The Vancouver Canucks took a swing at nostalgia on Tuesday night while honoring the late John Garrett, rolling out tributes across the building and even serving up some of his favorite foods in the press box.
Then came the trivia. Marcia McNaughton answered all three questions correctly and set off a hot dog giveaway, with the toughest prompt digging up one of the most colorful moments from Garrett’s NHL days: the night he tried to fight Mario Lemieux.
That showdown goes back to Lemieux’s rookie year, 1984-85, when the 19-year-old made his home debut for the Pittsburgh Penguins on Oct. 17. He had already lost on the road to the Boston Bruins and Montreal Canadiens, and against Vancouver he wasted no time getting involved, assisting on the opening goal just 18 seconds into the game.
From there, the temperature rose fast. Gary Lupul got in Lemieux’s grill in the defensive zone, and Lemieux said Lupul had speared him twice.
“Lupul hit me twice in the stomach with his stick,” said Lemieux after the game to Arv Olson of the Vancouver Sun. “The first time I thought it was an accident. The second time I dropped my gloves.”
Lupul owned up to making contact, but insisted he was only trying to tie up the rookie near the net.
“I might have jabbed him,” Lupul admitted after the game. “But I was just trying to hold him to tie him up at the side of our net.”
Lupul was known as a scrappy player, but at five-foot-eight he was no match for Lemieux’s size and strength. That’s when Garrett jumped in.
“Gary Lupul’s my size, so I come diving over the top rope,” recalled Garrett nearly forty years later on After Hours with Scott Oake.
The goalie was hit with a two-minute minor for leaving his crease during an altercation and a game misconduct as the third man in. Lemieux also picked up an extra roughing minor on top of his fighting major.
“Lupul was an instigator at the time,” recalled Lemieux in 2002. “He just got under my skin a little bit and, being young and foolish, I dropped the gloves.”
Garrett’s intervention fit into a strange bit of symmetry, too. His only career fight had come the season before, also against the Penguins, when he went after agitator Gary Rissling during a huge seven-point night from Patrick Sundstrom. Garrett tried to keep his teammates out of it then, but Lupul ignored the warning and jumped in to help, drawing a third-man-in game misconduct of his own.
Lupul didn’t think much of Lemieux’s fighting ability.
“If he ever takes on someone who knows how to fight, he’ll get his ass kicked,” said Lupul to Olson. “He didn’t land one [punch]. When he started swinging, I just ducked down and held my hands in front of my face.”
The skirmish had another casualty, too. Penguins defenceman Rod Buskas sucker-punched Michel Petit, leaving Petit with an estimated 50 stitches and plastic surgery to repair his lip.
Garrett never got the chance to land a punch of his own, but he did get a few words in while the scrum was on.
“I said, ‘Hey Mario, you’ll never make it. Anybody can score a thousand points in the Quebec league. You’ll never make it, you’re nothing but a big goon,'” said Garrett later to Oake on After Hours.
Lemieux answered that challenge in the years that followed. He finished his rookie season with 43 goals and 100 points in 73 games, then went on to rack up well over a thousand points in the NHL. His career ended with 690 goals and 1,723 points in 915 games.
In the end, Garrett was off the mark on the hockey prophecy, but not on the good humor. As he put it, “Every time we see each other, he laughs about it with me, so that’s good.”
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