SHJON PODEIN BATTLED THE Grind Line when he played for the Philadelphia Flyers, who were swept by the Red Wings in the Stanley Cup Finals (more on that later), and when he went head-to-head with them in the bloody Avalanche–Red Wings rivalry (a lot more on that later). “But we had a different name for them. We called them the PITA Line. As in ‘Pain In The Ass.’ ”
“I take that as a compliment,” Kris Draper says, laughing. “I think if another team or organization thinks I was a pain in the ass to play against, I was doing something right. That’s a compliment to the three of us.”
The Grind Line was formed after the Red Wings were swept in the 1995 Stanley Cup Finals by the Devils, and, as mentioned earlier, it helped lead to a Detroit turn- around. The Red Wings returned to the Cup finals two years later with the Grind Line intact and swept the Philadelphia Flyers to end the Red Wings’ forty-two-year Cup drought. What separates the Grind Line from other fourth lines in hockey his- tory is the fact that they not only epitomized every single aspect of the hockey- strong ethos—a blue-collar outfit of skill and belligerence that played in pain, bat- tled back from adversity, fought and hit, stuck up for their teammates, and scored huge goals—but they won a lot (ahem, four Cups).
The four primary members of the Grind Line—Kris Draper, Kirk Maltby, Joe Kocur, and Darren McCarty—played more than three thousand games combined, and each has had numerous moments of glory and gore. Their true greatness can be seen in four single moments in their long careers that together give us the true meaning of hockey strong.
Kris Draper :
Kris Draper did not see the hit that would obliterate the right side of his face com- ing. It was Game 6 of the 1996 Western Conference Finals between the Red Wings and the Colorado Avalanche, and Draper was hit from behind at full throttle by Avalanche forward Claude Lemieux; it drove him face-first into the side boards with a sickening thud. The blow broke Draper’s nose, jaw, cheek, and orbital bone, caved in an entire row of teeth, and produced facial lacerations that took forty stitches on the inside and outside of his face to close. But the damage didn’t stop at the surface. When Lemieux smashed Draper’s face into the side boards—the collision resembles a crash test dummy being rammed into a partition—Draper’s brain suffered a major concussion. Seconds after impact the Red Wings’ trainer hopped over the boards and covered Draper’s face with a towel, for it was already in ruins. The towel instantly filled with blood.
Moments later, Kris Draper lay on the training table in the Red Wings’ locker room. When Draper wiggled his way out of the concussive fuzz in his head—he had been slipping in and out of consciousness—the first thing he did was not to call out in pain or moan for sympathy—instead he started putting his pads back on: Draper still wanted to play. Despite the multiple broken bones and the mon- strously swollen face, despite all the wreckage in his mouth, despite slipping in and out of consciousness, despite the blood pouring out of his face, despite the fact that he could see out of only one eye . . . despite all of it, Kris Draper’s first in- stinct was to try to get back into the game.
“Where do you think you’re going?” the NHL doctor asked Draper when he no- ticed him reaching for his gear. After all, here was an athlete in no condition to eat a cracker, let alone compete in a professional sporting event.
“I’m going back to finish the game,” Draper told the doctor through his badly broken jaw as he reached over and started pulling on his gloves.
This all might sound like lunacy, that a man with a crushed face, unable to see, speak, eat, breath through his nose, or even think clearly would still want to carry
on, all in the effort to play a game. But Kris Draper was a hockey player, and that is what hockey players do. They carry on. They play in pain. Sure, the injuries sucked. But not playing was worse. Despite the fact that his body had been broken and he had suffered a traumatic head injury, there was still something untouchable and unbreakable buried deep inside Kris Draper that was guiding him off that training table.
“Any time I had an injury,” Draper says, “and they said I’d be back in two to four weeks, I tried to make sure it was two weeks or less. That was the mind-set. That was expected. You played hockey and you were going to get cut and you got back out there.”
That’s why Kris Draper wanted back in the game even when he was shattered to pieces. He was a part of all of it. He felt the history of the game tugging inside of him; he felt that thread that connected him to all the players who had worn the fa- mous winged wheel on the front of the Detroit sweater and had battled back from injury. He owed it to his teammates and to the Detroit organization that had picked him up after the Winnipeg Jets dumped him. He owed it to the fans and to the city of Detroit, a no-nonsense kind of town that above all things appreciates an honest effort.
“I thought, Hey, man, just don’t pass me the puck from my blind side and we’ll go from there,” Draper says, laughing. “Then they walked me over to the mirror and told me to take a look.”
For the first time, he saw his massively swollen and bloodied face, a face that would later require a three-hour surgery and his jaw to be wired shut for six weeks. His nose was crushed, and he couldn’t breathe through it. The orbital bone was broken, too, but you couldn’t tell, because the jaw and cheekbone had swollen so monstrously that they engulfed everything else. At that moment, the NHL doctor used some quintessential hockey understatement.
“They said I was done for the night,” Draper says, aghast as he recalls the absur- dity.
Done for the night. Even the doctor, a man of science with years of medical schooling and training, had to give credence to the fact that no matter the severity of a hockey player’s injury, you could simply never count him out.
“It looked bad,” Kirk Maltby says. “Once we got on the plane I remember seeing the whole side of his face and jaw area and cheek. It looked like someone had blown up his face with an air pump.”
It was no mistake that Lemieux found Draper there along the side boards. While no player ever deserves to suffer such a horrific injury, Draper was a defensive cen- terman and made his living right there in the dirty areas of the rink, the areas of in- tense physical contact between the players along the side walls and in front of the net and in the corners. That is where Draper plied his trade, with all the fury of a ri- oter with a pitchfork and torch.
Draper paid a heavy price for all that time on the Grind Line battling against the top lines during the regular season and the playoffs. The physical toll of his defen- sive work compounded over the twenty years he spent in the NHL—more than one thousand games altogether.
“The ultimate compliment came from Scotty Bowman,” Draper says. “He trust- ed us. He trusted the Grind Line in big situations. In the last minute of the game he trusted us to kill penalties. We played against all the top players, like Sakic, Fors- berg, Modano, and Gretzky, and all the top lines. We took a lot of pride in that. I took all the face-offs. I always felt that if I could win the draw, then those skilled guys would have to work harder to get the puck back.”
During his long career, Draper played against a lot of men who were bigger and stronger; now the history of the game and its mantra of playing in pain is inscribed on his body.
“Ask any NHL player who has played over one thousand games like I did, and they’ll say the same thing. There’s a lot of wear and tear on the body,” Draper says humbly.
“Kris got cut so many times it seemed like if someone went by him fast, the wind would cut him,” Maltby jokes. “It was never a nick. It was always three stitch- es here, five there. I don’t recall a guy getting cut more times than Kris did. He’d get it done right away and come back or wait till after.”
“I’ve had over two hundred stitches. Nothing major, though,” Draper says. “I’ve broken my wrist, dislocated my thumb, separated both shoulders, played in the playoffs with broken ribs, and tweaked both my ACL and MCL. But it was a game I loved, and you find a way to keep playing.”
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