They say the game slows down for the truly great players. Until they get old. Then, without exception, the tables turn, and the greats begin to slow down for the game.
The funny thing is, the erosion of Teemu Selanne’s legendary speed began a decade ago in Colorado when his deteriorated left knee could take no more. To this day Selanne swears he would have walked away from hockey had reconstructive surgery not given him back what former teammate and opponent Chris Pronger refers to as “The Burst.” But it did, and he cheated Father Time for a long while after. “He lures you in,” Pronger says over the phone from St. Louis. “You think he’s going fast, and all of a sudden he actually tries to go fast, and boom: He’s gone. The nickname says it all—The Finnish Flash. His zero-to-60 speed is, like, two strides.”
Programming Note: Game 3 of the Eastern Conference quarterfinals between the New York Rangers and Philadelphia Flyers will air on Sportsnet 360 Tuesday night beginning at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT
Pronger played against the best of his generation, facing first-line competition every night. Selanne was the quickest of the quick as an opponent, but Pronger would learn in 2007 with Anaheim that he was just as fast off the ice. He remembers how Selanne would saunter towards his dressing-room stall on game days, still in underwear, with just two minutes remaining before warm-up. Then, somehow, he would get fully geared up and beat Pronger out on to the ice. “I swear to God, he gets dressed in 90 seconds,” Pronger says.
I was never a teammate of Selanne’s, of course, and never dressed beside him, though I’ve known him longer than Pronger has. My first handshake with Selanne came in the Winnipeg Jets’ old dressing room inside Winnipeg Arena, early in the 1992–93 season, after which he lounged upon a trainer’s table in the middle of the room long after his teammates had cleared out to fill the notebooks—no digital recorders back then—of all reporters present.
So, as he faces retirement whenever these Stanley Cup playoffs come to a close for the Anaheim Ducks, the Selanne I will remember was never in a hurry at all. In fact he has always lingered, telling stories, having a laugh at his own expense, and generally enjoying the interview process as an extension of the game he loves so dearly.
It is late in the Ducks’ regular season for this likely final interview between us, and Teemu sits down in his stall after a long morning skate. At age 43, he doesn’t play on back-to-back nights anymore, and he’s out tonight. So he cracks opens a Gatorade and his memory bank for one last time, and we are back inside the Jets room, like it is 1992 again. “My dad was a crane operator. Ilmari—I-l-m-a-r-i. My mom, she was a kindergarten [administrator]. Liisa, with two I’s. They are why I am what I am,” he says, his English very strong but still delivered with a healthy Suomi accent. “My dad thought that hard work is the only way to do it, with the discipline. My mom was more teaching how to treat the people. She always said, ‘Treat people how you want them to treat you.’ Those are the things, you know, how you are always going to succeed.”
Few have scored more than Teemu’s 1,457 points, but many have held a far higher opinion of themselves. If you saw last summer’s self-directed video announcing that he would play one more year, you know Selanne has plenty of pride but very little ego. “I was just a guy who loved hockey,” he sums up, knowing his career is almost over. “A happy guy who came to the rink every morning, every day, with a smile on my face. That’s me.”
Rather than an oversized sense of self-worth, the intangible that Selanne always had an overabundance of was the need to score. It is not indigenous to the Finnish hockey player, Anaheim teammate Saku Koivu reminds. The Finns are about “team” far more than the individual. “It is sort of untypical of a Finnish player, his passion to score goals. He thinks the game a different way,” Koivu says. “A lot of Finns, it’s about the team, the defensive side. That’s how we were brought up. He was the one (who said) ‘I want to get that shot. I know I’m good at that.’ He was, in a good way, more confident.”
Selanne will leave the game this spring as he arrived, with a shot that didn’t do much for anyone—other than light the lamp 684 times—and that Jofa 366 helmet, a lid not worn by anyone else in the league. There are, of course, stories that are apropos to nothing, yet should be retold when a great player hangs ’em up. Like the $55,000 speeding ticket he got tagged with in Finland for going 73 in a 55 zone. Back home, the penalty for speeding works on a sliding scale with the offender’s income. “It was 255,000 Finnish marks,” he says, still sour about a ticket issued more than a decade ago.
Then he brightens up. Selanne always brightens up. “Actually, it’s a funny story,” he begins. “I had (the option of spending) five days in jail. But the jail in Finland, it’s like a daycare almost. I said, ‘I’ll go to jail.’ But Don Baizley, my agent, said to me, ‘If you want to apply for U.S. citizenship, you can’t have a criminal record.’ So I paid the fine. I had three months to pay. I paid it on last day.”
The stories aren’t new anymore, because let’s face it—a 43-year-old hockey player hasn’t done his finest work for a few years now. It is the memories that he can separate from the herd however, that fascinate. From 1,451 regular season games, and another 119 playoff games (and still counting), Selanne has decided on his favourite career moment. “Western Conference Final. It was Game 5 in Detroit. The series was tied 2-2. We were down 1–0 with 45 seconds to go,” Selanne says. “I remember it like it was…”
Yesterday.
Selanne and Pronger set up Scott Niedermayer for a powerplay goal at 19:12 of the third period,” Selanne says. “Then it was time for OT at the Joe, Selanne on the ice. “Andreas Lilja went behind the net, and he sort of overskated the puck. [Linemate] Andy McDonald was forechecking. I went behind the net chasing, got the puck.”
He’s in his own world now, his mouth telling a story that ears could hear a million times. I could have left the room and he would never have noticed. “I made the fake, shot it backhand. The water bottle went up, Hasek went down….” Then he looks up at you, making an observation that few hockey players would ever make. “It was so silent, the rink, right after. People were shocked,” Selanne says. “You could hear people breathing. At that time we knew we were going to go all the way.”
Could he really hear people breathing, while being mobbed by 19 teammates? Doubtful. But Selanne is a romantic, and there is a part of him—like Ryan Smyth trying to score that final power-play goal in Edmonton in his final game—that believes he’ll go out this spring with a water bottle suspended in the air, illuminated by the red hue of a goal light.
His coach, Bruce Boudreau, knows there might be some tough decisions along the playoff route, as the games grind on Selanne’s 43-year-old legs. Where once he had “The Burst,” today that extra gear is undeniably absent. Like Freddie Couples at the Masters, however, Selanne’s mental game can still carry him. “People underestimate how passion affects the game, and he loves the game,” says Boudreau, whose own cup-of-coffee career petered out in the minors at age 37. “He loves the people, he loves to get dressed every morning to play the game. It’s really difficult for him to take days off. He wants to be on the ice all the time.”
When the two discuss whether or not Selanne will dress for the next playoff game—and that will become a larger topic of conversation the further the Ducks go—Selanne won’t use words like “have to” or “must.” He considers those words to be a negative, preferring statements like, “I like. We want to. We really want to. I won’t have anything negative in my life,” he says.
Selanne has learned from the golf course not to dwell on scoring slumps or losing streaks. “Don’t worry about the last, bad shot. Think about the next shot,” he says. “That’s how you get better. This game, you can’t play with the fear. Mistakes happen. If you play with the fear, and you’re scared of making mistakes, this is the wrong game. Again, it’s like golf: If there’s water and you think, ‘Oh no. The water.’ Of course it’s going to hit the water.”
So forget the water. Whether or not he’s got The Burst in his back pocket, Selanne’s hoping for just a few more chances to hit the water bottle this spring before he slows it down for real.