'I'd probably bleed blue': Fogolin, Smyth honoured with inaugural Oilers HOF induction

EDMONTON — Teeth. 

When did choppers and hockey players become so entwined, when in reality no sport separates one from the other like hockey? 

When did hockey become about incisors and bicuspids, for some players, as much as goals and assists? Why does my memory of Bobby Clarke flash first to that toothless smile, before I picture anything he did back in ’72? 

Why do we remember Lee Fogolin, whose pain threshold was once compared to that of a cadaver, for the time he ripped a cap off a tooth with a hotel room curtain hook? Just because a trip to the dentist would have taken too much time. 

Or Ryan Smyth, for swallowing that Chris Pronger clearing shot during the Oilers’ ’06 run? They carefully picked his teeth off the ice, scraped away the blood, and back came Smytty to set up Shawn Horcoff’s winner in overtime. 

Smyth became fully indentured in Oilers lore that night, leaving his mark in bright red on the old Rexall Place ice. But as he enters the Edmonton Oilers Hall of Fame alongside the original Oiler Fogolin, he’ll tell you that maybe your eyes were fooling you back on May 10, 2006. 

“Cut me open,” Smyth said on Wednesday. “I’d probably bleed blue.” 

Chops. 

More than anything, that’s what both Fogolin and Smyth brought to the table. A generation apart, one was an expansion-era father figure to a daycare of Hall of Famers-to-be, while the other was a mucker extraordinaire who never met a goal crease he didn’t want to inhabit. 

“Just a small-town kid from Banff,” Smyth said of his Journey to the Oilers Hall of Fame, to be marked by a ceremony to be held before Thursday’s game against the New Jersey Devils. “I'm just in awe to be in the presence of these type of players that have paved the way for players like myself and players to come. Very special and humbling and honouring to be a part of.” 

From the ceilings at Rogers Place hang banners dedicated to hockey’s all-time greatest player (Wayne Gretzky), perhaps the best power forward the modern game has ever seen (Mark Messier), a defenceman in Paul Coffey who erased records that once belonged to Bobby Orr, and wingers such as Glenn Anderson and Jari Kurri — who have 11 Stanley rings between them. 

Below that, a Wall of Fame in the bowl at Rogers Place will bear Smyth’s and Fogolin’s names in stark contrast to the style the Dynasty Oilers played. 

The old Oilers scored like the ’72 Russians — tic-tac-toe and an open-net goal. 

When Smyth scored, sometimes the goalie was pushed deeper into the net than the puck. 

Smyth was relentless. A true gamer. He was Zach Hyman while Hyman was still in diapers, and would become known as Captain Canada for his copious time on the international stage, never one to shun springtime hockey just because his Oilers had been eliminated. 

“I think going into the hard areas would be one of my things that I did well. Going to the net,” said Smyth, who now lives in Nashville. “Early on in my career, I was watching guys like (Tomas) Holmstrom and other players — Dave Andreychuk — go to the net. And the puck would go to the net too, because the puck’s got to end up towards that net anyway. 

“So you might as well get your body there.” 

Then there was Fogolin, son of Original Six defenceman Lee Fogolin Sr.

Junior played as a Buffalo Sabre in that foggy 1975 Stanley Cup against the Flyers, and was snapped up by Glen Sather in the 1979 expansion draft when the Oilers, Winnipeg Jets, Quebec Nordiques and Hartford Whalers merged into the NHL from the World Hockey Association. He would share in Edmonton’s first two Stanley Cups, playing seven seasons as the defence partner and mentor to Edmonton’s first-ever draft pick and goal scorer, Kevin Lowe. 

“We were young guys having a bunch of fun, because we were having success on the ice,” Lowe recalled. “But I remember, from time to time, he'd pull me aside and say, ‘Hey, listen. It's great to have fun, but you’ve gotta remember you got a job to do.’ You know, when you get it from a guy like Lee Fogolin, it's like, ‘OK, I’ve got it.’” 

When Fogey got mad, you could see his opponents' body language change. As if their father was coming down the stairs and they’d broken a window. 

He was the stay-at-home glue guy who the fly-by-the-seats-of-their-pants Oilers so dearly required. Sather was smart enough to know that his young horses would need a few old hands like Fogolin, Blair McDonald, Stan Weir, “Cowboy” Bill Flett and goalie Ron Low. 

They would become the village that raised the children. 

“They didn’t push us down, or try to hold us back,” Messier said of those vets, in my book, The Battle of Alberta. “They accepted the fact we were an expansion team and we were going young. They understood what their jobs were. Not only did they play well, but they guided us along the way.” 

Today, Oilers history gets a little grittier. 

The banners may be for the greatest of the greats, the members of the team voted as the best hockey ever gave us. But the new Hall, it’s about players who perhaps had less to work with, yet squeezed more out of that talent than anyone knew was possible. 

“Wayne, Mark, all of us. We live and breathe the Oilers,” said Coffey. “You look at Ryan and Lee, you know what they've done and what they've meant to this organization. 

“I can't think of two more fitting guys to be the first two guys to be put in this Hall of Fame.”