APRIL 1998
by Barry Stagg
OLYMPIC HANGOVER
Considering that this is the April edition of the Downhomer, the aftermath from the Olympic hockey disaster may have faded into the mists of time. An epoch in sports usually means that a season has ended and another sport season has begun. With that in mind I hope to jog a few memories about what did happen there on the ice there on the ice in Nagano, Japan in February.
We all saw an unbeaten, untied Canadian Olympic team go right down to the last minute of regulation time before tying the score. The much maligned Trevor Linden, now of the New York Islanders, but formerly of the Mike Keenan coached Vancouver Canucks tied up the game on a nice shot through the armour of one Dominik Hasek. Then we saw the Czechs play for a tie in the ten minute overtime session. Then came the execrable shootout. Nothing is more demeaning to the essence of a championship game then to have it reduced to penalty shots. It simply means that the passion of the game has been taken away and some practical and immediate solution has been devised to end the occupation of ice time by these two teams.
In the overtime, the flaws in the makeup of the Canadian Olympic team were laid bare. It always happens this way. Flaws in characters, flaws in plans, mistakes and errors in design always show up when stress is placed on the object. The object can be a hockey coach, it can be an airplane fuselage, or it can be an ordinary persons psyche. In any event, Canada went to the shootout with hockey's alltime best player sitting as a spectator. Everybody knows by now that Wayne Gretzky sat and watched as underachievers like Brendan Shanahan and Theren Fleury frittered away Canada's chances to take the gold medal.
The arguments against putting Wayne Gretzky on the ice were plain and simple. In fact they were very plain and very simple. Marc Crawford, young coach with a Stanley cup ring on his finger got to make the decision (apparently before the game) about who would participate in the shootout. Crawford was not provided with the guidance that such veterans as Bobby Clarke and Bob Gainey might have brought to what was then only a theoretical decision. Clarke and Gainey, part of the management trio at the Olympics, have been through all of the hockey wars that matter in the past thirty years. Crawford, who is essentially the same age as Gretzky, was left to make a decision that should not have been his alone.
After the game was done, a thought came to me about the first and only time I ever saw Marc Crawford play hockey. It was in September of 1981 and I was in Winnipeg. The Winnipeg Jets were playing an exhibition game that night against the Vancouver Canucks. I went to the Winnipeg arena mainly because I wanted to see professional hockey but also because Dale Hawerchuk was a rookie with Winnipeg that year after being the first overall pick in the junior draft. Marc Crawford was a fourth line forward with Vancouver that night.
Well, in 1998, that fourth line forward certainly turned the tables on Wayne Gretzky. In 1981, Wayne Gretzky was at the top of his game and any fourth line forward could only look way up and see this twenty year old phenomenon who was breaking all the scoring records while in possession of one of the scrawniest frames that ever skated onto National Hockey League ice. Seventeen years later, Marc Crawford sat Wayne Gretzky on the bench and denied hockey's greatest player the chance to bring Olympic Gold to Canadian hockey. No one but Marc Crawford himself can ever know whether the decision was tactical or personal or a combination of both. The fact remains that the player from Brantford who owns all of the National Hockey League offensive records was given a seat on the pine not unlike that given to his coach many times during his coach's brief National Hockey League career.
The Harbour Grace Oracle and I discussed this theory at length, sitting at the bar at Wayne Gretzky's franchise restaurant in Toronto on a Tuesday evening late in February. We reached no other conclusion other than that it was time to shut the bar down and get home. We both agreed that George Faulkner and Dick Power would have added a much needed touch of courage and professionalism to the Canadian Hockey Team's effort. We left it at that.
Until next month be proud - be prosperous.