This cover story from The Hockey News' March 5, 1982 edition profiled eventual Hockey Hall of Famer Lanny McDonald in his first season as a member of the Calgary Flames.

Legendary NHLer Lanny McDonald recently had a health scare, and the hockey world is grateful to still have him. And in this cover story from The Hockey News’ March 5, 1982 edition (Vol. 35, Issue 22), writer Erik Duhatschek wrote an in-depth profile of McDonald in his first season as a Calgary Flame.

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After coming over to Calgary in a November 1981 trade with the Colorado Rockies, McDonald was an instant hit with Flames fans, posting 34 goals in 55 games in the 1981-82 campaign. One year later, he would go off for a career-high 66 goals and 98 points in 80 games, but McDonald stressed to Duhatschek that he wasn’t going to singlehandedly lead his new team to Stanley Cup glory.

“One guy doesn’t turn a team around,” McDonald said. “One guy can’t turn a team around in the first week he’s there either. You can play to the best of your ability and still not turn a team around. Hopefully I can help not only on the ice, but off the ice too. It’s got to be 21 guys in a dressing room and on the ice and that doesn’t happen the minute you’re traded.”

McDonald was a key cog in Calgary’s Cup-winning season of 1985-86, generating 11 goals and 18 points in 22 playoff games and winning the first King Clancy Memorial Trophy as the NHLer who best exemplifies leadership qualities and has made a significant humanitarian contribution to his community. But McDonald also was unafraid to speak up about the financial elements of the league, and as a vice-president of the NHL Players’ Association, he recognized the importance of having a voice in monetary matters.

“In hockey, the name players, the best players are active in the union because they’re the ones who really care about what happens in hockey and in the direction it’s taking,” McDonald told Duhatschek. “The more name players you have when you go to meet the owners, the better off your representation to them is. They’re a lot more satisfied with any agreement or proposal put before them by the Marcel Dionnes or the Bryan Trottiers than say, the 18th or 19th players on the roster.”

One of McDonald’s biggest labor concerns was the move to employ younger, cheaper talents. The numbers he quotes almost sound quaint by today’s NHL economics, but relatively speaking, McDonald made a strong point about the perils of going young simply to save a certain amount of money.

“Definitely, there are teams replacing older players with younger players for salary reasons,” McDonald said. “When you’ve got a 29 or 30-year-old player that may be making $150,000 or $175,000 and you’ve got an unproven junior making $70,000 or $80,000, a team is willing to say, let’s take a chance and go with the kid. Maybe we’ll struggle for a year or two, but for the next three or four years, they’re saving $100,000 a year on one player. If it happens to three or four players on a team, there’s half-a-million dollars they’ve saved.”

In his time as an NHL star, and in his post-playing-career days, McDonald has been a people person. And he did wonders when it came to humanizing pro athletes. His affable nature made him one of the most beloved players in league history, and he was always prepared to show fans and media what mattered most to him.

“People dwell too much on the hockey itself and what goes on in the dressing room,” McDonald said. “They get away from what a family means to a player. If you don’t have a strong relationship with your family, it takes a lot of the fun out of the game. I look forward to going home after practice to see my wife and two little girls as much as I do coming down to the dressing room because I enjoy both very much. I think the life away from the game is the part people forget about. It’s an important part of your life too.”

LANNY MCDONALD

Vol. 35, No. 22, March 5, 1982

By Erik Duhatschek

The myths of Lanny McDonald began on the day he arrived in Toronto. It was 1973. Wayne Gretzky was 12, the Edmonton Oilers were a gleam in Bill Hunter’s eye and the Maple Leafs had yet to be supplanted in the eyes of the country as Canada’s team.

McDonald, the Leafs’ first choice in the 1973 draft (fourth overall), fuelled all the stereotypes by admitting that, yes, he did grow up watching Toronto on television and he did dream about playing in Maple Leaf Gardens. What else could he say? In Hanna, Alta., the Leafs were on television every Saturday night.

A muscular 20-year-old, McDonald’s background suggested all the old cliches of hockey development — all-day shinny sessions on frozen ponds with Sears catalogues for shinpads, horse apples for pucks and rubber boots for goalposts. The myths continue.

McDonald is still thought of as a throwback to the old days, the kind of player who could rip the door off of a refrigerator; a player who would play for free, for the love of the game. McDonald is still perceived as the quiet kind of player who keeps his thoughts and opinions to himself, even if he’s badly misrepresented or used.

And when the Colorado Rockies traded McDonald to the Calgary Flames earlier this season, it was widely believed that McDonald had no qualms at all about leaving Denver and its hockey problems behind. And with McDonald on the team, speculation was that Calgary’s slow and disappointing start would now end and the team would head straight up the standings in hot pursuit of Edmonton.

McDonald would like to set the record straight:

• McDonald is not a charity. He does not play for free. He gets paid pretty well, but he would like to get paid better. Contract talks between his agent, Alan Eagleson, and a bevy of owners and general managers have been going on since he was first traded by Toronto to Colorado. His contract troubles, never settled because of the instability in the Rockies’ operation, accompanied him from Denver to Calgary. In Denver, it was to have been renegotiated, it almost did get renegotiated and then he got traded away. He’s still playing on the final contract he signed in Toronto.

“First of all, sure you love the game, but you wouldn’t play for nothing, you have to make your living at it,” McDonald says. “The two go hand in hand. But the day you lose the love of the game, it’s time to get out.”

• McDonald is outspoken. He is vice-president of the NHL’s Players Association and is intimately involved in the negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement. McDonald doesn’t like to talk about his troubles in Toronto, his years in Colorado and the not-so-happy situation he walked into in Calgary, but he will — if it serves the players or the team.

“In hockey, the name players, the best players are active in the union because they’re the ones who really care about what happens in hockey and in the direction it’s taking. The more name players you have when you go to meet the owners, the better off your representation to them is. They’re a lot more satisfied with any agreement or proposal put before them by the Marcel Dionnes or the Bryan Trottiers than say, the 18th or 19th players on the roster.”

• McDonald is a family man. As such, the trade, the second in three years, uprooted him and his family again. It won’t be until summer that things settle down. In the meantime, McDonald, his wife Ardell and his two young daughters live in a Calgary apartment when the Flames are at home and in their Denver house when the Flames are on the road.

“A lot of people don’t realize when you are traded that you’ve got to sell a house and buy a house here, it just doesn’t happen overnight. Unfortunately, it’s taken time and by the end of the season, we’ll be all set up here. We’re looking forward to it, but it isn’t all wine and roses at the time of the trade.”

• McDonald is not a savior. When he was traded to Calgary for Don Lever and Bob MacMillan, the Flames were six games under .500. Since then, the team has more or less hovered at that mark. They’re falling further and further behind Edmonton and are in a close race with Vancouver for second place in the Smythe Division.

“One guy doesn’t turn a team around,” McDonald says. “It’s a combination of things. One guy can’t turn a team around in the first week he’s there either. You can play to the best of your ability and still not turn a team around. Hopefully I can help not only on the ice, but off the ice too. It’s got to be 21 guys in a dressing room and on the ice and that doesn’t happen the minute you’re traded.”

When general manager Cliff Fletcher parted with the popular players, Lever and MacMillan, he explained the trade in a number of ways. The discussion always came back to one thing — McDonald’s “leadership” abilities, his being a “man of strong character”.

Specifically, the Flames needed help in three areas: In the dressing room, on the road and in the playoffs. Just what McDonald has done in the dressing room is hard to say; just what he will do in the playoffs is anybody’s guess. The statistics show, however, that Flames have improved their play away from the Corral since McDonald and Mel Bridgman have been added to the team.

Still, the team’s performance in the NHL’s Stiff Division is a puzzle to everyone here from management right on down to the fans. A year ago, the Flames had their best season ever — 92 points. They followed that by knocking both Philadelphia and Chicago out of the playoffs. That was the first time in 10 years that the Flames did anything in the post-season.

Now, with the ‘81-82 season winding down, the Flames are a dissension-riddled club on a perpetual roller coaster ride. And McDonald has seen it all before.

“The key is that when you’re winning on the ice, there’s not too many problems off the ice. When the team is up and down like we are right now, then a lot more problems surface. And that’s where we’re at right now.

“That final year in Toronto, we went through a similar situation, where we had turmoil day in and day out with [general manager] Punch Imlach causing a lot of problems in the dressing room. We weren’t playing consistent hockey because we had so many other problems to worry about.

“I can relate that situation to this situation because we’re going through basically the same things. We’ve got a lot of problems to get solved so we can put it all together. It’s nothing that a few wins back to back won’t help solve.”

Part of the problem, says McDonald, is the league’s new division structure. Because Edmonton got ahead so quickly, it left the remaining four teams chasing for second almost right from the start of the year.

Although the standings show differently, almost no one on the club believes that Vancouver, Los Angeles or Colorado are in the same class as the Flames. Hence, the entire season boils down to a showdown with the Oilers for the division title in the second round of the playoffs. The only problem with that way of thinking is that there’s no guarantee the Flames won’t revert to previous form and find themselves out of the running after the first round.

“We have to stay ahead of Vancouver, regardless of what Edmonton does or doesn’t do.” McDonald states flatly. “We have to get that first-round home-ice advantage. You have to go into the playoffs with some kind of advantage, it may as well be home ice.”

Now 29, with his 300th NHL goal behind him, the days of living and dying for the team are now in McDonald’s past. They ended when the Leafs dispatched him to Colorado in a move McDonald says was out of “vindictiveness” as much as anything.

It explains his concern with players’ issues a little. One in particular on the minds of the Players’ Association is the youth movement in the league today.

Says McDonald: “Definitely, there are teams replacing older players with younger players for salary reasons. When you’ve got a 29 or 30-year-old player that may be making $150,000 or $175,000 and you’ve got an unproven junior making $70,000 or $80,000, a team is willing to say, let’s take a chance and go with the kid. Maybe we’ll struggle for a year or two, but for the next three or four years, they’re saving $100,000 a year on one player. If it happens to three or four players on a team, there’s half-a-million dollars they’ve saved.”

Outside of hockey, McDonald’s life revolves around his family, something that he says rarely gets discussed when the subject of a player’s life and lifestyle is raised.

“People dwell too much on the hockey itself and what goes on in the dressing room. They get away from what a family means to a player. If you don’t have a strong relationship with your family, it takes a lot of the fun out of the game. I look forward to going home after practice to see my wife and two little girls as much as I do coming down to the dressing room because I enjoy both very much.

“I think the life away from the game is the part people forget about. It’s an important part of your life too.”

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