Breaking Away Read online

  And the bottom line is that I didn’t know any different. When I was a kid in North Carolina, I didn’t know any real hockey players—my father told me there weren’t any in the South. When I got to Toronto, I didn’t get a chance to know the other kids on the team—my father told me that what I was doing was what they were doing, so I just figured that no one who played hockey seriously had the time to hang out with other kids.

  It’s easier to look back and put together what I was thinking when all this was going on. It’s harder to get inside my father’s mind. All those hours I spent working through The Hockey Handbook, and he had to watch it all. He didn’t trust me to do the work in the basement on my own. He thought he had to be there in case I messed up or got lazy. He had to be there when he rented ice and put me through a private workout—a liability thing that required an adult to supervise a minor—but he felt like he had to be there anyway to make sure that I put the work in. Unlike me, he knew that there were other things in life, but this was the one thing he chose above all else—above my mother, above my sisters, above his family. He had no close friends, and those he did have he hardly ever saw except for a few beers and maybe to show me off, make me do the Hockey Handbook drills for them like some sort of a floor show. My playing and practicing took priority over everything else, and what little money we had he poured into the dues for my team and ice rental.

  I’ve always wondered if Percival would have written the book if he knew the awful way that my father would use it. I’m sure a lot of players benefited from The Hockey Handbook, but I’ve always believed there had to be hundreds of other kids who were put through these drills the same way I was—until there was no sense of play or practice, just work, and in the worst cases, punishment. Percival must have expected that some coaches and parents might take his training program to an extreme, because at the end of the book he included a section on coaching philosophy, a section that speaks directly to people like my father. He laid out how coaches should exercise understanding and patience, how they should encourage rather than threaten, how they should be friends rather than the bosses of their players. He laid out rules that seem basic to being not just a good coach but also a decent human being. The section feels tacked on, and after a couple of hundred pages of technical stuff and X’s and O’s, a lot of readers might have not made it that far. Really, Percival should have used the first chapter to deliver the message or put an advisory on the cover. “It is better,” Percival wrote, “to build a player’s ego rather than knock it down, and in every case be prepared to substitute analysis for criticism. A player’s failure is almost always the failure of his coach. Bawling out in public is not only bad for the player but also gives the coach an unpleasant reputation with the rest of the team.”

  I didn’t get a chance to read The Hockey Handbook when I was a kid. It was my father’s book, something he wouldn’t trust me with. Looking at this paragraph twenty years after my father started putting me through the Hockey Handbook drills, it seems so strange that Percival believed that the coaches should take a paternal approach to players. Really he was saying that they should be supportive father figures for them. I suppose my father never had a chance to play for anyone like that in major junior or the minor pros—his coaches would have believed that they couldn’t afford to be friends with players, not when they had to trade or cut them, stuff you don’t do to friends.

  In fact my father wound up doing the exact opposite—he treated me like a hard-ass minor-league coach would have treated him. Everyone in the game knows and hates the guy who is bitter about falling short of the Show and takes it out on the players who have to ride the bus with him. After games, games that I scored four or five goals in, my father would ream me out for minor stuff—he’d blow up and call me “a little fag” before I had any idea what it meant. When he’d rent ice and get on the ice with me, he would slap the back of my helmet and daze me if he thought I wasn’t trying hard enough. It was as if he learned his fathering skills in the Atlantic Coast Hockey League. Maybe if he had ever played for a coach who had gone out of his way to help him out, maybe if he had stuck around with Rick Dudley in Winston-Salem, he might have turned out different—not just a better player, but a different sort of father.

  8

  THE TRAINING TABLE

  Toronto, Ontario, 1994

  The Hockey Handbook gave a coach and a player a lot of direction on skill development, but it made no mention of diet. Looking back, my life would have been a lot easier if Percival had laid out some sort of meal plan, something that balanced the food groups for better performance. My father didn’t have a guidebook on that count, just his own lunatic theories: he was convinced that I would grow taller and get stronger if I ate super-sized portions at every meal. He gave me portions that would be appropriate for two adults or three kids, three meals a day. I wasn’t allowed to snack, but he hardly had to enforce that—I felt so stuffed so often that I’d have to save up an appetite for the next sitting. That I was average-sized and stayed average-sized didn’t faze him. Others would think that the experiment wasn’t working, but my father just doubled down and heaped more food on my plate. It could have turned out to be a disaster if I didn’t have a fast metabolism. I could have easily ended up obese or diabetic if I hadn’t been burning thousands of calories every day.

  Making all this tougher was the fact that my mother wasn’t a great cook by any stretch. It was like the Three Bears taken to an extreme: one meal was undercooked, one was burnt and the third was the right temperature but tasteless. I used to look forward to the times when my father brought leftovers home from the greasy spoon. Still, I preferred to take my chances with her cooking than my father’s. Thankfully, it was rare that he’d have to make dinner. But one time still makes me nauseous just thinking about it.

  I’m not sure where my mother was—it might have been that she had to go to hospital with my sister and was kept there for hours. Whatever the case, dinner was left up to my father. He had never made a meal for himself in his life. Before my mother had done it for him, it had been his mother, then billet families that he stayed with in junior, then burger joints in the minors, then whatever his employees at the submarine sandwich shop or his fry cook at the greasy spoon whipped up. That night my father made what would have been a gruesome dinner even if a French chef had prepared it: Spam and baked beans.

  My father heated up the Spam on the stovetop and put the baked beans in a pot. Then he piled it high on my plate. I don’t know that I would have been able to keep it down if it were a normal-sized helping, probably not. But when I balked at eating it and told him that I wasn’t hungry, he just put more on my plate and ordered me to finish it.

  Soon I was on my knees in the kitchen, throwing up on the floor.

  That would have been bad enough but it got worse. At that point my father scooped my vomit onto a plate and told me to eat it. I started to cry and he slapped me in the back of the head and said there was more of that waiting if I didn’t clean my plate. And so I did. I ate my vomit.

  And I vomited again.

  And again, my father scooped up my vomit and made me try again to finish up.

  I ate again, vomited again, was slapped again, cried again and again.

  Eventually, I managed to keep my food and the vomit down, though I almost choked a few times with the food coming back up. As overstuffed as I was so many other nights, I actually hurt when I went to sleep that night. It probably wasn’t even going to sleep so much as passing out from the effort. Just the eating and re-eating had left me exhausted and sweating like I had a fever.

  And to this day, just the smell of baked beans makes me dizzy and sick to my stomach.

  9

  HIS DO-OVER

  I’m sure that when I first skated in a tryout with the Toronto Marlies AAA atom team, players and parents and coaches were wondering who I was and whether I really did come from North Carolina. The Marlies were probably the highest-profile atom-age team in the city—al
l kinds of history, kids who went on to play in the NHL, a program for ten-year-olds that was as professional as a lot of college teams. I was eight years old and I’m sure that the Marlies’ staff were ready to brush my father off when he approached them about getting me a tryout. It was going to be the first of many times that my father managed to find his way and mine past a coach who thought I wouldn’t be able to keep up with older players and wouldn’t be able to stay out of harm’s way on the ice.

  My father was wound up so tight at home and with me when he was on the ice putting me through a workout, but he was a different guy at the arena when the Marlies practiced or played. He talked to other fathers and mixed with other families after games. He made jokes in a way that he would never do when we were home or alone together. He played the role of a cool dad, the guy who is rough around the edges, will swear in front of the kids on the team, making their dads seem uptight by comparison. And they were uptight—and successful. Most of the fathers were white-collar professional, executive types. They had done well with their lives, and my father couldn’t possibly fit in with them, so he tried being something else: the guy who had been there and done that. I’m sure a lot of the parents could see right through it, but the kids ate it up.

  My father talked a lot about his playing days—this was back before there were hockey databases where you can look up anyone who has played a professional game, so I know that my father padded his credentials and improved on the truth, as much as he could. Still, even if he stuck close to the truth, he would have made it farther than most of the other fathers—he had played for a national champion at U of T.

  In other words, my father mounted a charm offensive. He had a sense that he had to tone down his act and get along with the coaches and the other players’ families or else he’d wear out his welcome and mine. That charm offensive lasted right up until the drop of the puck and it picked up again at the final buzzer, but during the game, while I was out on the ice, he turned into a different guy completely.

  It’s not that my father wasn’t self-aware—he knew enough to move away from the families when the game started and to stand alone in a corner of the rink. Whenever I was on the ice, I could hear him shouting at me. In fact, everyone in the arena could hear him shouting at me. It had to turn heads in the stands, but I had heard it before—he was no different during our games from during my workouts. Not that he yelled at opponents or my teammates or the ref. No, he yelled only at me. There’s a voice in your head when you play that tells you where to go and what to do next—well, the voice in my head had to compete with the shouting from the corner of the arena where my father was standing.

  My father’s ambition—that is, his ambition for, with and through me—really crystallized my year with the Marlies. Before we’d left North Carolina he was convinced—or at least had convinced himself—that I was going to make it as a professional player. It’s a hell of a leap to see a seven-year-old in house league and be able to project him to professional hockey. It’s an even bigger leap when that house league is in Winston-Salem. I was coming from a vacuum as far as hockey went and, with the Marlies, I made an elite team two years ahead of my class. It was something like going from grade 10 at a vocational school to making the honor roll in physics at MIT. It can be done, but it really shouldn’t happen. Making the Marlies and playing well proved him right—to his mind, anyway.

  That said, it wasn’t all about what I had done. It was also about his life at that point. He had thought all those years that hockey was going to be his profession, but seven years had gone by since he’d cashed his last puny check from the Thunderbirds. Coming back to Toronto, he didn’t even have a job that was as reliable as his father’s. Short of the tap that he could get my mother to turn on with her parents, he had nothing going on to be optimistic about. It wasn’t just that he saw something in me—he was desperate to see something good in his own life somewhere, anywhere. Coming back to Toronto and seeing me succeed where even he’d admit he struggled by comparison, he had reason to believe, when not long before he had just about given up.

  He talked about how I was only going to get one chance to make good in the game. The fact was, he had a second chance. I was his do-over.

  * * *

  We were a good team but not a championship team that year, something that would become a theme in my career. I’m sure that my game improved over the course of the season—the move to Toronto was a boon to my skills development, pushing me harder than any competition in North Carolina or even in states with a much better quality of minor hockey might have. Still, my father wasn’t satisfied with the progress I was making. Kids in minor hockey often stick with one organization all the way from atom to midget, from age ten to sixteen. Once a kid made a Marlies team, he’d have the inside track to making the squad the next season. But after I played as a double underager with the Marlies, my father started to look for other teams for me to play for the next season. I don’t know exactly what went on behind the scenes, but the coaches and organizers had had their fill of my father’s act. No matter how much my father tried to fit in, he didn’t.

  Minor hockey is pretty tolerant of “involved” parents—that’s the word that you’ll always hear coaches use, their shorthand for “overinvolved” or “meddling.” Involved parents are hockey’s equivalent of stage mothers in the entertainment business. And that was my father. He was the most involved of the Marlies parents that year. He rubbed the coaches the wrong way. They thought he was way over the top with how he behaved at games. Even though AAA hockey is the most serious level of the game in minor hockey, all but the involved parents don’t lose sight of the fact that it’s kids who are out on the ice—in the case of Marlies that year, kids in grades 4 or 5. All but the involved parents understand that the game might be important but that not every game is life or death. My father took notes during our games so that on the trip home he could go over, point by point, what I did wrong—and it was always what I did wrong.

  My father had been a professional hockey player of no big distinction. With the move to Toronto, he became a professional parent. He was a problem. Coaches and teams can deal with some of their players’ problems and try to avoid others. When a parent is a problem, they try to steer clear of it. Someone might have said something directly to my father about toning down his act at the arena, but even if no one did, the message from the coaches and other parents would have been pretty clear to my father. It just isn’t done. And my father would have brushed that off. His attitude would have been: They don’t know anything. They never played the game. You don’t like me—who needs you? They were at cross-purposes. They wanted him to back off; he wanted a bigger role. He wanted to be able to take an active hand with me. He wanted to be on the ice with me.

  So my father looked for another place for me to play—something else that would become a theme in my career, just like it had been in his. He had never played for the same team or even the same league from one season to the next. A lot of the time he hadn’t even lasted a season with a team. That was going to be how it would be for me. With him managing me—and he looked at it as just that, managing—it was inevitable that this was going to be “like father, like son.” It wasn’t a matter of influence, like how with all his coaching I ended up carrying my stick just like him or picked up some of his mannerisms on the ice. No, this was a matter of control. I was going to pick up pretty much where he’d left off as a player.

  I ended up with the Toronto Red Wings that next season, and my father worked as an assistant coach with the team. The Red Wings would be the best team that I played with through minor hockey—we lost only a couple of games all season. We had a bunch of kids who went on to play in major junior. A couple, like Chris Campoli, made it to the NHL. It should have been all good memories that I took away from that season, but one thing stuck with me that has always bothered me and that would be best evidence of his screwed-up values, at least within the dressing room of a team that I played for.
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  One day during a practice my father took me aside to tell me to drop my gloves during practice and fight another kid, one of my linemates. I’ll just call him Steve.

  “Punch him the first chance you get,” he said.

  He didn’t say why, and I knew not to ask him. I also knew that if I didn’t, I was going to be in all kinds of shit afterward. Either I was going to fight Steve or my father was going to thump me later on. I was resigned to the fact that my father was going to slap me around at some point, but I was prepared to do whatever it took to avoid it for as long as I could. And that’s how I looked at it with Steve. If it meant slugging a kid I liked, a kid who’d invited me for a sleepover, a kid I considered a friend, then I didn’t have much of a choice. Suckering Steve was a matter of self-defense.

  I’ll admit that I wasn’t a Boy Scout. My father had taught me how to fight on the ice and how to fight in the street. I had a lot of fights on the playground at school, stuff that I never told my father about. Maybe I did it because I was wound up like a golf ball, with all the shit I was dealing with at home. I have to accept the blame for those. And I had been a willing participant in a lot of my fights in games. My father might have told me to go out on the ice and go after a kid, but often he was just authorizing me to do what I already wanted to do.

  That wasn’t the case with Steve, though. And that wasn’t the case when my father told me to do the same thing with other teammates in minor hockey later on. I’ve seen Steve a bunch of times in all those years since. I wouldn’t say that we’re close friends, but I worked out with him a few times in the off-season when we were both playing pro. We never discussed that fight.