Marty Klinkenberg - The McDavid Effect: Connor McDavid and the New Hope for Hockey

Simon & Schuster Canada

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Copyright 2016 by Martin Klinkenberg

The McDavid Effect is not authorized by or affiliated with Connor McDavid, the Edmonton Oilers,
the National Hockey League or any other persons, organizations or entities upon which it reports.

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Cover design: PGB

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Klinkenberg, Marty, author

The McDavid effect : Connor McDavid and the new hope for hockey / Marty Klinkenberg.

Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-1-5011-4603-9
(hardback).ISBN 978-1-5011-4605-3 (html)

1. McDavid, Connor, 1997. 2. Edmonton Oilers (Hockey team). 3. Hockey playersAlberta
EdmontonBiography. 4. HockeySocial aspectsAlbertaEdmonton. I. Title.

GV848.5.M38K65 2016 796.962092 C2016-903174-8

C2016-903175-6

ISBN 978-1-5011-4603-9

ISBN 978-1-5011-4605-3 (ebook)

This book is dedicated to my son, Matthew, who has taught me my love for hockey and given me a great appreciation for persistence and hard work, on and off the ice. I love you, Matt. This is for you.

PROLOGUE

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 Americas 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 thirty 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.

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 fifteen 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 sixteen 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 millionthe 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 twenty miles southwest of Edmonton. Seismic studies had identified two areas of interest there, but Vern was skeptical for a number of reasonschief 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 teams heavy equipment through the landowners 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 February 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.

Ten days later, on a chilly Thursday afternoon, a crowd of five hundred people, including company executives and Alberta government officials, were invited to the site for an unveiling ceremony. Shortly before four oclock, after a delay of a few hours caused by an equipment malfunction, Nathan Eldon Tanner, the mines minister for Premier Ernest Mannings 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 Albertas 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 Albertas 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 Hunters crew made the provinces first significant find of oil. That oilfield itself remains active, with more than 300 million barrels extracted thus far. Leducs neighbouring communities of Devon and Nisku have flourished, and Edmontons population has grown from a little more than 118,000 in 1947 to nearly 900,000 today.

For mostly better and occasionally worse, Albertas economy, and Canadas 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 Albertas 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 Hunters crew used to make the discovery that changed millions of lives and altered Albertas 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.