Even a Heart Attack Fails to Slow the Plans of Coach Gary Green

When he felt the sharp pain in his chest, Gary Green wasn’t that surprised. The signals had been there for several weeks and he had ignored them. There had been chest pains before, though nothing like this. There had been heart palpitations. Green is a very bright young man. “But this time,” he said, “I was stupid. I just kept telling myself I was OK.”

Now, sitting at his desk in Peterborough, Ontario, he knew he was not OK. And yet, even then, nauseous and a little bit frightened, he couldn’t quite deal with the notion that at 33 he was having a heart attack. Once, when he was the youngest coach in the history of the National Hockey League--running the Washington Capitals--he made the comment on national television that he didn’t expect to live to be 50. But that had been half sarcastic, a crack made when he was tired and frustrated. Seven years later, there was no mistaking the symptoms.

And yet, he refused to accept what was happening. “I tidied up my desk and drove home,” he said. “I sat down and poured myself a drink. I thought maybe a good belt of whiskey would straighten me out. I couldn’t even swallow. That’s when I figured I’d better get to the hospital.”

Sharon Green kept the gas pedal near the floor all the way to the hospital. There, the doctors confirmed what Gary Green had suspected. “I was the youngest man to ever coach in the NHL,” he said six days later. “I was the youngest coach ever fired in the NHL. Now, I’m the youngest former coach to have a heart attack.”

He smiled. “I’ve always wanted to do things at a young age.”

Green had the heart attack Sept. 17. It was shocking, because he is young and vibrant. But it was not, to those who know him, all that surprising. He is a workaholic. Driving to the hospital that night, Sharon Green couldn’t help but think, “I’ve been trying to get him to slow down for 10 years.”

He always has been in a rush to do things. Even before he became the boy coach of the Capitals at 26, he had been extraordinarily precocious. He took two years to finish a three-year program in college. He retired as an active hockey player at 20 and at 21 was president of a hockey school. Two years later, he was the majority owner. At 23, he became head coach of the Peterborough Petes in the Ontario Junior Hockey Assn., lying about his age (he said he was 25) to do so. On Nov. 14, 1979, searching desperately for someone to lead their team to respectability, Capitals owner Abe Pollin and General Manager Max McNab, turned to Green.

“Max wanted him because of his hockey knowledge,” Pollin said recently. “I wanted him because he impressed me so much as a human being when I met him. I don’t think it’s possible to know Gary Green and not like him.”

Green took over a 4-10-2 team that season and brought it the respectability the franchise never had had. The Capitals missed the playoffs on the last night of the season. They spent much of the next season among the top 10 teams in the NHL. But a late-season collapse left them one game out of the playoffs again. The next fall, when the Capitals lost 12 of their first 13 games, Pollin fired Green and McNab.

“The whole time I was coach in Washington, the youngest-coach thing followed me around,” Green said. “It was a little bit like a circus sideshow. I didn’t mind it then, but I think if I coached again now I would be better able to just do my job and run the hockey club.

“I have no regrets, though. I wouldn’t have taken the job if I didn’t think it was the right move at the time for me. I still think it was.

“If I do have a regret, it’s the way I handled the firing. Abe called me at 9:30 in the morning. I’m not a fighter in the morning, I’m just not ready to go. If he had called me at 2 in the afternoon, I would have gone in there and shook him by the shoulders and said, ‘Abe, let’s not panic. We’re losing, but we’re going in the right direction. You knew when you hired me this would take time. You have to give the (Mike) Gartners, the (Ryan) Walters, the (Bobby) Carpenters and the (Rick) Greens time. They’re going to be stars, and we’ll get it done.”

Gary Green was right about Gartner and Carpenter and Walter and Rick Green. Gartner and Carpenter became 50-goal scorers. The trade of the latter two to Montreal a year later brought Rod Langway, who became the team’s leader and defensive rock. Gary Green, naturally, believes the Capitals would have become one of the NHL’s three best teams if he had stayed as coach.

Instead, he threw himself into his business and into television broadcasting. Two years ago, working for various outlets, he broadcast 103 hockey games. He has opened more of his Can-Am hockey schools, made a just-released hockey video, opened a restaurant in Peterborough (with Rick Green as his partner) and recently bought the Canadian rights to Coney Island hot dogs. In short, he never lost a step once out of hockey. There have been other coaching possibilities, interviews with Hartford and the New York Rangers, but the right spot hasn’t come along--yet.

“I still want to coach again,” he said. “But it doesn’t have to be right away. The need to rush is gone. Some people have told me I should have stayed in coaching in some way, but I’m still in hockey every day of my life. I teach, I coach other coaches, I do analysis. I’ve been very happy the last five years.

“I’d still like to coach a Stanley Cup champion. Who wouldn’t?”

Sharon Green, who met her husband when they were both 16 growing up in the tiny town of Tillsonburg, Ontario, thinks he needs to coach again. “He still feels like he didn’t completely meet that challenge,” she said. “It will bother him a little until he does it.”

He was admitted to Peterborough Civic Hospital on a Wednesday. Two days later, he was transferred to the cardiac-care unit at Toronto Western Hospital. En route to Toronto, the ambulance carrying him came upon a traffic accident. A woman had been hit by a streetcar. “I kept trying to tell them to get me out and her in,” Green said. “She was in a lot more pain than I was.”

Another ambulance showed up before Green could talk his way out of the ambulance. One night later, lying awake in bed, he craved pizza. So, he called a pizza joint that delivers. Only they wouldn’t deliver to the cardiac-care unit of the hospital. “I’ll meet you downstairs,” he said.

And so, off he went in his blue pajamas and brown polka-dot bathrobe, sneaking down nine floors on the elevator to meet the delivery truck on the corner of Dundas and Bathurst streets.

“I had to bribe the nurses because they caught me coming back,” he said. “I gave them enough of the pizza to keep them quiet.”

He is not a man who is apt to get depressed or down because of a heart attack. He insists that the thought of dying never crossed his mind. Sitting with Sharon, he is asked what ran through his mind on the way to the hospital. “All the damn money she was going to get,” he answered straight-faced.

He has been in the hospital 10 days. On Monday, an angiogram showed that his arteries were clear. But during the angiogram, he began having palpitations. That concerned the doctors, who decided to keep him around for more testing until they can be certain what is causing the palpitations. In addition to all the wires and tapes and blood tests, he was hooked up to a machine that monitored his heart rhythms.

He was fidgety. When a needle-wielding nurse approached him in the hall and asked his name, he answered: “My name is Gary Green and you are not taking any more blood from me.” The nurse fled. He grinned. A victory is a victory.

“I joke about all this and I really have been optimistic all along,” he said. “I want to get out of here because I’ve got work to do. The hockey season is starting soon. People have been great. Gordie Howe called and told me that some people would do anything to get their name in the newspaper. I’ve been telling people that I did this just to prove to my old players that I do have a heart.”

He turned serious. “Really, I’m embarrassed to be here. I would have preferred that people didn’t find out. I’m supposed to be strong and indestructible. I almost feel as if I failed somehow. The hardest thing was dealing with my parents. They seem to feel they somehow did something wrong. Like why didn’t they raise me to not be so driven. . . . My kids (Jennifer, 6, and Melissa, 5) have been great. I joke around when I see them so they don’t get worried. The other day at breakfast, they turned to Sharon and said, ‘Poor daddy, he has to eat that hospital mush.’ Boy were they right.”

He laughed again. He is easy to talk to even when he is sitting in a bathrobe that barely covers all the wires running up and down his chest. He is a little rounder than when he was the boy coach, but he still has the baby face, the light blue eyes and the easy smile that made him so popular.

“The one thing that’s been really hard,” he said, “have been the lectures. I tell half my friends that the way they work they could easily be in bed right next to me. I know I work hard. I always have. My father’s a farmer. I can remember him getting on the tractor at 5 in the morning and getting off it at 1 in the morning. That’s the way he is. My grandfather started our farm and he worked hard, too. He’s 87. The odds should be in my favor. This was a warning. I know I’ve been stupid. I’ll learn from this.”

Green’s younger brother Randy shakes his head when the question of slowing his brother down is raised. “There’s no way,” he said. “Can’t be done. That’s just not Gary’s way.”

Gary Green was released from the hospital last weekend. For now, he plans to continue his TV work--both the New Jersey Devils and the Winnipeg Jets have talked to him about doing analysis this season in addition to the Canadian college game of the week and the CBC game of the week. He is expanding his hockey-school empire. And, he has promised Sharon, he will delegate some responsibility.

And there is coaching.

“I like the idea that, if I went back to coaching again, I could just do the job,” he said. “I wouldn’t have to worry about money and I wouldn’t have the youngest-coach thing to deal with. I could just coach. I know more hockey now than I did when I was 26. A few years from now, I’ll know even more.

“I thought I did a good job in Washington. I like and respect Abe Pollin very much. He was a wonderful owner to work for.” Green paused and his eyes narrowed. “But he made a mistake firing me. I think he panicked.”

McNab, who was the general manager and a father figure to Green, thinks the mistake was in the hiring, not the firing. “We didn’t do Gary any favors making him the coach as fast as we did. We signed him to coach for two years in Hershey and we should have given him those two years. Instead, we made him coach in Washington two months later. It was probably too fast. Even for Gary.

“I’d love to see him back coaching. . . . Gary can be an excellent hockey coach.”

Green thinks so, too. Even in the hospital recovering from the scare of his life, he insisted that the pain he felt wasn’t comparable to what he felt five years ago on that morning at Capital Centre.

“In a way, neither the firing or the heart attack was unexpected,” he said. “I had warning signals both times. In a way, I feel like I should have had more control in both situations.”