IGGY LEFT AN INDELIBLE MARK
Former Flames captain set to retire
The Kamloops Blazers had held a spring camp, just outside of Edmonton in Sherwood Park.
It was 1992 and Jarome Iginla, then an undrafted bantam-aged player for the St. Albert midget AAA squad, had turned heads.
“Him and his mom and his grandparents were there and Bob Brown (the Blazers general manager at the time) and I offered him a Western Hockey League contract,” recalls Don Hay, then head coach of the Blazers. “We told him to take his time and think about it and get legal representative to look at it. He had it back to us by the end of the day.”
It was clear that the high-scoring right-winger wanted to play, from Day 1. And, making a major impact as a 16-year-old scoring six goals and 23 assists in 48 games in the 1993-94 season, he did.
He’d score 33 goals and 38 assists in 72 games the following year in the regular season as the Blazers won their second straight Memorial Cup.
Iginla, a former 11th overall draft choice of the Dallas Stars before being traded to the Flames for Joe Nieuwendyk, added another 63 goals and 73 assists in 63 games in 1995-96 for 136 points and added 120 penalty minutes. He was named the WHL’s most valuable player.
So, when the Blazers had been ousted from the WHL playoffs and Iginla had been called up to the Calgary Flames for his big-league debut immediately, no one was surprised that he made an impact as an 18-year-old fresh off signing his first professional contract.
Hay, who had been promoted that season to an assistant coaching role with the Flames, remembers being impressed, too. “For him to make that step and not be intimidated, that was good to see. He just played with so much composure and played with a lot of professionalism as a young player and played with a lot of respect for the league.”
Two nights after his debut, he notched his first NHL goal — a playoff marker — against Ed Belfour. The Flames were swept by the Chicago Blackhawks in that game but the tone had been set.
Iginla was going to be the difference-maker in these parts for a very long time. And, for a long time, he was one of the seemingly only difference makers.
“I was so lucky to have a chance to coach him. He was such a special kid,” recalled Pierre Page, Iginla’s first NHL coach who was the Flames’ bench boss from 1995-97. “Jarome arrived in Calgary when the team was selling all of the parts and he was there for 17 and a half years … holy smokes, everyone was gone. Nieuwendyk was gone. Al MacInnis was gone. Gary Suter was gone. Joel Otto was gone. Joey Mullen was gone. It was a totally different team.
“Calgary was trying to figure out how to win with scoring two-anda-half goals per game. You needed three to four to win. That was a tough career in a time when the Flames were trying to figure out if they could spend less money.” Suddenly, 2004 rolled round. The Calgary Flames were suddenly thrust into the playoff spotlight, and their captain began gaining media attention.
That spring, Darryl Sutter had been asked: “What makes Iginla so special?”
“He’s a big power guy. He’s an old-school player. Plays a lot of minutes. Plays power play. Plays penalty kill. Plays against big players. Plays against skilled players. Plays the last minute of a period. Plays the first minute of a period. He’s healthy. A good guy. A great family guy. He’s from Alberta. He’s good with the media.”
Iginla had been giving the ‘C’ that training camp by his linemate and pal Craig Conroy.
Added Sutter: “He wanted to be the captain of the team. There’s a lot of captains who wear the C, but it doesn’t make them the leader of the team.”
If the saddle-shaped roof was ever going to come unhinged, this was the moment.
“There were so many different highlights,” said former teammate Shean Donovan, reminiscing about Jarome Iginla’s role in the Calgary Flames’ fairy-tale run to Game 7 of the Stanley Cup final in 2004. “But maybe the most memorable one for most people is when we come home after the split in Tampa, and he has that fight with (Vincent) Lecavalier. I don’t know if I have ever heard a rink louder in my life.
“They went at it pretty hard, too. They weren’t just slapping each other in the face. They were actually mad. It was a good fight.
“Every series we were in, he’d try to mix it up,” Donovan added. “He scored a lot of goals for us, obviously, and led the charge offensively. But also, he was the guy who was leading the charge physically. He’s the one who made that team have that identity. We all played to the identity of him and Darryl (Sutter) — that hard-nosed hockey.”
For Iginla’s family and friends, for former teammates and foes, for his legions of fans, the past several days have been a skate down memory lane.
The legendary right-winger is retiring after 20 seasons in the National Hockey League — 16 of ’em with the Flames.
He returns Monday to the Saddledome for an official farewell.
Iginla’s legacy in this city can be summed up simply: He is the greatest of the Flames’ all-time greats.
He shredded the club record book, racking up 525 goals and 1,095 points in Calgary’s colours. He was the fan favourite. The face-of-the-franchise. The captain.
And, of course, he was one of the main reasons the Red Mile was rocking into early June in 2004, with Iginla scoring, scrapping and co-starring with the acrobatic Miikka Kiprusoff as the Flames came within a whisker of hanging a second championship banner at the Saddledome.
“Just whenever we needed anything good to happen, a big moment, a big goal, a fight. He just rose to the occasion and he led the way,” said Craig Conroy, Iginla’s centre that spring and now an assistant general manager for the Flames. “And he just had a belief that we were going to win, we were going to win that Stanley Cup for Calgary. And he never wavered. Even probably in the last minute of that Game 7, we thought we were going to tie it up.”
They didn’t. Lecavalier and the Tampa Bay Lightning sipped from the shiny trophy that spring.
Iginla, as Conroy points out, “won everything else.”
A pair of Maurice ‘Rocket’ Richard Trophies.
A couple of Olympic gold medals. After a bust-out campaign in 2001-02, he bagged what was then known as the Lester B. Pearson Award, a peer-voted nod to the NHL’s most outstanding player.
“Jarome was one of the most competitive guys I’d ever seen in my life. Anything that was going on, he wanted to win,” recalled longtime teammate Robyn Regehr, second to Iginla among the Flames’ career leaders in games played. “We used to play this ridiculous computer game called Age of Empires. We’d play it on the plane. Technology wasn’t what it is now, so we would have wires running everywhere, duct-taped to the ground so they wouldn’t trip anyone as they were walking around.
“Denis Gauthier was really, really good at this game. I wasn’t that great, Denis was awesome, and I would say that Jarome and Craig started as average. But they didn’t stay average for very long. I heard from sources — reliable sources — that Craig was hiding in his bathroom, reading these books about how to improve his Age of Empires strategy, and Jarome was always sending him stuff.”
Regehr chuckles at the memory. “I feel bad now, here. We caused them to take time away from their family,” he said. “But that just shows you how competitive they were and Jarome was. He did not like losing. It makes me smile every time I think of that.”
Iginla, as has been well-documented, provided a lot of smiles during his stay at the Saddledome, and not just with his on-ice exploits.
With a steady stream of visitors from one province over, the Saskatchewan-raised Regehr would see it time and time again.
“They ’d say, ‘Hey Robyn, we want to come to the game to see you.’ But after the game, they would be waiting there with an eye, looking around like, ‘Where’s Jarome?’” Regehr said. “And he knew it. We all knew it. Where his professionalism really came through was it didn’t matter if we won the game or lost the game, and being the faceof-the-franchise, he had to face all the tough questions after, even if it was a loss. But he always came out and I never once saw him deny any of my friends, family, people that would come to visit.
“He stood there. He smiled. He took pictures. He signed autographs. He was a true professional in that way, and I always remember how he handled that.”
Now 41, Iginla and his family — wife Kara, daughter Jade and sons Tij and Joe — have settled in Boston, one of his four other stops as he chased that elusive Stanley Cup ring.
He retires with 625 goals, tied for 15th on the NHL’s all-time list. He totalled 1,300 points. Including that duke-it-out with Lecavalier and a few other spring skirmishes, he dropped his mitts for 76 career dust-ups.
It’s telling, though, that his old pals always start by talking about the other stuff.
“I always say, he’s probably one of the best teammates I’ve ever had. You don’t say that about everybody, and it’s the truth. He really was one of the best teammates I had,” Donovan said of the surefire Hockey Hall of Famer. “He was so down-to-earth. He didn’t carry any airs about him. You wouldn’t know that he was Jarome Iginla, the superstar. You’d just think he was on the team, with the way he acted. He was just another one of the guys, and that’s high praise.
“He was just somebody that you wanted to be around. And then when the game started, he was somebody the other team didn’t want to be around, because he was hard on those guys.”