Goose Loonies (Visions of Yzerman)

[Edit: updated as I've been editing the book]

SAWCHUK

1

March 24, 1988 – Joe Louis Arena, Detroit, Michigan.

Hartford Whalers 3, Detroit Red Wings 2.

My old man used to say that it was the only game he failed to watch during the 1987-88 Red Wings season. “It was the best game of the season, though,” he used to tell me on game nights after a few Labatt’s, “because it was the night you were born”. It was always through sports that he told me he loved me.

Ostensibly it was an unremarkable regular season loss, the box score and newspaper collections in the National Hockey League archives indicating that Hartford defeated the Red Wings 3-2 at Joe Louis Arena that night; it was a late season throwaway game, Detroit having already clinched the Norris Division. Soviet defector Petr Klima scored a goal for the Wings, bad boy Bob Probert notched an assist, the ever-scrappy Joey Kocur amassed a whopping twelve penalty minutes with his fists alone -- ten for fighting, and two for slashing -- and John Chabot, resembling a cast member of Dazed and Confused, tallied two assists in the loss.

What that box score couldn’t suggest was that, underneath the surface, the gears of fate were turning deep within the Motor City hockey machine. Objectively, as opposed to my father’s biased perspective, the best game of the season would have been the night the Wings clinched that Norris Division title, as it was Detroit’s first division title in twenty-three years. Along with the squeaky-clean Steve Yzerman, who had been named by new head coach Jacques Demers in 1986 training camp the youngest captain in Red Wings history, Petr Klima and Bob Probert -- both 1983 draft picks -- were pivotal cogs in the hockey revolution that brought Detroit out of the depths of “Dead Wings” era dormancy and into serious contention in the late eighties. In the process, however, the pair had also developed a reputation for themselves as hard-drinking troublemakers. Three years removed from Soviet Russia -- sporting a diamond earring and blond streaks in his hair to the chagrin of Demers -- Klima notched a career high 37 goals during the Norris Division-winning ‘87-88 campaign. Probert, fresh out of his third addiction treatment facility the previous offseason and now on antabuse, a prescription medication that induced vomiting in reaction to alcohol, made the All Star team en route to posting his own career highs that season with 29 goals and 33 assists. Jacques Demers, himself the son of an alcoholic, recognized the warning signs exhibited by both Klima and Probert early on. “When you start winning with a bunch of kids,” Demers recalled of coaching the wild young Wings of the eighties, “you start playing father and you start playing doctor. They were just troubled kids. We knew we were always in a [ticking] time bomb with a couple of those guys.”

A few weeks later, just after I had left the hospital – an incision stitched halfway across my belly, I was a hospital baby in my first couple months in this world – rumors of a scandal scorched the hockey world. On May 12, the morning after the Red Wings had been eliminated from the Western Conference Finals by the Edmonton Oilers for the second consecutive year, the sports world read the details of what would come to be known infamously in Detroit as the Goose Loonies incident in the sports pages of the morning papers, the press hot with the details of a late night drinking incident involving six Red Wings players. A young Mitch Albom, whose sports column I would grow up reading in the Detroit Free Press, detailed the night in a Free Press column titled “Wings Lost Much More than a Game”. Under normal circumstances, perhaps – it being the late eighties – it wouldn’t have merited news, but the six perpetrators happened to pull the stunt on the eve of the biggest Red Wings game of the season and perhaps even their biggest game of the nineteen eighties to date – an elimination game in the conference finals against the juggernaut Edmonton Oilers. It was more who than what, perhaps, too.

Two of the ringleaders turned out to be none other than Petr Klima and Bob Probert – the was recovering alcoholic; Probert later admitted he’d been swapping ibuprofen for his antabuse pills under his coaches’ noses. Other guilty parties included John Chabot, Joe Kocur, Darren Eliot, and Darren Veitch. The rumors were that Probert and Klima had organized an all-night drinking party at a downtown Edmonton establishment called “Goose Loonies.” The Red Wings fan base, starving for a winning team, took the Goose Loonies incident personally, feeling a few bad apples had jeopardized the franchise’s best shot at a Stanley Cup in years. It was a big story in the newspapers in Stanley Cup-deprived Detroit that summer, and Goose Loonies became a household name in my neighborhood in the following days, weeks, and months. Even now, twenty-seven years later, I still come across references to the infamous Goose Loonies incident in the sports section of the Detroit newspapers, usually around its anniversary.

The oft-troubled Probert must have lost control at some point earlier that season. No stranger to trouble with the law, Detroit’s notorious tough guy had famously cleaned up his act the previous offseason, and it seemed he had managed to pin down his demons for most of that 1987-88 regular season – that season featured Probert’s lone all star game appearance – but even one drink can be the unraveling of a recovering alcoholic. Red Wings assistant coach Colin Campbell incredulously found the hotel rooms of Klima and Probert empty at curfew check, put on his jacket, and went looking for the missing players in the city lights of downtown Edmonton. Enlisted to aid in the search was front office assistant Neil Smith, who recalled: “Probert had alcohol issues and Klima had a track record of running wild. So Colin and I went out to try and find them.”

Meanwhile Probert and gang were still sucking down Molson’s in the whiskey hours of the Alberta night, undoubtedly under the hazy spell of Canadian beer and Canadian women. What a buzzkill it must have been for the six of them, when, to their great infamy, assistant coach Colin Campbell showed up at Goose Loonies, a sardonic grin on his face as he imagined what head coach Jacques DeMers would have to say about his discovery. Six Red Wings caught red-handed.

“I waited outside and Colin went in and found not only Klima and Probert but four or five others,” Smith remembered of the fateful night. Detroit’s third goalie, Darren Eliot, who eventually became a Red Wings commentator for Fox Sports Detroit in the aughts, recalled: “Neil Smith and Colin Campbell were looking for Probert. In a hockey town like Edmonton, the word was out that Probert was on the streets and going crazy.”

A surely hungover Probert dressed in the following evening’s Game 5 against Edmonton anyways; the Wings couldn’t afford to sit him. He accumulated a tell-tale minus three rating in a lopsided 8-4 loss to that loaded Edmonton team. Wayne Gretzky, Canada’s soon to be departed Great One, scored a goal and added two assists for the hometown Oilers. Had it been a victory for Detroit, the details of the previous night might have fallen away into the great chasm of forgettable sports stories. But it was a loss, and a season-ending one at that. As such, the Goose Loonies incident would haunt the Red Wings for some time.

A la Shoeless Joe Jackson and Chicago’s “Black Sox,” the six perpetrators – Probert, Klima, Kocur, Eliot, Darren Veitch, and John Chabot – became forevermore associated with the scandal, the words “Goose Loonies” stitched permanently onto their jerseys like damning scarlet letters. The proverbial last straw broken, Red Wings then-coach Jacques DeMers stood shamefacedly at a podium in front of news cameras back at Joe Louis Arena and issued a heartfelt public apology to Detroit fans, calling the incident his “biggest disappointment since coming to Detroit.” Fighting back tears, DeMers apologized profusely, looking like a broken man. Captain Steve Yzerman later called it a “black cloud on the season”.

DeMers’ public apology, while dramatic, belied more volatile currents running through Detroit’s front offices. Behind closed curtains, Detroit’s management team discussed rehab facilities and treatment options for Probert while debating the termination of some of the other perpetrators’ contracts. The fault lines beneath Hockeytown were shifting. The turn of the decade fast-approaching, Detroit’s brain trust wanted to put an end to the “Dead Wings” era, for good.

Twenty-four years later, while vacationing in Ontario with some of the guys I grew up with, I read Probert’s tongue-in-cheek version of the Goose Loonies incident in his autobiography, Tough Guy: My Life on the Edge, over some breakfast beers. It was springtime, and we were visiting my lifelong friend Jim Racine’s schoolhouse cottage on Lake Huron for Game 4 of the OHL Championship in London, Ontario. The corn stalks planted in rows behind the schoolhouse had barely peaked out of the dormant earth, the North country air still crisp as morning dawned.

Hungover and jittery – unable to sleep – I retrieved my copy of Tough Guy from my duffel bag and tried not to wake my buddies as I snuck a handful of beer bottles out of the refrigerator. Although I drank in the morning all the time with my college buddies back in Ann Arbor, these were the guys I grew up with, and they were much less further gone than I was at the time. As the eldest of our friend group, a role model to those guys, I didn’t want them to catch me drinking so early in the morning.

The wood floorboards creeky in the morning chill, I slipped out of the front door, crept around back through the cool shadows of birch trees, found a chair on the deck, facing the cornstalk horizon, then uncapped my first beer bottle. Soggy playing cards, beer bottle caps, and various cans and bottles littered the glass table, relics of a debaucherous night. We had gone pretty hard the previous night – cracked our first beers in the car before we even pulled in – and, in the pale light of sunrise, I felt nostalgic for childhood summers at the school house for the first time since our arrival.

From 1898 through 1969 the property served as a school and boarding house in Hay Township, Ontario. The Racine’s grandfather, who died before I was born, bought it shortly after it closed publicly. He and Mrs. Ewasek, his wife and a Dearborn school teacher herself, used it as a summer house for decades, and my family joined Mrs. Ewasek and the Racines there two or three times per summer for most of my childhood. From the Bluewater Highway, where red pines bent from waves and wind lined the eastern shores of Lake Huron, it was a short drive north past the beach town of Grand Bend in a bucolic town called Saint Joseph Township, on Black Bush Line. Factoring customs at the Blue Water Bridge in Port Huron, it was about a four hour drive from Livonia -- Westland.

Maintained in its original layout and decor, with the outdated schoolmaster rules still nailed to the walls, the interior of the schoolhouse resembled an historical site. On the main floor, the front end featured a dining room table and chairs, a china and liquor cabinet, a kitchen and a modern bathroom addition, while, in the back, chalkboards still lined the back wall and a wood stove heated the interior in colder weather. There was a separate mudroom entrance at the front where the rope to the school bell dangled temptingly; we rang it as frequently as we had as children, its magnificent gong-like chimes echoing into the Ontario days and nights – we must have annoyed the neighboring farm houses to no end.

A metal spiral staircase with wood steps led upstairs to an overhead wood-floor balcony lined with bookshelves that held old classics and elementary school readers. An open doorway from the balcony led to the sleeping quarters, which included  a schoolmaster’s bedroom and a separate, open sleeping room with three beds, some end tables, and an old billiards table that squeaked with the floorboards. A wood ladder in the main boarding room led up to a small loft area that looked out of the crow’s nest window above the school bell tower, where I preferred to sleep when it was not inhabited by bats or bees.

Despite many family vacations with the Rivards and the Racines, who were more like aunts, uncles, and cousins in practice and in spirit than close family friends – trips to Hilton Head, Disney World, and Virginia Beach, where Mr. Rivard was stationed at a naval base – the school house remained my favorite vacation spot throughout my adolescent years and into the young adult ones. A relic of a forgotten time, its sepia photographs and science artifacts told stories of long-lost Canadian yesteryears, while outside, the cornstalks swayed breezily and the adjacent creek meandered lazily, as if at a slower pace of life. A trip to the school house offered more than a mere escape in destination; it was an escape to the past.

Two summers prior, Bob Probert had suffered a massive sudden heart attack on his boat on Lake St. Clair while boating with his children and in-laws. He was pronounced dead later that afternoon at Windsor Regional Hospital. Unreleased toxicology reports indicated that Probert was using large quantities of OxyContin daily, and in that sense, the loss of one of hockey’s greatest tough guys devastated the hockey world, if it didn’t surprise them. Probert died just a couple chapters shy of finishing his autobiography, and Helene St. James, a local hockey columnist who co-wrote the book, ironically had to ghost write the final pages of the book. Only two years had passed since his death, and the wound of his passing was reopened as I voraciously consumed his roller coaster of a life story.

As I discovered in the pages of that book and in subsequent research, the Goose Loonies incident was only the beginning of the downward spiral for Probert and others present at Goose Loonies that fateful night. In Tough Guy, Probert downplays his own role in the affair, then channels Jeff Spicoli in recalling the summer that followed: “after the Goose Loonies incident, the team was telling me I had to go into rehab again. I told them, ‘No way. I just got a boat and a new car and I’ve been in rehab three summers in a row!’” Just as nonchalantly he then describes how he and buddy Petr Klima began using cocaine that offseason. “In September 1988, Petr Klima and I got suspended. I’d been sent down to Adirondack and fined $200 a couple days before because we had missed a team bus and a flight from Chicago to Detroit for a game. Petr and I were at my house the night before, and we were supposed to report the next day by 11 A.M. We stayed up late, so we called up and postponed our flight. It was time to leave for the second one, but we postponed it again. We headed out to catch the [third one], but got held up at the titty bar near the airport. We finally got on the last plane, but didn’t get in until about 12:30 A.M., so the team left us a message on our phones, saying, ‘Don’t bother staying. You’re suspended.’” According to the team’s account, both Klima and Probert skipped practice before missing their flight to Glen Falls, New York, where they were supposed to report to the Adirondack Red Wings. At any rate, Probert soon landed back in rehab. Amidst pressure from the Red Wings, he entered treatment for the fourth time in October 1988.

The Goose Loonies incident must have seemed like small potatoes to him indeed when he was arrested a few months later, in March 1989, for attempting to smuggle more than fourteen grams of coke across the Windsor-Detroit border. Probert faced serious felony charges. To his credit, he served his time in federal prison and would find his way back onto the ice for Detroit -- later finding a successful career with the Chicago Black Hawks -- but his personal demons would forever be linked to his name, fairly or unfairly. It was hard not to speculate that his early demise was somehow loosely connected to that fateful night at Goose Loonies in 1988.

Petr Klima also struggled with alcohol after the Goose Loonies incident -- even in the absence of his sidekick. While Probert was at the Betty Ford Center in October of 1988, Royal Oak police arrested Klima for drunk driving after he backed his car into a parked vehicle outside of The Jukebox, a Royal Oak bar, a violation of his probation terms for a previous drunk driving violation. In late May of the following spring -- not to be outdone by Probert’s March cocaine bust -- Klima was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol again -- for the third time in two years, this time in Bloomfield Hills, and this time for the last time with Detroit; the Wings dealt him to Edmonton in a six-player deal later that summer. Between Edmonton, the minors, and several other NHL franchises, Klima would bounce around from team to team throughout the remainder of his career, even winning a Stanley Cup in 1993 with the Oilers – perhaps fitting that he won there – but he never quite lived up to the hype he generated during his first three seasons in the league with Detroit.

Steve Chiasson, a longtime Red Wings defenseman, never got caught at Goose Loonies, but later admitted to having been present there. Chiasson struggled mightily with alcohol abuse, too. In August of 1989, a little over a year after the Goose Loonies incident, Oakland County deputies busted Chiasson for driving under the influence of alcohol in Waterford Township; his blood alcohol content was .13. He played in Detroit through the 1994 season, then played with Calgary, Hartford, and Carolina. Following elimination at the hands of the Boston Bruins in the 1999 Stanley Cup Playoffs, Chiasson joined several Hurricanes teammates for an impromptu end-of-season bash. He died later that night after rolling his pickup truck in suburban North Carolina, a single-car drunk driving wreck.

Laying the book on the glass, leaf-printed deck table -- folded text down -- I grabbed my beer and gazed out at the cornfield stretched out below the schoolhouse deck, feeling the strange buzz of a liquid breakfast. Rolled out across the shell-pink horizon was Canadian farmland as far as the eye could see, the fields glowing golden under the early morning sun, hawks circling the fields from high above, blackbirds watching from the telephone wires. Probert and Klima’s struggles with cocaine and booze captivated me. I was reading a lot of books about the dark side of alcohol at the time, memoirs of battles with the bottle, probably on some subconscious level knowing that my own toe to toe battle with the bottle was looming right around the bend.

But all that was still in the stars.