bad enough but perfectly explainable. It wasn’t just hockey players — everybody from schoolboys to actors had them way back when they were fashionable. But Kerry Fraser lives in a world where bouffants are perpetually cool. According to the Oxford Dictionary, bouffant means “puffed out” — kind of a mullet on steroids, in other words. Marie Antoinette is credited with inventing the hairstyle when she was the French queen; her bouffant died, of course, along with the rest of her when her head became dislodged. If Leafs fans had their way, the punishment inflicted upon Fraser for the events of May 27, 1993, would make the guillotine look dignified by comparison.
It was Game 6 of the Campbell Conference Final and the Leafs had a 3–2 lead in their best-of-seven series after their overtime exploits two days earlier. One more Leafs victory was all it would take to set up a dream Stanley Cup Final between Toronto and the Montreal Canadiens.
Kerry Fraser was one of the NHL’s most respected officials, and he now dabbles in media commentary. Leafs fans will never forget his gaffe in Game 5 of the 1993 Campbell Conference Final, however. The perfectly manicured hair only added to the angst.
Courtesy of Graig Abel.
Playing in Los Angeles, the Leafs’ Wendel Clark had completed a hat trick, scoring late to tie the game 4–4 and forcing overtime. With the Leafs’ Glenn Anderson having drawn a penalty late in regulation, they took to the ice knowing they had to kill off the Kings power play to prevent the series returning to Toronto for a Game 7.
Wayne Gretzky, largely an inert presence to that point in the game, was starting to find his mojo. Both Gretzky and the Leafs captain, Doug Gilmour, were on the ice when Gretzky attempted to shoot the puck toward the Toronto goal. The shot was blocked before it reached goaltender Felix Potvin, and Gretzky and Gilmour reacted instinctively, heading toward the deflected puck.
Gretzky missed the puck and clipped Gilmour on the chin. Gilmour went down in a heap, bleeding, and play was whistled dead. No one doubted the hit was unintentional but it was equally beyond doubt that Gilmour was fouled, perhaps grievously so given the blood pouring from his chin.
The television footage shows Fraser, who would normally drink in the thick air of the spotlight on such occasions, looking like a child scared out of his wits. He later claimed that he had asked Gilmour what happened and that the Leafs captain had told him Gretzky had clipped him on the “follow-through.” It was a critical distinction because in the early 1990s, like now, hitting an opposing player while “following through” shooting the puck was not normally a penalty.
The Wayne Gretzky–led Los Angeles Kings and Wendel Clark’s Leafs engaged in an epic playoff battle in late May 1993.
Courtesy of Graig Abel.
There was also some doubt at the time as to whether Gilmour was struck by the deflected puck or by Gretzky’s stick, to the point that the NHL offices cited the confusion as part of the league’s official explanation for why a penalty wasn’t called.
Replays of the incident — widely available on YouTube in raw video but also in many hilarious spoof formats — show Fraser feverishly consulting with his linesmen Kevin Collins and Ron Finn. Linesmen are allowed to call stick infractions, or at very least advise the referee that an offence had taken place.
Although admitting that it was a missed call all these years later, Fraser maintains that he never saw the infraction. There is one huge problem with his recollection: the replay clearly shows that he had an unobstructed view to the incident. Fraser never saw Gilmour being fouled because his head was turned toward the Leafs goal anticipating the puck arriving there. Gretzky and Gilmour were reacting to the puck being blocked before getting to the net but Fraser failed to pick up on it. To put that oversight into perspective, even Bob Cole, who has been missing broadcast calls in his own unique manner for the past thirty years, could see that the puck never made it to Potvin’s crease.
Fraser simply missed what at the very least should have been a minor penalty. That miss, combined with the official explanation from the NHL office, which was clearly at odds with the so-called following-through argument, burns the collective soul of Leafs Nation to this day.
Perhaps even more telling was the look on Gretzky’s face at the time. Like all superstar athletes, Gretzky had an understated swagger. When he was on the ice, his face rarely changed from that of a determined, singularly focused athlete. But the look on Gretzky’s face as Fraser and his two confederates deliberated was more like a worried schoolboy than a confident superstar. The only other expression that approached the one Gretzky wore for a brief moment that night came almost five years later when he was left on the bench during a shootout at the 1998 Winter Olympics as Canada lost to the Czech Republic.
During the Hockey Night in Canada broadcast of the game, analyst Harry Neale asked, “Wouldn’t this be something if Wayne Gretzky was thrown out for a high stick?” It would have been something all right, but Fraser made no call. And so it turned out to be nothing and Gretzky remained on the ice without so much as a minor penalty as Gilmour went to the Leafs dressing room to be stitched up.
With seconds left in that same Kings power play, the game’s greatest-ever player took a nice feed from Luc Robitaille and deposited the puck behind Potvin to win the game.
The Kings lived to fight another night and sent the series back to Toronto for the deciding Game 7. Two nights later Gretzky scored three more times to clinch the series for the Kings with another 5–4 win. Gretzky later called it the best game of his incomparable career.
For the Leafs, their best opportunity to win the Stanley Cup since 1967 swung, literally, on a missed call. And by a man who, for all his later regret, gave off an air of indifference, an unspoken “Do you really think that I, a man of such brilliance, could miss something so important?”
There are Leafs fans out there who, without a shred of evidence, claimed that this was all part of a big conspiracy perpetrated by the head office to deny a Leafs–Habs final, which would have run counter to their plans of expanding the game into sunnier climes. These fans, who are otherwise sensible human beings, swore that the “fix” was in that night — a claim that gathered some steam when Don Cherry hinted that he, too, believed something fishy had happened.
There are no shortage of Leafs fans, often perched on a bar stool and with the help of one too many drinks, who still feel the need to regale those around them with their theory that NHL commissioner Gary Bettman may have been involved. It’s enough to make 9/11 Truthers blush, and it’s all codswallop, of course, but it gives you a sense just how much the thought of Kerry Fraser still stings, even now, two decades later.
Wayne Gretzky and Doug Gilmour shake hands at the conclusion of the Kings’ victory in Game 7.
Courtesy of Graig Abel.
Though it was the most blatant example, that 1993 missed call by Kerry Fraser was not the only one that has cost the Leafs over the years. The next incident came late in the 2006–07 season, when the Leafs were battling the New York Islanders (and others) for the final playoff spot in the Eastern Conference. That night Fraser inexplicably put himself in the midst of another season-defining incident.
Fraser was officiating the game, which took place
