Leading the charge
MARK MESSIER, SPEAKER AT THE GREATNESS IN LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE TUESDAY, MADE HIS NAME IN NHL AS A TEAM LEADER
The last time Mark Messier was in southern Alberta was nearly two years ago when the six-time Stanley Cup winner and NHL Hall of Famer came to Lethbridge as part of the Rogers Hometown Hockey Tour, sitting alongside fellow former NHLer Darcy Tucker for the Scotiabank Hotstove.
On Tuesday, the product of Edmonton who won five Stanley Cups during the 1980s Oilers dynasty and another with the New York Rangers in 1994 returns to Lethbridge for the Teamworks Training Institute’s third annual Greatness in Leadership conference at the Enmax Centre.
This year’s Greatness in Leadership conference theme is “I Have a Dream,” headlined by global humanitarian Martin Luther King III along with Messier.
“I’m looking forward to it, and it’s always nice to come back. I played some junior hockey and Hometown Hockey was there, so it hasn’t been too long since I was back,” said Messier.
But his hockey roots in southern Alberta reach a little further back to his Alberta Junior Hockey League days in the late-1970s with the Spruce Grove Mets and the St. Albert Saints, featuring some memorable clashes with the Taber Golden Suns.
“I was playing in the AJHL back then and we were in Taber quite often,” said Messier. “They had some great rivalries with Taber.”
Messier now returns to Lethbridge to speak of his Hall of Fame career.
“It sounded like a great venue and a great opportunity to share some of my stories that helped me through my career and hopefully it resonates with some people.
“I look back on my own career even through minor hockey and how many people were instrumental in helping me through my early years in minor hockey and then through pro and through retirement and into the business world. As a hockey player you never stop learning and you always try to improve and I think in every field it’s a good idea to feel the same way.
“There’s always something to learn and there’s always a way to do it differently and think differently. To hear people that have been successful, for me, has been inspiring, but also educational. Hopefully I can give back in the same way.”
The six-time Stanley Cup winner who went on to play 1,756 career games over 25 years with the Oilers, Rangers and Vancouver Canucks, recalled a wide array of individuals who influenced him growing up.
“As a young guy I loved Muhammad Ali, Bobby Orr and Guy Lafleur,” said Messier. “So you have your role models that you look up to, (whether) it’s a parent that helped drive you to games that you spent time with and people you meet along the way in the game itself, the coaches and managers and owners and the philanthropists.
“If you think about the exposure you get, that I was fortunate to get with the amount of people I was able to meet, I think that’s kind of where you get filled up with all these different ideas and inspired to do more, give back more and help kids and create access and opportunity to help kids that are trying to weave their way through their own life to try and get some success. For me, it was such a wide array of different people from different fields and backgrounds was very important.”
Playing during a dynasty era in Edmonton from 1979 to 1991 that earned him five Stanley Cups, Messier noted a culture of unselfishness that was created on those teams.
“Everything we did, we did for the team first and foremost. It started with Glen Sather and continued down with Wayne (Gretzky) being our leader and captain and the way he treated people — not only on the team, but away from the rink — it created a culture that was condusive to winning and everybody fell in line with the same attitude. We’re all here to try and help the team win no matter how big or small our role was on the team, but we had to do it to the best of our ability. And when your best player and present GM and coach is preaching the same thing, it’s pretty easy to follow.”
Messier used that leadership to help guide the Rangers to the 1994 Stanley Cup, snapping the franchise’s 54-year drought since their last title.
That run was made a little more memorable with Messier’s infamous guarantee with the Rangers down 3-2 in the semifinals to the New Jersey Devils that the Rangers would win Game 6 and ultimately the series.
He scored a hat trick in Game 6 and the Rangers went on to win Game 7 and eventually their first Stanley Cup since 1940.
“It was one of those moments in a playoffs series where I felt we were good enough to win the Stanley Cup that year, I know the opportunity was there for us, but we had to figure out a way to play better in that series,” he said. “I was just trying to instill confidence in the team that they knew I believed we could win the series was a start. But then, of course, we had to go out there and earn it.
“It’s always the same as a captain, you’re always monitoring your team and the confidence level and things like that. We had kind of lost momentum in the series and we needed to figure a way to pull more out of each other, so it started with trying to instill the confidence.”
With his playing days over, Messier remains involved in charitable causes in New York.
“There are three charities I’ve been involved with for a long time, one of them is the Tomorrow’s Children fund, which is (for) kids with terminal cancer.”
Another is Answer The Call, which provides financial assistance and a network of support to the families of New York City police officers, firefighters, port Authority Police and EMS Personnel who have been killed in the line of duty.
“(Former Major League Baseball player) Rusty Staub set up a charity back in the early-80s to help these families along, so it’s become much more important and a much larger charity some 30 years later,” said Messier, who has also set up his own foundation to help youth in the inner city, especially in the Bronx, to learn how to skate.
“I’m involved in a project that’s going to build the world’s largest ice facility with nine sheets of ice and a 5,000-seat centre bowl,” he said. “So with that and some other small businesses and coaching my son’s hockey team, there’s not a lot of spare time.”