From this chair, hanging a Glen Sather banner in the rafters of Rexall Place next to Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier et al marks a bit of a realization. Like, how did this take so long?
Did somebody forget who it was that built the National Hockey League’s last, great dynasty, winners of five Stanley Cups in a seven-year span?
From where Glen Sather sits, however, the concept that this might happen one day never really occurred to him.
“I was stunned,” he said of the phone call last summer that sought his permission for this week’s ceremonies in Edmonton. “I didn’t have any idea that any of this was going to happen. Putting the players’ names in the rafters, I can understand that. But to have mine there? It’s pretty shocking.”
But then he allowed himself to chew on the thought for a moment, that his name would be on a permanent banner atop Oilers home games from Friday night’s visit by the Rangers, to games taking place in the new, new arena 50 years from now.
“I suppose as they look at those names up in the rafters of the next building it will pass the heritage down, just like the (Montreal) Forum and (Madison Square) Garden. But for my name to be there, it’s kind of unusual. Al Arbour and Bill Torrey are the only other two guys (builders) I know about. It’s unusual. I’m very honoured.”
History records Wayne Gretzky as the most valuable member of the Edmonton Oilers organization to make the jump from the old World Hockey Association back in 1979, on to the merger roster of the Oilers as they joined the NHL. But what if Sather hadn’t been the head coach, and soon-to-be general manager?
What if, like so many expansion operations, they’d muddled along with four or five coaches and three or four GMs in the Oilers’ first 10 years?
Would head scout Barry Fraser have been there to secure five Hall of Fame players in his first three drafts? It was Sather who convinced then-owner Peter Pocklington to acquire Gretzky. Without Slats, would Gretzky have been like Sidney Crosby, a great player on a (thus far) ‘one-and-done’ team?
“I once told Glen,” Gretzky said. “For a six-goal scorer, he had tremendous hockey sense.”
The hockey axiom goes like this: the great players — Gretzky included — seldom make great head coaches. Well, that wasn’t an issue for Sather, who played 658 NHL games for six different NHL teams. He earned his nickname from where he spent most of his time — the slats of wood on the benches of the Original Twelve NHL rinks.
He came home to Edmonton in 1976 to join the WHA Oilers, the smartest move he made in his hockey life.
“The thing about the WHA is, it offered opportunities,” said former Oilers goalie Dave Dryden, in Ed Willes’ excellent book, The Rebel League: The Short and Unruly Life of the World Hockey Association. “My brother (Ken) played with Slats in Montreal, and he said, ‘He’s got a lot of confidence and he’s smart,’ and that was pretty accurate. He was a horse trader and he was good at picking up information by asking the right questions and talking to the right people. Once he got behind the bench, I really liked the way he handled things. He didn’t over-coach. He was clear and direct. Then, when we got Wayne, he made sure (Gretzky) was surrounded with the right guys who’d teach him the right things.”
Sather built a team in Edmonton based on creative hockey, having fun off the ice — but always remembering that the team, and winning, came before everything else.
“Glen cared very deeply about the players and we knew that he cared about us,” former Oilers captain Craig MacTavish said Wednesday. “Glen had a bit of a rule that we all tried to abide by, that if you ever got into any questionable situation, make sure he was the first guy you called. If you did that, you had an ally. If you didn’t do that and he found out about something, then you had a real enemy.”
Sather was a fatherly figure to that group. As Grant Fuhr told me in an interview for my book, The Battle of Alberta: “He gave us a lot of rope, so that we could learn on our own. But he also knew when to yank on the rope to reel us back in.
“So he let us grow, thinking it was our idea.”
“Mark (Messier), he was a young stallion,” Sather recalled, also in The Battle of Alberta. “Two things I did with Mark: One, I found out that he had a motorcycle. I told him to get rid of the motorcycle. He got rid of the motorcycle. The time before that, he was late for a plane, I sent him to Houston for four games. Look what he is today? All those guys, they all had some warts on them, but they all grew into tremendous players.”
Married to his wife Ann for 47 years, the kid with the brush cut out of High River, Alberta has always been about loyalty. Sather, now 72, hired good people, then he let them do their jobs. “I found that out very early in the whole process,” Sather said.
He seldom told his chief scout Fraser who to draft, because it was Fraser who was watching 230 junior games per season, not Sather. Like when Fraser had drafted goaltender Andy Moog in 1980 (in the seventh round), and the next year informed Sather that they’d be selecting a goalie named Grant Fuhr with Edmonton’s first round pick.
“Glen said, ‘Well, you know we have a pretty good goalie…?’” Fraser recalls. “And I said, ‘Well, now we’ve got two.’ That was about the extent of the conversation we had. He never bothered me in that respect at all.”
Sather was the motherboard of those Oilers teams. Everything ran through him, but he was smart enough to leave everyone below him the freedom to do their jobs. As such, they loved their boss, and loyally did their absolute best work for him.
And on the off days, he’d take his players to a shooting range, a duck-hunting trip, or a bar-hopping trip on snowmobiles.
“I wanted to let them experience some other things than playing hockey and being a celebrity,” reasoned Sather. “In order to do that they had to have some other activities in their life to give them some purpose, other than hanging around bars. There were lots of bars and I knew that would be part of it, but Alberta is a great place for the outdoors, and a lot of these guys had never experienced it.”
Then he thought for a moment.
“The ski-dooing? That might have been a little risky.”
