The following is an excerpt from The Battle of Alberta, by Mark Spector.
Wayne Gretzky is sitting on the Edmonton Oilers’ bench, watching one of his teammates duke it out with one of the Calgary Flames.
This time it is Kevin McClelland, and the Oilers are losing big-time to the Flames. The last time it was Dave Semenko in a lopsided Edmonton win. The next time? Dave Brown in a tied game. In the Battle of Alberta, the scoreboard changed but the routine stayed mostly the same.
As Steve Smith said, "When you look back and you think about the Battle of Alberta, every time you went into that building, you knew you were going to shed some blood. And hopefully you were going to take some with you."
Gretzky didn’t have to take, or give, any blood. When you average about three points a game, you get a pass on the whole blood-spilling thing. But on this night, Gretzky had a front-row seat to a fight that, for some reason, he remembers ahead of so many others he’d seen over the years. "We were losing 7–2, or 8–2. There was about four minutes left in the game, and Kevin McClelland and Tim Hunter drop their gloves right in front of our bench. They’re both tough guys, and they were going at it pretty good," Gretzky said, now 25 years after the fact. "Hunter hit McClelland so hard that his nose shattered. It was almost on the other side of his face. The whole bench just kind of went, ‘Oh my God…’"
Whichever end of a lopsided lead a team found itself on in the Battle of Alberta, their tough guys would do exactly what McClelland was doing on this night. Was it kind of dumb? Yes, sometimes—by today’s standards—it got kind of dumb. But this was the 1980s NHL, a far different place than today’s NHL.
It was a time when the Edmonton Oilers and the Calgary Flames combined for 780 goals in a season. It was less about defensive systems and Department of Player Safety videos and more about scoring goals and throwing down, when two of the NHL’s best teams were also two of the league’s toughest teams.
In this bout, however, McClelland was getting a bad case of east-west nose from Hunter. He took a big shot, the Oilers bench cringed, and then he did something Gretzky will never forget. "Without missing a beat, McClelland turns to our bench and says, ‘It didn’t hurt! I didn’t feel a thing!’" Gretzky says. "I remember Tim Hunter looking at him, like, ‘Are you serious?’ It was almost like a piece out of a movie, and it said to us, ‘You guys can do whatever you want to us. We’re not going to back down. We’re going to keep coming.’ We all rose about six inches off the bench. He just made us all that much bigger. I remember after that game, all of us saying, ‘That’s it. We’re not going to lose to this team.’"
You cannot capture the Battle of Alberta with one story—or even one series. But the McClelland-Hunter incident encompassed as many elements of the epic Oilers versus the Flames crusade of the 1980s as you could ask for.
It included the greatest player the game has ever seen, yet it involved a level of fury that made you want to avert your eyes; a dash of slapstick comedy, as McClelland somehow timed his delivery to the very moment his nostril reached his own ear; and a pinch of wrestling-like thuggery. Like the time Mike Bullard hopped off that stretcher underneath the stands or the night a roundly beaten-up Doug Risebrough used his skates to slice Marty McSorley’s jersey to bits while sitting in the penalty box.
Hockey people would say that the Battle of Alberta began when the Calgary Flames moved north from Atlanta for the 1980–81 season, one year after the Edmonton Oilers had merged into the NHL as one of four survivors from the World Hockey Association. But no visceral, loathsome rivalry just fires up when two teams arrive in two geographically linked towns. A proper rivalry has to simmer through political decisions, to amateur sports, to fights over services and education. In Alberta, the competition began long before Highway 2—the north-south ribbon of highway between the two cities—was even paved.
By the time the two NHL teams had been established in Alberta, however, so was the pecking order of the two sports towns. Edmonton called itself the City of Champions, which took some nerve considering its hockey team was in its infancy. But they had a better football club, a better football stadium and a better and newer hockey rink. And they had Wayne Gretzky, the great difference-maker, who some Edmontonians believed might one day be known as the best player the sport of hockey has ever seen.
If there wasn’t a goal scored in the opening 35 seconds of the Battle, then there might be a five-on-five brawl. Nobody could promise, when you bought a ticket for Edmonton-Calgary, whether the game would have an R rating or merely PG. The guarantee was, however, that you would be entertained.
The following is an excerpt from The Battle of Alberta by Mark Spector. Copyright © 2015 Mark Spector. Published by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.
