The Final Call (19 page)

I have come across many different coaches, with varied personalities and coaching styles. None could match the wit Glen “Slats” Sather possessed. Glen knew when and how to use it to his advantage, whether to motivate his players, deflect the pressure from their young egos, or throw opposing players off their game. Often, his ultimate purpose was an attempt to intimidate—or at the very least get under the skin of—the officials. In all of this, he was truly the master. From my perspective, I just enjoyed his banter.

Sather has five Stanley Cups to his credit, though it didn’t hurt that he had arguably the greatest player of all time in his lineup, along with a supporting cast of superstars in their own right. What Slats did so effectively was mould that brash group of kids into champions. He took their collective blend of cockiness, confidence, and superior talent to a whole different level through the systems he developed. He allowed them the freedom to be kids, but also was able to rein them in like a father who has to take away the keys to the family car on occasion. And I’m not so sure that some of their personalities didn’t rub off on him; some nights it was difficult to tell the difference between the kids and the dad. The dead giveaway was Glen’s unmistakably high-pitched voice.

In the early 1980s, I had an Oilers game in Northlands Coliseum and had just assessed a penalty to an Edmonton player. I lined up inside the blue line, with my back to the Oilers’ bench and my hands on my knees, when I heard Glen’s voice shout, “Fraser, wake the eff up.” Without making a big deal of it, I simply took one hand off my knee, turned my head, and placed a finger to my lips in a “hush” signal to the coach. In the best display of total innocence his body language and facial features could muster, he placed both hands upon his chest and shouted, “It wasn’t me,
Kerry, it was
him!
” He pointed at the dumbfounded photographer who was shooting from between the two benches. I laughed as Glen and his players joined in on the light moment.

The very next night, the Oilers and I had another engagement, this time in Vancouver. I thought I would set the tone for verbal tolerance right after the national anthem and before I dropped the puck for the opening faceoff. Glen never stood behind the bench during the anthem; he would wait until it was over before making his entrance behind the bench. When I saw him appear, I skated over to the bench and said, “Glen, are we going to have any trouble with that photographer tonight?”

“No,” Slats immediately shot back, “we left the son of a bitch at home—he couldn’t keep his mouth shut!”

In 1984–85, Glen’s team finished first in the Smythe Division with 109 points and went on to win the Stanley Cup for the second consecutive year. One night toward the end of that season, the Oilers took an odd night off in Chicago when the Hawks’ scoring hit double digits. Since it was just before the playoffs, Glen didn’t want his boys to feel any tightness over such a spanking. With a couple of minutes remaining, Lowe broke his stick over a Hawks player, demonstrating the frustration that Glen might have feared. After assessing the penalty, I looked over at the Oilers’ bench, where all the players were standing up with their sticks poised to club a fan on the other side of the glass behind their bench. Glen was the ringleader. I rushed over and got Glen’s attention. He immediately directed his choirboys to sit. As they all took their places, I asked Glen if he would like me to get some additional security or remove the obnoxious fan. (The truth was, I just wanted to get the game over without having to write a long report if something broke out between players and fans.) Slats turned down my offering of security by saying, “No, Kerry, everything’s all right now. That asshole said the penalty you just gave Kevin Lowe was horseshit, but we stuck up for you!” I laughed, Slats
laughed, but most importantly for Glen, his players couldn’t contain their laughter. The coach had deflected the embarrassment of a humiliating loss at the end of the season. His boys were loose once again.

While the Oilers had a star-studded cast of leaders on the ice, including Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier, Kevin Lowe, and other future Hall of Famers, Glen Sather was the guy at the top who put it all together and kept it together for as long as he could. The financial woes of Peter Pocklington triggered the exodus of stars, and over time the nucleus of the Oilers was playing elsewhere. Sather himself moved on to work for the New York Rangers. You’d be hard pressed to find a more astute businessman anywhere. It was an absolute honour and delight for me to deal with Glen Sather during my 30 seasons in the NHL.

From the time that I arrived in the NHL in 1980, it was plain to see that the Edmonton Oilers were Wayne Gretzky’s team. In his rookie season, 1979–80, Wayne tied Marcel Dionne for the scoring lead with 137 points. Dionne was given the Art Ross Trophy, awarded to the league’s highest scorer, because he had scored one more goal than Wayne. The next year, it was Gretzky’s turn, as his 164 points outpaced Dionne by 29. Wayne was a 19-year-old sophomore in 1980–81, while I was a 28-year-old rookie!

Wayne eclipsed the 200-point barrier in his third season in the National Hockey League, with 212, and repeated that feat in three of the next four seasons (in 1982–83, he had an “off year” with 196 points). He’s the only player to break that barrier, and upon his retirement he held 40 regular-season records, 15 playoff records, and six All-Star records. Gretzky was called “the greatest player of all time” in
Total Hockey: The Official Encyclopedia of the NHL
. I missed being on the ice with Bobby Orr, Gordie Howe, and others who came before, but I can tell you without hesitation
or reservation that Gretzky was the very best player I ever skated on NHL ice with over my 30 seasons in the league. What may come as a shock is that, in the early going, we clashed on more than one occasion.

Wayne Gretzky did not enter the NHL and become a phenom; he arrived fully formed. In many ways he was mature well beyond his years, but at times he was still just a kid, not unlike those who followed him—Super Mario, “Sid the Kid,” and others. All needed to scale a learning curve and endure some growing pains; some completed the process more quickly than others.

The same is true of officials. Even though I was a man with a family, I was a long way from possessing the maturity I now know is required to handle the pressure and abuse that often came my way. Unfortunately, when I was challenged on the ice, I did not always respond appropriately. I too had a lot to learn.

Each official has inherent strengths and weaknesses that we bring to our game. The obvious physical attributes and mechanical skills—size, skating ability, positioning—are easily detected. The less obvious—but, in my opinion, most important—qualities the job demands are strength of character, integrity, judgment, and the ability to communicate effectively and cultivate and develop professional relationships with players, coaches, and other officials. That was where I had some early flaws.

As a player, my physical stature could be best described as “vertically challenged.” In an effort to compete, I often fought the biggest opponents in an attempt to gain a measure of respect. I gained courage through these sorts of encounters, an important attribute that I would call upon countless times throughout the course of every game as players, coaches, and fans tried to sway my decisions in their favour through some form of intimidation.

But while I brought an abundance of courage and confidence to the ice each night, when I came under fire these positive qualities would morph into the less attractive and effective indicators of
“Little Man Syndrome.” When that negative side of my personality kicked in, observers were left with the perception that I was cocky and arrogant. Unfortunately, quite often their perception was correct. The more I was challenged, the more this character flaw would surface. I felt the need to let “them”—whoever “they” were—know that I was in charge and would not be intimidated. In a one-on-one confrontation with players or coaches, I usually won the battle to establish myself—or so I thought—by imposing a misconduct or bench penalty. In fact, however, I was losing the war.

What infuriated me most was when a player, especially in his home rink, would take a dive in an attempt not only to draw a penalty but to unleash the wrath of the crowd against me. Any time a player persisted in these attempts, I became extremely stubborn. The more they tried, the less likely it was I’d give them the benefit of a call, warranted or otherwise. I adopted the attitude “You made your bed, now lie in it.” I kept a mental list of players who belonged to my “springboard club” and tried to make sure they didn’t fool me whenever they were on the ice. One night in Edmonton in 1981–82, Wayne Gretzky joined this undesirable club!

Wayne’s young Oilers were playing host to Bobby Clarke and the Philadelphia Flyers in Northlands Coliseum. It had been a close-checking, hard-fought game from the very beginning and Gretz had, in my judgment, fallen down a couple of times in an attempt to trick me into calling a penalty and give Edmonton the man advantage. Generally, if Wayne and his supporting cast were given the extra space a power play afforded, the end result was pretty much a foregone conclusion. The dead giveaway when a player is trying to draw a penalty is that they look at the referee before they hit the ice. On two occasions in the first period, Wayne was looking for me long before the perfect entry of his landing. The partisan crowd already believed that Wayne could walk on
water, and with what he gave them each and every night, who could blame them? They didn’t subscribe to my “frozen pond” theory that, just because there wasn’t a splash didn’t mean it wasn’t a dive. There was no penalty on the books for embellishment back then. The best recourse was to heighten my awareness and make sure I wasn’t fooled in the future. Since that approach didn’t seem like much of a deterrent to me, my preferred response was to adjust the standard relative to penalty selection on that particular player. There was no grey area at that point; only high-definition black and white. Wayne and I became locked in a duel where there could be no winners, only losers. With each failed attempt to draw a penalty, Wayne complained more vehemently, making me even less tolerant.

With under a minute to play, the Oilers were down by one goal. They were attacking hard in the Flyers zone, and at that stage of the game their very best option was to get on the power play and try to tie it up. Wayne was positioned in “his office” behind the goal line and to the side of the Flyers net as Pelle Lindbergh caught the puck and I whistled the play dead. With no one around him, Wayne leaped into the air, threw his hands forward, his feet stretched out behind him, and executed a belly flop worthy of a perfect score. Bobby Clarke skated up to Wayne and said, “Get up, you effin’ baby.”

I was on the scene and said, “Wayne, what are you doing? There was nobody within 10 feet of you.” Wayne hit the boiling point as he responded, “You wouldn’t have called it anyway; you haven’t called an effin’ thing all night!”

I said, “You’re right, and I’m going to start right now: you’ve got two minutes for unsportsmanlike conduct.” As Wayne stormed past me on the way to his dressing room, he shouted, “Good! It’s about effin’ time you called something!” He didn’t even bother to go to the penalty box. I had to go over to Glen Sather and tell him to put someone in the box in Wayne’s place.
That was the first, but not last, time a player would thank me for giving him a penalty.

I was deeply troubled by my attitude on the ice that night. I’ve always believed that two wrongs don’t make a right, and the message I sent to Gretzky was not in the best interest of the game. For my part, I was clearly wrong. I felt I had compromised my integrity and that of the game. On both counts, this was totally unacceptable to me. I needed to change, and it didn’t stop with players who tried to draw penalties. I made a much deeper examination of my conscience as I tried to recognize and correct the flaws that became evident.

At the end of that season, I met with Scotty Morrison for my year-end review. Scotty opened the book of supervision reports and went through them rather quickly. He mentioned a lot of good comments that appeared in those reports, and said, as he closed his book, I was on target and that he was looking for great things from me in the future.

I asked if he would mind reopening the book, since it was my desire to be the best I could possibly be and whether he could advise me on some of the areas I needed to work on. More specifically, I asked if there was a common thread that ran throughout the reports. Scotty perused them once again. Some examples of the phrases that held the key to failure were: “While Kerry displays confidence, he sometimes gives the impression of being cocky;” “Occasionally appears arrogant with his body language and gestures”; “On occasion can challenge and incite players through his actions.” As strange as this might sound, it was exactly what I wanted to hear.

I looked across the desk at Scotty, only five-foot-six himself, but a giant of a man in my eyes. Scotty was extremely respected, both in his days as an on-ice official as well as in his role as referee-in-chief. Given our similar size, I thought he might have ideas as to how to solve my real and perceived problems. Scotty was
amazingly kind and helpful in guiding me. He suggested that I slow down my thought process and articulate what I wanted to say in my head before I spoke aloud—to think about how it would be taken at the other end. Scotty also suggested I relax my body language, especially at the shoulders, when I skated and not appear so rigid and stiff. This was really about changing 31 years of learned behaviour and a Type-A personality. I immediately went to work on applying Scotty’s suggestions, and my career skyrocketed. There were times in the beginning of my transformation that I would stop in mid-sentence during a conversation with a player or coach and apologize for what I had just said and rephrase it the way I had intended it originally. When I asked a player to put his stick down for a faceoff, I always used the word “please”—it became a request as opposed to an order. Don’t get me wrong: I wasn’t handing out roses, but I was definitely handing out fewer misconducts. That season, 1982–83, I was selected to work in the opening round of the Stanley Cup playoffs for the first time. Two years later, I was selected to work my first Stanley Cup final, between the Flyers and Oilers.