Wayne Gretzky's Ghost (21 page)

This is the age of parity in the NHL, not the age of dynasties, and Carey Price's life will never be as Dryden described his old job on the January night when they raised his No. 29 to the rafters. “Watching, waiting, not doing much of anything,” Dryden joked about his lonely life in the Montreal net. “That is pretty much what the 1970s were all about—that, and a whole lot of Stanley Cups.”

That situation will likely never come again, in any hockey city. Right now, Montreal would be grateful merely for a chance at a twenty-fifth Cup. And any hopes it might have rests largely on jersey No. 31, which still has a long, long way to go before it reaches any rafters anywhere.

“Every round it gets worse,” Price said Wednesday of the mounting pressure on the ice, let alone what that history provides off the ice. “It doesn't bother me one bit.”

The Montreal Canadiens mounted an exceptional playoff run two years later, when they defeated Alexander Ovechkin and the Washington Capitals and then Sidney Crosby and the Cup-defending Pittsburgh Penguins. They managed this with truly
remarkable goaltending—but not from Carey Price. The darling of the nets now was Jaroslav Halak, who put on one of the greatest playoff performances in recent memory before the outmanned Canadiens fell to the Philadelphia Flyers in the conference final. In the summer of 2010, to great controversy, the Canadiens elected to stick with Price and traded Halak to the St. Louis Blues. Price responded with the best year of his young career, appearing in more games than any goaltender in Montreal's long history and winning more games in 2010–11 than any Canadiens goaltender since Ken Dryden
.

NASHVILLE, TENNESEE

I
f the Vancouver Canucks are now Canada's Team—no matter whether by choice or by default—then the main flag bearer is an American. All Ryan Kesler did to win Game 3 on Tuesday night was score the goal that put the Canucks back into the match at 1–1, set up the goal that put them ahead 2–1 and then, after the Nashville Predators had tied matters late in the third period, draw the dubious penalty in overtime that gave Vancouver a power play and score the winning goal that gave the Canucks a two-games-to-one lead in this series, which continues Thursday at Bridgestone Arena. Not a bad night's work for someone who hadn't scored at all in these Stanley Cup playoffs.

Kesler is, by his own admission, a “streaky” player. He had 41 goals in the regular season, none in the opening series against the Chicago Blackhawks, none against Nashville until he rather dramatically broke out on Tuesday. A red-hot Kesler—despite an ice-cold Henrik and a cooled-off Daniel Sedin—is a significant
factor in a hockey series where the goaltending has been so sharp and the defence so suffocating that goals are as rare as Canadian teams winning Canada's most-revered trophy.

Kesler's best play Tuesday probably had nothing whatsoever to do with his own hockey stick—but rather the stick of Nashville captain Shea Weber, who was sent to the penalty box in overtime for hooking Kesler. “I've got one hand on my stick and he grabs my stick,” said a bewildered Weber. “And I get a penalty?”

Wednesday afternoon, Kesler was sticking to the story: “He was hooking me.” At least that's what his mouth said. Kesler's mouth is easily the least interesting part of his personality. If you wish to know what he really said, you have to listen to his eyes and that small twitch that sometimes turns up the edge of his mouth. What the eyes said was this: “Damn right I suckered him. I had my arm and elbow clamped down on his stick like a big turkey wing and the referee fell for it—Shea Weber can go cry to his Mawwwmmmie for all I care …”

Kesler is twenty-six years old and, while long a known force in Vancouver, is only now getting the widespread appreciation his play deserves—and as much for what he has accomplished in international play as in NHL play. He is, for the third year in a row, a finalist for the Selke Trophy as the league's top defensive forward, though there are many in Vancouver who believe he also could have been a candidate for the Hart Trophy as the most valuable player, a nomination that went to teammate Daniel Sedin, an obviously worthy candidate given that Sedin won the NHL scoring championship.

The Michigan-born Kesler may well be the best U.S.-born player in the world at the moment, given that Chicago's little Patrick Kane was a bit off this year.

It is a remarkable rise for a player who, little more than a decade ago, was cut from several elite teams he tried out for and wondered if hockey was really for him. His father, Mike, who drove eight hours from Livonia, Michigan, to watch Tuesday's
game, took him on the bantam team he was coaching and kept the kid in the game.

Rather than the major-junior route chosen by most Canadian youngsters, he is a product of the U.S. National Team Development Program and Ohio State University. At eighteen, he went twenty-third overall in the NHL entry draft, far behind such today stars as Pittsburgh's Marc-André Fleury, Carolina's Eric Staal and Boston's Nathan Horton (first, second and third overall). He was not even the top American taken, chosen after Ryan Suter had gone seventh to Nashville, Zach Parise seventeenth to New Jersey and Dustin Brown thirteenth to Los Angeles.

But very quickly his career began to shine. Vancouver lent him to the U.S. team entering the 2004 world junior championship, where he scored the third-period goal against Canada that tied the gold-medal game 3–3 and led to the stunning 4–3 U.S. victory when Canada later scored on itself. It was the U.S. team's first win in the tournament. He was, as well, a key player for the Americans in the Vancouver Winter Games, scoring the first goal as the United States came back to tie the Canadians 2–2 and force overtime in the gold-medal game, a game won by Canada when Sidney Crosby scored.

He has become a major force, now widely considered one of the game's best two-way players alongside the likes of Detroit's brilliant Pavel Datsyuk. A year ago it paid off when the Canucks signed him to a six-year $30-million (U.S.) extension. No one doubts any longer whether he belongs on elite teams.

“He's a big body, works hard, good hands,” says Nashville goaltender Pekka Rinne, who will have seen enough of Kesler no matter how this series ends. “Somebody you have to be aware of all the time.”

“He plays at both ends of the ice,” says Suter, a Nashville defenceman who is also one of Kesler's closest friends. “He's just the total package—I don't know what else to say.”

Say nothing, Ryan Kesler would suggest. And let the actions speak for themselves.

In the 2011 Stanley Cup playoffs, Ryan Kesler emerged as a dominant force in post-season play. He, along with the Sedin twins, led the Canucks all the way to the Stanley Cup final, where they lost to the Boston Bruins in seven games
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THE CHARACTERS

I
t is—at least on Saturday nights throughout the winter and every night for most of each spring—the most recognizable, popular, controversial, beloved and, yes, often despised political voice in the country. It has come to Ottawa in the midst of a snowstorm, come to Ottawa to speak out and to speak loudly.

“Just shut your goddamn mouth for a minute!” Don Cherry barks from the far side of the toilet stall. “Shut up and let me talk—okay?”

“Okay,” the young man by the urinals says. The young man surely never meant it to go this far. He came in to Don Cherry's brand-new Nepean bar, had a couple, saw Cherry heading off to the washroom and figured it was as good a chance as he'd ever have to tell his buddies he'd spent the afternoon raising a few glasses with Cherry and talking about hockey—more specifically about Eric Lindros and his refusal to play for the team that drafted him, the Quebec Nordiques.

Cherry, after all, was talking hockey with everyone. For nearly three hours he had been sitting in a far corner of the restaurant and it was clear to anyone who wandered in that the last thing the host of
Hockey Night in Canada's
Coach's Corner wished to be was inconspicuous. He had on one of those suits Nathan Detroit last wore in
Guys and Dolls
. He had his Wilfrid Laurier collars done up tight enough to choke and yet nothing, not the collar, food, autograph seekers or even the endless cups of coffee could stop the endless flow of opinion that erupts from the active volcano of Don Cherry's mouth.

“There they go!” Cherry would bark and above him, across from him, around him, television screens would fill with the video fists of Bob Probert and Keith Crowder. Every half-hour or so the same punchout, the same raw result—and yet each time the bar would stop dead and stare and shout as if the fight were live, the outcome unknown.

“Who's the toughest, Don?”

“Pretty hard to beat Probert.”

“Who's your favourite player, Don?”

“Gotta go with Neely, eh?”

“Who's the best you ever saw, Don?”

“Right there.” Cherry points to the screen, where Bobby Orr skates by every half-hour or so with a grace not seen since the early 1970s. “There's the best. I was behind the bench when he scored that goal, you know, and I got tingles down my back then and I still get tingles every time I see it. Never been anyone like Orr.”

But now, with the coffee forcing a break in the action, the prodding has accompanied him to the washroom and Don Cherry, who is nothing if not accommodating to his fans, can take no more.

“You think Lindros should be forced to play in Quebec?” the voice barks from behind the stall door.

“Yeah, I do,” the young man says.

“Well I don't. And I happen to think he's a hell of a fine young man, too.”

The man is flustered. “I—”

“Shut up. I heard you out, now you listen to me. Eric Lindros is a friend of mine, okay? Where do they get off calling him a snot and a punk and a racist and a bigot? Who the hell do those politicians think they are saying he should be dropped from the Olympic team? If someone ever said those kinds of things about a Queee-bec kid they'd take him to court. Now whaddya think about that?”

“Okay, eh? I just thought I'd ask.”

Moments later, Cherry is back at his coffee, stirring angrily as he recounts the story of the washroom encounter. “I tell you, the closer I get to the Quebec border, the worse it gets.”

This being an inward-looking country with but two mad obsessions, hockey and politics, it had to happen that someday someone would come along to harness them together and, in doing so, create a brand-new power base. Don Cherry has become the Prime Minister of Saturday Night, a voice now so popular that hockey has become the only television sport where the audience goes up during intermissions.

In Toronto's Maple Leaf Gardens, the fans are taping up banners calling for him to take over the country as well as the intermissions. He has even become a national figure without the grace of a second language, for it is said that between periods in the province of Quebec the channels switch by the tens of thousands from the French broadcast of the game to the English—so that no one will miss the most outrageous act on Canadian television. Bashing foreigners, spoofing gays, celebrating fighting, he is so politically incorrect it is a wonder he survives on television. Yet he not only survives, he thrives, his popularity soaring by the week.

But is it an act? His close friends will say Don Cherry is, at heart, a fairly quiet fifty-six-year-old man with a gentle, sentimental streak who happens to go on instantly at the sight of a microphone or a potential fan, but none will say Cherry does not hold dear the wild opinions he serves up each Saturday night.

Thirty years ago when he was an unknown player in the American Hockey League, no one had to listen to him but his wife, Rose, who now cashes in on those dues by doing headache commercials with him. To fill in time between games Cherry would go shopping with Rose, and rail all the way home about those in the grocery line he'd seen handing over food stamps for steak when he, a working stiff, could barely afford hamburger.

If Don Cherry had never gone farther than the AHL—the scrappy defenceman did get in one game for Boston in the National Hockey League in 1955, leaving behind a career record of no goals, no assists and, more surprisingly, no penalties—no one but Rose would ever have heard about the abuse of food stamps. Nor would millions have sat by their television last winter while Cherry decided to ignore the tedious hockey game in progress and instead harangue viewers for their wimpishly feeble support for the Gulf War.

After sixteen years in the minors, he had a nickname, “Grapes,” a wife he met in Hershey, Pennsylvania, a daughter, Cindy, a son, Timothy, and a lifetime supply of anecdotes—he likes to claim, for example, that Montreal once picked him up in a trade for two rolls of tape and a jockstrap. But he also came out of the AHL with a philosophical base, and it did not grow out of what he picked up on the ice and the bench, but what he picked out of books late at night when the game was still playing through his veins and he could not sleep.