The Architect: Honouring Glen Sather, the great one behind the Great One

It was a warm day last summer, the morning the Edmonton Oilers announced a banner would be raised in Rexall Place to honour Glen Sather, and Kevin Lowe was reminiscing about the self-effacing mastermind behind the NHL's last dynasty.

Once a rugged defenceman and now a member of the front office, Lowe was standing outside the arena where some of hockey's greatest feats occurred, beside a bronze statue of Wayne Gretzky, the laces on its skates worn from being touched time and again.

Even after all these years, the ashes of fans are left at the base.

With Sather as coach, general manager and rabbi, the Oilers won five Stanley Cups in seven years, and the skinny little centre he encouraged team owner Peter Pocklington to obtain at all costs rewrote record books and changed the way the game is played. "When you talk about Gretzky and Mark Messier and some of the others, Glen Sather is every bit deserving of the respect they received," Lowe said. "It's possible that none of the Stanley Cups would have happened without him."

"There are a lot of great players, and they never win. It takes a great leader, and Glen was one."

Now 72 and president of the New York Rangers, Sather was born in High River, near Calgary in southern Alberta, grew up in Wainwright and owns a heritage home in Banff where he spends summers and hosts lavish annual Christmas celebrations for family. He began his hockey career in Edmonton playing with the junior Oil Kings more than 50 years ago. After toiling in the NHL for six teams over 10 seasons, he returned in 1976 as captain of the World Hockey Association Oilers.

He took over as head coach near the end of the 1977-78 season, and a year later convinced Pocklington to acquire Gretzky, a 17-year-old whiz kid then playing for the Indianapolis Racers.

Sather then stayed on as coach in 1979 when Edmonton joined the NHL, and won four Stanley Cups in the 1980s and a fifth in 1990 as president and general manager after Gretzky was traded to Los Angeles.

"The older I get, the more I realize what a special time it was," said Lowe, who was on all five Edmonton teams that won Stanley Cups, and on the last Rangers team to win one, in 1994. "Glen believed in us, and made us believe in ourselves."

On Dec. 11, before the Rangers play in Edmonton, Sather will become the ninth and final Oiler to have a banner hung from the rafters at Rexall Place. The team is moving from the arena, which opened as the Northlands Coliseum in 1974, to a $480-million downtown rink at the start of the 2016-17 season.

"I never expected the Oilers to put my name on a banner," said Sather, who jokingly refers to the tribute as "the hanging."

"Certainly, I was surprised. It's not a coach that makes a team. It is the team that makes the coach."

Gretzky, Messier, Paul Coffey, Grant Fuhr and other Oiler greats will be on hand for next Friday night's ceremony, along with some of Sather's past and present NHL colleagues, including Leafs former general manager Cliff Fletcher, and John Muckler, the head coach when the Oilers won their last Stanley Cup 25 years ago.

Fletcher was general manager of the rival Calgary Flames from 1980 to 1991 before moving to Toronto that year as chief operating officer, president and GM.

"Glen is legendary hockey man and one of the greatest general managers and coaches the league has ever had," Fletcher, now 80 and still a senior adviser to the Leafs, said. "The Oilers will go down in history as the best team ever on the ice in the NHL."

Sather personally invited Pocklington, his long-time boss, friend and hunting companion.

"With what he has done, he deserves to have his shirt hanged or dropped or whatever the hell they do," Pocklington, who lives in Palm Desert, Calif., said this week. "It's Glen's night, and he deserves it."

'GETTING GRETZKY REALLY WAS THE TURNING POINT'

Glen Sather went from being a fringe player to building the NHL's last true dynasty from the ashes of the WHA.

He scored 80 goals in 658 NHL games, causing Gretzky once to tease his boss.

"I told him, 'For a six-goal shooter, you have tremendous hockey sense,' " Gretzky once told The Globe and Mail.

The year after the Oilers won their first Stanley Cup in 1984, they sent eight players to the all-star game, not a single one older than 25. Gretzky was 24 and scored 208 points in the 84-85 season. In the season before that, and the season after that, he topped 200 points.

"Getting Gretzky was really the turning point," Sather said. "He was the reason we won."

Gretzky was still a teenager and had played only eight games for Indianapolis when the Racers' cash-starved owner, Nelson Skalbania, offered him to Pocklington along with two other players for $850,000. Before making a decision, Pocklington, who had bought out Skalbania as the Oilers' owner only a year earlier, asked Sather's opinion about Gretzky.

His response: "Whatever you have to do, get him."

"With Wayne, it was an easy decision," Sather said.

The Oilers had played the Racers once that season, and Gretzky hadn't done much to catch Sather's eye. Then he watched him more closely when Indianapolis came to town a short time later.

"I went to their morning skate, and he was so small I thought he was one of the Racers' player's kids," Sather said. "Then that night he had two goals against us. I knew he was going to be exceptional."

Initially Gretzky lived with Sather and his wife, Ann. He remained a father figure to players throughout his coaching career.

"A lot of people misunderstand him," Gretzky once told The Globe and Mail. "He's a family man who lives for his kids and his wife, and we are his kids by extension. He's close to us and wants to be more to us than a coach and a general manager."

Sather was especially protective of his young superstar, who was questioned by newsmen every day. At one point, complaining that it had become overwhelming, Sather threatened to cut off their access to Gretzky.

"As a coach, it was distracting," Sather said. "Everyone wanted to talk about Wayne, and it became frustrating answering the same questions and telling the same stories 20 times.

"It was like that everywhere we went. It was complicated dealing with all of the requests."

Sather was among the first coaches to insist his players wear suits and ties on the day of a game.

"If you treat men like men, they will act like men," he said.

He also encouraged them to explore the world beyond hockey.

"His ultimate strength was the way he treated players," Lowe said. "He encouraged us on the road to get out of our hotels and go to museums and libraries and do other stuff. He has a great appreciation for life and has a lot to offer. It was a message we appreciated."

Sather and Pocklington struck up a relationship after the flashy young entrepreneur, who made millions as a car salesman, took ownership of the club in 1977.

"I gave anybody responsibility and let them do things their way," Pocklington said. "All I wanted was for them to get results. I tried not to interfere with Glen because of how good he was. I respected him for what he could do."

Eventually, their working partnership evolved into the friendship that remains today. For a long time, they fly-fished for trout and hunted ducks, geese, pheasant and partridge together several times a year.

Pocklington also talked Sather into joining in one of his other favourite passions – racing jetboats. Once, while competing in a race along Alberta's Smoky River, Pockington went barrelling into rapids at 90 miles an hour, standing the boat onto its end and tossing Sather into the water.

"You gotta be crazy to race powerboats," Pocklington said. "Years ago that pretty much described both of us."

'THEY BUTTED HEADS, AND EVENTUALLY GLEN LEFT'

Once the public-relations director for the Edmonton Oilers, Bill Tuele served as host in October of 2014 when the 30th anniversary of the team's first Stanley Cup was celebrated at Rexall Place. He will be the emcee during Friday night's program, which honours Sather.

"We talked about doing this for Glen almost since the day he left the team," Tuele, retired and living in Nanaimo, B.C., said. "From my perspective, he did things for hockey and created direction for the Oilers forever. Anybody who is around the organization knows his fingerprints are still there."

After spending more than 20 years as the Oilers' coach and general manager, Sather resigned following the 1999-2000 season and accepted a role with the Rangers as president and GM. At the time he left, he was having differences with the 37 investors who had assumed control of the Oilers.

"Those were trying times to say the least," Tuele said. "When the new ownership group took over, there were 30 guys who each felt entitled to have an opinion on the approach that was being taken with the team.

"They butted heads, and eventually Glen left."

Even though they live on opposite sides of the United States, Pocklington and Sather have managed to stay close. They have dinner together whenever possible, and sat side by side during the anniversary celebration last year, during which the crowd stood and cheered the former owner.

For the first time, fans seemed to forgive him for the shocking 1988 trade of Gretzky, which occurred three months after the Oilers won their fourth Stanley Cup in five years.

"I was sitting beside him and there were tears rolling out of his eyes as the crowd gave him a huge ovation," Sather said. "He was nervous beforehand about the way he would be received. That was kind of a nice way to get what happened behind us.

"One instant can change your life."

Sather has forgiven his friend for making a deal that was so loudly decried that members of Parliament talked about blocking the trade.

"I was pretty pissed at Peter at the time," Sather said. "I was real tempted to leave. I thought about it for two or three days, and decided I couldn't do it. There was a whole team of players left behind, and that was the reason I stayed.

"We went through a lot of good times together, but I still think he made a mistake. It was a financial decision, and he had the right to do what he did, but it was an awful thing to happen. We had a hell of a team."

Losing Gretzky was gut-wrenching, but by then Sather had been fighting a difficult battle in trying to keep the heart and soul of the team together. Paul Coffey, a Hall of Fame defenceman, was the first star player to leave in 1987.

"Greed has destroyed just about every great championship team in sport," Sather said in 1986. "And it looks as though we are not going to escape."

Sather, who always shunned the spotlight, rescued two people from a burning vehicle on Feb. 20, 1978, for which he received a heroism award from the Alberta government. On Friday night, he will take some bows again.

"I was in Edmonton a long time," he said. "My kids grew up there, and I have friends there. When you start to get on the downside of life, you think of the good times. And in Edmonton, there were not too many bad times."

Editor's note: An earlier digital version of this story incorrectly stated in a photo caption the number of Stanley Cups Wayne Gretzky and Glen Sather won together. This story also incorrectly stated Wayne Gretzky's age when he was sent to the all-star game and the number of points he scored in the 1984-1985 season. This digital version has been corrected.

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