Unloved in Canada, Carson Is Glad He Found a Way Out

Outside the visitors’ locker room Tuesday morning at the Northlands Coliseum, three teen-age girls gathered to have their pictures taken with Jimmy Carson of the Detroit Red Wings.

“See,” Coach Jacques Demers of the Red Wings told reporters standing nearby, “Jimmy has friends in Edmonton. Three of them.”

On the whole, though, this town hardly misses Carson, a 49-goal scorer and All-Star game center in his only season with the Edmonton Oilers after having been acquired in the trade that sent Wayne Gretzky to the Kings on Aug. 9, 1988. It was viewed as a wildly unpopular deal across Canada.

In Edmonton fans’ eyes, Carson, 21, is the spoiled American brat who wanted out almost from the time he first landed at Edmonton International Airport, asking several times last season to be traded.

He’s the one who up and quit the Oilers last October, saying, in effect, that he would rather not play at all than have to play in Edmonton, eventually forcing the deal that sent him home to Detroit three weeks later.

On Tuesday night, Oiler fans made their feelings known, showering Carson with boos and catcalls as the Red Wings defeated the Oilers, 6-4, in Detroit’s only appearance of the season at the Northlands Coliseum.

Read one sign, hanging next to a stuffed Oiler sweater with Carson’s name on the back: “We Hang Wimps, Whiners and Quitters.”

Carson knew it was coming.

“I’m expecting the worst,” he had told reporters Monday.

But as he ate breakfast Tuesday at a downtown hotel, Carson admitted to no regrets about the drastic move he had made to bring about his trade to the Red Wings.

In fact, he said, it couldn’t have turned out any better.

“Not at all,” he said. “And I think that’s what people (here) are a little upset about. They can’t stand it.”

Carson was born in the Detroit suburb of Southfield, Mich., grew up in the more affluent Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe Woods and had followed the Red Wings from the time he first laced on a pair of skates.

His father, Chuck, owned parking lots surrounding the Red Wings’ former home, the Olympia Auditorium, and as a youth Jimmy often skated with his heroes, the Red Wings. His favorite was Marcel Dionne, later a teammate with the Kings, and Carson watched many a game from the lap of Dionne’s wife, Carol.

Last November, at a news conference to announce the trade that sent Carson, Kevin McClelland and a 1991 fifth-round draft choice to the Red Wings for Petr Klima, Joe Murphy, Adam Graves and Jeff Sharples, Carson said: “I’ve waited a long time to put this jersey on.”

Ironically, the Red Wings could have had Carson all along. But, instead of taking Carson with the No. 1 pick in the 1986 NHL draft, they took Murphy, who was a major disappointment in Detroit.

Meanwhile, Carson thrived.

And, truth be known, he never wanted to leave Los Angeles.

He was a rising star with the Kings, establishing since-broken NHL records for a U.S.-born player with 55 goals and 107 points two seasons ago, when he became the first teen-ager other than Gretzky to score more than 50 goals in a season.

The trade to the Oilers pained him immeasurably.

He had only recently furnished his new home in Redondo Beach, and owner Bruce McNall of the Kings had offered to renegotiate his contract.

“Things were rolling so smoothly in L.A. and then, suddenly, the roof caved in,” he said. “What did I do to deserve it?”

Looking on the bright side at the time, Carson told a reporter on the day that the Gretzky trade was announced that he at least was one step closer to the Stanley Cup than he had been the day before.

It was only a brave front.

He didn’t want to have to live up to Gretzky’s memory, he didn’t want to pay Canadian taxes, he didn’t want to deal with the tightfisted Oiler management and he didn’t want to live outside the United States.

“I knew this wasn’t the place for me,” he said. “I knew, financially, this was the wrong place to come.”

Carson was determined from the beginning to play out his option, get out after two years and sign with a U.S. team. But he grew increasingly disenchanted and asked last season to be traded.

A deal with the Red Wings fell through last February, however, and Carson finished the season, unhappily, with the Oilers.

Last summer, he decided that this season would be his last in Edmonton. If the Oilers wouldn’t trade him, he’d play out his option.

“But then I realized, ‘I have to have a great year to get out of here, to keep my marketability up,’ ” he said. “But I said to myself, ‘I’m not in the right frame of mind to have a good year because I want to get out of here so badly.’ I decided I had to do something drastic.”

And so he did.

Last Oct. 14, after having been benched the night before in the third period of a 3-3 tie against the Boston Bruins, he walked out.

“I called (Coach) John Muckler and said, ‘John, I’ve finally faced reality here,’ ” Carson said. “ ‘I’m going to have a terrible year. I’m not going to play well.’ I said, ‘It will be in your best interests to trade me. I’m just useless out there.’ ”

Muckler was shocked.

“But at the same time, I said to myself, ‘It will be done,’ ” Muckler said. “You could see that he didn’t want to play. He had no intensity.”

A former teammate, Oiler defenseman Kevin Lowe, said that Carson might have figured, incorrectly, that he would never be fully accepted by Gretzky’s former teammates, most of whom are still Gretzky’s closest friends.

Said Muckler: “I’m trying to think, why? Why didn’t he fit in? Why didn’t he want to fit in? I think he could have. I just don’t think he wanted to. I don’t think he wanted to be in a Canadian city.”

And maybe, Muckler said, he just didn’t want to be an Oiler.

“We tried to change him,” Muckler said. “He was an individualist when he left L.A. He did things he wanted to do and nobody told him otherwise. And when he came here, we tried to teach him to be an all-around player. He had difficulty with that.

“Not that he didn’t try. He tried to a certain point, then kind of gave up and said, ‘This is not what I wanted to do.’ ”

Carson returned to Los Angeles to spend time with his girlfriend, Paula Alexander, a theater major at UCLA. After about 10 days in Los Angeles, he moved on to Detroit to wait it out with his parents.

Finally, on Nov. 2, he was traded to the Red Wings.

“The best thing that ever happened for the organization, and for Jimmy, is that he forced our hand,” Muckler said. “We’re a better team without Jimmy Carson and Jimmy Carson is happier in Detroit, playing in his hometown.”

The Oilers, all but left for dead last April when they squandered a three-games-to-one lead and were eliminated by the Kings in the first round of the playoffs, are the leaders of the Smythe Division.

And Carson, despite a knee injury that forced him to miss seven games last month, has scored 15 goals in 26 games with the Red Wings.

“He’s happy now,” Demers said of Carson, who sat with his future coach at a Detroit Tiger baseball game last summer and asked if Demers could speak with Jimmy Devellano, the Red Wings’ general manager, about arranging a trade. “It’s evident in the way he’s playing. He’s among friends.”

Carson’s decision to leave Edmonton “took guts,” Demers said.

A more mature player wouldn’t have done it, Muckler said.

“I think he’ll look back on it and say he could have done it a different way and ended up with the same results,” Muckler said. “He just went about it the wrong way. He just acted like a 21-year-old man, I guess. I don’t want to say ‘boy’ because that doesn’t sound very good.”

Carson, who will return to the Forum Thursday night when the Red Wings face the Kings, believed that he had run out of options.

“I’d seen the owner,” he said. “I’d seen the coach. I’d seen the general manager. They knew what I wanted, but they weren’t going to give it to me unless I forced their hand.”

When he did, Carson knew that he would be castigated.

It has bothered him that he has been portrayed by some as a quitter and a crybaby, and that some have called him selfish.

All he did, Carson said, was change jobs, just as anybody else might if he didn’t enjoy what he was doing.

“In the long run, and the short run, I’ve benefited,” he said. “A lot of people wish they could do what I did.”