Threatening calls came to his home. His coaches knew. Teammates noticed. Reporters asked questions. The NHL looked the other way, and five Stanley Cups made it very easy to do.
Grant Fuhr won 5 Stanley Cups with the Edmonton Oilers between 1984 and 1990, backstopped Canada to the 1987 Canada Cup, and earned the Vezina Trophy as the league’s best goaltender. On September 27th, 1990, NHL President John Ziegler suspended him for a year after Fuhr admitted to substance use spanning approximately six to seven years.
The timeline meant one thing: he was using during the entire dynasty. Every championship, every all-star appearance, every clutch playoff save. But the question that followed wasn’t only about Fuhr, it was about what everybody around him knew, how long they knew it, and why nobody did anything until a newspaper forced their hand.
The System That Needed Him Broken
The 1983–84 Oilers scored 446 goals in a single season, still an NHL record, averaging 5.58 goals per game. Their defensemen weren’t really defenders. Their philosophy was simple: outscore everyone. If that meant giving up four or five goals, so be it. This created an impossible situation for whoever played in net.
Most goalies faced 25 to 30 shots per game. Fuhr regularly saw 40 or more, playing behind a team that treated defense as a suggestion. The mental toll of that system broke traditional goaltenders when you give up an early goal, the standard response is to tighten up, play more conservatively, and dwell on what went wrong. The Oilers couldn’t afford that. They needed someone who could surrender a goal that would destroy most goalies mentally, then make a game-saving stop thirty seconds later as though the first one never happened.
On December 11th, 1985, Edmonton beat Chicago 12–9. Fuhr gave up nine goals and won. Think about that for a moment. In any other system, that’s a career-ending performance. In Edmonton, it was a Tuesday.
Substance use creates exactly the kind of psychological distance that system required, the ability to compartmentalize, to function through discomfort without processing it. Whether anyone in the organization understood that dynamic consciously or not, they had found a goaltender whose coping mechanisms were accidentally perfect for their chaos.
For seven years, nobody asked why he was so good at surviving it.
The Signs Everyone Chose To Ignore
The warning signs weren’t subtle, and they weren’t hidden. As early as 1983–84, coach Glen Sather confronted Fuhr directly. “I said to him, ‘I’ve got all kinds of reasons to believe you are doing it,'” Sather later recalled. Fuhr denied everything, and Sather chose to keep watching rather than act.
In 1986, Sports Illustrated published allegations that five or more Oilers had substance issues, with specific details and corroborated sources. Sather called it irresponsible. NHL President John Ziegler criticized the article for “McCarthyist tactics” rather than launching any investigation. Nothing was looked into.
During the 1988 playoffs, reporters noted that Fuhr appeared physically compromised in post-game interviews, dilated pupils, slurred speech. The hockey media attributed it to exhaustion from the playoff grind. The Oilers were chasing their fourth Cup in five years, and the narrative of a warrior goaltender playing through pain was far more appealing than the alternative. So that’s what got printed.
Beat writers documented erratic behavior at practices throughout the mid-1980s. Teammates noticed mood swings and unexplained absences. His weight fluctuated between seasons in ways that didn’t align with training or injury recovery. Everyone around the team saw fragments of something wrong. Nobody assembled the pieces publicly.
In 1989, an assistant coach approached Fuhr privately about getting help. Management was informed. They chose to wait until after the playoffs. The team psychologist on staff, someone employed specifically for situations like this, was never brought into the conversation. The phrase used internally was “we’ll deal with it in the summer.” Summer arrived. Nothing happened.
The Newspaper That Did What The League Wouldn’t
On August 31st, 1990, the Edmonton Journal published a story that made silence impossible. Fuhr admitted to using substances from 1983 through the summer of 1989. His ex-wife Corrine provided details about finding hidden stashes in their home, about drug dealers calling with threats over unpaid debts, about watching him use in public places where anyone could see. She had tried everything privately for years. Going public was the last option left.
Teammate Esa Tikkanen confirmed to reporters that he had witnessed a dealer pass Fuhr a bag in a bar. The league announced an investigation the next day. Fuhr was suspended for a year without pay, later reduced to 59 games.
The suspension came thirteen months after Fuhr had already gotten clean on his own, quietly, without any official NHL framework, after his agent pushed him into a private treatment facility in the summer of 1989. Sather later confirmed Fuhr had tested negative three times in the year leading up to the suspension. The league punished him for a problem he had already addressed himself, only because a newspaper forced the issue into public view.
His teammate Craig MacTavish said it plainly: “What was Grant guilty of? He was guilty of having a problem and trying to remedy that problem. If that’s a cause for suspension, what kind of message does that send? If you’ve got a problem, don’t seek help, just continue to do it quietly and you’ll be able to play hockey.”
What The League Finally Did — And When
In 1996, six years after Fuhr’s suspension and more than a decade after the warning signs first appeared in Edmonton, the NHL and NHLPA implemented the Substance Abuse and Behavioral Health Program, a confidential system allowing players to seek help voluntarily without league involvement, with full salary continuation and no automatic suspension.
It was progress. But it arrived only after the league had spent years building a system designed to avoid inconvenient truths until public scandal made them unavoidable. Testing remained largely voluntary. The pattern stayed reactive rather than preventive.
In 2003, Fuhr was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame, becoming the first Black player to receive that honor. Glen Sather, the general manager who confronted Fuhr in 1983 and chose to wait, was inducted as a builder in 1997. The dynasty they built together remains celebrated as one of hockey’s greatest achievements.
So does the institutional failure that ran alongside it for the better part of a decade.
