Breaking Away

by Patrick O'Sullivan

  Going into the World Under-17 Challenge, the biggest event of our season, I played on the first line and led the team in scoring. Not that this dialed back the pressure I faced from my father. Even if we won, even if the coaches told me I played well, I knew my father would find some sort of issue with my game. If I scored a goal, I should have scored two; if I scored two, it should have been more. Thankfully, he didn’t tell me to run a teammate or sucker someone.

  Up until that season, USA Hockey programs had had no success in international tournaments, not even podium finishes. A lot of people in the game thought that Ann Arbor was a failed experiment and that the under-18 and under-17 programs should be dismantled and rebuilt. The organization needed a good result out of the Under-17 Challenge in Nova Scotia. And my father thought I needed a good tournament too—the day after Christmas, when all my teammates were still coming back from their holiday break, he called up our assistant coach, John Hamre, and asked him to open up the arena so that I could get in a skate. Hamre thought it was strange but went along with it.

  I was leaving with the team for Nova Scotia on the morning of the 27th, but my father pulled out of our driveway a few hours after the workout at our rink. The under-17 tournament was a twenty-hour drive from Sterling Heights, not counting time lined up at a border crossing and any winter weather you might hit en route. My mother had to stay home with my sisters, so he’d have to do all the driving himself. Still, I had no doubt about my father driving out to Nova Scotia. Not flying—driving. I know that he had issues with both his license and his credit card, so even if he could fly into Halifax like the team did, he’d basically be stranded there, unable to rent a car. It would be the longest road trip that he would have made to see me play, but it was also the biggest event I had played in to that point—dozens of NHL scouts were going to be attendance. The best of the ’84 birthdays, players like Rick Nash and Eric Staal, first and second overall picks in the NHL draft, were going to be playing.

  We ended up going 6–0 in the tournament and we won most of those games in a walk. In the final, a game broadcast on TSN, we played the team from Alberta and British Columbia. Off the opening face-off, just fourteen seconds in, I let loose a slapshot from the left wing and put it over the goalie’s shoulder—1–0, a lead we wouldn’t give up. I ended up leading the tournament in scoring. And still it gave me no relief from my father’s criticism.

  I was carrying my gold medal out of the dressing room when he pulled me aside.

  “Be fuckin’ ready to play in Chicago,” he yelled.

  His tirade didn’t last long. Our next game was against a really weak team in Chicago—nothing remotely meaningful, but it was scheduled less than forty-eight hours after the gold-medal game. My father knew that with a full twenty-four hours on the road, he had to get on the road ASAP to make it in time.

  When our bus pulled to the arena in Chicago, I saw my father’s van in the parking lot. He hadn’t even stopped at our house on the way.

  18

  THE PITCHES

  Ann Arbor, Michigan, February 2001

  Even before the season in the USA Hockey program was done, my father started to look ahead to the next, when I would be sixteen turning seventeen. Though the exceptional-status application had been snuffed out on him, he stilled aimed high. This time he was looking at the International Hockey League. As the top professional minor league without direct ties to the NHL, the IHL was free to sign underage players. The league had recently opened the door to a bunch of East European sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds who collected six-figure paychecks rather than playing for pocket money in major junior. My father figured I could be the first North American teenager to play in the IHL. The hard, cold cash looked good to my father, and the level of competition, pros mostly in their mid- to late twenties, would have been a step up from major junior. A lot of the players in the league would have NHL experience. Again, it would seem a bit strange, but really no stranger than my experiences in Alvinston and Strathroy—it would be playing up again, just on a bigger stage. He thought that I could play for the IHL team in Detroit, the Vipers. He used to take me to Vipers games when I was eight or nine years old, part of my immersion studies. The Vipers back then had a teenage Czech player, Petr Sýkora, who went on to be a first-round NHL pick. My father thought I could play in the IHL at sixteen, and that all the hype would translate into endorsement money.

  If he reached out to the Vipers, they didn’t return his calls, at least as far as I knew.

  * * *

  My father’s act wore out coaches and officials in the Ann Arbor program, but he kept up appearances at the rink. The scenes he made weren’t as over the top as in Strathroy or in minor hockey before that. He exercised control that I didn’t think he possessed. He had put it together that his act could have a negative effect on me—or at least on my stock with the NCAA recruiters who came out to scout the under-17 and under-18 teams.

  USA Hockey had good relations with college coaches. The Ann Arbor program made for one-stop shopping for the top NCAA Division I programs. Coaches were already making overtures to my father even though I was too young to recruit officially—the schools couldn’t offer me expenses-paid visits but what they could do within the rules, they did. Still, Michigan and Boston College, two NCAA heavyweights, had expressed interest to my father and, quietly, to the USA Hockey coaching staff. Both had strong cases. Michigan would let me stay close to home, which was important to my father. I liked BC because Patrick Eaves, my linemate and best friend in the program, was heading there.

  Either way, my father liked the idea of me heading off to play in the NCAA at seventeen. He could see me making a splash in the media, being the youngest ever recruit at a big college in a traditional hockey market like Detroit or Boston. He also liked that he could attach dollar figures to the scholarships the schools would offer: tuition and expenses at $40,000 a year. He liked the idea even if I wasn’t going to stick around for four years to get a degree. He liked it enough to push me hard to graduate a year ahead of my class—to carry a 50 percent larger course load than other sophomores, in class from the first bell to the last without a lunch break or any study hall. All that plus practice and games with the under-17 team and my father’s workouts, which could still come unannounced at three in the morning when he got home from work. I was on a treadmill turned up high without a stop button to push.

  The rush to graduate ahead of my class ended up being pointless in the end—I would graduate a year early, but I would never go through the recruiting process at the NCAA schools. My father had his head turned by a big name and a chance for me to make a splash where he as a player had not even made a ripple.

  * * *

  After the under-17s, coaches and scouts from a few OHL teams started to come out to my games in Ann Arbor and talked to my father. I was going to be eligible for the OHL’s entry draft that spring, and everyone knew that I had the option of staying on in Ann Arbor to book a ticket to the NCAAs. Teams pitched my father on opting instead for major junior—what had been his first choice at the start. The NCAAs gave my father leverage, and OHL execs tried to get him on board with promises of cash—up to $100,000 in one case—along with use of a car, a computer, a cellphone and some of the expenses for my family’s travel.

  The league that didn’t want my father when he was eighteen seemed to be bending down to kiss his ass. I was going to the OHL only on the terms of a guy who couldn’t cut it there himself. I was my father’s payback.

  Don Cherry and his lawyer, Trevor Whiffen, started to come out to games in Ann Arbor. Cherry, the television personality, owned the Mississauga IceDogs. He was old school, talking a lot on Hockey Night in Canada about his years in hockey’s minor leagues, making it sound like the game’s glory days. He wanted to have a team that was in line with hockey’s traditions. He mocked European players, saying he wouldn’t have them on his team, accusing them of stealing jobs from Canadian and American kids. His formula wasn’t working in Missi
ssauga, though. The team he sent out on the ice was the worst argument for his vision of the game, and critics were able to throw it back in his face. That season the IceDogs were setting major junior records for losing, winning just three games in the sixty-eight-game season. Cherry’s famous name and reputation didn’t matter to a lot of the top prospects—since the franchise came into the league, a lot of prospects let the IceDogs know not to bother drafting them because they wouldn’t report. Even worse for the team, though, was the fact that Mississauga had trouble keeping its best players. No one liked losing that much, and pro prospects thought they weren’t developing. Some, like Jason Spezza, would give it a shot until they realized they weren’t getting out of it what they put in, then demand to be traded.

  The IceDogs were going to own the first overall pick in the OHL draft that spring, and they didn’t want to be in the same position as they had been with Spezza. A former No. 1 pick demanding to be traded would have been a public relations disaster. Cherry and Whiffen didn’t say that when they approached my father. They softened the message, telling him that it was a critical year for the franchise and that they wanted to know early whether I was going to come if the IceDogs made me the first overall pick in the draft.

  I’m sure my father wasn’t the only parent Cherry and Whiffen talked to, and I’m sure those two heard “Thanks, but no thanks” a few times.

  My father was there to be swayed. If it had been anyone else in charge of a two-win team, my father would have told them to take a hike and would have positioned himself to negotiate an offer from another team with money attached and a better chance to win—he had already heard from some teams promising six-figure payouts and lots of perks if I’d commit to them. Or he would have leveraged my chance to go to college as a way of extracting a better offer. Because it was Cherry, he heard them out. He was like a star-struck schoolgirl. My father played the hard-ass, plain-talking tough guy, and unless John Wayne were coming along to recruit me, no one was more my father’s style than Cherry. I don’t know how my father’s motivations could have been divided into fractions—money and fame were big pieces of the puzzle, but so was the chance to rub elbows with hockey heroes, and Cherry fit the profile. He knew that Cherry had coached Bobby Orr. He had watched Cherry on Hockey Night in Canada. Now Cherry was slapping him on the back. Turn my father’s head? Cherry put it on a swivel. My father knew how Cherry had talked Spezza up on television when he drafted him, and he would have imagined Cherry doing the same with me. My father knew Cherry brought media attention to the team, knew he’d have a chance to bend reporters’ ears. He would have imagined that Cherry would even work in a mention of his top prospect’s father, one career minor-leaguer paying tribute to another.

  Even though going to major junior had been a key part of my father’s plan for me, even though going No. 1 was a big attraction, my father didn’t sign on right away. It wasn’t going to be that easy. It was a big leap for him. If I signed with the IceDogs, he was going to lose control of me. He’d had complete control of me all the way through Strathroy. He had his special deal with USA Hockey that kept me living at home and under his watch. Mississauga was another story.

  My father said he didn’t want to leave Michigan. Kelley was playing tennis there, and he had hopes of her landing a scholarship and probably playing pro down the line too. It might have been more than that, though. I suspect that he had gone to Sterling Heights one step ahead of creditors. So he made a proposal: rather than living with a billet, I would live in a townhouse with my uncle, something that the team could arrange for him. The team would have to give me the best education package that they could offer—my complete college education paid for even if I signed a pro contract (which usually voids any guarantee of underwriting college expenses). I don’t know if my father had any illusions about working for Cherry, his newfound friend. I suspect that my father didn’t push it. Since his experience with Dwight Foster, he felt he didn’t need to be on the ice with my team to put me through my paces.

  I don’t doubt that my father was at least as qualified as the IceDogs’ staff. That much was clear from the first practice, when I reported in August. Cherry’s nephew Steve had been coaching girls’ high school hockey. He had zero major junior experience. I laughed the first time he stepped on the ice: he could barely skate. Joe Washkurak was the other assistant, a Toronto policeman who coached minor hockey in Toronto but hadn’t coached in major junior either. Joe basically ran the practices and Don parachuted in occasionally, coming in for most games that didn’t conflict with broadcasts. Other OHL teams had former NHL players behind the bench, even a few former NHL coaches. Going to major junior should have been like advanced studies, but it turned out to be like going back to grade school, a big step back from Ann Arbor. In fact, a big step back from Strathroy and Pat Stapleton. Even in atom I’d played for a coach, Dwight Foster, more qualified than the staff on the ice with this team at most practices.

  19

  SUITCASE

  Mississauga, Ontario, September 2001

  When the IceDogs started playing pre-season games back in September 2001, my father got top billing in the headline over a story in the Toronto Star’s sports section.

  Suitcase Sully’s son goes to the ’Dogs

  The nickname “Suitcase Sully” is one that I never heard anyone call my father. I never heard him mention it before. I know Suitcase Smith used to be the nickname of Gary Smith, who played for the Toronto Maple Leafs and then six other NHL teams as well as a bunch of minor-league stops back in the sixties and seventies. I suppose a lot of minor-leaguers get tagged with something like that.

  The story’s lead was more accurate than the reporter could have known: “Every aspect of Patrick O’Sullivan’s life is engulfed by hockey. For the rest of the O’Sullivan family, their lives are completely consumed by his game.”

  There was no doubt about the facts, though it put a pretty cheery spin on my life story, a script that my father could have dictated. The paper also described how we had moved eight times in sixteen years, all to advance my career. Of course, moving four times in a season was what my father’s first year of junior hockey had looked like. Again, the emphasis was on dedication and on my father’s and family’s sacrifice for my sake. It drove home the idea that my father had been there once, and now was going through it as a parent. He had been a hockey nomad and now was there to guide me through it—a minor-leaguer whose love of the game was unrequited had become the selfless hockey father. He wasn’t quoted saying it, but I have no doubt that at some point he’d dropped his favorite line about doing it all for his son.

  If you read between the lines, the story wasn’t really all that flattering to me, mind you. I came off looking pretty self-involved, a kid who puts his own interests ahead of his family’s. I was the one who had us living out of suitcases. Because of me, my family had the zipper blues. Not that my father would clear that up or worry that I was getting thrown under the bus. He really wasn’t worried about people getting a good impression about me. So long as he looked good, he was good.

  The Star story made a passing mention of the “controversy” with USA Hockey and the Under-15 Festival. Again, it was entirely my father’s version of events: “According to [John O’Sullivan], he only became aware of the age limitation after the final cuts were made.” The way he told it and the newspaper presented it he had made an innocent mistake. USA Hockey’s side of the story didn’t make it into the article.

  One small, dark cloud did show up on the radar: the Star story mentioned that my father had a reputation for “meddling” wherever I played. Don Cherry downplayed any rumors about my father. In fact, he gave my father his personal endorsement. “Some of the things I heard (about John O’Sullivan) were not complimentary, to say the least,” Cherry said. “I went and talked to him, and I guess John’s got the same reputation as me. I think he’s great, but maybe it’s two guys who are a little nuts together.”

  The IceDogs were coming off th
e worst season in the history of Canadian major junior hockey. They needed some good news. They needed positive publicity. Thankfully, they didn’t portray me as the franchise savior or a wonder boy or anything like that. I wasn’t a player who could single-handedly turn around a franchise, and I’m not sure if anyone could have for that team. But the IceDogs managed to get out a feel-good story that didn’t even brush up against the truth. They endorsed me when they used their draft pick to select me and when they signed me. Effectively, though, at the media day they gave my father their character reference.

  20

  DEBUT

  Mississauga, Ontario, September 21, 2001

  “I wonder how they’re going to put a negative spin on this,” Don Cherry said. He was standing outside our dressing room and reporters were taking down notes after we won our home opener 9–1 over Peterborough. Cherry was telling the press how we had given him the game puck for his first win behind the bench with a major junior team and how he had promised to buy us new sweatsuits for playing so hard. He stopped short of saying I told you so.

  While Cherry was holding court and crowing, my father had cornered me down the hall. He was giving me his post-game analysis of everything I had done wrong. I had scored two goals, assisted on two others. “What the fuck were you thinking on that play?” he said. “Where was your fuckin’ head?” I looked around to see if anyone heard him going off on me. Everyone in the area was focused on Cherry.