Adrian Dater
Marc Crawford’s biggest memory of the famous (or infamous, from an Avs perspective) March 26, 1997, Avalanche-Red Wings “Fight Night at the Joe”, a game at Detroit’s Joe Louis Arena that turned around both teams’ fortunes for the next couple of years, is what happened right after the game.
“I stormed right down the hall to the referees’ room. You’re not supposed to do that,” Crawford, with a chuckle, recalled from that game of 25 years ago today, during a phone call with Colorado Hockey Now Friday night. “I spotted Paul Devorski and started yelling at the top of my lungs.”
Devorski, a longtime NHL referee who worked in the days when there was just one ref on the ice, had just finished working a game that had nine fighting majors. The game took close to four hours to play, and was won in overtime by Detroit, 6-5, on a Darren McCarty goal on Patrick Roy.
In the first period, McCarty had exacted a nearly yearlong wait for bloody revenge on Avs winger Claude Lemieux, who had rearranged the face – literally – of Detroit’s Kris Draper with a hit from behind in Game 6 of the 1996 Western Conference finals. McCarty, was best friends with Draper and saw the hit happen right in front of him while sitting on the bench.
All I can remember thinking is ‘I’m about to watch a car crash in slow motion, and I can’t believe it’s happening,'” McCarty told me in my 2006 book on the Avs-Wing rivalry, Blood Feud: The Inside Story on Pro Sports’ Nastiest and Best Rivalry of its Era.”
That incident made an already growing rivalry go thermonuclear, with the Avs going on to win the Stanley Cup while Draper sipped food through a straw for weeks with his mouth wired shut.
On March 26, 1997, however, the Avs viewed the Wings as the same “pretty but not gritty” team that they not only had beaten in the playoffs a year before as heavy underdogs, but had beaten them in three previous regular-season meetings. The Avs were on their way to a Presidents’ Trophy as defending Stanley Cup champs, with the Wings way behind them in the Western Conference standings.
While the Avs had played the Wings three times to that point in the season, Lemieux missed the first two while recovering from abdominal surgery. In the third game, at McNichols Arena, the Wings didn’t do much of anything to Lemieux. But Detroit was waiting to get Lemieux back to Joe Louis Arena, where the day of the game Lemieux’s face appeared in a Wanted Poster graphic on the front page of the Detroit News sports section, next to a column titled “A Time for Revenge”. Lemieux had been getting death threats from presumed Wings fans in the days leading up to the game, so the Avs hired a bodyguard to watch over Lemieux, including being stationed outside his room at the Atheneum Hotel. The Avs expected a tough game, but didn’t fear the Wings physically.
McCarty had personally promised Draper he’d get Lemieux somehow, and at the 18:22 mark of the first period, he did. The whole thing started when Peter Forsberg and Igor Larionov got into a tussle that stopped play while they wrestled some on the ice. Eight combined Avs and Wings players were paired off into harmless holding sessions, but two others remained free of entanglement – Lemieux and McCarty.
McCarty saw his chance to jump Lemieux, and got him with a right-hand haymaker that immediately dropped him to the ice. As McCarty hit him a couple more times, Lemieux kneeled with his hands over his head. McCarty dragged him closer to the Red Wings bench, when he wailed on Lemieux a few more times, drawing blood.
Then, the goalies, Roy and Detroit’s Mike Vernon, fought at center ice, but not before Detroit’s Brendan Shanahan got a hit in on Roy on his way to meet Vernon (Roy suffered a shoulder injury from the hit that later required surgery and was probably a factor in some subpar play in the 1997 playoffs). Then, Adam Foote grabbed Shanahan and they began an epic fight. Chaos reigned, all to the roar of 20,000 bloodthirsty Wings fans.
McCarty had clearly – clearly – just instigated a fight, and under the rules at the time should have been kicked out of the game. But Devoski, whose back was turned at the start of the incident because he was busy trying to monitor the scrums elsewhere, gave McCarty just a double-minor for roughing.
McCarty had thrown numerous punches, which is the definition of fighting. But he got to stay in the game, and that proved to be crucial to the outcome.
Even though Lemieux returned to the game and assisted on a Valeri Kamensky goal that made it 5-3 near midway through the third, McCarty’s OT game-winner capped the comeback and the Wings celebrated as if they’d just won the Stanley Cup. In a way, they had. The Wings got their manhood back with the win and thumping of Lemieux. They drew internal strength as a team and went on to beat the Avs in the Western finals and then the Stanley Cup.
That’s why Crawford, whose pageboy looks belied a big temper and foul mouth, made a beeline for Devorski after the game.
“I called him every name in the book, that he (McCarty) never should have been in the game,” Crawford said. “He said something back to me that probably had a couple unkind words in it and walked away.
During the game, Crawford also screamed at Devorski after giving McCarty only the double-minor. “No fucking balls,” Crawford yelled at Devorski, while grabbing his crotch. “No fucking balls.”
On his way to Devoski’s office, Crawford rounded a corner to see Detroit’s Aaron Ward in street clothes as he was walking to the Wings’ dressing room. Crawford gave Ward a good hard elbow and the two engaged in an expletive-filled confrontation. Crawford would deny elbowing Ward, telling AM 950 The Fan host Dan Palomino the next day, “I wouldn’t know Aaron Ward from the equipment boy.”
Mike Keane after the game would call the Wings a bunch of “gutless homers.” The Blood Feud was on and would stay nasty and vicious and great for the next eight years or so.
Crawford told me Friday night that, a few years ago, Devorski sent him a card with a confession in it.
“He wrote, ‘I should have kicked McCarty out. You were right,'” said Crawford, now an associate coach with the Chicago Blackhawks.
Indeed, in my book on the rivalry, Devorski too said he should have kicked McCarty out.
The question I’ve always had for those on the teams then: If the Avs had lost the fights but still won that game, would Detroit’s momentum have greatly been curbed?
McCarty told me, for the book, that, yeah, the Wings had to win the game too, not just the fights, or else Colorado could well have still held a big psychological edge on them.
“I think some of their momentum would have been lost, yeah,” Crawford agreed. “But they were a different team than the one before. Getting Shanahan from Hartford was huge. Guys like Bob Rouse were great little additions, and Marty Lapointe was a good addition for them, making them tougher. “But I think if we held on to win the game, we would have come out of that game much better.”
I chatted with the 88-year-old living legend Bowman Friday as well. Bowman remains sharp as a tack, with easily the best recall/memory of anyone I’ve ever been around in sports.
“That certainly was a bizarre game as I look back on my nearly 2,500 career games coached,” Bowman told me. “McCarty scoring the goal was kind of icing on the cake, after being down 5-3. It helped bring closure to the issue for us. I don’t remember us circling that game or anything, but it was Colorado’s first game in Detroit since the incident, so maybe that was a factor.”
Lemieux and McCarty later patched things up, when Lemieux was a player with the Dallas Stars. They even held an autograph signing together. Crawford and Bowman would have a screaming match (well, with Crawford doing all the screaming) on the bench in the ensuing playoff series. But 25 years have soothed the hot memories.
“Man, I can’t believe it was that long ago,” Crawford said. “Where did the time go?”