I should have Wendel Clark up for the weekend
I wouldn’t blame Wendel Clark if he crosses to the other side of the street whenever he sees me coming. The former Maple Leafs star has to be getting tired of being reminded that he bought my cottage for me. One time he laughed, “So do I get two free weeks there every summer?” Clark, who’s done very well in life, doesn’t need my cottage, but I needed Clark to help me get it. It’s really the only thing I own, so I am grateful and probably bring it up waaayyy too often. This all dates back to New Year’s Day, 1985, in Helsinki, Finland. What today’s Canadian hockey fan will find hard to believe is that I was the only print journalist who covered the 1985 World Junior tournament from beginning to end. It wasn’t as big a deal in those days. Canada had finished fourth the previous year with Russ Courtnall, Dave Gagner and Kirk Muller on the team, and had won only a single medal (bronze) in the previous five years. Plus, no Canadian team had won a world championship on European ice since the Trail Smoke Eaters took the senior men’s title in 1961. So interest on this side of the ocean was very low, and no papers — not even The Canadian Press — had planned to send a staff writer to the event. Dennis Gibbons of Burlington, one of the world’s experts on international hockey, was going to do some freelancing for the Globe and Mail, which also sent their Moscow bureau chief over for a couple of games. But there was no full-time presence by any news outlet other than CBC, which had the radio rights and was showing maybe three games on TV. A few months earlier, the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association (now Hockey Canada) had seen me freelance at the Sarajevo Olympics. Working at The Orillia Packet and Times, I wanted to get to those Games to cover Brian Orser, so in order to finance the trip I wrote a lot of stories on skaters, skiers and hockey players for their hometown papers. Canadian hockey officials asked if I’d be interested in doing that again for the World Juniors, which would start before Christmas in Helsinki and end on New Year’s Day. No playoffs then, just round-robin, so you had to finish first to get the gold. They were desperate, and offered to fly me over, get me a room in the team’s motel, and feed me, and I could keep any freelance money I made. I said no. I had two young kids and this was over Christmas and it didn’t seem right, but Ellen, my wife, pointed out that we could do a small Christmas before I left and another when I got back. She figured that if I went I could take vacation time and maybe I could make what I was paid for a week at The (now gone) Packet. So I went. It was lonely on Christmas Eve but I got through it and Canada, ranked no higher than fourth, was soon beating weaker opponents handily. After a stunning 5-0 victory over the heavily-favoured USSR, during which general manager Sherry Bassin gave a stirring speech about his forefathers being repressed in Russia, Canada headed into New Year’s Eve against pre-tournament favourite Finland. That terrific game ended in a 4-4 tie, creating a logjam at the top of the standings, but with Canada in a favourable position to win because of goal differential. All they needed to do was beat or tie Czechoslovakia — a country which no longer exists — on the afternoon of New Year’s Day. With seven minutes left, Canada trailed 2-1 when head coach Terry Simpson told exhausted Hamilton Steelhawk winger Jeff Jackson, the team’s leading scorer, to sit a shift and sent out Clark, one of only three draft-eligible players on the team. Clark hadn’t played regularly in the tournament and was really a defenceman. From the faceoff, Clark, on his off-wing, went straight to the net, Brian Bradley got the puck near the left corner, fed Clark and he classically one-timed it, tying the game. Canada withstood a furious Czech surge, with great goaltending from Craig Billington, and went completely bonkers when the final horn went. It was a hockey unicorn. Canada didn’t used to win this thing. When I got back to the hotel, there were all kinds of messages, most of them from media outlets and most of them with some variation of this theme: “Hey, remember how we didn’t want a story? Now we do.” My replies were all variations of this theme: “Remember how it was 30 bucks? Now it’s 300.” There was enough interest that I made six times what I’d hoped to make. When the cheques starting coming in later in January, Ellen scooped them all up and said, “We’re going to buy a cottage.” We used that money as down payment on a little place on a small lake in Port Sydney and, 33 years later, the kids and I still have it. Clark fared OK, too. He became the first overall draft choice in June, going to the Maple Leafs, and has had a great career and post-career in Toronto. With huge crowds in Hamilton the following year and the punch-up in Piestany the year after that, the world junior tournament was soaring toward its current exalted-by-Canadians status. And every summer, I’m glad that I happened to be there when that soaring started. Veteran Spectator columnist Steve Milton has pretty much seen it all in his 40 years covering sports around the world and, in Being There, he relives special moments of those stories, from the inside out, every Friday. If there’s a memorable sporting event you want Steve to write about, let him know at smilton@thespec.com. Chances are he was there.