(Editors’ note: This story was originally published in The Denver Post on Oct. 6, 1995.)
It’s a sound only the superstars of any sport can produce.
And it only happens in the opposing team’s building. It’s a kind of “ohhh” sound. Eighteen thousand people collectively make it when they’ve just seen a player from another team do something they’ve never seen before. There’s a curious mix of danger, surprise and awe in the sound, and it doesn’t happen often.
It happens rarer still at the Montreal Forum. For 71 years, the old building on St. Catherine Street has seen it all. Host to the great ones from Rocket Richard to Wayne Gretzky, it takes almost a supernatural occurrence to produce the “ohhh” sound in the Forum.
But it happened on the night of Sept. 18, when the Colorado Avalanche visited the Canadiens for an NHL exhibition game before a near-sellout crowd.
The Avalanche’s Peter Forsberg gained control of the puck along the left boards near the blue line, and looked to skate up ice with it. But before he could, Montreal’s Mark Recchi made a beeline for Forsberg, hoping to knock him into the boards and off the puck.
Forsberg had his face still pointed toward the glass, and there didn’t appear any way he could tell he was about to be hit.
But all of a sudden, Forsberg did a 180-degree turn from left to right, all while controlling the puck, almost as if it was magnetized to his stick.
Recchi went crashing into the boards, looking like a bull running into a red cape made of glass. Forsberg, leaving his prey looking foolish, never broke stride up the ice and eluded one more defender with a head fake before bearing down on Canadiens goalie Patrick Roy.
Ohhh.
Moves like those are leading many hockey observers already to call Forsberg, “Peter The Great.”
The 22-year-old Avalanche center’s name is starting to be whispered in the same hushed tones reserved for the Gretzkys, Lemieuxs and Lindroses of the hockey world.
In his first year in the league last season for the Quebec Nordiques, Forsberg was the winner of the Calder Trophy for the NHL’s rookie of the year.
Some think he’ll win a Hart Trophy as NHL most valuable player before too long, and many think he’ll be to hockey in Denver what John Elway is to football.
But the last person saying any of these things is Forsberg. Trying to get the shy young man from Ornskoldsvik, Sweden, to say anything complimentary about himself is like trying to find a shady spot in the Sahara Desert.
“Oh, I won’t win a Hart (Trophy). I’m not going to be in the same level as those guys, so I don’t worry about that,” Forsberg said with a modest shrug. “This year’s going to be
tough and I just have to do my best. I don’t think I’m better than anybody. I don’t think I’ll ever be cocky or anything like that.”
But the way Forsberg dominates play when he’s on the ice, it sounds almost ridiculous when he says he made sure he finished high school because he worried about not being good enough to make the pros.
With the bank account he has now, it sounds just as preposterous to hear him say how he almost thought he might have a career in economics and not the NHL.
But as you listen to Forsberg talk about his growing up, the pieces to the puzzle as to why he’s so humble and shy begin to fit.
Growing up in Ornskoldsvik (pop. 60,000), Forsberg not only had to compete for attention with and from an older brother, but his father as well.
His brother Roger is 2 years older than Peter, and keeping up in every way was tough. His father was the hockey coach of a junior team in town, and he made sure he played no favorites with either son as they battled for ice time.
“It was like anything else, always fighting for things – it was pretty funny,” Forsberg said of his relationship with his brother. “He was a good player, so it was pretty natural for me to follow along. He was better than me in everything in the beginning, but we were pretty even after awhile.”
And then, the younger Forsberg started becoming better than his brother, and everyone else in Ornskoldsvik. That’s why, at age 16, he moved out of the house to play for Modo Jr. of the Swedish junior league.
After a 1990-91 season in which he scored 38 goals and had 102
points in 39 games for Modo Jr., Forsberg moved up to the next
level, the Modo Elite team.
Later that year, he was drafted by Philadelphia with the sixth choice in the first round of the NHL entry draft.
At age 18, Forsberg had to choose between joining the Flyers right away, or staying in Sweden to continue playing for Modo.
“I didn’t feel mature enough to go and play 84 games, and I just wanted to stay home. And I had school to finish there,” Forsberg said.
Forsberg continued to play hockey in Sweden, right through the 1993-94 season. But by then, he was property of the Nordiques, who acquired Forsberg along with five players, two draft picks and $15 million for Eric Lindros in June of 1992.
At the end of the ’93-94 season for Modo, Forsberg was selected to the Swedish National Team for the 1994 Olympic games in Lillehammer, Norway.
By then, Forsberg had gained a reputation as the best player not in the NHL, and he showed why in the gold-medal game against Team Canada.
In a shootout against the Canadians, Forsberg scored the goal that gave the gold to Sweden.
Skating in on Canada goalie Corey Hirsch, Forsberg went one way with his body, while his stick and the puck went the other, into the net.
The goal was immortalized on a Swedish postage stamp, and suddenly one of the shyest persons you’d ever want to meet was a national hero. Still, Forsberg remembers the moment with modesty.
“I don’t think there was anything special about the move. It was the save by (former Denver Grizzlies goalie) Tommy Salo that made us win the gold,” Forsberg said. “But that was a great tournament for us, and I think I’ll always remember that.”
Partly because of his Olympic performance, Forsberg signed a huge contract with the Nordiques, one which paid him nearly $3 million (Canadian) last season.
“I had a pretty big paycheck, so some guys were a little bit
upset about it,” Forsberg said.
But it didn’t take long for the rookie to show the money was well spent. Forsberg helped re-energize what had been a moribund franchise, scoring 15 goals and 50 points in the lockout-shortened season.
The big question about Forsberg was whether he’d be tough enough to handle play in the NHL, because most Europeans come stereotyped as too soft physically for the rough play in the league.
But that question soon was put to rest as well.
“You can’t knock him off the puck,” said teammate Joe Sakic, a five-team all-star. “A lot of Europeans have that tag, but he’s really strong. He’s just tremendous on and off the ice. He’s a great teammate, and he’s not a limelight kind of guy.”
And not being a lover of the limelight was a difficult proposition for Forsberg in Quebec City. With only one major sport in town, Forsberg and the rest of the Nordiques were often the only outlet for the sporting public and the media to focus.
With an inability to speak much French, Forsberg found it hard to communicate with many people in the city. He couldn’t understand the newspapers, and he couldn’t go to any movies because they were all in French.
“It was a little boring at times, and it was a little tough to leave Sweden for the first time,” he said. “English is not my best language, but French is absolutely not my best. But the media pressure wasn’t so bad for me, because they knew I didn’t know any French, so they left me alone a lot.”
But the hockey part was fun. The Nordiques had the second-best record in hockey, and Forsberg looked forward to showing up at the Quebec Colisee.
But just when it looked as though he might settle into a comfortable niche in the city, the team was sold to Comsat Entertainment Group and moved to Denver in May.
So far, the adjustment to Denver has been a lot easier than the one to Quebec.
“Oh yeah, it’s a nice place,” Forsberg said. “We haven’t been there much because of the preseason (travel), but it’s a pretty good place to have to come to.”
He likes the number of golf courses in the city, and even though he’s not a party-all-night kind of person, he likes the variety of things to do at night in Denver as well.
But for now, all that matters is hockey and the Colorado Avalanche doing well on the ice.
“It was so much fun last year because we had such a good team,” Forsberg said. “It just makes everything so much easier. It’s no fun to lose, I really hate it.”
Forsberg’s contract is up in two years, and it will doubtless take a king’s ransom to keep Forsberg with the Avalanche.
And although it’s easy to say when you have so much of it, money really doesn’t seem to have any impact on Forsberg.
For him, a perfect day is to get up a little late, play some golf and then lie down and watch television. Wild shopping sprees and a garage full of sports cars don’t seem that important to him.
“I hope I don’t get like that. I don’t think I will,” he said.
Still, Forsberg sometimes can’t help but sit around and think about how far he’s come in such a short time. It wasn’t that long ago that he was getting noogies on the side of his head from his brother in Ornskoldsvik.
“I don’t think about that stuff often, but sometimes you think about it,” he said. “Like, guys you went to school with and they’re probably still studying and here I am, traveling around the world every day. It’s a little bit different, but I don’t think I’m better than any of those guys.
“I’m just glad I’m pretty good at one sport.”
Adrian Dater: adater@denverpost.com or at
