Breaking Away

by Patrick O'Sullivan

  In the final, the Canadians came out and tried to run us out of the rink. They were the bigger team and they took runs at us, trying to knock our heads off. That was always what the Canadians did in the tournament. European kids had never seen that stuff before—they just play a different game—and usually the Canadians just knocked the will out of them in first five or ten minutes. We didn’t back down like the other teams in Helsinki did. Our game was no different from theirs. We hung around and we had our chances. Still, at the end of two periods we were down 3–1, maybe a little unlucky not to have at least one more goal to show for the way we played. It was a game that Canadian teams in this tournament just don’t lose—somehow, Canadian teams find a way to get out of jams most of the time, but given any advantage, they had never let go. We could see it in the faces of the Canadian kids when they were skating off the ice: they thought this game was done, and the last twenty minutes were going to be their victory lap.

  In our dressing room, Mike Eaves set the tone. He didn’t panic or yell or raise the stakes. He didn’t say that we had to play better. He told us that if we just kept playing the way we were, things were going to come. “One goal and it’s a whole new game,” he said.

  I had been playing the best hockey of my life before leaving for Helsinki—I had 28 goals and 23 assists in 29 games in Mississauga. I had thought I had played pretty well in Helsinki, but through five games and the first two periods of the final, I didn’t have much to show for it, just one goal. Early in the third period, though, I had an opening—the Canadian forwards were caught deep in our end, and we had a long three-on-two break. Patrick Eaves got the puck over to me on the wing and my snapshot beat the goaltender, Marc-André Fleury. That made it 3–2 with a lot of time left, and for the Canadians, the goal sucked the air out of the room.

  We started to take control of the game on the next shift, and Ryan Kesler tied the game about two minutes later. For the next five minutes or so, it looked like the game was going to head to overtime. Even if we owned the puck, we still had to beat Fleury, and he had been the best Canadian player in the under-20 tournament in Halifax the year before. NHL people considered him the best goaltender to come along in five years, maybe more. He was going to raise his game and not give up anything cheap, or at least that’s what they figured.

  Then with about five minutes to go in regulation, Drew Stafford picked up the puck in our end and saw that I had slipped behind the Canadian defense on the right wing. He threw the puck up the ice and I controlled it, cleanly behind Brent Seabrook, the defenseman on that side. There was nothing but open ice between Fleury and me, but Seabrook put a hook on me and wasn’t going to let go. I was still trying to break free, still skating toward the net, when Fleury came out of his crease to clear the puck—or at least try to. I was almost on top of Fleury, and he should have just dropped on the puck and covered up. Instead he tried to clear the puck and ended up firing it off the back of the other defenseman, Braydon Coburn, who was coming back on the play. Fleury tried to dive back into his net but he was too late. The puck crossed the line and we had a one-goal lead. My teammates skated up the ice to celebrate but I didn’t know how the puck had crossed the line—I thought it had gone in off me. I was the last American player to touch the puck so I wound up credited with the goal.

  The Canadian guys couldn’t believe it. This was the first time they had trailed all tournament. They were rattled. That Canadian team had a bunch of guys who are in the 1 percent: Crosby, Getzlaf, Perry, Carter, Richards and Weber—guys who would win Olympic gold and make $8 and $10 million a season down the line. Though a player might be in that 1 percent, no team is, not as a group. The Canadians had tons more talent than we did, but we played better as a team, and in those last five minutes we might have played our best hockey.

  Because I scored the winning goal, I was one of the American players the reporters went to after the game. One reporter asked me about the Canadian players saying they’d lost on a “lucky” goal. It felt like the word was robbing us of credit I thought we earned. “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “If he didn’t hook me I would have scored on the breakaway.”

  It wasn’t an arrogant line, just a jab for a jab. There was no way we were losing that game. We ended up outshooting Canada 10–1 in the last ten minutes of the gold-medal game.

  Inevitably, I was asked about the story that had come out at the draft. I didn’t want to get into it, and I made a point of not mentioning my father. I didn’t want to ruin this moment, but if I refused to answer the question I’d just be adding to fuel to the fire. “I’ve had some tough times, no doubt about that,” I said. “But that stuff’s in the past and I’m just excited about playing hockey. Obviously winning this tournament is the highlight of my career so far. Winning is part of the healing.”

  And winning with that team—completing the cycle with wins in the three major international tournaments—was, like I said, the best moment of my career. That was the best team that I ever played with, and I had been an important player with that group. It ended up that a couple of guys on our team would be 1 percent players themselves, Zach Parise and Ryan Suter. And with the way that we played in the third period, those two goals, those three gold medals, I came away thinking that I had a chance to be part of the 1 percent, someone who’d walk out of the wreckage and still make the moment mine.

  That would pass.

  I had no idea when I came off the ice that night that I’d never again play a game that mattered as much.

  * * *

  Mississauga, Ontario, January 2004

  The fans booed me in my own rink. I was standing at center ice and I didn’t know how to react. I tried to laugh it off. Here I was, the team’s leading scorer, the captain, the one top player who’d stuck around through tough years without asking to get traded, and I was getting booed. All I had done was play for the wrong team. I didn’t take it personally. It’s just the way Canadians feel about the tournament. All you can do is laugh at things beyond your control and move on. Having a gold medal to show for it made it easy to laugh off.

  When things would be beyond my control later in my career, it would be impossible to laugh off.

  30

  LONG DISTANCE

  Mississauga, Ontario, October 2004

  Sophie stayed a part of my life, but circumstances forced us to be physically apart. It was more than just a hockey schedule. That was really the least of it. Sophie worked in her father’s office that summer, but she had only come to Toronto so that she could get herself ready for college. She had set her mind on going to the University of Denver. Given that, we knew that she was going back to Colorado eventually and that we were probably going back to the relationship we had in the beginning—phone calls, chats online, visits when possible. That was always in the cards. Circumstances took a serious and eventually tragic turn when, back in Colorado, her mother was diagnosed with cancer. It turned out to be an aggressive form of cancer, and she was put on a schedule of radiation and chemotherapy. Sophie had been accepted to DU’s business school and was ready to start classes but deferred so that she could stay home with her mother and help out with her brother and sister—looking after them by himself would have spread her stepfather too thin. It was a sacrifice Sophie had little choice but to make. I called every day, but at my end of the telephone I felt powerless to help most of the time. Words of encouragement really don’t pack a lot of weight in that situation. She needed me there and I couldn’t get away. I know now that it would have been easy for her to think that I wasn’t just geographically remote but emotionally remote too—even when I do care about someone, I know it doesn’t always show and doesn’t show as much as it should. It was a strain on our relationship, but really Sophie had far bigger things to worry about than me. I told her that I would find a way to come down to Denver as soon as our season was over. I wanted to believe that our relationship could last through something like this, but I had to be realistic: serious relationships and even marri
ages have broken up over a lot of things less significant than what we faced. And we were still teenagers who had not even known each other for two years. Just as statistics, we shouldn’t have lasted, never mind the awful complicating issues—my history and the most emotional strain she was under.

  * * *

  Denver, Colorado, September 2005

  I had spent more than a month with Sophie that summer. Her mother was in failing health. Doctors had told her that further treatment wasn’t going to help her. It was clear that she had weeks to live. Her mother had one wish for Sophie: she told her not to defer another year. Sophie pushed back at first. She wanted to be there to the end for her mother. Her mother, though, recognized that Sophie was emotionally spent. She also knew that she was going to need professional help to stay at home in her last weeks of her life and that her husband was going to put everything aside when the end came near. Sophie’s half-brothers were a year older than they had been when the diagnosis was down and they were better prepared for the inevitable. Sophie’s mother wanted to see her daughter moving on with her life. So at the start of the school year, Sophie enrolled in Denver University. For some people it would have been a burden lifted off them, but Sophie didn’t feel that way—it was tough for her to head off to school each day, seeing her mother so weak, worrying about her. It wasn’t quite the fresh beginning that her mother hoped for, but Sophie appreciated her mother’s selflessness and let her know that.

  A boyfriend or a husband in a situation like that can feel like a fifth wheel, and I did a lot of the time. I was still just a teenager and I wasn’t equipped to be “a rock” through all of this. I had lived through a lot, but this was all new ground for me. I could only do my best for as long as I was there, and I could only be there until I had to head to training camp for what would be my first season as a pro, which would start in Houston. I struggled to help before at times while I was in Denver, but once I headed off to training camp I felt completely powerless. Sophie told me that she understood, but she had to resent the fact that, again, I was just a voice on the phone. We weren’t married and I was barely a professional—she was like a hockey wife but with none of the benefits and a lot of emotional weight to carry.

  I had hoped that I would make the Wild lineup that year, but management wanted to me to put in a full season in Houston. I let the team know about Sophie’s mother’s health and asked if I was going to be able to go to Denver for the funeral, whenever it would come. The people in the front office told me that they understood and that they could give me a couple of days’ leave on short notice. I told Sophie that and she said she understood, but I’d have understood if she didn’t really. And when the day would finally come a few weeks later, I would fly in one morning and be gone not even forty-eight hours later. Even saints wouldn’t understand.

  31

  OLD SCHOOL

  Minneapolis, Minnesota, September 2005

  “Understand, you are not going to play center in this league. And you’re not going to play here this season, no matter how well you or what you do.”

  Less than two minutes before, I had sat down across from Jacques Lemaire in his office. I figured it was going to be basic stuff, a coach-to-rookie speech like all the others. I had separated my shoulder in training camp and had spent a few weeks rehabbing. Now I was ready to go. I figured Lemaire was going to give me the standard work-hard-and-you’ll-get-rewarded line or something like that. I figured I’d get told what my season could be if I held up my end and the stars lined up right, no guarantees, no promises, just reason to keep the faith. Instead, Lemaire was telling me what my season wasn’t going to be, what my career was never going to be.

  There was no pushing back, not with his position and mine. He had played for eight Stanley Cup winners with Montreal in the sixties and seventies and coached the New Jersey Devils to a championship in ’95. He was a Hockey Hall of Famer. It wasn’t just that he had credibility. He was old school. The Wild management were all old school. The GM was Lemaire’s teammate from the Canadiens teams in the seventies, Doug Risebrough. Other people on the staff were their friends and contemporaries. Risebrough and Lemaire aimed to build an organization in the image of those glory days.

  I was just twenty. I’d always considered myself a student of the game. I read about the NHL’s history. I respected the hell out of these guys for what they had done as players and as executives—just the last season (before the lockout), the franchise’s third in the league, the Wild had made the Western Conference final. I had to believe Lemaire knew what he was talking about. I wasn’t about to question what he was telling me. I wasn’t even going to ask him why I wasn’t going to play center or make it into games with the Wild that season. I knew that if he was telling me this, then he was speaking on behalf of the entire organization, not just giving me his personal opinion. Still, I was disappointed. I tried to hide it. I probably didn’t pull it off.

  I had hoped to play that season with the Wild. I thought I had a good chance. In their first three seasons in the league, the team had a history of playing kids straight out of the draft. The Wild’s first pick in my draft year, Brent Burns, went straight to the NHL at eighteen. It seemed like Risebrough and Lemaire’s philosophy was to keep their best young players close and under their direct control, develop them with the big club rather than trust them to find their way in the major junior leagues. I had put in two more years with Mississauga. I had done the work needed to take the next step, at least by spring. Instead I was being told before training camp started that I was going to spend the full year with the minor-league affiliate in Houston.

  Going back to draft day two years before, I’d had a good feeling about being drafted by the Wild. I had talked to twenty-six teams at the combine, and my interview with Minnesota had gone well, one of the best that I had there. They didn’t dig deep with questions about my father. They seemed to be satisfied with the background work they had done.

  I guess it came down to my expectations of how an NHL team would operate—I’m sure that it’s what a lot of people would expect.

  The Wild had used a second-round draft pick to acquire my rights. It didn’t carry the prestige of a first-round pick, and the money that they’d commit to a second-rounder was about half the amount they’d be looking at with a top pick. Still, the Minnesota staff had picked me ahead of hundreds of others—they had thought there was something I could offer. It seemed like it would have been in their best interests, not just mine, to put me in a position to be the best player I could possibly be. The Wild had all kinds of knowledge and experience on their staff that I could learn from. And yet the message that I took away from my meeting with Lemaire and all my dealings with the club was straightforward: come back when you’ve figured it all out, and you have to figure it out on your own.

  In the years since, people have asked me what teams did with me in terms of psychological work, either general sports-psychology stuff that all players are expected to go through or support that they wanted for me specifically because of my background. And people are always surprised to find out that the teams I played for did nothing. People presume that these organizations, with all the money they have and all the money at stake in salaries, would have a vested interest in their players’ psychological and emotional well-being, and in my case, reasonable questions and concerns too. I can’t speak for most organizations from personal experience—I’d end up playing with five of the thirty NHL teams. Still, from my time with those teams, not one of them ever wanted me to sit down with a psychologist who worked for them—not for an assessment, not for therapy. In Minnesota, it seemed like that would have been the last thing that team executives had in mind—it’s not like the Canadiens teams they played for had ever given special consideration to anyone. Montreal’s management hadn’t given any extra attention to Guy Lafleur when he had been a first overall pick back in the seventies—in fact, they might have actually gone out of their way to make things difficult for him. That was the
old-school culture—it was all about independence and self-reliance, you working for the team, not the team working with or for you. Come in as boys and become men and Canadiens . . . or don’t. It’s all up to you.

  At some level, I was okay with that. Although I expected them to want to do something about my issues, I didn’t want to feel or look like a special-needs case. What’s true for you as a ten-year-old kid—nobody wants to be that player, the one who isn’t like everyone else in the room, the one who is separated from everyone else—remains the same ten years later. Wherever I was going to play, whether it was with their big club or, as Lemaire was telling me in no uncertain terms, in Houston, I really didn’t want to be that player. Teammates in any dressing room I’d walk into would know my story on day one, and a lot of them wouldn’t appreciate any special attention that I’d get. And I get that.

  I was determined to figure it out on my own. I took it as a challenge. And I’d challenge them to stick to their guns about keeping me down in Houston all year.

  * * *

  Years later I heard what Doug Risebrough had told someone about me.

  “When I met him at the combine and at the draft, I had an idea of what he’d been through,” he said. “And I thought, ‘He’s going to be all right. He’s a strong kid and he knows what he wants. I like him.’”

  Risebrough also said something about pulling for me to make it.