Breaking Away

by Patrick O'Sullivan

  It was only when I was watching an NHL game on television that my father told me that he’d played. I can’t say that I was hooked at that moment—I was too young to remember. That became the story that my parents would tell people later on. They probably exaggerated a bit, figuring it would be like Wayne Gretzky when he was a little kid, staring at the television screen, following the puck with his finger. It made a good story and it might have been half true. The other kids I grew up with wanted to play baseball, basketball and football, the usual sports you’d expect kids in North Carolina to be interested in. And I was interested in baseball a bit. Still, from six or seven, I wanted to play the game that my father had.

  Winston-Salem was a hockey backwater for pros, and it was probably even farther off the axis at the grass roots. There were only a couple of rinks around the city, and those wouldn’t have been able to keep going without figure skating. There were a couple of house leagues for kids, but nothing serious—no top coaches, a practice a week, a game a week, really not much of a chance to get on the ice more than that. Wanting to get serious about hockey in North Carolina back in the nineties was sort of like wanting to become a championship golfer in the Yukon—it can be done, but it’s not easy. Carolina would get a team, but not for another eight years.

  My interest in hockey brought back some memories for my father, but it might never have gone anywhere, or maybe I would have moved on and found something else. Our family scraped by and we moved from one rental to the next in not the best neighborhoods. We didn’t go without food, but it was hard to cover the bills and have much left over. The births of my sisters were big financial hits too—we had no insurance, so I’m sure that my mother’s folks bailed us out again. My father took the attitude that doing without extravagances was a way to build character. Hockey would have counted as an extravagance. Any parent of a hockey player can tell you it’s a pricey game, even just to play house league, putting a kid in new skates and new equipment every year. When my grandparents got wind of my interest, they stepped in and bought me equipment.

  I was six years old when my father signed me up for house league—two years younger than everyone else on the ice. I didn’t get the earliest start in the game by any stretch, not compared to kids in Canada or the northeast or Michigan or Minnesota, where kids are on the ice as soon as they can walk, at two or three or four. I wasn’t one of those preschoolers playing with cut-off sticks and shooting on nets in their driveways or basements. I was probably about the age my father was when he came over with his parents from England, and he had always complained that his development had been handicapped by a late start. And even though it was house league—just recreational hockey, entry-level stuff with a game and a practice a week—I wasn’t a star by any means. I was an average size for a kid my age, so I looked tiny out there with eight- and nine-year-olds. I kept up, maybe did a little better than keep up, but I wasn’t a natural for the game. My first year in the game, you’d have to look pretty hard and see something that everyone else missed to think that I was gifted.

  My father did. He was dead sure of it.

  He started working with me every day after school. He hadn’t pitched his equipment, but he hadn’t picked up a stick or opened his hockey bag since his last game with the Thunderbirds. He didn’t have the money to send me to summer hockey school to learn from top coaches, so he decided to do take on the work himself. He rented ice time, and I still don’t know where he found the money to do that. He laced up skates that he had figured he’d never put on again. He had me do drills. Every little detail, he taught me. People who had seen him play and who saw me years later would always say that I carried my stick the same way he did, that it was obvious who taught me the game. When he was growing up, fathers in Scarborough had been on the ice with their sons, teaching them the game, and he told me how lucky I was that he was there for me. Really, he was saying how unlucky he had been to have to try to teach himself the game on his own, his father being new to the country and tied down by an afternoon shift that kept him away from his kids except at breakfast.

  A lot of people didn’t completely buy into my father’s claim that circumstances had worked against him and had limited how far he could go in the game. There’s no way that people could miss his bitterness. But I was too young to know the difference. When he explained to me how the odds had been stacked against him, I was six or seven, and of course I believed every word. However he described himself as a player, I bought it. I felt like he hadn’t got what he deserved. More than that, I took it as a crime against our family. When you’re that young, you can god up your father, and I did.

  It’s stating the obvious to say that my father started to live vicariously. Another thing might not be so obvious: I made it my mission to get justice for us. Before I knew what the word vindication meant, I was living it every time I stepped on the ice. I was going to be his proof. I was going to take him with me. I was going to be him, if everything had been laid out for him like he was laying it out for me.

  Hockey school was beyond our means, but my father was determined that I wasn’t going to want for anything else if it gave me a better chance at success. That started with equipment. Even though we were living on basics otherwise, he was going to spare no expense on my second pair of skates. He bought me the most expensive out there, Bauers, his favorite brand in his playing days. They would have been the only pair in house league in North Carolina, top-of-the-line skates that top older players would have worn. My father was going to be as particular for me as if he were outfitting himself, and he let me know that he was doing this. He told me it was up to me to play like I deserved those skates. He told me that I was wearing pro skates, so I should play like a pro and I should put in the time like one.

  He filled my head. He told me what it was going to take to become a professional and how lucky I was to have an ex-pro as my father.

  One thing hit home above all, though. I would have been seven or eight when he said it for the first of a thousand times—more, really.

  “I’m doing all this for you.”

  I bought in the way only a kid can buy in. I wanted his attention. I wanted his approval. I was going to make it right.

  I was going to be the epitome of all the virtues he claimed had gone unappreciated in him as a player. He claimed that no one had been tougher, no one more determined. He said that he hoped I’d be the same way, though he made that sound almost impossible. He’d say that he was worried that I might take after my mother too much—he made it sound like a joke, though he said it with a straight face, just enough to make me wonder if he really believed it.

  I was going to do it all for him.

  * * *

  In my second year of hockey, age seven, still playing against kids a couple of years older than me, I led the Winston-Salem house league in scoring. A lot of parents would have been more than happy with their son enjoying a game and doing well, but not my father. He saw dark clouds blowing in.

  As soon as I started doing well, he figured I was at risk of becoming his story turned inside out. He had grown up in the world’s most competitive hockey environment without support from a parent who understood the game. I was growing up with all the support in a foreign place for the game. I could hit a ceiling just like he did.

  There was some truth in that.

  Even if I was the best player, it was house league in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Kids in Toronto and other traditional hockey cities played more games against better players, practiced more with better coaches. Their top teams traveled to tournaments to play the best kids in Canada and the U.S. Everything was just more serious in those places. And those kids would pull away from me. Every week they’d have one or two more practices and one or two more games under their belt than I’d get in Winston-Salem. And those kids would be playing beside skilled kids who would make them better—in Winston-Salem, a lot of times, I had to slow down to play at my teammates’ speed.

  I’m sure that the
level of the game in North Carolina is higher today than it was back in the early nineties. When the Carolina Hurricanes played the first NHL game in the state in 1997, hockey’s profile took off. When the team won the Stanley Cup in 2006, a lot more kids were looking to play the game. And hockey’s reach is growing now to places where the game has no traditions at all. Still, as of the early nineties, no player born in the Carolinas had ever played a game in the NHL. The culture of the game was going to change there, but not soon enough for me.

  So my father made a big leap, the first of many. He decided that we were going to move to Toronto to advance my hockey career—if an eight-year-old with a couple of years in house league can be described as having a career.

  It couldn’t have been an easy move. He had railed against the place. Though he never said so, he had to associate the city with his failures. It wasn’t home for him in any way. He did speak to his parents, but I wouldn’t say that they were particularly close—in all the years we were in Winston-Salem, he’d gone back to see them no more than a couple of times. Though his sister had drifted away from the family, my father might have thought that moving back would give a chance to reconnect with his brother, Barry.

  My father convinced my mother that the move wasn’t just for hockey. He made a case that the schools were better and they wouldn’t have to worry about medical bills. That would make life a little less tense. So would a little distance between my father and the Martins. At this point, my father had effectively cut himself off from them. In all my life I can’t remember him ever going over to their home or them coming over to ours. It was always my mother taking us to their house. When my grandparents went on vacation to a resort in West Virginia, I’d go up there with Kelley and, later on, our little sister, Shannon, but my father would always stay behind. I never saw my father and the Martins in the same room, and I can’t say that they ever spoke on the phone.

  The move had its benefits in a lot of ways. Not that life would be better, just that it could be. But I’m sure that we wouldn’t have gone to Toronto if it weren’t for my chance to become a better player.

  * * *

  Over the years I’ve heard of families that shipped off their kids at a young age so that they could play at an elite level of hockey or another sport. It’s done more now than you might suspect, but it’s something that goes back a long time. Back when my father was playing peewee hockey, a twelve-year-old kid moved away from his family in Brantford, Ontario, to play for a team in Toronto. All the same reasons were in play: the kid’s father, a former minor-league player, thought his son was being limited by the level of game that was played in his hometown and that he needed a bigger challenge. A lot of people thought his decision to send his son away crossed a line. They thought it was crazy for a kid to leave home for the sake of a game while he was still in grade school. It would have seemed crazy if he had crashed and burned. It seemed a lot less crazy when that twelve-year-old was named the NHL’s most valuable player before his twentieth birthday. Yeah, they used to say that Wayne Gretzky was pushed too hard.

  A lot of parents have followed Walter Gretzky’s lead since then, and some of their kids have landed in the NHL. My father wasn’t about to send me off at age eight, but he wasn’t about to wait, either. His career, he thought, was the cautionary tale of the high cost of a late start. We were going to move, and again he made a decision and claimed the high ground: we were moving for my benefit and to keep the family intact. He made it sound like a sacrifice he was willing to make. Heartfelt stuff, the way he’d play it. Really, though, he didn’t trust anyone else to coach me. It didn’t matter if the coach had a record of winning teams and successful players—the way my father saw it, that coach might focus on other players and not give me enough ice time and attention. It didn’t matter if the coach had played the game—the way my father saw it, he knew more about the game than anyone who was coaching in minor hockey. It didn’t even matter if the coach had played in the NHL—the way my father saw it, a guy who had played in the NHL had only got the breaks that he hadn’t.

  My father thought he had to watch over me. He talked about getting only one chance to become a player, just one chance to get it right. One slip, a year wasted, and other kids would pass me and I’d never catch up. He hammered the message that every game was a matter of life or death. If I didn’t play well, if I didn’t make it, it wasn’t going to be just my disappointment, my wasted chance. No, if I was anything less than the best, I was going to let him down, let the family down. That’s what he sold me and that’s what I bought, all in. “We’re doing it all for you,” my father said, meaning moving a thousand miles away and starting over. It might seem like my father was watching over me to protect my interests, but he was invested in my success. He had to watch over me to protect his own interests. And it was my father almost to the exclusion to my mother. Early on, he left packing my equipment to my mother but one time she forgot to pack my helmet and I couldn’t play in a game. For years after that, my father took charge and my mother almost always stayed home when we went to the rink. It wasn’t a family event for me, not like it was with other kids who went to the arena with either of their parents and most of the time both. It was my father’s time, period.

  Eight years after being bounced from the game, he was getting back in. It was at a lower level, the grass roots, but that was for just now, he thought. He was planning on getting all the way back in and more.

  7

  THE HOCKEY HANDBOOK

  Toronto, Ontario, 1993

  After we moved back to Toronto when I was eight, my father found a book that he would make his Bible: The Hockey Handbook, by Lloyd Percival. And because the book was my father’s Bible, it was mine. I would know every page of it. I’d live every page of it growing up.

  Percival hadn’t been a hockey player—he had played tennis and cricket and had boxed. He was better known for founding the Fitness Institute, a training center in Toronto’s west end that had attracted a lot of Olympic and professional athletes, including NHL players, back in the seventies when my father was growing up. It would have been out of my father’s price range as a kid—another advantage other players had over him. They could get the top personal training and conditioning while my father had to make up his own program as he went along.

  Percival had a lot of ideas that were way out of the box when he wrote the first edition of The Hockey Handbook back in the late fifties. Coaches in the NHL carved him and called the book bullshit and worse. The book would have been out of print when my father was growing up and taking up the game. Then in the eighties it came out that The Hockey Handbook was the training manual for the coaches of the Soviet Union’s national program, which won Olympic gold medals and dominated the amateur game for a couple of decades. After that publishers printed a new edition of the book and my father picked up a copy.

  My father didn’t look for other textbooks and training guides. He thought that Percival book was the ticket. Every drill on every page wound up consuming hundreds of hours of my life. Whether it was a puck on the ice or a ball on the concrete floor in the basement, I’d spend hours every day doing what Percival called “shadow stickhandling” with a golf ball: like a fighter shadowboxes an opponent he imagines, I stickhandled through whole games without anyone else in the room except my father standing there, pushing me. In the basement he’d put a blindfold on me and have me stickhandle for hours more just on feel, also a drill out of Percival’s book. My father would cover the net with a sheet of plywood with only small slots at the top and bottom corners; I had to hit the same slot four times in a row before moving to the next, or try to hit each of the four in four straight tries without a single miss. I counted shots by the hundreds and then counted them again into the thousands.

  Hours laid together—whole weeks and months of my life—were given over to repeating the same drills. Wherever we lived for the next eight years of my life, it was the same routine: my father would push me through stickhandlin
g and shooting drills out on the ice at an arena, away from team practice, or he would take me downstairs at home. After a few hours he’d have me doing push-ups or sit-ups or running intervals out on the street. Every time we were out on the ice, he’d push me through skating drills until it felt like my legs were filled with sand. Players at every level of the game dread “bag skates”—practices with long, drawn-out skating drills that are supposed to develop conditioning and punish teams for what a coach thinks is a lousy effort. Well, bag skates were my usual working day when I went to the rink for a private session with my father. I never felt physically pushed in practices with my teams growing up—that hour or hour and a half would fly by and be a lot of fun compared to those times I was on the ice alone with my father.

  My father pushed me through The Hockey Handbook, and I didn’t push back when I was eight or nine years old. I took it all as a challenge. He told me that if I did everything in the program every day and put the sweat in, I was going to make the NHL, and I bought it. He’d put me through a workout when my team had a day off. He’d put me through workouts before and after my team’s practices. He’d put me through workouts after my team’s games, all the while telling me what I had done out on the ice. And when my team went to weekend tournaments, playing four or even five games in a couple of days, he’d put me through workouts in the gaps on the schedule—while other kids were eating lunch or dinner, I’d be out in the parking lot stickhandling or at the arena running steps.

  My father pushed me, but I could motivate myself for most of it. Those first years I took it all as a challenge. And, yeah, I loved the game—I just looked at this as the price I had to pay to play. I created challenges, little mind games, to get past the boredom. It would be different teams I was playing against every night when I was shadow stickhandling in the basement. I’d be racing imaginary players when I was out on the ice doing skating drills. I could try to make it new every day and night.