Finnie Walsh (20 page)

A week after Finnie was traded, my call came. There was a spot open on the NHL team’s roster. Three days later I would play in my first big-league game.

At first everything Finnie had told me about the NHL proved to be true. There were so many fans in the stands, all cheering and yelling, and the level of play on the ice was mind-boggling. Everywhere I looked I saw a player whom I’d seen on
TV
when I was a kid. I was crashing into my heroes, taking them into the boards. They made me look like I belonged back in Portsmouth.

I was sent back down to the minors after one game. I wasn’t really sure what the brass had thought of my performance. I had made some good plays, but I also knew that I had made some mistakes, so I wasn’t sure if I had come out ahead.

My second game back in the minor leagues was against Finnie’s new team. I wasn’t sure if Finnie would be starting or not; the word was that his new team thought he had an attitude problem, which was probably true. On game day they decided that, attitude or not, he was the better of the two goalies they had, because he was there on the ice as we sang “O Canada.”

Our two teams were the best in the minor league and there were several players on each team who had an ongoing feud. I didn’t subscribe to that sort of thing; a game was a game and their vendettas had no bearing on how I played. In a situation like that, though, I knew it was going to be a physical 60 minutes.

There were a lot of penalties in the first period, most of them ours, but eventually our team ended up on a power play, even though we probably didn’t deserve it. We had a face-off in the opposition’s end. I was stationed on the right point and when the puck was dropped our centre pulled it back to me and I shot without even thinking about it. I beat Finnie high on the glove side, scoring what was the first game-situation goal I had ever scored against him. It felt so weird that I didn’t even raise my stick in celebration, I just skated to the bench and sat down. When the puck had gone in, I had distinctly heard the sound of a tennis ball striking a garage door.

I guess Finnie’s team interpreted my reaction to the goal as cockiness, because from then on I was a marked man. I took a number of cheap shots; some of them the referee saw and some of
them he didn’t. I refused to retaliate, but I delivered a number of solid, clean hits.

Early in the third period, however, I was skating to the bench on a change, not even part of the play, when a big goon of a left-winger, Eddie Johnson, came from out of nowhere and crosschecked me in the back of the head. I fell to the ice as the whistle blew. Eddie jumped on top of me and started throwing punches at my head. I was completely unable to defend myself. Johnson should have got a game misconduct, maybe even a suspension, and I should have gone to the dressing room to have my injuries attended to. But this is not what happened.

As soon as Johnson hit me, Finnie skated toward us. My team had come to my defence and a couple of guys had paired off and were sort of half-heartedly fighting or, more accurately, wrestling. The goalie on our team thought that Finnie was coming after him, so he dropped his gloves and skated out of his crease to meet him. Finnie had no intention of fighting the goalie, though. He held his stick in his hands like a scythe and swung at Johnson’s head. He connected with such force that a sharp
crack
was audible throughout the arena. The acoustics of a rink are funny that way; you’d be surprised how certain sounds travel. Johnson slid to the ice, reminding me of how a building crumbles when it’s imploded.

The players on both teams stopped fighting and stood, dumbfounded, not sure what to do. As far as I know, no player in the history of professional hockey has ever attacked a member of his own team during a game. Even the referee and linesmen were momentarily stunned. Finnie’s coach eventually took control of the situation, scrambling onto the ice and physically removing Finnie from the building. The trainers took both Johnson and me off the ice, Johnson on a stretcher.

Johnson suffered a severe concussion and some minor neck injuries and he didn’t play for the rest of the season due to what
is now diagnosed as post concussion syndrome; back then they didn’t have a name for it. I also had a concussion, although a far less serious one, and a swollen, bruised face. My injuries were bad enough that I missed three games.

I spent the night in the hospital for observation and in the morning, while I was waiting for the doctor to check me out, Finnie showed up. “How’s the head?” he asked, smiling.

“I could ask you the same thing,” I said. I still couldn’t believe what he had done.

“Yeah, I guess that was a pretty stupid thing to do.”

“It sure was.”

“Why weren’t you watching out for Ahab?”

“What?”

“That’s what I thought. You should have been watching out for Ahab.”

“You shouldn’t have done it,” I said.

“I know. I fucked up, big time. Something inside me just snapped. I don’t know why.”

I didn’t know why either. Sarah’s accident might have had something to do with it. I think that Finnie just couldn’t stand to be responsible for one more bad thing happening to a member of my family or, as he saw it, a member of his family. Between Sarah and my father, he had more than enough guilt buried deep within him and he wasn’t about to stand idly by and watch me get hurt. I appreciated the sentiment, but I still thought that he had overreacted.

“What did your team say?” I asked him.

“I’ve been released.”

“Released?”

“Yes. They said that they couldn’t have a loose cannon on their team, no matter how good a goalie I was.”

“But they didn’t even try to trade you?”

“In their opinion I’m untradable.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“I know. I’ll get on with another team. It’s just a matter of time.”

“What are you going to do until then?”

“I’m going home.” He turned and walked toward the door.

“Hey Finnie,” I called.

“Yeah?”

“Thanks.”

“Sure. You’d do the same for me.”

I wasn’t so sure and as a result felt a little guilty. I don’t think Finnie’s extreme loyalty to me was justified; I had not done anything to deserve such a sacrifice.

Finnie went back to Portsmouth the next day. News of what he’d done had travelled through the league before he’d unpacked his bags and no team was willing to give him a tryout. There are certain rules in hockey that you just can’t break and most of them are unwritten. Viciously attacking a member of your own team is one of those rules and in the hockey world there were no circumstances under which such an action could be tolerated. Finnie was patient, hoping that things would blow over given a little time, but they never did. Finnie’s hockey career was over

The 1993–94 season was my second complete season in the NHL. I had climbed out of the minor leagues by the skin of my teeth; I had been traded four times and was a perpetual sixth defenceman, always the one closest to getting the axe. During regular-season play, I had recorded 4 goals and 10 assists, the highest totals of my career. Just before the March trading deadline, I was traded from a team that had virtually no hope of making the playoffs to a team that had a decent shot of winning the cup. I couldn’t have been happier; unlike Finnie, I had no
problem with being traded. Each trade was a chance to break out of my spot as the last defenceman in the line-up, a chance to prove myself. My latest trade did just that; even though I wasn’t a starter, I was seeing a lot more ice time and even got in on some penalty-killing.

My new team stopped trying to use me as an offensive defenceman. I was fast, had a hard shot and could pass fairly well, which had led other teams to conclude that I would make a fairly good goal scorer if given the opportunity. But this was not the case and when I didn’t score they lost confidence in me and relegated me to the bottom of the defencemen heap.

What I was, was a good, old-fashioned, stay-at-home defender, a player far more concerned with stopping goals than scoring goals. I was willing to lead a rush out of our end, but once we reached the offensive zone I was more comfortable with passing the puck to one of the forwards or at most putting a shot on net and letting someone else chase the rebound. I did not like to score goals.

This team seemed to understand these strengths and weaknesses and in the first round of the playoffs we swept our opponents. I put in a solid effort, racking up three assists in the series while preventing several goals that would have been game-breakers.

The second round of the playoffs proved to be more difficult than the first, but once again our team played up to its ability, me included, and we won four games to two. The third round proved even harder and went to seven games, with my team winning in overtime. We were on our way to the Stanley Cup finals.

That year Wayne Gretzky did something that many people thought impossible. Late in March, Gretzky beat goaltender Kirk McLean, scoring his 802nd career goal, breaking Gordie Howe’s 14-year record of 801. It had taken Howe 26 NHL seasons and 1,767
games to set the record; Gretzky had broken it in just 15 NHL seasons and under 1,200 games.

The year before, another record was broken. Peter Stastny’s record for the most points in a season by a rookie was broken by a young Finnish player, Winnipeg’s Teemu Selanne. Selanne scored 76 goals and 56 assists in his rookie year, surpassing Stastny’s 109-point season by 23 points, which might not sound like a lot, but it was more points than I amassed in my entire career. Stastny only had 40 points that year and he was traded to St. Louis for the 1993–94 season, where he played only 17 games out of an 84-game schedule. The next year he would play only 6 games and would retire at the age of 39, having amassed more points during the 1980s than any other player except Gretzky.

Since his involuntary exit from professional hockey, Finnie had, to say the least, deteriorated. He had become bitter, almost sarcastic, a possible result of working in his father’s sawmill. Finnie had insisted that he start at the bottom of the totem pole and be treated like anyone else, regardless of who he was, and to a surprising extent that had happened. Once the guys on the mill floor got to know him, they liked him; after all, he had screwed up his life, just like many of them thought they had. He was almost one of them. The other workers could never completely forget that when he went home at night he went to the same house as the man who owned the mill, the man whom many held directly responsible for their misery. It is doubtful that Roger Walsh was responsible for anything of the sort. More the opposite; he gave them jobs — well-paying jobs — and as far as sawmills went the Walsh operation was a pretty good place to work. That’s what my father had always said anyway and certainly he had
ample reason to speak poorly of the lumber industry.