Blood Feud (part 1)

Blood Feud: Detroit Red Wings v. Colorado Avalanche: The Inside Story of Pro Sports' Nastiest and Best Rivalry of Its Era by Adrian Dater

I'm going to buy this book soon. I've wanted it for a very long time.

Adrian Dater, who is a Colorado sports reporter, gives a very good account of one of the greatest rivalries in the history of sports.

Red Wings vs. Avalanche...

Dater offered up a chapter from his book here. I'm not much of an editor, but his offering is very reader unfriendly. I did my best to make it more readable and I hope it helps to show what a must read this book is.

Mr. Dater offered another chapter on a different forum and I will be editing that one soon, but it is somewhat difficult to do (makes my head hurt), so you are invited to enjoy this one for now...

‘‘A Car Crash in Slow Motion’’

As a boy growing up in Toronto, Kris Draper loved those distortion mirrors, the kind at amusement parks and circuses. A husky kid with red hair and freckles, Draper liked how the fun mirrors made him look a little slimmer. A tilt of the head, a step to the side, and he went from short and squat to tall and athletic looking.

On May 29, 1996, Draper looked into a mirror inside the visitors’ dressing room of Denver’s McNichols Sports Arena—and gasped. Please let this be another distortion mirror, Draper thought. No way—no way—could this be his real face.

His right cheek looked like it was stuffed with 10 cans of Skoal. His right eye, rapidly swelling shut, had as many colors as a Jackson Pollock painting. His nose looked like a piece of wadded-up newspaper, his jaw like somebody had moved it a couple inches to the left. I’ve turned into Frankenstein, Draper thought.

A defensive oriented center in his third season with the Detroit Red Wings, Draper had no idea who had done this to him. Playing a loose puck along the boards by the Red Wings’ bench, Draper had his head down, a no-no in the sport of hockey. But Draper knew he needed to use all of his body for better positioning to get control of the puck. Getting control of that puck, he knew, could make the difference in getting his team a victory it had to have.

Despite setting a National Hockey League record with 62 victories in the 1995–96 regular season, despite entering the playoffs as prohibitive favorites to win their first Stanley Cup since 1955,the Red Wings entered Game 6 of the 1996 Western Conference finals down three games to two to the Colorado Avalanche. A franchise that had been known as the Quebec Nordiques for the previous 23 seasons, first in the old World Hockey Association and then in the NHL, the Avalanche played in a city scorned by Original Six hockey markets such as Detroit: scorned for losing its first NHL team, the Colorado Rockies,which left town to become the New Jersey Devils in 1982.

Those same Devils had beaten the Red Wings for the Stanley Cup the year before, sweeping them in four humiliating games. A trash-talking right wing named Claude Lemieux was the hero for New Jersey, winning the Conn Smythe Trophy as the playoffs most valuable player. A contract dispute with the Devils led to Lemieux’s trade to the Avalanche on October 3, 1995, and here he was again leading his team to an upset series win over Detroit. Not if Draper could help it—which is why he was determined to get that puck for his team, trailing 1-0 with time running out in the first period. Get the puck to a teammate, get a quick goal, and she’s all tied up. Go on to get the win, and it’s back to friendly Joe Louis Arena for Game 7, where it would be advantage, Red Wings.

That was the plan, anyway. But then, with 5:53 showing on the clock, a deep, sickly thud sounded on the ice. As he was skating backward slightly to make his way to the bench, the 185-pound Draper’s head was driven into the top edge of the boards, face first, by a 220-pound man skating at roughly 25 mph from behind. The man was Lemieux. Sitting right in front of Draper was close friend and teammate Darren McCarty, a third-year forward known for his toughness and occasional scoring touch.

‘‘I mean, it was right in front of me,’’ McCarty recalled, ‘‘and all I can remember was thinking I’m about to watch a car crash in slow motion, and I can’t believe it’s happening. I could see Lemieux coming from 20 feet away, and I kept waiting for him to slow up. I kept thinking, ‘He’s going to stop, right?’’’ Wrong. ‘‘Heyyyyy!’’ McCarty yelled. McCarty was immediately sickened by what he saw of Draper’s face. ‘‘You could see it cave inward,’’ he said.

By then, Lemieux had already turned and skated away. Referee Bill McCreary, respected by players as probably the NHL’s best, whistled to halt play. Players from both benches leaned over to see the ice rapidly turning the color of Draper’s uniform. Lying facedown, gripping his face with his gloves, Draper was conscious but knew he was in big trouble. He could taste his own blood. It felt like his neck might have snapped in two. He couldn’t move his jaw to talk. ‘‘I remember trying to get up. And I knew things didn’t feel right,’’ Draper recalled nearly 10 years later.

Red Wings trainer John Wharton immediately jumped the boards to aid Draper. Wharton was often teased by opponents for his many trips onto the ice—more TV time was what he wanted, the kidding went—but there was no laughing this time. The partisan Avalanche crowd was silent. Able to stand after a few minutes, Draper was led off the ice with Wharton pressing a white towel to his face. The towel had turned mostly red by the time they crossed the ice to the visiting team’s entrance.

Lying on a table in the small visitors’ dressing room, the ceiling, to Draper’s barely focused eyes, seemed to be spinning. Blood continued to seep from his mouth and right eye socket. For several chilling moments, Draper thought he’d already lost the eye. The career he had worked so hard for, the one that seemed to have little hope when the Wings obtained him for just a $1 waiver fee after he was dumped by the Winnipeg Jets in 1993, might already be over.

Several NHL players had had their careers shortened when they lost the use of an eye.
Most of them might have avoided the fate had they worn a protective visor. Lemieux wore such a ‘‘shield,’’ and, like most players who did, was ridiculed for it. Real men don’t wear shields, most Canadian NHLers—including Draper—believed. Now he wasn’t so sure.

On the ice, Lemieux was assessed a five-minute match penalty by McCreary, which meant his automatic ejection from the game. Believing McCreary’s call to be unfair, Lemieux made a showy, petulant exit, slamming the door built into the boards behind the north-side net in the aging arena. Red Wings defenseman Paul Coffey tied the game on the ensuing power play, and everybody on the team knew Draper was tough enough to get back in the game and help them win.

When he regained full consciousness in the dressing room, the first thing Draper did was look for his gloves.‘‘I just felt I was going to be able to get up and go out and play, finish the game,’’ said Draper, who did not know until the next day, when he watched a replay from his hospital room, that it was Lemieux who had hit him. ‘‘That’s the one thing I remember, just: ‘OK, grab my gloves and let’s get back out there.’’’

But while the Red Wings took the ice for the second period of a 1-1 game, team doctor David Collon gently informed Draper his season was over. Just looking at his face was enough to know that; never mind the X-rays. They would eventually show broken bones to Draper’s nose, jaw, cheekbone, and, possibly, right eye socket. Five teeth were bent inward toward his throat. A total of 40 stitches were needed to close cuts around his eye and inside his mouth. Dr. Collon knew Draper’s jaw would probably need to be wired shut. Detroit captain Steve Yzerman was the only Wings player to get a look at Draper between periods. Not until after the game did Draper’s other teammates get a look.

Immediately, the disappointment of losing the game, 4-1, turned to rage for some. Red Wings veteran forward Dino Ciccarelli and goalie Chris Osgood were the most vocal—particularly when they realized they had already shaken the hand of Lemieux in the traditional series ending procession at center ice.

Ciccarelli, no stranger to controversy in his career, including a previous stint in jail for assault, would utter one of the more famous quotes in one of the most famous rivalries in hockey history: ‘‘I can’t believe I shook this guy’s frickin’ hand. We lost and I’m pissed off. But to see Kris Draper’s face makes me sick. I didn’t see his face until after the game, but his face is turned sideways. If the league doesn’t do something about that . . . I mean that’s ridiculous. He could have broken his frickin’ neck.’’

Down the hallway, in the jubilant Avalanche dressing room, Lemieux stood in a hot-off-the-presses Western Conference Championship T-shirt, drinking a beer and high fiving teammates. A first year beat reporter for the Denver Post—covering my first NHL team ever—I stood in that dressing room and immediately posed a question to Lemieux about Draper. ‘‘Are you sorry about the hit on Draper?’’ I asked. ‘‘Apparently his injuries are pretty bad.’’

‘‘Nobody wants to see a player get injured. I didn’t try to hurt him, and I’m sorry he’s hurt,’’ Lemieux said.

That was as close as Lemieux would get to an apology.

There was no asking about the extent of Draper’s injuries. No asking where he might be in the building for a quick visit. When some Detroit reporters pressed Lemieux about the incident, the two-time Stanley Cup champion and son of a blue-collar truck driver from Mont Laurier, Quebec, took a familiar adversarial posture.‘‘I don’t want to waste my time talking about Detroit,’’ he said. ‘‘They were beaten for the second year in a row. I try to hit everybody as hard as I can, just like everybody tries to hit me as hard as they can. Everything is always vicious about us, and not them. At worst, I thought it should have been a two-minute penalty. I think that was going to be his first call, but then [McCreary] saw blood and decided to change his mind.’’

With that, Lemieux took a long last drink of his beer, crumpled the can, and tossed it in the trash. That’s the end of it, Lemieux seemed to say with the gesture. No more questions about that. Move on.

Not by a long shot.

Osgood, the second-year Wings goalie who had been bested by Colorado’s Patrick Roy, had to fight himself not to storm the Avs dressing room looking for Lemieux. Osgood issued the first of many threats Lemieux would receive the next few months—many of them, from fans via fax and hang-up phone calls, threatening death.

‘‘Our players aren’t going to forget it. When he comes back to play the Wings next year, he’d better be ready. We’ll be waiting for him,’’ Osgood said. This wasn’t the first time in the series somebody wanted to physically go after Lemieux. Lemieux was suspended for Game 4, following a Game 3 incident in which he reared back and threw a punch to the back of the head of Detroit’s Slava Kozlov. That was in retaliation for Kozlov’s previously unpenalized sucker punch to Colorado defenseman Adam Foote, which drove his face into the glass and drew a cut that needed 18 stitches.

‘‘I told ‘Footie,’ when he got up and I saw his face, I said,‘We’ll get him back,’’’ said Lemieux, foreshadowing in reverse the events that would take place three games later.

After Game 3, a 6-4 Detroit victory, Lemieux walked out of the south entrance to McNichols with his wife, Debbie, and baby son, Brendan—named in honor of Brendan Shanahan, Lemieux’s good friend and former teammate in New Jersey.

To get to the player parking lot, the Lemieuxs had to walk past the idling Detroit team bus. Through the bus’s open doorway, Lemieux heard what sounded like an older man’s voice yelling his way. ‘‘Lemieux, you gutless son of a *****, nice sucker punch,’’ the voice said from the front. ‘‘I hope the league suspends your ***.’’ Lemieux instantly knew the voice to be none other than that of legendary Red Wings coach Scotty Bowman.

‘‘Pardon me?’’ said a stunned Lemieux, who walked onto the first inside step of the bus to confront Bowman. For Lemieux, this was a first. Hockey has always been a vicious sport, but one held together by a tenuous code of moral conduct off the ice. When a game ends, tradition holds that any beefs can wait to be settled until the next game. When the game’s over, it’s over—no matter the injustice that might have happened on the ice. Players who tried to punch each other’s lights out in a hockey game were likely to shake hands and have a laugh afterward.

‘‘That’s hockey, eh?’’ as the Canadian saying goes.

This, however—confronting a player carrying a baby in his arms, next to his wife—was not hockey. Lemieux heard ‘‘Get the **** out of here’’ from some members of the Wings before heatedly telling Bowman, ‘‘I would expect better out of you. I’m with my family here, have some class.’’‘‘**** off, **********,’’ was returned in chorus upon Lemieux’s exit.

The next day, prior to a practice, Lemieux walked through the same doorway into the arena. The first person he saw was Bowman, talking quietly with Colorado general manager Pierre Lacroix.

‘‘Hey Scotty, if you want to talk, it’s time to talk now. I don’t have my kid now, and you don’t have your entire bus behind you,’’ Lemieux said, inching closer to the 62-year-old Bowman, a former junior player in the Montreal system whose playing career was partially derailed by a head injury suffered from a high stick by Jean-Guy Talbot in a 1951 game.

Bowman didn’t want to continue the matter. ‘‘He just buried his head and walked away,’’ Lemieux said.

Lemieux, sure enough, was suspended one game by NHL director of hockey operations Brian Burke. Convinced that Bowman’s parking lot tirade and griping about Lemieux in the media had something to do with Burke’s decision, Avalanche coach Marc Crawford felt he had to return Bowman’s ‘‘mindgame’’ with one of his own.

A former fringe player with the Vancouver Canucks, at 35 Crawford was in just his second year as an NHL head coach—on paper, no match for the six-time Stanley Cup champion Bowman. But Crawford had a media savvy beyond his baby face and anchorman stiff hairstyle.

Asked about the suspension in a morning press conference at McNichols, Crawford turned the subject back around to Bowman and the metal plate he was long rumored to have in his head as a result of his junior injury. (The rumor was untrue.)

‘‘Scotty Bowman, he’s notorious for taking an incidental factor in a game and trying to create a lot of focus around that. He does it by planting questions in the media; he does it by trying to create an awful lot of controversy,’’ Crawford said.‘‘He’s a great thinker, but he thinks so much that you even get the plate in his head causing interference on our headsets during the game.’’

Crawford’s wife, Helene, scolded her husband for the remarks, even telling Sports Illustrated it was a good thing he and the team were staying in a Denver hotel for the series—a playoff hockey tradition—because he wouldn’t have ‘‘gotten any’’ that night at home.

After Lemieux’s hit on Draper, not even Crawford believed a suspension wouldn’t be coming his way. ‘‘Claude plays the game hard, and he probably deserved the penalties,’’ Crawford said after his team knocked out the supposedly invincible Red Wings. ‘‘But tonight’s not the night to talk about it.’’

The day after Game 6, Lemieux knew a suspension for the upcoming Stanley Cup Finals against the Florida Panthers was a strong possibility. If anything would be a killer for Lemieux, it would be sitting out a Finals game. He was already gaining a reputation as hockey’s Reggie Jackson, a Mr. October in June.

He loved the pressure of big games and the boos from enemy rinks. Entering the 1996 Finals, Lemieux already had 52 goals in 136 career playoff games, with one Conn Smythe Trophy and three overtime game-winning goals with the Montreal Canadiens.

Lemieux tried to make a deal with Burke: In exchange for letting him play every game of the Finals, Lemieux would sit out half of the following regular season without pay. No dice.

‘‘They turned me down,’’ Lemieux said. ‘‘It was a big commitment on my part. That’s how bad I want to play in the playoffs.’’

Lemieux was suspended for the first two games of the Finals, both won by the Avalanche. Supporters of Draper were outraged at what they said was a light sentence.

Lemieux returned for Game 3, and scored Colorado’s first goal in a 3-2 victory. Two nights later, in the sweaty, packed visitors’ dressing room at Miami Arena, Lemieux took a long drink of champagne from the silver Cup for the third time in his career.

Having been promised by Lacroix before the season that his current four-year, $5.2 million contract would be ripped up for a richer one if things went well, Lemieux was the king of the world

.‘‘Thank you, Father Pete,’’ Lemieux said, hugging Lacroix.

About a thousand miles away, Draper lay in a room at Michigan’s Henry Ford Hospital. While Lemieux sipped sweet bubbly from the Cup, Draper sucked down the last of his ground-up meal through a straw into a mouth that would stay wired shut for five weeks.

The 1995–96 NHL season may have ended that night, but the nastiest and best played rivalry in pro sports for the next six years was only just beginning.