UKRAINIAN PRO HOCKEY UPDATE (12/01/96)

UKRAINIAN PRO HOCKEY UPDATE

by Ihor Stelmach

Ray Martyniuk: "The Can-Miss Kid"

Right up until the moment he stepped on the ice at the old Montreal Forum back in September of 1970, Ray Martyniuk lived the Canadian prairie hockey dream.

Granted, that wacky bit about wrapping toilet paper around the net in Winnipeg was a little outrageous even for Ray, but he was a local boy playing for the hometown team, the Flin Flon Bombers. He was also pretty good - the top goaltender in the Western League (unions) for two straight years.

It didn't much matter that he had only a sixth-grade education and went to work full-time at Hudson Bay Mining and Smelting in Flin Flon when he was just 15. The only future he foresaw for himself in the summer of 1970 was with the Montreal Canadiens, the NHL powerhouse franchise that had selected him in the first round, fifth over all, in that year's NHL entry draft.

Martyniuk signed up with high-profile agent Bob Woolf, who represented Boston sports legends John Havlicek (a Celtics Hall-of-Famer) and Carl Yastrzemski (a Red Sox superstar). Martyniuk was prepared to take on the whole world.

But that fateful fall, this small-town lad did not fare very well in the big city of Montreal. The Canadiens' top selection, sandwiched between Rejean Houle in 1969 and Guy Lafleur in 1971, was sent to the minor leagues and actually never returned. Way back then he was labeled "The Can-Miss Kid."

Only two other goaltenders, John Davidson by the St. Louis Blues in 1973 and Tom Barasso by the Buffalo Sabres in 1983, have ever been chosen as high as fifth over all. Yet of the 130 top-five draft picks between 1994 and the introduction of the universal amateur draft in 1969, Martyniuk is the only one never to play in a single NHL game.

It all began when he first graced the ice with superstars such as the venerable Henri Richard, Jean Beliveau and even Rogie Vachon at training camp, only to fall flat on his face.

It was the skates, Martyniuk explained. They weren't sharpened properly. He preferred them done like the arena manager back at Flin Flon Arena did them. They had to be done that way because, unlike most netminders who slide from side to side in their crease, Martyniuk hopped. He did not actually start playing the goal position until he was 14; up to then he was a forward. But Montreal's trainer did not understand any of this specially requested skate sharpening.

"Rogie likes it this way, Rogie likes it this way," the trainer said.

"I'm not Rogie," Martyniuk deftly replied.

And so it went. It was two days into training camp before someone clued the befuddled Martyniuk in on why Montreal coach Claude Ruel kept glaring at him during a particular skating drill. He was going too fast. Somehow Martyniuk had not heard the proper skating instructions.

"Claude Ruel," Martyniuk readily admits, "is not one of my favorite people."

Today, Martyniuk is a carefree, regret-free 47-year-old living in Cranbrook, British Columbia, where he has worked in the service department for Coca-Cola, repairing and installing vending machines for the past 17 years. He admits he still gets calls from hockey writers fairly often, usually around entry draft time.

'"I make it every year," Martyniuk says. "Sam Pollock's (legendary Montreal G.M.) worst draft."

Martyniuk was small at 5-foot-9 and 155 pounds, but lightning quick. Then-St. Louis Blues' general manager Scotty Bowman called him the best goalie prospect he'd seen in 20 years. Players like Flin Flon teammates Bobby Clarke and Reggie Leach say he had all the talent in the world. And also the temperament to waste it all by the wayside. He was a great athlete from the shoulders down, but from the neck up he was a total mess.

"That'd be about right," Martyniuk concedes. "I didn't know what to expect. All I wanted to do was play hockey."

He stuck around that first training camp long enough to see his buddy Glenn Resch off to Muskegon, but soon he, too, was demoted, off to Kansas City, Halifax and Seattle in his first season alone.

He went on to play 11 seasons of professional hockey with 11 different teams in four different leagues. He won best goalie in the old Central League in 1974-1975 with a sparkling 2.96 goals-against average and felt he was ready for a second genuine NHL shot, but his flaky reputation stood in his way.

"He was off the wall," Clarke says. "He was really well-conditioned and worked on off-ice conditioning when no one else did. The rest of us were playing hockey and drinking beer, and he was way ahead of us."

Martyniuk says running marathons in Flin Flon had nothing to do with conditioning. It was just something he did.

The skate problem continued to plague him. The trainer with the Canadiens' top farm club, the Nova Scotia Voyageurs, where Martyniuk spent part of his rookie season with Ken Dryden, was dumbfounded.

"He says, 'Prof, this guy's nuts,'" recalls then-Voyageurs' coach Ron Caron. "'You won't believe what he wants me to do. He wants me to sharpen one skate and he'll put the skate on and he'll give me an answer.'"

"He was a typical goaltender," Leach says. "He did a lot of strange things."

Of course, there was the time in junior hockey when he took the toilet paper Winnipeg fans threw at him and proceeded to wrap the entire roll around his own goal net, just for fun. The Winnipeg faithful also pelted him with sausages.

In Halifax, during practice a day before the home opener, he fired a puck off his own defenseman's helmet and almost started a brawl. Apparently the defenseman had fired a shot too close to Martyniuk's own head in a shooting drill and the frustrated Ukrainian netminder did not appreciate the close call.

He did not mellow at all with age or experience. He actually fought his own defenseman during a senior hockey game for the Cranbrook Royals. The defenseman kept losing the puck behind his own net. One giveaway resulted in a point-blank shot that nearly led to Martyniuk's, uh, decapitation. The goalie and the blueliner cursed at each other as play turned up ice. Martyniuk then chased him to the blueline and started throwing haymakers.

"Imagine the play-by-play man calling the game," Martyniuk recalls. " 'There's a fight going on behind the play and it's two guys on the same team!' If I could do something a little weird to make people have fun or make them laugh, then I'd do it. I would do it all over again. I had some great times."

Today Martyniuk helps organize the lefty-righty best-ball tournament at the Cranbrook Golf Club, with proceeds going to the Children's Wish Foundation. This year's will be the sixth annual.

The ultimate end of Martyniuk's hockey career came sometime in the mid-1980s; he does not actually remember exactly when. The Royals lost 7-2 in the season's finale. When the team bus approached Moyie Lake on the way back to Cranbrook, Martyniuk ordered the bus driver to stop.

He got out of the bus, lifted up the baggage compartment and grabbed his equipment bag. He opened it and started bailing. Everything went into the lake, piece by painstaking piece. Shoulder pads, chest protector, pants, jock strap, garter belt, socks, mask. His teammates were, naturally, hollering their foolish heads off. He briefly considered hanging on to the skates that had caused him so many problems, but then ditched them, too.

It marked the end of the best NHL career that never was.

"Deepest lake in B.C." he says. "They'll never find it."

Why would anyone even bother to look?

The next time any of you pop open a cold can of Coca-Cola, think of the once promising Ukrainian goaltender Ray Martyniuk - the old "Can-Miss Kid."

(Quotes reprinted from 1996 Hockey News entry draft special.)