Bill McCreary’s farewell tour will make a stop in Vancouver at the Olympic Winter Games.
The 54-year-old NHL referee, who is due to retire at the end of the season, has been a presence at just about every big game for the last 25 years.
He’s worked 14 Stanley Cup finals and the gold-medal games at the 1998 Olympic Games in Nagano and in 2002 at Salt Lake. Now he gets to make one more trip to one of the pinnacles of the game.
“When you think about it, being on the ice with the two top lines from every NHL team is a privilege and to represent the NHL and our officials association is a tremendous honour,” said McCreary, a Guelph, ON, native who is in his 28th NHL season and hit the 1,600-game mark in October (he’s also worked 282 playoff games).
“All these guys play for their club teams and all of sudden they’re playing for their country and pride comes into play. It’s a whole different mindset than what we’re used to in the NHL.”
He told Sun Media he was surprised to get the call from NHL director of officiating Terry Gregson to tell him he had been selected to work the Olympics.
He shouldn’t have been.
Speak to his colleagues and McCreary remains one of the most respected referees in the NHL, still at the top of his game.
He’ll be one of seven NHL referees to get the call to work the Vancouver Games. The others are Paul Devorski, Marc Joannette, Dennis La Rue, Dan O’Halloran, Chris Rooney and Brad Watson.
NHL linesmen in Vancouver will be Shane Heyer, Jean Morin, Brian Murphy, Thor Nelson, Tim Nowak and Jay Sharrers.
The rest of the officials have been culled from European leagues. Among them, Switzerland’s Danny Kurmann is the only non-NHL referee to have worked the 2002 and 2006 Games.
(An aside: it will be interesting to see how the NHL and IIHF officials are integrated at the Games. This will be the first Olympic tournament to incorporate the two-referee system. There has been some speculation that, at least for the preliminary round, an NHL referee and linesman will be paired with a European referee and linesman for each of the games. It will bear watching to see if the same standard is going to be applied at both ends of the rink.)
McCreary has been involved in some of the most memorable moments in Olympic hockey, at least from a Canadian standpoint.
In addition to the gold-medal game in 2002, he also worked the controversial semifinal game between Canada and the Czech Republic in Nagano, won by the Czechs in a shootout. It was controversial because Wayne Gretzky wasn’t picked by coach Marc Crawford to take a shot.
“There was a lot written about Gretzky not being selected and a lot written about that shootout,” said McCreary, who had a front-row seat to see Gretzky slumped on the bench. “That was my first shootout. You remember a lot of things, the whole procedure.”
Another memory foremost for him is the buildup to the Canada-USA game for the gold in Salt Lake.
“If somebody had written a script, they would have picked the U.S. and Canada to be in that game,” he said. “To be there and be part of a game everybody in hockey was watching was a great experience. There was a lot of pressure, but I looked at it like I was out on the ice with the same players I was out on the ice with every night earning a living for my family. I didn’t look at the names of the players on their backs.”
McCreary said he’s hoping to have his family join him in Vancouver for at least part of the Games, giving them a chance to share what will likely be one of his last moments on one of hockey’s biggest stages.
“This being my last year,” he said, “this will be a nice way to put a finishing touch on it.”
chris.stevenson@sunmedia.ca
