Game Change Read online

  Undrafted out of junior, Steve had been signed as a free agent by the Flames in 2000. He played the 2000-01 season with their AHL team in Saint John, New Brunswick, before bouncing back and forth between Saint John and Calgary for the next two years. At the end of training camp, the Flames had to decide between Steve and Mike Commodore for their seventh and final defence spot. “Monty had played well, but I thought Commodore outplayed him,” Warrener recalls. “But Jimmy Playfair had a soft spot in his heart for Monty, and the team kept him.” Playfair, one of the Flames’ assistant coaches, had been Steve’s coach in Saint John three years earlier, when the team won the AHL championship.

  The Flames began the regular season slowly. Roman Turek, their starting goalie, was injured in the second game and didn’t play again until the new year. In mid-November, with the prospect of playoffs already slipping away, Sutter acquired goalie Miikka Kiprusoff from San Jose. Kiprusoff had seemed on the verge of stardom for several seasons but had never broken through. In December, with him in goal, the Flames lost only two of their next fourteen games.

  Steve was playing even less than he had the year before—but surrounded by other young players and on a team beginning to win, he was having the time of his life.

  “We had a lot of single guys,” Warrener recalls. “Everyone hung out together.” For them, all day—every day—was team time. Practice was at eleven at the Saddledome, or across the street at the Corral. It lasted an hour. Then to the gym, for twenty minutes if you were a regular and playing long minutes every game, as Warrener did; forty-five minutes to an hour if you were a healthy scratch, as Steve often was. The players all rode the stationary bike, then did some weights—then Steve hit the weights harder. Warrener tolerated the off-ice stuff; Steve loved it. In the gym, he felt as if he were a member of the team in a way in which, when the games began, he sometimes didn’t. He knew that the training he did would somehow, some day, pay off for him and for the team.

  “We had an attitude that year,” Warrener recalls, “all of us, that ‘When I go to the rink I am going to be the best player, whether it’s in practice or training, and I’m going to work my tail off because, guess what, I love what I’m doing.’” And, he says, for “a young guy like Monty, you’re not seen or heard, you just work, and [you] get in a game here and there and think to yourself, ‘I’m here, and life’s not too bad.’”

  When practice was over, the team that skated and trained together went to lunch together. Typically it was Warrener and Steve, and backup goalie Jamie McLennan; often they were joined by Regehr and Kiprusoff, sometimes winger Shean Donovan, and Commodore when he was up with the team—most of the unmarried guys. They went to the Mongolie Grill or Joey Tomato’s. “It had to be a place that had chicken and white rice,” Warrener laughs, because “Noodles,” as McLennan’s teammates called him, “was a very picky eater.” Weirdness on a team is tolerated, even encouraged, because it can be mocked. McLennan was also a goalie.

  Lunch was a time to talk about last night’s adventures, and about the next game. Then it was home for a nap, then back together for dinner, then a movie. Two hours spent watching a film brought them two hours closer to the bar. And the stupider the movie, the stupider the lines they could riff on with each other for days after. Dumb and Dumber was a favourite from some years before, and Caddyshack, and that year’s must-see was Jack Black’s School of Rock. Steve and McLennan’s particular obsession was Kingpin, the story of Roy (Woody Harrelson), a bowling prodigy fallen on hard times, now with a prosthetic bowling hand; Ernie (Bill Murray), an established, obnoxious pro-bowler; Ishmael (Randy Quaid), Roy’s mentee, who is Amish; and Claudia (Vanessa Angel), the love interest. When Steve and McLennan would see each other, they would begin quoting lines from the movie. Either of them might start:

  ESPN Announcer: So, Roy, let me ask you, what have you been doing all these years?

  Roy: Well, I uh…Drinking. A lotta drinking.

  ESPN Announcer: Are you still drinking?

  Roy: No. I uh…Why, you buying?

  And their favourite:

  Ernie (in the direction of two girls together): Hi…

  One Girl: Hello…

  Ernie: Not you…

  Ernie (to the other girl): Hi.

  Years later, on different teams in different cities, “All of a sudden I’d get a text from Monty,” McLennan recalls. “It was just ‘Hi.’ And I’d text back, ‘Not you. Hi.’”

  For Steve, McLennan, Warrener, and the rest, to do what they were doing three nights a week, eighty-two games a season, they needed to know each other, like each other, trust each other. What to non-players might seem like killing time between games, to them was hanging around with a purpose. The dressing room, ice surface, gym, restaurant, movie theatre, or bar was where they did the work of the team. It was their office. And sometimes, Warrener admits, they stayed too late at the office, “doing things maybe we shouldn’t have.” Girls, alcohol, even drugs for some…but they knew that the more they won, the more nobody—coaches, managers, fans, media—would see anything. For them, winning meant freedom.

  “You’re young and cocky, and you know everything,” Warrener says, thinking back on that team. “You’re a band of brothers.”

  “We had a great coach, Darryl Sutter,” he adds. “He’d walk through the dressing room and right away he knew the mood of the team. Then he’d push the button that needed to be pushed.” Sutter always talked about “chemistry,” McLennan recalls. “He wanted players that he felt could fit into the room. He wanted to have good guys; guys that would buy in.” And to Sutter, buying in meant a player not putting himself first. “To Darryl,” as McLennan puts it, “if you didn’t buy in, you didn’t fit in.”

  McLennan remembers a rookie dinner early in the season in Chicago, when things got out of hand. “But Darryl just said to us what he always said: ‘You deal with it.’” By that, of course, he meant deal with it by winning. “Because,” Sutter told them at the time, “if you don’t win, I will deal with it.”

  Warrener remembers another time when the players didn’t deal with it. “We were playing Colorado, Kiprusoff was hurt, and Jamie was in net. We were down 2–0, it’s the end of the first period, and Darryl came into the dressing room and starts yelling. ‘You fuckin’ guys. Your good buddy Jamie McLennan. You all care about him. He’s the best. He’s your friend. He’s wonderful. He goes in the net and you lazy bastards won’t play hard for him. Some friends you are.’” As Warrener recalls, “We all looked around the dressing room at one another and went out and won the game.”

  Steve played twenty-six games during the regular season. He would sit out for a few weeks, then play a game, then somebody would get hurt and he’d play four or five more games, then he’d be in the press box for ten days, then play another game. He didn’t play more often because, as Warrener put it, “he wasn’t as good as Regehr or Lydman or Gauthier or Leopold or Ference or myself. He was a skilled guy. He was a good player. But he was raw. He was just learning.” And what Steve was learning was what he always seemed to be learning.

  “Monty was confident,” Warrener continues, “and that was a beautiful thing. But he was too confident. He’d be a healthy scratch for a couple of weeks, then go out and make an unbelievable play, then all of a sudden throw a backhand saucer pass through the middle of our zone and I’d be screaming to myself, ‘Nooooooo, don’t do it,’ because if it doesn’t work you’re toast. You’re back in the press box for a month.” Sometimes Steve would remember what every coach had told him all of his life and not make that pass, and sometimes he’d forget. About once a game, he would have what McLennan calls a “hey, I’m Bobby Orr and I’m going to try something” moment.

  To a coach, a good guy is someone who does what he’s supposed to do. To a player, it’s not much different. One guy makes a blunder; they all pay the price. But teammates also hope harder for good guys, and fear deeper. “Darryl knew how much we liked [Steve],” Warrener recalls. “The team loved Monty. H
e had his faults, for sure, but there was a lot more good about him than bad, and we could see that. Darryl really liked him, too. As hard-assed as he could be, and he was hard, Darryl could see who Monty was, and was pretty supportive of letting Monty be Monty. As long as it didn’t cost us a hockey game.”

  “Monty was a good player,” Warrener continues, “but really he was a better teammate. He made being on a team fun.” A team needs good players, and it also needs good teammates—and, as a teammate, Steve didn’t have lapses.

  “I remember we were in Anaheim late in the season,” Warrener says. “We had gone out for supper and were walking back to the hotel. There were ten or twelve of us. My mind was wandering and I started looking at these guys, and I said to myself, ‘Craig Conroy, good guy. Marty Gélinas, good guy. Jarome Iginla, good guy. Miikka Kiprusoff, good guy. Shean Donovan, good guy. Monty, good guy. I just kept going down the line, and then it dawned on me, ‘That’s why we’re having success. There’s a bunch of good guys on this team.’ We spent a lotta, lotta, lotta time together. We had Kipper and Jarome [Kiprusoff and Iginla, two star players] but we made our run because we cared about each other and worked our tails off.”

  The Flames finished sixth in the Western Conference and played third-place Vancouver in the first round of the playoffs. The teams split the first four games, each winning and losing a game at home. Lydman got a concussion in Game 3, and Commodore replaced him for Game 4. Gauthier tore up his knee in Game 6; Steve replaced him and played the seventh and deciding game of the series. In that game, Iginla scored two goals and the Flames went ahead, 2–1; the Canucks tied the score with only 5.7 seconds to go, then Gélinas scored in overtime to win it for the Flames. Steve played just over ten minutes, was plus-1 (he was on the ice, at even strength, for one more goal for than goal against), and never left the lineup for the rest of the playoffs. Two healthy scratches, Commodore and Montador (or “The Doors,” as they came to be called)—one who had spent most of the season in the minors, the other in the press box, both of them putting in countless hours in their respective gyms preparing for this moment that they thought would never happen—were now needed as regulars.

  When a team is on a roll, it doesn’t even realize it’s on a roll. It just rolls. For Steve, Warrener, Commodore, and the rest of the Flames, the playoff fun was only just beginning. And the more fun it was on the ice, the more fun it was off the ice. Flames T-shirts and hats were everywhere in the city. Inside the Saddledome was a sea (a “C”) of red Calgary jerseys; outside, when the game ended and the fans poured out, a section of 17th Avenue became the “Red Mile.” Oil patch mechanic, teacher, banker, or barista—in the playoffs, everyone becomes a player. And as the games went on, more and more green hard hats began to appear.

  Craig Conroy had gotten the idea of a hard hat from Kelly Chase, his former teammate on the St. Louis Blues. The Flames were a team of two stars, Iginla and Kiprusoff; one all-rounder, Gélinas; and a bunch of grinders. The stars had to play like stars, and they did—but the team would only go as far as its grinders took it. Iginla and Kiprusoff had their own identities; the rest of the team needed their own. Conroy found a battered green hard hat abandoned in the catacombs of the arena. “We weren’t a pretty team,” he recalls. “That green hard hat symbolized what we were all about.” The players awarded it after every win, to the “unsung hero” who had done the kind of grimy, scuffly stuff on the ice that those outside the dressing room might not have noticed. The player who had won it the previous game was the one who presented it to the next recipient, getting lots of advice from his fellow grinders. “We had a song and Rhett [Warrener] would do a little dance, and it was hilarious,” Conroy recalls. “Then we’d turn off the music and give out the hard hat.”

  “Jarome and Kipper would never get it,” Conroy says with pride. After all, they weren’t grinders. But the presenter would often fake a toss in their direction, then throw the hat to someone else, and everyone would roar. The winner had to wear the hat for post-game interviews. Fans at home saw the interviews and began wearing their own hard hats to the games. This was the playoffs: the fans were grinders, too.

  “Going into the season, we weren’t supposed to do anything,” Warrener says. “We got Kiprusoff, which saved us, then we beat Vancouver, so holy smokes, now we’ve actually done something. Everyone else in the world is saying, ‘Hey, that’s awesome, but now you’re going into Detroit, who’s got everybody, and now you’re done.’ But we knew we’d beat them.”

  The Wings had won the Stanley Cup two years earlier, in 2002—and with Nicklas Lidström, Steve Yzerman, Brett Hull, Brendan Shanahan, Pavel Datsyuk, and Henrik Zetterberg, had finished first overall during the regular season. The Detroit–Calgary series went six games and the Flames scored only eleven goals—including just two in the last two games, both of which they won, 1-0, the second in overtime (Gélinas again). In that final game, Steve played twenty-six minutes and was plus-1. More importantly, his teammates awarded him the Green Hard Hat.

  Then, what couldn’t get better got better. Calgary played San Jose in the Western Conference Final. The Flames went ahead 2–0 in Game 1, but the Sharks tied the score. Conroy gave Calgary the lead again, but San Jose scored with just over three minutes left, and the game went into overtime. Many minutes passed. The Sharks got possession of the puck in their own zone and started up the ice. Their forwards headed to the bench for a change. Suddenly, the puck got loose at centre and Iginla picked it up. He skated to the Sharks’ blue line, it was two-on-two; behind them was a large gap as the San Jose players scrambled off the bench to get into the play. Steve saw the open ice. Iginla circled into the left corner; Steve rushed towards the net, banging his stick on the ice. “You could hear him in Sacramento,” Sutter said later. Iginla, as Hockey Night in Canada announcer Chris Cuthbert, put it, “heard the beaver tail” slapping and passed the puck to Steve. He was all alone with Sharks goalie Evgeni Nabokov. Steve waited, and waited, and shot. The puck went off the post and in. The photo in the newspapers the next day showed Nabokov, his right leg split to the corner; Steve, his arms in the air, his mouth wide open (and minus his right front tooth) in a huge, over-the-moon grin. In the next moment, Steve turned and ran on his skates up the ice, his teammates running after him. They caught up to him, and together they piled against the boards.

  “It makes me emotional just talking about it,” Warrener says now. “Because we all loved him, and because he worked so hard that year. For him to do that, and in that Monty way, banging his stick coming down the ice. It was perfect. And that look on his face when the puck went in. It was just awesome.” Warrener pauses in his recollection. “For me, that play epitomizes his life. It took confidence. It was overtime. In the Stanley Cup playoffs. He saw a small window to jump up, and he did.”

  “To me the goal is one thing,” Gélinas says, “but the smile is another. He was just so happy. Everything was just so special. I will remember that moment for the rest of my life.”

  The Flames won the second game in San Jose, then lost both games in Calgary, then won the next two to end the series. The Red Mile got longer and longer. The Flames had beaten all three Western Conference division champions. Gélinas had scored all three series-winning goals, two of them in overtime, and became known as “The Eliminator.” But Warrener has another memory of the events. “We won both games in San Jose, then blew two at home. To play extra games when you don’t have to really hurt us. We should have done a better job of putting them away.”

  Tampa Bay was next, in the Stanley Cup Final. The series went seven games, and at one point the Flames were ahead three games to two. They could have won the Cup—but they didn’t. The players all live with memories of what they could have done differently. Warrener and Gélinas remember “the run in 2004” with regret and with pride. And they remember the fun.

  McLennan watched the playoffs on TV. He had been traded late in the season to the Rangers. He remembers Steve in those games: “Monty was the type of
guy who embraced everything, so he embraced the whole package of it. He’d say to himself, ‘I’m not just going to enjoy the games, I’m going to enjoy the fanfare, I’m going to enjoy the popularity, I’m going to enjoy all of this.’”

  CHAPTER THREE

  How did we get to where we are? To hockey as we play it, to Steve, to brain injuries and CTE?

  The story starts at McGill University in Montreal, in 1875. For centuries, people had been strapping bones or wood or metal objects onto their feet to move across the ice. But on March 3, 1875, eighteen McGill students, many of them rugby players, came onto the ice at the Victoria Skating Rink near the university, in order to play a very special game. It had been some time in the planning, and an announcement had appeared in the Gazette that morning.

  Similar games had been played on outdoor ponds for decades in Canada, most notably in Nova Scotia. The sticks of the early players were short, like those in field hockey; a lacrosse ball was used in lieu of a puck. The players acted as their own organizers: the rules evolved by trial and error to reflect the game they wanted to play and the conditions they faced. Depending on the size of the pond, any number of players could play.

  It was different indoors on the Victoria Rink. The ice surface was smaller—there was room for only nine players on each side. There were no boards; only a slight rise separated the ice from the off-ice area around it. To protect the rink’s glass windows and the large number of spectators expected, the usual lacrosse ball was considered too dangerous and a flat, square, wooden “puck” was used instead. The “nets” were two vertical sticks with flags on top, set eight feet apart. The game was played in two thirty-minute halves. As in rugby, player substitutions were not allowed to enter and re-enter the game, and all of the players remained on the ice throughout the entire sixty minutes of play. After all, sport was a test of endurance. Also as in rugby, no forward passes were permitted. The puck could be advanced only by a player skating it up the ice. After all, sport was a trial of character.