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    Unbreakable: 50 Goals in 39 Games: Wayne Gretzky and the Story of Hockey's Greatest Record
    Unbreakable: 50 Goals in 39 Games: Wayne Gretzky and the Story of Hockey's Greatest Record
    Unbreakable: 50 Goals in 39 Games: Wayne Gretzky and the Story of Hockey's Greatest Record
    Ebook324 pages4 hours

    Unbreakable: 50 Goals in 39 Games: Wayne Gretzky and the Story of Hockey's Greatest Record

    By Mike Brophy and Todd Denault

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    About this ebook

    In only his 3rd NHL season, Wayne Gretzky set the unbeatable NHL record - scoring 50 goals in just 39 games. A book for the devoted Gretzky fans, and books like 99 by Al Strachan.


    Unbreakable: 50 Goals in 39 Games, Wayne Gretzky and the Story of Hockey's Greatest Record     sets out to chronicle that unforgettable streak of 39 games in the fall of 1981, when a 20-year-old wunderkind from the town of Brantford, Ontario, captured the imagination of not just the hockey world but the world at large and emerged as both the game's biggest star and it's most recognizable face.
    Published on the 35th anniversary of this remarkable feat, the story of this unforgettable season is chronicled by renowned hockey authors Mike Brophy and Todd Denault. Based on new interviews with Wayne Gretzky and with those who surrounded him during his magical run at hockey's greatest record, Unbreakable: 50 Goals in 39 Games, Wayne Gretzky and the Story of Hockey's Greatest Record will detail on a game-by-game basis Gretzky's stellar run towards hockey immortality, through extensive research and the reminiscences of those who were there, including teammates, and players from opposing teams.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMcClelland & Stewart
    Release dateOct 18, 2016
    ISBN9780771017568
    Unbreakable: 50 Goals in 39 Games: Wayne Gretzky and the Story of Hockey's Greatest Record

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      Unbreakable - Mike Brophy

      Game 1 | October 7, 1981

      Vs. Colorado Rockies

      Northlands Coliseum, Edmonton, Alberta

      At practice, when the Edmonton Oilers held any sort of drill that involved skating, he usually finished, at best, in the middle of the pack. A few years before, during his first season in the NHL , amongst all the other Edmonton players, he tested last in upper-body strength. He was skinny, and when he skated his elbow waved in a way that many observers would have called awkward. When the team lined up for a shooting drill, his shot was one of the weakest, hardly powerful enough to bulge the twine at the back of the net.

      To the untrained hockey eye watching the Oilers practice, the 20-year-old wearing number 99 would not have resembled what he became when the game started: the greatest hockey player in the world. Wayne Gretzky.

      —

      The start of hockey season is a wonderful time of year, filled with so much promise. There are the contenders, pretenders, and defenders—the defenders being the team that won the Stanley Cup the year before.

      No matter which category it slots into, each team shares a common refrain: All we want to do is make the playoffs, and if we get in, you never know what can happen.

      If only it were that simple.

      At the outset of the 1981–82 season, the New York Islanders were the defenders, attempting to win the Stanley Cup for a third straight season. They were a dynasty in every sense, and they had it all—size, speed, experience, toughness, not to mention great goaltending. They were the model every other team tried to follow, led by superstars Denis Potvin, Bryan Trottier, and Mike Bossy—who, just the season before, in 1980–81, had scored his 50 goals in 50 games.

      In Edmonton, the young Oilers were still very much a work in progress. But in 1980–81 they had finished with a record of 29 wins, 35 losses, and 16 ties, scoring 328 goals while allowing 327. The Oilers took giant strides that season, upsetting the heavily favoured Montreal Canadiens in three straight games in the best-of-five preliminary round of the playoffs before succumbing to the Islanders in six games in the best-of-seven quarter-finals.

      Many years after Gretzky retired, he looked back fondly at the start of his third season in the NHL. The Oilers were, overall, a pretty young team to be entertaining the notion of winning the Cup, he admits, but they were having the time of their lives. Occasionally their giddiness got the better of them.

      In some instances, we did show our age, Gretzky said. You know, I think when we’d go to the Montreal Forum or Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto and we acted like we were 10 years old, it kind of got the better of us. We were like little kids. We were lucky we were all together, because outside of the locker room and outside of the group, we didn’t feel younger; we didn’t feel any inexperience. Part of that was to do with Sather and how he treated us, and the other part of it was the older guys that were on the team who led us; guys like Lee Fogolin and Doug Hicks who were consummate professionals. In a lot of ways they were extremely unselfish because they knew the importance of us growing as players and as people. We had the right mix and right group around the young guys who made us feel better about ourselves.

      Pumped for the 1981–82 season, Gretzky believed that what the Oilers had accomplished in the previous season—sweeping the Canadiens in Round One of the playoffs and extending the Islanders to six games in Round Two—spoke volumes about where they were as a team.

      I think in our minds, we felt we were ready, Gretzky said in a recent interview. "Even the year we lost to the Islanders in six games, in the locker room we felt we were as good as they were and we should beat them. It’s funny how the feeling of the group was, especially after we had gone into Montreal and won two games there. In Game 1 we played really well and caught them flat-footed, and in Game 2 Andy Moog stood on his head and stole the victory. When we came home for Game 3, the whole excitement for the fans really started to percolate and take off. Up to that time most of the fans would come to the game, and they were excited about the team because we were an exciting team to watch, but they didn’t really feel that we were ready to compete for the Stanley Cup. Consequently, it was a little quiet in our building throughout the years. But when we played Game 3, our first home game of the playoffs, things were taken to the next level.

      So going into the next season, we really believed we had a chance to compete for the Cup because the Islanders had won and we felt like we were very competitive against them through the entire series, even though we lost in six games.

      In his first two NHL seasons Gretzky had already amassed 106 goals and 195 assists for 301 points in 159 games. What could he possibly do for an encore?

      Time would tell.

      First up for Gretzky and the Oilers as the 1981–82 season kicked off were the ill-fated Colorado Rockies. Previously the Kansas City Scouts, the franchise transferred to Denver in 1976 and would eventually move to New Jersey in 1982. Over six seasons in Colorado, the team only made the playoffs once, in 1977–78, when they lost in the preliminary round to the Philadelphia Flyers in two straight games. Not much of a legacy.

      Bill MacMillan, who coached the Rockies in 1980–81, also held the title of general manager that year. The team had one legitimate star: captain Lanny McDonald, formerly of the Toronto Maple Leafs, who, soon after the start of the season, was handed his get-out-of-jail-free card in the form of a trade to the Calgary Flames.

      At the insistence of cantankerous Toronto Maple Leafs owner Harold Ballard, Leafs general manager Punch Imlach had banished Lanny McDonald to Colorado in December 1979. Imlach had wanted to trade captain Darryl Sittler, but a no-trade clause in his contract made that impossible—Sittler would have to give his okay to be moved. So, in an effort to diminish his captain’s resolve, Imlach traded Sittler’s closest friends on the team: McDonald and Dave Tiger Williams. Eventually Imlach wore Sittler down and found a way to get rid of him, too, eliminating the nucleus of what some believed could have been the first Maple Leafs team since 1967 with the potential to win the Stanley Cup.

      For McDonald, who was 28 and entering the prime of his career, playing with the Rockies was a nightmare. Our team normally got outshot, and unfortunately giving up 50 shots in a game was not a rare occurrence, either, McDonald recalled.

      The Rockies were mostly a bunch of journeymen, sure to be easy pickings for the rapidly developing Oilers. And yes, it was an easy game for Gretzky and company as they blasted the visitors from Colorado, 7–4.

      On a night when 21-year-old Walt Poddubny was making his NHL debut with the Oilers, it was not the Great One who led the charge for Edmonton, but 33-year-old veteran Garry Unger, who had joined the team after being traded the previous season by the Los Angeles Kings for a seventh-round pick in the 1981 draft. Earlier in his career, the mop-haired centre had been one of the flashiest scorers in the NHL.

      Edmonton defenceman Kevin Lowe, who was just 22 in 1981, recalled seeing a picture of a young Garry Unger wearing jeans and cowboy boots and standing beside a souped-up Corvette Stingray. He looked so cool, Lowe said. He was the guy we all wanted to be when we were young.

      The oldest player on the Oilers in 1981–82, Unger broke into the NHL with Toronto in 1967–68, but was promptly traded to the Detroit Red Wings in a blockbuster deal that also sent future Hockey Hall of Famer Frank Mahovlich, Peter Stemkowski, and the rights to defenceman Carl Brewer to Detroit in exchange for Norm Ullman, Floyd Smith, Paul Henderson, and Doug Barrie.

      In 1969–70, his second full season in the NHL, Unger scored a career-best 42 goals. Unger starred with the St. Louis Blues for more than eight seasons in the 1970s, but in the years leading up to Gretzky’s 50-in-39 season, he had bounced around the NHL, landing in Atlanta, Los Angeles, and finally Edmonton, where his role was as more of a journeyman checker than a scorer.

      Unger was a close friend of Oilers head coach and GM Glen Sather. The two had played together with the Blues in 1973–74 and had stayed in touch over the years.

      When I joined Edmonton, I felt like I was going home, said the Calgary, Alberta, native. My career had come full circle and I could play out my NHL career in front of my family and friends.

      Unger saw action in 13 games with the Oilers in 1980–81, but was goalless and minus-9. He didn’t register a single point in eight playoff games. Not exactly the kind of numbers that inspire confidence in an aging veteran. As of the first game of the 1981–82 season, he had not scored a goal in 43 games, dating back to January 20, 1981. In addition, the Oilers had left him unprotected in the preseason waiver draft, and he was not claimed by another

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