Hockey Dad (19 page)

The analogy I like to use is that once a kid goes through
what is now known as his minor midget season, and if he has
aspirations of playing at the next level, he gets on The Ladder.

Every other player of any age, sixteen and older, who wants to
keep playing hockey at the next level, is on it, too. The Ladder
is crowded and it's frenetic, because there is only one rule on
The Ladder-you're always moving, either up or down. You
can be moving up fast or down fast; up slowly or down slowly;
but whatever it is, you're either passing guys or getting passed;
if you're standing still, you might as well be going
backwards
as
there's no shortage of guys blowing by you. And for all the
players there are who move up or down, there are others who
simply fall or jump off for one reason or another.

My TV analyst pal Keith Jones, who had a good nine-year
NHL career, puts it another way, in his usual funny fashion.

"If you play long enough, all the really good players quit and
then you make the NHL," Jonesy says. "That's what happened
to me. I go home in the summer and have beers with the guys
I played hockey with when I was a kid and they say to me, 'We
were a lot better than you were, how did you make it to the
NHL and we didn't?' I tell them, 'You quit, I didn't. You should
have kept playing.'"

Now, that's funny. Jonesy is, of course, selling his talent
and ability far short for the sake of a laugh-and that's why we
love him-but his premise, to a point, has some validity. You
play as hard as you can for as long as you can, you don't allow
other people to de
fine
your limitations and you just never
know how far you'll go up The Ladder and how many people
you'll pass until you
finally
fall, jump or get knocked off.
And it doesn't hurt if along the way you make good friends
with the Hard Work Fairy.

I know what you're saying. The Hard Work Fairy? Is this
guy serious? I don't recall exactly when I started it, but I was
driving home from one of Mike's games and he was lamenting
his hard luck around the net and how a recent hot streak he
had been on turned into the coldest of cold streaks. I told him
he had obviously offended the Hard Work Fairy. Where I came
up with that one I have no idea, but it just came out.
It got a laugh out of Mike, which was the idea. The notion
of there being fairies in hockey is, well, it's pretty funny.

Someone else might call the Hard Work Fairy the hockey gods.

Whatever. I only know I have an unwavering faith that if
an
individual
works hard enough long enough at anything, good
things will happen and there will be a reward. But the problem
with that philosophy is that every hockey player of any age
or ability always thinks he's working hard, and most of them
aren't. Not even close.

So I suppose I feel there needs to be this mythical
fi
gure-the Hard Work Fairy-who takes stock of who's actually
working hard and who's not, and doles out rewards and/or
punishment accordingly. You can't jive the Hard Work Fairy.
He(?) knows. He always knows.

Laugh if you like, but you show me a hockey player who's
on a roll, scoring goals in game after game after game, and I'll
show you a player who somewhere along the line during that
hot streak allows complacency and comfort to creep into his
game. At some point, he forgets how hard he worked to be successful and even though he may still be
fill
ing the net, he's on
borrowed time. There's a day of reckoning coming. At some
point, the Hard Work Fairy says "enough is enough" and steps
in and now that player is in big trouble. It may not be nice
to mess with Mother Nature but you
definitely
don't want to
screw around with the Hard Work Fairy.

Then the stick goes cold and even after the player realizes
he has to work harder to get back into the good graces again,
it's going to take some time to build up the account and for
the player to
find
himself on the right side of the ledger again.

That's when, and only when, the Hard Work Fairy will see
fi
t
to bestow a reward. I have seen it happen with individual players. I have seen it happen with whole teams. Complacency and
comfort are the enemy. Hard work is the ally.

I'm not saying the Hard Work Fairy doesn't sometimes
work in mysterious ways and I'll admit there have been a few
occasions when I've wondered if the Hard Work Fairy has
abandoned me and my kids in their time of need, but my faith
remains resolute: You work hard enough for long enough and
you'll be rewarded.

The point of all of this-for us anyway-was that Mike
had, seemingly against all odds, played well enough in his
major bantam year that there was no chance in the world he
was prepared to close the door on playing hockey at the next
level. He wanted to get on The Ladder; he wanted to please the
Hard Work Fairy.
Football? Cross-country? Volleyball? High school hockey?

Balance? You could have summed it up in just one word.
"Scouts?"

26: Discretion Isn't Always The Better Part of Valor

I WASN'T SURE where Mike's hockey renaissance was taking
him, but it goes without saying, as a Crazy Hockey Dad, I was
most certainly enjoying the rather unexpected ride.

What was supposed to be his farewell tour had seemingly
become a launching pad. It was kind of surreal, to be honest,
and I kept thinking this would be the day the clock would
strike midnight and the party would be over.

For kids who are going to play at the next level, the days
and weeks immediately following the minor midget season
are like a whirlwind. First up, once the actual team's season is
over, is the regional tryout camp for the provincial Under-17
program. For us, it was on an April weekend in Peterborough.

They create six teams; play a round-robin type tournament;
do a lot of physical and
fitness
testing; try to give the kids a
sense of what it will take to continue playing at a higher level
and then pick a dozen or so kids to move onto another camp.

I kind of
figure
d Mike was a long shot to advance, but that was
fine
. It was just fun to be there.

Mike played well enough over the course of the weekend,
scored a few goals and didn't look out of place, but something
happened in his next-to-last game that I thought sealed his
fate. Mike was coming back through the neutral zone towards
his own end when a defenseman on the other team turned
and, out of nowhere, pitch-forked Mike with a major-league
spear to the midsection. I was really worried that he might be
seriously injured, it was that vicious. The attack was totally
unprovoked in the context of that game, but it was a rival
defenseman from another ETA team who Mike had a running
battle with over the course of the season. This player
definitely
wasn't going to get to the next level so I suppose he decided
to give Mike a going-away present in what was probably their
last-ever on-ice meeting.

There have been times in Mike's hockey-playing days
when I have perfectly understood opposing players' desire to
annihilate him because there were occasions when he may
have said or done something to justify it. But this attack was
indefensible.

Mike was down on the ice for a bit and then the trainer
took him in the hallway beside the bench in Peterborough's
Memorial Centre. I made my way down to make sure he wasn't
seriously injured, but aside from a big red welt across his stomach, he seemed to be okay. I could see by the look on his face
he was furious. He never said a word to me, he didn't have to;
I knew exactly what he was thinking and wondering: Should
I forget about what had just happened and focus on trying to
advance or should I seek some vigilante justice at the expense
of moving on?

I knew what I was voting for and it wasn't detente.
"You do what you want," I said to Mike, "but if it was me,
I'd give it to him. It's your call, though."

I went back up into the stands, but I knew what was coming next. On Mike's next shift there was a dump in for a line
change and Mike was
first
onto the ice. The defenseman who
had speared him was going back to retrieve the puck. Mike
flew
in there full steam and ran the defenseman hard into the
end boards with a vicious, nasty and high hit into the glass. As
they both rebounded off the boards, their gloves were off and
they attempted to
fight
but with full cages on it wasn't much
of a battle.

Afterwards, between that game and Mike's
finally
game of
the weekend, a lot of the other kids at the camp told Mike he
was stupid for
fight
ing because the rule was if you
fight
, you
won't move on. After his
finally
game of the day, we headed
home and Mike was regretting what he had done, upset that
he had no chance to move on.

I disagreed. I told him, in the grand scheme of things, moving on at the U-17 didn't matter as much as standing up for
himself, that the chances of him actually making the provincial Under-17 team were nonexistent-it is almost exclusively
the domain of
first
-round OHL draft picks. I told him I would
much rather see him defend himself the way he did than allow
some dirty bastard to try to seriously injure him and that if
he had done nothing to respond to the spear, it would have
sent a message to others that they could go after him any time
they like without reprisals. I told him there are occasions when
turning the other cheek is the smart thing to do-discretion
is sometimes the better part of valor-but this wasn't one of
them. I told him I was proud of him and there would be times
in life when he had to stand up for himself, make
sacrifices
for
the sake of principle and accept whatever consequences came
his way. This, I said, was one of those times. I believed it then;
I believe it now.

The funny thing is we got a call that night from the U-17
camp director, who informed us Mike was moving on to the
next level of U-17 camp for the entire OMHA, in Guelph in
May. I expressed surprise that they picked Mike after the
fight
and the camp director said: "I would have been disappointed
if Mike hadn't responded."

Mike was ecstatic at the news he was moving on, but
within the hockey circles we traveled, there was a lot of chatter about Mike's selection. Not much of it was kind. Other kids
told Mike he only made it because "his dad was on TV," that
he violated the rules by
fight
ing and they still picked him. The
message boards on internet sites that the kids and many parents frequented were full of stuff about the inequity of Mike
McKenzie getting to the
finally
OMHA camp at the expense of
this good player or that good player.

None of this was new for Mike, or me, although it was a
little more intense and personal than usual this time. Mike
never said a word to me, but I could tell going into the second
OMHA U-17 camp in Guelph that he was a man on a mission.

I try to say this without sounding like an Overbearing
Hockey Dad, but Mike and Michael Haley from Oshawa, who
Mike had played lacrosse with since they were Paperweights,
dominated the entire weekend in Guelph. They were teammates and linemates. They were virtually unstoppable,
although the camp administrators made them play on separate
lines for a couple of games to see if it would slow them down.

It didn't. They continued to score and lead the way.

Bear in mind that no one from that camp has made it as
a regular in the NHL, and the OMHA crop of '86s was really
quite weak compared to the GTHL players (who had their own
U-17 camp), but this was nevertheless a stunning development
for me. I could scarcely believe what I was seeing. I had never
seen Mike play so well, skate so fast, compete so hard and elevate his play to that level. It was the
first
time I ever actually
believed Mike might be able to play at a level as high as the
OHL or perhaps U.S. college hockey.

I asked him on the way home, "What the hell got into
you?"
"I wanted to prove to everyone I deserved to be there
because of me, not because of you," he said. "All of that talk I
didn't deserve to be there pissed me off."

Now, reality did strike at the
finally
U-17 camp at York
University in June, when all the best players from the GTHL,
the Ottawa area, northern Ontario, southwestern Ontario and
northwestern Ontario got together. Mike played reasonably
well but he had hit his ceiling. His play there showed he still
had a lot of work to do if he was going to play at the next level.

While this U-17 process was unfolding in April, May and
June, lots of other things were happening as well.

In April, the Oshawa Legionaires Junior A team was holding its spring tryouts. For a sixteen-year-old Mike, that was
the very de
fi
nition of his next level at that point. He tried out
and made the team that could take no more than six local
sixteen-year-olds. Mike and Zack Greer made it from Whitby;
Mike MacLean, Derrick Bagshaw, Andrew Gibbons and Daniel
Larocque made it from Oshawa. The coach of the Legionaires
was Wayne Marchment, the brother of NHL defenseman Bryan
Marchment, and the GM was Peter Vipond, a local Brooklin,
Ont., lacrosse legend who once played NHL hockey with
the California Golden Seals. They were
terrific
guys. Wayne
Marchment was a very good coach with a great feel for the
game. Mike was thrilled to be moving into Junior A hockey,
where he would play against players as old as twenty-one.

In May, Mike was chosen in the seventh round of the OHL
draft by Saginaw, a franchise that had just relocated from North
Bay, Ont. Mike had thought he might go as high as the
fi
fth
round and was equal parts disappointed and relieved while sitting in front of the computer (the OHL draft is conducted on
the internet) to see he had been chosen 125th overall.

All of this-the U-17 experience, making the Junior A
Legionaires as a sixteen-year-old and getting drafted into the
OHL-was really quite unexpected, especially for a kid who
had, one year ago, been on the verge of giving up high-level
competitive hockey.

Go
figure
.

27: Making the Big Time: Shawn Steps It Up

LIFE WAS GOOD for Crazy Hockey Dad in 2002. Very good.

Mike had effectively been born again, in the hockey sense,
and was looking forward to his
first
season in Junior A. Shawn,
meanwhile, was playing AAA hockey for the very
first
time.

I've never gotten too hung up about the number of As
attached to a team name. Shawn played AA for three years and
I thought that was great because he thought that was great.

Shawn played A for two years and I was cool with that because
Shawn was cool with that. But Shawn was sincerely thrilled to
be part of John Annis's AAA Whitby Wildcats for 2002-03 and,
well, I don't need to tell you how I felt, especially since I was
going to help out as an assistant coach.

I talk to a lot of people about their kids playing hockey
and I often get dads of younger kids saying, with an overtone
of disappointment or resignation, "My boy doesn't really care
that much about hockey, he doesn't take it that seriously, he's
not that good." I have two responses for that. One, there's nothing wrong with any of it, as long as the kids are happy
and healthy and having fun playing the game. Two, you never
know when a kid will suddenly develop a greater passion for
the game or play it at a level you never would have imagined
possible. Shawn would be a prime example of that.

The timing of all this for Shawn was especially exciting
because this was supposed to be his major peewee (thirteen-year-old) season and that's the year of the Quebec Peewee
Tourney. If I got Mike's hard-working-but-not-very-talented
peewee team to Quebec, it would be a slam dunk to do it for
this highly ranked team that Shawn was on.

But Hockey Canada had other ideas. This was the year
Hockey Canada revamped the age groups to make them consistent across the country, so a thirteen-year-old player in
Ontario became known as a minor bantam instead of a major
peewee. Shawn's team was out of luck for Quebec on what
amounted to an administrative technicality, a name change.

Shawn liked playing on the AAA team. He was good friends
with a lot of the kids on the team. He was enjoying his newfound
confidence
at that level. He played a solid physical game
and his puck skills were decent enough that he could make
plays. He could keep up just
fine
as he was a much better natural skater than his brother. Shawn wasn't nearly in the same
class as the top two players on the team-Patrick Daley, who
would go on to have a good OHL career, and Louke Oakley, who
would go on to get a scholarship at Clarkson University-but
he often played on their line. Whether Shawn was alongside
the two big guns or playing a role on the third line, he was
happy and
fi
tting in.