It is a strange thing to hear a professional hockey player say those words out loud. But Kirk Maltby was no normal hockey player. Yes, he was an integral part of four Stanley Cup–winning teams and one of the most beloved players in Detroit history. He was also one of the greatest pests in hockey history, so loathed by the opposition that entire cities hated him. For many fans, particularly those in Col- orado, his last name was a slur, one that congealed in their mouths, and they spit it out with venomous rage.
“Most of the league hated him,” jokes Draper. “Sometimes we hated him in practice. That’s how effective he was.”
Maltby was hated because his game was annoying at such a fundamental level. When he went in to check an opponent, he never let up; he finished all of his checks, tearing his opponent down to the studs, and was happy to do it. Maltby would climb over the boards, skate as fast as he could, and launch himself into your favorite player. Sometimes it would be a massive, lights-out, open-ice colli- sion. Other times it would just be a rubout along the boards as he smeared the player into the Plexiglas. But every time he was on the ice, he was always running the players you passionately rooted for; after a while, a whistle would blow and there would be a stoppage of play. A scrum would break out, and Maltby would poke at your favorite player with his stick or maybe put his glove in his face and wash it down. Draper would clear the crease with a napalm bomb of obscenities, and Maltby would continue yapping as well. They would light a bonfire of hate right there in the goal crease or corner or face-off circle after each whistle. Maltby would fight, or perhaps Joe Kocur would come in to fight for him, which only made you angrier.
Unless, of course, you were a Detroit fan. In that case, you loved him beyond measure.
“I always enjoyed the physical aspect of the game,” Maltby says. “The chirping part was just our personalities, and we knew that it got under their skins. After a playoff series, five or six games and you’re constantly finishing checks on players and chirping and giving them a shot in the back of the leg—whatever it may be—it gets to them.”
Maltby’s job was to stir his opponent into fits, and it wasn’t about one indi- vidual. The Grind Line went after the whole team, and especially loved going after defensemen.
“We made a point of finishing our checks on the defense and made their game as hard as possible,” Maltby says. “Especially at the tail end of a season, if it was going to be a team that we’d play in the first round or second round of the playoffs, we let them know what they were going to get.”
What the Grind Line had to give their opponent is what military historians call total war, an all-out guerrilla campaign of physical and mental and spiritual warfare. Nothing was to be left standing when they were done. They burned it all down like Sherman marching to the sea.
They were willing to sacrifice everything they had to win. Consider the time Malt- by single-handedly took on the Death Star of slap shots.
When asked if he can recall a time when a teammate sacrificed his body for the good of the team, Kris Draper replies without hesitation. “The time that Maltby stood there and blocked Al MacInnis’s slap shot stands out.”
The Red Wings were playing St. Louis, and the Blues were on a power play. Maltby was covering the point, where Al MacInnis, a player known throughout the league for wielding the hardest slap shot, which routinely exceeded 100 mph and broke equipment, bones, and the will of penalty killers, was positioned.
When there is a traditional power play, one team has a man advantage and the defending team deploys a penalty-killing unit to stave off the offensive attempts. While the power-play unit features five offensively skilled players, the penalty-kill unit is typically composed of two defensemen, who are positioned near the goal, and two forwards at the top of the offensive zone, up by the blue line. While the de- fensemen are responsible for clearing the goal crease and controlling traffic near the net, the penalty-killing forwards are responsible for closing down shooting and passing lanes. As a result, they stand directly in the line of fire of the league’s best shooters, and it is one of the most dangerous jobs in all of hockey. Penalty-killing forwards like Maltby must willingly hurl themselves in front of slap shots in an at- tempt to keep the puck from reaching the net. And all the pads in the world can’t save them, because the puck always hurts.
“MacInnis’s first shot broke Maltby’s stick,” Draper says. “But then the puck went back to MacInnis and he shot again. That next slap shot hit Maltby in the skate!”
When a player attempts to block a shot, it’s best to get his pads squared up and all in line, because this offers the greatest surface area of protection. One of the most vulnerable places to take a slap shot, though, is in the skates. The thick leather of the skate boot may feel sturdy, but in reality boots offer minimal protec- tion against a slap shot. Players often break ankles, toes, or feet. Maltby knew all of this, of course, and still stared down MacInnis’s blast. The vulcanized rubber trav- eling over 100 mph hit his foot dead-on and instantly hobbled him. But hockey games don’t stop just because a player may have broken a foot. The Blues’ power play cycled on.
The puck swung around the offensive zone, and Maltby, undeterred by the two previous cannon shots, prepared for more. Without a stick and with his foot badly injured, possibly broken, he continued to relentlessly push off on his one good leg and pursue the puck up near the point. The puck came back around to his area, and Maltby remarkably flung himself in front of another shot. He blocked the next slap shot with his hand. By the end of the power play, Maltby had blocked three shots with his body and was seen limping to the bench, visibly battered but lifted emotionally by the chanting Detroit crowd.
“I had to put ice bags on my ankles on the bench after that,” Maltby says, shrug- ging it off. “It is never fun blocking shots. It’s part of the job.”
In another game, MacInnis was teeing off another slap shot when Maltby once again got to work and stepped directly into harm’s way.
“He shattered the toe cap on my skate,” Maltby says. “I thought he broke my en- tire foot and all my toes. When I got to the dressing room to change my skate, three of my toes were instantly black-and-blue. I don’t know how he didn’t break them.”
Maltby was X-rayed, and when the films came back negative, the Detroit equip- ment men put a replacement skate on his foot and he went back out there.
But life on the Red Wings during those dominant years in the 1990s and early 2000s was like that. The Red Wing players were all in, no matter their status or ca- reer stats or role.
“In the ’98 playoffs, my teammate Brent Gilchrist was getting shot up in the groin and stomach area,” Maltby says. “It was for his groin and sports hernia. It was a disaster in his abdomen.”
The Red Wings were on the road in the old Dallas arena, playing the Stars. Gilchrist would leave the dressing room and go out into another room with the doctors to receive his shots.
“He was biting down on stuff, and we could hear him wincing and moaning out in the hallway,” Maltby says. “Gilchrist was getting it every . . . single . . . game. He couldn’t play in the finals because it was just too much. We were so happy to win the Cup for a guy like him.”
Sometimes doing everything for the team crossed the line of player etiquette and entered barbarism. This happened in the rivalry between the Colorado Avalanche and the Red Wings, one full of political chess moves, verbal sparring in the newspapers, cheap shots, and the acquisition of players for muscle or for stick work. The entire war was ignited by the Lemieux hit on Draper; the ensuing vio- lence lasted several years and yielded some horrific bloodshed.
In 1997, things took a turn toward the medieval during a fight between Col- orado’s René Corbet and Detroit’s Brendan Shanahan. It was during the Western Conference Finals; the Red Wings were up two games to one in the series and were leading 6–0 in the third period of Game 4. The Red Wings’ Martin Lapointe hit Eric Lacroix with a hip check near his knees, and a massive scrum broke out. Shanahan fought Corbet and worked him over with a serious of heavy rights, eventually throwing him to the ice. As the players paired up and stood around, Shanahan lay on top of Corbet. Then Corbet’s legs started twitching and he began flailing about on the ice. Soon there was blood all over the place.
“Corbet had a cut in his cheek and it was stitched up,” Maltby says. “They got into a fight. Shannie [Shanahan] told us afterwards that he grabbed it and ripped it open.”
Tearing open another man’s stitches may be over the line (I guess it depends on whether you live in Colorado or Michigan), but physical, gutsy hockey has always been in Maltby’s wheelhouse. Long before he ever made it to the NHL, toughness was ingrained in him.
“My parents were a huge part [of learning to play in pain],” Maltby says. “They set in me the hard work. They didn’t miss a day of work even when they were sick. They had to be on their deathbed before they’d miss work. I remember one time my mom was sick and I needed something for hockey. She was sick, and Dad was at work, and she still took me. She had to pull over because she wasn’t feeling good. When you grow up with things like that, it gets instilled in you.”
Maltby was around sacrifice all the time at home and at the rink. He remembers his dad hitting his thumb with a hammer and then duct-taping the wound closed and carrying on. At the rink it was no different. Physicality was a natural part of hockey to him. As he grew up, the injuries, the bumps, the bruises, grew with him, too. When he was a young player he was whacked, punched, hit into the boards, and, yes, hit in the foot with flying pucks. Kirk Maltby simply grew accustomed to it all from an early age.
When pressed about any particular injuries that stand out, Maltby gives a good- natured shrug. He doesn’t want to draw too much attention to what he considers to be minor injuries, especially given players like Gilchrist, who was biting down and receiving shots just to play, and Draper, whose crushed face he saw up close.
But after a thousand games in the NHL, Maltby knows what real pain looks and feels like.
He says, almost as an afterthought, “At the end of my career, my shoulder was so busted I could not raise my arm to get my jersey on. Oh, I once got hit so hard in the head my visor broke in half and the bone in my nose stuck out.”
Maltby doesn’t elaborate any further because he feels there is no need. For the members of the Grind Line, bones puncturing skin was all just a part of their job, of playing the game, of killing all those penalties, of laying down their bodies for the good of the team. As humble as Maltby may be, no one can dispute the fact that one of the shining moments in his career, and ultimately in the history of the Grind Line, was when he willingly and repeatedly stepped in front of MacInnis’s slap shot, a cannon that scattered lesser men like dandelion seeds in the wind. But not him. He laid it all down.
“At the young level, I never shied away from it. I didn’t want to get my head taken off. But hitting got me involved, got me going, got the adrenaline going,” Maltby says. He pauses and then adds without any second thought, “I actually en- joyed getting hit.”
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