Breaking Away

by Patrick O'Sullivan

  We had trouble drawing a crowd on a good night in Mississauga, and that Wednesday night in January was not a good night. The league stats show that 1,800 bought tickets and came out to the game against St. Mike’s, but it didn’t feel like half of that. I skated in the warm-up and looked around the arena. Out of force of habit, I had always tried to spot my father during the warm-up, and he always tried to get my attention.

  After the warm-up, we went back to the dressing room. Joe Washkurak came into the room and took me aside. He kept his voice low so that the other players wouldn’t hear.

  “I just talked to Metro Police,” he said. “They arrested your father.”

  “Where?”

  In five days my father could have been a thousand miles away, could have assumed another name. I asked where the manhunt ended, but really I wanted to know how the police chased him down.

  “They got him outside. He was trying to come to the game.”

  Even after putting out an all-points bulletin for my father, the police didn’t really have to search for him. If they had wanted to just wait, he would have come right to them. He was so obsessed with seeing me play that he couldn’t stay away, not even when he was risking arrest, not even when he couldn’t have known for sure that I was going to play. The need to see me play outweighed the potential of landing in jail.

  We wound up beating St. Mike’s 6–3 that night. We had a great game, maybe our best of the season. It might have been my best game of the season too, the exact opposite of the game in Ottawa. I had a goal and a couple of assists, but it was more how I felt out on the ice. In Ottawa every bounce had gone against me and I’d gotten getting tenser and tenser every shift. Against St. Mike’s, the first game of the rest of my life, the game just flowed.

  In a Hollywood movie, the fans would have been on their feet, cheering loud enough to make your ears hurt. This wasn’t a Hollywood movie, though. It was a small crowd, and at times, in the middle of play, the arena was almost as quiet as at practice. You could hear players calling for the puck on the ice, bodies hitting the boards and skate blades carving the ice. It was the type of night when my father’s voice would have been the loudest thing in the building, when I wouldn’t have had to look for him because I could just hear where he was. And that game, I heard nothing, and no one else did either.

  Like I said, a player just wants to fit in and not be the special kid. That night I wasn’t the special kid, the kid with that father.

  While the game was going on, the police impounded my father’s van, but not before going into the back seat and pulling out my equipment bag. I got my skates back.

  * * *

  A couple of days later I had a short conversation with my grandmother. It would be the last one we would ever have. “Maybe it would be the best thing if you patched things up with your father,” she said.

  I felt sick to my stomach.

  My grandmother had seen what happened on the lawn. She saw the bruises on my face. She knew what my father had put me through. She knew what type of father he was to my sisters, what type of husband he was to my mother. I couldn’t imagine why she thought things would be better if I didn’t cooperate with the police and the warrant for his arrest was thrown out. Compassion for her son, even if she thought he was mentally ill and not responsible for his actions, wouldn’t have explained her seemingly heartfelt plea for some sort of truce. I had no idea how she thought we weren’t way past the point of forgiving and forgetting.

  And then it came to me in a flash: my father must have gotten to her. He had called the house. Maybe it wasn’t compassion. Maybe it wasn’t a mother’s love. Maybe she feared him enough to do his bidding for him. And to do that, she was basically offering me back up to him for more abuse, sacrificing me so that everyone else remained safe.

  24

  NOT QUITE A FRESH START

  Plymouth, Michigan, January 19, 2002

  The Toronto police charged my father with assault. He’d wind up facing three counts: the first for what happened on January 4 in Ottawa and the others dated the next day in Kingston and Toronto. A judge set a date to hear the case and released my father on his own recognizance. The judge attached two conditions of his release. One: My father was “not to be in the province of Ontario except for attending court or counsel’s office.” Two: He was “not to be within 50 metres of any ice rink in Ontario and not to attend any ice arenas where the Mississauga IceDogs hockey team are [playing].” Even before he’d appear before a judge to enter a plea, he did both.

  The IceDogs had a road game against the Whalers in Plymouth, Michigan, just a few minutes from the house where my father was living. I knew he was going to be there—so did the team. The coaches and my teammates were extra cautious with me. My father wasn’t worried about being seen. He didn’t hide in the shadows or in the back row. He took his usual place in the corner of the rink and yelled like he had at any other game. That night he was able to go through his whole routine with impunity. Although the judge barred my father from any arena where the IceDogs were playing, the conditions of the peace bond didn’t carry any weight in the U.S.

  Just in case we might have missed him, my father left a calling card. My mother had come out to the game and she had left our border collie in the back of her van. After the game, my mother went back to the van and found that my father had taken the dog. He might have thought the dog needed walking. He still thought all of this was going away. The letters he sent to me care of the team spelled that out—that I was going to drop the charges and we could go back to what he thought were the good old days. He was going to get a wake-up call the next day.

  * * *

  Windsor, Ontario, January 20, 2002

  After the Plymouth game we stayed over in Windsor because we had a game there Sunday afternoon. Everyone with the team knew that there was a risk that my father was going to try to track me down. Even if he didn’t go looking for me, it was going to be impossible to stay away. I don’t know if my father tripped an alarm at the border or if security at the Windsor Arena spotted him, but police arrested him at the Windsor Arena. He had breached a condition of his peace bond and would be sentenced to fifteen days in jail.

  * * *

  Toronto, Ontario, February 2002

  When my father appeared before a judge in Toronto, he pleaded guilty on the second and third counts of assault, those in Kingston and Toronto. He was given what I thought and still think was a slap on the wrist: five days on Count No. 2 and ten more consecutively on Count No. 3. Of course I thought he should have done more jail time. It seemed unfair: He had put me through years of abuse and he was being punished by days in jail. My mother, the team officials and my agents, all the adults, told me to try to keep it in perspective. A restraining order against my father was going to be issued and the conditions set down to keep him away from me were going to be extended. My mother had retained a divorce lawyer and though my father would try to make things as miserable as possible for her and for my sisters and me, it was going to be finalized in a few months. The message that everyone around me tried to drive home: Look on the bright side. It’s over. It’s a fresh start.

  My mother’s divorce lawyer talked to her about having me see a psychologist. It’s standard stuff for kids going through a much less troubling divorce to get that sort of counseling. I had no interest in it. My father had always said I wasn’t tough enough. This was just my first chance to show how tough I was, to prove him wrong—if not to him, to me. I had survived his abuse. I was convinced that I was strong enough to handle anything thrown at me. I was convinced that in any room I walked into I was the strongest willed there. Divorce, the idea that my father was out of my life, was nothing I thought I needed help with. The proof was on the ice.

  My game took off those weeks when he was in jail. I was able to go into games free of his advice. Even though the IceDogs were outmanned most nights and other teams could focus on shutting me down with nineteen- and twenty-year-olds bigger than me, I h
eld on to my spot in the league’s top ten scorers. And more than that, I could enjoy the game more, for once like everyone else in the dressing room.

  It turned out that I wasn’t completely free of my father. After he had served his two weeks on the assault charges, I knew he wasn’t going to be able to stay away. I looked for him in the stands before games and a lot of nights I’d spot him. So did my teammates and the coaches. As much as I could pick anything out in the crowd noise, I listened for his voice—it wasn’t just his voice but his usual instructions, no different from when I was eight years old. Maybe he toned down or cleaned up his act from the game in Ottawa so that he wouldn’t attract the attention of security, but still he did what he could to let me know he was out there at games.

  When I couldn’t find him and couldn’t hear him, I was relieved. I could play my game with an uncluttered mind.

  Even when I saw or heard him, I could get past it, I thought. It sat in the back of my mind for a while, but then I knew he wouldn’t be out there waiting for me after the game, ready to rip me or make me chase the van or beat the shit out of me again. All he could do is annoy me, I thought. There was nothing I had reason to fear, I thought.

  25

  ALL-AMERICAN AGAIN

  Ann Arbor, Michigan, March 2002

  It wasn’t like I went through life without a care in the world for the rest of the winter and into the spring. I knew my father couldn’t bring himself to stay away from IceDogs games, so the team still abided by the same rules: I was never left alone for any stretch of time and my roommate would screen my calls in the hotel on road trips. It might have made some kids feel like I was a bubble boy, but I felt exactly the opposite way. Yeah, he was in the back of my mind, at least that’s the way I looked at it. But before I had been completely preoccupied with him. By the spring of 2002 I’d never felt as free in my life. I’d never felt more upbeat about what was ahead for me.

  We wound up finishing last in the league that spring, no surprise. In fact, it might have been a surprise that we had been as competitive as we were. My season didn’t end there, though. USA Hockey called me and asked if I would be interested in a spot on the team going to the world under-18 championships. I jumped at the opportunity. It wasn’t just a chance to keep playing. It was a chance to get back on the ice with everyone I had played with in Ann Arbor, the same team that had won the gold at the under-17 challenge in Truro the year before. Most of all, it was a chance to win.

  I wound up staying with the Eaves family in Ann Arbor. It was a perfect fit. Mike was coaching the under-18 program that season and he had always been in my corner. He could be critical of me when it was necessary, but he was always fair and he always let me know that he believed in me as a player. I can say point blank that he was the best coach I’d ever play for. Patrick had been my linemate when I played on the under-17 team and he was my best friend in the program. I loved getting on the ice every day with Mike running practice and skating beside Patrick. They forced me to raise my game. The change wasn’t just at the arena, though. No, it continued when we would go back to the Eaves’s house after practice.

  I had been around “normal” families before, of course: those few times that my father might let me out of his sight for a night and I’d stay over at friends’ homes and the months I had billeted with the Tanels. I had seen parents and kids interact with real love and without abuse. With the Eaves family, though, it was different. I liked Mike as a coach but he was demanding. He pushed hard. He showed no favoritism and paid no special attention to Patrick on the ice. And Patrick could give it back when Mike reamed him out at practice. Yet when we drove away from the arena, anything done or said there was left behind. They didn’t bring the game home with them. What happened at the rink that day barely came up at dinner or through the evening. It was the exact opposite of my family-life experience. No night workouts. No wake-up calls before dawn. No constant badgering. With Mike and Patrick, we’d watch a game on television but it wasn’t a tutorial. The Eaveses weren’t slackers, the farthest thing from it, but they kept things in a healthy balance. When Mike pushed Patrick at home it was to get his homework done, same with his other siblings. Mike was an ex-NHLer and had his own ideas about the game, but he didn’t impose them on Patrick away from the rink. Patrick had free will and Mike encouraged him to make choices on his own. Mike had played at the University of Wisconsin and his father had attended Denver University and coached at Ohio State—still it was left to Patrick to decide where he was going to college, and he went off the board to Boston College.

  My father thought he could toughen me into a player. I always had known that there had to be another way, a better way. Living with the Eaves family those weeks I got to see it up close. More than ever I had a sense of what I’d missed out on.

  * * *

  Piestany, Slovakia, April 2002

  When we went to the world under-18s we knew that we had a chance to win a title.

  We were facing the same teams that we had beaten at the under-17 tournament in Truro, though Canada’s roster was limited to players whose major junior teams, like mine, had missed the playoffs. Still, we weren’t the favorites going into the under-18s. The Russians were the team that everyone was talking about and Alexander Ovechkin was the player that everyone was watching. He was an ’85 birthday, like me, one of the few in the tournament. In fact he was six months younger than me, so he was eligible for the draft two years down the line. If all the NHL scouts in the stands had had a chance, they would have taken him above anyone else there—maybe over any other teenage player in the world. And if all those scouts had to bet their own money on the winner of the tournament, they would have pushed all in on the Russians.

  I had never played better in my life that I did in Piestany those two weeks. I was able to focus on my game more than I ever did before. Officials with the team, including the U.S. Marshal who traveled with us, told me that there’d be no way my father would make it to Slovakia. Despite their reassurances, I couldn’t completely rule it out—he did, after all, drive from Nova Scotia to Chicago overnight to see me play a meaningless game, so I’m sure he would have been willing to pay any price to make it to the biggest games in my career, no matter where they were played. After a couple of days on-site, though, I realized that there were only teams, NHL scouts and locals around—he always stood out in a crowd, but there’d be no missing him in Piestany.

  It was more than a clear mind that raised my game. I had a comfort level with Mike Eaves, and he was confident in my ability. We had an even more talented roster than the team that had won the under-17 championship. Zach Parise, who had left the under-17 program the year before to open up a spot that I filled, came in like me for the pre-tournament camp. Years later Ryan Suter would be named to the NHL first-all-star team. Ryan Kesler would play for the U.S. at the 2010 and 2014 Olympics. Ten of us would go on to play in the NHL. I skated on the first line with Patrick Eaves and wound up leading the U.S. team in scoring, tied with Russia’s Alexander Semin for second place in tournament scoring, behind only Ovechkin.

  The way the tournament played out we wound up playing Ovechkin and the Russians in the last game of the tournament. We won lopsided games over Belarus and the Ukraine and we beat Canada 10–3. We just got by the Finns 3–2 and we wound up get stoned by a hot goaltender when we lost to the Czechs 1–0.

  The Russians rolled through the tournament unbeaten. In a skills competition, I’m sure that they would have beaten us—they were bigger and faster, they shot harder and they had amazing puck skills. Ovechkin just steamrolled defensemen who were going to be high draft picks and NHL veterans. His teammate Nikolai Zherdev might have been the fastest skater I’d ever seen. They had a defenseman, Anton Babchuk, who had a cannon from the point and would be a first-round pick that June.

  If you were going to look for one weakness in the Russians’ game, one chance we had to beat them, it was pretty plain: the Russians were all out to impress the scouts and were selfish
with the puck. They were players after my own father’s heart: they didn’t seem to give a damn about their teammates when they were playing to get drafted. We were the exact opposite: Mike Eaves had us all buying into the team concept. That’s how it had been when we were playing in the under-17 program, up against older teams over the winter—that was the only way that we could compete with them.

  The tournament had a screwy format—it wasn’t a winner-take-all final. Going into that game we needed to beat the Russians by two goals to win the gold. Mike Eaves had us ready and we jumped out to a 2–0 lead in the first period on a pair of goals by David Booth, who’d go on to a long NHL career. Ovechkin scored a goal in the second period to pull the Russians within one—all they’d need for a gold if they were able to hold us off the rest of the way. The Russians didn’t exactly put it on cruise control, but a lot of them didn’t play smart hockey either. They could have played a tight defensive game, taking no chances and sucking the air out of the game. Instead of turning the game into a chess match, though, one forward after another tried to go through our whole team rather than passing the puck and playing a possession game. Still, it looked like they were going to hang on right until the last shift—then with fifty-eight seconds to go, Ryan Suter set up Zach Parise for a goal to make it 3–1. We had beaten the Russians but they’d done their fair share to beat themselves.

  26

  GOING PUBLIC

  Mississauga, Ontario, April 2003

  A writer with ESPN The Magazine had found out about my father landing in jail and about the judge issuing a restraining order. The writer had contacted the agency at the time and asked about talking to me. He told the agency that he didn’t think it was appropriate to report the story without my consent, and that I couldn’t make informed consent until I turned eighteen. The writer just asked if the agency would keep the request in mind and mention it to me down the line. He told them he wouldn’t try to ambush me and wouldn’t try to report the story without me.