He Leads, Winning Follows

The coldest room in California, the ice rink in Culver City, is as peaceful as the North Pole this morning and Paul Coffey is upstairs, shirtless, toweling off after a long ride on an exercise bike. He is 31 years old and keeps in shape. He has to. Something in the slippery corners of a rink inside his mind tells him that he must.

“Do you know what motivates hockey players most? What motivates athletes most?” Coffey asks. “Fear of failure.”

Not trophies, not money, not glory?

“Not if you ask me.”

Someone from a political party could do a background check on Paul Coffey in search of a personal failure on his part and come up empty. Wherever Coffey goes, winners follow. He played for the Edmonton Oilers. He played for the Pittsburgh Penguins. Now he has become the defensive backbone of the L.A. Kings, hockey’s most improved team, in his first full season as one of them.

Leadership? Could this be what Coffey brings to the Kings?

He claims no such credit, but he does volunteer this: “I’m a firm believer in leaders. It’s like the military. Somebody at the top has to be doing something right. Somebody has to be calling the shots.”

So, let us consider L.A.’s leadership. The Kings have lost Wayne Gretzky indefinitely. They have lost Tomas Sandstrom for several weeks. Elder statesman Larry Robinson is retired, and their acting captain, Luc Robitaille, is 26. Their general manager has never been one before. Neither has their head coach.

And yet, as of this morning, no NHL team other than Pittsburgh or Montreal has won more games than the Kings.

Coffey can’t explain this with any logic that could be offered as actual proof, yet he has been around long enough to recognize a few simple truths. One is, harking back to his emphasis on leadership, the job being done by Barry Melrose, the team’s new coach.

Says Coffey: “From Day 1 at Lake Arrowhead (training camp), when he gathered 70 of us together and looked us all in the eye and told us what he expected of us, the man has had this team playing with a purpose.”

Days later, this team lost Gretzky, maybe for good. Coffey, not being crazy, knows what Gretz can do for a hockey club. They played together at Edmonton. Coffey has, in fact, had the luxury of spending most of his career at the side of either Gretzky or Mario Lemieux, which is a nice place for a defenseman to spend time.

Yet, what happens to some teams when the star player gets hurt? The other players start trying harder. They redouble their efforts. They stop waiting for the superstar to make things happen. They start making things happen themselves.

“It’s not inconceivable,” Coffey says. “Pittsburgh kept playing good hockey after Mario got hurt. Guys realize they can’t get by on sheer talent. They go out and skate harder, hit harder. They play harder.”

Pittsburgh experienced leadership blows of many kinds when Coffey was there. One day, Coffey was playing in a Canada Cup series when word got back to him that the Penguins’ coach, Bob Johnson, was very ill. Next thing Coffey knew, there was an exhibition game at Denver and the hospital where Johnson was a patient had transported him, weak and frail, to watch the team play.

“He didn’t even look like himself,” Coffey recalls. “It made you want to cry. Bob Johnson was a good coach and, more importantly, he was a good man.”

The Penguins won a second Stanley Cup without him, in spite of Johnson’s death having rocked the entire team. They also won this second Cup without Coffey, who on Feb. 19 was sent to the Kings in a deal involving Brian Benning and a first-round draft pick. Coffey didn’t squawk. He saw such a deal coming. He merely asked Penguin management one thing: “Please, trade me to a winner.”

Two months later, there he was at the Northlands Coliseum at Edmonton, along with Gretzky and Jari Kurri. As an Oiler? No. As a King. In Game 4 of the playoffs, the Kings, trailing by 2-1 counts in the series and in the game, were electrified when Coffey scored two goals to open the final period, two minutes apart.

He is that kind of player. Coffey was the man who broke Bobby Orr’s record for goals in one season by a defenseman. He was the third defenseman in NHL history--after Orr and Denis Potvin--to score 100 points. Of this season’s Kings, only Kurri, Robitaille and Sandstrom have scored more points than Coffey, who, remember, plays defense.

Slowing down? Some once said Coffey’s career was in decline. And, hey, since breaking some of Orr’s records, the man has sat out games because of back spasms, sprained his right shoulder, bruised his right shoulder and torn cartilage in his knee in a collision with a referee.

Perhaps this is why his buddies back home in Ontario, the guys who have spent their years building airplanes in a factory, keep asking Coffey what he plans to do when he packs up his skates.

He says, “I honestly don’t know. I’m one of those guys who have never given a minute’s thought to my future. Sometimes I sit at my cottage up there and ask myself what I’d do without hockey, and I don’t have any answer.”

So, he stays and plays.

“I was talking one day to Gordie Howe, who played something like 32 seasons, and he said everybody kept asking him why he kept playing,” Coffey says. “He said: ‘Because there’s always more to learn.’ Maybe that’s why I won’t quit the game easily. Because there’s always more to learn.”

And more others can learn from playing with him.