Hockey Dad (7 page)

So much for the golden rule.

11: So, That's How You Want to Play the Game, Is It?

I AM NOT GOING TO LIE, writing this book isn't easy at times.
I don't mind highlighting my shortcomings to get a laugh or
make a point, but I also don't want you to think I was some
kind of loon bar 24/7, because I wasn't. I look back at Chapter
Eight, where I told you about Mike's scoring exploits in house
league, and I worry you might think I'm one of those self-centered Hockey Dads who are so full of themselves and run
around bragging about their kids. I would be devastated if that
were the case. That's not me at all.

But the real
conflict
in writing parts of this book isn't
as much about how I characterize myself-because I am
ultimately driving the bus on that-as it is my family and
whether, in the telling of this very personal story, I am
doing Cindy, Mike and Shawn justice in terms of how they
are portrayed. I mean, it's possible some of these snapshots
I'm providing could create the wrong impression, or least an
imbalanced one.

So as I prepare to tell you about some of the things that
happened in Mike's major novice AAA year, and throughout
his hockey-playing days, maybe some things that are not so
fl
attering to Mike, I feel the strong need to tell you this up
front about him.

Mike was, as a boy, and is now, as a young man, a great
son, a
terrific
person.

As a kid he was fairly quiet and could, when in the company of people outside of our family, be quite shy. He was
extraordinarily respectful of all authority, conscientious at
school, a very good student who worked hard at all times. He
cooperated and played well with others, including his little
brother, Shawn, and really was never any problem to his parents or teachers or anyone else.

But when it came to anything where competition was
involved, winning or losing, well, this quiet, well-mannered,
well-behaved, bespectacled little kid could go from Jekyll to
Hyde in a heartbeat. Probably the
first
time Cindy and I saw
this manifest itself was with video games when he was four or
five
. He would be playing Super Mario on the old Nintendo
system. If the game was beating him, look out, because that
video game controller used to go
fly
ing all over the place. I
lost count of how many times we had to ban video games for
a week or a month.

The same was true when he played sports.

Mike was over-the-top passionate about playing hockey
and lacrosse. He just loved his sports. He couldn't wait to get
to the rink. He would always be one of the
first
kids dressed.

While other kids would horse around in the dressing room,
thinking and talking about anything but hockey, Mike would
go out and watch the game being played before his.
My friend Kevin O'Brien, who coached Mike in lacrosse
and was the trainer for hockey, said in all his years of being
around kids playing sports, no player ever prepared himself for
games the way Mike did.

As calm and quiet as Mike was at home (except when he
was playing video games), the intensity came off him in waves
in the sporting arena. He was driven on the ice, gave his all
every shift and badly wanted to be successful as an individual
scoring or setting up goals-and ultimately wanted team success in the form of a win. I would like to tell you he was this way
because I was drilling it into his head that a good player works
hard every shift and never lets up, but who's kidding who? It
was just his nature and my words only reinforced what came
naturally to him.

There was one time I was driving Mike home from a
minor novice AAA game. He told me that in the middle of his
game he had to go to the bathroom but that he didn't want
to leave the bench and miss a shift by going to the dressing
room.

"So what did you do?" I asked him.
"I just went on the bench," he said.

The good news was it was No. 1, not No. 2. And between
his long johns, jock, pants, socks and shin pads, any of the
evidence would have been soaked up so it was just our little
secret, until now, but it gives you an idea of how intent Mike
was to not miss a single shift. (Cindy gave Mike's equipment a
good cleaning that night.)

Kids on other teams would call Mike "Four Eyes"-at the
younger ages they hadn't yet twigged to the fact his dad was
on TV; all that nonsense would come later-and that only
added fuel to Mike's
fire
.

In his second year of rep, major novice AAA, the Wildcats
were playing in a December tournament in Lindsay, hosted by
the Central Ontario Wolves organization. The team and Mike
were on top of their game. The Wildcats went 6-0-0 to win
the tournament and Mike, who had eight goals and eleven
points in the six games (we know the precise stats because the
newspaper story is in an old scrapbook), was named tournament MVP.

Cindy and I should have been thrilled, but we weren't.

In fact, we were really quite upset. Throughout the weekend's play, Mike's intensity level was too high. We talked to
him about it a couple of times after the tournament games
on Friday and Saturday, warned him that if he was going to
continue to play like that, we weren't going to put up with it.

But right into the championship game, he was getting worse
instead of better. As well as he played, and he was on
fire
, he
was banging his stick when things didn't go his way, waving
his arms or getting
fl
ustered and agitated, at times almost to
the point of tears.

We had seen enough. Before Mike had even emerged from
the dressing room with his trophy and the MVP award, Cindy
and I had decided to "suspend" Mike for one game. The next
league game the Wildcats played was against their arch rivals
from Oshawa, so we determined that would be the game he
would have to miss. He needed to understand he couldn't
keep playing like that, even if he was playing well and being
successful.

We told Mike on the way home from Lindsay and he
begged us to relent, promised us he would behave himself
from now on, but we had heard that story on previous car rides
and it hadn't happened, so we were sticking to our guns.

We told John Velacich about our plan at practice that week
and, not surprisingly, he tried to talk us out of it. As a coach, he
didn't want to be without Mike for the game against Oshawa.
But Cindy and I felt strongly about it and wouldn't relent.

I would like to tell you that Mike sitting out that game
against Oshawa did the trick, but there was a game later that
season when Oshawa was really putting the boots to the
Wildcats. In that game, a ticked-off, frustrated and angry Mike
turned a noncontact major novice AAA game into full contact
and had the six-six, count 'em, six-minor penalties for body
checking to prove it. Remember when I told you before that
parents shouldn't necessarily be held accountable for what
their kids do or don't do on the ice? Well, I was speaking from
experience.

And let's just say this whole discipline thing with Mike has
remained a work in progress.

The Wildcats were having a good major novice AAA year. When
the playoffs arrived, we were all hoping the team would be
good enough to get to the Ontario Minor Hockey Association
championships. That's the Holy Grail for every OMHA team.
The league we played in was called the Eastern Triple A (ETA);
there were eight to eleven centers depending upon the age
group (Barrie, Richmond Hill, Markham, Ajax-Pickering,
Whitby, Oshawa, Peterborough, Central Ontario, York-Simcoe,
North Central and Quinte) and they competed for the right to
get to what we simply called the OMHAs. Two teams from our
ETA league would advance, two teams would advance from
the South-Central Triple A (SCTA) league (Brampton, Oakville,
Halton, Hamilton, Burlington, St. Catharines, Welland,
Niagara Falls and Guelph) and there would be one host team,
from either the ETA or SCTA, depending upon who had won
the OMHA title in that age group the year before.

Oakville had won the OMHAs in minor novice so the SCTA
would get three teams in the major novice AAA OMHA championships. Only two would go from the ETA, so the Wildcats
were going to have to win two playoff rounds to get a berth in
the OMHAs.

Our
first
-round playoff series was against Barrie and it was
a barn burner. The Wildcats were leading the best-of-
five
series
2-1 and Game 4 was being played at Iroquois Park Arena. But
Barrie rallied for the win and tied the series. Late in the third
period of that game, Coach Velacich got tossed from the game
for arguing a call with the referee. Minor hockey rules being
what they are, if a player or coach gets a game misconduct in
the last ten minutes of the third period, he or she must sit out
another game in addition to the one they were ejected from.

So we weren't going to have our head coach for Game 5
back in Barrie. But the kids overcame that. The boys played
well in Game 5 in a really tense nail-biter and it was Steven
Seedhouse who scored the game-winning goal for Whitby with
only a minute left to play. We were on to the next round,
against our neighbors from Ajax-Pickering, one playoff series
victory from getting to the OMHAs.

We showed up for our next practice and were told there was
going to be a parent meeting. We then found out the OMHA
had reversed the outcome of Game 5, which Whitby won on
the ice 2-1, after Barrie
fi
led an
official
protest. Barrie protested
the fact that our suspended head coach was seen coming out of
our dressing room before the game. John Velacich had apparently gone in to tie his son Jason's skates before the game and
wish the boys good luck, but according to OMHA rules, a suspended coach is not permitted to even be around the dressing
room before the game. So the OMHA ruled in favor of Barrie's
protest, and reversed the outcome of that game and the series.

Barrie, not Whitby, would be playing Ajax-Pickering the next
night, and the Wildcats were destined to play in what's called
the ETA playoffs, or ringette/consolation round, as it's disdainfully known.

Poor John Velacich felt terrible. It was such an innocent
thing. No one was trying to pull a fast one. I really felt bad for
the poor guy. Mike's team was done as far as the OMHA playoffs were concerned and it was because of some technicality
which, on one level, made sense (you don't want suspended
coaches permitted to "coach"), but the punishment (reversing
the outcome of a game and a playoff series) was ridiculously
heavy-handed, penalizing a bunch of innocent kids.
Games are won and lost on the ice, especially with nine-year-olds, and there was no advantage, real or imagined, to the
coach innocently being in the room before the game to tie his
son's skates.

I was outraged. All of the parents were. And the kids? They
were all crying; it was quite a scene.

You hear about really ridiculous things happening in the
name of minor hockey and this was one of them. What was
the OMHA thinking? What was the Barrie team who lodged
the protest thinking? Was that how Barrie wanted to advance
in the playoffs, winning a series in the boardroom, not on the
ice? We couldn't imagine a more unfair scenario. I've been
known to spin a good yarn in front of a keyboard so I wrote
a scathing letter, epic length too, to both the OMHA and the
Barrie Minor Hockey Association. It was just blistering. But it
obviously fell on deaf ears because no one ever responded. We
were done.