Breaking Away

by Patrick O'Sullivan

  It sounds strange to say, but I feel like I never had a chance to get to know my younger sister, Shannon, at all. By the time she was starting school, I was already off playing in Mississauga. I was just never around—my father left my mother all of my little sister’s child-care responsibilities. She would have had every reason to feel like an afterthought in the family. She was too young to understand—but might now—that being an afterthought to my father was a blessing, not a curse.

  That’s one price of my father’s obsession that’s easy to miss: I never really developed relationships with my siblings. And that didn’t change after our father’s conviction and our parents’ divorce.

  Fact is, by the time I made major junior hockey, I was used to being on my own.

  That was true from my first season in Mississauga. I lived a very separate life from my mother and sisters. I was more like a relation than any part of the family.

  My mother took my sisters back to North Carolina to be close to her parents after the divorce. I went back to North Carolina for a couple of weeks in the summer of 2002, but Winston-Salem really wasn’t a great place for a young pro trying to land in the NHL someday. There weren’t other players to train with. There wasn’t quality ice time. After a couple of weeks in Winston-Salem with my mother and sisters, I was restless. I was afraid of getting out of shape and falling behind other players—my father’s mindset, no doubt, but an obsession that is fairly common among athletes in all sports. So I went back to Toronto, where I could get to the gym and find ice for a pickup game with other juniors and some pros.

  And that’s how it played out the summer of the draft and the summers after that. Over the years it was never longer than a couple of weeks in North Carolina in the off-season and sometimes less, because I would spend some time visiting Sophie when she was living in Colorado. Other than that, I saw my mother and sisters only when the NHL schedule brought my team through North Carolina. Given that I had played my entire career to that point in the Western Conference, my teams would play only one game in Raleigh each season. It never worked out that the mother and sisters would come to see me during the season—even though Kelley was through high school, my younger sister, Shannon, hadn’t graduated yet, so that kept my mother home-bound.

  * * *

  My father being out of our lives should have meant a fresh start for all of us. It was for me. It wasn’t for my mother.

  Living with my father was hell, and so was going to court to get a restraining order and a divorce. Having to tell your young daughters that their father is going to jail would be some sort of hellish experience as well. I appreciate that’s a lot of weight to carry, but if that’s what you have to do to get out of a dangerous marriage, it’s a trade that you have to make, every day, no questions. And if you watch your husband beat up your son, your marriage is dangerous simply by definition. To think otherwise is pure denial.

  I don’t know what a reasonable time is to get back on your feet, to start healing and getting on with the rest of your life. Nobody could give you a hard and fast answer on that. You’d have to judge it on a case-by-case basis. I didn’t expect it to be overnight. How many months or how many years, I really didn’t know. Fact is, though, more than five years after my mother first filed for divorce, she showed no signs of pulling her life together. She didn’t even seem motivated to try. She’d checked out emotionally. She stayed at home, never trying to find work, never even looking to train for a profession that would support her and my sisters. She saw herself as a full-time mother, someone who would stay at home and see her daughters through. That would have been acceptable in other circumstances, but her judgment was questionable and her commitment less than wholehearted. Kelley had dropped out of high school not long after the divorce. My mother let that pass and didn’t put any demands on my little sister as far as school went either.

  I don’t know if my father ever sent her any support payments. Even if he did, based on an income that was never much above the poverty line, the court couldn’t have demanded enough for my mother to make ends meet. My mother needed some help until she could get her life straight. First that came from her parents, just as it had before the divorce. They bought her a house. They covered bills and expenses as they came in. And then, after I signed my first contract, the money came from me.

  I sent her money regularly. She didn’t work from a monthly budget. She would ask, and I would wire her money. I knew her account number by heart. I never sat down to add up the dollar figures. She never sent me any accounting of it. Everything was on a piecemeal basis. And in time, her requests went from basic bills or unexpected expenses to big-ticket items. A bathroom that needed new fixtures, a kitchen that needed updating, a landscaping job—based on what I was cutting checks for, they could have shot a season’s worth of a Home and Garden Television series at my mother’s house. The strange thing was that when I would come to visit during the summer, the work I paid for wouldn’t have been done—my mother would tell me that she had dropped a deposit with a contractor who was backed up on his schedule. For good reason, the requests for money for work on her home started to leave a bad taste in my mouth when I signed a check, especially if it wasn’t an essential repair. I felt like my trust had been violated, like I was getting played.

  My mother also put in requests for money for my sisters. Some things they needed, and I had no issue helping out. But then I realized that they weren’t going to school and that my mother was letting them hang around the house. I understood that Kelley was troubled—she never picked up a tennis racquet after our parents’ divorce. My mother could have tried to help her get in better shape emotionally but settled for letting her be. Likewise, my younger sister, Shannon, was basically left to her own devices—my mother had no demands or expectations about her going to school and no concern about her friends.

  What had been a pressure cooker with my father was now a weightless environment. Other than asking her parents or me to help provide for my sisters, my mother seemed to do precious little parenting, and for a full-time stay-at-home parent, that’s not a good thing.

  It wasn’t something that I concerned myself with too much when I was in Los Angeles or on the move to Edmonton. I had my life and work to worry about three time zones away, and I was just in my early twenties, not emotionally equipped to fill the role of father to my sisters and lifeline to mother.

  * * *

  Sophie did not want to be a girlfriend of a NHL player. Just like a lot of players are content to live within the bubble of the league, removed from real life, a lot of women are happy just to be a “hanger-on” and enjoy the lifestyle their boyfriends’ work affords. Not Sophie, though. She wanted to know if I was serious about her. She wanted commitment. She wanted to start a family, and she didn’t want to wait. We had practically grown up together. I couldn’t imagine my life without her—she was pretty much what I had for family. And so, the summer before my first full season in Edmonton, I proposed to her and she accepted.

  It was only after that, when my finances really became our finances, that Sophie and I sat down and went through the books. She had been aware that I had been helping my mother and sisters, but she wasn’t aware of the extent of that help. I had effectively been paying my mother a living wage, even when I was a rookie trying to establish myself as a NHL player. Across not even four full NHL seasons, I had given her upward of $400,000.

  If you’re looking at the number and comparing it to the biggest contracts in the game, then $400,000 might not seem like a lot. You might think the same if you look at the numbers on the deal I was playing under in Edmonton: a three-year deal at $2.9 million per—a very good salary, twice the league average. When I scored twenty goals in Los Angeles, I wanted to believe that I hadn’t just earned that contract but had also won a place in the league and would have a long career—I thought I was smart enough to figure out what it was going to take to stick. That’s to say, I was guilty of a conceit that infects 99 percent of the leagu
e when they break in. If you didn’t believe in yourself along the way, you’d have never got there in the first place.

  After I was traded to Edmonton, though, I lost a lot of those illusions. I had no real security. I had beaten the odds just making as far as I had in the league: four out of five second-round draft picks don’t stick. The reality gets even colder than that—more than half the players who make the league play less than a hundred games across their careers and don’t make close to $2 million in their lifetime as players. If I had been the player that my father had planned to make me, an all-star, one of the league’s 1 percent, someone who plays a thousand games and makes $80 million in his career, then giving away $100,000 a year would have been sustainable. That wasn’t me, though.

  When I sat down with Sophie, with her finance degree and the work she’d done in her father’s company, she was able to put it into context. Blindly giving my mother money was no longer acceptable. And I realized that it was no longer just my money but our money. It was just common sense.

  I was going to have to have “the talk” with my mother.

  * * *

  I didn’t go into it angry when I picked up the phone, but I was going to be plainspoken. I was going to give her a financial facts-of-life speech: I can’t foot the bill for your new kitchen or an extension on your house or anything like that. I was going to give her a pep talk too: if there’s something that you’d like to do, a line of work that requires training or school of some kind, I’d be ready to help out. I’d think of that as an investment and an incentive. I didn’t flatly come out and say that the indefinite period of mourning had to end. I tried to keep the message positive.

  She basically said nothing. She seemed surprised that money was an issue. She cut off the call, got off the line.

  There was another message I intended to get across. I wasn’t shutting her out of my life. I still wanted to have a relationship with her. I still wanted to have a relationship with my sisters. I just didn’t want that relationship to be founded on nothing other than my providing financially. I was prepared to be supportive. I wasn’t prepared to be the sole means of financial support or the main means of the same. I didn’t want to go from my father’s retirement plan to hers.

  I didn’t know that it would be the last time that I’d talk with her.

  * * *

  That conversation with my mother didn’t really enter my mind a couple of weeks later when Sophie and I were putting together the guest list for our wedding. The date was months off. By that time, I figured, things would have been sorted out and settled. Between the invitations being sent out and the ceremony, we’d hash it all out, I figured. In the days leading up to the wedding, we could talk face to face, I figured. Maybe it would be awkward, but we’d move past it—we had moved past a lot worse already.

  My mother sent her invitation back unopened.

  A couple of weeks later, Sophie and I sent off our Christmas gifts to my mother and my sisters. We were both filled with dread, and it turned out the way we feared: a couple of weeks later, the gifts too came back to us unopened.

  I called her and left messages a few times. The calls I made weren’t returned. After a few weeks I got the message and stopped trying. I was going through a difficult time with the team. It was stressful enough. I had to focus on my job, and I couldn’t afford any stressful distractions.

  My mother never tried to contact me by phone, by email or by letter. If she wanted to reach me, she could have easily—my email address hasn’t changed in ten years. People I know have mentioned that they’ve seen her and that she asked about me, about Sophie and my sons. That’s as far as it went, though.

  Nothing has changed in the years since. Radio silence.

  I never thought when I made that call to her that it was going to work out this way. I thought that she might be upset at first, but I was sure that she was smart enough to understand my situation once she sat down and looked at the big picture. My sisters needed a self-sufficient and ambitious role model as a parent, especially given that they had no positive role model from my father.

  For now it’s not a matter of curiosity for my sons: they’re not really old enough to ask why they only have one set of grandparents or why they only have aunts and uncles on one side of the family. When they’re old enough, I’m going to have to fill in a lot of details about my life. I don’t know which absence in their lives will be harder for me to explain: their grandfather or their grandmother. I suspect it will be the latter. They’ll get why my father had to be shut out of our lives, just as a matter of safety. They’ll have a tough time understanding how my mother could walk away from Sophie and me without any explanation, without a single word since that phone call in 2009. I know I did. Only one thing had changed when she stopped picking up the phone or replying to messages: I had stopped writing checks. I can only conclude that money mattered more than anything else.

  34

  SCRATCHED

  Edmonton, Alberta, January 2010

  “You’re going to be a healthy scratch,” Tom Renney said.

  “What?”

  “You’re going to be a healthy scratch,” he said. “We’re going to have a bunch of you in and out of the lineup for the rest of the season.”

  “Why are you telling me? Why isn’t it Pat telling me this?”

  Pat was Pat Quinn, the Oilers’ head coach. Renney was his assistant.

  “I’m speaking for Pat,” Renney said.

  “I think this is bullshit,” I said.

  I went off. It wasn’t quite like my father going off on Tom Watt at the University of Toronto, but it was salty and to the point.

  I could go into more detail, but ever since I had been traded to Edmonton, it felt like this moment had been coming. Eighteen months earlier, I had been a first-line winger with a team that was on the rise. I had been happy in L.A., certainly when Crow was pink-slipped and Terry Murray came in to take his place. But it seemed I’d lost a grip on my career in just a few months. It was like a long, deep cut with a razor blade—just one stroke, you might not even see it at first, might barely feel it coming, but there’s no stopping the bleeding.

  I didn’t get a honeymoon in Edmonton. I was put in a role that couldn’t have given me a greater opportunity to fail: the third line, with the assignment of slowing down and stopping opponents’ star players. At the end of the season, my center, Shawn Horcoff, a longtime Oiler, one of the fan favorites, had the second-worst plus–minus in the league, a minus-35, the basic measure of defensive effectiveness. Only one player in the league had a worse number: me.

  Sophie was with me at my career’s low point. We had spent time together in the off-season the past few years, but during the winters we’d had pretty separate lives—while I was playing, she was in business school in Denver. The previous summer, after the trade, we’d had the big talk: she would come up and spend the season with me in Edmonton if we set a wedding date. And so we did.

  A year or two earlier she would have come away with a very different picture of the life that NHL players lead. If she had been in L.A. with me, there might have been ups and downs across the season, a player’s mood swinging with the way he and his team are playing. In Edmonton there were only downs, and my downs were, like my plus–minus number, at the bottom of the league.

  After games where I’d been on the ice for four goals against, which happened a few times, I would come home with her and she would want to talk. I’d tell her that I couldn’t. I felt physically ill. I would have five or six beers to try to steady my nerves, but the mood would last six, even eight hours, without sleep. I know guys who might take an hour or two after they get home after a bad game, but losing and losing the way we were was digging down deeper in me. We were a bad team, and I was failing as badly as if not worse than anyone else on the team—whether or not I was being used right, I had to accept responsibility for that. I was losing my grip on a career in the NHL. Sophie had known me for five years. She was engaged to me b
ut not engaged in the game. There wasn’t really much we could talk about—or, at least, having to explain it would just dig the hole deeper and put me in a worse mood.

  * * *

  There’s nothing worse in hockey than being a healthy scratch. If you have a shred of pride, if you give a shit, you don’t want to be told that you’re not good enough. As a rookie you can take it, you understand that your turn will come, but I wasn’t a rookie in Edmonton. As a call-up from the minors, as a depth player in case of injury, you get it, but I wasn’t a call-up. I had a contract that was paying me $2.9 million a season. It was the second year of a three-year deal. A player making $2.9 million isn’t supposed to be the healthy scratch.

  Getting scratched would have been hard to take anywhere, but nowhere would it be harder than Edmonton. For one thing, everyone in Edmonton recognized Oilers on the street. For another, everyone there knew everything about the team’s business. In L.A. if you walked out in the street, no one recognized you. And people in L.A. are used to star culture—no one in L.A. is such a big deal. Wayne Gretzky can walk around there without getting hassled. In Edmonton, though, there was no escaping public attention. Players were known wherever they went and people had no filter—they’d ask you right up front what’s going on with the team, without any hi’s or how are you’s. And when the team was going badly, you got no relief. People pressed you. Things were definitely going badly that season. The Oilers were heading to a last-overall finish. I felt like Sophie and I couldn’t go out for dinner. The waitress was likely to say, “Hi, my name is Meghan and I’ll be your server. Why are you a healthy scratch?”