I didn’t really appreciate Schnurr’s version of history—my father enabling me to make the NHL, my father somehow having succeeded because I played almost four hundred games in the league. In spite of my father, not because of him. But listening to the audio recording again, one word jumped out at me: obsession. Another phrase grabbed my attention: “whatever it took, legally or illegally.” The way Schnurr saw it, my father’s obsession had been a healthy one, even if he was prepared to commit a crime. Schnurr made it sound as if I had reason to be grateful to my father for everything the game gave me.
“John’s actions in the rink bothered a lot of people,” he said, “because he was very loud, aggressive . . . Well, not aggressive, but very loud. When you were on the ice he’d bang on the glass. He’d make comments to you. I didn’t say anything to him because, one thing, it was his kid and he didn’t bother the rest of the team. He bothered the parents but they didn’t come and register complaints with me. It was a kind of a joke. It was like, ‘Look at this guy being a lunatic.’
“Besides, John wasn’t bothering the rest of the team. I kind of rationalized in my mind, the fact that the stuff he was telling you to do was the right stuff. He was yelling the right things. He knew hockey. He wasn’t telling you to take the puck and try to go the length of the ice, don’t pass it and try to score a goal. John would be telling you to make the right plays. He wasn’t abusive to other kids. So I accepted it. He wasn’t the first parent to tell his kid what to do on the ice. I rationalized it because he was telling his kid to do the right thing, unlike some other parents.”
I told Schnurr that I could imagine that his opinion of my father had to be different from other parents’.
“Look, the other parents were uncomfortable around John,” Schnurr said. “The other parents talked about him—everybody had a Johnny O. story. He was an interesting study as far as his approach to raising you—it was a lot different. John didn’t socialize with them. John would typically stand over by the glass. He was loud. It just bothered some people that he was as loud as he was. As far as the physical abuse goes with you, I’m sure it happened but I didn’t see any of that. I heard a lot of stories, but I didn’t know if they were true or not. I heard stories, but that’s all hearsay.”
I listened and listened again to the audio recording of this part of the conversation: Schnurr had “heard stories” but decided on his own that they were “hearsay,” suggesting that they weren’t credible enough to follow up. Though he said he didn’t know if the “stories . . . were true or not,” Schnurr’s actions or his decision not to act made it seem that he gave them little chance of being true. And of course, Schnurr’s friendship with my father—they “socialized”—gave him more insight into his character than the other parents who were “uncomfortable around him” had.
I pressed Schnurr. “Who were those parents?” I asked.
“Just other parents,” Schnurr said. Though so much was vivid in his memory, he couldn’t think of a single player’s parents who were bothered by my father and had a story—even though, as he said, “everyone had a Johnny O. story.”
It seemed that Schnurr was making this a dead end strategically. He had no problem recalling something as insignificant as the day he had seen my father and me at a rink under construction in Mount Clemens but remembered nothing at all about a parent coming to him to express concern about the way my father treated me. Schnurr’s failure of memory was just too convenient a fit for his rationalization of inaction. There were two possibilities. One: Schnurr didn’t want to refer me to any of those parents if there would be any chance that they’d think he threw them under the bus, impugning them for their own inaction. Two: Schnurr didn’t want to refer me to any of those parents if they might tell me about damning complaints about my father that Schnurr chose to ignore, more damning than Schnurr was painting them, more credible than “hearsay.”
Schnurr then took it one step further, suggesting that he was not only right to have done nothing but had to keep his distance. “It was none of my business,” Schnurr said. “I’m not a psychotherapist. I’m not a family psychologist. There were other people out there that took it to an extreme . . . not as far as John, but still, it wasn’t uncommon for parents to be loud in the stands. John wanted what they wanted, the best for their kids. I’m coaching a team. I had all the duties of trying to keep the team going forward. Obviously, I want what’s best for the kids. If John’s actions were hurting the team or the other kids, I would have done something. But obviously it wasn’t like that. Whatever went on with John, it wasn’t bothering sixteen other kids.”
That is, even if those stories had been credible rather than hearsay, even if Schnurr had seen a red flag himself, he wasn’t an expert. Intervening to protect a kid wasn’t part of his job description. Schnurr basically says that the nanny-state approach to child rearing has no place in the game of hockey.
Schnurr claimed what he must have considered a victory at this point of the conversation. “I know that’s not what you’re looking for,” he said.
Schnurr was a prime example of the culture of the game that protected and enabled my father. And like Schnurr, the values at the arena have been slow to change if they’ve changed at all. They haven’t changed for Schnurr, apparently. Schnurr gave up coaching a few years ago, but when I asked if he would do anything different if he saw a father “going to the extreme” or “taking it to another level” today, he said he wouldn’t.
“I have my own moral compass, my sense of what’s right and wrong,” he said. “I wouldn’t do anything different today than I did with John and you. If I saw someone who I thought was taking it too far, I might go up to him and say, ‘Let me tell you a story.’”
Maybe he would. Maybe he’d think that this was just another parent who wants the best for his kid, and so long as it doesn’t bother the other kids, and so long as the team moves forward, there’s no harm in it. He sees no real threat in parents being obsessed with their kids’ success.
Schnurr had it half right. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear, but it was exactly what I expected to hear from a friend of my father, someone who thought he was one of the good guys.
40
FOSTER
Dwight Foster was anything but a friend to my father. Though he brought me in as an underage player and brought in my father as an assistant coach with the team in Dearborn, he was the coach who pushed back harder against my father than anyone else. And while Schnurr said he had no regrets, Foster, who’s a partner in a venture-capital group in Detroit, has no problem admitting that he wished he had done more to help me.
“I guess there were warning signs of some trouble coming that I didn’t pick up,” Foster says. “It probably goes right back to when he told me that he’d like to get a tryout for you and then he explained that you were double underage. I told him that’s pretty ambitious, putting a boy that young against players two years older. I had a picture of you sort of, based on your father asking for a tryout. I could have seen it if you had a kid who was unusually big for his age, physically advanced. But the fact was you weren’t big for your age. You were average, if that. I played with a lot of guys who went on to play pro, and while a lot of them had played against kids a year older than them, I suppose those who played against kids two years older were really rare. I asked myself, what was the point of having you skate against kids that much older and bigger? . . . If it was really worth the risk. You could do it, but I don’t know that you really needed it. It was something John wanted more than anything you needed. That should have been a red flag.”
For all his NHL experience, Foster was in his first year of coaching the year I played for him, and he admits that he was on a learning curve when it came to dealing with hockey parents. My father and I came along when he was just at the base of that curve. “You assume that the way that you feel about your kids is the way everyone else feels about his,” Foster says. “You figure that if anyone is going to go too much one wa
y, then it’s going to be on the side of being overprotective. You can’t imagine that a parent who is bringing a kid out to play organized sport, putting in a lot of time and money, is the type of parent who would let their kid get in harm’s way—never mind actually go out and put their kid in any sort of danger.”
To be fair to Foster, he actually did pick up on the red flag. “[Your father] told me that he had played in the minors, though I can’t remember exactly where,” he says. “I didn’t see much of a way to check out whatever he said. Now you could go online and find out exactly when and where he played, but back then I wasn’t able to do much, and that didn’t seem the biggest worry—if he claimed to have played in the minors and he was exaggerating what he was a player, that didn’t seem to be a big deal. It just meant that there wasn’t anyone who played with him that I could call.”
If Foster had been able to call Dave Herbst from the Skipjacks in the ACHL or anyone on the University of Toronto championship team, he might have come away with a different picture of my father. Still, Foster didn’t like his first impression of him as an involved parent, someone who might be wanting too much for his son. That he felt obliged to follow up was in a way a red flag—if intuitively something doesn’t feel right, odds are pretty good that something at the root is wrong.
“I made calls to some people,” he says. “I tried to check things out. It wasn’t so easy with your family moving around the way that you did. I heard from people in Toronto that your father was a real piece of work, high maintenance. Well, there are lots of those. Some of those top teams would have trouble [finding] six players whose parents weren’t really demanding. I didn’t hear anything that made it sound like he could be a danger to you or anyone else.”
Going into that season, Foster was expecting my father to be some sort of headache, but he hoped it would be more of an annoyance than a full-blown migraine. I asked him why he didn’t just avoid dealing with my father completely and tell him he didn’t have a spot on the team for me.
“I’ll give someone a fair shot,” Foster says. “You don’t know what agendas people have when they’re critical of another parent. You have to do your homework, but I was taking it with a grain of salt. It’s not like a workplace with professional references or anything like that. I don’t want to punish a kid—deny him an opportunity—based on what I have second- or third-hand about a parent.”
Foster admitted that he let my father help out as an assistant coach in part because he felt overwhelmed. “I was just happy to have someone help out, and your father seemed to know the game,” he says. “It was my first year coaching. I signed up because my sons were playing and it was a new team, looking for a coach. With my background, I didn’t feel like I could turn my back on them. I didn’t know exactly what I was getting into, [it was] a lot to run a practice with little kids.”
On the ice, all the worst that Foster had heard about my father rang true. Even from the first practice, he started second-guessing his decision to let my father work with the team. “It’s one thing to be serious about coaching, but he just went at it with an intensity that was over the top right from the start,” Foster says. “It was inappropriate. Almost all of it was directed at you. I gave him a lot of latitude that way—too much, now that I look back at it. If he had treated anybody else’s son the way he treated you, I don’t think he would have lasted a practice. In retrospect, I realize that sounds bad. It shouldn’t matter if it’s somebody else’s son or your own. There’s a right way to work with kids and a wrong way. If he was okay with everybody else but wrong with you, then he’s 100 percent wrong . . . not mostly right.”
Teams accommodated my father wherever I played. He made demands of them and cut special deals, getting registration fees cut or tossed aside completely. Every time teams did that, it only encouraged my father to ask for more and to push me harder to play better so that he could ask for even more. Foster was the one coach or organizer who didn’t accommodate my father. When he kicked the two of us out of practice, he was trying to lay down ground rules. Other coaches had felt physically intimidated by my father, who looked and carried himself like a bouncer, but Foster didn’t rattle. “I thought that maybe kicking him off the ice and telling him he was done as a coach with the team might shock him,” Foster says. “I thought he’d ask to come back behind the bench and that it might make him pull back a bit. I knew how important being able to coach you was to him, and I thought having that taken away would straighten him out some. It didn’t work. It seemed to make him that much more intense.”
Foster also told me that he wouldn’t have hesitated to act if he had thought I was in any immediate danger. “I met your mother and your sisters—they didn’t come out as a family as often as the families of other kids did,” he says. “Still, your mother seemed like a nice lady who cared for you and wouldn’t let anything happen to you. I was thinking she was there to strike a balance. As over the top as your father was, she wouldn’t let it get too far, at least that’s what I figured.”
Foster told me that he had gone back through his own reservoir of memory after he had heard the reports about my father going to jail for assaulting me. He wasn’t surprised when the story of the history of abuse surfaced, though he said the “physical stuff” blindsided him. “Your father seemed to have some real issues,” he says. “You hope people get over them, but they probably don’t more often than they do, I guess.”
Nobody I played for knew the game better than Dwight Foster, and no one took less shit from my father. And yet even though he wasn’t intimidated or conned by my father, even though he intuitively sensed that my father had “real issues,” even though he had seen my father go wild-eyed and out of control when he ripped into his eleven-year-old son in practice, Dwight Foster didn’t have any idea about the O’Sullivan family secret. He couldn’t see it, he said, because it was so unlike his own experience in hockey. “Your father wanted you to be the best player in the world,” he says. “I was never the best player [on my teams] coming up. I just kept playing. I never even thought about the draft until my draft year. My father was supportive, but he wasn’t overly involved at all. I was the farthest thing from pressured about playing. I think that’s why I was able to keep playing. I had no expectations, never mind demands. I enjoyed the game and I just kept playing. There were guys who were way ahead of me and they gave up the game the first time they had a bit of adversity. I found out that isn’t how things in the game are anymore . . . not how parents are. Your father was the first one like that I dealt with, but I coached for a while and came across others.”
Again, in contrast to Schnurr, Foster told me that he felt conflicted when my story came out years after. “I do think sometimes if I could have done something different,” he says. “I wondered if I missed something, or if your father was just extra careful not to slip up around me that year. If there had been anything concrete as far as physical abuse goes, I really wouldn’t have had any trouble calling a cop. And he knew that too.”
41
ALVINSTON
I have to admit that when I sat down to write this book, the season I played in Alvinston was a blur. That year, with all the driving across the border to games and practices, the game was just taking up so much time and energy, more than ever before. A lot of the time I felt like I was asleep on my feet. I have a vague recollection of games but can hardly remember any names at all. The only contact I had with anyone from that season came a few years back when I was playing for L.A. and I got a call from Alvinston—the team wanted to know if I could donate a signed sweater for a charity auction. That was it.
The season was a mess. It had looked like I was going to spend another winter with Belle Tire, and I skated with them for a few games, but my father decided that I was done with the program and started to look at teams in the Great Lakes Junior C league. I recalled my father getting me into practices with a couple of teams, but I wasn’t sure which teams those were—it was only when I looked at the le
ague’s website that I remembered skating at practices in Blenheim and on the reserve in Walpole Island. I have to believe that my father had told them that I was fourteen or fifteen to get a tryout and that both teams chased us off when they found out I was only thirteen. My memories of making Alvinston were only a little clearer—I do remember the Flyers being such a weak club that they let me stay on. I couldn’t remember who had been Alvinston’s coach or the manager that season until I called the team. It turned out that Ed Wagner had been the coach and Paul Moffatt the manager.
Because I remembered so little about the season, I could only ask them the obvious question point blank.
“Did you ever have any suspicions about my father abusing me?” I ask.
“Just that one time we pulled you out of the dressing room and asked you about the bruises on your ribs,” Wagner says.
I had no memory of anything like that—not of bruises, not of a conversation—but Moffatt confirmed it.
“One of the players came to us before a practice and said, ‘Patrick has bruises all ’round his ribs.’ It didn’t look like normal stuff, nothing you’d see from a game or anything. We hadn’t had a game recently, and the last time we had, it wasn’t like you had taken a big hit or anything—you probably hadn’t taken a big hit like that, something that would leave bruises all over your ribs, all that season. So we definitely had suspicions about that. So I said, ‘Patrick, where’d you get those?’ I didn’t ask if your father hit you or if someone else did. And you said, ‘Happened in a pickup game.’ Or maybe you said it was skating with another team. But you said it was hockey, nothing other than that. I don’t think anybody believed that those bruises came in a hockey game. They were on both sides of your ribs. They didn’t look like you took one bad check or fall. We weren’t sure that you should even be playing, the way they looked, but you said you were good to go.”
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