Gilmour: 'All-time Maple Leaf'

Rick Wamsley fancies himself a bit of an historian. Not on Civil War tactics. Or the Curse of the Kennedys. Or Italian Renaissance art.

His major lies in the legends, the lore, of hockey.

In the late fall of 1989, he and the Calgary Flames trooped into Moscow for the final stop of their behind-the-Iron-Curtain "Friendship Tour" for a game against the KLMpaced Soviet Red Army billed as the world club championship. Most of Wamsley's buddies were grumbling about the demands of a pre-training camp odyssey of such magnitude, weary of the mysterious food groups and nearly driven mad by the insistent scuttle of adventurous hotel-room roaches.

As the bus pulled up to the rink for practice, though, Rick Wamsley rushed into Luzhniki Arena, the scene of the most indelible, Where-Were-You? moment in Canadian sports, like a nun visiting the Vatican for the first time, and demanded to know from an understandably befuddled Soviet guard at which end Paul Henderson had scored that goal 17 years earlier.

Now, most hockey players don't get interested much beyond the official stats sheet and their bank balance (the two being incestuous bedfellows). If pressed, more of them than you'd imagine might confuse Howie Morenz with Howie Mandel.

But the game, its makers and its magic, matters to Wamsley.

He doesn't treat the past lightly, which makes him able to put the present into perspective.

"Oh, Dougie rates up there," he is saying from St. Louis, where he works as goaltending coach for the Blues.

"With Sittler and Armstrong and Keon and Horton and those guys. There've been a lot of fine players there over the past few decades, the Wendel Clarks and Rick Vaives. But Dougie, I think, goes above that.

"He's an all-time Maple Leaf, in my humble opinion."

The Toronto Maple Leafs tonight honour Doug Gilmour at Air Canada Centre by raising a banner in his honour, the 17th such tribute, linking him forever with Bower, Broda, Salming, Teeder Kennedy and Syl Apps, among others.

Here in Calgary, we think of Doug Gilmour as the final piece in Cliff Fletcher's magnificent Stanley Cup puzzle (imagine a 5,000 piecer from Ravensburger of a polar bear ambling along in an Arctic whiteout, and missing a single chunk of the border to complete it); the man whose two decisive goals drove a stake into the hearts of the Montreal Canadiens in Game 6 at the fabled Forum in the spring of '89.

He took his unique brand of tenacity to seven cities over 23 years, and celebrated his only championship as a Flame.

Still, Maple Leaf zealots think of him only as their own.

"When Cliff made the trade," reminds Wamsley, a component of the 10-player blockbuster that moved Gilmour east, along with Ric Nattress, Jamie Macoun and Kent Manderville, "they didn't have a Hakan Loob there. Or a Joey Mullen. Or a Joe Nieuwendyk. Or an Al MacInnis. They really didn't have much there at all. Oh, I guess there were some what you'd call solid 'pros' around. But that was the extent of it.

"In Calgary, he was a very good player in a team full of very good players -- the best player among the very good players, in my mind. But still just one of a group. In Toronto, be became the focal point. The go-to guy.