Game Change

by Ken Dryden

  Paul went to road games that were close to Toronto—and sometimes those farther away when he could find a reason to schedule business nearby. He recalls a game in Oshawa late in Steve’s first season with the Cents. Steve was skating up the ice, without the puck, and out of nowhere an Oshawa player, Nathan Perrott, raced at him and crushed him against the boards. Steve didn’t get up. Perrott was over 200 pounds and twenty years old. He would play 89 NHL games, mostly with the Leafs, recording four goals and five assists, and 251 PIM. Perrott got a penalty. Two or three rows in front of Paul, before Steve even got up from the ice, an elderly woman in a hand-knitted Bobby Orr sweater yelled, “Hit him again, Nathan.”

  Steve was helped to the dressing room. A short time later, he was back on the bench, then on the ice. He skated over to Perrott and “tapped him,” signalling that he wanted to fight. Perrott was a fighter and, as Paul said, “Steve was a wannabe.”

  “He acquitted himself fairly well,” Paul recalls, “and may have impressed his teammates. Nobody told him to do this. He was going to stand up for himself. I remember thinking, ‘He’s not a kid playing hockey at home anymore. He’s part of a different world now.’”

  Midway through the year, the Centennials coach, Shane Parker, was fired and replaced by Greg Bignell, but not much changed. The team finished the season with an embarrassing 14–44–8 record, and were out of the playoffs for the second straight year. Steve had gotten a year older, and a year better in some ways. But he played on a dysfunctional team in a not-always-constructive environment. When school was done, Steve went home.

  Home for him was now in a different place. The Montadors had moved to Lakefield, a picture-perfect town of old stone houses and churches on the Otonabee River, fifteen kilometres north of Peterborough. Paul was the head of Johnson & Johnson Canada, a division of one of the world’s largest health care companies that had begun its operations in Peterborough three decades earlier, expanded, then contracted as manufacturing was moved to less costly sites offshore. Peterborough had been able to attract large companies in its past—Canadian General Electric, Quaker Oats, Outboard Marine—initially because of the availability of local sources of hydroelectric power, and later because of the lifestyle that the area afforded. Executives of a company who were offered a more senior job might not accept the promotion if it were to a small town. But if it were to Peterborough, they might. With its lakes, rivers, and proximity to Toronto, Peterborough was a blue-collar town that appealed to white-collar people.

  Johnson & Johnson in the U.S. had been a major supporter of an injury-prevention organization called ThinkFirst, whose purpose was to get people, especially kids, to “think first” before they dove from a cliff or played chicken with a passing train. Spinal cord injuries were the group’s initial focus; head injuries and concussions came later. Because the U.S. head office had made ThinkFirst a priority, Paul decided to do the same in Canada. He would be on its board for more than fifteen years. The head of ThinkFirst Canada was Dr. Charles Tator, a neurosurgeon. Twenty years later, it was Dr. Lili-Naz Hazrati from Tator’s sports-concussion group who examined Steve’s brain and discovered his CTE.

  Peterborough is a hockey town. The Petes had arrived in the city in 1956 and, with a history of great players—Steve Yzerman, Bob Gainey, Chris Pronger—and even greater coaches—Scotty Bowman, Roger Neilson, Mike Keenan—they had been at or near the top of the OHL since then. If you were a boy growing up in Peterborough, you likely played hockey; and if you played hockey, you likely also played lacrosse, as Peterborough’s top lacrosse team—at different times called the Lakers, Trailermen, Petes, and Red Oaks—had won many Canadian championships. And if you were born in Peterborough, you were likely raised in Peterborough, and got married and had kids in Peterborough. Summer cottagers came and went by the thousands; Peterborough’s 80,000 year-round residents stayed. For those new to the city, it wasn’t easy to fit in.

  When Steve was twelve, some Peterborough and Toronto fathers put together a team that included kids from both cities to play in summer hockey tournaments. Steve was one of the Toronto players on the team, Jay Legault one of Peterborough’s. It is where they first met. The team, called the Trent Stars, offered good competition over the summer and took up only three of their weekends. There were no practices. The experience was especially useful for the Peterborough kids. Toronto was the big city—its best teams recruited players from across the entire GTA, which had fifty times the population of Peterborough. During the regular winter season, when Peterborough teams played Toronto teams at tournaments, the Peterborough kids thought they would get killed. The Trent Stars were a chance for them to change in the same dressing room as the Toronto kids, go out onto the same ice surface, and see for themselves. They would have to raise the level of their game. The Stars played together for three summers—and the Peterborough kids discovered, of course, that they weren’t so bad after all.

  The first night Steve was in Lakefield, he looked through the Peterborough phone book and found the name he wanted. “Hey, Jay, it’s Steve Montador,” he said, “and we’ve moved into the area.” It was a Friday or Saturday night, Jay recalls: “Right away, I got my dad to drive me out there to pick up Monty. I introduced him to all my hockey friends and to the other Peterborough guys who played in the OHL.”

  This was the summer, and the Peterborough “hockey guys” were back together again, picking up where they had left off the September before—but now with a season’s worth of stories they couldn’t wait to tell. Nick Robinson had been in the Soo, Chad Cavanagh in Sudbury, Ryan Ready in Belleville, Jay in Oshawa, and Colin Beardsmore with Steve in North Bay. Also in the group were some players who weren’t as good or as interested in hockey, who had played locally on Junior B or Junior C teams. One of them was Mike Keating, or “Keats” as everyone called him.

  Jay, Steve, Keats, Nick, and some others worked as on-ice instructors at a hockey school. It ran for seven weeks. If they were lucky, they got four shifts a week, and made between three and four hundred dollars. They also picked up odd jobs to fill in their other days. Many of their parents had small businesses in the area. They cut wood for Nick’s dad, who was an arborist. They roofed houses, poured concrete, and put up tents for Lester Awnings. When they weren’t working, they hung out and trained.

  The OHL players, all with at least one junior season behind them, were now more serious. An NHL future had always been the dream. Now they knew what they were up against. Now they could feel time running out. The next few years would determine whether they would make it or not. They got together at the Peterborough Lift Lock and ran; they went to the gym; they pushed each other. They rented the ice to work on their new moves and to laugh at last year’s ones that still didn’t work. On the ice with them were the Peterborough pro-hockey guys—Cory Stillman, Marc Savard, Dave Reid, and others—the guys who had made it. Some of them had been born in the city; others had played with the Petes, had loved the atmosphere of its winning team and adoring fans and, with pro money in their pockets, had come back: to jobs in the city, to summer places on one of the lakes, to marry a girl they had met in junior, to make Peterborough home. They all knew each other—the pros and the juniors. They were the same guys, only a few years apart, and on the ice the pros had to live up to their local reputations, and the juniors had to show them they belonged. For all of them, it was a chance to work up a sweat and a thirst.

  For Steve, Jay, Keats, Nick, and the others, a job instructing at the hockey school, roofing houses, or pouring concrete was all about having money for the weekend. None of them had places of their own; none of them wanted to invite twenty-five occasionally out-of-control guys over to their parents’ house. So they had “field parties,” as they called them. At the Lagoon or at Jackson Park, some place enough off the beaten path that they could make a little noise, drink underage, not bother anybody, and not have anybody bother them.

  They also took things a step further, and built a cabin in the woods between Douro
and Norwood, and called it “the Shack.” The father of one of their friends was a dairy farmer. He had a little land he wasn’t using, supplied them with some barn lumber, and helped them build it. All of them pitched in. The cabin was about fifteen feet by twenty feet, with one room on the main floor and a ladder that connected it to two mini-lofts that could sleep four or five comfortably, and which often slept eight. On weekend summer nights, there might be thirty or forty people around. Everyone brought a case of beer, and they would have a bonfire, hang out, talk, and act foolish, as Jay puts it. They would “chirp” and needle and get under each other’s skin, and everything was fair game. The only offside words were the ones that weren’t funny.

  They talked a lot about girls, and at two in the morning, they talked about things that sounded profound. But it didn’t matter what they talked about. This was about being with each other. They were seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years old, and at the Shack they could do what they wanted to do. “We spent one whole summer building that thing,” Jay recalls. “Keats, Monty, Nick, all the guys. It was our baby.”

  Steve fit right in with the Peterborough guys because of hockey, drinking beer, and girls; because of his humour and the way his mind worked; because he was willing to try anything and do anything, look stupid and be stupid if that’s what the moment was about. He wasn’t shy about the “shenanigans” they got up to, as Keats calls them, they were just more fodder for stories and laughs they would share years later. Steve fit in because he never thought of himself as a hotshot. He lived in the big house on the lake. He was a Toronto guy, but he was different from every other Toronto guy his Peterborough friends had met. Toronto guys acted as if they knew something Peterborough guys didn’t. Steve wasn’t like that. He was one of them. He liked to hang around, pitch in, and do what they did, as if what they were doing mattered, as if Peterborough mattered, as if they mattered. Even when he made it to the NHL.

  “He gave everyone the time of day,” Keats recalls. “He used to say, ‘You never know what a person has to say, so why not listen?’”

  In time, for the Peterborough guys, their year-round lives took over their summer lives. They got married, had kids, got adult jobs. In time, the drinking got to be too much; the stupid stuff too stupid. Keats, Jay, and Nick went away for a few years. Keats and Jay came back; Nick stayed away and got a job in New York with a large private investment firm, but he came back to visit his family. When Paul and Donna later returned to Toronto, only Steve could pack up and walk away. Yet he always came back, too, for a few days each summer—and Keats, Jay, and Nick visited him wherever his NHL career or summer freedom took him. Between these times, Steve kept in touch with them by phone; later, by email and text. When they were on his mind, he let them know. Just a few funny, familiar lines. It made them feel like they were always close. Jay, Keats, and Nick began as Steve’s summer team, and became his lifelong team.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The next season in North Bay was much like the first. Still, it had its moments. The Cents had a game early in the year against the Sudbury Wolves. Steve Valiquette, six-foot-six and twenty years old, was the Wolves’ regular goalie, but this being a game against North Bay, he was given the night off. So “Vally,” as everyone called him, decided to milk the moment. He sat back contentedly at the end of the Wolves’ bench, a big smile on his face, a white towel wrapped around his neck. He and Steve had never met. Steve lined up for a faceoff near the Wolves’ bench and looked over at Vally. “What’s the matter, Fatso? You not playing tonight?” he said. Vally, everyone knew, was not the fittest athlete on the planet. “Let me have that towel to wipe my brow.” The puck dropped, Steve jumped into the action, and Vally was left stunned but smiling.

  Later in the season, Vally was traded to the Erie Otters, who were in a desperate chase for the playoffs. Not long afterwards, the Cents’ management, realizing that the team was going nowhere, began dismantling it to build for a new future. Steve was also sent to Erie. The day after Steve was traded, the Otters were having a team breakfast before getting on their bus to head out onto the road. Some of the players decided to go for a walk, Vally included. Suddenly Vally looked up, and Steve was walking beside him. Vally had skipped breakfast and hadn’t heard the news. He couldn’t believe what he saw. “Hey, Gillies,” Vally blurted. “What’re you doing here?” Trevor Gillies had been the second-round pick of North Bay in Steve’s draft year. Vally looked again. “Hey, you’re not Gillies. You’re the guy who wanted my towel.” Steve would become, as Vally put it, “my best friend in hockey.”

  For Steve, the move to Erie meant a new city, new country, new school, new classmates, new courses; and also a new team, new teammates, and new possibilities. But the same old bus rides. He had gone from almost the northernmost team in the OHL to the southernmost, and the Otters’ nearest opponent was two hours away, with Lake Erie’s “lake effect” snow in the way. When their team walk was done, Vally and Steve got onto the bus and each went to where each was supposed to go. Vally, an overager with seniority headed to the prize spot on the bus—“the Pit,” where the second-last row of seats had been turned around to face the back row, and where the card games were played. Steve, not much more than a rookie to his new teammates, stood at the front, waited for the other players to take their seats, found an empty one, and sat down.

  Life on the bus is about real estate, Vally describes. And it’s about rank. The older players have it; the younger ones don’t. The older players sit at the back, eat first, and choose the movies. The younger players sit at the front and wait. But what they all did together was chew tobacco. Chewing tobacco was the bus’s pastime. “We couldn’t smoke cigarettes,” Vally explains. “We were hockey players. We had spittoons all over the place. We bought Skoal, everybody did, and Cherry was the flavor du jour, until it got old, then Wintergreen, which was lousy, then Mint Straight.” The players were each paid $40 a week by the team; the team held back half—or $19.79, to be exact. “Our paycheques were for $20.21,” Vally recalls. For Steve, “that was gone in two days. I always thought he was from a family of no means.” With post-game drinks, a late-night run to Subway, and tins of chew at four or five bucks a piece—one tin every day and a half—the money went fast, and Steve’s went the fastest. A player chewed even when he didn’t want to chew, because, as Vally puts it, “you wanted to be an OHL player.” With dip in their mouth, playing cards with their buddies, on that bus they were kings of the world.

  Steve would always run out. “Can I borrow a chew?” he’d ask Vally. “It was always ‘borrow,’” Vally says, “like he was going to give it back. Then, on the very rare occasion when I’d ask for some of his, he’d say, ‘Sure, but it’s recycled.’ He’d have taken a chew that he wasn’t completely finished with, and put it back in the tin, to save it for later.”

  After the trades, the Otters went on a roll. Friday night, a win; Saturday night, a win; Sunday, a day off; Monday, it all started back up again. And the more they won, the harder they worked; the more they won, the more fun they had; and still the more they won. Week after week. Everybody’s a great guy when you win.

  Earlier in the season, the Otters were just missing a few pieces, but often trades don’t work. Trading wisdom says that while you should always know what you’re giving up, you can never know what you’re getting. You know on paper, you know what your scouts tell you, but will that new player fit in? He was a leader on his old team, perhaps. Part of what made him so good was the responsibility he had, the respect he held, the specialness he felt. Is that same role open to him here? And what about the player who was filling that role before? Can he adapt? And all the time, there’s a game tomorrow, and the playoffs are looming. But in Erie, Steve and Vally fit in.

  Dale Dunbar was their coach. He practised the team hard, and had them do push-up and sit-up circuits in the gym and do their time in the weight room. Everything was structured. They had lots of team meetings. The Otters bought them each their own director’s chair to
sit in, their own “Road to Success” T-shirt, their own “beautiful robe,” as Vally describes it, with their own number on it. They even had team flip-flops. There was energy and purpose to everything they did, and Steve loved that. He loved the feeling of being a part of something. For the younger players, Steve was their “sheep herder,” says Vally. “They needed someone popular with them who was also cool with the vets. He was the captain of the rookies. He got everybody going in the same direction.” The Otters began to feel like a team.

  Other players used practice to prepare, Vally recalls. But Steve prepared for practice. “He had this attention to detail.” He was such a competitor; games, practices, it didn’t matter, and as a goalie, Vally loved playing behind him. “He didn’t skate like anyone else,” Vally says. “He skated into the ice. You could hear it. He went deeper. He had power. There was commitment.” While for many, defence is a grim position to play, with opponents always running at you from behind, “Monty absolutely loved playing defence. He went in first after the puck every time. And I knew, any fifty-fifty puck was his.”

  The Otters’ roll continued. Another Friday win, another Saturday win; and a Saturday night after a win was always the best. The week’s work was done. The team would go to a bar called the Magic Lantern on the outskirts of town. Pennsylvania’s drinking age was twenty-one, but the players knew that they would be served at the Magic Lantern. There were no women there; Erie’s women could wait for them a few hours longer. “We would just sit there, drink warm pitchers of beer, and be the happiest guys on earth,” Vally remembers. “They had a jukebox, we’d play music and tell stories, and Monty’s were always off the charts; about some girl he’d met. Then you’d get up and be having a piss, and you could still hear that laugh of his all across the bar.”