Fuhr, Grant 1962—

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Grant Fuhr 1962—

Professional hockey player

The Edmonton Oilers dominated the National Hockey League throughout the 1980s in no small part due to the goaltending talents of Grant Fuhr. Fuhr was an indispensable component of a team that won five Stanley Cups in seven years, a sometimes brilliant defender who was particularly effective in playoff games. In 1988 Ralph Wiley called Fuhr— who was then 25—”the best goalie in the NHL. The best on earth.”

Fuhr is now almost 30, and his once stellar reputation has been tarnished by injuries and the admission of substance abuse. Suspended from the Oilers in 1990 for drug use that occurred during the team’s glory years, Fuhr is struggling to regain his place in the league and to remain drug-free (he has not tested positive for cocaine or other drugs for several years). Reflecting on the negative headlines he earned after so much success, Fuhr told Sports Illustrated: “I was living life to have some fun. I wasn’t worrying about the responsibilities that go along with life. I was just young.”

Hockey is nothing less than an obsession for many Canadians. Children learn to skate at an early age and dream of the NHL the way American boys dream of playing professional football. Grant Fuhr was no exception to this rule. At the age of seven he announced that he was going to become a goaltender in the NHL, and he made good on his promise. Fuhr was born in Edmonton in the autumn of 1962 to teenage parents who gave him up for adoption. Even though he considers himself black—or at least of mixed race—he was placed with a white family. Initially his adoptive parents were reluctant to accept him, fearing that they would not be able to instill in him a sense of racial pride. They found that most people accepted their unorthodox family, however, and they were able to deal honestly with their son and his concerns. “We were always honest with Grant,” Betty Fuhr told Sports Illustrated. “We asked him to be fair in his judgments, to not judge a person—or himself—on social or economic standing, but on their honesty and integrity.”

Fuhr’s father was an insurance salesman who was fond of both golf and hockey. He allowed his son to turn the family basement into a makeshift rink and bought the boy a pair of skates when he was four. Grant skated constantly, developing coordination far beyond the norm for one of his tender age. In school he excelled at other

At a Glance…

Full name, Grant Scott Fuhr; born September, 1962, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada; adopted son of Robert (an insurance salesman) and Betty Fuhr; married twice, two daughters. Education: Attended Composite High School, Spruce Grove, Alberta.

Goalie for the Edmonton Oilers, 1981 —. Winner of five Stanley Cup championships in seven seasons, 1984-90. Recipient of Vezina Trophy as the NHL’s outstanding goaltender, 1988.

sports as well, but hockey remained his favorite. In 1979, when he was 16, he turned down a chance to play catcher with the Pittsburgh Pirates’ baseball farm team because “hockey was in.” Needless to say, this fascination with sports left little time for formal studies. Fuhr dropped out of high school at 16 and joined the Victoria Cougars of Canada’s Western Hockey League. Wiley described the young athlete as “5 ft. 9 in., with strong legs, good eyes, and hands that defied description. He was … different.”

Fuhr was also black, and he was attempting to make the majors in a sport that is still almost exclusively white. Bob White, a coach in Montreal, told Sports Illustrated that Fuhr might have been steered away from hockey had he grown up in eastern Canada. “If Fuhr had been born in Quebec, he might not have made it to the NHL,” White said. “You can be recruited with a mask on, like Grant Fuhr. He was lucky he was out west … And it’s good he wears the mask.” If this harsh judgment speaks to inherent racism in hockey’s ranks, it also speaks to Fuhr’s outstanding ability, mask or no mask. As a teenager, Fuhr showed such obvious potential that he was made a member of the Edmonton Oilers as a number one draft choice before his eighteenth birthday.

Ron Low, a former Oiler, remembered Fuhr’s early years in a Sports Illustrated feature. “Grant never played in the minors,” Low said. “We all knew he was great from the first day of camp. A natural. Yet he had no style. Or, rather, his style was all styles. He would come out 15 feet to challenge the shot on one offensive rush. The next time he would be back in his crease. He could read the game so well. He anticipated the game. Grant was just … different. Different from anyone I’d ever seen.” Fuhr honed his skills by practicing against his high-scoring teammates such as Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier, as formidable a pair of offensive players as can be found anywhere. Quickly Fuhr improved his reflexes and grasped every nuance of the game, becoming expert at both instinctive plays and strategic moves.

Fuhr helped the Oilers to advance to the playoffs in his rookie season as well as his sophomore year. By 1984 the seeds of the dominant Oilers team had been sown. In that Stanley Cup season, Fuhr turned in ten playoff wins. The following season he stunned the league by earning 15 playoff victories as the Oilers won another Cup. In the 1985-86 season the team once again advanced to the playoffs, and Fuhr stood in the goal even though he had spent several sleepless nights by his adoptive father’s deathbed. When Edmonton contended for the Stanley Cup again in the spring of 1987, Fuhr had an astounding goals-against average of 2.46 through nineteen games. He was universally feared as a cool hand in the game’s most stressful position and was considered nearly unbeatable in the clutch. Barry Pederson of the Vancouver Canucks summed up the exceptional talents of Grant Fuhr in Sports Illustrated. “Bar none, Grant Fuhr is the best goalie in the league,” Pederson said. “He has the fastest reflexes. Sometimes his concentration might drift during inconsequential games. But in the big-money games Fuhr is the best. He’s the Cup goalie. It’s sure not by luck.”

A five-time All-Star, Fuhr was chosen to be the starting goalie in the 1987 Canada Cup games against the Soviet Union’s national team. Although Team Canada’s roster also featured star goalies Kelly Hrudey of the New York Islanders and Ron Hextall of the Philadelphia Flyers, Fuhr started all three games and helped the Canadians to beat the Soviets for the Cup. Wiley called Fuhr’s performance in that series “breathtakingly effective.” Fuhr then turned in yet another stellar season with Edmonton in 1988, earning the Vezina Trophy as the league’s best goaltender.

With such success to his credit, Fuhr was allowed to go his own way off the ice with little supervision. Perhaps not surprisingly, he ran into trouble, financial and otherwise. In the early years of his contract, Fuhr’s salary was extremely modest by the standards of professional sports. He paid little attention as his extravagant ways led him into debt. In retrospect, Fuhr told Sports Illustrated that he was “a kid who did some dumb things.” He added, for instance: “When my clothes were dirty, I just threw them in the closet and went out and bought something else.” Fuhr now admits that overspending was only one of his problems. He fell in with a fast crowd and began to use cocaine—not to the point of addiction, but certainly to the point that it added to his financial woes.

In 1990 Fuhr came forward about his drug use after spending two weeks in a counseling center in Florida. He admitted that he used “a substance”—he did not say cocaine—for some seven years, or most of the period that the Oilers rested at the top of the NHL. Details of Fuhr’s drug use were supplied by the player’s ex-wife, Corrine, who told the press in Edmonton that she often found cocaine hidden in Fuhr’s clothing and that she fielded numerous threatening telephone calls from drug dealers who had not been paid. These embarrassing details no doubt added to the severity of Fuhr’s one-year suspension from the National Hockey League. The suspension was handed down in September of 1990 by NHL president John Ziegler, who called Fuhr’s conduct “dishonorable and against the welfare of the league.”

Many observers felt that the year-long suspension was too harsh. Fuhr had, after all, acknowledged the problem and had sought treatment for it. He had also tested free of drugs for a year before the suspension even began. Taking these factors into consideration, the NHL reinstated Fuhr in Februrary of 1991. However, age will inevitably become a factor in Fuhr’s play as he tops thirty, but his worst enemy is injury. After years of recurring tendonitis in his left shoulder, he has undergone surgery and has had the joint pinned. He will also rejoin a team that has lost Wayne Gretzky and must therefore work twice as hard to retain its luster.

These difficulties do not seem insurmountable to Grant Fuhr. Now remarried, he is taking each day in stride and is even planning for his future beyond professional hockey. “Life is going to happen,” he told Sports Illustrated. “That’s a goalie’s philosophy.” The former Vezina Trophy winner said that nothing—not bad publicity, not race, and especially not public opinion—will shake his confidence in himself and his game. “You’re an individual,” he said, “and you should be accepted as such. Some people don’t like to do that, so they might have a problem. Well, it doesn’t bother me. If it doesn’t bother me, then it shouldn’t bother anybody else. See, I know that I’m not dumb, or anything else anybody says I am. And as long as I know that, I have no problem.”