Hockey Confidential (16 page)

“Every year, the kids on the team would vote Connor as the captain, and every year I would give it to someone else,” Brian McDavid said. “People would say Connor was only good because his dad was the coach. I was so offended by that, because he deserved better. Another coach would have played him more; another coach would have made him the captain. Whatever Connor got, he earned it.”

“I liked [having his dad as coach] but it was hard sometimes,” Connor said. “A lot of stuff would be said, but in peewee, for example, I wasn't even an assistant captain, so I'm not sure how anyone could talk about favouritism. All I know is that my dad taught me everything I know about hockey. Every kid wants to play in the NHL, and that's something I became focused on. The best advice I ever got was from my dad. He told me, ‘If you want to do something in life, you have to do something every day to help make it happen.'”

Connor took that advice to heart with passion and zeal. Every day. Literally.

“Every day, he would come home from school, and his routine would be the same,” Brian McDavid said. “He would do his homework, and then he would get on his Rollerblades in the driveway, shoot his pucks, set up obstacle courses, skate around paint cans, time himself. He did that every day for years.”

Connor created a virtual hockey Camp McDavid in the driveway of the family home. Both garage doors would be opened up. Whatever he could find in the garage was likely to find its way onto the obstacle course. The routine was more or less the same each day, though he would refine his drills by adding an extra twist or deleting a turn.

“I would always shoot pucks, at least 100 pucks, that was always part of it,” Connor said. “Then I would set up the pucks all over the driveway and stickhandle through them, like Patrick Kane did in that video. I would do some footwork. I took old paint cans out of the garage and set them up, one here [pointing], one here [pointing to a different spot] and one here [pointing to a third spot]. Then I would skate through them, weave around them, stickhandle through them. I had one stupid drill where I would have two paint cans set up beside each other and I would lay a stick across the top of them. After I would weave through the first cans, I would then flick the ball over the stick or under the stick and jump over it.”

Sometimes he would work his skateboard into the routine, making it the final obstacle, passing the puck or ball to himself under the skateboard before shooting it into the net.

McDavid didn't just do this every day. He timed himself doing it. Or sometimes he would call for his mom to do the timing for him. In the summer, when he had more free time, he would do this routine two hours a day.

“Two hours would be the minimum,” he said. “On a school day, I'd only be able to get an hour in.”

Brian and Kelly would marvel at Connor's dedication, but they became a little self-conscious about it, too.

“People would see him out there every day,” Kelly said, “and they would think or say we forced Connor to do it.”

“And by ‘we,' they meant ‘me,'” Brian said, shaking his head.

“I used to want him to come in,” Kelly said. “Sometimes he was too tired, but he would say to me, ‘I won't be happy with myself if I don't do it.' Some days he would come home from school and say he was tired, and I would say, ‘You don't have to go out there. We don't care. You don't have to do this. Listen to your body.' But he would always say, ‘I'm going to be mad at myself if I don't do it.' So he would go out and do it. After the fact, we found out people thought Brian was making him do it.”

The look on Connor's face as he heard that said it all. He took it as a personal affront, an insult, for anyone to even consider he was being pushed by someone other than himself or something other than his natural passion for the game.

Mind you, he comes by his competitive streak honestly. All the McDavid men, when it comes to hockey, have demonstrated a desire to play for keeps.

“Me and my brother would play in the driveway, one on one, and there's not a lot of space in our driveway, and it would get intense,” Connor said. “I was four years younger than him, and if I beat him, he would get so mad. He high-sticked me a couple of times, and I had to get stitches. He'd go after my eyes.”

But nothing rivals the intensity of three McDavids—Brian, Cameron and Connor—putting on the Rollerblades in the summer and a playing a cutthroat game of one-against-two hockey in the library parking lot near their cottage in Thornbury, Ontario.

“One ball, whoever has it is against the other two,” Brian said. “Connor would almost always win, but it's really intense. There are usually some pretty serious injuries.”

“One time I was sure I broke my wrist,” Connor said, “but the worst was my dad.”

“Oh, man, I got some gravel under my wheels and I went down hard,” Brian said. “The gravel was embedded in my leg. We had to go home, and Kelly said, ‘Why are you guys home?' Then she saw my leg. It was a mess. It was for weeks, with road rash.”

Connor laughed at the memory.

“It was,” he said, “the worst road rash I've ever seen. When we play hockey, it gets pretty heated.”

•   •   •

That cub reporter from 1978 went on to become editor-in-
chief of
The Hockey News
in 1982. In all the comings and goings of the hockey world, from the NHL on down to the low minors and junior hockey—What was that old hockey saying? “We'll send you so far away, not even
The Hockey News
will be able to find you.”—the editor-in-chief did make good on his vow to remember Pierre Dupuis's name.

But a funny thing happened on the way to future stardom, on that road to “going places.” Pierre Dupuis never got there. Not really.

His entire hockey resumé on the HockeyDB website shows four games in 1981–82 as a 15-year-old with his hometown Sudbury Wolves, followed by 64 games the next season with the Windsor Spitfires (13 goals and 26 points), plus only eight more OHL games (one more goal and three more points) over the next two seasons, split between Windsor and Belleville.

By the time he turned 19, in 1985, Pierre Dupuis had, for all intents and purposes, dropped off the face of the hockey earth.

The editor-in-chief didn't attempt to reconcile it, or investigate the specific whys and wherefores, as much as he just duly noted it, tucked it away as a future reference point and hopefully some sage hockey context: as in, “Be careful, all things are not always as they appear, especially with precocious puck talents”; as in, “Beware: if a 12-year-old kid who was that good in minor hockey couldn't even make it as an everyday junior player, never mind pro hockey . . .” Well, you get the picture.

Eventually, the editor-in-chief went on to become the
Toronto Star
's hockey columnist and ultimately a national broadcaster, the so-called Hockey Insider on TSN, yet through all the job description and title changes, the lesson of Pierre Dupuis was never really forgotten: “When reporting on teenage puck prodigies, tread carefully. Very carefully.”

So, it was with some trepidation, on November 30, 2004, that the Hockey Insider introduced 14-year-old John Tavares to a national television audience for the first time:

In the hockey vernacular, J.T. is a late-1990 birthdate, having just turned 14 on September 20. For the purposes of the NHL draft, for example, he wouldn't be eligible until 2009. But he's already turning heads. Playing up a year for the Toronto Marlboros 1989s of the Greater Toronto Hockey League, Tavares is, on any given night, one of the very best players on the ice. He's not eligible for the OHL draft until the summer of 2006, but to give you an idea of where he fits in, he would be one of the elite picks if he were available this year . . . It's never a great idea to put unrealistic expectations on a kid who just turned 14, but J.T.'s exploits force you to take notice.

If you must know the truth, the Hockey Insider believed he might have gone with a harder sell on Tavares. He'd actually seen Tavares play both minor hockey and minor lacrosse and seemed reasonably certain that this was no Pierre Dupuis, that Tavares was an exceptional two-sport athlete. He knew there was already a buzz within the OHL about Tavares and the possibility of a new rule to allow a truly exceptional 15-year-old to play in the league.

But still, Tavares had only just turned 14. Fourteen. It's so young, isn't it? And if, for some unknown reason, this Tavares kid didn't turn out to be as good as advertised, if he wasn't as exceptional as his billing, who would have been responsible for putting him in the glare of a national spotlight, perhaps creating unrealistic expectations and additional pressures he never asked for?

•   •   •

No sooner had the OHL officially declared John Tavares
“exceptional”—the Oshawa Generals made him the first pick in the 2005 OHL Priority Selection, ahead of the talented, one-year-older prospect Logan Couture, who had expected to be taken first overall—than OHL commissioner Dave Branch figured the league needed to get out of the exceptional-player business.

Sort of.

Branch didn't have any problem with the notion of a legitimately exceptional 15-year-old playing in the league, provided he went through a rigorous vetting process; he just envisioned some thorny issues if it were the OHL that had to tell a talented 15-year-old, “Sorry, we don't think you're that exceptional.”

“There was lots of speculation at the time [Tavares] would open the floodgates and would invite many more applications for exceptional status,” Branch said. “As a league who wants these players, be it at 15 or 16 or 17 or whatever, was it wise for us to be so closely associated with the process, even though we set it up as an independent, arm's-length committee? So I phoned [Hockey Canada president] Bob Nicholson and asked him if Hockey Canada would be interested in taking over the administration of the exceptional player program, and he said it would. I sent him our model, [Hockey Canada] took it, adopted it and [Hockey Canada] uses virtually the same standards and methodology as we did. It's now a fully independent process.”

Sure enough, Hockey Canada's current mission statement on exceptional players reads as follows:

The purpose is to develop a map that would aid in discovering an exceptional player. A player that is uncommon, superior, distinguished, remarkable, exclusive. Such a player is deserving of reward to participate in Major Junior Hockey and whose development might be significantly impaired if not permitted to participate in Major Junior hockey. This is a map of values or a map of the way things should be to ensure a deserving journey.

Any player applying for exceptional status must do so by submitting an official application prior to February 15 in the year preceding the season for which exceptional status is being sought. It costs $1,000 to apply.

Ultimately, the decision on whether exceptional status is granted rests in the hands of a three-person Hockey Canada National Evaluation Panel comprising Hockey Canada's chief scout, a designate of Hockey Canada's board of directors, and a member at large appointed by Hockey Canada.

It's designed to be a highly confidential process, with no public acknowledgement of which players have even applied so as to protect the identity of those who are unsuccessful. If an applicant is successful, there's a straightforward and simple announcement in late March or early April saying the player has been deemed exceptional and is therefore eligible to play Major Junior Hockey as a 15-year-old.

The three members of the Hockey Canada National Evaluation Panel must be unanimous in their support for a player to be granted exceptional status. In effect, the national panel subcontracts much of the detailed due diligence to a three-man regional committee: the local branch administrator, to oversee the process; a life-skill interviewer to make subjective evaluations of the player's maturity and support system; and a regional hockey scout who can assess the player's physical attributes and on-ice skills and ability.

A plethora of questionnaires are required to be completed. The player and parents must fill out one, and the player must write an essay explaining why he should be granted exceptional status. Additional questionnaires must be filled out by a current teacher of the player, a coach of the player as well as a separate hockey evaluator, in addition to the report of the regional scout. Perhaps most important of all, the life-skill interviewer conducts at least one, and often more than one, in-depth interview with the player and his family, providing both written and verbal submissions to the national panel.

When all the forms have been filled out, all the questionnaires completed, all the interviews and research considered, only then does the National Evaluation Panel make its ruling. It's all or nothing; an exceptional player gets three of three votes, or he isn't exceptional.

Oh, yeah, one other thing: If the applicant is successful, $500 of the initial $1,000 fee is returned to the player; if unsuccessful, no money is refunded.

•   •   •

Kids' hockey is supposed to fun and games, and for the most
part it is, but as a player climbs up the minor hockey ladder—especially if the player is a high-end performer who shows signs of elite ability—it begins to change in minor bantam. That's when the players become teenagers, 13 years old, and if life in general becomes more complicated and serious in those teen years, the same is true of life and times in minor hockey.

It's as if minor bantam signals the start of a testosterone-fuelled three-year sprint—minor bantam, major bantam and minor midget—that gets progressively more serious each year. But it's a run that can open doors to the next level of junior or college hockey—businesslike worlds that require teens to grow up even more quickly—and ultimately the pro game.