Steve Yzerman is still puzzled that the question keeps coming: “Why?”
After more than two decades of pain and suffering, after all the broken bones and torn ligaments and surgeries and stitches, after all the headaches and heartache, why is he still sitting here now? Why, at 40 years old, with an ice pack on one knee and a sweat soaked T-shirt draped over his shoulders, is this married father of three school age girls still enduring the punishment of a profession meant for men half his age?
“Why?” he is asked. Why not just retire Stevie Y.?
“Because you’ve gotta try, that’s why” he says quietly, sitting on a locker room stool at Joe Louis Arena, a place that has been his office for virtually his entire adult life. “At least try, you know? And if you can’t do it, well, then you know. But you’ve got to at least try.”
So try, he will. After more than a year without hockey due to a protracted labor dispute the Red Wings are back on the ice this fall and so is Yzerman for his 22nd season and his NHL record 19th as team captain. “It’s pretty remarkable, when you think about it,” says Jimmy Devellano, the Wings’ senior vice president and the man responsible for drafting an 18 year old Yzerman back in 1983, plucking him from the Canadian junior hockey ranks. “You’re watching probably the last player who will ever do that, play 20 years with one team – in any sport. That says quite a lot.”
It says it all in a city like Detroit, one that’s fiercely passionate, and provincial, about its sports teams. Yet as recently as last spring, Yzerman wondered if there still would be room for him on the roster, as management was forced to slash the Detroit Red Wings’ league high payroll, from more than $75 million to barely half that – to fit under the NHL’s new salary cap.
“Without putting them in a difficult position and saying, “‘I absolutely want to come back; I want to play,’ I thought it was fairest to wait and see what the system was going to be and where I would fit into it,” says Yzerman, who eventually came to terms on a one year contract worth 1.25 million – perhaps as much as $2 million with performance bonuses.

“After that, my concern was, ‘Can I get myself in good enough shape to be an effective player?’…I mean, I’m not 30 years old anymore. At 40 years old, I’m kind of maxing out here.”
At that, he laughs. So does his current boss, Wings General Manager Ken Holland, who never had any doubts about whether Yzerman, a future Hall of Famer with three Stanley Cup championship rings, would return. “He loves the game too much,” says Holland, who came to work for the Wings – as a minor league goaltender – the very same day Yzerman did back in September 1983. “He loves the game, he loves to compete, he loves challenges. And I also think he knows that when you walk away, at least at his age, its forever.”

It seems like forever ago that they actually played hockey at Joe Louis Arena. The Wings, who opened the 2005-06 regular season on Oct. 5, went more than 16 months between games here. That’s an eternity for fans in this self-proclaimed “Hockeytown,” but especially considering the lingering prelockout image was such an ugly one: Yzerman writhing on the ice in shock after being struck squarely in the face by a deflected slap shot.
It was game 5 of the 2004 Western Conference semifinals against Calgary, and Yzerman, to the horror of everyone in the building, had to be helped off the ice with a towel covering his left eye. He sustained multiple fractures to the orbital bone around his eye and a scratched cornea. Yzerman underwent nearly five hours of surgery that night, and it would be months before he’d see clearly again.
But typical of Yzerman, his memories of that season’s abrupt end – the Wings went on to lose that playoff series to Calgary – are less about the puck he couldn’t have seen coming and more about the trouble he insists he should have.
Dave Lewis, the affable coach who was once Yzerman’s teammate, fought a losing battle to keep control of a veteran dominated dressing room that season – 700 goal scorer Brett Hull was among the malcontents – and Yzerman now laments his own inability to right the ship. “I think we underachieved,” he says, shaking his head. “I had higher expectations for that group. We kind of, I thought, imploded a little bit. Every guy’s got a role to play, a responsibility; everybody has to live up to that. That didn’t happen. And without being specific, if I analyze it now, there are situations that I wish I would’ve addressed sooner as captain of the team.”

That sort of self-analysis has been his summer job for nearly two decades now, ever since Yzerman first had the “C” sewn on his jersey in 1986. At 21, he became the youngest captain in franchise history on a hunch, “a gut feeling” says Jacque Demers, the coach who made the call. A few years before that the Wings selected Yzerman with the fourth overall pick in the 1983 NHL entry draft, but only after the player they’d coveted – Waterford’s Pat Lafonatine – went to the New York Islanders at NO. 3. Devellano, then the Wings’ GM, had just been hired away from the Islanders by Mike and Marian Ilitch, who bought the floundering Detroit franchise in 1982 for the paltry sum of $8 million.
Before Yzerman arrived, the Red Wings were known around town as the Dead Wings. The Ilitches went so far as to give away a free automobile at every home game in order to bring the fans out. Now, the team – in a reprise of its hockey heyday in the 1940s and ‘50s – boasts a sellout streak that’s approaching 400 consecutive games. The Wings had to cap season ticket sales at 17,000, leaving a waiting list with nearly 15,000 names on it. Coincidence? Holland thinks not. “Stevie’s the guy who really put hockey back on the map in Detroit” he says. That took time, of course, though Yzerman wasted little himself. Ask Devellano how long it took to realize his good fortune with that 1983 draft and he bursts into laughter. “About five minutes,“ he says.

Before Yzerman’s first training camp, Devellano figured he might want to send Yzerman back to juniors for some more seasoning. At 5 feet 11 inches and 165 pounds, the Wings weren’t sure he was big enough to play, let alone mature enough, to play in the NHL. “I didn’t want to put him in a situation where he would struggle,” Devellano says. “But within two shifts, he was the best player in camp. There wasn’t much doubt. He came in and was able to play at a high level right away.”
A month later, Yzerman scored a goal in his NHL debut. He went on to score 39 goals that season – a franchise record for a rookie – and became the youngest player in NHL history to play in an All – Star game. In his first two seasons, Yzerman led the Wings to back to back playoff appearances, something they hadn’t done since 1966. But then came an abysmal finish in 1985-86 and the hiring of Coach Demers. Yzerman, still fretting over his performance the previous season, drove from his parents’ home in Ottawa to Montreal, and when he showed up there unannounced at the NHL draft to meet with Demers, the new coach knew he’d found his leader.

“You could see even then what he was made of,” Demers says. “You could tell he was a winner.”
There would be plenty of winning in the years to come, including six division championships in a nine year span for Detroit beginning in 1988. But as each season passed, all that success only accentuated the failures: The ultimate prize – The Stanley Cup – remained out of reach. And as coaches came and went – first Demers then Bryan Murray before Scotty Bowman was hired – Yzerman remained the focal point.
Injuries coupled with Yzerman’s naturally introverted manner (often read as aloof by others) only fueled the criticism, both inside the organization and out. Yzerman was too selfish, too one-dimensional, the critics said. He’d scored 137 points in the 1992 – 93 season, but the Wings were sent packing in the first round of the playoffs by the Toronto Maple Leafs. “I do remember the people on the talk-radio shows saying we’d never win the Cup with Yzerman,” Devellano says. “Fortunately, I happen to think most of the people that call into those shows are kooks, so I didn’t pay any attention.”
Still, there were serious trade talks involving Yzerman, who became expendable in the eyes of some in the front office after the arrival of Sergei Fedorov in 1990. There was a deal in place to send Yzerman to Buffalo in 1991, but it fell apart at the last minute. A few years later, Bowman, a master motivator, had made it clear he, too, was ready to deal Yzerman, a player whose defensive ability he questioned. Rumors of a deal that would send Yzerman back to Ottawa surfaced in 1995. “There were talks, I’ll tell you that, “Devellano says now. “It wasn’t just fluff.” But Ilitch squashed that deal, and on opening night of the 1995-96 season, the fans voiced their approval with a wild ovation for Yzerman and a cascade of boos that drowned out Bowman’s introduction.

If they were going to win it, they would have to do it together. “I made a conscious effort to change,” Yzerman says. Soon enough, the Wings’ fortunes finally changed, culminating with a rollicking ride to the Stanley Cup in 1997. That ended a 42 – year championship drought for the city and any debate over Yzerman’s leadership ability.
”The last five years, you didn’t want to be recognized,” Yzerman said that night. “I put a hat on, glasses on, tried to hide. A couple of years ago, I went to Las Vegas after the playoffs. I was at the craps table. Two old guys from Windsor came by me and recognized me. I heard one of them say, “You don’t want to play at this table. There’s no luck at this table.’…
“They always say, ‘He’s a good player, but he hasn’t won the Cup.’ Now they can’t say that anymore. No matter what, they can’t say it.”

He won it again in 1998, earning MVP honors as the Wings repeated as champs. And even more remarkably, Yzerman did it again in 2002, leading Detroit to the title while playing through excruciating pain on a knee that would need major reconstructive surgery after the season. “One of the greatest sporting accomplishments I’ve ever witnessed,” Holland says. “To watch him limp into the rink the morning of a game, to see the pain he endured every other night for two months, it was incredible. Steve wanted it so bad, he willed us to win.”
Earlier that winter, he’d done much the same for Team Canada at the 2002 Winter Olympics. The knee, first injured in a game in 1988, essentially gave out on him in the tournament opener, but Yzerman refused to sit. “I remember walking by the dressing room before the gold medal game, and the trainer said to me: “Even if it was Game 7 in the playoffs, I probably wouldn’t let him play on that knee,” said Wayne Gretzky, the hockey giant who is Team Canada’s executive director. “ He plays with a lot of heart, a lot of unselfishness, and …he’s a special individual. He’s a tremendous leader.”
Gretzky wants Yzerman back for the 2006 Turin Olympics in February and has even gone so far to say he’s a “lock” to make the team, even at the age of 40. “I appreciate the faith that he has,” says Yzerman, who missed the start of this season with a torn groin muscle. “But I feel I have to prove I’m worth of it. I really feel I have to earn it.”
“That’s the thing with Stevie,” says Chris Osgood, the Wings’ 33 year old goaltender who considers Yzerman a mentor. “He’s a superstar, but he doesn’t have that mentality. Not even close. He doesn’t think he’s better than anybody else, or that because he’s Steve Yzerman he should be put on a pedestal. He really wants to earn everything he gets. He doesn’t want anything easy, and that’s what has made him so special.”

And so surprisingly down to earth, which isn’t the easiest thing to be when your likeness is plastered on the side of a downtown skyscraper. When Nextel, one of the Red Wings’ sponsors, commissioned a giant, 170 ft high mural of the Wings’ captain for the Cadillac Tower façade in Detroit, Yzerman’s plea to have it portray the entire team fell on deaf ears. The mural was painted over last April during the lockout, but Yzerman remains the reluctant icon.
“He’s not one of those guys that drops his name to get a table at a restaurant,” Osgood says. “It’s not like that at all. He’s almost embarrassed by his celebrity. He just wants to be Steve.” That’s exactly how he introduces himself to the new faces in the Wings’ dressing room, from mop haired Finnish rookie Valtteri Filppula to Osgoods heir apparent, Jimmy Howard. Yzerman makes a point of saying hello and engaging in a little small talk as soon as each newcomer arrives. “You’ve got to hold back a smile when he does it, too,” says Kris Draper, who joined the team in 1993. “He comes up and says, “Hi I’m Steve Yzerman.’ And it’s like, ‘Uh, no kidding.’”
If anything, it’s Yzerman who may feel a bit out of place these days. After a year away from the game, many of his contemporaries – future Hall of Famers like Mark Messier, Ron Francis, Al MacInnis and Scott Stevens – finally decided to hang up their skates. Even in the Wings’ locker room, many of the old familiar faces, from Joe Kocur to Darren McCarty to coaches Lewis and Barry Smith, are gone, replaced by youth and uncertainty.

“You come back [from the lockout] re-energized in a lot of ways,” Yzerman says. “Everybody talks about the ‘new’ NHL, and I think that’s a little bit of an exaggeration. But there are a lot of new, different things to be excited about, and in some ways it lures you back.
“In some ways though, it makes you feel like maybe it’s time to step aside, you know? But I just look at it as, you know, I have the rest of my life to be retired and maybe just one more year – or whatever it is – to try to do everything I can to play.”
“I don’t have a problem being a role player,” he adds. “I know I’m becoming more and more of that. I just want to be an effective player. I want to be on the ice. I want to be a player that, when the coaching staff looks down the bench, they say, “You’re going” and whatever that role is, I’m fine with it.”
He grins when it’s pointed out that his new coach, Mike Babcock, is only 2 years older than Yzerman, “Yeah, but I don’t look at it like that,” The Captain says. “To me, he’s the head coach. He’s still the boss. And especially with a new coach, you’re careful not to make mistakes and get on his bad side or give him a bad first impression.”

The way Yzerman sees it; this is unquestionably his last chance to make a first impression. He has left the door open to continue playing beyond this season. But those close to him say his mind is already made up: This will be his last year, but he won’t say so because he desperately wants to avoid any sort of rocking-chair farewell tour. “Mostly it takes the focus off what the team is trying to accomplish, you know?” Yzerman says. “You’ve got young guys here trying to prove themselves. You’ve got guys like Kris Draper and others whose careers are at their height. The coaching staff wants to win hockey games. Everyone wants to do well. And [retirement talk] just distracts from all of that. It’s not about a player or an individual. It’s a professional team trying to win games.”
Yzerman insists he has given absolutely no thought to what it will feel like to take that final skate at Joe Louis Arena. Other than the obvious, that is. “The way we all go out is winning a Stanley Cup,” he says. “That’s the way we all want to go out: playing well. But there’s no way of guaranteeing that.” He considers himself lucky to have gotten a preview of what retirement will be like. For years, the NHL Players Association warned its membership to prepare for a lengthy work stoppage.

“My approach was, ‘I’ll be ready for it, and I’ll make the most of the time off.’ And that’s what I did,” says Yzerman, who lives in Bloomfield Hills with wife Lisa and their three daughters. “I continued to train, but I spent a lot of time at home and we traveled some – summer vacation, Thanksgiving, Christmas, spring break – things I hadn’t been able to do before with my family. I enjoyed being around more, being there for my kids’ activities and helping my wife out.”
In fact, Yzerman, the shy, middle child of five growing up in Ottawa, fairly reveled in the daily monotony: making breakfast, driving the girls to and from school, running errands around town, attending soccer games and tennis practices. “I found a way to occupy my time," says Yzerman, who also worked on his golf game – he’s a 14 handicapper at Oakland Hills Country Club. “I was never bored.”
One of his daughters, the one he’d brought out to center ice when he hoisted the Stanley Cup in 2002 also stunned her father during the lockout when she announced that she wanted to start playing hockey. Jersey No. 19 wasn’t available, he says, so she wore No. 20 instead. “Was I surprised? Yeah,” Yzerman says, laughing. “That sort of came out of the blue. But, hey, whatever she wants. Let them try everything – she’ll figure out what she wants to do.”
He’ll do the same, he figures.
“Sure, I got a sense of what retirement’s all about,’ he says. “And I may take some time off when I’m done playing. But I don’t plan on doing nothing.” Yzerman has watched several peers leap into coaching and management jobs with various NHL teams. Mario Lemieux operates as both owner and player for the Pittsburgh Penguins. Wayne Gretzky is the owner and coach now of the Phoenix Coyotes, in addition to his Team Canada duties.

But even closer to home, there’s an even better model for success, and don’t think Yzerman hasn’t noticed. Joe Dumars, who arrived in Detroit two years after Yzerman, already has won a championship in his brief tenure as president of the Pistons. “You’ve got to look more at the individual person and why they’re going into the role they are: What’s their motivation?” Yzerman says. “My motivation to do it is, I’d like to build a winner. I’d like to think I know a lot about the game. I’ve watched it, I’ve studied it, I’ve talked about it, I’ve learned a lot. For me, it would be a real challenge to build a championship team like Joe did. You look at a lot of guys who take front office positions like that and you don’t question their commitment to it. You don’t question his commitment to it.
There’s no questioning Yzerman’s commitment, either, though admittedly there’s a different scenario in play. After a postretirement year of observation, Dumars stepped in to grab the wheel of a rudderless front office with the Pistons. The Wings’ management team has been the envy of the NHL for a decade or more. “You don’t just jump in and run a team, particularly in this situation where you have an established successful group,” Yzerman says. “I have no unrealistic goals. I’ll take some time off and then get into it in some capacity and go from there”

It used to be written into Yzerman’s contracts that he’d have a job in management when he retired. But it became such an afterthought in recent years that now it’s simply a gentleman’s agreement between Yzerman, Ilitch, Devellano and Holland. “I would love to have Steve come on board and be part of our management team," says Holland, who took over as GM from Devellano in 1997. “Exactly what title and what role? I think at the appropriate time we’ll sit down and define it.”
In the meantime it will be up to Yzerman to define his own exit strategy. And although the end is near, he insists he’s not finished yet. The legacy, he says, will have to wait. “Honestly, I’m looking more ahead at what I want to do over the next few years, as opposed to what happened over the last 20,’ Yzerman says. “I’m really proud of what we accomplished here. I mean, sure, everybody wants to be appreciated or liked or whatever. But I’ve just tried to do the right thing, and…people are either going to like it or they’re not. Either way, I’m not too worried about it.”
And with that, he shrugs. The interview is done, and Yzerman is off to the training room. There is a bike to ride, weights to be lifted. There is work to be done.