Hockey Confidential (3 page)

With his lungs literally ready to burst and a most horrific death seemingly imminent, floating on his side, that was when Campbell experienced the dual visions—of his wife, Heather, watching the morbid salvage operation from the edge of the pond and his own funeral procession up on the county road.

Even now, Campbell's a little unnerved by them; how lifelike they both seemed, how it was an almost out-of-body experience for him at the precise moment he was drowning, but there's no doubt those visions inspired him to give one last kick for freedom.

A kick that saved his life.

“I've been told since then that the window probably popped out when I kicked it the last time because, once the cab filled up with the water, there was equal pressure on both sides of the glass,” Campbell said. “That makes sense. Still, I'm glad I wore those big Roots boots, because I had thought about wearing running shoes instead, and I don't know if I would have been able to kick [the window] out with shoes on.”

Once out of the cab, Campbell bobbed up to the surface, but the jagged edges of the hole in the ice the tractor had fallen through cut his head in numerous places. He was able to grab onto the just barely submerged tractor arm that led him onto the big bucket, which he crawled over to get to solid ground.

The weird thing, Campbell said, was that at no time during the entire ordeal did he ever feel cold or think about the cold. Not when the icy water was rushing over him in the cab, not when he was swimming up to the surface, and not even when he scrambled up to the field in his water-soaked clothing on a below-freezing day and walked the better part of half a kilometre to the house.

“I was probably in shock, but the cold never registered, not in or out of the water,” he said. Yeah, it was probably shock. Or the fact that, as a hockey player, Campbell was tougher than a two-buck steak. Don't forget, we're talking about the father whose son, Gregory, had gained NHL-wide acclaim and universal respect for playing a shift on a broken leg suffered when he blocked a shot against Pittsburgh in the 2013 Stanley Cup playoffs, still managing to leave the ice under his own power. So perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised when the father, after a near-death experience, plodded across that frozen field to his home with nothing on his mind but an overwhelming sense of relief at still being alive.

“That's all I thought about,” Campbell said. “I was alive. It was kind of exciting. I was just happy to be alive.”

Campbell walked up to his house—to the side garage door, actually. He was standing there, now trembling, soaking wet and frozen, vainly trying to recall and punch in the security code to open the garage door. As he fumbled with the keypad, he could hear Heather, who was putting garbage in the garage from an inside door leading to the house. Campbell started banging on the garage door and yelling to get her attention. She came over, hit the automatic opener and couldn't believe what she saw when the door opened: her husband standing there, rivulets of blood all over his head and face, wet and frozen.

“At first, because of the blood, she thought I had been attacked by coyotes,” Campbell said.

Many a man, having been through such a traumatic physical ordeal with exposure to ice-cold water, bitterly cold winter weather and quite likely hypothermia, to say nothing of nearly drowning with dirty pond water filling his lungs, would have gone to the hospital for medical attention. But Campbell possessed a hockey player's mentality and farmer's stubborn streak. Besides, it was a workday.

All he wanted, once he got into the house, was a long—very long—hot shower. And, practical man that he is, he wanted to make arrangements to get the tractor hauled out of the pond.

Campbell spent a good half hour in a steaming hot shower, doing nothing, he said, but luxuriating in the “sheer joy of breathing.” A doctor friend who lived in the area did drop by the house later that day, but aside from taking some Advil, Campbell seemed to be okay. Mind you, as the day wore on, he lost his voice, leaving him with just a hoarse whisper. And by that evening, he had tremendous lower-back and rib pain, which turned out to be a nasty kidney infection from ingesting the dirty pond water.

But the NHL schedule waits for no man, not even one who almost drowned at lunchtime on a Friday afternoon. By seven o'clock that night, NHL games were being played. And in Campbell's world, that meant the next issue or controversy was only a puck drop away.

Right on cue, in the second period of the New Jersey Devils–Tampa Bay Lightning game at the Prudential Center in Newark that night, the lights unexpectedly went out. A circuit breaker blew, and the computers controlling the lights in the arena were damaged and couldn't be repaired. There was a delay of more than an hour and 40 minutes.

For much of that time, there was great uncertainty as to how the league could, would or should proceed, all initially exacerbated by the inability of many to get hold of the league's senior executive VP and director of hockey operations. Campbell's cell phone was still at the bottom of the pond in the big, orange Kubota. (As an aside, Campbell said when the tractor was pulled out of the pond, he got the cell phone back, dried it out for a day or two, and it worked like a charm. Even his cell phone had a knack for survival.)

No rest for the weary. Campbell had no choice but to be back at work, using his landline to consult with his right-hand man, Mike Murphy, in Toronto.

“We felt the teams could not continue playing,” Colin Campbell was later quoted as saying in the newspapers in New York City and northern New Jersey. “We tried for an hour and [42] minutes to restore power and appropriate lighting but were left with no alternative but to postpone further play for the evening.”

Campbell could have added: “Oh, I came within a breath of dying today.” He didn't, of course.

After the fact, it bothered Campbell that his tractor had crashed through the ice at all. He'd been careful, he thought. With the extended frigid temperatures that winter, he was convinced the ice in the man-made irrigation pond was plenty thick enough to take the weight of the tractor. Campbell even asked the NHL's ice expert, Dan Craig, about the thickness and weight ratios and couldn't, for the life of him, figure out why he'd almost met a most untimely end.

It was later, long after the ice had melted that spring, that Campbell discovered, to his surprise, that the man-made irrigation pond they often needed to top up with water in the summer was, in fact, also fed by either a very small underground spring or underground runoff through the tiling. The water entered the pond at the northeast corner, mere feet from where his tractor crashed through the ice.

“The ice all over that pond was more than thick enough to take the weight of the tractor,” Campbell said. “It was just at that one point, where the spring or the runoff feeds into the pond, there was a little bit of current. That's why I went through the ice right there. It wasn't as frozen.”

Campbell was comforted somewhat to get the answer to that question. He had so many more, though.

“Sure, you wonder why, you wonder about a lot of things,”
Campbell said in November 2012, standing at the edge of the pond where his tractor plunged through the ice almost three years earlier, the first time he was prepared to discuss for the record what happened that day.

It's not as though he had gone out of his way to keep what happened a secret. His family, friends and co-workers obviously were aware of it shortly after it happened, and in the weeks that followed, word did filter out to others. But when asked if he wanted to discuss it in any public fashion, Campbell had always declined.

Even three years after the fact, it was difficult for him to put into words the range of emotions he'd had since his brush with death.

“I'd say—for the first year afterwards, anyway—not a day would go by that I wouldn't think about it,” Campbell said. “As more time goes by, you don't ever completely forget about it, but it's not like you wake up every day and it dominates your thoughts. It's not like I put together a bucket list and said to myself, ‘I have to do this or that before I go,' but, yeah, it changes you in some ways. It's a cliché, but probably the biggest difference is you don't sweat the small stuff as much.”

Campbell knows he's not the same man he was before he almost drowned. He can't go past that pond, or even look at it from afar, without an involuntary shudder that reaches deep into his soul.

Truth be told, Campbell said he's much more cognizant of potential danger now than ever before, that before he begins any task on the farm, he thinks about what could go wrong, about the inherent risk.

“I don't just do something now,” he said. “I try to be more careful, a little more cautious.”

If he ever forgets that, there's no shortage of reminders. When Campbell is doing any work around the farm, especially anything involving machinery, his wife or daughters are much more likely to monitor it. And if he's doing anything on the farm that includes having one of his grandkids with him, he said, the scrutiny from his wife and daughters is even greater.

It wasn't just crashing through the ice that January day that had an impact on Campbell's view of life and death. The following April, in 2011, Campbell's friend and co-worker E.J. McGuire—the director of the NHL's Central Scouting Bureau—succumbed to a five-month battle with a rare and incurable form of cancer, leaving behind his wife and two teenaged daughters. McGuire, one year older than Campbell, was 58 when he died.

“Those two incidents really hit home for me,” Campbell said. “E.J. was a healthy guy with a young family, and just like that, no warning, everything changes. It could have been the same thing for me. But, you know, E.J.'s death was just so unfair. He's healthy, he didn't do anything to get the cancer. He just got it. If I had died, that was on me. I was the one who caused it by going out on the pond and falling through the ice. So between what happened to E.J. and me, it hit me pretty good.

“I realized you don't get any guarantees on how long you live. I tell my kids, I tell Gregory, if he's going through a tough stretch [in hockey], you can't get too upset with little things you think are big things because, well, you never know . . . which is funny me saying that, because when I coached, [like] any coach, we all get so goofy about a loss or a losing streak, but it's really not life-altering stuff, even if we think it is when it's happening.”

Campbell has since dabbled a little in trying to understand the hereafter. He's read material about people with near-death experiences, in particular Dr. Eben Alexander's
Proof of Heaven,
a bestselling non-fiction book that chronicles the story of the atheist neurosurgeon who came out of a week-long coma believing he had come in contact with heaven.

Campbell's own near-death experience didn't leave him with any deep or abiding knowledge of what happens, or doesn't, after you die, but he was unquestionably curious about those two visions that had come to him so vividly at the precise moment when he thought he was about to die.

“Who knows what it all means?” he said. “Is [life and death] just fate? Are you just lucky to live or unlucky to die? Is your time just up? I don't honestly know the answers to those questions, but I've thought about them. I don't really talk too much about [the visions] because I think people look at you like you're a bit crazy. It's not like I saw myself at the gates of heaven with Roger [Neilson], my dad, my grandfather, all there waiting for me, waving at me. That's not it.

“I'm no more religious now than I was before [the near-death experience]. You know, I've always believed in God, gone to church, so you do kind of wonder about it all. I mean, was it something more than dumb luck that got me through it? I think maybe it was. I guess I really wonder about that moment in time, those seconds, when you think you're dying. I know I went from being anxious to panic-stricken to ‘I'm done,' and I won't forget that scary feeling of thinking my life was over.

“I think of those poor people who jumped from the World Trade Center on 9/11, and as they were falling to their death, however many seconds it was that they were still alive while they were falling, what must have been going through their minds? There was a story I saw of a construction worker who fell off a 70-storey building and died when he landed on top of a 15-storey building, so for 55 storeys and however long it takes to fall that far, he was alive. What was he thinking? What was that like for him? Because I can tell you, for the last 30 to 40 seconds I was underwater, I was certain I was dying. But I didn't, and I'm not sure exactly why.”

Campbell is wholly certain of only two things, really.

One, after coming so close to dying, he's happy to be alive; he cherishes each and every day.

Two—and he isn't being flippant about it—he hopes others will think twice before they venture out like he did: “I'll never go out on another pond. Growing up, I'd play pond hockey all the time. There wasn't a day went by when I was a kid that I didn't walk across the frozen pond in town and never thought twice about it. But I can't do it now. Those days are over.”

The best hands in the National Hockey League do not belong
to Sidney Crosby, Patrick Kane or Pavel Datsyuk.

In fact, the guy with the best hands in the NHL also has the best hands in the National Football League, Major League Baseball, the Professional Golfers Association and the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), as well as the Olympic Games—summer and winter, in case you were wondering.

His name is Dr. Mark Lindsay. If you haven't heard of him, don't feel bad. He is the first to tell you his friends sometimes call him “The Ghost.” It's been said by some that it's easier to track down Keyser Soze, the mythical underworld figure from the movie
The Usual Suspects
, than it is to reach Lindsay, whose personal motto in life (which he borrowed from a famous athlete) is: “Stay hungry, hidden and humble.”

So who, precisely, is this international man of mystery with the gifted, magic hands?

Mark Lindsay is a Canadian chiropractor, born in 1963 near the little Ottawa Valley town of Arnprior, Ontario (population 8,114). Mind you, calling Lindsay a chiropractor is like saying Picasso was a painter or Sinatra was a singer. He's a star in his field who treats athletes to allow them to excel in theirs.

That would include the NHL's pre-eminent superstar, Sidney Crosby, and upwards of 100 active NHL players, not to mention countless retired NHLers. Modesty, as well as the bond of confidentiality he shares with his world-famous clients, prevents him from even acknowledging who he treats.

“The people I treat value their privacy and so do I,” Lindsay says of his clientele. “They trust me to work on them; they also trust me to not talk about it. That's sacred, and rightfully so.”

U.S. publications have reported he's worked with Tiger Woods and Alex Rodriguez. There's talk within the sporting community that Lindsay may have, at one time or another, worked with tennis ace Maria Sharapova and Canadian/world figure-skating champion Patrick Chan, amongst so many others who are world class in their respective disciplines. Suffice it to say he's worked with the best of the best and won't discuss any of it.

To know Lindsay—and what he can accomplish with his healing hands as well as a wealth of practical experience on how the human body should optimally function—is to want him to treat you. He's a man in great demand, even though the most devoted sports fan likely wouldn't be able to pick him out of a lineup or recognize him if he were standing next to the stars he looks after. But in the eyes of the athletes he treats, and those of his peers, Lindsay is also a superstar.

“Between the tactile, his incredible ability with his hands, and his thirst for learning, to be current and innovative and ahead of the curve, Mark is the best at what he does,” said Ottawa-based high-performance chiropractor Dr. Duane Smith, who also treats elite athletes.

“Mark has that X factor and it's his hands,” said highly regarded Toronto sport chiropractor Dr. Mike Prebeg, another star in the field who works with the Toronto Blue Jays as well as myriad other elite athletes in all sports. “In our field, Mark is a stud. When Mark puts his hands on an athlete, they immediately know it's special, that he's special. He has the touch.”

“He has the gift of touch, no doubt about that,” said former NHL player Gary Roberts—who would know, since Lindsay has probably treated him, quite literally, thousands of times. “But with Mark, when you combine his touch with his incredible experience, to have treated so many great athletes in so many sports and be able to apply all that he has learned when he's treating you, that's what makes him special.”

Lindsay is humbled by his station in life. He's blown away that sports' best and brightest athletes, the
crème de la crème
, seek him out for injury treatment or rehab or to maximize athletic performance. And that they are willing to put their faith and trust in him to the point where their bodies, careers and entire futures are in his hands. Literally.

“It is like playing an instrument,” Lindsay said. “You can be super-bright, super-intelligent, but it has to translate to tactile, to the hands. I mean, you're working on someone's body. You have to feel it. From my own experiences, getting treatments, you can tell right away when someone gets it, when someone has the touch. . . . It's like watching Wayne Gretzky or Connor McDavid play hockey and you say, ‘How do they know to do that?' What they do isn't easy, they just make it look that way. . . . I shake my head a lot at how things have gone for me. I grew up in a small town. Never in a million years did I imagine I'd be doing this. Sometimes I think, ‘This is cool—this is my job.'”

Imagine a 39-year-old Mark Lindsay being called into the office of the notorious Oakland Raiders boss Al Davis and being given his marching orders for the 2002–03 NFL season: keep the aging core of Raider veterans healthy enough to stay on the field and make plays.

That veteran core included Rich Gannon, Tim Brown, Charlie Garner, Rod Woodson, Charles Woodson, Bill Romanowski and Jerry Rice, amongst others.

Every Friday during the season, Lindsay would fly from Toronto to Oakland or wherever the Raiders were playing. He'd treat the star veterans the day before the game, the day of the game, and on the sidelines
during
the game. On Monday, he'd fly back to Toronto and his regular, and thriving, chiropractic practice.

“It almost killed me,” Lindsay said, laughing. And all that separated Lindsay and the Raiders from fulfilling Davis's Super Bowl dream were the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the revenge of former Raider coach Jon Gruden and the bizarre disappearance of Raider all-pro centre Barrett Robbins, who went AWOL from San Diego the day before the Super Bowl to party in nearby Tijuana, Mexico. (Robbins was later diagnosed as bipolar and has suffered from mental, emotional and legal issues since then.)

Word travelled fast about the skilled young Canadian chiropractor with healing hands. There's no better calling card than word of mouth, and whether it was athletes from one sport talking to those in other sports or their agents talking amongst themselves, it wasn't long before the biggest names in football, baseball, tennis and golf were clamouring for Lindsay to rehab their injuries or treat them on an ongoing basis. With a thriving practice back home in Ontario, there were occasions when Lindsay actually had no choice but turn down some of the invitations from some of the world's pre-eminent athletes. No sooner would one door close, though, than another two would open.

“It was an unbelievable experience,” Lindsay said. “This was all happening in a period of a few years between 2008 and 2011 when I was working with some incredible athletes in so many different sports. I had, in my profession . . . I can honestly say I reached the pinnacle.”

Maybe Mark Lindsay was always destined to be a healer of
high-performance athletes. As a teenager growing up in White Lake, near Arnprior, he dreamed one day of going to medical school. And he always loved and played sports himself. He ran track—400-metre hurdles—and was a wide receiver in football in high school. He was good enough to get an NCAA Division I football and track scholarship to Ball State in Indiana, a school he chose in large part because of its strong exercise physiology department and the presence of Dr. David Costill, who did work in the 1980s with distance runners Mary Decker and Alberto Salazar.

Two years in, Lindsay realized Ball State and Division I football weren't for him. He came home to Canada, ended up being a receiver and punt returner with the University of Guelph Gryphons, coached by the late Tom Dimitroff, and won the Vanier Cup—the national university football championship—in 1984. His roommate then was Parri Ceci, who was named MVP of that championship game and whose son Cody was the Ottawa Senators' first-round pick in 2012.

Lindsay graduated from Guelph with a degree in kinesiology and was planning on going to medical school at McMaster University in Hamilton. Until, that is, he suffered a herniated disc in a bad waterskiing fall in Muskoka. He was in back-pain hell until treated by a noted Scarborough, Ontario, chiropractor, Dr. Keith Innes, who was at that time treating, amongst others, sprinter Ben Johnson.

Innes did such an amazing job of easing Lindsay's back pain and healing him without surgery that it made a tremendous impact on the young would-be medical doctor.

“I was like, ‘Wow, I can't believe what he did,'” Lindsay said. “I was totally fixed. That's when I decided I wanted to be a chiropractor.”

It was too late to apply to chiropractic college in Toronto, so Lindsay went to Palmer College of Chiropractic, which is the founding college for the science, in Davenport, Iowa. He graduated from Palmer in 1989 and did a one-year residency in Texas before finally returning home to Ottawa to set up his practice there. In 1991, Lindsay hooked up with chiropractic pioneer Dr. Michael Leahy to get in on the ground floor of Leahy's brainchild: Active Release Technique (ART). It's aptly named because it is as much an art form as a science.

Leahy, a chiropractor from Colorado Springs, Colorado, graduated from the United States Air Force Academy and served as a fighter and test pilot. In 1985, he discovered ART, a hands-on manipulation of soft tissue for the treatment of injuries. In 1991, Leahy taught his first ART class to other chiropractors. There were two Canadians in Leahy's first class of six: Lindsay and Mark Scappaticci, another highly regarded Toronto-area chiropractor whose resumé is strikingly similar to Lindsay's. Each of those six “students” in Leahy's first class has gone on to become an ART instructor, teaching and registering the ever-increasing number of chiropractors who have embraced ART not only as a treatment for trauma and injuries, but as a systemic approach to prevent injury and enhance athletic performance. It's a much more commonly known procedure now than it was then, but like all young sciences, its boundaries and applications are constantly being redefined, and Lindsay is at the forefront of that movement. And Toronto, Lindsay said, has become a mecca of sorts for practitioners of ART.

“There are more good ART chiropractors in the Toronto area, in Ontario, than anywhere in North America,” Lindsay said.

And if he had to explain to a layperson exactly what ART is and its benefits?

“Every muscle has a wrapping of fascia, like Saran wrap, and every vein, artery and nerve that goes into a muscle is also encased in fascia—it all really floats in fascia,” Lindsay said. “The muscles glide over each other in these fascia casings. What happens when you have an injury or overuse or trauma, [is] it creates an inhibition of the gliding. ART is the manual manipulation to restore that glide. It's like you have a hard-shell suitcase and you want to make it a soft shell. It's not like you're trying to make spaghetti out of the muscle; you're just trying to create gliding, create space . . . does that make sense?”

Around the same time Lindsay was embracing the brave new world of Leahy's ART, all the while working at his chiropractic practice in Ottawa, he got hooked up with the Canadian bobsleigh team that was preparing for the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville, France. Lindsay had run track with some of the bobsleigh athletes. Noted strength and conditioning coach Charles Poliquin was looking for a chiropractor to treat his Canadian Olympians. So Lindsay started working with the bobsleigh team and the short-track speed skaters (Marc Gagnon and Nathalie Lambert, amongst others). He had found his calling, not to mention his wife.

In 1994, while at the Winter Games in Lillehammer, Norway, Lindsay met Canadian and world champion downhill skier Kate Pace, who in 1993 was ranked No. 1 in the world. In 1995, the two were married in Ottawa, and their reception was held in the Hall of Honour in the Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings.

It was around that time that Lindsay's career path took a meteoric rise. The newly minted Kate Pace-Lindsay wanted to compete in one more Olympics—Nagano, Japan, in 1998—so Lindsay sold his Ottawa practice after getting married and, amongst other things, became the Canadian Alpine Ski Team's therapist between 1996 and 1998. It was a great way to spend time with his wife while continuing to expand his professional horizons, treating Olympic athletes. The real turning point, though, came in 1995 and 1996, when Lindsay became part of trainer Dan Pfaff's team overseeing the training and treatment of Canadian sprinter Donovan Bailey.

Mark and Kate would spend their summers with the Pfaff–Bailey crew working and training in Texas, working not only with Bailey but with his Olympic sprinting teammates, Bruny Surin, Glenroy Gilbert and Robert Esmie. Mark and Kate's winters were spent on the ski circuit, effectively living the life of athletic nomads for the first three years of their marriage.

But when Bailey won gold and set a world record in the 100 metres at the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta, and then Bailey, Surin, Gilbert and Esmie teamed up to upset the Americans on their home turf to win gold in the 4 x 100-metre relay, it was a major turning point in Lindsay's career. Bailey was golden and so were all those who were part of his team.

“Donovan was successful on the biggest stage,” Lindsay said. “And we had had a lot of success with the short-track speed skaters in the '90s, so a lot of doors got opened for me after that. That really paved the way for everything else—the football, all the other pro sports.”

In 1998, at his wife's final Olympics, Lindsay began working with Dr. Tony Galea, the Toronto sports doctor who was doing cutting-edge work with injury treatment, specifically PRP (platelet-rich plasma) injections. It was the beginning of an ongoing and successful partnership, though one that didn't lack for controversy along the way. Lindsay worked out of Galea's sports medicine clinic in Toronto's west end until 2007, when Lindsay and his wife escaped the hustle and bustle of city life to build their dream home on White Lake.