oalie meets the team of his Hall of Fame grandfather
By Derrick Goold
St. Louis Post-Dispatch Online
DETROIT - He would never say it to or around his grandson.
Never.
Sid Abel, Hall of Famer and a vital part of Detroit Red Wings
history, kept a piece of paper that charted his grandson's
performance from junior hockey on. Every game Brent
Johnson played in net for his junior team, Owen Sound, or
for minor-league Worcester went on the sheet.
And when Abel's health started to decline, he would say to
his wife but never to Brent, absolutely never to Brent: "I hope I
live to see Brent make it."
He did.
Abel saw Brent play in the NHL. But now, Brent's arrived.
Against the team his grandfather served as player, coach, general manager and
broadcaster, Johnson leads the Blues into the Western Conference semifinals tonight at
Joe Louis Arena. Fresh off history, having become the first goalie since 1945 to have three
consecutive playoff shutouts, Johnson will make his next step - good, bad or historic - under
Gramps' retired No. 12.
"Wouldn't Sid be proud?" said Brent's grandmother, Gloria Abel. "That what my daughter and
son always say, 'Wouldn't Sid be proud.' It was his fervent prayer to see Brent do well. This is
wonderful."
In the span of one playoff round, Johnson has gone from the Blues' unknown quantity to
their headliner. Shutting out Chicago three consecutive games - and doing so with 27 saves
in the third game - pushed his name to prominence. And now there's this series, spanning
the generations.
Is there a better story than the famed Production Line center's offspring returning as an
opponent to the city that made his grandfather famous? A young, ascending goalie,
returning to the building he used to walk around "treated like a star"?
Johnson was surrounded by "tons" of Red Wings memorabilia as a kid. "All Gramps' old
stuff, old pictures and there's still a ton of it up," he said. "I guess I did want to follow in
Gramps' footsteps and play for the Wings. Now I want to beat them."
Forget the lineage. That's the bottom line.
The Blues need Johnson to be at his sharpest to win.
"The last 25 games he's proven to everybody in this room, some of the media and people
around the league that he's a goalie of our present and not a goalie of the future," captain
Chris Pronger said. "He's the guy that's going to have to bring us as far as we're going to
go."
Sitting with a group of sports editors in New York late last month, NHL commissioner Gary
Bettman even addressed the opportunity Johnson has. When asked about the low scoring
in the postseason, Bettman spoke of Johnson and Ottawa goalie Patrick Lalime, who had
his third consecutive playoff shutout 24 hours after Johnson's.
"The goaltending is better than ever," Bettman said. "Johnson and Lalime have done an
outstanding job. If (Dominik) Hasek and (Patrick) Roy had done that, people would have
said, 'Wow.' People would have notched this up to the legend of Hasek and Roy. But with
Lalime and Johnson it's, 'Who are these guys?'
"And can they do it again?"
The legend of Hasek, the goalie on the other end of the ice tonight, spans six Vezina
trophies.
Johnson's is six postseason starts long.
But what a place for his seventh.
His grandfather won the Hart Trophy playing for Detroit in the 1948-49 season. Abel won
three Stanley Cups, flanked by Gordie Howe and Ted Lindsey on the Production Line. Gloria
Abel wears Sid's Hall of Fame ring, an heirloom Johnson will inherit, she said.
"I've been dreaming of facing (the Red Wings) since I became a professional," Johnson
said.
The tangle of Abel-Johnson roots in the Blues and Red Wings' franchises sometimes
seems almost eerie.
It's only because the family's patriarch has been famous in hockey for so long that it's easy
to connect Brent to Bob to Sid and see all the connections in between. It can't be anything
more than the usual hockey-family fare for Sid to have come from the Red Wings to replace
Scotty Bowman as Blues coach in May 1971.
And then to have Sid's grandson play for the Blues against Bowman's Red Wings in 2002.
Bob played 12 games for the Blues after he had married Sid's daughter, Linda, and two
seasons after Sid served as Blues coach. Sid was general manager at the time. Still a few
years before Brent was born. But the time in St. Louis helped Gloria accessorize for Brent's
trade from Colorado to the Blues. Gloria found out and said, "Perfect, I've got that
somewhere."
A quick look in her jewelry box produced a bluenote charm.
She wears it now, along with the All-Star Hockey Puck pendant from Sid's playing days given
to the each family member. Only because of Sid's short term with the Blues did she have the
bluenote necklace to wear.
Sid Abel died of heart failure the morning of Feb. 8, 2000. At that night's Red Wings game a
moment of silence was broken by a yell, "Yeah, Sid!" The home team then went on to lose -
to the Blues. Between that day and Brent's first victory against Detroit on April 13, 2002, the
Blues never defeated the Red Wings.
Not once in 10 tries in 26 months.
Not until Sid's grandson won.
Johnson has lost once since that victory, his first in four starts against Detroit. He's only
allowed five goals in that span and stopped 96 percent of the shots he's seen. His
grandmother has seen very few of those saves. She buries herself in crossword puzzles
and word games. She attended every one of Sid's games but is too nervous to watch
Johnson's.
"I'll have my head in the sand," Gloria said. "The butterflies are so huge for all of us. I'll tell
you, talk about euphoria. But I'm nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof. Being a goalie - give me a
break. If he were a forward or a defenseman, I'm sure I'd watch."
Instead of watching, she'll peek.
And sneak a message onto Brent's cell phone, something his Gramps told him all the time,
an echo from Brent's childhood:
"Keep your dobber up. Keep your dobber up."
