Searching for Gary Sutter

Publication date: March 2005 | The Crow, University of Regina Journalism School Magazine

Header photo: Rogers Hometown Hockey screenshot

Author’s note: This was the first substantive magazine-style feature I wrote in my career, and I’m still immensely proud of it all these years later. I was a student at the University of Regina at the time, and for our magazine-writing class, I decided to get a bit ambitious and see if I could a) track down Gary Sutter, and b) convince him to talk with me. Remarkably, as it happened, Louis and Grace Sutter were listed in the Viking, Alta. phone book. I called the house, and Grace – Gary’s mother – answered. She was so kind, and for reasons I’ll never fathom, agreed to pass on Gary’s phone number to a humble journalism student. The rest of the backstory is in the article itself, which I chose to write in the first person for some reason. But I will forever be indebted to Gary Sutter for sharing his story with me. It directly led to my first journalism job (that’s a story in itself), and in more recent years, I’ve had LA Times Magazine and Sportsnet reach out to me requesting a copy of the article. It used to exist online through the University of Regina, but the link was broken, leading to these requests. I’m glad to give this piece a more permanent home on the web.

It was June of 2004 when I first heard The Legend of Gary Sutter.

It must have been June, because I remember my eyes burning from second-hand smoke as I sat at a table in Saskatoon’s Yard and Flagon Pub. The city-wide ban on smoking in public places kicked in on July 1.

As I blinked away the tears, an article of clothing across the table caught my eye. My friend Cory was sporting a blue T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “The Gary Sutter Experience.”

“What’s the deal with that?” I asked him, pointing at his shirt.

“That’s the name of my band,” he said.

Cory, a sports reporter, had always struck me as more of a jock than a musician.

“You’re in a band?”

“Well, no, but if I was in a band, that’s what I’d name it.”

Okay. I still didn’t get it. I’d never heard of any Gary Sutter. Of course, as a sports fanatic, I recognized the surname. Even casual hockey fans know the improbable story of the six brothers from tiny Viking, Alberta who carved out distinguished careers in the National Hockey League based on a farm-boy work ethic.

I reviewed the list mentally. Brian. Darryl. Duane. Brent. Rich. Ron. In that order. No Gary.

“So who the heck is Gary Sutter?”

“He’s the oldest Sutter brother, the only one who didn’t play in the NHL.”

Immediately, I knew Cory was screwing with me. After all, everyone knows that there were only six Sutter brothers. The biography is called Six Shooters, isn’t it? A Seventh Shooter? Sounded like a grassy knoll theory to me.

“There were only six, you doofus.”

Cory leaned back in his chair, a knowing, Mr. Miyagi-esque look on his face.

“Ah, that’s what everybody thinks.” 

 * * * * *

One month later, I found tangible proof of Gary Sutter’s existence.

It was a brief in the sports section: Non-NHL Sutter Brother Shares in Lottery Win.

According to the article, Gary had plucked a lucky ticket and won a million-plus. "He works for a lumber company out in Kelowna now and his group buys tickets all the time,” brother Darryl was quoted. “He phoned me up and said, ‘You'll never guess what happened.’”

When Cory got back after lunch, I hustled over to his desk.

“Your boy Gary Sutter’s a millionaire.”

“Get out.” Cory snatched the paper. He started laughing.

“Here’s a guy who wore a blue collar all his life while his brothers became Canadian icons,” he said. “It’s nice to see him get rewarded.”

I’ve got to meet this Gary Sutter.

 * * * * *

Seven months later, I get the man on the phone. The question I’m about to ask him is written on the top line of my notebook. I introduce myself, then read the question.

“I was wondering if I could interview you about what life’s been like as the only Sutter brother not to play in the NHL.” I was wondering if you’d like to talk about being a huge failure. That’s not what I mean, but I imagine that’s what it sounds like. There’s no better way to ask, though. I know, because I spent half an hour wording the question.

 “Sure,” Gary says.

 * * * * *

I call back several times to set a firm date for the interview, but I can’t get a hold of Gary. The February 16 edition of The Globe and Mail tells me why.

“Hockey’s Sutter brothers – from left, Darryl, Brent, Ron, Brian, Duane and Rich – bear the casket of their father, Louis, yesterday in Viking, Alberta. The six all starred in the NHL.”

That’s the caption on the front-page photo. Darryl and Brian, NHL head coaches, carry the front of the casket. Darryl, who led the Calgary Flames to the Stanley Cup Finals last year, is leaning to avoid the open door of the hearse. Brent, who coached Team Canada to a World Junior Championship in January, and Duane, director of player development for the Florida Panthers, are in the middle. Twins Rich and Ron, pro scouts for the Minnesota Wild and the Flames, respectively, wear matching purple dress shirts and bring up the rear. 

No sign of Gary.

His existence is hinted at in the article below: “. . . the National Hockey League, where six of Louis Sutter’s seven sons went off to play a total of 4,994 games.”

So The Globe knows there are seven boys in the Sutter family. But when it comes to Hockey’s Sutter Brothers, there are only six.

 * * * * *

The Globe article sits on the passenger seat of my rickety ’91 Jetta as I head westward on Highway 97, through Kelowna and across the Okanagan Lake Bridge. As I roll into the aptly-named suburb of Westbank, the highway becomes an eerily alliterative Main Street: one block consists of a Ba’hai Bookstore, a Bakery, and Barry’s Barbershop. As I make a right onto Elliott Road, I wonder if the merchants planned it that way: Who can resist the letter B? We’ll be rich!

As the road climbs away from the lake, the stores give way to orchards and vineyards. On my right, a weathered sign advertises Gregory’s Fresh Farm Produce – Tomatoes, Apples, Peppers, Onions, Potatoes, Pears. 

That song that Ashlee Simpson lip-synched on Saturday Night Live is playing on the radio as I pull up to Gary Sutter’s house. “Cutting corners,” I scoff to myself. “How very un-Sutter-like.” (In hockey circles, “Sutter” is a synonym for “hard work,” based on the family’s trademark Tasmanian Devil brand of hockey. As in, “We’re really happy with the new Zamboni driver. He’s really pulling a Sutter, eh?”)

Gary’s house is two stories, with white siding, grey shutters and a deck that wraps around the southeast corner. Pretty standard, really. Not the Millionaire McMansion I was expecting.

I press the doorbell, and almost immediately, the door swings open and Gary reaches forward to shake my hand. He’s wearing charcoal slacks and a crimson golf shirt with a black Calgary Flames logo on the left breast. He’s a slim six feet tall, with graying hair combed straight back in the Pat Riley style.

To my surprise, he looks every bit the hockey coach. Apparently, I was expecting to walk onto the set of The Beverly Hillbillies and find a country hick in an unnecessarily massive house. 

Gary invites me in and leads me to the dining room. We sit at a cherry-wood table beneath a white chandelier, and I pull out my mini-disc recorder.

 * * * * *

“Times weren’t great. I mean, we certainly weren’t poor, but my mom and dad worked really hard,” Gary says. “My brothers and I were driving tractors when we were seven years old. We were hauling bales, doing chores when we were little boys.”

The legendary Sutter work ethic was born in those fields as the brothers competed to see who could pick the most rocks or haul the most bales. This competitive drive transferred to hockey games on the Sutter slough, where every game was contested like it was the seventh game of the Stanley Cup finals. Gary can still hear the arguments echoing across the pond. 

That puck was in the net! 

It was not, it was on the line!

 * * * * *

It’s been thirty-five years, but Rich Sutter can still picture his oldest brother blazing down the wing to blast a slap-shot past a helpless goalie.

“He was a hell of a player,” Rich tells me over the phone a few days later.

“How good was he, exactly?”

“Oh, he was better than any of us,” Rich asserts. “Some of the things growing up, even to this day in your life, you remember.”

Gary’s mom tells the same story.

“He was probably the much, much better player than Brian, a finer skater,” Grace Sutter says. “But Gary was kind of the underdog in the family.” 

According to Grace, Brian was her husband’s favourite. After a hockey game, Louis was always more critical of Gary, while Brian could do no wrong. 

“It was very noticeable,” Grace says. “I knew that from the time both boys were small.”

But that didn’t stop Gary from thinking the world of his dad. He made more trips to Viking to see Louis during his illness than any of the other boys, Grace tells me. She reads from a poem that Gary wrote four years ago on a birthday card for Louis. 

You taught me the value of knowledge

So that I would be prepared to make decisions big or small

So that when I make mistakes, I would try to learn from them

And then go on from there.

I ask Grace if there’s anything else she’d like to add about her eldest son. She pauses a beat.

“You can say that his mom thinks he’s a real good boy.”

 * * * * *

Gary doesn’t buy that he was the best hockey player of the bunch.

“I think I was probably on a level with the other ones,” he insists. “There have been a lot of things that have been written and said that are a bit overrated.”

When pressed, Gary will admit that he was a pretty fair player back in the winter of ’69. Up to that point, he had spent his minor hockey career as a right winger. But that season, only two players on Viking’s bantam team volunteered to play defense. In small-town hockey, the best players go where they’re needed most. So Gary became a defenseman.

The move paid off, and Gary became a dangerous puck-rushing rearguard in the mold of Bobby Orr. That season, he tied for the league scoring title – an extraordinary feat for a defenseman – and was named league MVP.

“When I was 14, I was as good a bantam player as there was, that I was playing against, in Central Alberta,” Gary says matter-of-factly. 

The way Gary tells it, his development as a player plateaued after that season as he struggled with the jump from bantam hockey to midget.

“No one ever taught me how to play defense,” he says. “In bantam, I just took the puck and I kept the puck. No one else had the puck enough to worry about it.”

Over the next three winters, Gary was unable to duplicate his dream season. 

 * * * * *

Late in the summer of 1972, an envelope arrived at the Sutter farm addressed to “Gary and Brian Shooter.” It contained an invitation for the two eldest boys to attend tryout camp with the Red Deer Rustlers.

An invitation from a Tier II club!!!

The letter caused a sensation in the hockey-mad household. Tier II junior was only one step away from The Western Hockey League!!!, one of Canada’s three elite junior circuits. The WHL, in turn, was only one step away from The NHL!!!

But from the beginning, Gary was skeptical of the letter. He was almost certain that no one from the Red Deer organization had actually seen him play – rumor had it that the Rustlers had gotten a tip about the boys from a traveling Coca-Cola salesman. Do they really want me that badly? They probably sent the same letter to a hundred other guys across the province! For Pete’s sake, they don’t even know how to spell my name!

The night before he was to leave for Red Deer, Gary informed his parents that he had decided to stay home. Brian went to Red Deer alone to battle 125 other players for a roster spot. He was cut after training camp, but stuck around with the local Junior ‘B’ team. One week later, he was called up to the Rustlers, and he never looked back. He made the jump to the Lethbridge Hurricanes of the Western Hockey League in 1974, and in 1976, he was a second-round draft pick of the St. Louis Blues, a team he would later captain.

The other five brothers would follow Brian’s Viking-to-Red Deer-to-Lethbridge-to-stardom trajectory. By the time Ron hung up his skates in 2001, the brothers had suited up for a total of 4,994 regular season NHL games over 81 cumulative seasons. They’d scored 1,320 goals and spent 7,224 minutes (equal to 120 hours, or five days) in the penalty box. They had hoisted the Stanley Cup six times.

Meanwhile, Gary Sutter coached hockey at every level from Tom Thumb to Tier II junior; worked three blue-collar jobs; and endured one divorce.

 * * * * *

Gary doesn’t like where I’m going with this next question.

The question is, “Can you explain to me exactly why you turned down the invitation from the Rustlers?”

Gary sniffs out where this is going and heads me off at the pass.

“There’s been a lot of things said,” he says. “They said I had a girlfriend in high school, stuff like that. That really wasn’t top priority. I made my own mind up. I didn’t think that I was good enough to play junior hockey.”

I’m taken aback. In the four pages of Six Shooters devoted to Gary, author Dean Spiros made it seem like “the girl” played a major role in Gary’s decision not to go to Red Deer. According to the book, Gary married at age 19 and moved to Edmonton. The marriage lasted only four years.

Either Spiros was way off-base, or Gary simply doesn’t want to talk about his first marriage. Later in the interview, I try a different tack. “You said that your relationship played a very small role in your decision-making process. Could you explain what role it did play?”

But Gary slams the door.

“Actually, it played zero role in my decision.”

But where did Spiros get this idea, then?

“That was his point of view talking with other people. That’s not what I told him.” Gary’s gestures are growing more emphatic, and there’s a tone of finality in his voice. “I don’t even want it to be part of the article. It was something that was very overrated.”

Um, okay. 

 * * * * *

Rich Sutter remembers it differently.

“He was seeing a girl he was pretty serious with,” he tells me when I ask him why Gary decided not to go play in Red Deer. “I think that held him back.”

“Was that the main reason?”

“Absolutely.”

Interesting.

“So why doesn’t Gary want to talk about it?”

“I don’t know, maybe Gary just didn’t want anybody to know,” Rich says. “But he’s happy now . . . so I mean, there’s nothing wrong with telling the truth.”

According to Rich, the breakup of Gary’s first marriage multiplied the pain of regret as he watched his brothers succeed in the NHL. Rich believes it took Gary at least 15 years to recover from the loss of the marriage that he chose over hockey.

“It was hard for us, too, knowing that he had an opportunity and went by the door,” Rich says. “We just thank God that he’s got his feet planted again.”

Rich says Gary was always a little different than the other six – not a rebel, necessarily, but maybe just a bit more independent. Case in point: Gary’s red Honda motorbike, which he bought after selling the cow his father had given him for his 14th birthday.

“We never even had a bike, but here Gary had a motorbike!” Rich chuckles. “To this day, you’d have to pay me to get on a motorbike. I don’t know if I’d even be able to keep the damn thing from falling over.”

“He kind of just did some things differently than we would have done at that age,” Rich continues. “We chose to leave home at 14 or 15 to pursue a career in hockey, and to us, it really wasn’t that big of a deal. It was just something that we just did, before any of us even thought about what we were doing.”

 * * * * *

After Gary brings me an iced tea and a coaster, I switch gears and ask how he came to The Decision. How long did he agonize over it? Did he ask anyone else for advice?

“I didn’t ask advice from anybody,” Gary says. “My parents let me make the decision. They did that with all of us guys – they guided you, but they didn’t tell you what decisions to make. And I’ve always respected my mom and my dad for the way they treated those situations.”

Gary wrestled with The Decision for a couple weeks. In retrospect, it’s difficult to remember that he wasn’t turning down an NHL contract. Hundreds of boys each year drop out of competitive hockey, but they don’t have to deal with six younger brothers going pro. 

“Even though I was an outstanding 14-year-old, when I was 17, I honestly felt in my mind that I wasn’t good enough,” Gary says. “The guys that played in the NHL when I was young, they were icons. It seemed that they were on a part of this earth that was so far away, a level that wasn’t attainable.”

If he had gotten some solid feedback from a scout, or gotten the invitation a year earlier, maybe Gary’s decision would have been different. But who’s to say that life would have turned out the same for him, even if he had gone to Red Deer? It’s only in retrospect that 17-year-old Gary seems like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, choosing between the blue pill and the red pill to alter the course of his life forever.

“Life’s about decisions,” Gary says. He pauses.

“It’ll eat you up. You could let it bother you to the point where it’ll eat you up and really bother you mentally.”

 * * * * *

For one year, Gary did allow what-ifs to eat away at him. They didn’t hit him right away – not when Brian was called up to the Rustlers, nor when he moved on to Lethbridge. Nor did it faze him when Brian was drafted by the Blues.

It was when Brian made his National Hockey League debut with St. Louis that it really hit Gary: That could have been me.

Maybe I should have done a bit more.

I should have tried a bit harder.

“I definitely had regrets,” Gary says. “It was tough.”

“And it’s something I dealt with for a while.”

Gary dealt with his regrets by finding solace in hockey. He joined the Riley Flyers, a senior hockey team in the Edmonton area that was stocked with guys who had, for one reason or another, missed their shot at the big leagues. Some, like Gary, had turned down training camp invites. Others had flamed out in the Western Hockey League.

With Gary serving as player-coach, the Flyers won the 1977 Beaver Hill Hockey League championship.

“This was a new league, and we built a team from scratch,” Gary says, still bursting with pride 27 years later, like he was Toe Blake masterminding the Montreal Canadiens dynasty. “It wasn’t just the hockey part – it was the people I played with.”

That camaraderie went a long way toward shaking Gary out of his doldrums.

“I had four or five really good friends on the Riley Flyer hockey club that knew what I was going though,” he says. “I sat and talked with them a lot. That got me through it. And those people today are life-long friends of mine.”

Classic Sutter willpower also played a part in Gary’s recovery. Before the 1979-80 season, when it became apparent that it was only a matter of time before Darryl and Duane cracked an NHL roster, Gary made another landmark Decision – to suck it up and move on.

“I decided, hey, these are your brothers, the guys that you grew up with, the guys that you love, your best friends,” Gary says. “You’re not going to sit around and sulk and whine and complain because you didn’t go play.”

Gary also determined to get as much out of the sports as he could. Between 1979 and 1989, he coached hockey and played top-notch fastball in the Edmonton area, even making a trip to Maui in the late 1970s to play in the World Series of Fastball. He also scouted part-time for three Western Hockey League franchises. He may be the only Sutter boy not to play in the NHL, but he’s lived a lifetime in sports. 

“I’d be a liar if I didn’t say that little bit of doubt will always be there,” Gary says. “But it’s not something that you can let control you. I’ve done well in my life.”

 * * * * *

Even though Gary’s come to terms with his lot in life, it still stings when people treat him like a second-rate Sutter.

Some people will pointedly ignore him at a Sutter Brothers charity golf tournament while they hobnob with Darryl or Brian.

“A lot of people are that way. They like the attachment of being close to someone with more fame. My brothers don’t go for that,” Gary says. “My brothers have never made me feel left out.”

Then there are those individuals back home in Viking who repeatedly needle Gary with the comment, “You should have made it.” To Gary, saying “You could have made it” is a compliment; “You should have made it” implies that he’s a failure, and puts him on the defensive.

“I’ll take that attitude, and I’ll start questioning their success,” Gary says, jabbing the table with his index finger for emphasis. “‘What have you done for me lately?’”

 * * * * *

A horn honks twice as Gary’s wife Margaret pulls into the driveway. She enters the kitchen, sets down an armload of groceries, introduces herself and offers to make me a sandwich. Her white hoody accents her deep tan, left over from the trip she and Gary made to the Dominican in December.

“He told me quite a story today,” Gary says to Margaret, prompting me to repeat my anecdote about Cory’s “Gary Sutter Experience” t-shirt. It’s clear that Gary relishes being an alternative hero in an era where everyone thirsts for their 15 minutes of fame.

Gary and Margaret have been married seven years now, the same length of time as they’ve lived in Kelowna. They’ve known each other since 1972, when Margaret and her parents emigrated from London, England to Viking. Margaret has five adult children from a previous marriage; Gary has no children of his own. 

“I respect and love her a lot. She’s worked really hard, and she deserves this as much as I do,” he says. 

“This” is the lottery money. When they moved to the Okanagan, Gary and Margaret both took jobs at Westside Building Centre, a home building supply company. A group of eight couples from the store bought lottery tickets on a regular basis, and on June 11, 2004, they hit a $10 million-plus jackpot. Gary and Margaret’s share was $1.5 million.

“My brothers wouldn’t believe me,” Gary laughs. “We have quite a common practice of practical jokes with each other, and they weren’t sure what was going on. I had to convince them that it was happening.”

Before the lottery win, Gary and Margaret lived in a mobile home. Last fall, they bought a “new” 20-year-old house that overlooks the valley. Gary takes me out on the deck. 

“I love it out here,” Gary says, and it’s easy to see why. To our left, it’s orchards and vineyards. Due south, beyond the houses of Westbank, Okanagan Lake sparkles. 

The house, along with a pair of 2004 Fords (an Explorer and a Taurus), were the only major expenditures. The rest of the money is invested.

“My wife has quit working, and I want to start slowing down a little bit,” Gary says. 

Hold on a second. You won a million bucks and you’re still working your job? How many other millionaires still bust their humps at Westside Builders?

“Just me,” Gary says as my jaw drops to the floor. “Margaret and the other seven, they all trained new people within the company and they all left within a month.”

Gary cut back on his hours during the slower winter season, but that doesn’t explain why he’s still working. He says he won’t work a day past his 55th birthday. He turned 50 in January.

“It’s something I think about every day,” he says of retirement. “We’re set up that if we really watch ourselves, I can quit tomorrow.” He smiles. “But I know that I’m going to make the right decision.”

 * * * * *

Margaret comes back in the room and offers me a sandwich, again. Am I really that skinny, that people feel compelled to feed me?

I ask Gary if he believes that God or fate, whichever way he understands it, played a role in his lottery win. Is it a reward of sorts for sticking it out as the other six brothers lived their childhood dream? Cosmic justice, if you will?

“I do think that fate played a part,” Gary says. “You know what, I worked hard all my life. I never gave up, I’ve supported my brothers, I didn’t throw the towel in and live a bad life.”

“I got rewarded.”

 * * * * *

In June of 2004, just after the lottery win, Gary and Margaret went to Calgary to take in a George Strait concert at the Saddledome with brother Ron and his family.

During the concert, Ron’s nine-year-old daughter Reagen sidled up to her uncle.

“Uncle Gary,” she asked, perplexed, “How come you didn’t play in the NHL?”

Gary took a deep breath and sat down beside her.

“Not everybody does the same thing in life,” he explained to his niece. “We all have choices to make.”

I ask Gary how he defines success. His answer is Sutter-esque.

“Success is working hard,” he says. “Being positive. Being a good person. Being a good husband. Being a good brother. Being a good son. Being a good employee. All those things.”

 * * * * * 

As I’m packing my stuff to leave, Gary spots the Globe and Mail article about his father’s funeral sticking out of my backpack. He bends down and picks it up. 

“Are you in a hurry? Do you mind if I read this?”

“No, not at all.”

We sit back down at the table and Gary puts on his reading glasses. 

Earlier, Gary had explained to me that he feels no burning desire for the general public to know his name. “The people who I want to know, know,” he said simply.

I point out the caption on the photo, which implies that as far as The Globe is concerned, there are only six members in the club known as Hockey’s Sutter Brothers.

Gary squints and leans in to take a closer look at the photo.

“We’re right behind – here.”

He points to the top edge of the picture. In the shadows, over Duane’s left shoulder, is Gary. He’s wearing a grey suit and a red tie. His eyes are downcast, and the top one-third of his head has been cropped out of the photo. Even after spending the afternoon with Gary, I never would have spotted him in the background. He’s the Out of Focus Guy.

“Wow,” Gary says mildly. “It even happens at a funeral.’”