortunately for me, and unfortunately for them, it just ricocheted off [Ellett’s] skate and went in. Did I do it on purpose? No. One hundred percent, no.”
There wasn’t an LA player in sight as the puck hit Ellett’s right skate and rolled just inside the right post at 16:46, the second Kings goal in thirty-seven seconds. “That one hurt,” says Potvin, who tried to kick at the puck before it crossed the goal line. “I just remember looking around, knowing Gretzky was by himself. I didn’t want to give him a wraparound chance. He threw it in front, and there was no time to react. I’ve looked at it many times. You don’t see another LA player around.” Melrose still isn’t so sure it wasn’t an intentional play. “People say he was lucky,” he says. “How can one man have that much luck in his life?”
Gretzky was elated. From the bench, he looked across the rink at his father, confident that despite Walter’s groggy condition he would still understand the moment, and pumped his right glove. “I wish I hadn’t noticed it, but I noticed Wayne gesturing to his dad,” says Hrudey. “I thought, Oh my God, I just caught an incredible moment. Right away, I wished I hadn’t. I was distracted.”
Just before the announcement that only one minute remained in the third period, Andreychuk’s shot was blocked by Blake in the LA zone. The puck bounced to Ellett, who buried it past the distracted Hrudey inside the right post with sixty-seven seconds left. It was 5–4. “The Leafs are not quite dead,” said commentator Harry Neale on the Hockey Night in Canada broadcast. “But they’re not breathing very hard.”
Burns called a timeout. The Leafs coach put his arm around Clark’s shoulder as he talked, and he tapped Anderson to tell him he’d be going on for Potvin once the way was clear to pull the goalie. Over on the Kings bench, Melrose told Gretzky to go over the boards and was surprised at the response he received. “That was the only time in my career when a coach said go, and I said no, it’s not the right thing,” recalls Gretzky. “I wasn’t ready. We had to do everything not to allow a goal. I felt like if they tied it up, we were going to be in trouble.”
All season long, knowing Gretzky would often start to take off his equipment on the bench in the dying minutes in order to get out of it quickly after the game and deal with his media responsibilities, it had been a standing joke on the LA bench that Melrose would tell him to go on the ice anyway. “He’d say, ‘Gretz, you’re up.’ And I’d say, ‘Yeah, yeah, good one Barry,’ ” recalls Gretzky. This time, however, Melrose wasn’t kidding. And neither was Gretzky. “I was surprised,” says Melrose. “I’d never seen him turn down ice time. It was like a drunk turning down cold beer.” Conacher and Taylor were going on the ice for sure, along with McSorley and Huddy. Instead of Gretzky, Melrose sent Kurri, one of the best defensive forwards of his era. So it was four former Oilers and the former captain of the Kings assigned to defend the one-goal lead.
The Leafs shot the puck into the Kings zone and Potvin scrambled to the Toronto bench for Anderson to come on. Kurri made a weak attempt to flip the puck out of the zone, and it was intercepted by Gilmour. The Leafs tried to get one clean shot. Anderson made like a goalie with an incredible kick save at the blueline to keep the puck in the zone. With fifteen seconds left, Ellett moved the puck to Gilmour behind the net, the same place from where Gilmour had scored his memorable overtime goal against St. Louis the round before. Gilmour, for a moment, had control of the puck and space to make a play. Rouse pinched down from his blueline post and cross-checked Huddy from behind, sending him sprawling into Gilmour. That forced the Leafs centre to skate out from behind the net, and he lost the puck, defusing the opportunity. The puck was cleared to centre, and moments later the horn sounded to end the game. It was over.
Gretzky jumped on the ice with his teammates, then turned back to the bench, skated over and locked in a warm embrace with Melrose. Three months after meeting with his coach in Quebec City and demanding more ice time, Gretzky had repaid Melrose’s faith in him with a spectacular three-goal, one-assist performance that pushed the Kings into the Stanley Cup final for the first time in team history. “The greatest player in the world just took over,” says Robitaille. “I remember saying, ‘We’re going to play hockey in June!’ I had never done that before.” The Leafs had contained Gretzky for more than six games, but he’d killed them in the end. “We let the gorilla out of his cage,” says Anderson.
In the postgame handshake line, Gretzky paused for a moment with Burns to tell the Leafs coach, “I just couldn’t let you win,” as he grasped his hand. They’d known each other since their junior days in Hull, with Gretzky the owner and Burns the ex-cop and aspiring coach. “Pat and I were really good friends. In a lot of ways, he reminded me of my dad,” says Gretzky. “Not their personalities, but their work ethic, and their work habits. So it was like trying to please your father sort of thing. I remember thinking in the [handshake] line, gosh, I felt so proud. Because I knew we had beaten a good team, and I knew we’d beaten a good coach.”
On the ice, in a memorable interview with Hockey Night in Canada’s Ron MacLean, Hrudey spoke defiantly about his trying season. “I can’t help but think back to January, February and March, when I was being pelted with all the criticism. Believe me, this is awfully sweet. I’m not vindictive, but it’s awfully sweet. I was sick of answering all the questions and sick of all the negative talk, but I didn’t believe it. I knew at times I wasn’t playing very well, but I knew that, in me, I had it. It was just a matter of trying to concentrate and get through it. I had some real dog days. I think around the beginning of March, I started to feel real good. I guess my biggest obstacle was trying to get the respect back of my teammates and their confidence, and I did that.”
The Leafs retreated to their dressing room stunned. The coaching staff sat in their office, trying to understand how it had gone wrong. “Whether it was the intrigue of Gretzky, the pressure of the seventh game, the national audience, all the games we had played, I don’t know,” says Murphy. “All those things had worn on us to the point, maybe, we didn’t have that usual strength of character. There probably was some doubt in our team, and the Kings put it there.” Hockey in general, and the NHL in particular, was a far less technical sport then. There were no analytics, no Corsi, no possession stats. There were fewer coaches per team. The games were less systematic, and often people in the sport read victory as a vindication of the inner determination of the players as much as evidence of superiority of skill or speed. That fed myths and hockey stories.
After a while, the coaches’ wives joined the Leafs coaches, and they all sat there, some drinking a beer. Told that the streets outside the Gardens were jammed with unhappy Leafs fans, they stayed there for two and a half hours, trying to focus on how much they had accomplished. “We didn’t have a lot of regrets, because the team played hard,” says Mike Kitchen. “It was just unfortunate we couldn’t get to the next stage. But weird things happen in Game 7s. That’s why you try not to let it get to that point.”
A few Leafs players braved the crowds to retreat to their usual haunt, P.M. Toronto. Gilmour was escorted through the mob back to his apartment. Unhappy fans, many angry, drunk and still resentful that Fraser hadn’t kicked Gretzky out of Game 6 for high-sticking Gilmour, banged their fists on the Kings bus. There was less than ten feet between the Gardens door and the LA bus, but Robitaille was still hit in the head with an egg when he tried to board.
Brian Cooper, who worked for Gretzky, McNall and Candy as president of the CFL Argonauts, had his tan Mercedes 300E parked underneath the Gardens. Gretzky, his suit sweat-soaked after doing interviews in the tiny visitors dressing room, was bleary-eyed and exhausted from the game. He got into the front seat and put the Campbell Conference trophy between his legs. They drove up the steep ramp to leave the Gardens, and at the top, the car had to stop. Fans saw Gretzky and began to rock the car. “Wayne said, ‘This is getting dangerous,’ ” says Cooper. They escaped, and drove to Gretzky’s restaurant in downtown Toronto, where he joined up with his teammates to celebrate. They were going to the Stanley Cup final starting in Montreal in three days.
FOR TWENTY-FIVE YEARS, many players on both sides who played in that famous Game 7 contest between the Leafs and Kings, and many fans in Toronto, have clung stubbornly to the belief that what made the difference was that Gretzky was motivated by all the criticism he had received during the series, particularly in the Toronto media. “It lit him up like a Roman candle,” says Anderson. “He read everything. He knew everything that was said. It one hundred percent motivated him.” For his part, Gretzky says that’s nonsense. “Those kind of things were things they’d bring to me in the locker room. They would try to fire me up,” he says. “Was that the difference in the series? Absolutely not. Did I stand there and hand out the article and put it on my fridge? Absolutely not. It was one of those things where I knew I had to play better. That was the motivation.”
In the end, his five goals and four assists in seven games wasn’t his best Stanley Cup final series ever, but in each of the final two games he had scored the winning goal. Once again, the Gardens had brought out the best in him, bringing his career totals to thirty goals and thirty-nine assists in twenty-eight appearances at the Carlton Street Cashbox. More than just goals and assists, Gretzky had supplied the moments his team needed to win. It wasn’t how many goals he’d scored but when he had scored them that made the difference. Gilmour and Clark had done much the same for their team. But Gretzky had conjured up the deciding plays. It didn’t matter what he’d done in the first five games anymore. It only mattered what he’d done in the final two.
It had been a spectacular series, start to finish, packed with emotion, colour, characters, nasty hockey and spectacular, unforgettable moments that Gretzky still cherishes. So much has happened since. Another Art Ross Trophy. His father’s return to health. The World Cup disappointment of 1996, followed two years later by the shootout loss to the Czechs in the Olympics. There was the wonderful goodbye tour leading into his retirement, an Olympic gold medal in 2002 as executive director of Team Canada, four unsuccessful seasons as head coach of the Phoenix Coyotes. Financial complications as a part-owner of the Coyotes pushed him away from the game, but he returned in 2017 to become vice-chair of the Oilers Entertainment Group in Edmonton.
Gretzky’s been in the game for five decades, and still relishes the chance to go over his hockey memories. To him, ’93, and the series with the Leafs, was a special time. “When Wendel and Marty fought, that was a man’s fight. When Wendel scored those three goals to tie it up in Game 6, that’s a man, that’s a superstar, that’s a guy bringing it to the table. The best players were doing something every game to excite the fans and motivate the fans to cheer for their team. That’s what made it exciting,” he says. “It was such an emotional series because of how good the hockey was. It’s like the ’72 series and the ’87 [Canada Cup]. In my mind, and in a lot of ways, Toronto might have given Montreal a better series than we did. I’m not saying they could have beaten the Canadiens, but a Toronto-Montreal matchup might have been better for Toronto than it was for us.
“You can’t sit here and say the Kings should have won the series in five games, or that Toronto should have won that series in five. If we played Game 7 again ten more times, they might have won five and we might have won five. That’s how close it was.”