Hockey Confidential (26 page)

Karl Subban loves Canada. He feels as though Canada has
done so much for him and his family, from that first day he arrived on Peter Street from Jamaica. He's a celebrity of sorts now, appearing with P.K. in the Hyundai Hockey Helpers commercials on TV, part of a sponsored program that helps underprivileged kids play the same game Karl immediately fell in love with in that first Canadian winter of 1970. And he wants to pay all of it back, with interest.

This so-called retirement of his will no doubt allow him to support P.K., Malcolm and Jordan on each of his three boys' quest to live out their version of the Canadian Dream, as they strive to etch the Subban family name alongside Sutter or Staal, the gold standards for Canadian hockey siblings in the NHL.

“I wouldn't trade their situations for anyone's,” Karl Subban said. “Their situation will define who they're going to be. I would ask them, ‘Who are you going to be, Jordan? Who are you going to be, Malcolm? Who are you going to be, P.K.?' You know what I mean? I know how difficult it is. You know what they say, eh? The only place you get a free lunch is a mousetrap, and you know what happens to the mouse.” He laughed. “You have to pay the price, you use your situation as fuel to light your fire.”

Ultimately, though, for as much as the father wants his sons to fulfil their hockey dreams, he has loftier goals for them, just as he does for himself. And those goals mean more than scoring in the NHL.

“The boys may make it in hockey, but they have to make it in life, too,” Karl said. “There's more to life than hockey. P.K. could win six more Norris Trophies, and that would make him a great player, but is he a great person? I think he's seeing that now. P.K. went to Haiti after the earthquake there to do work with World Vision. He doesn't miss an opportunity to visit a sick child, he's seeing that [is] as important as hockey is. You have to give back. I want to give back. If people knew how many times others reached out at various times to help us up when we needed it . . . we've tried to teach our boys the importance of giving back.”

But retirement is also a time for the simple pleasures in life—driving or taking the train, here, there or anywhere with Maria, to watch one of the boys play a game. Or maybe time spent with Maria, just being grandparents to Legacy, Epic and Honor, the second generation of Canadian-born Subban boys. When Legacy was 27 months, he skated for the first time.

“He cried for 30 minutes,” Karl Subban said, laughing. “I told his dad, ‘You have to go out on the ice with them.' They love mom and dad being there with them for comfort, if you have the time. It's good family time. . . . Legacy, he just doesn't know what he was born into.”

He will find out soon enough.

Karl Subban didn't write the book on parenting or training or coaching or teaching or putting three sons in professional hockey. But that's most certainly the plan.

Gord and his younger brother, Pat, talk on the phone.

Every day.

They talk about what is near and dear to them: the Boston Bruins. During the playoffs, contact is even more frequent and intense, upgraded to a combination of phone calls, texts and emails on pretty much a shift-by-shift, running-time basis during every Bruin game. As it should be. When the Bs up their game in the postseason, so too do Gord and Pat.

Gord and his older brother, Mike, will speak to each other about the Bruins—it isn't like they
never
break bread over the Bs; it's not as if it's
forbidden
—but it's not as frequent, not as naturally simpatico as it is with Gord and Pat. You see, Gord and Mike know that sometimes, in the interest of peace and love, it's best to steer clear of certain topics, at least since the infamous Ray Bourque blowup of 2001. That's when Gord left Mike's house in a huff because Mike was mad at Gord for not being happier for the ex-Bruin great winning his first Stanley Cup with the Colorado Avalanche. Gord and Mike are kin, flesh and blood, brothers in arms, but when it comes to the Bs, they sometimes tend not to see things the same way, so they will opt for the path of least resistance.

Now, whether it's Gord talking to Pat, or Gord talking to Mike, or Pat and Mike talking to each other—they're all Bruins at heart, dammit—it should go without saying, but needs to be said for emphasis nonetheless: the Downie brothers are not what you would call casual fans of the spoked B.

Their passion for the black and gold knows no bounds. It is deep and abiding, communal, maybe even tribal.

“It's how we connect,” Gord said. “We have deep discussions every day about the Bruins or other stuff that may or may not be important in our lives. So, yeah, mostly about the Bruins.”

Could you really expect anything else from Gord and Pat, two boys who, when they were christened, had Harry Sinden, the architect of the Big, Bad Bruins and the team's longtime head coach general manager, as their godfather?

Not every song the Tragically Hip sings is about hockey; it
just seems that way sometimes.

The iconic Canadian rock band, which came together when five young guys from Kingston, Ontario, got together in 1983, writes a lot of music and sings a lot of songs that dissect, reflect or chronicle what it is to be Canadian, everything from Jacques Cartier to Tom Thomson to Hugh MacLennan to David Milgaard to Bobcaygeon. Hockey just happens to be one of those things, the organic by-product of, well, being Canadian.

Gord Downie, the front man and lead singer, as has been duly noted, is a diehard Bruin fan, but even before discovering the Bs, he was a goalie in Amherstview, Ontario.

Guitar players Paul Langlois and Robbie Baker are fervent fans of the Montreal Canadiens and Toronto Maple Leafs, respectively. Bass player Gord Sinclair describes himself as a “floater,” a Chicago Blackhawk fan in his youth but now quite content to cheer for any team that is contending for the Cup. Drummer Johnny Fay always liked the Philadelphia Flyers.

They all like hockey; they like watching it; they like playing it—or at least, to varying degrees, they did. In the early or middle years of the band's existence, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the boys in the Hip would go to great lengths while touring to organize hockey games. Sometimes it was just ball hockey in an arena parking lot, but oftentimes it would entail finding ice and equipment to play a real game with the crew.

“I remember when we opened for [Jimmy] Page and [Robert] Plant, we did two legs of America as their opening act,” Downie recalled, “and we had this ferocious three-on-three game on Rollerblades in the parking lot of the [Philadelphia] Spectrum right before we went on. I remember our tour manager coming out and yelling at us, ‘You're on in eight minutes.' When you're opening for someone, there's no pressure. It was like, ‘Okay, backstage, skates off, on stage.' We would do that a lot.

“We had a lot of band and crew games [on ice], too. We'd rent gear, find ice, play a game. Not the band, but some guys would have a few [cocktails] and play. Or some of them hadn't played in a long time. Someone would always get hurt. We haven't done that as much in the last 10 years. To be honest, it feels like the right time to do this [convergence of Hip and hockey] interview would have been 10 years ago. I used to run the band hockey pool—regular season and playoffs. I would write weekly reports, which were meant to demoralize and diffuse enjoyment for others.” He laughed.

So many of the venues the Hip plays are hockey arenas. So many of those who have come backstage to meet them after shows are NHL players. The Hip has always been an in-arena music staple at hockey games and in NHL and junior team dressing rooms, too.

“There is that connection,” Downie said of the link between band and hockey and vice versa. “We've met a ton of pro hockey players, got to know them, our music plays in their locker rooms. We've always taken pride in that.”

Maybe it's become a bit of a cliché, too, this seemingly inexorable link between hockey and the Hip. Although maybe that's a harder case to make when one of the band's own iconic symbols is the official Tragically Hip hockey sweater, available for purchase ($150 Canadian). The Hip jersey has had multiple incarnations in colour and design, everything from traditional Canadian red-and-white with a maple leaf crest to the more recent Boston-style black and gold, emblazoned with Gus the Polar Bear (after the title of a Hip song) on the front.

“The jersey, yeah, it's become kind of the trademark of the band,” Downie said. “It always changes [colours and style]. I had nothing to do with [the Boston colours] this time. If we were smart, we'd have one for every [NHL] town . . . on one hand, we're saying, ‘Let's exploit this love of hockey,' but we're also saying at times, ‘Hey, we're not all about hockey.' I guess we're kind of sucking and blowing on that one.”

Edgar Downie, whose parents came to Canada from Belfast,
Northern Ireland, was a travelling salesman based out of Oakville, Ontario. He would peddle his wares—cutlery and flatware from Wallace Silversmiths, corsets and women's underthings from Dominion Corset—all over Ontario and Quebec. He was on the road a lot, with his wife, Lorna, back home taking care of the family's three children—eldest daughter Charlyn, son Mike and youngest daughter Paula. Lorna was pregnant with their fourth child when Edgar decided to get off the road and try to settle into a sales job with less travel.

So the Downie family left Oakville, moved to the Kingston area—Amherstview actually, on the north shore of Lake Ontario, just west of Kingston. (Between Millhaven and Collins Bay, if you're into correctional facility geography.) Edgar got his real estate licence and a job selling new homes in a new subdivision, so it was there in Amherstview that the family put down roots. Soon after, on February 6, 1964, Gord was the first of the Downies to be born in Kingston, his brother Pat arriving four years later.

At the time, Harry Sinden was in the final stages of his playing career, as a player-coach with Minneapolis and then Oklahoma City in the old Central Pro Hockey League. In 1966–67, Sinden became head coach of the NHL Bruins, but whether he was in the minors or the NHL, he always returned home in the summer to Kingston, where he and his wife, Eleanor, became part of a group of friends that included Edgar and Lorna Downie.

Soon after Pat was born—Gord was four at the time—Lorna wanted to get her two youngest boys christened. A chaplain who lived across the street from the Downies offered to do it in the family's living room. Lorna asked Harry and Eleanor Sinden to stand in as the boys' godparents, an invitation they readily accepted.

“In the years since, I've sort of wondered about all of that, what is the role of a godparent?” Downie said. “They're meant to be in charge of the spiritual development. In the definitive and traditional sense, that's their job, to educate you in the ways of the Bible and the ways of the spirit. While [the Sindens] didn't do that in the traditional biblical sense, they mentored us in a way just as meaningful to us. They have done that in spades. Really, I've always thought that, even though we've been in rare touch and rarer all the time. But I would see [Harry and Eleanor] at my brother's wedding and they would ask me about my kids, remember all their names. It's really been great. Harry has taught me a lot.”

Yes, the ways of the spirit; also, the ways of the Bruins. Sinden went on to be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame, an NHL coach and later a general manager, the face and vision of a franchise synonymous with Boston and the Bs.

“The Bruins have become so much more to me than some boyhood fascination,” Downie said. “That's why I talk to my brother in Boston every day for more than 30 years, and I imagine we always will. Back in the day, we supported every move Harry made. It wasn't just bias; we honestly believed in what he was doing. . . . He had this sort of blue-collar budget, trying to compete with white-collar teams. He made competitive teams in his own image, that shared his work ethic, and he managed to walk that tightrope with ownership. Everyone has their stories about him, their thoughts on him, but every move he made, even trading Espo [Phil Esposito] was, in our minds, spot on. We really admire Harry in every way. He was a mentor. He taught us more than he will ever know. And I will always be grateful to him.”

Downie doesn't really remember the Big, Bad Bruins' first Cup in 1970—he was six at the time—but vividly recalls the Bs beating the New York Rangers for their next Cup in 1972.

“It was May 11 when they beat the Rangers to win the Cup. It was my little brother's [Pat's fourth] birthday, and me and my older brother [Mike] were dancing in the rain, whooping and realizing how quiet it sounded—
whooooo, whooooo
,” Downie said.

But Downie didn't just like watching the Bruins; he liked to play hockey, too.

His first year of organized hockey, in novice, he played defence. Wore No. 4, naturally. But when he and his brothers and friends would play road hockey, he always enjoyed playing goal. He was hooked on it and became a goalie in minor hockey, too.

“I really got into the nobility of it, what Jacques Plante would call the noblest position in all of sports,” Downie said. “I felt it was the position where you could be the cause, where you could have the biggest effect on the game. I liked everything about it. You can't play goalie harder or faster. I liked that aspect of it. Rarely would a coach say anything to me. Coaches never know what to say to the goalie. ‘Go stretch, we'll get to you later.' I liked that independence. It's still the case, really; it's just a very different game than what everyone else is playing.”

Downie was good in net. Good enough that the Kingston AA rep team came calling, but with a schedule that included travel as far away as Oshawa, Edgar Downie said no. He hadn't moved his family to Amherstview to put down roots only to go back on the road for kids' hockey. He was too busy trying to sell homes, to make a living.

But it wasn't long before a rink was built in Amherstview, with a team that started in the small-town Ontario double-C loop but quickly moved up to the more competitive B level. Downie loved playing goal. It loved him, too. There was his dream season in major bantam, when Downie's Amherstview team won the provincial B championship.

“It's not like it happened yesterday; it's not like I dined out on it,” Downie said, with a laugh. “But we played Picton, Campbellford, East Gwillimbury, Gravenhurst and Exeter to win the championship.” Downie seemed to recall that future NHL defenceman David Shaw, coached by his father [Bruce] at the time, was on the Exeter team Amherstview beat, mounting what Downie referred to as a “Hendersonian” comeback from a 5–1 or 7–1 deficit in the eight-point series, which was played to capacity crowds in each of their towns.

But he also learned it can be a cruel game, especially in the cruellest of positions.

“It was a game in that dream season, our run to the Cup year, and it was a very special weekend because everyone in my family—I mean everyone—was there to see me play,” Downie said. “My grandparents, my parents, all my brothers and sisters—and my sisters didn't even care about hockey, but for some reason, everyone was there on that one weekend.

“We got up on this team 5–0 after two periods and there's a break to flood the ice. We come back out for the third period and they score early in the third. It's 5–1. Then it's 5–2, 5–3, 5–4. I'm thinking, ‘This can't be f---ing happening.' Then it's 5–5, they go ahead 6–5. They have scored six goals in less than 10 minutes, and something happened in me. My whole family is there, my grandpa is a huge sports fan, a hero in my life, and I'm like, ‘Wow, this isn't really happening.' So I take my stick and start whaling on the crossbar. I didn't hit it seven times, I hit it 14 times until it broke. I was taken out of the game, to the bench—thank you, Coach, do you think it's time for me to come out?—and I went to the dressing room. Our other goalie goes into the game, our team ties it up and we win it 7–6, but no thanks to me. The president of the league comes into the dressing room after and says, ‘I've never been more ashamed of a player in my life.' I'm crying and my dad comes in and says, ‘Get your stuff, let's go.' It had all turned to shit. I went home and I was in the laundry room, the mud room, crying. My grandfather had to come in to talk me into moving to the kitchen. I think I'm still scarred by that game.”

It's funny, but when the Toronto Maple Leafs collapsed in their historic meltdown against the Bruins in Game 7 of the 2013 Stanley Cup playoffs, blowing a 4–1 lead in the final 10 minutes of regulation time and losing in overtime, Downie thought back to his own bantam-level apocalypse. Which one might think would allow him, love of the Bruins aside, to be empathetic or even a little sympathetic towards the Leafs and their plight that night.