Free The Final Call by Kerry Fraser

in any of the 2,165 NHL games that I refereed.
    For most of my career, video review of plays wasn’t even technically feasible, and even today, it is not allowed for a penalty call. The play was over and gone, lost to that split second of time and space that seemed like an eternity once Doug’s blood started to drip.
    All Gilmour could do was go in for repairs, and all that was left for the officials to do was drop the puck and hope that, if a high-sticking call had in fact been missed, there would not be a consequence that would affect the game’s outcome.
    Big gulp here.
    Seconds later, Gretzky scored the game-winner and the series was tied. Game Seven would be played two nights later, in Toronto.
    Leafs fans watching on television, as well as the
Hockey Night in Canada
team of Bob Cole and Harry Neale, had the advantage over those of us on the ice. Even so, Cole’s first impulse was to suggest Gilmour had been hurt while blocking Gretzky’s initial shot. Neale was quick to guess that Gretzky had high-sticked Gilmour, but it wasn’t until a replay, from a different camera angle, was shown that he was able to definitively make “The Call” from the broadcast booth.
    It’s important to mention that even after Gretzky scored the overtime winner, I wasn’t chased off the ice. Neither the Leafs players, nor coach Pat Burns, harangued me for missing the call. The only dissenter was Anderson, who was still pleading his case over the boarding call that caused him to watch from the penalty box as the game was decided.
    In the dressing room afterward, director of officiating Bryan Lewis informed us that it had been reported, but not confirmed, that
Hockey Night in Canada
had a replay that detected Gretzky clipping Gilmour in the face with his stick. But he said we had followed the proper procedure in trying to determine whether an infraction had been committed.
    I went to bed, and the next morning caught a flight home to Philadelphia. The next day at about 6 p.m. I spoke to my parents at their home in Sarnia. That’s when I heard that my father had been awakened between 4 and 5 a.m. to the sound of one car hitting another in his driveway. Looking out the window, he saw a vehicle continually backing up and ramming into the trailerhitch of his mini-motorhome parked in the driveway. Clad only in his tightie whities, he grabbed an axe from next to the back door and chased the motorist up the street.
    I was livid. I was furious that someone would take out their hostility on my family. The next call I made was to NHL security, who investigated and later informed me that the vandal was a Leafs fan from Kitchener-Waterloo, who had made the 90-mile drive to the Fraser family homestead. My parents also received obscene crank calls; this prompted my mother to answer the phone with a referee’s whistle poised at the ready to shatter the eardrums of anyone who dared invade their privacy.
    (After Dad passed on, Mom still kept the whistle hanging by the telephone. It’s time for her to retire her whistle as well!)
    In the seventh game, Gretzky scored a hat trick and added two assists as the Kings won, 5–4. Gretzky has called it “the best game I ever played.”
    The misplaced hostility and aggression were not limited to the days and weeks after the Leafs lost the series. Following a game I worked at the Air Canada Centre in 2008, I joined Wes McCauley and the officials who’d worked the game with me at the Irish Embassy, a pub on Yonge Street, near both the ACC and the Hockey Hall of Fame. NHL security representative Paul Hendricks had a table reserved for us. As I entered the establishment, I noticed that many of the male patrons were wearing vintage Leafs jerseys. Most of them were probably teenagers back in 1993.
    I passed one table, where a fellow with his back to me was wearing a jersey with the name and number (29) of Félix Potvin, the goalie of that 1993 team. I heard someone at his table say, “There’s Fraser.” I made