Making Coco: The Grant Fuhr Story is a documentary film on the first National Hockey League (NHL) goaltender who was of African descent to be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame, Grant Fuhr. This film was shown at the Manhattan Film Festival in April of 2019 and it struck a chord with me because I am a hockey fan.
The first time I heard about Fuhr was on a bus ride home from a high school ice hockey game. My high school coach at the time, Dean Portas played goaltender in high school and we got around to discussing the NHL goaltenders who he grew up watching.
“Grant Fuhr and [Glenn] ‘Chico’ Resch were the goalies that I grew up watching in the Eighties. I used to pick up little things here and there from the way they played.”
Dean Portas, Championship-winning Ice Hockey Coach
Portas enlightened my 16-year-old mind about the NHL in the 1980s, which was before I was born. Obviously, all hockey fans who were born in the nineties have heard legends of the Edmonton Oilers dynasty of the mid 1980s, because the ‘great one,’ Wayne Gretzky played back then. Still, it was great for someone like me, who hadn’t watched those great Oilers teams play, to hear about them from someone who did.
Grant Fuhr was born in Spruce Grove, Alberta on Sep. 28, 1962 to one white and one black parent. Fuhr’s biological parents put him up for adoption and, as a result, was raised by two white parents in Alberta. The documentary unsurprisingly opens with Grant Fuhr discussing his origins so here is how the film went.
First Impressions of ‘Making Coco: the Grant Fuhr Story’
The film starts off with his early hockey career. At the age of sixteen, Fuhr signed with the Victoria Cougars of the Western Hockey League (WHL). In two seasons in Victoria, Fuhr was a first-team all-star. Then, two years later, Fuhr got his big break—being drafted by the Edmonton Oilers of the NHL with the eighth pick in the 1981 draft.
When the NHL expanded in 1979, four Western Hockey Association (WHA) teams joined the league, including Edmonton. The Oilers were building a solid foundation by drafting Grant Fuhr and adding him to a group of young players that already included two of the greatest forwards to ever play in the NHL in Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier.
The filmmaker, Don Metz asks Gretzky how good Grant Fuhr was compared to other goalies and ‘the Great One’ did not hesitate and said, “he’s the greatest goalie who ever lived”. This is debatable and highlights the fact that all of the interviews with Fuhr’s teammates in this documentary were with Fuhr’s teammates on teams which Fuhr had the most success with— which seems biased at times.
The filmmaker shows a different perspective from Sather, who says that he was not interested in drafting Fuhr originally but was convinced by one of the Oilers scouts. To hear Sather admit that he did not want to draft Fuhr was definitely a good contrast to the other interviews that just repeat the same praise of Fuhr’s on-ice skill and off-ice venerability.
It was great that the film, Making Coco was able to interview two of Fuhr’s teammates, Fred Brathwaite and Jarome Iginla, who are respectively of black and biracial backgrounds like Fuhr. During Iginla’s interview, the retired, hall-of-fame forward offered an insight into his childhood. Like Fuhr, Iginla grew up in Alberta and he says that there were times when he was playing ice hockey as a boy when white kids jabbed him with statements like, “there aren’t many black players in the NHL.” Not one to give in to anger, Jarome always referred those insensitive young men to Grant Fuhr, who was not just a hockey player, but was the starting goaltender on the Edmonton Oilers.
Iginla’s comments resonated with me because they showed how even a young boy, who had every reason to feel like an outsider as a biracial kid in a white country, had the wherewithal to not give in to popular belief. To not let insults like this lead him to the conclusion that black players could not play in the NHL. I attribute this to the fact that a young Jarome Iginla found inspiration in watching a black hockey player like Fuhr on television.
In order to provide background to the history of the NHL color-barrier, it was a decade after Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s (MLB) color barrier in 1947 with the Brooklyn Dodgers that Willie O’Ree became the first black ice hockey player, in 1958, to play in an NHL game as a member of the Boston Bruins. That was twenty-four years before Fuhr would play in his first NHL game and it was a moment that paved the way for the black players and broadcasters, Anson Carter and Kevin Weekes who have for at least five years now, been helping the NHL and its broadcasting arms become more diverse and a reflection of a more tolerant society when it comes to race.
Over the course of ‘Making Coco,’ the filmmakers chose to include interviews with some very well-known players who were teammates of Fuhr’s in Edmonton. One of Fuhr’s Oiler teammates the film featured his Oilers teammate and Hall-of-Famer, Glenn Anderson. I met Anderson in 2017 and he was so polite to me, although he is a hall-of-famer who has every right to be aloof since he remains one of only three NHLers in league history (Mark Messier and Kevin Lowe included) to win six Stanley Cups during the course of a career. As far as what Anderson said in Making Coco about his former teammate, Grant Fuhr they rang as true as anything he ever did on a sheet of ice.
He was never ‘black’ to us.
Glenn Anderson, Hockey Hall-of-Famer
Another sign of the tolerance that Fuhr’s coaches and teammates showed him was demonstrated during the interview the documentary featured with his former Oilers coach, Glen Sather. During this interview, the experienced coach who guided Fuhr and the Edmonton Oilers to five Stanley Cup victories from 1984-90, described a moment when Fuhr felt shame when he told his coach that his parents were white. Sather tells the audience that he responded to Fuhr’s admission by telling Fuhr that he did not mind and that he only “cared if he was a good hockey player.”
Fuhr’s Off-Ice Struggles
The documentary was very informative to this point and the views it provided of Fuhr’s life became darker when it began to show the off-ice issues that Fuhr encountered, later on in his career. The documentary highlighted a moment when Fuhr is in his late 20s and begins using recreational drugs.
The Edmonton Sun newspaper publishes an article spotlighting Fuhr’s cocaine use and the NHL suspends Fuhr for the 1990-91 season, even though the league never drug-tested him.
Fuhr’s career seemed like it was on the downside and we see that Fuhr’s cocaine scandal was the lowest point of a career that had so many more highs than it did lows. The NHL did in fact shorten this suspension and allowed him to return for the last 23 games of the ’91 season. Fuhr played well, but the Oilers were unable to win the Stanley Cup that year and afterwards Fuhr gets traded to the Toronto Maple Leafs.
The last ten minutes of the documentary film takes us to the end of Fuhr’s legendary career, about 15 years before this documentary was made in 2003. That was the year when Hockey Hall-of-Fame enshrined Fuhr as the first black player to be given such an honor since the hall’s first induction took place in 1959 (scroll down to formal induction venues). At the time, Fuhr was the first black player to be inducted into the Hockey Hall-of-Fame and the Oilers would retire Fuhr’s jersey number that very same year.
In terms of Fuhr’s legacy, he still holds the record for the most games-played by a goalie in a single-season (79) and consecutive games played by a goalie (76), which will be nearly impossible for any modern goaltender to surpass. Aside from the superficial statistics, Grant Fuhr holds a special place in NHL history and ice hockey lore for two reasons, he is the greatest goaltender and one of the greatest players who was born in Alberta, and he was the first black man inducted into the Hockey Hall-of-Fame.
From adopted kid to under-sized NHL draft pick to winning five Stanley Cups and becoming a member of Hockey’s Cooperstown, “Making Coco” is a documentary that does not just chronicle the career of a professional hockey player. It’s really about the adversity that made Grant Fuhr’s NHL career unique and made Grant Fuhr, the human a trailblazer for people of color in the great sport of ice hockey.
The Grant Fuhr story: Screened at the Manhattan Film Festival Apr. 26.
Anthony Paradiso 