It’s the end of August, and the Hockey News’s Sam Stockton spends today’s column examining the ESPN documentary of the Red Wings and Colorado Avalanche’s bloody, bitter rivalry throughout the late 90’s, a.k.a. “Unrivaled.”
There was nothing like that particularly vicious rivalry between Detroit and Colorado, and, as Stockton suggests, the documentary feature–aired among what seems like an endless sea of (pardon the pun) hard-hitting sports documentaries–stands alone:
Unrivaled couldn’t be confused for a SportsCenter highlight pack because games defined by players like these don’t seem to exist anymore. As if the game highlights from the era aren’t enough to make this clear, Brian Burke—then the NHL’s player safety boss—tells us that any wound requiring fewer than 10 stitches was then considered a “shaving cut.”
Of course, prioritizing McCarty and Draper within this story would only work if those players had something new to add to this well-told story, and that’s where Unrivaled works best. From a film-making perspective, its most powerful tool is live footage of McCarty and antagonist Claude Lemieux at a sports bar in Royal Oak. By bringing together the erstwhile combatants, Unrivaled arrives at a fresh perspective on an evening—March 26, 1997—that has been discussed by Red Wing fans in exhaustive detail for 25 years.
The documentary also uses its interviews to make plain that even with the passage of time, tensions are still beyond a simmer. This is never clearer than when Draper is asked directly at the outset of the film whether he’s forgiven Lemieux. Draper’s response?
“Um…It seemed like was brought of what he did, but in the end, I quote my good friend Darren McCarty, karma’s a b**ch.
As Stockton continues, he notes that the most important part of the documentary, from a Red Wings fan’s perspective, at least, is the footage of Vladimir Konstantinov during and after his heyday as one of the NHL’s most punishing and complete defensemen. I happen to believe that the dignity with which Konstantinov lives his life today is a beautiful thing, and, as Vladdy himself summarizes the rivalry, what mattered?
“Beat them.”
