The best most of us can do is guess what it’s like to be Phil Kessel or Vince Carter or Jose Bautista, to constantly see our face on TV, our name ripped in opinion columns, to have clusters of reporters surround our stalls and evaluate.
Grant Fuhr isn’t most of us. He arrived in Toronto via trade, in 1991, with five Stanley Cup rings and the pressure to win on a bad team — and he read the newspapers every morning.
We sat down with the Hockey Hall of Famer in November for an extensive Q&A. Fuhr offered some great insight into his season-and-a-half experience with a losing Maple Leafs team and his relationship with the press at the time.
We decided to save that portion of the interview for the next time media-Leafs relations got testy. We didn’t have to wait long.
SPORTSNET.CA: You go from winning everything in Edmonton to the struggling Maple Leafs. How did the Toronto market compare?
GRANT FUHR: I actually enjoyed it. Growing up as a kid with Hockey Night in Canada, you watch the Leafs and Montreal, so before the Oilers existed I was a Leaf fan. If I couldn’t play in Edmonton, the other place I’d like to play was here. For as much as we had success and were in a fishbowl in Edmonton, it’s an even smaller fishbowl here. You have more reporters at practice here than at games anywhere else, which I found interesting. You were graded on your practices – that was fun, different. Unfortunately we weren’t very good at the time, but Cliff [Fletcher, the general manager] was putting pieces in where we were starting to get better. When [the rebuild] didn’t go really fast, it was interesting to see the reporters report on it. You could see the team getting better, but it wasn’t going to happen fast.
So you’d read the bad press?
All the time. I enjoy reading what’s written. I think that’s the fun part. You see the [reporters] that know and the guys that are assuming or guessing.
Did you take harsh articles to heart?
I knew better by then. As a young guy, if you’re reading it, you’re taking it to heart, it’s not a big seller. Because they were critical at that time. With them being critical, if you don’t believe in what you do, your confidence is going to disappear quickly. You see that here a lot. Guys lose their confidence in Toronto, and it’s because the press is hard on them.
“We got slaughtered, beat 11-nothing, and we weren’t very good. And I was happy he left me in for the whole game.”
And there’s the theory that some free agents don’t want to come here because of the press.
There are guys like that. But your really good players thrive on it. You want to be pushed. The really good ones that want to get better want to get pushed. Is it a hard way to do it? Yeah. But if you can do it, you’ll be that much better. But for a player that’s not used to getting criticized, if you have a bad day at practice, it’s hard on guys’ egos and it’s hard to swallow. In Edmonton it was the same thing, just in a smaller market, so we were used to it. You know what [the media] is trying to accomplish.
You’ve said you wanted to play and finish every game, but did the losing in Toronto ever make you wish for a mercy pull?
I would rather stay in. Perfect example. I played one game as a Leaf. I think it was Dec. 26 in Pittsburgh. Our coach was Tom Watt. We got slaughtered, beat 11-nothing [Note: Actually 12-1], and we weren’t very good. And I was happy he left me in for the whole game. The press really took some nasty shots at him for it, but they never asked me what I thought. You don’t want to leave. That’s the pride of being a goalie—you never want to be pulled. Good, bad or otherwise, you want to be the guy at the end of the day. I figured out at a young age, you’re not going to be great every day. There’s going to be some bad days. But you’d rather be left to fight through the bad days because you learn more when you’re struggling than when you’re better. Even though it was a pretty day, I’d rather be left in for it. We knew we’d get roasted the next day in the paper, but I was happy I stayed in.