If Chris Kontos is remembered at all, it is for helping Wayne Gretzky and his LA. Kings eliminate the Edmonton Oilers in 1989. If that's all he's remembered for, that's OK with him.
Will not be forgotten
The short, white-haired, elderly man is standing behind the restaurant cash register, staring intently at his dark-haired customer.
The old man's brow furrows as he searches for the connection, and then, a smile creases his lips:
“Did you play hockey?”
The tall man smiles back as he answers: “Yes.”
“What's your name?”
“Kontos.”
“Kriptos?”
“No, Kontos.”
“Who did you play for?”
“New York, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Tampa Bay.”
“And what did you say your name was again?”
“Chris Kontos.”
Chris Kontos is the NHL's version of a one-hit-wonder, a player who reached great heights, and now, 14 years after the fact, has seen the sum of his career become the answer to a trivia question.
Eight months after Peter Pocklington sold Wayne Gretzky to Hollywood, the Los Angeles Kings met the still-mighty Edmonton Oilers in the first round of the 1989 playoffs.
While the whole hockey world tuned in to watch Gretzky get his revenge, it was Kontos – a Noname King from no-one-knew-where who stole the spotlight, scoring eight goals in seven games as the Kings knocked off the Oilers.
“I've looked back at the tapes, and they are good goals — not great goals – they were opportunistic,” says Kontos, who runs a multimedia marketing firm in Midland, Ont. “I don't know if it was a fluke, but I don't think it was, because I think I could still do it.”
He did it in junior and the New York Rangers picked him in the first round of the 1982 draft in the hope that he would do it for them, too. Given a chance to play the following year, albeit mostly on a checking line with Robbie Ftorek, Kontos aroused cheers on Broadway when he slipped the puck past Washington goaltender Pat Riggin for his first NHL goal.
“I thought there were many more to come,” Kontos recalls with a laugh. “So I played it real cool and barely celebrated.
“Pretty soon after that, I found out not everybody has a career like Wayne Gretzky.”
Not everybody makes one bad decision they wUl always regret.
After a respectable rookie season that produced seven goals and 15 points, Kontos spent the summer working toward winning an increased role with the team.
“I got to camp the next fall and it became clear pretty early that no matter what I did, my name was on the back of a sweater in the minors somewhere.”
Instead of accepting the temporary fate of so many other top prospects, Kontos sulked, and then he announced that he was quitting, which he did for a few months, until Rangers general manager Craig Patrick paid him a visit and convinced him that getting some seasoning with the Rangers affiliate in Tulsa was a good idea.
“Here I was, a 19-year-old first rounder who had refused to go to the minors,” Kontos says. “And you got a whole bunch of old time hockey guys who have been stuck there for their whole careers, and then I show-up some silver-spoon fed kid.
“To this day, I regret that. I should have stayed in junior, and then gone straight down and
spent a season or two learning how to be a professional.”
Shoulda, coulda, didn't – which did not endear Kontos to Hilsa's coach, Tom Webster. Still, he wanted it to work out with the Rangers, and over the next three years he would play 34 more games with New York before being dealt to Pittsburgh.
“I used to go play Donkey Kong at Mario's [Lemieux] until 4 o'clock in the morning,” Kontos says. “He was even incredible at that – his hands, his coordination, he was unbelievable.”
The friendship between the emerging superstar and the fading prospect was short-lived, however, and a little more than a year later Kontos was traded to Los Angeles.
The swap was a stroke of good fortune. Indeed, the man behind the Kings bench was Robbie Ftorek, and with six games left in the season, he called his old linemate up from the minors.
Kontos responded with 12 points. Yet, despite impressing, the coach, Kontos did not win over management and he was released.
“That was a real shock,” he says. “And then a great deal came in to play for a team in Switzerland, and I said: ‘OK, forget it, I am going to Europe.'”
Kontos and his wife spent a happy goal-filled season in Switzerland, before returning home to Penetang, Ont., where they had bought a new house.
The chain of events that would end with Kontos's outburst against Edmonton started a few hours after they dropped their bags.
In seven games against the Edmonton Oilers during the first-round of the 1989 playoffs, Chris Kontos scored eight goals and helped the Great One oust his former team eight months after he was traded to the Kings.
“It was the first night – we didn't even have a phone yet — plus we were all whacked out from jet lag. Then, at 11 o'clock, there is this great banging on the door, and it was my dad.”
Kontos senior told his son that Ftorek and the Kings had called to offer him a contract, and that he had until midnight to fax in his acceptance before the offer expired.
“There was this little lumber yard in town,” Kontos says. “The manager was a friend of mine, and we got him to meet us there so we could fax in the signature.”
His next stop was on the Kings power play where he proved that the hands that made him a top scorer in junior – and in Europe – had not lost their touch.
“It wasn't Gretzky deking out the whole team so I could tap in from two feet out,” he says. “The goals I scored against Edmonton, they were honest goals. Besides, a lot of the assists were from [Bernie] Nicholls.”
Alas, in a business where it is nice to have some friends on the inside, Kontos lost one that sum-* mer, as the Kings fired Robbie Ftorek.
The man hired to replace him was Tom Webster. The same Tom Webster that Kontos walked out on eight years earlier when the Rangers assigned him to Tulsa.
“I was doomed,” Kontos says with a laugh. “Hockey is a funny game, and the politics of hockey are even funnier sometimes. And they buried me. Oh, they buried me.”
The Kings IHL affiliate in Phoenix was the graveyard. Kontos, however, proved he could score in the desert, notching 26 goals and 62 points in 69 games. As the playoffs approached, the Kings came calling again, hoping Kontos could conjure another miracle run.
There would be no magic that spring, as Kontos managed just one goal in five games before Los Angeles was bounced by the Calgary Flames.
Not long afterward, Kontos was bounced too, and he did not land back in the NHL until the expansion Tampa Bay Lightning offered him a contract in 1992.
“I was thinking ‘OK, I am 29 years old, and I am going to get a fresh start.' So I work my tail off all summer and during training camp I lead in scoring. So there is no way they can send me down because I am on fire.”
Tampa's first regular-season game was Kontos's greatest nonplayoff moment. Facing the Chicago Blackhawks and their Vezina TYophy-winning goaltender Ed Belfour, the Oilerkiller caught lightning in a bottle, scoring four goals in a 7-3 Ihmpa win.
He would have 21 by the 20-game mark, before opposing coaches took some interest and decided that, journeyman or not, Kontos warranted some attention. The goals dried up after that, and then they disappeared altogether when Kontos tore a ligament in his knee. The injury did not end his hockey career. Indeed, he went on to win a silver medal with Canada at the 1994 Winter Olympics. It did, however, mark his last moment in an NHL uniform.
While he may have his regrets, unlike so many other never-weres who perhaps don't have much else, Kontos knows that his name is one that will not be forgotten.
“The way I look at it is that I had the opportunity to do that. And if the hockey world was watching that one series with Edmonton, well, it is kind of nice – once in a blue moon – to be remembered for something.”