Skip to main content
Connor McDavid, celebrating his first career NHL goal in October, 2015, has changed the way Oilers fans view their hockey team.

Connor McDavid, celebrating his first career NHL goal in October, 2015, has changed the way Oilers fans view their hockey team.

Ronald Martinez/Getty Images

Exclusive excerpt <br>

The Globe and Mail's Marty Klinkenberg spent last hockey season reporting almost exclusively on Edmonton Oilers centre Connor McDavid. The teenage NHL superstar from the Toronto suburbs got off to an auspicious start, broke his collarbone a dozen games in, but returned for the last two months of the season with a wild scoring tear and promise of more to come. A year of reporting on McDavid for The Globe turned into a book that is a narrative about hockey and much more. Excerpted here, the story of McDavid and the Oilers has roots that took hold decades earlier, in a field on the outskirts of Edmonton

Brimming with optimism but cursed by bad luck, Vern Hunter assumed the hole he was digging would be bone-dry, as so many others he had dug had been. Instead of prospecting for crude deep beneath the soil on the outskirts of Edmonton in the 1940s, he might as well have been Ponce de Leon searching for the Fountain of Youth, or one of those crackpots trying to lasso the Loch Ness monster.

Being on an expedition with the Spanish explorer would hardly have been any less comfortable. It was the middle of winter in Alberta, and so bitterly cold that a roughneck could freeze his ass off in those britches with a trap door in the rear.

It had been nearly a century since North America's first oil field was discovered by a fellow digging a water well near Sarnia in present-day Ontario. It was the first of many finds, the most significant of which had been in 1914 at Turner Valley, just southwest of Calgary in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. For 30 years, Turner Valley had been the main source of oil for the British Empire, but now it was running dry. Companies were scrambling to find a new supply.

Workers fill oil drums at Dingman Well in Turner Valley, Alberta in 1914.

Workers fill oil drums at Dingman Well in Turner Valley, Alberta in 1914.

Lane and Mitchell / Wikimedia Commons

It would be charitable to say that Vern had a spotty record at wildcatting. In the past several years, crews under his direction had drilled 15 barren holes while looking for oil, earning him the nickname "Dry Hole."

During such a slump, even if black gold were trapped beneath the wheat fields, it was not a sure thing that Vern would find it. The team of 16 men he was managing was one of five such crews that Imperial Oil had engaged in a high-stakes treasure hunt across the Prairies. The company had spent $23-million – the equivalent of about $280-million today – bankrolling the wildcatters' exploration efforts, and together they had drilled 133 holes without finding anything but dirt.

After starting in the 1920s as a junior clerk with one of the first petroleum companies operating in Alberta, Vern worked as a truck driver and roughneck before being hired by Imperial in 1940 to oversee an Arctic drilling project. He later became the foreman of one of those wildcat teams and, after drilling in Saskatchewan proved fruitless, was directed in November, 1946, to go to Leduc, a small town about 20 miles southwest of Edmonton. Seismic studies had identified two areas of interest there, but Vern was skeptical for a number of reasons – chief among them that few oil discoveries are made in a place so remarkably convenient to a major city. He was so certain the venture would prove a waste of time that he hauled his team's heavy equipment through the landowner's dooryard rather than construct a road for it. Vern figured that after a few unproductive days, the team would be instructed to pull up stakes and continue elsewhere.

The hole that they drilled uncovered traces of oil and natural gas, however, so for two months they persevered, probing deeper and deeper into a formation geologists thought promising. They were ready to give up when, on Feb. 3, 1947, Hunter persuaded his crew to drill a little longer, perhaps just another metre more. A short while later, the rig poked a hole in an ancient subtropical reef, similar to the Bahamas today, nearly one mile beneath the earth. A geyser of oil shot to the surface and blew halfway up the 145-foot-tall derrick, drenching one worker.

The Leduc #1 Oil Well in Devon, Alta., delivered a major find for Imperial Oil, and this historic oil well led the way to Alberta’s post-war oil boom.

The Leduc #1 Oil Well in Devon, Alta., delivered a major find for Imperial Oil, and this historic oil well led the way to Alberta’s post-war oil boom.

The Canadian Petroleum Discovery Centre

Ten days later, on a chilly Thursday afternoon, a crowd of 500 people, including company executives and Alberta government officials, were invited to the site for an unveiling ceremony. Shortly before 4 o'clock, after a delay of a few hours caused by an equipment malfunction, Nathan Eldon Tanner, the mines minister for premier Ernest Manning's Social Credit Party, opened a valve on the wellhead. At first, mud and water was coughed up, and then, after a sound similar to a train approaching, a mixture of crude and gas roared out of the pipe and burst into a streak of flames in the air. That night, Imperial held a party in Edmonton, which would soon be transformed into the oil capital of Canada.

Given the name Leduc #1, the well produced 318,000 barrels of oil and 324 million cubic feet of natural gas before it was decommissioned by Imperial in 1974. More important, it held the geological key to Alberta's petroleum reserves and changed its economy forever. Oil and gas supplanted farming as the primary industry and resulted in the province becoming one of the richest in the country. Nationally, the discovery allowed Canada to become self-sufficient within a decade and become a major exporter of oil.

Today, pumpjacks dot Alberta's landscape, bobbing like rocking horses each time they plumb the depths for oil and gas. A heritage site, museum and campground have been established near the spot where Vern Hunter's crew made the province's first significant find of oil. That oil field itself remains active, with more than 300 million barrels extracted thus far. Leduc's neighbouring communities of Devon and Nisku have flourished, and Edmonton's population has grown from a little more than 118,000 in 1947 to nearly 900,000 today.

For mostly better and occasionally worse, Alberta's economy, and Canada's with it, ebbs and flows with the price of oil. Several hundred miles north of Edmonton, the Athabasca Oil Sands contain the third-largest proven reserves of crude in the world. The thick, tarry bitumen extracted there is transported through a complex system of pipelines from Edmonton to Montreal, the U.S. Midwest and as far south as the Gulf of Mexico. More than 130,000 people are employed in Alberta's energy industry and, as a result, the province has one of the highest standards of living in the world.

Every day, tens of thousands of vehicles pass the derrick that Vern Hunter's crew used to make the discovery that changed millions of lives and altered Alberta's environmental landscape so dramatically that it has become a geopolitical powder keg. The retired piece of machinery rises like a beacon on a strip of land at an abandoned visitor centre in the middle of the Queen Elizabeth II Highway near the Edmonton airport.

A short distance away, along the same stretch of road, a sign welcomes travellers as they enter Edmonton's city limits. Put up in the 1980s to celebrate the city's thriving civic pride, the sign originally included Edmonton's motto, "City of Champions." When it was unveiled, the self-assigned accolade spoke to Edmonton's status as a provincial capital, a growing metropolis and an energy powerhouse. The title was also adopted by the city's population as a means of trumpeting their pride and joy: the Edmonton Oilers.

From 1983 to 1990, Edmonton's pro hockey franchise won five Stanley Cups, a reign recognized by the Hockey Hall of Fame as the NHL's last true dynasty. Wayne Gretzky, the skinny player upon whose back four of those five Stanley Cups were hoisted, changed the nature of the game with his otherworldly offensive skills and the team he led transformed the city of Edmonton, in turn.

Gretzky, right, brought the Oilers four Stanley Cups in the team's heyday in the 1980s.

Gretzky, right, brought the Oilers four Stanley Cups in the team’s heyday in the 1980s.

Mike Blake / REUTERS

From sea to sea, hockey rekindles the spirit of Canadians. But only in Alberta is its identity connected to adventurous roughnecks and wildcatters who lived in converted chicken coops and 10-by-20-foot shacks in the dead of winter. There would be no Edmonton Oilers if not for Vern Hunter. Without him, there would no oil derrick under which players skate onto the ice during pregame festivities. There would be no new $480-million arena in the shape of an oil drop in downtown Edmonton. There would have been no Wayne Gretzky, at least as we know him.

In early 2015, Edmonton City Council voted to remove the tagline "City of Champions" from the welcome signs in an effort to rebrand the city. In recent years, the city's image has waned. Gone are the Oilers' glory days and the years of profitable energy. Everything from global recessions to changing populations to the interminable rebuild of sports franchises has sapped many of their patience. From the outside, the City of Champions appears to be merely a memory.

And yet, if you walk the streets of the city and cast your eye over the cranes that dot the downtown skyline, if you speak with the people who live, work and play there, if you listen to sports talk radio, there is a sense that things are about to change. You get a glimpse of the first thing that any team or individual needs if they are to begin again: Hope. In this case, hope comes in the form of a six-foot-one, 190-pound teenager. And his name is Connor McDavid.

The youngest captain in NHL history, McDavid is a source of hope not felt among Oilers fans in decades.

The youngest captain in NHL history, McDavid is a source of hope not felt among Oilers fans in decades.

THE CANADIAN PRESS / Jason Franson

Excerpted from The McDavid Effect: Connor McDavid and the New Hope for Hockey. Copyright © 2016 by Martin Klinkenberg. Reprinted with permission of Simon & Schuster Canada, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Available Oct. 11.


MORE FROM THE GLOBE AND MAIL