“Around that time,” she recalls, “he started to spiral into cocaine and a few other things.”
As a young teenager in Mississauga, Steve drank a little beer because most kids did. It was curiosity and rebellion. In North Bay, away from home, he drank a lot more, in that barber shop/hair salon getaway the players had. There were also the road trips with the team. A game is over, you’re tired, but you’re so pumped up you can’t sleep. You just shared this intense two-and-a-half-hour experience with your friends and you want to keep sharing it. What are you going to do in the middle of the night? Where are you going to go? To your room and study? You’re bigshots, kings of the world, and the beer only makes you feel bigger.
In Erie, Steve’s drinking got worse—and for the first time in his life it had gotten in the way of his role as a player. He had been just a kid in North Bay; whatever he gave the team was a bonus. But in Erie, especially in his second year there, he was a veteran. The Otters needed him to be a leader on the ice and off. As a rookie, you just need to be one of the guys. When you’re older, to lead, you need to be that and more. Too much beer made Steve seem too much like everybody else.
And during summers in Peterborough there was the Shack, where everybody brought along a two-four. Things would get crazy at times, but not too often. There were the downtown fights, but growing up in Peterborough, if you were a kid, things like that happened. Drinking was a chance to loosen up a bit, laugh too loud, and say what you’d never say sober. It was about having fun. And, as Steve’s friend Mike Keating put it, “it gave you a little liquid courage to pick up girls.”
While being a jock offered Steve and his Peterborough buddies more opportunities to drink, it also held them back. People knew them. If they saw them a little drunk around town it might make them seem like good guys. More than a little drunk, and people would talk. Word would get back to their parents, to their hockey coaches. Some of the Peterborough guys played lacrosse in the summer for the local team. The people who saw them drunk one night might see them playing at the arena the next. The team might lose. So they had to pick their spots. If there was a two-day break between games—hockey in the winter; lacrosse in the summer—they could drink, but as Keats said, “You didn’t want to be playing guilty.”
Throughout his years in junior, his two seasons in Saint John, even in his first year in Calgary, Steve seemed no different from any of his buddies at home. They were all college-aged guys, and whether in college like Nick, or working a regular job like Keats, or playing pro like Steve or Jay, they were living a college life. But things were beginning to escalate for Steve. He now had money of his own. He was now one of the young guys on a team again, and being one of the guys in the early 2000s, for some, meant not only beer but cocaine. Alcohol at night to loosen you up and bring you down; a few hours later, cocaine to give you the boost you needed for the next day’s work. And Steve’s work was every day, weekends included. He wasn’t a regular on the Flames; he got almost no days off. He had a game or a practice almost every day—trying to keep his spot on the team, he had to be up for every practice, not just every game, and practices were at eleven. He didn’t have the whole day to rest and recover, to get ready for the game that night as the regulars did. Steve was, as Wickenheiser says, headed into a “spiral.”
One day at the gym, Steve told Wickenheiser his routine that summer: go out all night, sleep an hour or two, be at the gym at seven, work out, sleep in the afternoon, go out all night again. “I vividly remember one day he came into the gym and had two mismatched socks on, a black one and a white one, and then proceeded to throw three hundred pounds on the bench press and pound out eight reps,” Wickenheiser says, still amazed.
—
The summer of 2004 came to an end, but the hockey season of 2004–05 never returned. It was the NHL’s lockout year. When hockey had last been played, in the spring, the Flames had made their run for the Cup. And when you win, or almost win, the party never quite ends until there is another winner. There’s always someone around still wanting to celebrate.
Steve had been involved with the NHLPA since first coming into the league. A superstar has his own leverage; a players’ union protects everyone else. The NHLPA is the players’ team, and Steve was a good team player. The CBA between the league and the players would expire in September 2004. Until then, negotiations would follow their predictable path. Both sides would make respectful comments in public, and both would bad-mouth each other in private. Hatred and resolve would grow. There would be pretend talks during the summer, because the public needed to know that everyone was working tirelessly towards an agreement so the season could start on time. More importantly to those involved, both parties would need to demonstrate to their members—the NHLPA to the individual players; Bettman to the team owners—that they were doing everything humanly possible to extract the most from the other side and win the deal, which can’t happen if agreement comes too early. In fact, it couldn’t happen if the season started on time.
The beginning of the season would therefore need to come and go. There would need to be anxiety, then panic, and then with just enough time left to schedule just enough games to make a season of sufficient length to make the playoffs seem credible, a deal would be made. And the players would win because the players always win.
As it turned out, the season did not start on time. There was anxiety and panic—but then, when it came to the crunch, the negotiations went off script.
Both owners and players are competitors and both know how to win. But players have been teammates and team-players all of their lives, and know how to win together. Owners haven’t been, and don’t. In their own minds, players are team guys. In owners’ own minds, they are self-made men. In this standoff with the league, NHLPA head Bob Goodenow only had to do what he had always done: say no to anything the league proposed, offer no alternative, and wait for the owners to crack and say yes.
Bettman had been losing to the players since he became NHL Commissioner in 1993. Player salaries had increased hugely and rapidly. To Bettman, this made no sense. It was up to each team’s owner to make his decision, to sign a player or not, and to pay what he wanted to pay. Anti-trust law said so, and Bettman was always careful to remind the owners of that. Still, it was incomprehensible to him that owners could not stop themselves from getting into bidding wars over players. Sure, players could become free agents and go to other teams, but other players also become free agents and can sign with theirs. Why send salaries higher and higher? For owners, mindless competition for players was an always-losing proposition, Bettman believed, and only one team can win the Cup. Twenty-nine teams will lose. Every year. Bettman made this case to the owners passionately, incredulously, relentlessly. Any other conclusion was insanity. Any other action taken was clearly that of a fool. But then the first day of free agency would arrive each year on July 1 and all hell would break loose. Owners chased players, budgets were blown to smithereens. Bettman fumed.
It took him a decade and billions of dollars lost to the players to understand. Players are great competitors and need to win. Owners are great competitors and need to win, too. But a player, when he becomes a free agent, can go to five or six teams and still have a chance to win. An owner can win only in one place—where he is. So owners chased, players were chased, contracts went higher, and no amount of Bettman exhorting and fuming year after year was going to change that.
Left to their own devices, owners will break ranks and lose. Antitrust laws prevented them from working together, so Bettman got their support to take things out of their hands. He got them to agree to amend their own bylaws. It would require a simple majority—sixteen teams—to approve any proposed CBA deal that Bettman supported—but it would now take 75 per cent, or twenty-three teams, to approve any deal he opposed. He needed only eight teams on side to block any proposed CBA—a number he had easily in his back pocket. Now when Goodenow said no, Bettman could say no, too.
The CBA negotiation scr
ipt held into October, and November, and December, but then when a deal was supposed to follow, it didn’t. The season was cancelled. This time, the players cracked. On July 13, 2005, a new owner-friendly CBA was signed. Two weeks later, Goodenow was fired; the NHLPA imploded. Bettman won, and he has never lost since.
The NHL’s commissioner is an employee of the league. His authority rests with the Board of Governors. He needs their support; he himself can only influence. Bettman has always been adept at testing the winds and, if he finds them blowing the wrong way, shifting with them, or working patiently, calculatedly, to make them blow his way. He pretends that he must lead cautiously from behind. But with league revenues growing in multiples since his hiring, with fewer vulnerable franchises, and with most teams worth vastly more than in the decades before him—just as he did during the 2004–05 CBA negotiations, he has shown he can lead forcefully from behind when he wants to.
—
Steve worked out regularly during the early months of the lockout, but as with other players, without the usual urgency. If a day had to be missed or cut short, it was. There were NHLPA calls to participate in, meetings to attend. There were life details normally taken care of by the team that he had to attend to himself. Later in the season, he went to France to play for the Scorpions de Mulhouse. Mulhouse, once an industrial centre, the Manchester of France, is a picturesque and pleasant city of around 100,000 people, an hour’s drive away from Zurich and Strasbourg. The Scorpions were a good team in a weak league. Steve played fifteen pleasant and picturesque games.
Elsewhere during the lockout, things were not standing still. Minor league players were playing minor league seasons, making themselves a year better and a year more ready to play in the NHL. Including Mike Commodore. Because of the similarity of their family names, he and Steve had been the two “Doors” who had come out of the press box during the 2004 playoffs to help the Flames to the Stanley Cup Final. Commodore had played twenty games in those playoffs, but had played few enough regular-season games not to be caught in the subsequent lockout, and he was now playing and developing in the AHL. Junior and college players were moving one year closer to graduation, to compete for jobs in the pros.
With the new CBA agreement signed, the Calgary Flames could plan for the 2005–06 season. They were no longer a team that had missed the playoffs seven straight years, in need of help everywhere. They were Stanley Cup finalists, and seemed only a few strategic moves away from a big, contending year. They also had Dion Phaneuf ready to join them. Phaneuf, drafted in 2003 from the Red Deer Rebels, had been named the WHL’s best defenceman the following season, and would have played with the Flames in 2004–05 if not for the lockout. Instead, he stayed in Red Deer and won the top defenceman award for a second straight year. Phaneuf was strong and tough, a defensive and offensive force. He would score twenty goals with the Flames in his first NHL season, and finish third in the rookie-of-the-year voting, behind Alex Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby.
With Phaneuf’s arrival, the Flames traded Commodore. Needing help on the power play, they signed free agent Roman Hamrlík; with Hamrlík, and young defenceman Mark Giordano, who had developed more rapidly than expected in the minors, they traded Denis Gauthier and Toni Lydman. That left Robyn Regehr, Rhett Warrener, Jordan Leopold, and Andrew Ference, along with Phaneuf, Hamrlík, Giordano, and Steve. After his play during the 2003–04 playoffs, Steve assumed he would contend for a top-four defence position, which would be a step up for him but, from the perspective of the now Cup-contending Flames, not necessarily for the team. Their top-four, even top-six, defencemen needed to be better. A top 1–2 pairing plays the big minutes, regular shifts, and on power plays and penalty kills—a total of about twenty-five minutes a game. A 3–4 pairing gets some power-play and penalty-killing time, and plays about twenty minutes in all. Just as a fifth starter in baseball gives you innings, 5–6 guys in hockey give you minutes, fifteen of them, maybe. They eat up time, giving the big guys a breather until they can come back on the ice again. A 1–2 guy’s job is to win you games. A 5–6 (or seventh) guy’s job is not to lose them. Steve improved the team by being a better seventh defenceman than they had imagined he would be two years earlier. But that’s what he was. Then he had also been twenty-four, and seemed young. Now he was almost twenty-six.
For Steve, everything was confusing. In 2003–04, he had paid the dues he expected to pay and had always paid. Now it was payoff time, except that when the 2005–06 season began, he was in the press box even more than he had been before. He was surprised and disappointed. But he had felt that way before, and every other time he had picked himself up and worked harder. He was a team guy; he did what the team needed of him. If it wasn’t to play at that moment, it was to get himself ready for the next one, to practise and train hard, to be a role model and inspiration, especially to the younger players—to help make them better, to make the team better.
But this time, Steve was practising and training with less purpose, and less pleasure. He couldn’t stop himself from feeling this way, and he was upset and unhappy with himself that he couldn’t. And if his on-ice life wasn’t right, his life off the ice didn’t feel right either. You have to earn the party after, and you can’t play guilty. Maybe the drinking and drugs were holding him back, he began to think. He had always been a gamer. Whatever the situation, he would rise to the challenge, whether it was one that others had presented, or one that he had imposed on himself. If he were to stay up all night partying, he would still be in the gym at seven, drop 300 pounds on the bench press, and show everyone else, and himself, that he could do it. But this off-ice life didn’t feel right if his on-ice life wasn’t working. He was angry at his off-ice self. Everything began to feel shaky. Alcohol and drugs were putting his career and future in jeopardy.
In early December, after being a healthy scratch again, Steve went to see Darryl Sutter. He told the Flames coach what Sutter already knew: Steve was at a pivot point. He needed to play if he was to improve enough to stay in the league. Sutter agreed to trade him.
Calgary was on a ten-day, five-game road trip. They had lost in Nashville, won in Detroit and were on their way to Pittsburgh. Sutter met with Steve and told him that he had been traded to Florida. Rhett Warrener remembers the scene a short time later. The Flames players were on the bus in front of the hotel, about to leave for the airport. Steve was also in front of the hotel, waiting for a taxi to the airport to get to Miami. The bus left first. “And there was Monty,” Warrener recalls, “just standing on the sidewalk with his bag.” Warrener had played for the Panthers earlier in his career. In Florida, he knew, Steve would get a fresh start. He’d have a chance to find new interests and begin new habits. In Calgary, if a player did something wrong, everybody noticed and called the Flames office or contacted the media. In Florida, nobody saw anything because nobody was watching. Steve could hide in Florida. He could do anything. As the bus pulled out, “I looked back at Monty,” Warrener says, “and I remember thinking, ‘This could go either way.’”
Marty Gélinas, “the Eliminator,” who had signed with the Panthers in the off-season, met Steve at the airport in Miami. He had been aware of Steve’s drinking, but not the extent of it. When he heard of the trade, Gélinas and his wife sat down and talked. They agreed that Gélinas would suggest to Steve that he live with them, just until he was settled, of course. Gélinas knew what it was like to be in a new place: the Panthers were his sixth NHL team. “As a family, we didn’t know how to do this,” Gélinas recalls, “or how it would work. We had two young kids and my wife was pregnant. Sure we had question marks. But if someone needs your help to get back on track, to me it’s a no-brainer.”
Every morning, Steve left the Gélinas house before everybody else was up, but when he came back from practice, Gélinas recalls, “he would just be part of the family,” as he had been with the Babcocks in Peterborough. “If something needed to be done around the house, he’d do it. He did the dishes. He played street hockey with t
he kids. He took them to hockey practice. We all sat down and had dinner together. We chatted at night, sometimes had deep conversations about a lot of different things. He became one of us.” Steve stayed with them for the rest of the season. “We gave him some stability, and gave him a chance to see how a family man in a hockey family lived,” Gélinas says. “How when you get home from practice maybe you’ve got to cut the grass, or take your kids to something. I think that year Monty realized there was more to this than just the game. There had to be some structure. There was a life. There was something he could shoot for. He made such an impact on our lives. It was really good for my family, and it was good for Monty. And the way he talked with my kids, one on one. It was awesome. And they were young. Not everybody can do that. They still talk about him.”
Steve didn’t dress for the Panthers’ first game after the trade, nor for the second, a 6–3 loss at home to Ottawa. He played the third game, on the road against Dallas. The predictable happened—nineteen seconds after the Stars scored to take a 2–0 lead, Steve got into a fight with Bill Guerin. Before the period ended, the Stars scored again. The second period was different, however. The Panthers scored twice, Steve assisting on the second goal, then tied the game on a power-play goal by Joe Nieuwendyk, assisted by Gary Roberts. Then, on a power play, with only sixteen seconds remaining in the third period, the Stars scored and won the game, 4–3. As the game ended, Roberts—frustrated, angry—got a penalty for boarding.
Nieuwendyk and Roberts had both grown up in Whitby, Ontario—then a town of about 20,000, now a rapidly expanding bedroom community fifty kilometres east of Toronto. At age six, Nieuwendyk played tyke hockey for the Owls, Roberts for the Wrens. Thirty-three years later, Nieuwendyk, having played more than 1,200 NHL games, scored over 500 goals, and won three Stanley Cups, and Roberts, having played more than 1,100 games, and scored over 400 goals, and won one Stanley Cup, signed with Florida. They were both thirty-nine years old.