In the spring of 1997 — a quarter-century ago — the Detroit Red Wings embarked on their quest to end a 42-year Stanley Cup drought.
The Free Press has commemorated that historic quest with a new book: “Stanleytown 25 Years Later: The Inside Story of How the Stanley Cup Returned to the Motor City After 41 Frustrating Seasons.”
Day 52: June 6, 1997
The backstory: The Hockey Hall of Fame planned a busy Saturday for the Stanley Cup. Hockey’s Holy Grail would go on display at the Renaissance Center from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. It would return to its form-fitted case for the short drive to Joe Louis Arena, where, according to Phil Pritchard, aka The Keeper of the Cup, it would arrive shortly after the opening face-off and “it will be hidden away from fans and players.” But a couple hours later when the Red Wings completed their sweep of the Flyers — and nary a soul in Michigan expected any other outcome — the Cup would be handed to captain Steve Yzerman, paraded around the arena and spend its summer traveling the world with the Wings. “It’ll be over,” promised Ted Lindsay, the last Wings captain to receive the Cup, way back in 1955. “When you’ve got a team down 0-3, you kick him and keep him down. And when it happens and Stevie skates with the Cup, there won’t be a dry eye in the house.” After 4-2, 4-2 and 6-1 victories over the Flyers, the Wings had their first shot to win the Cup since April 25, 1964 — 12,097 days ago — when they lost Game 7 at Toronto, 4-0. Two days prior, the Wings lost Game 6 at Olympia when Maple Leafs defenseman Bobby Baum, who suffered a broken ankle late in regulation from a Gordie Howe slap shot, returned for overtime and scored the winner at 2:43. At that time, the Wings hadn’t played for the Cup since April 14, 1955, when they beat the Canadiens, 3-1, at Olympia for the seventh Cup, tying Montreal and Toronto for the most in NHL history. That night, Alex Delvecchio scored twice and Howe the game-winner. Besides NHL president Clarence Campbell presenting the Cup to Lindsay, the team also received handshakes from the Canadiens, who stunned the hockey world by refusing to shake the previous season, when the Wings won the Cup at Olympia on Tony Leswick’s overtime goal in Game 7. Despite the hysteria across the state that the Wings’ 42-year Stanley Cup drought could be hours from ending, the team tried to avoid the topic, keep its focus and prepare the final nail for the Flyers’ coffin. For all the car flags, statues with jerseys and song parodies proclaiming victory, the Wings were the only ones not cheering. “It’s sort of cool to watch,” Darren McCarty said. “You just sort of look at it from afar. … But we don’t get caught up in that. There’s business to take care of. … We don’t get wrapped up in it. Everybody else does.” That all could change, however, around 11 p.m. on June 6, 1997.
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The media: “ANTICIPATION” was the big headline on Page 1A of the Free Press. The big photograph featured a fan in a Wings jersey waving a broom in front of the Spirit of Detroit statue. (Kmart reported brooms were flying off its shelves.) The Sports front featured an illustration by Marty Westman of the Stanley Cup surrounded by a broom-welding octopus with the Wings’ names superimposed on the Cup, starting with Mike Ilitch and ending with Bob Rouse. In Philadelphia, the Inquirer’s biggest headline read “Rock Bottom.”
The soap opera: The Flyers, of course, could spoil Detroit’s party and force the series back to Philadelphia for Game 5. Even though the Flyers had been outclassed, dominated and embarrassed for most of the three games, they still had been the favorites, they still had their pride and they desperately wanted to avoid the indignity of a sweep. The Wings knew that feeling all too well from the 1995 finals against New Jersey. The Wings didn’t expect the Flyers to go down without a fight — and true to form, they didn’t go down without pregame controversy. After Friday’s practice, Flyers coach Terry Murray openly questioned his players’ character and crossed a line coaches rarely cross by using the C-word: choking. “Many teams have gone through this situation before,” Murray said, “and it’s basically a choking situation that I call it for our team right now. It’s as much of a mental block as anything else.” Drew Sharp wrote in the Free Press: “The outburst may have been triggered by a high-decibel, emotional team meeting before the Flyers’ optional morning skate at Joe Louis Arena. Players said the normally soft-spoken Murry sternly scolded his team’s lack of execution and an even more serious lack of effort. The Flyers didn’t take too kindly to the word ‘choke.’ Fans use it, reporters use it, but coaches almost never use it.” Murray continued: “Competition is supposed to bring out the best in you. But sometimes it brings out the worst.” Asked whether the Flyers were choking, left wing John LeClair wanted to know who implied they were. Told of Murray’s comments, LeClair walked away from reporters without comment. Right wing Mikael Renberg bristled: “I don’t think we’re chokers. That’s pretty strong. We haven’t played well. We played like crap, but I don’t think we’ve quit. Maybe he said it to try and wake us up. He is right in that this has been an embarrassment.” In three games, the NHL’s most prolific playoff offense had produced five goals — three by former Spartan Rod Brind’Amour and two by LeClair. Superstar center Eric Lindros had no goals, two assists and a minus-4 rating. Sharp wrote after Game 3: “One of the game’s most powerful offensive forces, Lindros has startled observers with his passiveness. He’s not shooting. He’s not hitting. With wizardry to make Houdini envious, the Wings have made a 6-foot-4, 236-pound giant disappear.” Lindros skipped practice, which was allowed, but he also skipped a media session, which raised eyebrows. “The captain, Eric Lindros, deserted his teammates,” Bill Lyon wrote in the Inquirer. “He didn’t practice with them, which was excusable because he had been excused. And he didn’t stay around to stand shoulder to shoulder with them on the burning bridge before another media interrogation, and that most definitely is inexcusable. … He sneaked out of the locker room and made a broken-field escape through the stands of Joe Louis Arena, leaving the rest of the players behind to face their inquisitors.” As bad as Philly’s offense had been, though, its defensemen and goaltenders had been even worse. “It doesn’t bother me if my coach says we’re choking,” said Ron Hextall, expected to start Game 4 despite allowing six goals in Game 3. “We’ve done nothing to prove him wrong.”
The Captain: The Wings alumni held a luncheon at The Joe, and besides their excitement about the Stanley Cup drought likely ending soon, they raved about Yzerman. “Steve Yzerman is what every athlete should be,” said Lindsay, who still had a locker in the Wings’ dressing room and paid frequent visits. “You see all these cement-heads paid all this money today and they’re nothing but jackasses. But Steve has been the ultimate professional. When he got here there was nothing else. He was the franchise. He was the whole organization. He owed this team nothing and could have demanded a trade. But he remained one of the classiest guys you’d want to ever meet.” Before, during and after Game 3, the fans at The Joe cheered wildly for The Captain. Before Game 4, Mitch Albom wrote about Yzerman on the verge of a dream come true.
His wife says he comes home now and looks right through her. Sits at the table. Sits on the couch. Looks right through her. Oh, he’s pleasant enough. He’ll chat about the kid, the house — never hockey — but he’s not really there. His eyes are locked on something off in the distance. In that way, I guess, Steve Yzerman is like a lot of working men. He doesn’t want to talk about it.
But what he can’t put into words these days is not frustration or embarrassment, although, like most of us, he has had plenty of those. No, what’s perplexing Yzerman is this coming tidal wave of happiness. He hears it rumbling toward our city, he sees it on the horizon. He asks himself, “What should I do now?”
This is what he does. He goes within himself. He stops reading newspapers and stops listening to radio and TV and he furrows his brow and he says very little, because the fight is not over, not yet, not yet, and so in typical fashion, the man Detroit calls “The Captain” chooses quiet as his ally. Quiet will be his friend. He will skate with the quiet tonight, calming himself, telling himself as the noise rains down that it is just another hockey game, just another night to lose a bucket of sweat and do whatever it takes to win.
And his heart will be going a million miles an hour.
You get into this business of writing about athletes, and the deal you make is you never gush, you always keep a cool and distant attitude. I may break that tonight. Steve Yzerman, one of the true gentlemen left in sports, came to Detroit not long before I did in the mid-1980s. We have known each other since he was single, since he was too young to legally drink, since he lived in an apartment, since we both had enough hair to wear it in bangs.
Now he is married, a father, building a new home. He is 32, working on what’s likely his final contract as a player. He has got more scars, less hair and is much more familiar to Detroit than he was as that shy, speedy 18-year-old draft choice out of the Ottawa suburbs. In fact, it seems like we’ve seen Yzerman in every possible pose, except one: We have never seen him happy on the last day of hockey season.
Tonight, sometime before midnight, that could finally happen.
And when it happens for The Captain, it happens for all of us.
There was a moment Thursday night, before Game 3 of these Stanley Cup Finals against Philadelphia, when the Wings were introduced and the sellout crowd at Joe Louis Arena lost control. It was when Yzerman’s name was called. The noise was deafening, it rattled the roof and cascaded down to the ice. Even the announcer had to wait before he could be heard over the loudspeaker system.
“I really wasn’t expecting anything like that,” Yzerman said Friday. “The only way I can describe it is if you have children, and you’ve been away for a while, and you come home and the dog is barking and the kids run at you and they’re all excited.”
“Like coming home?” I said.
“Yeah, it was like coming home,” he said.
And that is why The Captain means so much to this town. Because over the years, he has become part of us, one of many people who live here and are hardworking and ethical and sometimes find themselves in lousy situations but always believe they will find their way out. Believe me, Yzerman has told himself “things will get better” more times than Job.
He said it in the mid-’80s, when this hockey team was a joke. He said it in the early ’90s, when St. Louis, Toronto and San Jose sent the Wings home early. He said it two years ago, when the New Jersey Devils embarrassed Detroit in front of the whole world. Things will get better. They have to get better.
He was even saying it at the start of last season, when his name was trade bait. Remember? Rumors had him emptying his locker. And then he skated onto the Joe Louis ice for the first home game, and the crowd gave him such a deep, long, noisy ovation that anyone even thinking of trading him would have to join the Witness Protection Program.
Yzerman became a Red Wing for life that night.
Tonight, he could become one for the ages.
“It runs through your mind, what if we win,” he admitted Friday, “but I’m trying really hard to stay away from all that. What’s worked for us so far is ignoring everything and just playing hockey.”
Yzerman inspired that philosophy. He gave a rare speech after Detroit dropped its second game to St. Louis in the opening round of the playoffs. He said enough, we’re not crapping out again. Everyone has to step up.
And ever since, the Wings have been a humming machine, winning 13 of 15 games, now one victory from the Cup. That speech alone could earn him the Conn Smythe Trophy, but he has backed his words with action. He sets up plays, offers marvelous defense, works as hard as anyone out there, and has a key goal in each finals game — seven in the playoffs — and this is a guy who joked with me a few weeks ago, “Nobody said I was a great defensive player until I stopped scoring.”
The truth is, Yzerman allowed his style to be changed for — what else? — the good of the team. Anything to get to this moment. Over the years, he watched Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, Mark Messier — all his superstar peers — collect championship rings. Last year he watched Joe Sakic, another No. 19 — but younger, with much of Yzerman’s old game — do the same.
And all the time, his finger remained bare.
He never complained. He never demanded a trade, or lashed out at his sometimes less-devoted teammates. And if you asked anyone in the Wings’ locker room who the first person to skate around with that Cup should be tonight, I promise there’d be no argument.
“Not only do all his teammates like him and respect him,” said Darren McCarty, “but even the opposing players feel that way about him.”
Consider this from Joe Kocur, who could focus on his personal comeback. Instead he says: “The thing that would make winning this cup so special is doing it with a guy like Stevie.”
This, folks, is The Captain’s greatest gift. He makes you stop thinking about yourself.
Now, it’s true, “Stevie” has changed over the years. He is no longer the kid who was once too shy to introduce himself to Gordie Howe, or who once apologized to a Free Press photographer for cursing as he entered the penalty box.
He’s more mature now, molded by patience, hardened by disappointment — yet still soft enough to always stop for a child, to never tell an interviewer to get lost, to look down when he hears that women think he’s cute.
Mostly, through all the injuries, the disappointments, the times the national media looked the other way, Yzerman is and has been Detroit. He began his career in a red sweater. He will end it in a red sweater. His mother once told me that when he was a child, she dropped him at school, “and as soon I left, he walked right back home.”
So he’s always had a sense of where he belongs.
Tonight, he belongs right here. Center ice.
“Are you doing anything to record this past week?” I asked before he left. “Are you taping the games, making a scrapbook, anything like that?”
He shook his head no, as if he hadn’t even thought about it. “Right now, all I want to do is prepare. I don’t want to let my guard down.”
He had the same look as Thursday night, when he heard that thunderous ovation and was torn between a happy moment and the fear of embracing it. He raised his stick to the adoring crowd, while keeping a deadly serious look on his face.
But the tidal wave is coming, and so is his release. Should the Wings win, there will be no need for the safe side of Yzerman’s emotions. No reason to embrace the quiet. This is the end of the long, lonely wait. After 42 years, it is time for the working man’s hockey team to get a taste of that Edmonton, Pittsburgh, New York, Montreal, look-at-us-ma-we-won-the-Cup thing.
And that mysterious rumble that Yzerman hears is his destiny, rolling in. If the horn sounds happily tonight, it would only be fitting that No. 1 start the party, raise the Cup, throw back his head and let loose a holler that’s been a long, marvelous career in the making.
After all, he is The Captain.
They said it: From Kris Draper on Scotty Bowman: “He was able to handpick this team, and when the winningest coach in NHL history is having the choice of his players, it means good things can happen.” From Flyers defenseman Eric Desjardins: “One thing we can do better is be more conscious that hitting is part of the game. When the hit is there, you’ve got to do it. You’ve got to hit that man.” From Kocur, who won the Cup with the 1994 Rangers: “There are three guys on this team who have won it, but there are also 15 or 20 guys who have seen another team hoist what they wanted. That’s as much a learning experience as anything. You don’t forget things like that. That stays with you a long time until it’s your turn.” From Murray: “I don’t want to be BS-ing you. We have to give ourselves a chance. But we first have to break things down into small areas. Before we can win a game, we’ve got to first win a period, and before we do that we’ve got to win the first five minutes. Maybe then we can develop some team confidence and build this into something bigger.” From Johnny Wilson, who won four Cups with Detroit in the 1950s and later coached the Wings: “This city was Hockeytown long before you saw it on billboard signs. The support we got from this town — and we still get — is immeasurable. That’s why it was such a shame that this great franchise had faded from contention for a while. It’ll be great to see the Wings back at the top of the hockey world.”
Press clippings: From Bill Lyon, Philadelphia Inquirer: “So the only cups the Flyers will be drinking from are Styrofoam. … But first they must get out of this mess alive. They must avoid the ignominy of being swept. Who would have thought it? From Legion of Doom to Legion of Broom in less than a week.” From Rich Hofmann, Philadelphia Daily News: “You lose the way the Flyers lost, and the scars are lasting. You go down by three games to none in the Stanley Cup Finals and you’re looking at trying to climb Mt. Everest barefoot and in your underwear. At best, Game 4 turns into a meaningless salve. At worst, it becomes cruel torture. It’s not over, but it is over.” From Jason Diamos, New York Times: “The Red Wings, with their Russian Five, were supposed to be the finesse team. Forget it. Not only have the Wings not cowered before the Flyers, but they have been the ones doing most of the intimidating, as well.” From Kevin Paul Dupont, Boston Globe: “The Flyers are in a funk. Their hitting is pointless. Their forechecking is nonexistent. Their game faces are penetrating, empty stares.”
Can’t happen again, right? At the time, only one team in the major North American sports had blown a three-games-to-none lead in the finals. Meet the 1942 Red Wings. For starters, they never should have been in the playoffs with a record six games under .500. But the NHL wasn’t very particular about who made the playoffs in those days. Six of the seven teams qualified. At 19-25-4, the Wings finished fifth. But they reached the finals by beating sixth-place Montreal, 2-1, and third-place Boston, 2-0. Detroit was led by its Liniment Line of Sid Abel, Don Grosso and Eddie Wares. Against second-place Toronto in the Stanley Cup Finals, the Wings won twice at Maple Leaf Gardens — 3-2 and 4-2 — and once at Olympia — 5-2. They were leading, 3-2, in the third period of Game 4. After the Leafs scored two goals, the Wings fumed about penalty calls and a linesman was nearly struck by a hot water bag, all hell really broke loose at Olympia. With 69 seconds left, Wares refused to leave the ice after a 10-minute misconduct, so the referee ordered the puck dropped to restart play and assessed a too-many-men penalty. Fans littered the ice with debris. At the end, coach Jack Adams rushed the ice and fought with referee Mel Harwood. Some fans also rushed the ice, encircled Harwood and landed a few blows, but the referee managed to escape with the help of police. Fans encircled the officials room, but Harwood and NHL president Frank Calder made it out a side door. Calder wasted little time suspending Adams. Center Ebbie Goodfellow took over as acting coach and the Wings went to pieces — losing 9-3, 3-0 and 3-1.
Off the ice: Standing in front of the Spirit of Detroit, Mayor Dennis Archer praised the “family-style” behavior of Wings fans, but he warned that troublemakers were not welcome downtown. “If anybody steps out of line,” he said, “we will arrest you immediately.” Detroit Police Inspector Patrick Muscrat, who oversaw 19 officers on horseback and a fleet of motorcycle cops, also vowed: “No shenanigans will be tolerated. … We are not going to allow congregating or drinking on public streets.”
Famous last words: From Flyers forward Trent Klatt: “We can’t let this be a sweep. That’s all we have on our minds. We’re not talking about winning the Stanley Cup. We’re only talking about winning one game. Who would have thought a week ago that winning one game would be such a problem for us?”
Relive the glory: The Free Press has crafted a 208-page, full-color, hardcover collector’s book with fresh insights and dynamic storytelling about the 1996-97 Wings. It’s called “Stanleytown 25 Years Later: The Inside Story on How the Stanley Cup Returned to the Motor City after 41 Frustrating Seasons.” It’s only $29.95 and it’s available at RedWings.PictorialBook.com. (It’ll make a great Father’s Day gift for the Wings fanatic in your life!)
More to read: Another new Wings book arrived in April from Keith Gave, a longtime hockey writer for the Free Press in the 1980s and 1990s: “Vlad The Impaler: More Epic Tales from Detroit’s ’97 Stanley Cup Conquest.” It is available through Amazon and other booksellers and a portion of the proceeds is earmarked for the Vladimir Konstantinov Special Needs Trust. (Plenty of Gave’s prose also appears in “Stanleytown 25 Years Later.”)
Even more to read: Red Wings beat reporter Helene St. James, who helped cover the 1997 Stanley Cup run, recently wrote “The Big 50: The Men and Moments That Made the Detroit Red Wings.” Featuring numerous tales about the key figures from 1997, “The Big 50” is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Triumph Books. (Plenty of St. James’ prose also appears in “Stanleytown 25 Years Later.”)
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