Breaking Away Read online

  Herbst and the rest of the Skipjacks might have forgotten completely about my father if it hadn’t been for an incident that came toward the end of his second and last five-game contract with Baltimore. My father must have sensed that “Moose” Lallo, the coach, was not going to extend his contract and planned to cut him loose unless one of the players was injured. In the middle of what turned out to be his last game with Baltimore, my father had the puck near center ice and Lallo yelled at him to dump the puck into the other team’s end and come off the ice for a line change. That would have been standard stuff in the situation. For reasons only my father knew, he turned toward the bench and fired a slapshot toward the coach and the Skipjacks. “It might have been Moose that he was trying to hit, but Moose ducked out of the way and it caught me in the jaw,” Herbst says.

  Herbst managed to turn his head, but the shot still left him with broken teeth and fifteen stitches. While the trainer was waving smelling salts under Herbst’s nose and getting ready to take him to hospital for X-rays, Lallo told my father to go to the dressing room—he was done. The Skipjacks on the bench told the coach that they were going to walk out if he didn’t axe my father. But by the end of the period, when the team went back to the dressing room for the intermission, my father had cleaned out his stall.

  That would have made an unforgettable exit, but my father wasn’t quite done and neither were the Skipjacks. A few days later my father signed a five-game contract with the Winston-Salem Thunderbirds. No team at any level moved more players in and out of the lineup than Winston-Salem—my father was one of fifty-one players who played for Winston-Salem in that fifty-game season. He made it through one five-game contract and signed another. He didn’t exactly tear it up in his ten games with the team. He picked up three goals and a couple of assists. He did pick up sixty minutes in penalties, most of them in a game against his former Skipjacks teammates. “We ran him all night,” Dave Herbst says. “He would have had at least three fights that night. After what he did, guys were lining up to get a piece of him.”

  There was no third five-game contract with Winston-Salem that season and it didn’t look like he had any future there, but it would turn out that North Carolina would become his home for a while. And it was in Winston-Salem that he met the girl who would become his wife.

  * * *

  Anyone who has known my father would find it hard to imagine him in a romantic setting. Hockey at all levels is full of ladies’ men, but people who played with my father or coached him could never imagine him chasing skirts. He seemed the farthest thing from that, antisocial not just with the teammates but with society at large. If anything, my father spent his time away from the rink dreaming up ways to make money. Of course, he was undercapitalized, or not capitalized at all, but that didn’t stop him dreaming about making a big score in business. He dreaded the idea of punching a clock and wasting years away in a factory like his father.

  He met a woman who was perfect for him in a couple of ways. Cathie Martin was a couple of years older than he was, but she was a girl without much in the way of life experience. She was an only child, protected, sheltered and probably a bit spoiled by her parents. After graduating from high school, she didn’t head off to college and didn’t have any idea what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. I don’t know how they met exactly, but I imagine that she was starving for attention and my father was starving for that and everything else.

  Cathie Martin’s parents were wealthy. Her father had been sheriff of a town near Winston-Salem. After he left office, he developed a business, a company that manufactured fittings for hoses, and had at least sixty employees on the payroll. The Martins were a pretty sharp contrast to the O’Sullivans in blue-collar Scarborough. Even if he had been easy to get along with and to like, my father wouldn’t have been his in-laws’ type of people.

  Their courtship is hard, maybe impossible, for me to imagine. Cathie and her parents had no idea about professional hockey, so when my father told them that he wanted to keep playing in the ACHL and wanted a future in the game, they wouldn’t have second-guessed him. They wouldn’t have known that his ambitions to make a living in hockey were a pipe dream. They might have even respected his determination, as deluded as it was. Even if they had their doubts, my father would have told Cathie the one thing that she wanted to hear: that he wanted to have kids. And whatever made the Martins’ daughter happy made them happy.

  My father came back for a second season in the ACHL and landed a couple of five-game contracts with the Hampton Roads Gulls. Still, he couldn’t get a full-time job in the league, never mind anything that would sustain a reasonable person’s hope for moving up to higher tiers in the game. Over the course of a season or so, the Martins had to become more aware of the cold realities of their future son-in-law’s career prospects and offered to help him start up a business of his own, underwriting the first of what would be many sandwich shops and greasy spoons that he’d own and operate.

  At some point during the engagement or after the marriage, the relationship between my father and his in-laws started to turn hostile. I can only suppose that it was some sort of slight that he felt, but he kept his distance from them and stopped going by their home. That would never change. It didn’t stop the Martins from offering to help him out financially and never stopped him from taking advantage of their generosity, but my father would not be in the same room as them ever again. He never took up an invitation from them and he went out of his way to avoid them.

  Where else my father played that year is, again, something that even hockey historians will likely never dig up, but for some reason he landed the next fall with a men’s senior team in Thompson, Manitoba. This was at least another step lower than the ACHL and one step up from recreational hockey—not the professional game in any sense. It seemed the least likely place to get scouted by a professional coach, but Tom Watt, the coach of the Winnipeg Jets, spotted my father in a game. Watt remembered my father from that training camp a couple of years before. He had been the coach of the University of Toronto Blues in the seventies and kept close ties to the school. That fall, he got a call from of U of T, asking if he knew of any players who might be able to fill out the varsity roster. Look down university rosters in Canada and you’ll find players who spent seasons in major junior and occasionally in the pro minors. Watt told the U of T coach, Mike Keenan, that he had seen my father but had no idea if his marks would meet the school’s high standards. Watt put Keenan in touch with my father, and the team staff were surprised to find that he was in fact academically qualified. Most minor-leaguers wouldn’t have the marks to get into U of T, especially those who bounced around in major junior, switching schools—or, in my father’s case, switching provinces. No pro teams were prepared to give him another tryout, never mind a short-term contract, so at age twenty-three, my father went back to school, in what looked like a chance to get on with the rest of his life.

  My father was older than most of his teammates and had played pro, but he wasn’t a ringer or a star on the team. He was a center on the third line. If he thought that U of T was some sort of springboard to the NHL, he was right—it wasn’t for him, but it was for the team’s MVP, André Hidi, who would wind up signing with the Washington Capitals after the season.

  Even though he wasn’t competing with his teammates for a spot on the roster or a contract, my father didn’t mix with his teammates any more than he had with teammates in the ACHL. Most of the other players were serious students—almost all of them finished their degrees or graduate studies and landed white-collar jobs when they graduated. That wasn’t the direction my father was heading. Almost everyone on the team was single and liked to hang out at the campus pubs. My father had a wife at home and always seemed to be racing into practice at the last minute and racing out right after. His teammates had no idea about my father’s life away from the rink until the day they went to the Mr. Submarine sandwich shop across the street from Varsity Arena on Bloor Street aft
er practice. The players were surprised that my father went along. He stood at the end of the line while they were getting their orders filled. When his was the last to be filled, he didn’t pay. One of the players asked him how he got his sandwich for free and he told them, “I own this place.”

  Only after that did it come out that my father had three businesses on the go while he was a full-time student in the University of Toronto general arts program. And it turned out that his wife was doing assignments for him when he couldn’t squeeze in the time between showing up in class, practice and working behind the counter at his franchises. His teammates hadn’t seen that coming, but early on they had learned not to be surprised by anything “Crazy John” said or did. “I guess every dressing room has a guy that’s out of the box,” one former teammate says. “John just had this crazy look in his eyes and this crazy laugh.”

  Mike Keenan has a reputation as one of hockey’s hard-asses. The idea of Iron Mike in the same room as my father sounds like a potential disaster—if my father ever shot a puck at him like he did at Moose Lallo in Baltimore, people in hockey would expect Keenan to pull out a small-gauge sidearm. Yet they never crossed swords. In fact, Paul Titanic, Keenan’s assistant coach, remembers that the two actually got along. “Mike was tolerant of guys who were different,” Titanic says.

  It would have been hard for Keenan to find much fault with anyone on his team: the Blues that year were one of the strongest teams ever in Canadian university hockey, losing only one game all season and winning the national championship game over Concordia 9–1.

  Somehow my father kept his grades up and stayed academically qualified while running his submarine franchises.

  When Mike Keenan landed a job in the NHL, the University of Toronto athletic department went looking for a coach to take over the team at the last minute. It happened that the Winnipeg Jets had just fired Tom Watt, the coach who had recommended my father to Keenan the year before.

  “There were huge cutbacks in the athletic department and we had to cut a staff of four down to one,” Watt says. “Because of that the dressing room ended up in pretty bad shape. The players weren’t happy with it. I wasn’t happy with it, but there was nothing I could about except apologize. John decided that he was going to stage a protest—he took a shit in the shower. Left it there in the middle of the floor as a protest. His teammates were disgusted by it. I found out who did it—as unhappy as the players were with the cutbacks, they were a hell of a lot unhappier with a guy shitting in their shower room. I called John in the next day and he had no explanation—he was pretty defiant and profane about it. He went crazy. But that was that. He was kicked off the team, and he was out of school right after that. I’ve had some players do some strange things over the years but that was the single strangest thing ever. John would be up there with the strangest guys I ever coached.”

  6

  GETTING OUT OF THE GAME AND GETTING BACK IN

  Winston-Salem, North Carolina, June 1990

  My first memory of hockey is one of my first memories, period. I remember watching the Stanley Cup final between Edmonton and Boston. SportsChannel carried the playoffs that year. I was five years old. I remember that my favorite player was Andy Moog. I don’t know why the Boston goaltender was my favorite, probably just because I liked the sound of his name. The TV set in our house would have been one of the few in Winston-Salem tuned in to the game. It might not have been what you’re thinking, reading this—it might not have been my father watching the game and telling me about it. He might not have been watching it at all, or it might have just been on in the background. I don’t remember my father talking that much about hockey before I played it.

  It had been a while since he’d thought of himself as a hockey player. Not long after he was kicked off the University of Toronto hockey team and dropped out of school, back in 1984, my mother became pregnant. They might have wanted to go back to North Carolina—the submarine sandwich business wasn’t doing great. They decided to stick around long enough that they would have their medical expenses covered by the province’s health plan rather than be uninsured in the U.S. and on the hook for money they just didn’t have.

  When I was born the next February, my parents started the process to go back to Winston-Salem. As soon as my father could unload his businesses, they packed up and headed south. My mother had always wanted kids but she realized early on that she needed help, so having her parents nearby meant they could pitch in. It made it a little less uncomfortable to ask her father for money to make ends meet and, later on, to ask him to underwrite my father’s latest venture, a greasy spoon. And no big coincidence: the move gave my father one last shot at playing minor-league hockey, a chance to go back to the Thunderbirds for a couple of five-game contracts.

  My father had been a fish out of water playing Canadian university hockey—he still thought of himself as a pro. But he wasn’t a good fit going back to the Atlantic Coast league either. It had been fine when he was fairly fresh out of junior, but the ACHL was a young man’s league. Everyone else was in his early twenties, single, just out for a good time before getting on with the rest of his life. Only a couple of years had passed, but in that time my father had gone from the youngest guy in the room to the oldest. For the average ACHL player, a $300-a-week salary put a serious crimp on partying, but for the sole breadwinner in a family it wasn’t just his hardship alone. That sort of money put a couple with a baby below the poverty line.

  The game ended for my father in Winston-Salem.

  Rick Dudley, an ex-NHL tough guy, actually got along with my father even if he couldn’t figure him out. As a player and even as a coach, Dudley might have been even more tightly wired than my father (and definitely more talented). “John was a strange guy,” Dudley says. “He was talented enough to play [in the Atlantic Coast league], but what good was that going to do him? He talked about the things he was going to do away from the game. I don’t know how much he believed it. I have to suppose he realized that he had taken it as far as it goes. With him, someone telling him it was over wasn’t going to work, but when he figured it out himself, he’d walk away without looking back. That’s what I figured, anyway.”

  With Dudley there was no blow-up like there had been with Moose Lallo or Tom Watt. Dudley stopped just short of apologizing when he told my father that he didn’t have another contract to offer him. “I told him that I would have kept him on but I just didn’t have any room for him on the roster,” Dudley says. “I didn’t know how he’d take it, but it ended up he was okay with it.”

  That might have been true, but it’s hard to square with the story that he told about his last game, a story that he was seemingly proud of or at least not embarrassed by. Knowing that he wasn’t going to get another contract offer from Dudley and that no other team had any interest in him, my father didn’t go to the dressing room with the rest of the team after the game. He didn’t change back into the clothes that he wore to the arena. Instead he walked out of the arena and into the parking lot in his full equipment, across the asphalt still in his skates. I have no idea what to read into that.

  Years later he’d tell people that he gave up the game to raise a family, but I was in diapers when he was giving it his last shot, leaving my mother alone with me while he was heading out on road trips.

  * * *

  My father set up with another greasy spoon in Winston-Salem, another dead end that my grandfather threw money into. The business was a break-even deal on its best days. My father always seemed to have a money-making scheme going on. And whatever he was doing, he didn’t share the details with my mother. He treated her like she wasn’t smart enough to understand his business, though if it ever came down to getting money, he had no problem sending her off to her parents as if he were sending her to the nearest ATM.

  After he played his last game with Winston-Salem, my father ignored hockey completely, my mother said. He ignored himself too. He had always thought that clean living habits were g
oing to be his ticket to the NHL. In retirement there was no point to the sacrifice, and he let everything slide all at once. He had been a gym guy as a young man—not with a bodybuilder’s weight-lifting routine, more like the boxing routine he’d put me through later on. But after hanging up his skates, my father was like a lot of players when they retire: he shut it down physically. He didn’t work out and didn’t watch what he ate, so he gained weight. Within a couple of years he was twenty or even thirty pounds over his playing weight. He had lived healthy and he had criticized anyone who didn’t. With no reason to stay in shape, he started smoking in a big way. He had never been a big drinker. Now he drank, and hardly ever at home, mostly to get out of the house. He wasn’t what you’d call a social drinker—he didn’t have a lot of friends in Winston-Salem. He was more like an antisocial drinker. He just felt better about getting drunk if there were other people around getting drunk.

  If people ever asked, my father would tell them that got out of the game for “family” or that he wanted “to raise them the right way.” Throwing “family” out there was convenient. Like he was sacrificing his career, the thing he loved to do, for a noble cause. He claimed the higher ground but never admitted the truth, that the game defeated him, that the game kicked his ass all those years waiting for a big break that never came. By the time I was enrolled in kindergarten and my sister Kelley was a year away from going to school, my father had nothing to do with hockey. There were no photographs of him as a player hanging at home. He didn’t need the reminder. I don’t ever remember seeing him in a team picture—he rarely lasted with one team long enough to get in one. I’m sure the game and his career rarely came up in conversation. Maybe in a hockey town, people would have known and asked him for some old war stories, but in Winston-Salem they would be more likely to talk about baseball or hoops with guys who had been stars in high school.