April 6, 2004
BY SHAWN WINDSOR
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
The artist had just lowered himself 18 stories through single-digit air on the backside of the skyscraper when the critic arrived.
"Hey," a man protested. "His face is too pretty."
Steve Yzerman had never looked so good. His chin was smooth and shaven. His lips weren't swollen. His forehead had no stitches. He had all his teeth.
It was all wrong, a construction worker building Compuware's headquarters across the street had come to say.
So Jason Coatney, who'd flown in from Portland, Ore., last winter to paint the downtown mural, hoisted himself up the Cadillac Tower to make Yzerman's face look more Detroit -- to add some scars.
"I've never seen a town go so nuts over a painting," said Coatney, who has worked on more than 100 murals with his partner, Art Pastusak.
Everyone had an opinion on how it should look, even Yzerman himself, who, Coatney said, had suggested the mural depict the entire Red Wings team. His response was predictable -- he'd become an icon in part for his penchant for deflection.
But the older he'd gotten, the more analytical he'd become. And the more he gauged the angles, the more he realized the 18-story image wasn't just his.
It was Detroit's.
"Kind of cool," he says now.
If he's driving past the mural, he looks up.
"But it's not like I park my car in front of it," he said, a grin reconfiguring that stoic mouth.
As he begins what could be his last playoff run Wednesday night, Yzerman -- one of Detroit's most beloved athletes ever -- remains a kind of mystery.
Over the years, he has become a silent repository for blue-collar grit and upper-class aspiration. He prefers to express himself on the ice, even as he leads hockey's most glamorous team, one that has won three Stanley Cups in the last seven years and is stocked with superstars more comfortable with the limelight than he is.
Said Jacques Demers, who selected Yzerman as his captain at age 21 and who coached him in 1986-90: "I don't think anyone will ever know who he really is."
Along with winning the Stanley Cups, Yzerman has endeared himself to Hockeytown by playing hurt and -- no matter the circumstance -- saying the right thing in public and in the locker room and, finally, by acting as if his accomplishments are no big deal.
"I've been around forever," he said last week.
He had just come off a leg weight machine after a practice at Joe Louis Arena. He wore a long-sleeve T-shirt and shorts that fit like bicycle pants. A line of stitches held together a gash beside his right eye.
"People are used to my presence," he continued, fidgeting with the handle of a hockey stick that was leaning against a locker-room wall. "I'm not a novelty."
This year's team, which finished the regular season Saturday with the league's best record, is a fluid mix of old and young, Hall of Fame talent and grinders, a familiar concoction to Red Wings fans. The team is led, still, by an undersized, intensely reticent playmaker with a knee radically reconstructed before last season.
Does he have a 22nd season in him?
"You never know. We win the Cup and . . ."
His voice trailed off.
He wants to play as long as he can. But a labor dispute and possible lockout loom next season as owners and players battle over money.
Yzerman will turn 39 before this year's Cup finals. He has played better as the season has progressed, surprising nearly everyone. He played in 75 of the 82 games, the center's highest total in four seasons.
His father and brother would like to see him return for another season, too. But they don't know, either.
"I don't even think Steve knows," said Chris Yzerman, his younger brother who lives in Ottawa.
The year before Yzerman arrived in Detroit, Joe Louis Arena was half-empty. The Wings had been struggling for more than a decade. Mike Ilitch, who purchased the team in 1982 for $8 million, lured fans from towns in southwestern Ontario with $2 tickets and bus rides with beer. He also gave away cars at games.
Two weeks ago, Red Wings jerseys filled a hockey arena in the Arizona desert. Michigan retirees and the unemployed who have moved to the Sunbelt and the Southwest now comprise a transplanted Hockeytown cult. When the team plays where it's warm, the Winged Wheel jerseys fill the stands. Yzerman is the face of the far-flung popularity.
At Glendale Arena, the suburban hockey home of the Phoenix Coyotes, Wings fans, many sporting Yzerman jerseys, arrived early. They pooled around the entrance that leads the visiting team onto the ice.
It was the first game of the team's last western swing of the season.
"There's Stevie," a group of young women squealed.
He was a few feet from the glass, waiting for a turn in a pre-game drill. He didn't turn around. The fans didn't begrudge him this. That he was so close was enough.
The Wings tied the Coyotes, 1-1. In the locker room, a few players talked to the beat reporters. Coach Dave Lewis gave his post-game briefing. Brendan Shanahan tossed out one-liners. Darren McCarty, who loves to chat, did.
Yzerman slipped out. During the ebb and flow of the season, he is often elusive. Reporters tend to seek him out only for the most newsworthy games.
When his brother Chris was hired by the Canadian Press to cover the Ottawa Senators, Yzerman told him, "Don't ask stupid questions, don't come in with a list written down, and don't be a jerk. If a guy is struggling, say it, but don't be a smart ass."
On this night, Wayne Gretzky, part owner of the Coyotes, was waiting in the tunnel outside the locker room.
In the late 1980s, when Yzerman began tearing up the National Hockey League with his flashy grace, scoring points at a stunning clip, Gretzky was always there with more -- goals, assists, Stanley Cups.
A one-sided rivalry developed as Yzerman looked to break out of Gretzky's shadow.
"It got be frustrating as hell after a while," said Chris Yzerman.
Not until the 2002 Winter Olympics, when Gretzky assembled the Canadian team and picked Yzerman, did a deep respect develop between them.
Skating in pain on a shredded knee, Yzerman helped Canada win its first gold medal in 50 years.
"Gretzky was blown away by what Yzerman brought to that Olympic team," said Jim Lites, the president of the Dallas Stars and former son-in-law to Ilitch and vice president of the Wings. "He told me he'd never seen anyone bring such force to a locker room."
Outside the visitors' locker room at Glendale, Yzerman chatted with Gretzky for a few minutes. Brett Hull was there, too. Eventually, Hull and Gretzky took off.
When Yzerman left moments later, a group of fans pressed against a barricade spotted him in a black suit. His hair was wet, his eyes tunneled ahead like laser beams.
"STEVIE!" shouted the fans, most of them kids.
He jerked to a stop, signed jerseys, programs and hats and said nothing. He looked at what he was signing. Then he disappeared into the warm desert night.
He was 18 and skinny when he arrived in Detroit as the fourth pick in the 1983 draft. Jimmy Devellano, the general manager, had wanted Pat LaFontaine, from Waterford, to help sell tickets. LaFontaine was chosen third by the New York Islanders -- "you know, apple pie and USA," Devellano said.
Yzerman came from Nepean, Ontario. He stood 5 feet 11 and weighed maybe 170 pounds. The plan was to send him back to junior hockey to bulk up. Five minutes into the first practice at training camp in Port Huron changed the plan.
"Oh, my God," Devellano realized, "he's our best player."
Yzerman scored 39 goals that season, narrowly was beaten by Buffalo's Tom Barrasso, a goalie, for rookie of the year, and helped the Wings make the playoffs for the first time in six years.
He looked like he was 12. He parted his hair down the middle. He was exceedingly shy and had a tendency to mumble on camera.
"My father told him not to mumble and to look up," Chris Yzerman said.
Steve Yzerman was fighting genetics. Ron Yzerman, Steve's father, also is reserved. He passed it to his sons.
"Dad was never a strict disciplinarian," Chris said. But Ron Yzerman and his wife, Jean, had rules for their four sons and daughter: Don't ruin the family name, don't crash the car, don't end up in jail, don't call attention to yourself.
Ron was a social worker who was promoted to work in Canada's national government. Jean quit her job as a nurse to raise the children. The family moved from British Columbia to a suburb of Ottawa when Yzerman was 10.
He had begun playing hockey at 5. By the time he got to Nepean, outside Ottawa, he dominated the boys league.
His brother said young Steve forged notes from his parents to skip school to get more ice time.
"He's not a saint," Chris Yzerman said, "but he's always kept his nose clean."
Steve Yzerman met Darren Pang when he was 14; Pang was 15. Pang, who later became an NHL goalie and then an ESPN color analyst, lived across from a grocery store parking lot in Nepean.
Theboys spent nights under the lights in the parking lot playing street hockey in tennis shoes, slapping a tennis ball around with sticks.
"He was competitive even then," Pang said. "He had the will to excel, something internal that you see with the great ones."
They played squash and tennis. They talked of making it to professional hockey. Now, they talk about family and daughters -- Yzerman has three, Isabella, 10, Maria, 5, and Sophia, 4. And they talk wine.
"He doesn't know just superficially about wine," Pang said. "He knows what grapes must be stored at what temperature."
He has toured wine country in Italy and France, displaying the same single-mindedness he does with everything else that grabs his attention -- his home office is stacked with books and magazines.
"He's always had an interest in life outside hockey," Pang said.
Pang was best man at Yzerman's wedding in 1989 -- he married Lisa Brennan, who went to high school with Pang. They rendezvous in the summers, at the Yzerman cottage on an inland lake north of Toronto.
"I try to relieve him of every bottle of wine up there," Pang said.
Yzerman's cottage once belonged to Maple Leafs legend Conn Smythe, whose name adorns the playoff most valuable player award, which Yzerman won in 1998.
When the Wings won the Stanley Cup in 2002, the team and many wives celebrated all night at a Royal Oak restaurant. Later, Pang and Yzerman ended up at Oakland Hills Country Club, where Yzerman is a member. The Cup was on the table as they ate breakfast.
"It was 5:30 in the morning, there was dew on the ground, we went to the grill overlooking the putting green," Pang remembered.
They watched the sunrise.
His on-ice gift is a kind of geometric clairvoyance, an ability to see angles unfold a fraction before everyone else. His teammates call him Silk.
The NHL came easy to Yzerman the first two years, according to Devellano. The team made the playoffs each season. Opponents began looking for weak spots and zeroed in on Yzerman's size.
Yzerman was pushed around. He struggled, suffering a broken collarbone midway through his third season. The team missed the playoffs.
"He had to learn how to train, how to take care of himself," said Wings head coach Dave Lewis, a defenseman who played with Yzerman in the mid-1980s. "He had a lot to learn."
But he needed to learn fast. At just 20, the Wings "were asking him to carry a franchise," Devellano said.
The Yzerman mythology began in his fourth season, when an affable French Canadian and former truck driver was hired as coach.
Jacques Demers got to camp in the fall and named Yzerman the captain. The team, with the help of draft picks, free agents and Demers' emotion, got back to the playoffs. Yzerman tore up the league the next seven years. But the team kept losing in the playoffs, and the pressure grew.
"He had kind of gotten a reputation inside that we were never going to win with him," Lites said. "He was seen as a little selfish, a little aloof from the rest of the team. Most of it was shyness."
Sergei Fedorov left Russia in the summer of 1990. He signed with the Wings and made an Yzerman-like splash his rookie year. After that season, management began thinking it could move Yzerman.
In late October 1991, the Wings thought they had Yzerman traded to Buffalo.
"I went to bed thinking he was gone," said Lites, then the vice president of the Wings.
The next morning, the deal was off. Buffalo got LaFontaine instead. The local boy spent the rest of his career fighting injuries and retired in 1998.
"Can you imagine? That trade would've been a disaster," Lites said, chuckling at the thought. "Sometimes, the best trades are the ones you don't make."
Not long before the almost-trade, Yzerman had agreed to help negotiate for the players' union and ended up across the table from Ilitch. When players voted to strike later that year, and Yzerman backed them, Ilitch felt betrayed.
The next few years the team filled the gaps around Yzerman. Expectations grew. Early-round losses were devastating. Yzerman said this was the toughest stretch of his career.
"He wouldn't talk. Wouldn't say a word," his brother Chris said. "Before he had his little girls, when they lost in the playoffs, he'd just disappear inside himself for a few weeks until he got over it. He took it so personally. He was embarrassed. I used to feel sorry for Lisa."
More trade rumors added to the uncertainty, reaching a crescendo in 1993 when Scotty Bowman arrived.
Two days after the game in Phoenix, Yzerman was standing in the corridor outside the visitors' dressing room at the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles. The Wings had just beaten the Kings, 4-2.
He had played well, getting three assists. The rebuilt knee, the pulled groin, the smashed teeth -- this season's major ailments -- were all feeling better and he was beginning to look scrappy on the ice. "I feel like I'm getting stronger," he told a handful of reporters, looking, as always, ready to escape.
Despite the necessary but unpleasant task of talking to reporters about himself, he approached it with the seriousness he does everything else. When movie star John Cusack sauntered over to get Yzerman's attention, tapping him on the shoulder, the hockey star kept answering questions. Cusack waited his turn.
After L.A., the Wings drove across town to play the Anaheim Mighty Ducks, Fedorov's new team, the next night.
In many ways, Fedorov, the first Wing to match Yzerman's raw talent, was the captain's biggest challenge. In the early days, he rode the young prodigy hard, prodding, cajoling and intimidating him to squeeze out all his talent. Eventually, Yzerman discovered manipulation.
During the 2002 Stanley Cup run, with Yzerman skating on a blown knee, he often pulled Fedorov aside and exaggerated his pain and thus, his limitations.
"He would tell Sergei, 'Look, man, I don't know what I can do tonight, you gotta be the man,' " teammate Darren McCarty said. "He's like a parental figure."
Ten minutes after an 8-6 loss to the Ducks, Fedorov, stripped of his jersey, still in his shorts, wearing flip-flops, approached the Wings dressing room.
"Where's Stevie?" he asked as he peered into the entrance.
Yzerman had long commanded the locker room. But it took him a while to grow into the leader he has become, to learn to motivate with encouragement at one moment, to unleash scathing sarcasm at another.
"Maybe a guy is playing really well, his head is getting big," explained Pang, and Yzerman "might walk by and say: 'Not doing an interview right now, eh?' Or maybe a player is struggling and he hasn't worked hard enough. And he leaves practice a little too early and Steve will say: 'Not staying on the ice for a few extra shots?' He has that rare ability to put people in their place."
They were similar to techniques Bowman had used on Yzerman. When the coaching icon took over the team, he demanded Yzerman and the team play tougher defense.
Bowman wanted to break Yzerman down and build him back in his image. He insisted that Yzerman lie down to block shots and chip pucks to safety and other small things that make a difference.
Bowman leaked rumors of trades -- mainly, to Ottawa.
"No one will ever know how serious Scotty was with the trade talk," Wings general manager Ken Holland said. But "if he got the leader, he gets the team."
Bowman says now Yzerman wasn't going to be traded, implying that Ilitch wouldn't allow it. Fans got wind of the trade talk during the summer of 1995. They gave Yzerman a long ovation at the home opener to send Bowman a message.
Even though the fans sided with Yzerman, he already had begun to become a more complete player. In 2000, he would win the Selke Trophy as hockey's best defensive forward.
"To his credit, he didn't want to leave," Holland said. "He changed his game."
And that, said Lites, was when "Yzerman became a monster" of a player, "feared by other general managers."
Said Bowman of Yzerman: "He was such a fierce competitor; he took too much responsibility. There was too much pressure on him in the early 1990s. He needed to take a step back."
The two came to respect each other. They needed each other. When Bowman retired, he'd won nine Stanley Cups as a coach. Yzerman had won three.
One day, Yzerman wants to rent an RV with Lisa and his daughters and follow the sunset. They will drive until they reach western Canada. They will stop in the outpost towns that shaped his youth, and the girls will size up part of their roots, where their daddy laced up skates.
It will not be a mission of self-discovery. Yzerman has long known who he is.
That understanding is "a gift," Ilitch said recently. The Wings' owner recognized it when Yzerman was only 18, and Ilitch had invited Yzerman to his house.
"We sat at the kitchen table for four hours," Ilitch recalled. "I was flabbergasted. He was knowledgeable about many things."
The owner and star have long since patched up any ill will over the labor strife and trade rumors. Winning does that.
Yzerman's home now is metro Detroit. He has lived here -- in Detroit, Grosse Pointe and Bloomfield Hills -- longer than in his native Canada. Three years ago, he made it official and became a U.S. citizen, at a middle school in Bloomfield Hills.
No one knew Yzerman would be among the 50 swearing in that day. When his name was called, the room fell silent.
The reaction was somewhat typical. Yzerman's fans generally do not intrude on his space, allowing him a surprisingly low-key life, whether picking up his daughters after school or taking Lisa to dinner and a movie. Some wish him luck or summon the temerity to ask for an autograph.
"It's a nice blend of anonymity and recognition," he explained, again citing his longevity as the principal reason.
Gordie Howe, the Wings' original "Mr. Hockey," was different. He became famous before the television-fueled celebrity culture. He was a back-slapper, a charismatic old-schooler who might rub elbows at a corner bar, the proletariat legend. Still, he wasn't comfortable during his four years as Red Wings captain in the early 1960s.
"That 'C' on the jersey looks like it weighs only a few ounces," Howe said. "It's a hell of a lot heavier than that."
Yzerman is more comfortable as captain than community icon. He's the longest serving captain in NHL history.
"He's a god," McCarty said. "If I'm out on the town, people come up and say: 'Hey Mac! How's it goin'?' They can relate. I'm one of them, only with a cool job. With him, it's awe."
He is aware of his status in the Detroit area, although sometimes he forgets.
"I have to remind myself," he said, "of the kind of impact I've had" with fans.
His legacy could endure decades more. When he does retire, he'd like to help run the team.
"Some day I'd like to put my ideas to the test," he said.
Last August, before the season started, Yzerman's maternal grandfather died. He joined his brothers and father in British Columbia for the funeral.
They decided to drive to Creston, the tiny town where their grandfather had lived. When they pulled up to the house, Yzerman jumped out. He walked around back to the garden, and back to the front to the plum tree, which he climbed as a boy.
"That glare disappeared," Chris Yzerman remembered. "He was so serene."
He pulled off a piece of fruit. Dusk settled. In the twilight, he stood in the grass he had roamed before anyone suggested he couldn't win the big one, before anyone had deified him. This week, he begins another run at the Cup, not to add to his legend but because that's what he does.
Contact SHAWN WINDSOR at 313-222-6487 or windsor@freepress.com.