Looks like Mess bows out: Rangers fans salute Captain
Hockey is a beautiful and brutal game, and it can take a terrible toll on one's body. Few play the game well for an extended period. Fewer still play it at a high level for 25 seasons and past their 43rd birthday. Mark Messier is truly a unique and admirable player- he played the game the right way, he treated it with respect, and he understood his place in it. Last night may well have been his last game in a Ranger uniform. If it was, all of us who call ourselves hockey fans will be a bit poorer.
Mark Messier never said the words that made anything official. He just basked in the moment of mutual adoration that didn't have to be scripted because it was a decade in the making.
At the end of his 1,756th NHL game, 698 of which were played in a Rangers sweater with a C on the left shoulder, Messier accepted the congratulations of his teammates and opponents for the night and then turned to the people with whom he has forged an unbreakable bond. After taking a victory lap around Madison Square Garden, Messier bowed to the four corners of the rink and then offered a gesture of heartfelt thanks to Rangers fans who still would be offering their souls as possible payment had he not arrived in 1991 only to hoist a Stanley Cup three years later. (And what true Rangers fans doesn't drift off to sleep at night without remembering Gary Thorne screaming, "THE RANGERS WIN THE CUP!! THE RANGERS WIN THE CUP!!"?)
Messier is the last remaining active player from the 1980s Edmonton Oilers dyansty. He won five Stanley Cups with Edmonton, but he will most likely be best known for the Cup he helped the Rangers win in 1994. New York had not won a Cup since 1941, and when things looked desperate again New Jersey in the Eastern Conference finals, Messier guaranteed a win in Game 7. Not many players would have the cojones to make that sort of guarantee, never mind help deliver on it. Messier's guarantee helped to give Stephane Matteau, who scored Game 7's game-winning goal, a permanent place in Ranger lore.
Messier was never about the money, though he is certainly not going to have to worry about where his next box of Chicken McNuggets are coming from. He respected the game and played it in a way Gordie Howe would have been proud of. He was never as skillful as Wayne Gretzky, as flashy as Mario Lemieux, nor as physical as Howe. Even so, he made those around him better, and shouldn't that really be the true measure of greatness?
I cannot think of an athlete whom I have more respect for the Mark Messier. I will miss him, and I know Rangers fans will as well. Few have earned his place in the game's history or his right to retire than Messier. Bon voyage to one of the best to ever played the game.
