Hockey Towns Page 13

  St. Louis had the oldest players in hockey, and they were struggling. They posted a 17–18–5 season. But there were some great role models for Brian—Red Berenson, Jimmy Roberts, goalie Eddie Johnston, defencemen Barclay and Bob Plager, Claude Larose, Garry Unger and Derek Sanderson. Brian played on the fourth line, getting fourteen points in thirty-five games while spending eighty-two minutes in the penalty box. The next season, he was a first-line player. Just a year earlier, Brian was ready to quit hockey and stick with farming and paving roads in Red Deer.

  Emile Francis had been brought in from the New York Rangers in 1976 to turn around a franchise that was in disarray and lucky to attract five thousand fans a night. That June, in the draft, the Blues had taken Bernie Federko in the first round before choosing Brian in the second round, twentieth overall. They offered Brian a three-year contract at $15,000, $20,000 and $25,000.

  Brian had also been taken in the World Hockey Association draft—fourth round, thirty-sixth overall—by Edmonton, and the Oilers were offering him $50,000, $60,000 and $65,000. It was also a one-way deal. A two-way contract means you’re paid a lower salary if sent down to the minors, so the Oilers’ offer was much more appealing. Plus, Edmonton was close to home. Brian thought about it, but not for very long. By ’76, WHA franchises were constantly changing hands and moving from city to city. Some had even folded. Going to the WHA meant you weren’t sure you were going to get paid. In fact, a lot of the guys didn’t, and so they jumped back into the NHL. Brian was confident he’d get paid in St. Louis, but he’d get paid a lot less.

  Francis called Brian to hear his decision. Brian said, “Mr. Francis, I am not coming to St. Louis. My wife, Judy, works for the City of Red Deer as a clerk at the courthouse, and I have a good job on the paving crew. We figure that between what Judy makes and what I make, well, it’s more money than the contract.”

  Francis asked, “Well, what do you want?” Brian and his agent negotiated a three-year contract paying $25,000, $30,000 and $35,000. It was still a two-way deal, so if he got sent to the minors, he would only make, $7,000, $9,000 and $11,000. But Brian appreciated that Francis added a $50,000 signing bonus—half when he signed, and the rest after he played forty games. Brian ended that first year with only thirty-five games under his belt, but Francis sent him the second $25,000 anyway.

  But Brian wasn’t happy when it came time to do his taxes after his first year in the NHL. He owed more than he’d made. So he fired his agent, determined that he would negotiate for himself from then on. He and Francis understood each other—both were from small farming towns. Francis was a North Battleford, Saskatchewan, boy, and Brian’s family farmed near Viking, Alberta. Brian’s dad told him, “Hockey is a game, and you are a farmer. Never forget that.”

  Every team had a rookie initiation party. Usually, they shaved guys and stuff like that, but when Brian arrived, that practice stopped because he wouldn’t let them do it. But he did go along with St. Louis’s really fun tradition, snipe hunting. All the Blues, going back to the early years of Glenn Hall, Red Berenson, Phil Goyette and Doug Harvey, went through it. The team would load thirty guys into four half-ton pickups and drive west to Eureka, Missouri. The entire town was in on it—farmers, fish and wildlife officers, the police. When it got dark, the veterans took the 1977 rookies—Brian and Bernie Federko—down near the river to hunt snipe.

  The boys were left sitting at the end of a long, cultivated field, which was all mushy because of the extremely fertile soil. They were given two nets, a flashlight and a case of beer. The vets jumped into the trucks and drove to the other end of the field. They said they were going to make a lot of noise by banging pots and pans in order to drive the snipe down the furrows toward the rookies.

  Brian was pissed off and scared. He was in the middle of a field, it was pitch black outside and he was terrified of rats and snakes. As he held up the net, he could feel the cold muck seeping through the knees of his Levi’s. Bernie was crouched beside him, shining a flashlight down the furrow. They could hear the vets yelling, “They’re coming! Do you see them? A whole herd of them!”

  Brian was a farmer—he knew the whole thing was ridiculous. He rolled his eyes and said, “Bernie, this is friggin’ bull.”

  And then, all of a sudden, two big headlights flicked on behind them and a couple of police cars rolled up with their sirens blasting. The police charged Brian and Bernie with illegal snipe hunting. The boys were handcuffed, thrown into the back of the police car and raced into Eureka, where they were locked up.

  As the officers tried to push Brian into the cage, he tried to kick one of them, yelling, “You get the eff away from me!”

  Bernie was beside himself. “No, Sutter, cut it out! Don’t do anything! We’ll be deported!”

  The officers managed to get the guys into their cells and then they left—turning off all the lights.

  Dave Dietrich was a high-ranking, well-respected criminal attorney in St. Louis. About an hour after the boys had been incarcerated, he stormed in and demanded that “his clients” be released. And then he loaded them into his car and drove them to join the team, who were eating pizza, and drinking Busch beer at a local bar.

  The Blues seemed always to be run on a shoestring. They trained in Regina to save money, and some years they didn’t even have a farm team. Most teams had at least forty players under contract, but Brian remembers one year when St. Louis had only twenty-four under contract. From 1978 to 1981, the years when Alain Vigneault, Alain Lemieux, Mark Reeds and Paul MacLean were drafted, Brian says the team would rent out its hired guns to the Central Hockey League’s Montana Magic.

  For years, the Blues traded their first-round picks for a couple of young guys. At one point, they had ten ex–Montreal Canadiens, all under the age of twenty-five, including Doug Wickenheiser, Mark Hunter, Rick Wamsley, Ric Nattress and Kent Carlson. The players would shake their heads when they knew the Habs’ Al MacNeil was in town because it meant they were going to lose a top young prospect and get a third- or fourth-liner back.

  Other teams travelled with two or three trainers. St. Louis travelled with one. As the guys got settled into the hotel, the equipment was driven to the rink, but Brian would throw his suitcase in his room, hop in a cab and head over to help the trainer unpack. Brian took less money to sign with St. Louis, and sometimes he wasn’t even paid everything he was owed on time, but he’d wait a couple years until new owners would take over and then he’d receive a cheque for back pay. Didn’t matter, he stayed loyal to his team.

  In 1979–80, when Brian was twenty-two years old, he was made captain. He was playing more than twenty minutes a night. A lot of his job involved shutting down the other teams’ best players. That didn’t always sit well with the opposing teams, so he would get ambushed. A guy might dump the puck in, and when Brian went in to forecheck, another opponent might grab him from behind while he’d get sandwiched from in front. One time, he was beaten so badly, he played the rest of the game with one eye, because the other eye was seeing stars.

  In 1980–81, the Blues finished first in the Smythe Division and faced the Rangers in the quarter-finals. By now, the Blues were the youngest team in the league, with draftees Wayne Babych and Perry Turnbull and college free agent Joey Mullen having developed into valuable players. And they were loaded with talent thanks to the collapse of the WHA. Mike Liut, their goalie, had come from Cincinnati. Including the preseason he won close to fifty games that year and was runner-up behind Wayne Gretzky for the Hart Trophy. In 1982, another ex-WHA player, a big, tough scoring defenceman named Rob Ramage, would arrive from the Birmingham Bulls via the Colorado Rockies for a first-round draft pick.

  Brian loved the American national anthem. To him, it was the greatest song ever. He was a Canadian through and through and thought “O Canada” was special, but “The Star-Spangled Banner” in Chicago, Philly, New York or Boston on a Sunday night was like a call to march into war. Oh say can you see by the dawn’s early light . . . He’d feel
the blood burning like pepper through his nostrils. And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air . . . His jaw would clamp tight. O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave! And his heart would wrap around his whole body like a suit of armour.

  At the start of the series, Brian was thinking about taking on Ed Johnstone, Ron Greschner and Don Maloney. The teams were standing on the blue lines at Madison Square Garden as the anthem started up, when suddenly Brian and the boys could hear loud cracks exploding all around them. They looked at each other. “Gunshots? What in the hell is going on?” The game started and nothing more was said.

  The next game at the Garden, the anthem started playing again, and again they were surrounded by what sounded like rifle shots. Brian looked around and noticed his teammates starting to shuffle away from him.

  Ramage shouted over to him, “They’re throwing frickin’ walnuts on the ice from the upper decks . . . at you.”

  In September of 1983, Brian was back home, harvesting. He and Bernie Federko both had contracts up for negotiation, and Bernie was really upset. He had been calling the farm, telling Brian there was no way he was reporting to training camp because Francis wasn’t giving him what he needed to play. A seventh-overall pick, Bernie was making $75,000 a year. He was looking for an average of $150,000, which Brian thought was fair. Over an eight-year span, Brian says he thinks the only other tandem that scored as many goals as he and Bernie did was Wayne Gretzky and whoever was on his wing.

  In those days, the league had a strict rule—you had to be checked into your hotel by midnight of the first day of training camp. So each year, Brian would leave the day before and drive straight through to St. Louis. It was twenty-eight to thirty hours of easy driving, but he could make it in twenty-six if there were no delays at the border, and he always pushed it. Being a farmer himself, Francis understood when Brian arrived late. He would make a big deal about fining Brian, but when things settled down, he’d mail him his cheque back.

  This year, Brian drove twenty-four hours straight, stopping in Columbia, halfway between Kansas City and St. Louis, to get gas. He called Francis and said, “I’ll be there in a couple of hours.” And Francis said, “I’ll be waiting for you, even if it’s two in the morning.” Brian arrived at the old Checkerdome just before midnight.

  Francis’s office was on the third floor of a four-storey tower, and there was a little eight-by-eight-foot waiting room off the lobby. In St. Louis, the humidity can make it feel like it’s about a hundred degrees Fahrenheit at that time of the year, and nowhere in the building was air-conditioned except for Francis’s office. Bernie and his agent were sitting in the waiting room. They’d been negotiating with Francis the entire summer and hadn’t gotten anywhere. Training camp started in the morning, and they had reached an impasse, so Francis had given them the boot. Both men were drowning in sweat. Bernie’s agent was dressed in a three-piece suit and his tie hung around his neck like the tongue of a thirsty dog in the hot sun.

  Brian breezed in, excited to be back in St. Louis. Bernie’s agent asked, “Where are you going?”

  Brian said, “Up to see Mr. Francis.”

  Bernie’s head was hanging in his hands. He looked up and said, “Suds, I’m not reporting to camp.”

  Brian hopped into the elevator to go see his boss. Francis wasn’t a big man—he stood five foot four—but his presence made him a foot taller. He had a long office with a big, tall desk and a big, tall chair behind it. There was a low couch placed way across the room, and when Brian sat down on it, he felt like he was a child on the floor, staring up at a giant.

  Francis talked about harvesting and cattle, and asked how the hell Brian got there so quick, and then he left the room and came back with a couple of Busch beers, Brian’s favourite. As they talked, Brian told Francis that he and Judy had used every nickel he made playing hockey to buy farmland. Francis nodded, took a swig and swallowed, and said, “Well, what are we going to do about this contract?”

  Brian replied, “Yeah, well, what should we do?” He really had no idea, because it was the first contract he had ever negotiated, but he did have a number in mind. The average in the league a year earlier had gone up from $75,000 to $125,000. Somebody in the league office had told him that other top-scoring left wingers like Clark Gillies, Steve Shutt and Billy Barber were making that. But those boys were a little bit older and they played in New York, Montreal and Philadelphia, the top teams in the league. Brian made $35,000 in St. Louis, but he had scored forty-one goals, so he thought, “Well, jeez, if I get an average of $75,000 for the next three years, I’ll be happy!” And of course, there were bonuses too. So he said, “Here is what we will do, Mr. Francis. We will each write on a piece of paper what we think I’m worth for the next three years.”

  Both men wrote their numbers down, Brian scribbling “50, 75 + 100.” Francis stood up, walked out from behind his desk, set his note on the coffee table in front of Brian and then returned to his chair.

  Brian reached for the paper, trying to keep his hand steady. He was scared and his heart was beating hard, but at the same time he felt a certain calm because he trusted Francis. He cupped the paper in one hand and opened it up with the other. It said, “100, 125 and 150.”

  While Francis talked to him, Brian tried not to keep glancing down at the paper. He was having a hard time digesting the big numbers. Finally, Francis said, “Okay, let’s see your piece of paper.”

  Brian shook his head. “No, Mr. Francis, you don’t have to see my piece of paper. I’ll accept your offer.” And then, the talk turned to bonuses. Back then, fifty-goal scorers were really hard to come by—you could count them on one hand—so Francis wanted to offer Brian bonuses for forty, forty-five and fifty goals. Brian said, “Mr. Francis, you don’t have to give me personal bonuses. I’d like team bonuses instead.” So they worked out a plus/minus quarterly bonus for the whole team.

  As well, Brian asked for a loan of $100,000 so that he could pay off his farmland. And so Francis wrote into the contract that it was “a separate loan, an undisclosed amount, that is between the St. Louis Blues and Brian Sutter entirely,” and the beauty of it was, Francis made it non-repayable.

  Altogether, the two of them worked out the contract in about half an hour. When Brian stepped off the elevator, he was on cloud nine. Bernie and his agent were still in the waiting room. The agent asked, “What happened up there?”

  Brian answered, “I just did my contract,” and both their mouths dropped open.

  Bernie signed a couple of days later, and he and his wife and Brian and Judy all bought houses in a small town nearby called Chesterfield, which was less than twenty miles from the rink. Brian played for four more years, becoming great friends with guys like Doug Gilmour, who scored 105 points in 1986–87.

  In 1988, team executive Jack Quinn brought him in and said, “Brian, did you ever think about coaching?” A year earlier, Brian had signed a new contract paying $200,000, $225,000 and $275,000. There were only a few players making the kind of money Brian and Bernie were earning at the time—Wayne Gretzky, Dave Taylor, Larry Robinson. Brian knew that coaches, even great ones like Al Arbour and Scotty Bowman, made only $100,000 to $150,000, and he didn’t want to take the pay cut. But Quinn told him he could coach at the salary his playing contract called for. At thirty-one, he was the youngest coach in the league.

  In the middle of the summer of 1988, Brian was on his way back from coaches’ meetings in Minnesota. He was at the airport when he called the Blues’ general manager, Ron Caron, to check on Dougie Gilmour’s contract. Brian saw Dougie, who was among the team’s leading scorers, as one of the keys to the team’s success.

  Some allegations had been made about Dougie off the ice, so Caron had traded him to the Calgary Flames. (The allegations didn’t last, with a grand jury declining to indict on any criminal charges, and a civil lawsuit ending shortly afterward.) He listed the guys he got for Gilmour—Mike Bullard, Craig Coxe and Tim Corkery—but Brian didn’t
hear him. In his mind, it was a typical St. Louis move. Calgary was now doing the same thing to the Blues that the Montreal Canadiens used to do, and the team was using the “allegations” as an excuse. Brian was so mad he started banging the receiver against the phone. Security came running from all directions, but he didn’t care. He was in such a fury he grabbed the whole phone unit and ripped it right off the wall.

  Doug Gilmour went to Calgary and became one of their top players and an important part of their 1989 Stanley Cup win. The Blues now had a whole group of fourth- and fifth-liners from Calgary. A year earlier, they had traded Rob Ramage and Rick Wamsley for Steve Bozek and another guy that nobody in the league wanted—Terry Crisp was coaching the Flames’ farm team, and he didn’t even want him back there. The guy in question became one of the greatest goal scorers in the history of the NHL—in Brian Sutter’s opinion, the greatest right winger ever. His name was Brett Hull.

  Brian had played with him for a year, so he had an idea what kind of player “Hully” could become. Having lost Gilmour, he needed a guy who could score. Brian’s philosophy was that the two greatest words in life are trust and respect. So he took a team full of young players and misfits and totally rebuilt it in one year. Between playoffs, exhibition games and the regular season, Brett Hull scored a hundred goals for St. Louis in three different years.

  But once again, the team was going through a change of ownership and guys weren’t getting paid. Even so, Brian managed to take the Blues to the playoffs in each of his four years behind the bench. In 1992, after a first-round loss to Chicago, the NHL’s coach of the year for 1990–91 was fired. To date, the Blues have never won a Stanley Cup.