McKegney’s Juniors memories
Linemate at Forum in 1978 was pimply face Wayne Gretzky
The World Junior Hockey Championship will return to Montreal next year for the first time since 1978. It has certainly grown since then. On New Year’s Day 1978, when Canada played Sweden in the junior semifinal at the Forum, the start of the game was moved from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. because CTV was committed to showing an Oakland-Denver National Football League playoff game. CTV joined the hockey game in progress after 4:30 p.m.
Canada lost 6-5 to Sweden in front of only 2,200 fans at the Forum, ending hopes of a showdown with Russia in the gold-medal game. The Russians beat Sweden 5-2 in the final in front of 3,966 fans at the Forum.
There will be a lot more people at the Bell Centre for the 2015 tournament, with Montreal playing host to 13 games, mainly in the preliminary round, along with two quarter-final games. The other 19 games will be played at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre, including the other preliminary round group and the medal round. The 2016 tournament will be played in Finland, and then Montreal and Toronto will co-host again in 2017 with the medal round played at the Bell Centre.
The 1978 tournament featured a 16-year-old Wayne Gretzky playing centre on a line with Tony McKegney and Wayne Babych. Gretzky would finish the tournament with eight goals and nine assists in six games and was named the outstanding forward.
But the future Great One almost didn’t make the team. Bobby Smith was supposed to be the first-line centre before suffering an eye injury. Gretzky might not have even been invited to the Team Canada camp if Bill Derlago, who scored 96 goals the previous season with the Brandon Wheat Kings, didn’t break his leg a month before the start of the tournament.
“(Gretzky) was leading the OHL in scoring at the time and they just couldn’t refuse him (after Derlago’s injury),” McKegney recalled. “They had to invite him and they had no idea if he would fit in or if he would make the team … he was 145 pounds.”
McKegney added that Gretzky was “kind of quiet” off the ice and was just trying to fit in on a team with an average age around 19.
“But I’ll tell you a funny story,” he added.
Team Canada held a luncheon at a Montreal hotel during the tournament and Gretzky showed up with an unexpected and uninvited guest.
“Wayne Gretzky brings a girl to the team dinner and he’s 16 years old,” McKegney recalled. “Everybody’s sitting there and he brings a girl … it was unbelievable. He just walked in like it was nobody’s business and brought some young French girl to our team dinner.
“He couldn’t go to the bar … 16 years old, pimply face … but he brought this girl to our team luncheon. He didn’t think anything about it … it was hilarious.”
McKegney noted that the pimply face Gretzky was surrounded by a group of players on Team Canada who all eventually played in the NHL.
“Everybody on that team played at least one game in the NHL, which is kind of interesting,” said McKegney, who went on to play 13 seasons in the NHL, with stops in Buffalo, Quebec, Minnesota, New York (Rangers), St. Louis, Detroit and Chicago. “Some people not long, some people very long, but everybody on that team made the NHL at some point.”
McKegney, who would play in 912 NHL games, posting 320-319-639 totals, noted that he was the only player born in Quebec who was part of Team Canada that year. McKegney, now 55, was born in Montreal, but was adopted at 13 months old, raised in Sarnia, Ont., and played junior hockey for the Kingston Canadians.
“It was kind of weird because (the tournament) was based in Quebec … we played in Hull, we played in Quebec City, we played in Montreal and then Cornwall, and there was about three guys who were on the precipice of making the team that were from the Quebec junior league and they cut every one of them,” McKegney recalled. “One was Patrick Daley, there was a young kid named Daniel Metivier and (Dan Geoffrion). In essence they all could have made the team, but the coach (Ernie ‘Punch’ McLean of the New Westminster Bruins) was from Western Canada and he wanted to have his Western Canadian guys on the team.”
McKegney said that decision was a major reason for the lack of attendance at the Forum as well as Team Canada losing in the semifinals since many of the western players were “third- and fourth-line grinders.”
McKegney, who is black, knows about discrimination. After being selected by the Sabres in the second round of the 1978 NHL draft, he signed a contract with the World Hockey Association’s Birmingham Bulls in Alabama. The owner reneged on the deal after Bulls fans threatened to boycott the team for adding a black player to the roster and McKegney joined the Sabres.
McKegney said he didn’t experience racism from other players during his career and that it came mostly from fans.
“When you go to places like Washington and St. Louis and Pittsburgh and places like that, just from a fan standpoint I think there were a lot of white people who just liked the fact that their sport was white,” he said. “It wasn’t basketball, it wasn’t football … it wasn’t dominated by black people. It was the one sort of bastion for people that it was just a totally white sport and I think a lot of people liked that. So basically, it was an oddity … some people weren’t ready for it. I always say thank God I was really good because I couldn’t imagine being average. It would have been hard to survive being average.”
Not surprisingly, McKegney is a big fan of Canadiens defenceman P.K. Subban.
“I know him. … He’s a really nice guy,” McKegney said. “He’s very confident and I think that’s the best thing. He’s just a confident guy. I like his confidence. … they have to teach that to people, but he had it coming in the first year he played.”
McKegney recently joked with Subban that he was thinking about making a comeback to play alongside him, adding: “But after you sign (a new contract), there will be no money left.”
McKegney says he is now “semiretired” after doing “very well” on the stock market and with his NHL pension. He has a home in Kingston, Ont., spends a lot of time in Florida and enjoys visiting his sons in the United States. As for career highlights, he’s proud that his junior Kingston team sold out every game during the four years he played there and the fact he only missed the playoffs once as a pro, in 199091 with the Quebec Nordiques, the same season in which he assisted on Guy Lafleur’s final goal in the NHL.
And McKegney still enjoys watching the world junior tournament every year.
“I still watch it and I’m very proud of the fact I was part of the first year they ever did that,” he said.