This piece was originally published in The Hockey News magazine, vol. 51, issue 37, on Jun 19, 1998
BY MICHAEL ULMER
There is grey hair where it was once jet black, no speed where there once was a little. Time has tinged every outward feature in 38-year-old Dale Hunter and left him untouched inside.
Five years removed from his infamous late hit on then-New York Islander Pierre Turgeon, Hunter is in the Stanley Cup final for the first time in 18 seasons.
The Washington Capitals’ captain has moved from villain to sympathetic character. Hunter’s nastiness, which spilled out so graphically in the Turgeon hit, has kept him in the game far longer than much more talented players. His game, once a potent cocktail of intimidation and skill, could be riveting and repellent, skillful and chilling. His shopworn features and six-word sentences are what the game was once about.
“Dale Hunter,” said teammate Bill Ranford, “is a true-blue Canadian hockey player.”
In person, Hunter is unerringly gentle natured. The gap between the on-ice persona and the off-ice demeanor is startling.
“People in the media are looking for flash. He doesn’t say much, he’s not interesting to the electronic media in particular,” said Washington coach Ron Wilson. “It’s like watching a Sutter brother get interviewed. But what Dale does off the ice, his work ethic, he hasn’t changed a bit.”
“I don’t think the passion changes as you get older,” Hunter said. “I think as you get older, you enjoy every minute more.”
Only three times has Hunter advanced as far as a division final (twice with the Quebec Nordiques, once in Washington) and each time his team was swept.
Once an upper echelon star, Hunter has no false pride about his standing. “I’m a role player,” he said without a trace of embarrassment."You do what you have to to keep playing.”
“He’s still relentless and 1 think he has shown in the past, he’ll do anything to win,” Wilson said, “good or bad.”
The bad happened in the 1993 playoffs when Hunter blind-sided Turgeon seconds after the Islanders’ star scored a series-clinching goal. The late hit left Turgeon with an injured shoulder. Hunter was hit with a 21-game suspension the following season and there are those who will argue Turgeon, coming off a career 132-point season, has never been the same player.
Hunter said the chance to hold the Stanley Cup, not a lasting repositioning of his image, made advancing to the final so memorable.
“That was in the past,” he said. “You know to win a Stanley Cup is every kid’s dream. You don’t dream of losing a Stanley Cup when you’re out in the yard. You dream of winning it.”
Hunter worked the fringes of the first Caps’ appearance in the final in the club’s 24-year history, holding down an effective fourth line with Chris Simon and Craig Berube. He played between six and 11 minutes a game, most spent bashing Buffalo Sabres’ defenders about in their own end. He had no goals and three assists in 17 games.
Playing as hard as he can has been Hunter’s hallmark since he broke in with Quebec in 1981. An incendiary competitor, he topped 200 penalty minutes for his first six years in the league and four times hit the 20-goal mark in that span.
After seven seasons in Quebec, Hunter was shipped by the Nordiques to Washington. It would have been a disastrous deal, but for the first-round draft choice shipped to Quebec that the Nordiques used to draft Joe Sakic in 1987.
Hunter is playing out another one-year contract, as he has the past couple of seasons, and clearly his days in the league are dwindling to a precious few. If Hunter’s ability to reach trouble has slowed, his taste for it has not.
“I believe the harder the game, the tougher the situation, the better he’s going to play,” Berube said. “It’s like when we work out. We’11 go ride the bike and he’ll say we’ll do 30 minutes, nice and easy. We get 10 minutes into it, he doesn’t like it. he pushes it so hard that when you’re done riding, you’re cooked. That’s Dale.”
