The Battle of Alberta by Mark Spector

Author:Mark Spector [Spector, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7710-7807-1
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2015-10-20T04:00:00+00:00

9

Oiler Steve Smith’s Unforgettable Goal

“It was human error. I guess I’ve just got to live with it.”

“I got good wood on it,” Oiler Steve Smith said moments after that fateful Game 7 that he would wear like a tattoo for the rest of his playing days. “I thought the puck went in fast.”

Not an hour removed from what remains today the worst experience of his life, Smith was having a laugh at his own misfortune. Why not? A young defenceman’s first playoff run isn’t supposed to end that way, but on a team full of future Hall of Famers, Steve Smith—born on April 30, 1963, twenty-three years to the day before his errant breakout pass snapped Edmonton’s run of Stanley Cups—was never supposed to play a leading role in the Battle. He hadn’t ever dreamed that he might one day become a chapter in the book, and really, Smith never was the kind of guy whose game was meant to stand out.

Smith was the personification of why the Oilers and the Flames managed to stay on top for an entire decade: another mobile six-foot-three defenceman who could fight and play coming out of an Edmonton farm system that—as barren as it has been in the 2000s—simply belched talent in the early 1980s. He had arrived on the scene after a couple of years seasoning in the American League, a gangly, twenty-two-year-old defenceman who took nothing for granted. He wasn’t good enough to feel any entitlement as he walked into the dressing room of a team coming off back-to-back Stanley Cups in 1984 and 1985.

“I felt there was an opportunity, but my road to junior and the NHL wasn’t an easy one,” Smith said. “It wasn’t like I was a highly touted [prospect]. I was the last guy to make my junior team. I was never drafted in junior.”

Smith was born in Glasgow, Scotland. He was two and a half years old when he and his parents packed up and came over the pond, typically with not much more than what was on their backs and in their pockets. They settled in Cobourg, Ontario, a blue-collar town that lies an hour and a bit up the 401 from Toronto, along the shores of Lake Ontario.

The Smiths settled into some rich Ontario Hockey League country, with Oshawa, Peterborough, and Belleville each within an hour’s drive. But Rae Smith had to find work before his boy Steve —and the two brothers who would soon arrive —would play any hockey.

“My father came over, and on my birth certificate it still states that he was a ‘lorry driver.’ A lorry driver is a truck driver. Says it on the bottom of my British birth certificate,” Smith chuckles. Rae Smith only drove truck for a short while, though, before finding himself working at a juvenile home in Cobourg known as the Brookside Training School. “He was responsible for juvenile delinquent kids who needed counselling. It was a social-work type thing, for kids who had been in trouble with the law.

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