Wayne Gretzky's Ghost (12 page)

Pulford discovered, as so many others have, that the tallest part of Dionne is his pride. “I don't want to kiss anyone's ass,” he had decided just before turning professional and, though he has certainly suffered for his refreshing frankness, hockey's own belated maturing over recent years has meant that Detroit's “big
baby” is now seen as Los Angeles's leader and highly articulate spokesman—without Dionne himself having changed much. He once said, “There seems to be a tiny part of me I can't control.” But his railing against archaic management and gang-warfare hockey has in truth been extremely calculated. “If I had to do it again,” he says, “I'd do it. And I'll tell you why—because I know I can play for any team in this league.”

Before Dionne, the outspoken hockey player was a rarity—Ted Lindsay in the '50s, Bobby Hull to a lesser extent later—but today, with Darryl Sittler fighting management in Toronto and Guy Lafleur attacking lazy, wealthy hockey players in Montreal, the cures for the ill health of hockey are coming, as they should, from the game's healthier cells.

“I had to say to hell with it,” says Dionne. “If that's what hockey's all about, I'll say it depends on how much guts you have and how much you believe in yourself.”

This game is over, thankfully. Washington has come from behind to win 4–2, the contest as interesting as seeing which brand of paper towel will give away first under the faucet. Dionne, the singular example of grace and caring among so many of those he contemptuously refers to as “slackers,” dresses quickly and alone in a far corner of the dressing room. His teammates know better than to speak to him following a loss, as do the local reporters. Hair still dripping from the shower, he buttons up his jacket and walks away from the disgrace, momentarily pausing in the clutch of Jerry Buss and Gordon Lightfoot. A quick handshake and Dionne leaves, silently.

Outside, in the accelerating rain, he climbs into his Mercedes and pulls away, the weight of his anger falling on the gas pedal. It is a time for avoiding thought. There is little concern for making more than $500,000 a year or even for one day being as well known in Los Angeles as Lightfoot, as Buss has promised he one day will be. Playing for the Kings, there is little to be gained by
contemplating the game of hockey, where failure is beyond a single man's prevention. Better instead to think of baseball, a sport he loves better, and how he treasures those suspended moments in the batter's box because “when you're up there you're only one man, alone—nobody can help you.”

He knows that it is nearing midnight. With the time difference it will shortly be morning in Drummondville, and the radio in the big house on 13th Avenue will report that the hometown wonder managed but a single assist in the loss, and he knows that it will not be enough. “They want me to win the scoring title so badly,” he will say next afternoon. “More than I want it.”

But he will also know that words are not necessarily truth. “If I was not Marcel Dionne and he was not Guy Lafleur,” he will say slowly, “maybe then it wouldn't matter so much.”

Then he will say, “But …” And after that nothing.

Dionne did win the scoring championship in 1980, but only because he had scored more goals than a youngster in Edmonton called Wayne Gretzky, who surged at season's end to tie Dionne in overall points. In 1987, Dionne joined the New York Rangers in a late-season trade. He played another full season for New York and part of another before ending his career in the International Hockey League in 1989. His regular season totals were most impressive—1,771 points in 1,348 games—but he scored only 21 times in a mere 49 playoff matches. He never won the Stanley Cup. In 1992 he was admitted to the Hockey Hall of Fame. He is today a businessman living in Niagara Falls
.

A
s it turned out, the “cradle of liberty” is also an uncomfortable bed of paranoia. The good citizens had determined that since political freedom (as they saw it) was created in their city, then it was only fair that it be defended there as well; so by the time the “Thrilla in Philadelphia” actually got under way on January 11, the marvellous American mind had devised a workable domino theory of international hockey: the Soviets had fought seven times and New York had fallen twice, Chicago, Boston and Pittsburgh once each, Montreal had drawn even and only Buffalo had managed to turn back the red tide.

In the eighth and final match of Russian hockey vs. NHL hockey, the citizens of Philadelphia conveniently forgot the Soviets had already taken the series with five wins; for them, it had come down to their best against our best, and the blessed Flyers, led by their captain Bobby Clarke (who had himself set the mood by announcing “I don't like the sons of bitches anyway”), were assigned to strike the fatal blow for American liberty.

“They're playing this for God, motherhood and
NATO,”
local clothing salesman Mel Pastiloff said as he arrived at the arena, and elsewhere, at least two of the Flyers claimed they'd be representing “the free world” when they skated out. It was only a hockey game, but sitting in the press box that afternoon was not far removed from being an extra in a John Wayne war movie.

Philadelphia had been surly to the Central Red Army team since it had arrived. At practice the morning before, the Soviets had complained they were being held up by a late ice flood, and a fat man with a cigar had offered only his sympathetic “Tough shitsky.” It had become quickly obvious that this was to be no mere game, that—to the Americans, anyway—hockey is hell, too.

As expected, it was Clarke who set the standard in the match, attacking from the moment he lost the opening faceoff, and his
actions were backed by a continuous barrage of various salvos named Moose Dupont, Mad Dog Kelly, Bird Saleski, Hammer Schultz and Ed Van Impe. The team had obviously taken to heart the typed message coach Fred Shero had tacked to the dressing room bulletin board, a quote from Theodore Roosevelt: “The unforgivable crime is soft hitting. Do not hit at all if it can be avoided, but never hit softly.”

Comparing the Flyers' 4–1 victory of January 11 to the Montreal contest on New Year's Eve (a 3–3 tie) is like comparing a skin flick to a Bergman film, but Philadelphia still managed to demonstrate some skills other than merely mugging, and that Fred Shero may well be the greatest strategist the game has seen. After the depressing first period, the Flyers won by hockey skills alone, but it was still not what local TV announcer Gene Hart told his Philadelphia audience: “This has been an artistic success. This has not been the Broad Street Bullies.”

And long after it was all over, the man who had worked hardest for the victory still stood, naked and trembling, pinned to his dressing cubbyhole by a swarm of glad-handers, journalists and photographers. Most of the other Flyers had showered, dressed and were either drinking beer or gone, but Bobby Clarke had not showered, nor even put his front teeth back in. Someone had given him a towel and he had hitched it around his waist, though it might better have been used to soak up the blood that oozed from an accidental ten-stitch cut above the hairline and down over starchy skin that looked sick, if not actually dead, when compared with the robust colour of Clarke's friend Reg Leach, whom the photographers had pushed forward a few minutes earlier with their communal yell, “Kiss him, Bobby! Kiss Reggie on the cheek! C'mon boys, we need a shot!” Leach had laughed, but Clarke kept looking down, as he had all through the interviews, peeking up only when a photographer shouted. He was, as he always is in the dressing room, courteous and charmingly shy, which is why the media love him. He will always
talk, and seldom gets impatient, while he's in the dressing room.

Getting words out of Bobby Clarke is not difficult—providing the words have a proper distance to them, meaning they relate to the game finished or the game coming, or to a teammate, an opponent, a coach. Words that hit at home do not sit as well.

In any manner possible, Clarke will avoid letting people into his personal world, as this magazine has twice discovered. The first time we pursued him, about three years ago, a magazine writer flew down to Philadelphia only to have Clarke refuse to grant an interview, though a Flyers public relations man had promised one. So this time we checked first with Clarke personally, and he approved, but three days after the reporter's arrival Clarke was still reneging on his promise, arguing that no one had told him about it—though he himself had approved it just the week before. “
You're not being fair!”
he virtually screamed when asked if it was possible to talk before the departure of my already booked flight back to Canada. Finally, on the fourth day of the pursuit, he did agree, but only after much coaxing—and also after the flight had left.

The Bobby Clarke who answers questions so readily about his games and the Bobby Clarke who reluctantly discusses himself are actually one and the same: the Jekyll and Hyde of pro hockey. He is a study in contrasts—a choirboy in white cassock who sneaks nips from the sacramental wine. He exudes innocence with boyish, Donny Osmond charm, but beneath the angel hair and baby fat coils one of the chippiest, dirtiest hockey players in the history of the game—a brat who is very possibly the best.

Clarke is a rarity in the self-centred world of professional hockey: someone who will not talk about himself or his accomplishments, a star who never brags. It is a charming mannerism, one usually taken as his humility, and he is revered as a modest player in an era when modesty often seems as popular as brush-cuts. However, modesty may not be a fair interpretation of Clarke's reluctance to talk about himself. Could it not also be a fear of
opening up, a dread of coming to terms publicly with what a teenage crisis drove Bobby Clarke to do?

When the magazine set out to learn more about Clarke, it was to profile him as hockey's most valuable player (now that Bobby Orr is hobbled and Phil Esposito is fading) and not as hockey's well-known diabetic who made good. But the more we got to know about him—and to
not
know about him—the clearer it became that everything he is today is rooted in an incident that took place on May 24, 1965, when he was sitting in the family living room in Flin Flon, Manitoba, and realized that his mother's image kept going blurry. They rushed him to the hospital and he stayed a month and a half, completely missing his grade nine exams. (The school put him ahead anyway, but he left for good the next year.) His problem was diabetes, severe enough that even today a special diet is not enough, and he must give himself an insulin injection every morning.

The year they discovered the diabetes, the doctors advised him that if he intended to stick with hockey he should switch to goal, but he wouldn't listen, and that's where who he is today began. Instead, he charged into junior hockey as if he were driven by another force, and soon passed other local players who were far more gifted but much less dedicated. He took his average talents and stretched them until he was judged one of the finest players in the entire Western Canada junior league, and though he had proved there was no need for him to become a goaltender, he was not yet satisfied. His family would sometimes hold meetings with him and tell him things might be fine now, but what about later—but he wasn't listening then, either. He had changed into what he is today.

“He just shut up about it when he was about sixteen,” his mother says. “I don't think he ever blamed us, but he must have wondered ‘Why me? Why am I going to be different?' We'd go and get him from the hospital and he'd want to walk back alone, and think. He never said a word about it, just left things like diet
and medicine up to us. We don't talk much about it even now.”

“I've had it for ten or eleven years, so it's a part of life,” says Clarke, now twenty-six. “But when I first came up, all anybody wanted to talk about was the diabetes, so I just stopped giving interviews about it. When I first got it, it made me feel different from the other kids, and there was a lot of insecurity that went with it.”

The insecurity wasn't helped much when Clarke became the seventeenth choice in the 1969 amateur draft. He'd already proved himself a more capable player than a dozen or more of those selected before him—the Flyers' first pick, Bob Currier, never made it to the NHL—but the teams were shying away from him because of the diabetes.

“What really bothered me was that hockey scouts were making themselves medical experts by saying I couldn't last,” Clarke says. “But the Flyers at least invested in a phone call to their doctor who said sure, I'd be able to play.”

It gave him another point to prove, and he set about it with such intensity that within a few years he was indisputably acclaimed the best defensive player in hockey. (Somewhat ironically, at mid-season this year the defensive master was leading the league in offence as well.) He is, as the clichés about him go, one who never quits trying, a player so determined to win that he will do absolutely anything to accomplish it—and often with disturbing results. (“Professionals are paid to win, not play” is the way he words it.)

In 1972, he was first given national attention as a surprise addition to Team Canada. Coach Harry Sinden had selected all the best centres in hockey—the Espositos and Mikitas—and had wanted to add Walt Tkaczuk of the New York Rangers, as a possible insurance centre. Tkaczuk, however, had prior commitments to his hockey school, and Sinden's choice came down to either Clarke or Dave Keon of the Toronto Maple Leafs, and he selected Clarke. Playing far above what was expected of him, Clarke contributed greatly to the Team Canada victory by eliminating the top Soviet
threat, Valeri Kharlamov, when he disabled Kharlamov with a well-aimed chop to the ankles. Clarke was accused of, and did not deny, hurting the Soviet star deliberately, and quickly became the ultimate anti-hero in the USSR. “He jabbed me and I chased him,” says Clarke of the incident, “but I wasn't swinging to break his leg. If I was swinging to hurt him, I'd have swung at his head.”