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CJHL ALUMNUS STEVE YZERMAN ENTERS HALL OF FAME

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

CJHL ALUMNUS STEVE YZERMAN ENTERS HALL OF FAME

The Captain: Steve Yzerman heads to the Hall of Fame...

The gusting winds of mid-autumn blew in British Columbia as Ron Yzerman packed two sons and their hockey gear into the car and drove to a rink in Cranbrook.

The league that interested the father, in 1970, was for 6-year-olds. His older boy, Michael, had turned 6 his previous birthday. The younger, Stevie, was only 5. But his dad was determined he would play.

So was Stevie.

"Back then, you really didn't have much of a league until you were six, and my dad put me down for a year older than I was," Steve Yzerman recalled. "So, I played."

It was far from the last time he would be the youngest player on the ice, or one of the smallest.

"I was terrible," Yzerman said, bemused by the memory. "I couldn't skate. I just sort of knocked around, and walked around, or laid on the ice the whole game."

That would change.

Within a decade, fans in Ontario talked about his certain future, an NHL career. And even early into his tasks of resurrecting The Dead Things and transforming Detroit into Hockeytown, they talked about his place in the Hockey Hall of Fame.

Monday, the inevitable occurs: Steve Yzerman will be inducted into the Hall of Fame in Toronto.

Along the way, the influence of family, determination, courage and abiding humility shaped the man, the player, the champion and the legend.

"All I wanted, my whole life, was to be a hockey player," Yzerman said. "One of the ultimate and final honors of your career is to go into the Hall of Fame. There is nothing more I can do. I'm not going to play again, so this is the last opportunity I have as a player."

'Ahead of his age'

On the road to the pantheon, among Yzerman's early opportunities was playing with the Nepean Raiders of the Central Junior A Hockey League.

At 15, Yzerman was still a bit smaller than most boys his age, few of whom played with the older teenagers in junior A.

"He was always a year or two ahead of his age," said Darren Pang, the former NHL goaltender who played with Yzerman for the Raiders. "But even playing with older players, he was very even-keeled, extraordinarily mature and a very quiet leader.

"He blocked shots, won faceoffs and, when the game was on the line, he was the best player on the ice."

Like others who have known him across the years, Pang attributes Yzerman's celebrated character and the development of his talent to his parents.

"His mother, Jean, is as powerful a woman as you can find," Pang said. "She does so much for that family and does it in a quiet, discreet way. And Ron? I hung out there at the house a little bit. I didn't want to get into any trouble around Ron. He had that look about him. He was pretty firm."

A social worker in Canada, it was Ron Yzerman's transfer to Ottawa that resulted in the family moving east in the mid-1970s.

"He is very close and very respectful of his parents," said Brendan Shanahan, a friend later in life, with whom Yzerman won three Stanley Cups in Detroit. "They obviously had a big influence on his life and his personality. He carried that with him off the ice and on the ice, as well.

"His father is a quiet gentleman," Shanahan said. "But you can see a very intense competitor there, too."

His dad instilled "a passion for the game," Yzerman said. They constantly watched hockey, together, on television.

'Complete hockey player'

Yzerman recalls no year in his youth, let alone a moment, when he realized he would play in the NHL. Characteristically, he remembers the desire, extols his coaches and recalls that he took it all as it came, one step at a time.

"Each year, I just got a year older and moved up a division. It was a really, really high level of coaches that I played for that helped me out," he said, listing a few. "I compare them to NHL guys that I played for."

One of the considerable misimpressions about his career is that Scotty Bowman showed up in Detroit in 1993, cracked the whip, and Yzerman became "a complete hockey player." Pang remembers him blocking shots as a 13- and 14-year-old. And Dick Todd, Yzerman's coach with the Peterborough Petes, said Yzerman was an unselfish, two-way player then.

"I had a system of four lines playing all of the time, and a superstar like Steve probably didn't get as much ice time as he would on other teams," Todd said. "After he was drafted and it started going so well with the Red Wings, (senior vice president) Jimmy Devellano once said, 'Thank God for Dick Todd. We never would have gotten him with the fourth pick if he'd had more ice time.' "

When Devellano and the Red Wings drafted Yzerman in 1983, they had intended to pick Pat LaFontaine, who was raised in Michigan and went on to have a brilliant NHL career. But LaFontaine was taken right before the Wings picked in the first round.

To say it was serendipity is a monumental understatement.

"When the team is that bad, you don't anticipate a young man coming in and saving the franchise," said Ted Lindsay, the tough-as-nails, Hall of Fame forward who helped lead the Red Wings in their glory years of the 1950s. "And it took him two or three years until he got some more guys who knew which end of the stick to use. But, when they got those guys? It was just history, after that."

Rise of the Captain

In his early years, before the Dead Things came to life, Yzerman was frustrated, but unrelentingly earnest. His work ethic amid the disaster impressed other players on the team.

"We were losing by some bad scores that first year," said Gerard Gallant, who joined the Wings in 1984. "But you could see what kind of player he was going to be.

"He was very small. There wasn't much to him. And, he was just very shy."

Yzerman dropped in on the NHL entry draft in Montreal in the summer of 1986. When he approached the Red Wings table, coach Jacques Demers asked how his summer was going, thinking the 21-year-old probably was having a great time.

"He said, 'I've had a terrible summer,' " Demers recalled. "He said he was tired of losing, and he couldn't get used to it. And it was really affecting him. Right then and there, I knew he was going to be my captain."

He was the youngest captain in NHL history. He became the longest-serving.

"He took the captaincy," Demers said, "and he never looked back."

Soon, they were the Dead Things no more. Joe Louis Arena rocked. The famished hockey fans of Metro Detroit had a leader who would take them to a years-long celebration.

"I'll never forget my first day in this locker room," said Kris Draper, who arrived in 1993. "And over walked Steve Yzerman. And he came up, you know, and he said, 'Hey, Kris, welcome to Detroit and good luck tonight.'

"And he introduced himself as Steve Yzerman," Draper added, laughing at the thought that, by 1993, any kid from Canada, let alone an NHL player, would not know Yzerman.

"I just kind of remember watching everything that he did, sitting in the locker room with him and going out on the ice with him."

When Bowman arrived that year, Yzerman already had attained much, but not the ultimate prize: the Stanley Cup.

"He was one of the most ultra-competitive guys that I ever had play for me," said Bowman, who coached for three decades. "He never got upset, very much. But the odd time when the officials had done something that really affected a game, nobody could settle him down.

"We had too much offense, because you need both. But he was the reason that team got better in a hurry. I told him, winning the Cup was going to be costly to him in numbers, his own stats. But he really wanted to win. I would say the reason that team played the way it did was because he showed it how."

Olympic champion

When the Wings won the Stanley Cup in 1997, they ended a 42-year drought. The videos and photographs of Yzerman holding the 36-pound trophy aloft, his face infused with ecstasy, are bound to be displayed in the homes and workplaces of fans for another generation, maybe more.

In 2002, skating on a leg so ravaged by injury and pain that it was nearly useless, Yzerman won a gold medal for Canada -- the first in 50 years for the country that prides itself for inventing the game.

Three months later, amid rising pain, he won a third Stanley Cup.

"He just willed himself game in and game out," Draper said. "It was unbelievable. I just remember him getting knocked down and actually using his stick to get himself up."

Pang accompanied Yzerman at the Olympics and interviewed him at center ice after the Cup was won. "The pain that he was in was, from my point of view, indescribable," he said. "I have never seen one person not want to have attention on himself, or what he is going through. He'd always say, 'It's nothing. It's OK. It's not very much.' I think it was one of the most remarkable feats I have seen in sport."

Veteran announcer Budd Lynch had long before stopped introducing him at Joe Louis Arena as "Steve Yzerman." Lynch began swallowing much of the last two syllables, so that all that was fully heard was "Steve Yz..." as his voice trailed off. He need not have bothered finishing. Few could hear Lynch's words above the escalating ovations.

Waiting in the wings

As he enters the Hall of Fame, Yzerman has perhaps the toughest job in all of Canada, forming the Olympic hockey team for the country that birthed the game for the 2010 games in Vancouver. Nearly to a person, Canadians have watched his every move for three months now, and only a gold medal will suffice.

During a broadcast last Saturday of "After Hours," the CBC's postgame program, an announcer put it right on Yzerman, introducing him to fans from coast to coast as "the man about to be second-guessed more than anyone else in the free world, because that's how it is with hockey in this country."

Was he ready, Yzerman was asked?

"I definitely am," he said. "No, I'm really enjoying the process. And I've even second-guessed myself on every decision I've made, so far. So I'm one of -- like the rest of the Canadians."

It was vintage Yzerman: Incapable of cockiness, he instilled confidence, engaged in self-effacement and equated himself with Everyman, all in about 30 words.

As his career in hockey continues, the dénouement may amount to some disappointment for fans of the Wings. Yzerman has made clear he is intent on running his own team. And with the Wings brain trust in their early 50s, it seems against long odds the team will be the Red Wings.

Someday, perhaps sooner than most realize, the most storied U.S. franchise in the game may skate against a team run by a guy who authored a lot of the tales.

"He is not a figurehead in management in Detroit, and he is getting considerable experience now, with the Olympics," said Pang, who has discussed the situation with Yzerman. "It would have to be the right situation for Steve to move out of Detroit. But I think we all know he's ready to go."

 

GREGG KRUPA
The Detroit News