If you’ve read my hockey blogs before, you know that my favorite players include, among others, Valeri Kharlamov, Marcel Dionne, Theo Fleury, Wayne Gretzky, Sergei Makarov, Vladimir Krutov, Martin St. Louis, Håkan Loob, and Mats Näslund.
With the exception of Fleury and St. Louis, they’re all older than me, and they’re all forwards. So, yes, I was born in the late 1960s and, like my idols, I was a speedy forward in my more active playing days.
Those were the guys who made hockey magic as far as I’m concerned. Those are the players that I followed a little more closely, and secretly and not-so-secretly rooted for. They were my role models, the ones that I looked up to.
Or – and this is the point – not looked up to.
The tallest one of those players is Wayne Gretzky, at six feet. The rest are what you would call “diminutive forwards,” as the saying goes. Yeah, they’re all small guys. And even Gretzky was at one point considered too small. Yet, he became the Great One.
Maybe it’s because my active idolizing period occurred in the 1970s and mid-1980s, but it seems to me there were more small stars to choose from then. These days, anybody under six feet is small, and 6 foot 2 inches is big, but not huge. (And let’s not get into how much the players weigh).
Hockey, like most other sports has become a big man’s game – in a recent Stockholm Open tennis match Joakim Johansson (6 foot 6 inches,198 centimeters) played Ivo Karlovic (6 foot 7 inches, 208 centimeters). It has always been one, in a way, hence the old adage, “if two players are equally good, take the bigger one.” But it seems to me that the small guys had a better chance to make it to the NHL in the 1980s than today.
Back in 1970, the average height in the NHL was 5 foot 11 inches (180 centimeters). Last season, it was 6 foot 1 inch (183 centimeters). The shortest NHL player ever was goaltender Roy Worters who managed to play almost 500 games in the league in the late 1920s and 1930s. He was 5 foot 3 inches, and nicknamed “Shrimp.”
He did OK, though, winning both the Hart Trophy as the league MVP and the Vezina as the best goalie.
Every once in a while, some small dude, like Martin St. Louis, or Roy Worters, breaks through somewhere in the cracks – some pun intended – and makes an impact, and gives hope to all those who are used to hearing how they’re too small, how “he’s OK, but…” to proving to others over and over again that they can play.
That speed can overcome size. That shortness equals shortness, nothing more.
Size brands us. That’s the first thing we see. How big someone is. And from that, we draw our conclusions, right or wrong.
A few years ago, I was in Karlstad, Sweden, working on a story about Zdeno Chara (6 foot 9 inches, 206 centimeters) who played there during the NHL lockout. I was walking with Martin, a friend of mine, a, well, “diminutive” photographer and a designer, from the club office to the rink where the team was practicing.
On our way there, we bumped into Håkan Loob, who was almost skipping and laughing, happy-go-lucky as he is.
“Hey, Risto! Nice to see somebody I can see eye to eye with. I’m not the shortest guy around!” he said, and grinned.
Even then, Loob, the 5-foot-9-inch forward with a wicked wrist shot, the first member of the Triple Gold Club (winner of the World Championship, Olympics and the Stanley Cup), Swedish champion, and the General Manager of the most successful hockey club presently in Sweden, made a joke about his own size.
He was one of us.
A shorty.
(This used to be one of the previously unpublished stories in Off The Post, but, well, isn’t anymore. Get the book, there’s still one previously unpublished piece in it!)