Breaking Away

by Patrick O'Sullivan

  A former NHL coach of the year, the owner of the franchise, was celebrating and accepting congratulations for what looked like a brand-new day for the IceDogs. For me, in the post-game, it was more of the same.

  I had expected major junior to be a tipping point, that my father would have less control and less influence over me. And it had looked that way in the first few weeks after training camp opened in August. My family was still in Ann Arbor. My father had driven up for our first game of the season the week before—we opened in Sudbury, a good eight hours of driving each way for him. He made a point of whistling and catching my eye while fans were only starting to file into the arena during the warm-up. He made a point of pointing to his seat in the corner—the same place he’d parked himself for any of my games over the years. And all during the game, I could hear him shouting—again, his usual routine. And he was there after the game.

  This was just more of the same. There was one big difference, though: after twenty minutes of standing there in my face and shouting until I had to wipe the spit off my tracksuit, I was able to turn and walk away and get onto the bus. I’d have four hours of peace and quiet and then sleep, knowing that he was going to drive all night to get back to Michigan. In Ann Arbor, all the players had had to ride the bus as a team rule for road games, but I was still living at home. It was just postponing the inevitable. I felt more independent with the IceDogs. Not completely, but a least a little more.

  Through training camp and the first week of the season, I wouldn’t see him Monday to Friday. I did have to listen to him once or twice a day on school nights, when he’d phone me up and go off for half an hour or more about being tough enough, about junior being a different game than I ever had to play before. That shit I could deal with. His opportunity to take things out on me physically seemed pretty limited.

  Turned out that I was overoptimistic on that count.

  My father had a key to the townhouse where I was living with Barry. He had ended up getting there before me after the loss in Sudbury, and we’d got into a fight there. And he was going to be there after the win against Peterborough. He was going to have me doing push-ups and sit-ups, or he was going to drive me into the wall if I refused or if I didn’t work hard enough. And he’d stick around to watch our team practice the next day. Hovering. Just reminding me, I’m out there. And that’s how it was going to play out that fall—maybe there’d be some relief during the week, but it would be the same old shit on the weekends. If we had a single road game, he’d be there. After the bus had dropped us off at the arena parking lot and I drove back home, he’d be waiting for me. And it would start over again. And it was worse than any time before. Now my father didn’t hold anything back, maybe because I was big enough that I was able to trade punches with him, maybe because he couldn’t make me run after the van, maybe because he couldn’t lock me out in my pajamas.

  Major junior wasn’t quite the escape that I had hoped for, but it was still an improvement. From Monday to Friday I got a taste of how I could hope things would turn out down the line—one day I was going to be off on my own, where he couldn’t make it to every game, where he’d be cut off from the dressing room by a rope and arena security guards, where I’d be able to go home and lock the door behind me.

  Major junior was the last stop on the way to the pros, I thought. And it was looking like that was exactly where I was heading at eighteen. Almost every first overall pick in the OHL draft ends up playing in the NHL, a lot of them in the first year they’re eligible. Not all of my games were four-point nights like the opener against Peterborough, but I was having a lot of success. Sixteen-year-olds, even top picks coming into major junior, are expected to struggle playing against bigger, faster nineteen- and twenty-year-olds. I had first played against guys that age when I was thirteen in Alvinston. I didn’t rattle. I would lead all rookies in scoring that fall—I’d be the only sixteen-year-old in the top ten in the league in scoring and be named the OHL and CHL rookie of the year.

  A couple of years and all this shit was going to be behind me, I thought. My chance to break away was going to be out there. Life was going to be better after that. It was going to be pretty sweet.

  My father was going to make it to every game that fall. He’d gone a lifetime without missing one, and I was resigned to the fact that that streak was going to hold up during my junior career.

  More of the same: I was going to be able to deal with that. I figured it had gone as far as it could.

  It was going to go places I had never imagined.

  21

  JOB APPLICATION

  Sterling Heights, Michigan, October 2001

  My father was consistent. He had done strange things all his life, but he had done them for a single purpose: getting me to the NHL. The same way, he had a view of me that never changed: he thought I lacked the character necessary to make it to the top of the game. You don’t want it enough. And more to the point, he thought he had possessed that drive as a player but had been undercut by bad breaks and a late start—nothing that was any fault of his own, of course. His message: If you want it as much as I did, you can be the greatest player in the game. He thought character was teachable—or at least something that could be conditioned. He was going to instill it in me by ordeal. Waking me up in the middle of the night to do push-ups and sit-ups wasn’t about strength at all. It was about determination. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. He was going to impose his attitude on me until it became mine too. It will always be Us against the World. Never quit.

  It was always like that—with one exception.

  I didn’t think about it at the time. My life with my father wasn’t conducive to analysis. I was just too busy trying to survive the latest ordeal and get through the day to ask: Why? But my father broke from character late that fall. In retrospect, it seems so unlike him.

  The IceDogs had a break in the schedule around Canadian Thanksgiving, and we were given three days off practice. We had no school Monday and I had nothing to do in Mississauga, so I went home to Sterling Heights to pick up my winter clothes. This was my first trip back to Michigan since late August—I had never been away from home that long before. I wasn’t homesick, not even a little bit. In fact, the routine that I had settled into with the IceDogs was the closest thing that I had ever felt to autonomy. Not that I had been on my own. My father would still show up at every game, driving four hours each way to our home games, driving more if necessary. If he had to stay over at Barry’s—and he did once or twice a week—he’d sleep on an air mattress or maybe pass out on the living-room couch. Those times it didn’t feel like much had changed. When he wasn’t up in Mississauga, he’d be in my ear on the phone every day, morning and night. Still, I felt for a few days that if it was only a phone call I had to listen to, if it was only hearing him yelling from the stands at a game, if it was only having him wait for me next to the team bus for a ten-minute critique of my play after games, I could deal with it. I felt like I was getting out from under his thumb. Staying over a night or maybe two in Sterling Heights over that Thanksgiving break seemed like something I could handle.

  I expected the same harangues from my father. I expected that he was going to be either pushing me to go to the gym to work out or renting ice and pushing me through a practice. I was too old and had been pushing back too hard to have him throw me out of car and make me chase after it. At that point, I would just tell him to fuck off. I was turning the Us-against-the-World defiance he had taught me against him. Still, I counted on more of the same from him, and I figured I’d go through it, suck it up for a day or two knowing that I was going back to Mississauga the first chance I got and wouldn’t look back in the rearview mirror.

  Instead he was completely different.

  Yeah, as expected, he said I was playing like shit even though I was in the top ten in scoring in the league, no other rookie even close. And I heard all about how I was soft, not tough like him.

  This time, though, he said
nothing was ever going to change. He said it made no sense for him to keep trying to change me. He was conceding, admitting his failure. In the battle of Us against the World, he was caving, waving the white flag, surrendering. He couldn’t turn me into the best hockey player in the world. If there’s one thing he would have hated being called, it was quitter. He would have scrapped with anyone who accused him of it. Look back on his career in junior hockey and the minors, you couldn’t accuse him of quitting. He was always the guy who didn’t know when to quit. But now, with everything pointing in the right direction, he was going soft.

  It had always been anger. Now there wasn’t a trace of anger, just disappointment. He basically came out and said that he pitied me—but he pitied himself at least as much.

  “You’re never going to play,” he said. “You just aren’t good enough. There’s nothing that I can do for you. You’re just going to have to plan on doing something else with your life.”

  Somehow my father had erased any memory of the season before, when he had gone to the Ontario league, pushing me as an “exceptional player,” when I was the leading scorer on the best team of sixteen-year-olds in the world, when junior teams were prepared to give me money if I jumped to junior rather than return to Ann Arbor and go to college. Now, according to him, I had no future in the game.

  “There’s no sense pushing anymore,” he said. “It’s just not going to happen.”

  He had played hundreds of mind games on me over the years, but never this one. The message was mournful: Woe is me. I’ve wasted all this time and money, my whole life. He seemed depressed, like his hockey career had been a fool’s errand and mine was becoming the same for him.

  “You might as well pack up your shit in Mississauga and come home,” he said.

  Like that was ever going to happen.

  “No sense getting you in school here,” he said. “That’s not for you.”

  Even though I was going to graduate high school a year ahead of my class. Right.

  I waited for the next shoe to drop—I knew there had to be one. It wasn’t one that I expected.

  My father told me to clean up, put on a clean shirt and comb my hair. When I was presentable to his standards, he told me to get in the van. I knew this was going to be good. I went along with it even though I had no idea what it was going to be.

  My father drove to the Taco Bell nearest to the house and pulled up in the parking lot.

  “Go inside and ask for a job application,” he said. “Come back out here with it.”

  I suspect that he wanted some reaction from me. I gave him none. Maybe he wanted me to get angry, but I wasn’t about to do that. It was all I could do to keep a straight face, but I did. I went inside like a thousand sixteen-year-olds had before me, asked for a job application and came back out to the van with it.

  “Fill it out,” he said, and he handed me a pen.

  He didn’t trust me to fill out an application inside. He thought I would just go through the motions. When I was done, he read it over and made sure that I had filled in every box. When he was satisfied that the application was in good shape, he told me to go back inside and ask for the manager, which I did.

  My father stayed in the van, watching as the manager come out from behind the heat tables and I handed him my job application.

  “Okay, we’ll keep it on file,” the manager said to me.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Next stop: McDonald’s.

  On the drive my father laid out what my minimum-wage life was going to look like.

  “You’ll have to take the bus to work and you’ll probably get night shifts and weekends to start,” he said. “We’ll figure out what you’re going to pay in rent.”

  I just nodded and played along.

  “I guess you’re going to find out what life’s like for the rest of the world.”

  I resisted the temptation to crack wise and say that this might have been what his career prospects looked when he was back in junior hockey, but they weren’t mine. There was no sense taking a jab when he was in the middle of this hangdog routine.

  Once my father thought that he had made my immediate future look dismal enough, he changed the subject. He talked about the Toronto Red Wings, about Belle Tire, about all the places I had played in my career that was now, according to him, sadly played out. He was, of all things, wistful, or at least what passed for that.

  “We had some good times, didn’t we?” he said.

  Maybe he had a good time driving the van with me, age ten, running behind it, trying to catch up. Me, not so much.

  I submitted a job application at Mickey D’s. And then Burger King. Wendy’s. KFC. White Castle. And that’s how it went for another three hours. I lost track of how many applications I filled out, but by the end of the afternoon I smelled like a large order of fries. And I sat through my father’s nostalgic rewriting of history, all these stories of the places we had gone and fun we had. I sat there thinking: This sounds like someone else’s life.

  When we got back to the house, we had dinner, with my father talking about my moving back and working as a done deal. My mother and sisters didn’t register any surprise. They didn’t say a word about it. They knew that it was all bullshit, but no sense asking for trouble.

  Afterward, I went in the living room to watch TV. My father came in and gave me some sort of buddy-buddy routine.

  “Maybe a workout would be good,” he said. “Like in the old days. It might be fun, c’mon.”

  Again, I went along with it. I didn’t bother to point out that he had told me two hours before that my career was over. I just went along with it. I lifted weights and shot pucks in the basement. I went for a run. It didn’t feel like the not-so-good old days. Over a couple of hours, he didn’t try to hit me or kick me. He didn’t insult me. He just watched, weirdly supportive. “Buddy,” he called me, the only time in my life I ever heard that. Was this really happening? Was this some sort of body double? Maybe other father–son relationships were like this, but he had no practice at it and I had no practice at being the good son. I was just hockey-playing chattel, a high-risk investment that might pay off. Effectively, I was the only potentially valuable property he owned.

  The next day, I headed back to Mississauga. I never heard about any job offers pouring in from the fast-food franchises. I missed out on my shot at Employee of the Month. But I did wonder exactly what had happened that day. He might have been trying to scare me straight, to show me exactly what his career prospects had looked like when “Suitcase” O’Sullivan washed out as a player—he had, after all, run a greasy spoon after his last five-game contract ran out in Winston-Salem. But there seemed to be more to it than that. Not about me, but about him: if he wasn’t involved on a daily basis, if I wasn’t his, then successes I called my own didn’t matter. He felt like he was losing control. He’d rather have me quit than quit him.

  22

  THE NIGHT I SAVED MY LIFE

  January 2002

  In the first chapter of this book, I described what I saw from the back seat of the car on January 4, 2002—what was running through my mind and what I finally did the night I stood my ground against my father, the night I started to turn my life around. But I didn’t tell the whole story of that night in the first chapter. A lot more had happened in the hours before that long, awful ride and the fight on the lawn. A lot more happened in the hours after. There were other pieces to the puzzle, other players in the scene. If I had told you the whole story right off the top, it would have been too much for you to sort through. At this point, though, you have a pretty good idea of what my life was like. You have a pretty good idea of the people who were wrapped up in it. What was going on around me will have more meaning now.

  It wasn’t just my father I was up against.

  * * *

  Mississauga, Ontario

  7 a.m.

  For me that day started like every other. I woke up at seven that morning in the bedroom in my uncl
e’s townhouse and got ready for what I figured was going to be a long day: school in the morning, lunch and then the bus to Ottawa for a game at seven in the evening. I figured I’d sleep for a while on the bus to Ottawa and then sleep for most of the trip back. That much was routine. Still, I expected that the day and night were going to be different from usual.

  * * *

  Ann Arbor, Michigan

  7 a.m.

  It wasn’t long after seven that my father backed the van out of the driveway in Ann Arbor and started on the ten-hour drive to Ottawa. He wasn’t about to miss seeing me play, even though he would have come home from work and a few drinks a few hours before, even though he had come out to games four times in the week before.

  My sisters were in the back seat, excited to be off school and on their way to stay with my grandparents in Scarborough—my father was going to drop them off at lunchtime on the drive through Toronto.

  My mother was sitting beside my father up front. This was going to be the first time since the start of the season that he was bringing my mother along with him. My father preferred going to the games by himself. Any family with him was an unnecessary nuisance, something that could interrupt or interfere with his conversations with team executives, agents or other hockey coaches. I’m sure he told my mother to clear out if he had business to do at the rink, and I’m sure she would have been happy to do that. I’m not sure why she was coming on the trip. It might have been something as simple as my father needing the sleep, and this way he could hand the wheel over to my mother.

  My parents had even made a reservation at a Best Western in Ottawa rather than plan to drive back to Toronto or Michigan—again, that was something that just never happened and something that was never explained to me. It couldn’t have been a romantic thing, some sort of gift. My father never went in for that. It might have been that, eighteen months away from the NHL draft and my first NHL contract, he saw the promised land—after ten years of moving around and scraping by, they were going to be able to travel to all my games. The Best Western would be a start, but soon they’d be traveling in style to the draft on my agents’ dimes, with me picking up their tab when I started making millions.