Team Canada had one game left to play at the 1991 World
Junior Championships, but I was sure that our goal medal
dreams were cooked. We'd been through an emotionally exhaust-
ing roller-coaster ride against Czechoslovakia the day before.
We'd been so close to winning, but we went off the rails in the
closing minutes to lose 6-5. Our fate was no longer in our own
hands. We needed Finland to beat or tie the Soviet Union in that
night's game to give us a shot at the gold in our final game
against the Soviets.
A lot of the guys on the team stayed at the hotel to watch the
Soviet-Finland matchup on TV, but my teammate Brad May and I
couldn't bear to watch and decided to go see a movie in down-
town Saskatoon. I find something comforting about the darkness
in a movie theater whenever I'm on the road. It's a chance to relax,
a chance to escape the public scrutiny. You don't see the stares in
the dark. I never like feeling as though I'm on display, but in this
situation the desire for a little anonymity was greater than usual. I
didn't even wear my Canadian team jacket out that night. No one
did. I was proud of who I was and who I represented, but we were
tired of the constant probing about what had gone wrong.
The expectations placed on us were immense. Canada had
never won gold medals in back-to-back years at the World Junior
Championships, but we were playing in our own country and it
was built up as though a Canadian victory would be automatic. If
we didn't win, then it would be viewed as if we'd let the whole
country down. As our head coach Dick Todd put it, "It's win and
be a hero or come second and be a bum."
As we sat in the theater, I was trying not to think about
hockey, but my mind kept wandering. I couldn't help but wonder
what was going on in the Finland-Soviet game. I knew that my
parents hadn't given up hope. The whole family had made the
trip to Saskatoon to cheer us on, and Carl had borrowed a
Finnish national team hockey sweater to wear that day for a bit
of good luck.
We had needed some outside help to win the world junior
title the year before, too, and we got it when Sweden scored a
goal with one second left to tie the Soviet Union on the last day.
That lifted us into the gold medal position after we knocked off
the Czechs 2-1 in a thriller. It seems like too much to hope for
two years in a row.
The movie did nothing to raise our spirits, but the ride back to
the hotel provided an unexpected boost. Shortly after we slid into
the back seat of the transport van, the score of the Soviet-Finland
game crackled over the CB radio.

"Game's over. The Soviets 5 ...Finland 5."
The Finns had come back to tie the Soviets with fifteen sec-
onds left. Brad and I looked at each other in amazement and
started pummeling each other on the back. Canada's gold medal
dream was still alive!

The hotel was buzzing when we got back; the team was
relieved to get another shot at accomplishing what we had set out
to do back at the first training camp in August. The media, most
of whom had buried us the day before, quickly resurfaced to get
the lowdown on what we thought of our second chance.
The players and coaches got together for a team meeting in
the hotel and the main message delivered was, "She ain't over till
she's over." Any celebration was premature; the reality was that
there remained a large obstacle ahead. The Soviets weren't just
going to roll over and die. Finland might have opened the door
for us, but we still had to step through it.

There's something indescribable about playing for your country. When you pull on that red-and-white sweater with the Maple Leaf emblazoned on it, you have great feeling of responsibility. It's a sense that you're not just representing yourself, you're representing your country, your family and friends, your league and your team, your school, the variety store you go to, the place where you buy your gas. It may sound corny to some people, but it's true. I buy my gas at the same spot all the time and I always went to the same variety store in Oshawa before games. They all know me, I know them. In some way, we're all united. When people see you on television at a big event like the World Junior Championships, they feel part of it. They're thinking, "He comes to my restaurant to eat." "I sell him gas." There's a lot of nationalism involved, a sense of pride. Canadians can be a pretty conservative bunch, but hockey gives us a chance to puff our chest out a bit.
Every time a Canadian team goes up against the Soviet Union, it's a battle for prestige in the world of hockey. It doesn't matter whether it takes place at the Olympics, Canada Cup, world juniors or the peewee level, the honor of Canada as a hockey nation is at stake. Nearly four million people across the country watched our final game against the Soviet Union -- it was the biggest audience ever watching The Sports Network. There were guys sitting in bars in places like Flin Flon, Manitoba, and Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, watching the games, thinking, "I'm a Canadian. Those are our boys out there."
The fact that the 1991 world juniors were held in Saskatoon made that feeling of nationalism that much stronger. It just swept you up. I guess it was captured to a degree on television, but it's really too bad that more people couldn't have experienced it. Everywhere you went wearing your national team jacket -- whether it was to buy a pair of cowboy boots or grab a burger -- people wanted to meet you and shake your hand. You couldn't get through the mall, because you meant so much to everyone.

I had a much better feeling about myself and my role with the team in Saskatoon than I'd had the year before at the 1990 world juniors in Finland. I'd been a little fish from a little pond going into a big ocean the first time around. I was sixteen years old, the youngest player in the tournament, and had been playing Tier II hockey with Compuware in Detroit. It was a really big step to suddenly be going up against the world's best. I was slotted in as a third-liner, a bumb-and-grinder, and I was never all that comfortable with the assignment.
Building a winning team is like doing a puzzle -- you have to find a way to put all the pieces together. When you do a puzzle, you start at the borders. The border pieces are critical. They're the glue that holds the whole thing together. Without solid border pieces in place, you're unsure how to put the rest of the pieces of the puzzle together. In my first year with the national junior team, I wasnt't a blue-chip guy from any of the major Canadian junior hockey leagues, so I wasn't considered a border piece. I was just stuck into the middle of the puzzle somehow, and I never totally felt part of it.
Mike Ricci, who played for the Peterborough Petes at the time, was one of the team's border pieces in Finland, and he really helped me out. I roomed mostly with Mike, and he gave me a lot of confidence. He's a very calm and down-to-earth guy. When he signed his NHL contract after getting drafted in the first round by Philadelphia in June of 1990, he wasn't interested in getting a fancy car. He'd had the same car since he was sixteen, and that was good enough for Mike. As teammates go, you can't say enough about guys like him. They make it to much easier for players who have no experience and aren't on the same confidence scale.
Dave Chyzowski was a different matter entirely. Chyzowski, who played for Kamploops in the Western Hockey League, liked to pull pranks on the younger guys. He thought it was a real riot to do things like cut my skate laces and put vaseline in Trevor Kidd's goalie mask. It seemed as if he was trying to make things as difficult as possible for me on the world junior team.
Chyzowski took another crack at getting me during the Memorial Cup later that year. He hit me from behind, knocking me headlong into the boards from about three feet out. That could have been my career right there, and I won't forget it. Another thing I won't forget was that the penalty call was only a twominute minor!
Finland was a new experience for a kid who had never ventured much further than Buffalo. We stayed out in some cabins in the woods in a friendly little village called Berumaki. The accommodations were great for the situation, but it was a bit like Rocky IV, where Rocky goes out into the winter wilderness to train for his big fight against the Russian heavyweight.
There wasn't much in the way of night life, which suited the coaches just fine. I'm not so sure that a bunch of teenagers away from home were as thrilled about it. They didn't have to worry about us chasing girls at night; the only thing you could chase out there was bears. The big thing at night was to have a bonfire. The menu, which consisted of a lot of reindeer stew, took a little getting used to. The guys were just salivating when we made our only trip to McDonald's. We had three different cashiers going at a furious clip. Whatever you couldn't eat there, you were taking back to the cabins.

On the ice, I gained more confidence as the tournament wore on. I was on a line with Steven Rice and Kent Manderville, and we were what you might call the designated hitters. "Ricer" is a great team player, a real mucker who's willing to do whatever it takes to win, and Manderville is exactly the same way. We're all big guys and we made sure our presence was felt -- in a very physical way. Our job was to be an intimidating force out there, to put scare into some of the stylish European players. We'd always go up against the big line from the other team, and our strategy was basically hit, hit, hit, hit. Ricer and I would come in behind the net and just demolish the guy. We'd almost be knocked out ourselves and we'd struggle to get back to the bench while they would still be lying on the ice. We managed to score our share of goals, though. I had four goals, which put me near the top of the team's list, and Ricer had a couple of goals. The coaches gave me more playing time as things progressed and I played better and better. I went from being a middle piece in the puzzle almost all the way to a border piece.
The whole tournament came down to our final game against the Czechoslovakians in a barn-like arena in the remote town of Turku. Not only did we have to win our game to claim the gold medal, but we needen Sweden to tie or defeat the Soviets in a game two hundred kilometres away in Helsinki. Not too many people liked our chances.
Well, we were doing our part in Turku with a 2-1 lead heading into the final minutes, courtesy of Dwayne Norris's secondperiod goal. Meanwhile, in Helsinki, the Swedes were endearing themselves to us forever with a stunning comeback. The Soviets were up by two goals with less than five minutes to play, but Sweden rallied to score two goals in four minutes, including the tying goal at 19:59 to make it 5-5.
The coaches got the news from Helsinki with about four minutes left in our game, but head coach Guy Charron decided it would be better if we didn't know. We soon found out, though. The Soviet-Sweden result came over the loudspeaker during a whistle with 2:46 left in the game, and the bench went wild. I was standing on the bench beside Steven Rice and he was so intensely focused on the game we were playing that he didn't even realize what was going on.

"Ricer, you know if we win this game, we're going to be gold medal champions."
Did you see that? Did you think that was offside?"
Ricer, are you listening to me? Gold medal champions!"
"I still think it was offside."

The guys were all pumped when they heard the score from Helsinki. There was a lot of backslapping on the bench, but there was still a job left to do, and the guys were now more psyched than ever to do it. I don't think the puck left the Czechoslovakian end much after that. We were now going for the GOLD, and we got it.
We went crazy when the buzzer sounded to end the game. It was such an incredible turn of events. We stood at the blue line and belted out "O Canada" from the bottom of our lungs -- forgive us if we were more than a little off-key.
It was a great win, but I couldn't escape the feeling that I could have contributed more to the team. I wasn't disappointed.I had really done more than my job, and it's when people do more than their jobs that you're successful. Everyone did more than their jobs on that team. But if I don't feel that I've played a key role in the team's success, then I don't feel as much a part of it.

After the experience in Finland, I was determined to be the first border piece laid down when they started putting together the puzzle for the national junior team that would play in Saskatoon. I knew Dick Todd, who was an assistant coach at the championships in Finland, would be leading the team in Saskatoon, so I used every available opportunity to make the proper impression on him. My first big chance came in the Ontario Hockey League playoffs that year when we squared off against Dick's team, the Peterborough Petes. We blew Peterborough away in four straight games. The following season, we rolled into Peterborough shortly before we left for the world juniors and we bombed the Petes 9-2. I was trying to get my Oshawa linemate Robbie Pearson on the team, too. Our line had a big night: I had three goals and two assists; Robbie scored another two and added three assists; and Matt Hoffman played a solid game, too. It was like sending a message: "Dick, remember this." So when we got to Saskatoon, one of the first things Dick told me was, "All right, you're our gunner." That was just what I wanted to hear. I was ready to crack open the barrel of my shutgun, put in my round and go for it. We were all ready to take aim, and we had a gold medal lined up in our sights.

We had a good nucleus returning from the team that won in Finland. Mike Craig, a teammate from our Memorial Cup winning team in Oshawa, now on loan from the Minnesota North Stars, was a border piece. Goaltender Trevor Kidd was another border piece, as were my old linemates from Finland, Steven Rice and Kent Manderville. There was a good feeling at our first training camp. We were thick as thieves. Dick Todd was showing a lot of faith in us, and we didn't want to let him down. I really enjoyed playing for Dick, because he's so competitive, even off the ice. We played volleyball between games in Saskatoon and, to avoid injuries, the rule was that you had to play sitting on your butt. You weren't allowed to stand. Meanwhile, Dick was cheating left and right, lifting his butt off the gym floor. He would be yelling at guys if they weren't digging for the balls hard enough. Dick wanted to win. Dick's team won. Dick and I had some pretty good running battles in the OHL. We're both so competitive that we'd say anything to rattle one another, do anything to win. He would be shouting, "You're nothing! You're nothing!" and I would be getting in some personal digs at him. I found out he used to work in a supermarket stocking shelves, so I'd yell back, "Hey Dick, go shelve some stock, buddy! What are you doing here, Dick?" It would go back and forth all game. But then you go to work together on the national junior team and you're one, a tight unit. Dick's old-fashioned in some respects, but it's great to play for him. He understands you. He treats you like a person. It's like playing for an uncle. Dick was a pretty protective uncle during the lead-up to the world juniors, and he had to be. There were a huge amount of media attention, and Dick and his assistant coaches, Alain Vigneault and Perry Pearn, did their best to keep us under wraps. We held our final training session in Kindersley, a small farming community southeast of Saskatoon. We were there to keep ourselves focused on the job at hand, and I think we were more than focused. We went to bed at 10:30 PM on New Year's Eve (my brother Brett had fun cutting me up about that). All the phone calls we received were monitered so that only family and close friends could get through, and only at certain times, and they also made sure we couldn't be bothered when we were trying to sleep. The people in Kindersley were just super; they would do any thing for you. We went to the mall and we asked if we could borrow a stereo system for our dressing room and they happily obliged. We often had the tunes blaring during the intermissions of our games.

The same community involvement was there in Saskatoon. There was a corps of volunteers who did everything possible to make our parents and brothers and sisters feel part of the event. It really helped to rally everyone behind the team. Everybody recognized that it was on the line, that everybody wanted to be at their best, that there was a lot of pressure and there was a lot we would have to overcome. There was a real sense of camaraderie and patriotism among the families. The efforts of Brad May's family were pretty special, though. Brad didn't see a lot of ice time in the tournament, but he was really the heart and soul of the team. He was told the night before the final game that he probably wasn't going to play. He was devastated, and so were his parents, but they were the ones who made the arrangements to get the huge Canadian flag that was splashed all over television screens across the nation. My brother Brett and Brad May's brother Darryl and stepfather Doug got up at the crack of dawn to go to the car dealership to borrow that flag for the final game against the Soviets, and then they went to a fire hall to get a megaphone. All the brothers and sisters really got into the spirit for the game. Many wore stetson hats and had their faces painted in the red and white of the Canadian flag. Brett, Robin and Darryl dressed up in white painter suits covered with the Maple Leaf and with the names of the players scrawled on their pant legs. Brad May and I had a good laugh when we caught a glimpse of them in the upper deck before the national anthem. The road to the gold medal showdown with the Soviets was certainly a rocky one. It took us a while to gel as a unit; we just weren't playing as a team at the start. We nearly got knocked off by United States in our second game but bounced back to escape with a 4-4 tie. Sweden also had us down after two periods before we finally put it into gear to beat them 7-4. We really got fired up before the third period in the game against Sweden. All the boys who were leaders got excited. We were all mad at each other, mad at ourselves, because we were a much better team than we were showing.

We knocked the stick rack over, broke a few sticks. We got the stare going. I have a lot of stares that I use to psych myself up and to get the team psyched. It's a look that shows, as soon as you walk in the room, that it's all business. Guys joke around and all that, but if you portray that image and mean it, then it rubs off on them later on. It's a look that says, "If I'm ready, you better be ready because I'm not wasting my time if you're not there." You're only as good as the other people on the ice, so you've got to make sure they're ready too. After we tossed a few things around in the dressing room and had our little discussion, Dick Todd came in and didn't have to say much. We had delivered the message to each other loud and clear, and we went out and won the game in the third period. I was playing on a line in the tournament with my former Oshawa Generals teammate Mike Craig and Pierre Sevigny, a forward from the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League. We were the snipers. I really got a charge out of Sevigny, whom we called "Pete." He was a real instigator on the ice. He'd go into the corner, bump and grind, and all of a sudden he would be lying on the ice grabbing his cheeks as if someone had stuck him in the face. He had a full face-mask on so there was no way that someone could get their stick under his chin-guard, but Pete drew penalties that way. He was a great guy to play with, although I must admit our communication wasn't the greatest. We would say, "Pete, Pete, we're going to play two guys in and one guy back." He'd say "Okay, okay." Craiger and I would go in after the puck and, whoosh, Pete would be right in there with us. We'd just go scrambling back. The media scrutiny throughout the tournament was really intense. At times, I thought they were tying to pull our team apart when we weren't doing well. You had to keep your cool. A lot of reporters were looking for any little bit of controversy. The press just ripped our goalie Trevor Kidd apart after we lost to Czechoslovakia and it looked like our gold medal hopes were gone, and the defense really came under fire too. They took their fair share of cracks at me, but I was used to it. I preferred that they use me as their target. A lot of guys were under some stress. I really felt sorry for Kidd, whom I had become good friends with during the world juniors the year before. "Kidder" is an innocent kind of guy. He's like most goalies; he's a different dude. He's in his own world, and that's something I could relate to. We got along great, because I think we're in sort of the same world. I couldn't just sit there and let Trevor take a beating like he did. They were trying to make him the scapegoat. One TV reporter after the Czech game asked Trevor, "What sort of a burden does this put on you personally?" I talked back to the reporters and I said, "I can't believe you guys are doing that to Trevor Kidd. I don't think that's fair, I think that's inappropriate." I said it into the cameras and I said it to everyone, but not one of the reporters used it because I was cutting them up professionally. Dick Todd also took a lot of heat. We both tried to act like sewer systems for all the garbage that was getting heaped on us. When you're a goalie, so much of your success of failure has to do with confidence. When you're hot, you're hot. And when you're not, you've got to get right back up again. When things aren't going so great, why cut someone apart who's position relies on confidence? If you want the country to win so badly, why not show a little compassion and support? We knew that the only chance we had of winning the tournament was to back each other all the way, and that's just what we were determined to do.

I think the pressure was to the greatest extent on Eric's shoulders. He was the kid who was supposed to be the leader on the team. He had played on the world junior team the year before and everyone expected him to guide Canada to its second World Junior Championship. The fact that it was in Canada only heightened things that much more. The media also really hyped the tournament as a head-to-head confrontation between Eric and Pavel Bure of the Soviet Union, since both were considered the top junior players in the world. I had played Junior B hockey with Eric in Toronto at St. Mike's when he was fifteen years old. I really marveled at the fact that he handled the early exposure he got there so well, especially since he was playing against and with other players as much as six years older. Yet when I looked back at the amount of exposure he got at the world junior tournament - which dwarfed anything he had at St. Mike's - he still handled himself in the same mature way. It's hard to believe he was seventeen at the time. He really epitomizes everything you would want in a leader. At times, he can go out and be a pure leader on the ice. He can change the flow of a game and in his team's favor just by making a good hit, taking a hit, making a good pass or scoring a big goal. In the same sense, he's a leader off the ice. He's good in the dressing room, he's good at motivating kids on the team. His presence really pulls people up; it makes them play to their potential because you realize you are playing with Eric Lindros. In all cases, he's going to do the best he can. If everybody else goes out and does that, you're obviously going to be successful. That's the whole aura behind him. During the world juniors, he would come up to me before a lot of game and say, "If I'm not in this game, yell at me or do something to annoy me to get me motivated." He always wanted to be in a situation where he was playing at his best. And if he wasn't playing at his best and was struggling, he always wanted someone to do something that would give him a spark to get him going. He knew he was an integral part of the team and there were a lot of expectations of him. He didn't want to let anybody down. He didn't want to let the team down, he didn't want to let himself down. There weren't many times - if any - when I had to say something to him, but it made me want to do better, too. If Eric Lindros is telling me to help make sure he's ready, then obviously he expects that of everybody. When we lost to the Czechs and it looked like it was all over, that was really hard to deal with, since all of Canada expected us to win the gold. I think it was even harder on certain individuals, Eric among them, because he was set up to be the fall guy if we lost. WE knew after the Czech game that we had no say whether or not we won the gold medal. We had to rely on somebody else to do us a favor - and, fortunately, Finland did just that. Suddenly, we had a second chance to do what we wanted to do. I think everyone on the team felt relieved, but I think, in the same breath, everyone knew the pressure was back on our shoulders.

There was a lot of uncertainty in the dressing room before the Soviet game. Everyone was trying to convince themselves that the pressure was on the Soviets. Guys were saying the Soviet Union could have won the gold medal last night and they didn't, so they're the ones who should be feeling all the heat. But that outlook changed the second we stepped on the ice before more than eleven thousand truly pumped-up fans at SaskPlace. Everybody was dressed up in red-and-white and waving Canadian flags. No one on the team really said anything, but we pretty much realized all of Canada was behind us and everyone still expected us to beat the Soviet Union and win the gold medal.
Both teams were tentative at the start of the game, because we were the ones who had been given the second chance and they were the ones who had blown their chance. I think both teams were concerned with what the other team was going to do rather than just going out and doing what they were supposed to do.
Pierre Sevigny gave our team a wake-up call five minutes into the game when he scored off a rebound. I had made a rush from our end and tried to stuff the puck past the Soviet goalie from the short side. He made the stop, but Pete was right on the spot to tap it in. I think it was Sevigny's goal that kicked in confidence. That goal put us on Cloud Nine. From Cloud Nine, we were ready to go through the solar system. But there was some tough going ahead before we could take off into orbit. Steven Rice scored to give us a 2-0 lead after the first period, but the Soviets fought back to tie the game early in the third. Just as it was in Finland a year before, one of the boys from the Rock came though for us in the clutch. John Slaney, a defenseman from St. John's, Newfoundland, took a shot from the blue line. It bounced off something and went into the Soviet net. "Yes! Whoa!" The crowd just exploded. The goal came just when we were starting to tire and they were taking it to us. We were now just over five minutes away from victory, but the job ahead was not an easy one - keeping the hard-charging Soviets off the scoreboard. I looked over my shoulder at Dick Todd to let him know our line was more than eager for the task.