Local Boy LaFontaine Missed, but Red Wings Did OK with Yzerman

He played hockey in Waterford, growing up in the northern Oakland County burg in the 1970s—a decade of horrors when it came to his local team, the Detroit Red Wings.

As he honed his skills as an adolescent and started depositing pucks into opposing goals with eye-popping frequency, the Red Wings were stumbling through the National Hockey League, soiling what had once been a tradition-rich franchise history.

As the 1980s arrived, his name started to become known beyond Waterford. It didn’t hurt that it had a bit of royalty to its sound.

Pat LaFontaine, from Waterford, was off to play junior hockey in Quebec, in a town called Verdun. He was 17 years old.

In his lone season in the Quebec Junior League, LaFontaine made a mockery of it.

In 70 games, LaFontaine, a center, scored 104 goals. He added 130 assists for 234 points—over three points a game.

It was obvious that the QMJHL wasn’t big enough to hold his talent.

Down I-75 from where LaFontaine grew up, the Red Wings were playing to half-empty houses at Joe Louis Arena. The team had a new owner—a pizza pie guy named Mike Ilitch—but the only thing that seemed to change at JLA was that Little Caesars pizza was being served officially at the concession stands. The product on the ice was still miserably bad.

But the Red Wings held the fourth overall choice in the 1983 draft. They’d have a good shot at nabbing LaFontaine off the board.

It was GM Jimmy Devellano’s first draft with the Red Wings. He was Ilitch’s first-ever Wings hire in 1982, but Jimmy D. joined the team too late to participate in the draft that year.

Folks around town salivated at the thought of what local kid Pat LaFontaine could do in a Red Wings sweater.

The Red Wings wanted LaFontaine. The kid, by all accounts, was open to playing NHL hockey back home after his one year hiatus spent in Quebec.

Devellano didn’t make his mark as a hockey rink rat by targeting just one player, though. He knew that things didn’t always work out the way you’d like. He’d have to be ready to select another player, should LaFontaine already be gone.

Red Wings fans didn’t care about anyone else, though. Pat LaFontaine grew up in Waterford, and he should play for the Red Wings, dammit!

The New York Islanders, Devellano’s old team—the one he helped build into a dynasty in the late-1970s—held the third overall pick. It was by sheer luck, through trade, that they had a pick so high, because the Isles were defending Stanley Cup champs.

Sure enough, Jimmy D’s team stuck it to their old employee, nabbing LaFontaine with the pick just prior to Detroit’s.

PUCK!

No matter; with people back in Detroit slugged in the gut, Devellano picked himself up from the mat, deeply disappointed, and went with his Plan B.

No one knew how to pronounce Steve Yzerman’s name when the news came that he was the newest Red Wing.

Some thought it was Eezer-man. Others said no, it’s Why-zerman.

Jimmy D. not only knew how to say it, he knew all about the kid attached to it.

Yzerman’s numbers while playing for Peterborough in the Ontario Junior League weren’t as impressive as LaFontaine’s, but numbers never tell the whole story.

Devellano knew that Yzerman, the son of an Ottawa politician, quiet as a mouse, could be a big-time star in the NHL.

They played a video clip of Devellano, speaking in his squeaky Canadian-laced voice, at his induction into the Michigan Sports Hall of Fame in 2006. He was talking about this new kid Yzerman, shortly after drafting him in the summer of ’83.

“We feel he can contribute right away,” Jimmy D. said. “My only concern is that because of his age – he’s only 18 – his strength is a question mark.”

Then, one of the biggest understatements in hockey history, as it turned out.

“But I think he’s gonna make it,” Devellano added.

Drafts in any sport are a crapshoot. All the studying and scouting in the world can’t predict what a kid is going to do once he starts playing the sport for money.

Even Yzerman himself didn’t really know.

I cornered him at Cobo after Jimmy D’s induction that October night in 2006.

Doesn’t it seem silly now, I asked, to see Jimmy speak about you in such uncertain terms?

Yzerman gave that bashful smile.

“Well,” he said, “not many people knew for sure back then, eh?”

I suppose not.

Monday, Yzerman will go into the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto on Monday. He’ll be inducted with two former teammates: snipers Brett Hull and Luc Robitaille.

It’ll be 26 years, and some change, since he arrived in Detroit with that funny last name and the baggage of NOT being Pat LaFontaine.

LaFontaine, for his part, had a fine NHL career. He was no draft bust. A quick check on the Internet gives the numbers: 468 goals, 545 assists, 1,013 points. But no Stanley Cups—and a career cut short thanks to concussions. LaFontaine was only 33 when he played his last NHL game.

Yzerman played until he was about a week shy of his 41^st birthday. He scored 692 goals, had 1,755 points, and won three Stanley Cups and the hearts of Red Wings fans forever. His jersey hangs in the rafters of Joe Louis Arena, next to those of Howe and Abel and Lindsay and the rest.

All because the New York Islanders, Jimmy’s old employers, decided that they wanted the kid from Waterford, Pat LaFontaine, for themselves.

We cursed and grumbled in Detroit, then Steve Yzerman suited up and started playing some hockey for the Red Wings.

Jimmy Devellano’s hunch was right.

“I think he’s gonna make it.”

Yeah, just a bit.

Baseball in November? It MUST Not Happen Again

As I write this, we’ve managed to elect two new governors in this country, and scores of other officials locally—yet we haven’t crowned a baseball champion.

That’s right—-Election Day came and went and the World Series was still going on.

Now, it’s likely that by the time you read this, either the Phillies or the Yankees will have emerged triumphant. But there was no winner as November 4th dawned, and there just seems to be something inherently wrong with that.

Late isn’t so great.

If the Series goes the full seven games (the Yanks lead 3-2 as I write this), it will end on November 5, which will officially be the latest any MLB champion has been determined. If the Yankees wrap it up in six, it will tie the 2001 World Series (Arizona beat New York in Game 7 on 11/4/01) for lateness.

What if the Colorado Rockies had managed to emerge from the National League playoffs? Can you imagine WS games in Denver in November? You might have to wait until the following spring to find out how the thing turns out.

The World Baseball Classic helped push Opening Day back to the end of the first week of April, which has, in turn, put the World Series into November. And this is with most of the LDS and LCS series going nowhere near their maximum length. If those earlier series had gone longer, the World Series would be threatening to hit double digits—-as in November 10, 11, etc.

But you know what? Baseball’s Opening Day being April 6 or 7 was the norm, and not too long ago. But that was in the day of the traditional Sunday doubleheader, which has gone the way of the dinosaur, and flip phones.

You’d have a DH—-and I don’t mean designated hitter—-every Sunday afternoon in just about every ballpark in the big leagues. It was as American as the sport itself. So you could start a season as late as April 10-12, for example, and still fit the 162-game schedule in before too many days occurred in October.

Of course, there was no third tier of playoffs, like you have now thanks to Bud Selig’s Wild Card.

But knowing that the post-season, from LDS to WS, can now take about one full month to complete, I think it’s time to look at pushing back Opening Day into late March.

Look, I’m not crazy about that, either, but I’m willing to concede some games in March. It’s the lesser of two evils: early season games in March, or World Series games in November? I’ll take Option A, please. BUT—-and this is a biggie—-let’s be smart and schedule as many March games as possible in either domed stadiums or warm weather climates. Can’t we have a small modicum of common sense?

I’m not a meteorologist, nor an editor at The Farmer’s Almanac, so for all I know the temperatures in early November don’t vary all that much from late October. But two things: a) they MIGHT vary quite a bit; and b) who cares if they vary at all—-baseball simply wasn’t meant to be played in November!! Unless it’s in places like Venezuela.

I admit that I’m a traditionalist. Guilty as charged. But is it too much to ask to get baseball over with before trick-or-treating? Will we one day be flipping channels between the World Series and election coverage? (It could have happened this year; it was only by luck that this year’s Election Day fell on the World Series off day).

And what of post-season nicknames for playoff and World Series heroes of the 21st century?

What do we call Alex Rodriguez from now on? Mr. Octember? Or do we go the hyphenated route: Mr. October-November?

Seriously, this is nuts. Since MLB absolutely refuses to hold doubleheaders unless they’re forced to because of rainouts, then they MUST start the season earlier. Because one year Mother Nature is going to have herself a little fun and wreak all sorts of havoc on a November World Series.

Play Snowball!

 

Hockey Palaces Like Olympia Sadly Extinct Nowadays

They don’t make arenas like Olympia Stadium anymore. Hell, they don’t make buildings like it anymore.

I don’t know of any place where an escalator lifts you up at an 80 degree angle, which it did at Olympia—the Old Red Barn where the Red Wings played from the 1920s to December 15, 1979.

If you think I’m exaggerating about the 80 degree angle—you’re right; perhaps it was only about 77 degrees.

The Olympia—corner of Grand River and McGraw on Detroit’s west side—comes to mind because we’re inching closer and closer to the 30th anniversary of the last game played there. Oh, they played a charity alumni game there a couple months later, but 12/15/79 was when the Red Wings recovered from a 4-0 deficit to tie the Quebec Nordiques—Le Nordique—in a final score of 4-4. No overtime back then. Certainly no silly shootouts.

For a few moments that night, I thought they wouldn’t need the explosives used to implode buildings that have outlived their use, because when Greg Joly scored on an end-to-end rush with about three minutes to play to tie the game, you’d have thought the place would come down due to the thunder of cheers and foot-stomping.

I ought to know, because I was there.

It’s among the list of electrifying moments I’ve been lucky enough to witness in person in Detroit sports history—right up there with Kirk Gibson’s homer off Goose Gossage to seal the 1984 World Series, Isiah Thomas’s 16 points in 90 seconds against the Knicks in the 1984 playoffs, and the Lions’ 45-3 trouncing of the Pittsburgh Steelers on Thanksgiving Day, 1983.

Yep, my fanny was in the seats—and leaping out of them—for all of the above. Good stuff.

I cornered Red Wings owner Mike Ilitch a couple of years ago at the unveiling of the Gordie Howe sculpture inside Joe Louis Arena, and he confirmed that the organization was looking at parcels of land onto which they’d build a brand new arena for the Red Wings. One of them, I managed to get out of him, isn’t too far away from Comerica Park, near the Woodward Avenue corridor.

But despite the success the Red Wings have enjoyed over the past 15 years or so at JLA—four Stanley Cups and some near misses—I don’t know that the sentiment will hit me the same when they shutter The Joe for good, as it did when the medicine ball started ramming against Olympia’s bricks in the 1980s.

Olympia, with its famous marquee on the lower left; beyond it would be a drugstore where players often stopped for a post-practice milk shake

There was the balcony at Olympia, number one, which thanks to the architects made you feel as if you were looking down at the ice between your legs, if you were sitting in the lower rows.

There was no overhead scoreboard or clock; instead, those were located in the “end zones,” along the balcony facade, horizontally stretched from curved corner to curved corner. There were also smaller auxiliary scoreboards on the lower levels of the expensive seats, in the corners.

Olympia seated about 16,000 for hockey and was just about the most intimate indoor arena you’ll ever enjoy.

The place shook when the crowd reaction was explosive enough. But when the din was low, you could hear the players shout to one another, even if you sat in the upper rows of the balcony. It was like a theatre that way.

The skates etching the ice, the puck being smacked from tape to tape as it was being passed around, the crunch of the glass during a solid bodycheck—those are hockey sounds to be treasured. And you could hear them at Olympia as if you were wearing personal earphones.

The acoustics were tremendous—which made it a wonderful concert venue, too. All the big name acts played the Olympia: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, you name it.

The Pistons called Olympia home for a few seasons before Cobo Arena opened on the riverfront in 1960.

Olympia’s front doors—it literally had a lobby—were just a sidewalk away from Grand River. Kind of like the old Maple Leaf Gardens on Yonge Street. The old-fashioned marquee with the hand-posted red letters would announce that evening’s festivities: “HOCKEY TONIGHT RED WINGS VS MONTREAL 8:00.”

Then the escalators, which were, frankly, a nightmare for anyone with either claustrophobia or a fear of heights. If you had both, you were in trouble. The steps were barely wide enough for two people. And that steep angle made you feel like you’d tumble backward on the people behind you if you leaned back a bit too much.

I feel sorry for those who never got a chance to take in a Red Wings game at Olympia Stadium.

I feel that way, because they’ll never make hockey palaces like that again. No one has it in them, I guess.