The Final Call (9 page)

With an intensity and urgency in my voice, I asked for their help, if there was any to be had. Both linesmen answered they hadn’t had a sightline that could definitively determine what had happened.

It was at this moment that I came to understand clearly that in hockey officiating, it’s not always black and white.

And now that aching in the pit of my stomach only intensified, and my mouth went dry. It’s the most helpless feeling that I’ve ever had in any of the 2,165 NHL games that I refereed.

For most of my career, video review of plays wasn’t even technically feasible, and even today, it is not allowed for a penalty call. The play was over and gone, lost to that split second of time and space that seemed like an eternity once Doug’s blood started to drip.

All Gilmour could do was go in for repairs, and all that was left for the officials to do was drop the puck and hope that, if a high-sticking call had in fact been missed, there would not be a consequence that would affect the game’s outcome.

Big gulp here.

Seconds later, Gretzky scored the game-winner and the series was tied. Game Seven would be played two nights later, in Toronto.

Leafs fans watching on television, as well as the
Hockey Night in Canada
team of Bob Cole and Harry Neale, had the advantage over those of us on the ice. Even so, Cole’s first impulse was to suggest Gilmour had been hurt while blocking Gretzky’s initial shot. Neale was quick to guess that Gretzky had high-sticked Gilmour, but it wasn’t until a replay, from a different camera angle, was shown that he was able to definitively make “The Call” from the broadcast booth.

It’s important to mention that even after Gretzky scored the overtime winner, I wasn’t chased off the ice. Neither the Leafs players, nor coach Pat Burns, harangued me for missing the call. The only dissenter was Anderson, who was still pleading his case over the boarding call that caused him to watch from the penalty box as the game was decided.

In the dressing room afterward, director of officiating Bryan Lewis informed us that it had been reported, but not confirmed, that
Hockey Night in Canada
had a replay that detected Gretzky clipping Gilmour in the face with his stick. But he said we had followed the proper procedure in trying to determine whether an infraction had been committed.

I went to bed, and the next morning caught a flight home to Philadelphia. The next day at about 6 p.m. I spoke to my parents at their home in Sarnia. That’s when I heard that my father had been awakened between 4 and 5 a.m. to the sound of one car hitting another in his driveway. Looking out the window, he saw a vehicle continually backing up and ramming into the trailer
hitch of his mini-motorhome parked in the driveway. Clad only in his tightie whities, he grabbed an axe from next to the back door and chased the motorist up the street.

I was livid. I was furious that someone would take out their hostility on my family. The next call I made was to NHL security, who investigated and later informed me that the vandal was a Leafs fan from Kitchener-Waterloo, who had made the 90-mile drive to the Fraser family homestead. My parents also received obscene crank calls; this prompted my mother to answer the phone with a referee’s whistle poised at the ready to shatter the eardrums of anyone who dared invade their privacy.

(After Dad passed on, Mom still kept the whistle hanging by the telephone. It’s time for her to retire her whistle as well!)

In the seventh game, Gretzky scored a hat trick and added two assists as the Kings won, 5–4. Gretzky has called it “the best game I ever played.”

The misplaced hostility and aggression were not limited to the days and weeks after the Leafs lost the series. Following a game I worked at the Air Canada Centre in 2008, I joined Wes McCauley and the officials who’d worked the game with me at the Irish Embassy, a pub on Yonge Street, near both the ACC and the Hockey Hall of Fame. NHL security representative Paul Hendricks had a table reserved for us. As I entered the establishment, I noticed that many of the male patrons were wearing vintage Leafs jerseys. Most of them were probably teenagers back in 1993.

I passed one table, where a fellow with his back to me was wearing a jersey with the name and number (29) of Félix Potvin, the goalie of that 1993 team. I heard someone at his table say, “There’s Fraser.” I made my way past a partition, only to be confronted by the same fan, who stood there with a beer in his hand and said, “Fraser, you’re a fucking asshole!”

Under normal circumstances, when I come face to face with an angry fan I offer my hand and a friendly smile and open myself
up to entertaining any questions he or she might have. In this situation, I quickly determined that the man in the Potvin jersey was neither open nor receptive to any dialogue.

So I assumed a defensive posture. With my right hand, I grabbed him by the bicep of the arm that held his beer and applied pressure until I had control of him. I took half a step back so that I was off his back shoulder blade rather than beside him. He looked at the beer in his hand, to which I responded, “Don’t even think about it. I will knock you out.” And I squeezed harder. In the defining moment, our eyes met. He knew that he was vulnerable and that I meant business. This would not be a negotiation.

At this moment, a friendly barmaid danced around the corner and asked, “Mr. Fraser, can I get you anything?” To which I responded, “Please get this guy away from me, because I’m going to hurt him.”

She aggressively shooed him back to his table and told him to stay there. As my colleagues joined me, they found me sitting with my back to the wall at our reserved table. I informed them of my confrontation and said that if I happened to lunge across the table, they should stay out of the way.

Although I kept an ever-watchful eye on the corner from which the Potvin fan had materialized, we had an enjoyable evening. At about midnight, “Potvin” returned for one last verbal assault. While he hadn’t appeared drunk earlier, he seemed to have consumed enough liquid courage in the interim to face the table.

He stopped across the table from me and shouted, “Fraser, you fucked us in ’93!” and then gave me a two-finger salute—and not the two thumbs-up that Don Cherry has made famous.

I started to get up. He started to backtrack. Paul Hendricks shouted at him, and the guy took off for the door with Hendricks in pursuit. Shortly thereafter, Paul returned, dusting off his hands and saying, “We won’t have to worry about that guy again; he missed the last three steps on the way out.”

I have never avoided answering questions about the incident, but there are only so many ways a person can say “I missed the call” or, in stronger terms if it makes you feel any better, “I
blew
the call!”

Seventeen years later, the incident still haunts the Leaf Nation faithful as viscerally as though Gilmour’s cut is fresh and his chin is still bleeding. The media loved to play it up around the anniversary date of the incident or whenever I worked a game involving the Leafs. Since the latter won’t happen again, I propose that after this full and honest disclosure we bury the hatchet and move on—or, as Killer said in Mike Zeisberger’s
Toronto Sun
column on March 27, 2010, the date of my last game at the Air Canada Centre, “Please let it go. It’s over. The man’s retiring. For the sake of his sanity, let it go.”

M
y final visit to Mellon Arena—for a game in which the Penguins beat the Bruins 6–5—brought back memories of my earliest stops in Pittsburgh. In the early 1980s, the Pens were not a very good team. In fact, they were a laughingstock. Not surprisingly, they had a comedian: toothless Gary Rissling. Nobody in the game has ever made me laugh more.

Rizz had the unique ability to practically swallow his face. When the national anthem was being sung, he’d be in his familiar location at the end of the bench. He would make sure I caught his eye, at which point he would contort his face to look like a 100-year-old smoker. I lost any pretense of solemnity during the national anthem whenever I looked over at Rissling and had to stifle a laugh.

Things changed for Pittsburgh in 1984, when they landed the prize catch of the amateur draft, Mario Lemieux, amid more than strong suspicion they had tanked the final game of the season to acquire the coveted first-overall pick. The Penguins had finished dead last in the NHL with 16 wins and 38 points in 80 games, three behind the New Jersey Devils. Both teams seemed incapable of winning during the last couple of weeks of the season.

In 1984–85, Mario’s rookie year, they improved to 24 wins and 53 points. Mario had 100 points, but didn’t appear among the top 10 scorers. That’s what hockey was like in the 1980s. As a sophomore, Mario catapulted to second, behind only Wayne Gretzky, with 48 goals and 93 assists for 141 points. And the Penguins improved in the win column to 34, with 76 points, just two shy of a playoff spot.

Mario was beyond the real deal; he was the saviour of the franchise—as it would turn out, on more than one occasion. His immediate impact as a player was felt on the ice, at the gate, and in the buzz he created throughout the hockey community.

He was a giant of a man who was unique in that he had the hands of a surgeon, the wingspan of an albatross, and he always knew where the net was. Much like Mike Bossy, he always knew where to shoot the puck and could thread a needle with his passes.

Mario arrived as a proud French Canadian with a relatively poor grasp of the English language, a skill he quickly polished. He also brought with him a reputation for being independent-minded and perhaps a bit high-maintenance. In his final year of junior, he refused to play for Canada in the World Junior Championships, and at the draft he refused to go to the Penguins’ table and pose for photos in a team jersey with the team’s front-office staff.

What I’m saying here is that he had it all. With the exception of one thing: maturity.

He was under a lot of pressure to lead his team out of the wilderness. And the team put added pressure on him by requiring that he be a team leader by naming him captain in 1986–87. Management worked to help him in both departments by building a supporting cast. For example, they brought in Paul Coffey in November of 1987 in a blockbuster trade with Edmonton to stabilize their porous defence and provide leadership both in the locker room and on the ice. The Penguins now had two of the game’s greatest impact players on their roster.

As an extremely skilled player, Mario was way ahead of the curve. And he didn’t have much patience for the clutch-and-grab style that prevailed at that time. And why should he? People pay to see skill and grace, especially the type that Mario—and few other players of the time—possessed. The problem was that years of expansion had brought with it an influx of unskilled players. They survived by doing whatever they could get away with to neutralize the stars. We officials let them get away with “checking” tactics that pushed the envelope, and the more we allowed, the more universally accepted the interference and obstruction became. The true artists of the game were stifled and frustrated.

Lemieux was a target, of course. Whenever Mario was on the attack or the forecheck, it was common to hear coaches and players alike call out, “Hold him up.” That was the signal to reach out, latch on, and go for a ride. Often, it resembled waterskiing on ice. It was hard for a player with Mario’s presence to hide, so he had to be creative, in a way no player has been before or since, to find open ice and shake whatever player had been assigned to be his Siamese twin for the night. Mario was the first player I ever saw skate into a pack of players to draw his checking assignment into an area of heavy traffic. He would use those players as pylons to shake his confused dance partner and come out free on the other side of the pack.

All of that “special attention,” along with the clutching and grabbing in general, was frustrating for Mario. Understandably so. But it was apparent to me that he expected to be afforded preferential treatment. The problem was that neither the rules nor the standard of enforcement could be altered in favour of Mario, Wayne, Denis Savard, or Marcel Dionne.

During Lemieux’s second year as captain, I recall that he and I locked horns one night. Throughout the game, whenever he felt he was being illegally handcuffed, he gave me an earful. Finally, he’d had enough and decided to take matters into his own hands,
delivering a retaliatory two-handed slash to an opponent’s leg. Hooks and holds are one thing; a vicious slash is another. My arm went up immediately and I sent him off.

On the way to the penalty box, Mario chastised me for not calling the original penalty. He let me know in no uncertain terms that he had had enough, not only of the obstruction, but of me. For the duration of his penalty, he stared daggers at me from the box. A power-play goal was scored against the Penguins, and instead of skating to the bench for a line change he headed directly to centre ice, where I stood waiting to conduct the faceoff. He tapped his stick on the ice at my feet in a mocking form of applause and said, “Nice call.”