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 missed as a season
ticket holder during the 1987-88 Red Wings season. “It was the best
game of the season, though, because it was the night you were born,”
he used to tell me on game nights after a couple Labatt's. It was
always through sports that he told me he loved me.
On
the surface, it was an unremarkable regular season loss, the box
score and newspaper collections in the National Hockey League
archives indicating only that Hartford defeated the Red Wings 3-2 at
Joe Louis Arena that night in a late season throwaway game, Detroit
having already clinched the Norris Division. Russian defector and
rookie phenom Petr Klima scored a goal for the Wings, bad boy Bob
Probert notched an assist, and the ever-scrappy Joey Kocur amassed a
whopping seventeen penalty minutes with his fists alone.
What
that box score couldn’t suggest, however, was that underneath the
surface, the gears of fate were turning deep within the Motor City
hockey machine.
A
few weeks later, before I had even 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. A couple mornings after the Red Wings had been
eliminated from the 1988 Stanley Cup Playoffs by the Edmonton Oilers,
the sports world read the details of what would come to be known
infamously in Detroit as “The Goose Loonies Incident” in the
morning papers, the press hot with the details of a late night
drinking incident involving six Red Wings players. Under normal
circumstances it wouldn’t have merited news, but the six
perpetrators happened to pull this 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.
Three
of the ringleaders turned out to be none other than Petr Klima, Joe
Kocur, and Bob Probert – a was
recovering
alcoholic. The newspaper columnists
accused the three of them of organizing an all-night drinking party
at a downtown Edmonton bar 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 every now and then.
The
oft-troubled Probert must have lost control at some point that night;
I of all people should be sympathetic of an alcoholic relapse. 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 – 87-88
was Probert’s lone all star game appearance –
but even one drink can be the unraveling of a recovering alcoholic. A
Red Wings assistant coach found the hotel rooms of Klima, Kocur, and
Probert incredulously empty at curfew check, put on his jacket, and
went looking for the six missing players in the city lights of
downtown Edmonton.
Meanwhile
Probert and gang were still sucking down Molson’s in
the whiskey
hours of the Alberta night, undoubtedly under the hazy spell of Jack
Daniels and Canadian women. What a buzzkill it must have been for the
six of them, when, to their great infamy, the assistant coach showed
up at Goose Loonies, an
incredulous look
on his face as he imagined what head coach Jacques DeMers would have
to say about his discovery. Six Red Wings caught red-handed.
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 hero, 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 losses. But it was a loss, and a big one at that,
so the Goose Loonies Incident would haunt the Red Wings for some
time.
Like
Shoeless Joe Jackson and Chicago’s “Black Sox,” the six
perpetrators came to be condemned as the infamous “six” that
summer, the numeral six stitched permanently onto their jerseys like
damning scarlet letters. The proverbial last straw broken, the Red
Wings then-coach Jacques DeMers stood shame-facedly at a podium in
front of news cameras back at the Joe and issued a heartfelt public
apology to Detroit fans, calling the incident a “blemish on the
entire organization” and “a black cloud on the season”.
Fighting back tears, DeMers apologized profusely, looking like a
broken man.
DeMers’
public apology, while dramatic, masked much more volatile currents
running through Detroit’s front offices. There, hot-blooded
internal discussions raged behind closed curtains, Detroit’s
management team discussing rehab facilities for Probert and debating
the termination of some of the other perpetrators’ contracts. The
fault lines beneath Hockeytown were shifting, and some of its big
names from the eighties would crumble in the aftermath. The turn of
the decade fast-approaching, Detroit’s brain trust wanted to put an
end to the “Dead Wings” era, for good.
Years
later, while vacationing Up North in Ontario with some of the guys I
grew up with, I would read Probert’s own version of the Goose
Loonies incident in his autobiography, Tough
Guy: My Life on the Edge,
over a 24 ounce breakfast beer. It was springtime, the year 2012,
and the corn stalks planted in rows behind the schoolhouse we were
staying at had barely peaked out of the dormant earth.
Hungover
and jittery – unable to sleep – I retrieved my copy of Probert’s
book 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
previous summer Bob Probert had suffered a massive sudden heart
attack and died on his boat on Lake St. Clair in the waters between
Michigan and Ontario. The lake where he died was only a few dozen
miles of waterway south by Lake Huron from that Canadian schoolhouse
where I read his book. The loss of one of the great tough guys of all
time devastated the hockey community, if it didn’t surprise them.
Probert died just a couple chapters shy of finishing his
autobiography, and a local columnist ironically had to ghost write
the final pages of Probert’s autobiography. Only a year 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, the Goose Loonies incident
was only the beginning of a long battle with alcohol and drugs for
both Probert and Klima. Probert was shipped off on a flight to the
Betty Ford Center in Minnesota for substance abuse treatment
following the end of the ‘88
season,
but he was unable to maintain any long term sobriety throughout the
remainder of his playing career; the Goose Loonies incident must have
seemed like small potatoes to him the very next season,
when
United States customs officials found a hefty bag of cocaine in
Probert’s SUV at the Windsor border. To his credit, Probert served
his time in federal prison and would go on to find a successful
career with the Chicago Black Hawks, but his personal demons would
forever be linked to his name, fairly or unfairly. Probert had been
sober for some time at the time of his death, but it was hard not to
speculate that his early demise was somehow loosely connected to that
fateful night at Goose Loonies in 1988.
As
for Petr Klima, Detroit police found him slouched over the wheel of
his Chevy Corvette not long after the end of the ‘88 season, drunk
at the scene of a single car automobile wreck;
between Detroit, 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 Edmonton Oilers –
perhaps fitting that he won back in Edmonton – but he never quite
lived up to the hype he generated during his rookie year
with
the Red Wings.
I
looked up from the pages of my book and gazed out at the cornfield
stretched out below the schoolhouse deck, feeling the strange buzz of
a liquid breakfast. Stretched 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. Probert’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.
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