Yzerman: The Making of a Champion Mass market paperbound - 2005

First line

"HOW MANY LINES DID THE RED WINGS USE WHEN THEY finally started winning Stanley Cups?"

Excerpt

Introduction

The May 1, 2003, edition of News Night with Aaron Brown on CNN was preoccupied with the Middle East. A presidential photo op was being orchestrated for the next day aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, from which George W. Bush would declare victory in Iraq. News Night opened with a Nic Robertson report from Iraq on the frustrations in the search for weapons of mass destruction. Then came an interview with a photographer traveling in country with the 62nd Medical Brigade. Next, the comedian and producer Carl Reiner dropped by the studio to lighten the mood by chatting with Brown as he plugged his autobiography.

The hour-long show then did its customary wrap-up, a review of the front pages of the next day’s morning papers, which were already hitting the streets. The lead news was, of course, Iraq, from every angle. Except in one major American city.

“I want to get one more thing in quickly,” Brown said as time ran out. “Detroit News . . . The big front-page story is a hockey story, because it’s Hockeytown. ‘Yzerman to Stay for Run to Cup’ — or ‘At Cup.’ And we think that’s good because we like him. He’s a good hockey player.”

Professional hockey can scarcely attract the attention of the mainstream American press at the best of times, let alone for the best of reasons (a state of affairs exemplified by Todd Bertuzzi’s assault of Steve Moore, which lit up CNN in March 2004). But on a day when major media outlets were saturated with talk of Bush, Iraq and WMDs, the people at News Night felt it important before signing off to let everyone in the world know it was good that Stevie Y was coming back for another season in Detroit — because they, at News Night, liked him. And they liked him because, in Brown’s succinct words, he was “a good hockey player.”

Which pretty well sums up the stature of Steve Yzerman in the home stretch of his career: a good hockey player, in the way that “good” is used to define a good friend or a good man. There’s no “great” necessarily to consider beyond it — good is plenty good enough.

It was no longer possible to say Yzerman was the best, at least by the measure of who had the most goals, assists or points in the National Hockey League — or who was the most handsomely paid: the new one-year contract wouldn’t be finalized until late August, and would earn him (according to the players’ association) $5,849,823, a drop from his previous $8.5 million salary (both figures are in U.S. dollars). It made him only the sixth-highest-paid player on the team he captained, and ranked him thirteenth in the league among centers, thirty-eighth among all players. Still, if you were to ask fans (and the players themselves) to name the greatest player in the game today, you certainly wouldn’t find Steve Yzerman logging in around thirty-eighth. And you probably won’t see Aaron Brown hold up the front page of a newspaper announcing a new contract for Alexei Yashin anytime soon.

Yzerman had not yet been awarded the Bill Masterton Memorial Trophy on the night that Brown displayed the front page of The Detroit News. That would come in June, when Yzerman would stride to the podium at the annual NHL awards ceremony in Toronto to accept the award, given by the Professional Hockey Writers’ Association to “the National Hockey League player who best exemplifies the qualities of perseverance, sportsmanship and dedication to hockey.” The Masterton traditionally goes to players who have overcome some personal hardship, often in the form of debilitating illness. Montreal Canadiens captain Saku Koivu had earned it in 2002 for his battle with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. In 2003, Yzerman was up against Steve Rucchin of the Anaheim Mighty Ducks, who had come back from two injury-shortened seasons and the trauma of the death of his brother from cancer to play a full season in 2002–03, when his team reached the Stanley Cup finals, and Bryan Berard of the Boston Bruins, who had bounced back from an eye injury that almost ended his career.

There’s something unsettling about pitting people’s misfortunes against one another in an award balloting: should the death of Rucchin’s brother count for more than Yzerman’s battles with his bum knee? But in the end, the award went to Yzerman gracefully and unequivocally. Fundamentally, the basis for the award was his return to the game late in the 2002–03 season after undergoing major surgery on a troublesome right knee and missing 66 regular-season games. Rather than undergo full reconstructive surgery, Yzerman had opted for an osteotomy, a realignment of the knee joint—a procedure normally reserved for the elderly.

No athlete had ever used the operation as a career-lengthening measure, and in Yzerman’s case, playing more hockey had been a secondary goal to ensuring quality of life in his imminent retirement years. The fact that he came back at all was incredible. Underlying the Masterton award was the knowledge of everything that had led to that surgery. After an initial injury in 1988, Yzerman’s right knee had steadily deteriorated. He underwent arthroscopic surgery in mid October 2000, missed 22 games in recovery, then had another bout of surgery right before the Olympic tournament in Salt Lake City in February 2002. Yzerman had played on a knee that caused him excruciating pain all that season, helping Canada win its first Olympic gold medal in men’s ice hockey in fifty years before leading his Red Wings to their third Stanley Cup title since 1996–97.

Not everyone was happy with Yzerman’s decision to play the Olympic tournament on a bad knee, a move that forced him to sit out a few weeks of Red Wings games. Mario Lemieux similarly had to miss time in a Penguins uniform after the tournament when his hip gave him grief. Some Detroit fans were irate that Yzerman, in their view, put Canada’s Olympic medal hopes before his obligations to his NHL team. One unhappy fan wrote The Detroit News: “Steve Yzerman should stay in Utah after what he pulled. Yzerman’s knee flared up during the Olympics and now he’s going to sit at home on his butt and miss games for the team and the fans who pay him his $8 million per year. What an outrage! Mario Lemieux is being lynched in Pittsburgh and it should be the same in Detroit for Yzerman.”


From the Hardcover edition.

Media reviews

"Yzerman is the greatest player I’ve ever coached, and I’ve
coached guys who are in the Hall of Fame."
–Jacques Demers, former coach of the Detroit Red Wings.