by Ken Dryden
St. Mike’s had withdrawn from major junior hockey years earlier; during Steve’s time there, in the mid-1990s, it had become a prime feeder to U.S. colleges offering hockey scholarships. Most of the team’s players attended St. Mike’s, and were still of high school age, eighteen and under, making St. Mike’s the youngest team in the league. Steve—at fifteen, moving up from bantam and with his late birthdate—was its second-youngest player.
Kevin O’Flaherty and Steve were rookies together on the team. Kevin’s grandfather, “Peanuts” O’Flaherty, had played with St. Mike’s in the 1930s before having a pro career as a player, coach, and scout. Kevin’s father, John, had played Junior B with Steve’s minor peewee coach, Jim Donaldson. To Kevin, though Steve was a year younger than he was, Steve seemed the older one. It was the way he held himself, Kevin recalls. Steve seemed so comfortable in his own skin, right from the first day, yet without cockiness or swagger. The younger guys liked him because he wasn’t intimidated by the older guys; the older guys liked him because he seemed like them. “Their mothers and sisters liked him too,” Kevin remembers with a laugh. Yet Steve was no hotshot prospect, no “golden boy,” and as a fifteen-year-old he had to prove to his teammates, coaches, and opponents—and to himself—that he could play at this level and handle everything it demanded of him. Against big, tough teams, sometimes in small-town arenas, against big, tough local heroes four years older than he was, he had to show he was tough enough.
Steve wasn’t a fighter, Kevin remembers, but he fought because the team needed him to fight, so that others didn’t have to. St. Mike’s had another young player on the team, Kip Brennan, a big left winger. Brennan would go on to have a thirteen-year pro career; in his sixty-one NHL games with the Kings, Ducks, Islanders, and Atlanta Thrashers, he had one goal, one assist, and 222 penalty minutes (PIM). In forty games with St. Mike’s, Brennan had 155 PIM; Steve had 145. Brennan was a heavyweight; Steve a light-heavyweight. Yet Kevin recalls, “I never saw fear in his eyes. Ever.” Nor did Steve pick his spots and prey on the weakest, most vulnerable opponents. “Absolutely not,” Kevin says. Taking on the weak would be about him; taking on the strong was about the team. It might seem that the toughest guys are those who deliver the biggest hits, with a shoulder or a fist. But the toughest guys are really those who are willing to take the biggest hits, to make a play to help their team. And Steve, Kevin explains, was truly tough.
They were both from Mississauga. Kevin attended a high school in the area; Steve went to St. Mike’s itself, in Midtown, Toronto. Paul often dropped Steve at the Kipling subway station on his way to work, where Steve would catch a train to school. When Paul was away, Steve took a commuter train from Mississauga to Toronto’s downtown Union Station, then transferred to the subway, sometimes carrying his sticks and hockey bag. For Steve, hockey was a big commitment: up at 6:00 a.m.; home at 7:00 p.m., or later when there was a game. Paul was now the head of Johnson & Johnson Canada, busier than ever and travelling more often. He made it to most of Steve’s games—and when he couldn’t, and when Donna was busy with Lindsay, Steve got a ride with the O’Flahertys.
Steve and Kevin didn’t say much during these rides. On the way to the rink they had the game on their minds; on the way home, they were too zonked. Yet whether in the quiet of the car, or in the dressing room, or on the ice, Steve had a focus about him that Kevin remembers well. “He had this internal fire. You could see it in his eyes.” There were lots of players better than Steve, “but he was so determined. He could overcome things. What was going to stop him?”
Steve had had two pivotal hockey moments in his life. First, the decision to play AAA; second, his experience in Quebec. And now, he had a third: the 1996 OHL draft. The best sixteen-year-old players in Ontario, in U.S. states east of the Mississippi River, and in Europe were eligible. This was another chance for kids and their parents to see how they stacked up.
Steve was selected in the third round by the North Bay Centennials, the 36th overall pick of the draft. Rico Fata, later Steve’s teammate in Saint John, was the draft’s first overall pick. Kip Brennan went in the first round, 4th overall; Bryan Allen, who played more than 700 NHL games, went 9th; Mark Bell was 15th; Manny Malhotra, 17th. Tom Kostopoulos, Steve’s Red Wings rival, went in the second round. Others selected who would have NHL careers included Sean Avery, Paul Mara, Jason Williams, Mike Van Ryn, and Chris Neil. Steve’s former Marlies teammate Dan Nicoletti, Jim’s son, was also drafted, as were Mike Gardner, Steve’s Mississauga Braves teammate and buddy, and Nick Robinson, who Steve would later get to know in Peterborough and who became a lifelong friend. In all, 291 players were taken—the best of the best. Only a handful of them made it to the NHL.
For Steve and Paul, this was decision time. Major junior players in Canada receive a small weekly stipend to play for their teams, many of which are highly profitable, but the stipend is large enough that the NCAA considers the players professionals and ineligible for scholarships and college competition. Steve had one more year of high school remaining. He could stay at St. Mike’s, have another season of good competition, then graduate and take a U.S. scholarship; or he could leave home and go to North Bay, live with a billet family, play in a league with multi-hour bus rides, attend school under far from ideal circumstances, gain scholarship credits to help pay his future expenses to a Canadian university, and play against the best young players in the world.
To Paul, this was a very difficult decision. To Steve, it was not. School had always come first in his family because no parent or kid in any family had the right to think otherwise. But school had never been first for Steve. What drove him was elsewhere. Most of what he had learned, most of the people-lessons and life-lessons, had come from hockey. He had been in more tough situations, and had more responsibilities placed on his shoulders by the age of fifteen, than most people have in their lifetime. He’d had teammates who counted on him absolutely. He’d had an arena full of fans telling him he sucked. He had held up and met every challenge.
Paul talked to Steve. In his manager’s way, he tried to encourage, not push, but Steve knew which way Paul was “encouraging.” Still, Paul wanted to help Steve understand all of the implications of a decision that, in all probability, would affect the rest of his life. Paul wanted him to consider it carefully so that he could make the right choice himself. He did not want to intrude—or seem to intrude—on Steve’s decision; if he did interfere, that might have its own lifetime of implications. Paul wanted Steve to understand that they were really on the same side, that this decision wasn’t just about junior hockey or college hockey—it was about Steve’s future.
Steve didn’t say much, and Paul knew which way the wind was blowing. He also didn’t have much stomach for the fight. This decision wasn’t much different from all those times he had been offered a promotion, a new chance to learn and to move one more step up the ladder. And had he ever turned those offers down?
To make himself feel better, Paul made Steve promise that if he did go to North Bay, it would be on the condition that he stayed in school and graduated; and he made a promise to himself that if Steve did go, every time they spoke on the phone he would always ask him about school first, before hockey.
The two of them sat at the kitchen table. Paul knew that if he said no to Steve playing junior hockey, he’d have, as he puts it, “a very unhappy teenager on his hands.” He wasn’t prepared to have that happen. The horse had left the barn years earlier: hockey was what Steve did. And from that moment on, hockey was where he’d go, as long and as far as it took him.
Steve made the decision, not Paul. He went to North Bay.
CHAPTER SEVEN
It was early September 1996 when Chris got a call. It was Steve, in North Bay. “I should have taken the scholarship,” he said immediately. He didn’t even say “hi” first.
North Bay is a small city of about 50,000 on the shore of Lake Nipissing, near the southern edge of the Canadian Shield, an immense area of mineral resources
, lakes, trees, winter cold, summer sunshine, wide open spaces, and not many people. The city calls itself the “Gateway to the North,” but more than that it has been a transportation junction between east and west. By car, on the Trans-Canada Highway; by train, on the railroad line from Halifax to Vancouver; and, for centuries by canoe, on what is sometimes called “the first Trans-Canada Highway,” a waterway that runs from Montreal, up the Ottawa River and the Mattawa River to Trout Lake, then over a seven-mile portage to Lake Nipissing, and down the French River to Georgian Bay and Lake Huron. North Bay’s first senior hockey team was called the “Trappers”; and its first major junior team was named the “Centennials,” coming to the city as it did in 1982, one hundred years after the railroad had arrived in North Bay.
The city had once been a centre for lumbering and mining, for sport-fishermen and hunters. RCAF Station North Bay was constructed in 1951, in the midst of the Cold War; a decade later, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) built an operations centre sixty storeys deep into the rock of the Shield to monitor Canada’s airspace and warn of a nuclear attack. The base became North Bay’s largest employer. When the Cold War ended, its operations were cut back. By the time Steve arrived in the mid-1990s, the city was doing better economically than most places its size—especially in the north—but many of its young people Steve’s age were leaving for the action and the jobs in larger cities in the south, like Toronto.
North Bay hockey had also seen better times. Most of hockey’s promising young players were now being developed in the competitive hothouses of the suburbs to the south. The north’s hockey advantages were long gone: cold weather, ice more months of the year, kids with fewer things to do and more time alone to develop a star’s special skills. But no one played outdoors now, especially in the north—it was too cold—and the indoor game could be played twelve months a year. Hockey had also become less an individual game of great personal skill than a team game based on coaches and systems. Kids needed time to play with and against others who were just as good; they needed highly competitive time, not time alone. In the south, those players and teams were in the same cities. In the north, they were a long, time-wasting car ride away.
North Bay had had senior amateur hockey for decades, a minor professional team for a year, then senior again. It had built a new arena in 1955, seating 3,500; the rink, like the city, was too big for senior amateur hockey, too small for anything more—and the OHL was tethered by bus travel to southern and eastern Ontario. Then, in 1972, the league expanded to Sault Ste. Marie and Sudbury. Both cities were bigger than North Bay, but if distance was no longer the unanswerable question, then North Bay could dream.
In 1982, the OHL’s Niagara Falls Flyers were looking to the city of Niagara Falls to build a new arena, and when the city refused, the Flyers moved to North Bay. Importantly, their coach moved with them. Bert Templeton had been successful coaching junior teams in Hamilton, St. Catharines, and, of course, Niagara Falls. He would continue that success in North Bay, with the Centennials never missing the playoffs in his twelve seasons, the team making it to the OHL finals twice, winning once and going to the Memorial Cup. But Templeton was looking for a raise after the team won the OHL title in 1994, and when he didn’t get it, he left.
In the 1990s, Junior hockey was changing. NHL players were still mostly ineligible for the Olympics, and the World Championships, held at the same time as the Stanley Cup playoffs, were second-rate. For Canadians, the only defining international hockey competition was the World Junior Championships. Played in a post-Christmas, New Year lull in the NHL schedule, and broadcast on TV, these games generated a huge new appetite for junior hockey. And this enthusiasm came at a time when old local rinks were needing to be replaced. New ones went up—mini-NHL arenas with 5,000 comfortable seats, better food, and videoboards. The OHL continued to expand. Franchises increased in value.
With more money invested, owners began running teams like businesses. But North Bay had a new problem. It was the second-smallest city in the league. Much of its economy was government-based, in industries—military, education, health—that had little sponsorship or promotional money to spend on a hockey team. The Cents played in an old, small rink and had little prospect of a new one.
Templeton had made North Bay’s limited prospects work because he had made the Cents competitive. But the season after he left, the team lost in the first round of the playoffs. A year later, they missed them entirely. This is the team that Steve joined before the start of the 1996–97 season.
Steve’s call to Chris came soon after he had moved to the city—before the cold had come, before the team’s first five-game losing streak and seven-hour bus ride to Erie, before it was clear that this was a bad team going nowhere. As Chris puts it, this was an “I’m in freaking North Bay, four hours north of Toronto, and now I have to make the NHL because what the heck else am I going to do” call.
Then things began to pick up. Despite everything else, this was a major junior team, one of only forty-nine in the country. Except for some kids from Europe and a few top draft picks who had gone directly to the NHL, Steve was playing against the best under-twenty-year-olds in the world. He was going on road trips. In North Bay, he was playing in front of 2,000 people, near to the lowest attendance in the league, but that was 1,500 more than had ever watched him before, except in Quebec. And on the road, 4,000 or more might be at the games. The Cents were losing, but he was playing—and he was only sixteen years old. He was a big deal, and he was on his way to becoming a bigger one.
He stayed with a local family like all the out-of-town players did. Many of these families had billeted players for years. Most of them were hockey fans, and some enjoyed being almost second parents to teenagers who were tasting freedom for the first time but who needed a little guidance. For some players and their billet families, this would begin a lifelong relationship. But Steve’s accommodations were “terrible,” as Paul recalls. “There was peanut butter, and some frozen food in the freezer, and the people were never around.” Steve said nothing about this to Paul and Donna; as the new kid in town he wasn’t sure he had the right to complain, and besides, having mac and cheese for breakfast, lunch, and dinner didn’t seem to Steve such a bad deal. When Paul and Donna came to visit him and saw the conditions he was living in, he was moved to a new billet, then to another, before finally coming to live with a family he liked—and one who gave him the freedom he was looking for. They let him bring teammates over to their house, and if that led to drinking at times, well that’s what teammates and kids in small towns did. They brought him ice fishing on Lake Nipissing, and if that meant sipping a little whiskey to stay warm, well that was what ice fishermen did, too.
Steve had to get used to a new school. Chris had needed to do the same a few years earlier, but that was at Notre Dame, where if you didn’t do your schoolwork, you didn’t play hockey. In North Bay, the team didn’t pay much attention to the players’ schooling. Those who really wanted to go to school went; the others went sometimes. And while the school was proud to have the Cents as students, some of the teachers were not. The players were absent more often than other students, and at times had to leave class early; they got special treatment. When they were there, the other kids hovered around them; they disrupted the class.
It wasn’t easy for Paul and Donna to know how Steve was doing. He was 400 kilometres away. This was before cellphones, email, texting, or FaceTime—and what could they really tell from a phone call a couple of times a week? Paul wasn’t a talker. He would ask Steve about school, as he promised himself he would, but Steve was also a teenager, and he didn’t say much either. During Paul and Donna’s occasional visits, sometimes with Chris and Lindsay in tow, it always seemed like Steve was either getting ready for a game, or playing a game, or winding down from a game, and all they could really tell about how he was doing was how he was doing on the ice. If the team had won or lost; if he was playing power-play minutes; if he looked good o
r right to their eyes.
His friends were his teammates. His classmates had Friday nights and weekends to be with each other; Steve had games to play, in North Bay or on the road. The team travelled more than 16,000 kilometres a season, the second-highest total in the OHL—all of it by bus, almost 200 hours in all. Hours playing cards, trashtalking, watching bus-movie classics like Caddyshack or Dumb and Dumber on the VCR, or napping before or sleeping fitfully after the game. These were Steve’s scheduled hours; during them, he had no choices. The hardest hours were his unscheduled ones: after school, after practice, before the next game.
There was a bar they went to. Well, not really a bar, it was more of a barber shop, Chris recalls, or maybe a hair salon. It was a place the players could go, close the blinds, spend time with each other and with girls they’d invited, and drink. Chris had wondered what Steve did in all those hours he wasn’t playing hockey. What was there to do in North Bay? Ice fishing and snowmobiling are fun, but how many times can you do that? North Bay might have been a great place to live for older people during their settled years, but what about for teenagers, especially if they were from the south, as most of the Cents players were.
It was the drinking that most surprised Chris. At home, he and Steve had snuck the occasional beer, as most kids do. But his years in Saskatchewan had been a real eye-opener for Chris. Playing weekend games in small towns, he had never seen so many people so wasted. He thought he had gotten used to it, but during one visit to North Bay he saw his brother and his buddies in action. “This isn’t a place he should be,” thought Chris.
