Wayne Gretzky's Ghost (13 page)

Last year, Clarke swung again to deliberately hurt someone, and, ironically, it was at an old friend, Rod Seiling of the Toronto Maple Leafs, who had been Clarke's roommate with Team Canada. During a game in Toronto, Clarke speared Seiling—considered to be the cruellest of all hockey tactics, as it involves the chance of puncturing a spleen or kidney with the blade of the hockey stick—and when Seiling went down, Clarke jumped on him and pounded Seiling's face bloody.

“That's probably the worst thing I've ever done in my career,” he says now. “I was just fired up and I was frustrated. I said the first guy that comes around I'm going to get, and it happened to be him. That was definitely my low point.”

And often, it is not his stick but his mouth that brings on the trouble. A year ago he called publicly for NHL president Clarence Campbell to step down, claiming he was too old to handle the job. Clarke was furious about Campbell's suspension of two of his teammates for an incident during a game; he claims now he spoke without thinking, and wrote to Campbell later to apologize. He also apologized to Rod Seiling by phone the day after the spearing episode, and in Philadelphia after the game he was again apologizing, this time for referring to the Soviets as “sons of bitches.”

“I didn't mean I hate them as individual players. I just hate all the junk that goes with it. On Friday they showed up a half-hour late for lunch. They also said our presents weren't good enough. Why should we give everything to them when they don't appreciate it anyway? They smile and they're friendly but really they're crapping all over us. It seems like we've got to always kiss the Russians' asses, but I don't believe in all that. They should show
us a little respect when they're here. When we were there, we did as they said.”

All this nastiness, of course, is in direct contrast to the image the Philadelphia Flyers would like you to believe in, as they so religiously do. During his seven seasons in the NHL, Clarke has become something of a travelling media event, one who comes wrapped in his own mythology. There were early stories that he suffered diabetes so badly he had to inject himself with insulin between periods. There was a story told of how, during a team meeting before the playoffs, a veteran Flyer had raised the question of fees being paid for work done around the city for various groups. Clarke had reportedly risen, thrown a $100 bill at the man and then asked those present if they could now get on with the serious business. And there are the many stories of how he is so often available for banquets and such, free of charge.

None of these stories is fully true. Clarke has spoken only once at a banquet, and then for a friend, and he considered himself such a failure at it that he will not likely ever try again. When he does give his time freely, it is to such events as celebrity golf tournaments, where he doesn't have to speak.

And yet, there are other sides to his image. When Flyer backup goaltender Bob Taylor and his wife lost a baby, Clarke was there with money to help, though Taylor hardly needed the money; and whenever any player has need of a car, one of Clarke's is sure to be available. Coach Fred Shero figures he gets about $1,000 a year from Clarke; this year he got a purebred Siberian husky. (“You treat us like dogs, so you might as well have one,” Clarke said when he handed over the present.)

There is also the matter of his salary. Clarke, unlike most other hockey players, has no agent—he conducts all his own business. When his first Flyers contract ran out, he agreed to another with owner Ed Snider (for a rumoured $120,000 a year) and they shook hands on it. Later, before Clarke had actually signed the
contract and was therefore under no legal obligation to the Flyers, the newly established Philadelphia Blazers of the World Hockey Association came along with a first offer of $1 million over five years. But Clarke honoured his handshake. Only recently, he renegotiated his contract himself, and it is now set up to pay him a certain amount over a great many years, virtually a lifetime contract.

So there are, obviously, honourable actions to consider in trying to understand Bobby Clarke. And to hear his teammates say it, you would think Clarke is nothing less than a man who fully deserves his disciples. “He's just the best captain around,” says Reggie Leach, Clarke's best friend from the days when they played junior hockey together. “Yes-men are a dime a dozen,” says Fred Shero of his team leader. “Clarke is the most valuable player I've ever seen in sports.”

With such devotion, Clarke can well afford to be a fighter, though he's hardly tough: “I'm like a rat. I'll fight when I'm trapped. But I can't fight to begin with. I don't like guys bouncing punches off my head, so I'll fight if I have to. I've had a few draws. If I can grab his arms and hold on, I'll call it a tie.”

He knows only too well he'll never lose badly, for Schultz, Kelly or some other Flyer will be there. “If he was at the bottom of a fight I'd jump in, even if it meant getting kicked out of the game,” says Leach. “I wouldn't think twice about it.”

And Clarke has used this moral support to prove his point until no further proof is needed. Though he has never shown any great natural talent, he has won the Hart Trophy twice as the league's most valuable player, is now a perennial all-star centre, and last year was named Canadian male athlete of the year as well as the 1975 winner of the Lou Marsh Trophy, given annually to Canada's outstanding athlete (when they phoned to inform him, Clarke hadn't a clue as to what the trophy was about).

Materially, he, his wife, Sandy (whom he began going with in Flin Flon when he was fifteen), and their two children are set for
life. He is building a new home near Philadelphia, drives a Mercedes free (as a gift from Flyer owner Snider), a half-ton truck (thanks to a promotion deal with a garage), and has endorsements that include Sherwood sticks, Bauer skates and a Philadelphia clothing store that advertises “Mr. Mean Becomes Mr. Clean—Bobby Clarke in Jack Lang Clothes.”

With that security, it's possible to understand why a player as celebrated as Clarke has already moved to pave his exit from hockey. Last year he went to his old Flin Flon junior coach, Pat Ginnell, who now owns the Victoria Cougars, another junior club, and he asked Ginnell if he would like him as a coach when the time comes. Right now, Clarke places that date around 1979, which would give him ten full seasons in the NHL. He may stay longer, he says, if he is still playing as well and still enjoying it. But assuming he does play only the three seasons more, they are likely to be seasons in which he is at the peak of his career.

He will leave then, or shortly after, because he has to. There will be no hanging around for Bobby Clarke. There will be no feeling sorry for him in his fading years. He was fed up with pity years ago.

Bobby Clarke retired as a Flyer in 1983–84, following a season in which he scored 17 goals and had 43 assists—a good enough season to justify another in most players' minds. But not in Clarke's. He left having scored 1,210 points in 1,144 games. He won the Hart Trophy three times as league MVP, the Selke as the league's top checker and two Stanley Cups. He served as Philadelphia's general manager for more than two decades but never won another Cup. He is today a senior vice-president with the franchise
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E
nrico Ferorelli's perfect moustache is twitching. Looking lost in soft suedes and telephoto lenses, he is pacing the corridor outside the Toronto Maple Leafs' dressing room, three fingers of his right hand anxiously rummaging through his kiss-curls. No one told him that they play only three periods in hockey, not four, and he was counting on finally catching Borje Salming in the fourth. But the game is over and he has no picture, and Enrico blows quickly through his nostrils:
What can go wrong next?

Sports Illustrated
wanted a Ferorelli portrait, not just any shot, and they flew in the freelance fashion photographer from New York to capture Salming as he'd never been caught before. First there was the morning practice: Salming refused to pose. Then there was Enrico's idea that they go to Salming's home: Salming refused. Salming simply wouldn't pose; he told Enrico to grab shots of him during the pre-game warm-up, so Enrico came and set up his lights, but every time he yelled out for Salming's attention, Salming deliberately turned away, and all too quickly the warm-up was over. Enrico tried during the game, tried his best, but never having seen a hockey game before, he kept setting up at the wrong end of the ice.

“I've never had to take this kind of crap,” Enrico was saying when he realized he wasn't about to be let into the dressing room afterwards, either. “
Not even from Sophia Loren!”

It is noon on Church Street: dark enough for headlights, overcast and pouring. It is September 22 and summer is officially due to end in four hours and forty-eight minutes, making this day a perfect rear end for a failed season. Inge Hammarstrom, the Leafs' other Swede, the collar of his ecru jacket drawn tight about his ears, emerges from the heat of the Maple Leaf open kitchen where he has downed two full courses of boiled chicken and has
grown increasingly impatient with this writer who asks more questions about Hammarstrom's friend, Borje Salming, than about Hammarstrom himself. He would like to get away, but for the moment the weather has forced him to stand sheltered in the doorway, and when he speaks, his voice, already soft as fall milkweed, is barely audible above the frying sound the tires make in the rain.

“I don't know,” Hammarstrom says. “I just can't explain it. Borje is different—more different than all the players I've ever known.”

On the other side of Church Street on another day, a dozen youngsters gather around the Church and Wood streets entrance to Maple Leaf Gardens: again it is noon. They are waiting for the end of hockey practice, standing in the special tryst where worshippers and their gods have met for all of the Gardens' forty-five years. They are the dreamers come to touch their dream, and with the Leafs it has so often been a dream of innocence, for the team has produced some remarkably humble stars: Joe Primeau, a man so reserved and modest they called him “Gentleman Joe”; Syl Apps, who never drank or smoked or swore, went to church regularly and was named Canada's Father of the Year in 1949; Red Kelly, who, when violently aroused, might let slip a “hang it.” There have been other Primeaus and Appses and Kellys, but today the kids are waiting for one Borje Salming, who can out-humble the best of them. But this latest edition of Maple Leaf innocence is not the same as the others. This one not only doesn't believe in God, but commits the far greater blasphemy of having never, ever dreamed of one day playing in the National Hockey League.

Yet this matters not to those who wait. Two girls in denim and Bay City Rollers tartan begin to squeal as they catch sight of Salming through the plate-glass doors. He is wearing new jeans and a wine-coloured Scandinavian sweater, snowflakes but no reindeer. The closer he gets to the door the more he resembles someone who has been drawn by a sixth-grader for a fall-fair competition: all straight
lines and sharply mitred joints, the face too long, the teeth too straight, the shoulders too wide, the hands too low. He opens the door and steps into a wild hedge of waving books and papers, and patiently—for Salming, who usually seems petrified of adulation—he signs about half and even waits while the two girls arrange Instamatic memories of their finest moment; they cuddle up to Salming's arms as he stands ramrod straight, stiff as an unpackaged Big Jim doll. “No more,” he says finally. “I have to go.” Across Church Street and into one of two Volvos that are provided free for his use (the other he keeps in Sweden) and then he is gone.

“I write autographs as long as I can,” he says, a day later. “I consider it a part of the job. But I don't know if I'd do anything else.”

Up above Church Street, in the Maple Leaf offices, the letters are stacked eight inches thick, letters that have come to Salming over the summer, when he wasn't even in the country. He has suddenly grown as popular as Leafs captain Darryl Sittler, perhaps more popular, and Gardens publicist Stan Obodiac says the two of them may well be more popular than any Leafs of the past. Certainly they are the best paid, with Salming making more than Sittler, more also than the $200,000 a year usually referred to in the newspapers—possibly the $250,000 a year one Gardens official mentions.

Once every couple of months Salming comes and picks up his mail and answers his letters himself with an autographed picture. This type of thing he can also do, for it doesn't require that he talk to anyone; letters are private, and in his own time. It's also a pressure he can cope with; some others, such as a bad game, often cause him to sit up until dawn, unable even to escape into sleep.

“He's like so many Swedes,” Hammarstrom says in the Maple Leaf open kitchen. “He gets impatient when people want his time. Even in Sweden he was known as a lazy person outside of the rink.”

Salming's first reaction to an interview request is to imitate a ten-year-old whose mother has just reminded him it's time to
leave for his piano lesson. He asks a member of the Gardens staff whether or not he'll be paid for the interview, which is often a European practice. But finally, and reluctantly, he does agree. Tuesday, however, he is simply too busy. The Canada Cup series has just finished and everyone wants his time. He agrees to Wednesday, refuses Wednesday, agrees to Thursday, can't be found Thursday, promises Friday, but can't make Friday because Margitta, his wife, has just gone into labour, makes Saturday definite, and that date he keeps.

Not that all the waiting was worth much. A lot of “I dunnos” and “maybes” later—around strangers he is still disturbingly insecure about his English—a session with Borje Salming adds up to little more than talk about the upcoming exhibition game against Chicago, when the two most impressive players of the Canada Cup tournament, Salming and Bobby Orr, will meet for the first time this season. Salming is often embarrassed by his popularity; Salming likes living in Toronto; Salming gets homesick around Christmas … Just about what you expected to hear.