'Bo' Knows Hockey No. 23 Will rise to rafters as Habs honour a natural leader RED FISHER of the Gazette One-time Canadiens physician Douglas Kinnear tells this story about Bob Gainey, whose No. 23 will be raised to the Bell Centre rafters tonight. The Canadiens were facing the Quebec Nordiques in the 1983-84 playoffs, and during one of the games, Gainey tripped to the ice. A Nordiques player fell on him. "He took this hit and immediately came off the ice holding his shoulder," Dr. Kinnear recalled. "He came into our dressing room. I took one look and it was obvious he had a dislocation. Now there's a difference between a dislocation and a separation. With a separation, it's just rest and the player gets better. With a dislocation, you put your foot in the armpit and you pull like hell. With luck, it goes back in. "So here I was in Quebec City. 'Bo' is lying on the floor. I was lying beside him. And (Kinnear aide) Yvon Bélanger was there. The two of us are pulling ... and pulling ... and it didn't go back in. "I said to Bélanger: 'Let's get him to the hospital, give him some Valium, relax all the muscles ... get it back in,' but let's try it once more.' So, back we go, ... I put my foot in his armpit - and it went back in." The team returned to Montreal after the game. Gainey was sent home with some painkillers. The next morning, Kinnear met with his patient at the Forum. "Bo, you're out for the series," he told Gainey. "He sorta looked at me ... the quiet voice he's got, eh?" Kinnear recalled. "He said: 'Well, what would happen if I played?' "It'll pop out again," Kinnear said. "He said: 'Well ... you can put it back in again!' " Gainey played - and to this day Kinnear, who was with the Canadiens for more than three decades, puts him at the top of his list of players playing through pain. "Ah! To play 48 hours after suffering a complete dislocation? Holy smoke! Amazing!" the doctor said. How would Gainey, the general manager, describe Gainey, the player? "I was strong-willed," he said. "I was extremely difficult to play against. Determined to carry my part of the team's game to improve our chances to win the game. I enjoyed the harder parts of the games and the harder parts of the season." What he didn't say was that no player before him or since delivered those qualities game in, game out for the length of his 16 seasons with the team, which included 1,160 regular-season games - eight seasons as captain - and 182 playoff games, which brought home five Stanley Cups and the Conn Smythe Trophy in 1979. What Gainey also didn't say was that in 1978, his quality as a defensive player was responsible for the introduction of the Frank Selke J. Trophy. He won the trophy the first four seasons. "Bob could make a defensive play look spectacular," former linemate Steve Shutt said. "He was such a great skater. That was what made him; that was half of his game. "When we were up a goal in the third period ... it was like ... Bob's line (including current Canadiens associate coach Doug Jarvis and Jimmy Roberts) was going out on every second shift. Bob led by example. He would be hurt and he never complained ... never complained." "He wasn't what you'd call a goal-scorer, but he scored important goals," Peter Mahovlich added. "You wouldn't see Bob Gainey scoring two goals in a 7-1 game." Glen Sather was only with the Canadiens for one season, but that, he said, was more than enough time to see what Gainey was all about. "The impression that I got about Bob early was one that lasted throughout his career: hard-working, dedicated ... a serious, passionate hockey guy," Sather said. "The year I was there was the year Ken Dryden came back from his short retirement. The team was in a building process and Bob was a big part of that team. "Every place he's been he's been building and developing," Sather added. "He's focused. There isn't very much that really steers him off what he's trying to do. Once he gets an idea, he's gonna carry it out. That's why he was such a great checker. "People talk about his speed and his ability to check. I think it's because he had a single-minded intention to what he was going to get done when he played the game. That was to win the game, and part of his role was to check the best player on the other team. He did it like nobody else could. “He could do it legally," Sather continued. "He wasn't a guy that had to hook or hold or interfere. He just outworked the guy and paid attention to what had to get done. "It was his concentration that always got me." Said Gainey: "I enjoyed the physical contact of the game. There's lots of places for lots of good, rough physical play. I enjoyed it more when the game was important, like when you're playing head to head with one of your divisional rivals. "We see that every night in the playoffs, when a game is close, one-goal games for 20 or 25 minutes and with both teams really dedicated to winning the game and carrying out all the right assignments and responsibilities. I would relish those kind of situations. You had to be sure that you were not only not going to be the team that would crack, but that you'd be part of what would make the other team crack." Gainey was never short of opponents. Bryan Trottier was one. So was Vancouver's Stan Smyl. Others on most nights were members of No. 1 lines. "The first picture that comes into my mind is Lanny McDonald," Gainey said. "He was a gifted, powerful goal-scorer, but he also enjoyed the physical contact and would challenge the person who was playing against him in that way. He didn't try to go around when the opponent made it difficult for him. He went through. "We had two years where we had back-to-back playoff series against Toronto, in the 1970s, and I think throughout those two years, their team and our team were of the same calibre. I think that rather than me being able to participate in a way that would help us to win, it was more just staying steady, staying in the game, staying in the fight. "Lanny McDonald ... I saw a lot of him. He saw a lot of me." One of my favourite stories involving Gainey happened after the Canadiens eliminated the Nordiques the year he dislocated his shoulder. Now, they were in the conference final against a heavily favoured New York Islanders dynasty aiming for a fifth consecutive Stanley Cup. The Canadiens surprised everyone by winning the first two games, but the Islanders won the next three. The Canadiens were on Long Island for Game 6. After the team lunch, coach Jacques Lemaire stopped for a chat - and a request. "Would you talk to Perry Turnbull for me?" he asked. Turnbull had joined the Canadiens early that season in what was considered a blockbuster trade: Turnbull from St. Louis for Doug Wickenheiser, Gilbert Delorme and Greg Paslawski. Turnbull had scored 14 goals and notched eight assists in his 32 games with the Blues. The Habs needed offence, and Turnbull was their man. Alas, he slumped to six goals and seven assists in 40 games in Montreal. He was no better in the playoffs, with only one goal and two assists in the first two series. By then, Lemaire had seen enough. Turnbull was a healthy scratch for the first five games of the conference final. "Gainey has a very bad shoulder," Lemaire explained. "I don't think he can play. I'm going to have to dress Turnbull. Somebody has to talk to him." "Seems to me you should be the guy talking to him," Lemaire was told. "Sometimes, players will listen more to somebody who's been around a long time than he will to his coach," Lemaire said with a shrug. I tracked down Turnbull at the hotel's newsstand. "Perry, what's going on with you lately?" "What do you mean?" "Before you joined the Canadiens, you came into Montreal with St. Louis and scored two goals. You had two fights and won 'em both. Your team won the game 3-2. You were so far and away the best player on either team that night, it was no contest. Now, look at you; you haven't even been dressed for any of the games against the Islanders!" I thought my motivational speech was pretty good, until Turnbull snapped: "Geez, Red, I was crazy that night. It'll never happen again!" "I remember the story a little differently," Gainey said. "We had our usual morning skate. I really couldn't shoot the puck, but my legs were still fine and I said to Lemaire: 'I don't really think I should play. I don't think I can help you.' "I had dislocated my shoulder against the Nordiques. The Islanders were a good team. They weren't taking any prisoners," Gainey added. "They were going to play extremely straight up ... play hard. It might have been in Game 5 of the series I got hit by Trottier. I went into the boards in a way that I separated my shoulder. Our roster was pretty thin. We were getting depleted. We had won the first two games of the series, but now we were losing the series to them. They had flipped the momentum on us." Lemaire told Gainey: "We won't use you very much. If you can play, I think you should play. I think it would be good for the other players to have you in the lineup." Recalled Gainey: "We decided it was better to use a guy who can't play at his best than someone who won't play at his best. "We got beaten. Not big ... 2-1 or 3-2." (It was 4-1.) Gainey always has been a private person who picks his friends carefully and always has made it a point to do the same with words when he's not completely comfortable with people he doesn't know well. Nobody I know is more in command of what he says. Nobody was more in control of what he wanted to do as a player and later as the coach/GM with the Minnesota North Stars, positions he held when the team relocated to Dallas, where he won a Stanley Cup in 1999. And nobody is more in control in his current position as executive vice-president/GM of the Canadiens. "I can't separate myself from my history," Gainey said at the news conference announcing his signing in June 2003. "I was with some great teams in Montreal in the '70s and the '80s. Those of you with better memories will remember I was with some not-so-good teams in the '80s. But this is new. The city has changed since I left Montreal. The team has changed. I've changed. We're gonna have to get to know each other again. "We're going to take the younger players and we're going to improve them and we're going to make them better. We're going to push the players to do the things that need to be done to be a good team. It's about tomorrow. It's not about the 1970s , the 1980s or the 1950s!" In his best-seller The Game, the best hockey book ever written, Ken Dryden explains Gainey better than anyone else. "It is a great temptation to say too much about Bob Gainey," Dryden wrote. "It comes in part from a fear, guilt-edged in all of us, that Gainey, a 15-goal scorer in a league full of do-nothing 30-goal scorers, goes too often unrewarded. But mostly it is admiration. "If there is such a thing as a 'player's player,' it would be Gainey. A phrase often heard and rarely explained, it is seldom applied to the best player of a sport, as Gainey is not, for performance is only a part of it. Instead, the phrase is for someone who has the personal and playing qualities that others wish they had, basic, unalterable qualities - dependability, discipline, hard work, courage - the roots of every team. "To them, Gainey adds a timely, insistent passion, an enormous will to win, and a powerful, punishing playing style, secure and manly, without the strut of machismo. "If I could be a forward," Dryden wrote, "I would want to be Bob Gainey." Tonight's sweater-retirement ceremony honouring Gainey begins at 6 p.m. Doors to the Bell Centre will open at 5 p.m. RDS and CJAD Radio-800 will have live coverage of the ceremony.
