MESSIER

· NHL career regular-season rankings: No.2 in games played, No.6 in goals, No.2 in assists, No.3 in points

· NHL career playoff rankings: No.1 in games played, No.2 in goals, No.2 in assists, No.2 in points

· Winner of Hart Trophy 1990, 92; Lester B. Pearson Award 90, 92; Conn Smythe Trophy 84

· Named to NHL First All-Star Team at left wing 1982, 83, at center 90, 92; Second All-Star Team at left wing 84. Played in 14 NHL All-Star Games (1982-84, 86, 88-92, 94, 96-98, 00) and both games of Rendez-Vous ’87: totals, 16 games, 6 goals, 13 assists, 19 points, 4 penalty minutes

· Captain, Edmonton 1988-89 through 90-91; New York Rangers 91-92 through 96-97 and 00-01 through 02-03; Vancouver 97-98 through 99-00

Introduction
Mark Messier is playing hockey on television as these words are being written, and despite the advancing years his presence on the ice seems entirely appropriate. He has just hit the goalpost with a wrist shot, and now he is a bit late getting to his own end on the backcheck, although the same thing happens all the time to just about every player, including those twenty years younger than he. A few minutes ago he won a face-off and worked over the opponent he had beaten on the draw with a subtle glove to the face and a wicked little slash across the upper arm, the kind of thing he has done forever. But that’s the thing about Messier -- it feels as if he has always been there, yet he still seems like someone who started in the league just five or ten years ago. Watching Messier in 2003 is not the same thing as watching, say, Gordie Howe in the early ’70s, when Howe was getting well into his forties and was still good but clearly old, or watching Stan Mikita at the end of the ’70s, when he had ceased to be a factor but was still taking turns more or less for old time’s sake. To see Messier play is not to be reminded of how old he is, but rather to think of him as you would any other current player who is a central component on his team. You could certainly argue that he has not done well in that central role for quite a while, given the performance of the Canucks and Rangers under his captaincy the last several years, but that merely proves the point that he still plays a central role: even if Messier is not the player he used to be, he is still very much an active force in 2003, more so even than when he turned pro in 1978.

Consider how vastly different hockey was in 1978, when the seventeen-year-old Messier joined the Indianapolis Racers of the World Hockey Association. The game was only eleven years removed from the ingrown, provincial days of the “Original Six,” only six years past Paul Henderson’s epochal goal in the Summit Series. Foreign players were still a novelty in the pro leagues, and they were almost exclusively Swedes or Finns. There was one Czechoslovak, no Russians -- or more properly, Soviets, because the USSR was still more than a decade from dissolution -- and, hardest of all to believe, only a handful of Americans. The game was only starting to open up to influences from outside Canada. Meanwhile, big-league hockey, having burst out of its little six-team cocoon, was still swarming across the continent: of the twenty-four clubs then operating in the NHL and WHA in 1978, thirteen were less than nine years old. There had been overexpansion, too much too fast, to be sure, but the WHA was entering its final season and the sport was beginning to settle into a stronger, more mature position.

The cities that got hockey teams during this supernova-like period of growth weren’t the same Sun Belt, suburban-sprawl, Tobacco Road destinations that would mark a later round of NHL overexpansion at the turn of the millennium. True, there were the Atlanta Flames and Birmingham Bulls -- but they were more than made up for by young teams in places that had long lived and breathed hockey: Vancouver, Buffalo, Quebec, Winnipeg, New England, and of course, Edmonton. Among fans, there was a feeling of excitement and optimism about the game, a sense that big-time hockey was finally coming home to all the places where it ought to be played. Within a couple of seasons the Atlanta team would move north to Calgary, a transfer that today seems as counter to the natural order as water flowing uphill.

On the ice, the game was rugged, still very much steeped in the wild era of the Broad Street Bullies and the film Slap Shot. Many of those who shared the ice with the young Messier wore muttonchops and playoff beards and tended to eschew helmets. The boards and ice were white and pure, uncluttered by advertisements. Cable television was in its infancy, there was no Internet, no all-sports radio or television stations; most fans got their news about the game through the newspapers and from whatever reports aired on conventional radio and TV. The teenaged Messier played in the Winnipeg Arena, beneath a huge portrait of the Queen, and in Le Colisée, where public address announcements were made exclusively in French. The next year, in the NHL, he would skate at the Forum, Maple Leaf Gardens, Boston Garden, Chicago Stadium, Memorial Auditorium, the St. Louis Arena, the Met Center, and a half-dozen other buildings now demolished or devoid of hockey. The tactics of the game were about to change, too, in large part because of Messier and his future teammates; it would be transformed into a wide-open, high-scoring rush to the net in which goalies, clad in skinny pads and some still wearing Jacques Plante-style facemasks, could count themselves lucky to stop nine shots out of ten while their teammates gamboled carefree at the other end of the ice.

This was the now-vanished world that Messier entered when he turned pro. But he was already a different type of player than those alongside whom he began playing. Intelligent, curious, eager for new experiences, he would eventually develop interests far beyond hockey, yet he would direct all of the mental and spiritual proceeds of those interests back into his own total involvement in the game. From his father he learned how to motivate and how to lead, and from his boyhood he thrived in the world of the team. When he began as a pro, he was cocky, raw, an undisciplined hellion eager to challenge the status quo by skipping junior hockey and getting right to the money and excitement of the big leagues, and eager, too, to challenge the players he opposed on the ice, often with his stick and his fists in that anything-goes era. He quickly became something of an adjunct to a young teammate who was already being recognized as the greatest player ever, but in that shadow he thrived and learned so that when the team became his, he was sophisticated, worldly, disciplined, and a strong enough leader to will his teammates to victory. He played for his nation and helped restore its self-respect in the only sport it really cared about, he moved to New York and became the toast of a town notoriously indifferent to hockey, he took a leading role in the struggle between the players’ union and management, and he became the paragon of sports leadership. He spent three years on the west coast, where he failed completely, and it seemed as if his legend had gotten too big, too exaggerated; then he returned to New York where, despite his inability to improve the team’s miserable fortunes, the level of respect directed toward him remained so high that he retained a central role, probably long after it should have been denied him. Yet at the same time, he was there to help lift the city’s spirits after an unspeakable act plunged it into its darkest hour. Where most players, even most great players, have careers traced in one or two arcs, Messier’s spans four, five, six.

Many people see Messier as a latter-day Gordie Howe, which arguably makes him this era’s Mr. Hockey, and indeed, the game itself has risen and fallen with him. When Messier was a young Edmonton Oiler, a Team Canada mainstay, and then a mature but still youthful New York Ranger, hockey was healthy, its fans were happy, and the future of the game looked bright indeed. It may be only coincidence, but in the years when Messier was no longer called on to play for his country, when he left the Rangers in a swirl of mutual ill will to go to Vancouver and then made misstep after misstep in trying to lead the Canucks, the game’s fortunes also seemed to decline. By the time he returned to finish out his career in the city he loved most, hockey was practically invisible in New York and in most of the rest of the United States, where it was a victim of almost universal apathy, while in Canada a huge percentage of fans were alienated from a league grown overlarge, overdiluted, and overpriced.

A quarter-century into Messier’s career, hockey may have its problems, but it has the legend of Messier, too. He has been cited as a role model by a generation of players, the number-one hockey hero for a group that ranges across borders and races and genders, from Eric Lindros to Mike Grier to Hayley Wickenheiser. He is unbelievably durable, having undergone surgery only once as one of the toughest players in the toughest sport. The force of his charisma is so undeniably strong that certain moments stand out vividly in the collective memory: skating down the ice with Gretzky and Lemieux in the titanic struggles against the Soviets in the Canada Cup; holding the Stanley Cup high over his head in the corner of the Northlands Coliseum, ecstatically displaying it to family and friends; his guarantee of victory in game six of the Rangers’ semifinal series against the Devils. At the same time his forcefulness has left distinctly different impressions wherever his career has taken him: in Edmonton, he’s the home-town bad-boy hero; in Vancouver he’s a bum; in New York he’s a god.
From the Hardcover edition.