Mystery of the missing puck
The puck Wayne Gretzky passed to Mario Lemieux to score one of Canada’s legendary goals is missing. Could a grave in Brantford hold the secret to one of hockey’s most prized artifacts?
IT IS ONE OF THE THREE most important pucks in Canadian hockey history. Which makes it one of the most significant artifacts in our national sport.
The puck Wayne Gretzky passed to Mario Lemieux, who then scored on the Soviets here in Hamilton 30 years ago today is right up there with Paul Henderson’s in 1972 and Sidney Crosby’s at the Vancouver Olympics on the Mount Rushmore of vulcanized rubber. That goal at thenCopps Coliseum, after all, put a deafening exclamation point on what many consider the best hockey ever played.
Today, Summit Series defenceman Pat Stapleton apparently has Henderson’s puck, the hall of fame has Crosby’s, and that Canada Cup ’87 puck is now in the hands of … well it’s sitting in the … y’know it’s on display at … OK, where the heck is it? “Not a clue,” says Hockey Hall of Fame curator Phil Pritchard. C’mon, really? “We don’t have it, unfortunately,” the Burlington native says. “We’d love to find it. We don’t know where it is.”
Somehow in the excitement of that moment and the wild celebration that ensued, that puck went missing. It’s gone. Question is, where? Something like that doesn’t simply walk away. It must be somewhere. But where?
IN
HIS GAME STORY for The Spectator that appeared on Hamilton doorsteps the next morning, reporter Jeff Dickins mentioned that immediately after the goal, Soviet winger Andrei Lomakin picked up the puck, looked at it and then flipped it in the air. If it went into the crowd, some fan is quietly holding a treasure. Albeit, one that would be near-impossible to verify.
But the story doesn’t say it went into the stands, just that it went airborne. Since Lomakin and Dickins have both passed away we can’t ask them to elaborate. So to solve the mystery, we have to go back to the videotape from that Sept. 15 game.
After Lemieux scores, there is a pileup of elated bodies behind the net. Nobody seems to be paying any attention to the puck that clearly bounces back out of the net and slides toward the left faceoff circle. Because of the way it ricochets, none of Lemieux, Gretzky or Larry Murphy grab it. They couldn’t.
What about Dale Hawerchuk, who had taken the faceoff and was slightly trailing the play?
“I have no clue (where it is),” the Barrie Colts’ coach says.
Since every player on the ice is almost immediately part of the celebration — and since Pritchard says he’s chatted with Lemieux about the series several times over the years and the legend has never mentioned having the puck, which he surely would’ve if he did, same as Gretzky — we’ll rule them all out. Besides, video of them lined up on the blueline after the game shows neither star with a puck in his hands.
Meaning the likeliest scenario is that linesman John D’Amico picked it up as he would do after every goal scored in his end. Did he keep it?
Since he passed away in 2005, we can’t know for sure. But his son says his dad never mentioned anything about possessing that puck. As a hall of famer and a man who loved and respected the history of the game, he never would’ve kept something like that. Even if he’d stepped out of character and held onto it, he never would’ve gone to the grave with that secret.
“I’ve never heard my dad speak of that, ever,” Angelo D’Amico says. “I would know 100 per cent if he had that puck.”
So he’s out.
UNFORTUNATELY, the cameras lingered on that behind-the-net celebration and the delirious folks in the stands long enough that we can’t see what D’Amico did with it. We can’t see, for example, whether he skated over to the Canadian bench to give it to someone such as Hamilton’s Mike Burnstein or Barrie Stafford for safekeeping.
Burnstein went on to become equipment manager for the Vancouver Canucks and for the 2010 Olympic team. In 1987, he was a 16-year-old stick boy for Team Canada. Stafford was equipment manager of that Canada team, a role he’s since held for decades with the Edmonton Oilers. They were the obvious people to hand it to. Could one of them have received it and just kept it?
“I wish I could provide a great ending to that story and say I have it,” Burnstein says. “But I don’t have it.”
“I know they didn’t give it to me,” Stafford says.
Standing near them at that moment was NHL players’ union boss and tournament organizer Alan Eagleson. To someone so highly connected in international hockey and so emotionally invested in this event, that puck could be deeply meaningful. Does he have it?
“No,” he laughs. “At the end of the game we were too busy thinking about everything else.”
There’s another possibility. D’Amico may have simply delivered the puck to referee Don Koharski at centre ice to begin play again. This is important because over the final 1:26 of the game, the puck never flies into the crowd or is exchanged for a new one. With seconds left, Sergei Makarov dumps it wide of the Canadian net where goalie Grant Fuhr skates toward it.
Fuhr couldn’t be reached for this, so maybe he has it. Except once the final horn sounds, the cameras appear to show Lemieux skating by a puck lying on the ice, which would take the goalie out of contention.
Could Koharski have picked that puck up off the ice after the game so nobody stepped on it in the celebration and accidentally ended up with one of the most important pieces of memorabilia in hockey history? Possibly, he says, though 30 years later, he doesn’t recall doing so.
“I don’t know why I would,” he says. “I wouldn’t know where it is.”
There’s no video evidence of that, anyway. Nor is there photographic proof that any of the numerous rink employees who rushed onto the ice to keep people from jumping over the glass to join the celebration picked it up.
Regardless, it probably doesn’t matter. Because there’s a very good chance the puck lying there at the end wasn’t the one Gretzky passed to Lemieux.
HAMILTON’S EVELYN Russell was the official scorer in the off-ice officials’ box that evening. She was sitting next to timekeeper Frank Radlo and PA announcer Bill Sturrup between the penalty boxes. She says she doesn’t have the puck. Sturrup’s widow says she’s sure he never had it.
However, Russell clearly recalls that prior to the game, the on-ice officials — Koharski, D’Amico and Soviet lineman Mikhail Galinovski — were instructed to hand over each goal puck to them. And she says she remembers all of them following that protocol throughout the game. Including with that last puck. “I remember it, for sure,” she says. At the end of the game, she thinks her crew took all the pucks they’d collected back to the media room in the bowels of the arena and then surrendered them. “We were given the puck but handed it to the team.” Which team? It might’ve been Team Canada. Just as possibly, she believes, it might’ve been someone from the Hamilton Steelhawks, the local junior team of the time. Why them? Three decades later, who knows?
Bill LaForge was the coach of that squad. We’ll never know if he got it since he died in 2005. Stick-boy Burnstein was also part of the junior team’s equipment staff. He knows nobody handed it to him behind the scenes, either. Dave Kelly basically ran the arena and had tons of souvenir pucks and autographed pictures in his office. He’s positive he never touched it.
Which leaves us with no easy answer. Someone could still have it. It might’ve been picked up and absentmindedly tossed into the bucket of pucks at the bench, which would mean it became one of dozens used during the Steelhawks’ practice a day or two later. Somewhere, it could be lying in a drawer or a hockey bag or a box waiting to be found years from now like the warehoused ark of the covenant in Raiders of the Lost
Ark. Truth is, it could even have been thrown away.
Or somebody could’ve simply tucked it into a pocket and — intentionally or not — walked one of Canada’s most important sporting artifacts out of the building and into the horn-honking, flag-waving Hamilton night.
Just as the trail appears to have gone frigid, Mike Radlo picks up his phone.
HIS DAD, FRANK, was the timekeeper that night. He was sitting between Russell and Sturrup in the scorer’s booth, directly behind the little hole in the glass that pucks could get passed through. If D’Amico handed it over, it could well have been right to him.
His son remembers that tournament well. Partly because as a 23year-old engineering student, he worked as an off-ice official for some games. Mostly though, because the day after the tournament ended, his dad gave him a puck he’d somehow managed to get signed by legendary Soviet goalie Vladislav Tretiak. A game-used puck, Mike was told. Dad never specified that it was the one that went from Gretzky to Lemieux, and he’d never really thought about that possibility until now. But with the arena going nuts after the goal and everyone in the scorer’s booth concentrating on their job so there were no messes in the manic final seconds, could his father have innocently dropped it on the table in front of him rather than placing it with the other collectibles, only to hastily grab it on the way out? Not contemplating the historic significance it would have decades later?
“He was such a sports nut I wouldn’t doubt it could be the puck,” Mike Radlo says.
At last, a solid lead. Possibly a wonderful discovery. Time to take a look and see if it could really be the one. Where is it now? Can we examine it? Can we take a photo of it? Can we take it to the hall of fame for verification? That won’t be easy, he explains. Frank Radlo passed away in 2004, one day before the 17th anniversary of the goal. He was buried at Mount Hope Cemetery in Brantford, not far from Wayne Gretzky’s childhood home.
Just before the funeral, Mike slipped a copy of the eulogy he’d written into the coffin.
Then as the lid was about to close for the final time, he gave his dad back the puck.
“At the end of the game we were too busy thinking about everything else.” ALAN EAGLESON TOURNAMENT ORGANIZER The likeliest scenario is that linesman John D’Amico picked it up as he would do after every goal scored in his end. Did he keep it?