“Patrick was our rookie of the year,” he told the reporter from ESPN The Magazine. “John didn’t push him into anything he couldn’t handle. John was very involved in his son’s game but it didn’t seem to be anything more than that.”
Stapleton also said that he didn’t know anything about my father’s conviction for assaulting me.
When I contacted him all these years later, he took a sympathetic tone. Then again, according to David Honsberger, they had recently talked about my year in Strathroy and Honsberger would have mentioned that I’d talked to him about working on a memoir.
“It was pretty disturbing stuff, what I heard about it,” Stapleton said. “If we only could have known we would have done something.
“We didn’t have any contact with anyone from Michigan or Toronto, so we didn’t know anything that had gone on there . . . nothing about John O’Sullivan.”
Stapleton did admit he knew a bit about me from my time in Alvinston, “but not much.” It would seem a little odd to view a thirteen-year-old on the ice in a league with players seven and eight years older as business as usual, even if I came in after the season started and led the team in scoring.
About whether the Alvinston Flyers’ coaches had talked to him about my father, Stapleton maintained that he did no background check. “I only went to one of [your] games down in Alvinston,” he said. “That’s all I needed to see when it came down to making the team next year.”
That sounds quite different from Ed Wagner and Paul Moffatt’s account of Stapleton’s attendance at games on a weekly basis over the years as well as of his contact with the Flyers’ management about players who could be recruited to play for his Strathroy team. It’s hard to believe that Stapleton wouldn’t have asked questions about such an “involved” father. Wagner and Moffatt also said that Stapleton and my father talked regularly in the stands at games in Alvinston, that they were laying out the plans for me to play for the Rockets in the 1999–2000 season.
Stapleton maintained that he didn’t have a lot of contact with my father even when I played for the Rockets that next season. “I didn’t have that much to do with him,” Stapleton said. “He kept to himself . . . stood off down at the one end of the rink, shouting. We didn’t talk on a regular basis.”
According to Stapleton, I wasn’t around enough for anyone to get a read on. “It’s one thing if it’s a boy who’s from the town or nearby . . . if he’s billeting with a family that we know here and gets on the bus with the rest of the team. That’s a player we know something about. But if you have someone coming in just for the game, it’s hard to know anything much about him.”
I asked him if he considered it strange that I wouldn’t stay over in Strathroy with a billet family on weekends when we had games on back-to-back nights. “If it was true, it would be a father caring about his kid,” he says.
I described what Benedetti had said about my out-of-the-ordinary behavior: that I didn’t want to leave the dressing room, that I seemed stressed, that I didn’t celebrate goals, that I was concerned with what my father said. Again, a dead end. “I didn’t see anything like that,” he said.
Finally, I asked him about the report of my father kicking me in the parking lot. “I never heard anything like that,” he said. Suddenly the Strathroy Rockets seemed like such a big organization that one division didn’t know the other one was doing. When he had a hand in everything to do with the team, and when everyone involved in the operation reported directly to him, it’s hard to believe that any report of one his players being kicked by an adult didn’t reach his ear . . . especially if the source of the report was Stapleton’s own longtime friend and scout for the team—that is, a very credible witness.
Stapleton was claiming that he “never heard anything like that” even though Honsberger had told me that he and Stapleton had talked about the report and had tried to remember who had made the report and when it happened. They would have talked only days before I reached Stapleton. If Honsberger has it right, their conversation slipped Stapleton’s mind.
Conversation worked its way around to the present day, to the therapy I was undergoing. Stapleton registered no surprise that I hadn’t received treatment under the direction of any of the NHL teams that I played with.
“Teams don’t do social-work stuff,” he says. “That’s not what the game is about. Players have to look after themselves.”
Again, this was the old school. Stapleton sounded nostalgic about a time long gone, what were better days, he thought. “I didn’t really see that with the parents I met twenty or thirty years ago, back when I was first involved with the Rockets. That’s changed. Maybe it was the money that had something to do with it.”
Stapleton presented it like my father was a harbinger. It was time to get out of the game if he had to deal with people like him. Not worth the hassle. Fact is, however, I was the harbinger—the moral imperative that a coach has to have more than the game on his mind, to be aware of and concerned with his players’ well-being.
Stapleton had a story and he was sticking to it, no matter how the record worked against it, no matter how strained his version of events seemed.
I hate to think that anyone would expect abused kids “to look after themselves,” but I don’t doubt that a lot of coaches and teams believe that “social work” isn’t part of their mandate. It’s an attitude he’d probably share with Schnurr. I can understand how Stapleton would come by that mindset, honestly or not. It would be a generational thing. When he was a kid playing the game back in the fifties, playing in a small town like Strathroy, it might have seemed like there weren’t a lot of kids in trouble, like every family was made of a dutiful father, a loving wife and happy kids. If there were others, they were the unseen, the cursed, those to be avoided like the stigma was infectious.
43
MANTHA
Flint, Michigan, November 2014
The dressing room was quiet. Moe Mantha wasn’t peeling the paint off the walls. He didn’t have that much to say to his team, the Michigan Warriors, a Junior A team in the North American Hockey League. He had given them a couple of days off for Thanksgiving and thought that the boys would come out hard and fast playing at home. Instead his team had flatlined and wound up losing 5–4 to the Coulee Ridge Chill. The players were already dreading the bag skate that was coming. The coach and the owner of the team, Moe, was looking down at his shoes when he left the room and didn’t give me more than a quick glance.
“Can I help you?” he said.
Moe didn’t recognize me. The last time he had seen me I was sixteen, and since then he had coached hundreds of teenagers, so I wasn’t surprised.
“I’m Patrick O’Sullivan.”
It’s like his world came into focus.
“Jesus,” he said. “I’m sorry. Patrick, how are you doing?”
We exchanged a bit of small talk—he asked how my mother was doing and I told him that we were estranged and I had been out of contact with her for years.
Then I explained to him that I was out of hockey and had come to Flint to talk to him for the memoir I was writing.
That caught him off guard. Moe’s a plain-spoken, stand-up guy. He had been out of the USA Hockey program for more than ten years. He’d worked in the Ontario Hockey League, but his job in Windsor blew up because of a team-hazing incident and his career had stalled since. At this point of his life he would be fine flying under the radar. He was worried more about saying something that would reflect badly on others and sound like he was bitter rather than about looking bad himself.
“I guess I know what you want to talk to me about,” he said.
I asked Moe about USA Hockey deciding to offer me a spot in the under-17 category even after the birth certificate forgery.
“Would they have considered doing it if that spot hadn’t opened up when Zach Parise went back to Minnesota?” I asked him.
Moe said the decision wasn’t made of necessity—it had been discussed months bef
ore. “All of us in the program knew all about you,” he said. “Fact is, we had talked to your father and to the agency back when you were playing in Strathroy and just after that season. We were prepared to have a place on the [under-17] team for you as an underager from the start of that season. We were ready to bring you in in September. Your father and the agency said that wasn’t their first choice. Their first choice was you going to the O [the OHL] and playing in the league as a fifteen-year-old. I don’t know if you know that.”
I didn’t. It had never been mentioned to me. I was never asked about what I wanted, and my input wouldn’t have been welcomed anyway. It did seem like my father and the agency were willing to crawl out on the very thin branch of exceptional status, even if it meant passing on a guaranteed opportunity in a positive situation, USA Hockey’s program.
I asked Moe if the coaches and staff had concerns about my father. “Did you ever talk about it?” I asked. “Did you have any idea about the level of abuse that was going on?”
“We had a lot of meetings about you,” Moe said. “We really were trying to figure out what to do. We came close to going to the authorities—if you had stayed on another year in the program and he didn’t change, then I think we would have had to. Something had to give. We made some decisions about what we had to do. You probably weren’t even aware of it, but when we would travel and stay in a hotel, we always made sure that your room was next to the coaches or across the hall. We thought that if there was going to be something going on with your father, we wanted to be around just in case that it went over the top.”
This was the first that I heard about it.
Moe went to say that he took my father aside a few times and that Mike Eaves did the same thing, trying the heart-to-heart approach, as if a one-player-to-another talk might have had an impact on him, flattering him by treating him as an equal and making him see reason. That went nowhere, Moe said. My father let him know that he thought he was the only reason that I had made it this far—that his program mattered more than the program in Ann Arbor. Effectively, he said to their faces that he knew more about the game than all of them did combined.
Moe said that he and Mike Eaves also tried a more direct approach, telling my father to back off or risk pushing me away. “I told him, ‘You’re going to get the bad end of the deal if you keep acting this way,’” Moe said. “I told him, ‘You’re going to lose your retirement plan.’ But he wasn’t listening. Mike went after him when he heard that he made you run home after we lost a game and it was about 10 degrees [Fahrenheit].”
“I didn’t hear anything about that,” I said. “My father wouldn’t have shared that with me.”
“I’m sure there was lots he didn’t tell you . . . That game that we played in Illinois after the under-17s in Nova Scotia, when he drove all the way there and back . . . Right then we knew that we were dealing with a guy who wasn’t normal. And that game in Danville, he was worse than he had ever been. In the intermission you guys came off the ice and went to the dressing room. I didn’t bother even going in to talk to you guys. I told him, ‘This has got to stop. Shut the fuck up. This is a national program . . . not just a local team. You’re not going to do this. And Patrick is riding home with us on the bus after the game.’”
That stood out in my memory: it was one of the few times all year that I actually rode with the team. I’d never put it together that it was Moe standing up to my father, trying to draw a line with him in a futile exercise.
“What did you know about the physical abuse?” I asked.
“That something was happening,” Moe said. “We’d see you come into the dressing room with marks on your face. A couple of times it was really bad. A couple of times players came to us and said that there was something going on. The one time I saw your father pull up in the parking lot from our offices. I went out in the lobby of the arena, grabbed him and pinned him. I said to him, ‘If you want to hit somebody, hit me. Hit a man. Don’t hit your kid.’”
I had known that my father pushed Moe’s buttons, but also that my father would have gone only so far with someone in Moe’s position. He wasn’t going to do anything that was going to hurt my stock in the draft—at least he thought he wasn’t doing anything that would. If he hauled off and hit Moe and there were charges laid, I’d be gone from the program—either he’d pull me out or USA Hockey would throw me out or both.
No, my father would come up to the line and not cross it—with everyone else but me.
“When I heard what had happened, I wasn’t surprised,” Moe says. “It was easy to believe what they were saying about him and him going to jail. I honestly thought it was going to happen sooner or later.”
But that’s the inconsistency. It wasn’t just that he thought it was going to happen. He knew it was happening. If he thought it was going to reach the level of it being criminal assault, why didn’t he try to stop it from going that far? Moe wasn’t afraid of my father physically. He would call out my father. He did what should have been the hardest thing—confronting my father.
“Why didn’t you call authorities, even if you couldn’t be sure?” I asked.
“Honestly, we were really close to doing something,” Moe said. He sounded sheepish, apologetic. “If it had been another season that you were back in the program, I’m pretty sure that it was going to come to that. We thought he would come around . . .”
Like Schnurr, Moe Mantha said that times and values have altered in the years since I played for him. “I think now times have changed and we’d be a lot more aware of stuff,” he said. “Things that you could get away with then you couldn’t get away. I know that I would handle a situation like yours differently.”
So now a kid who is coming to the arena with black eyes and bruises will trip alarms; coaches and other adults involved with a team will get law enforcement involved. Now they’ll intervene and try to protect the interests of someone who is as obviously being abused by a parent. Maybe now Moe would handle things differently—just saying that he would felt like an admission that he should have made the call.
Moe said that my experience changed how he looks at the kids he’s coaching now. That all the people he worked with at USA Hockey were changed by what they saw when I was in the under-17 program and what they heard happened to me less than a year after I left Ann Arbor for the IceDogs. I think people would reexamine their attitudes about kids at risk of abuse if they could hear the regret and remorse in Moe Mantha’s voice when he said that.
44
WASHKURAK
Toronto, Ontario, November 2014
You’d presume that a professional who had worked with victims of abuse would have recognized the red flags in my case. And you’d presume it was my bad luck that my path never crossed with someone who fit that profile. Yet I saw just that sort of professional on an almost daily basis when I was in Mississauga.
Joe Washkurak was an assistant coach for Don Cherry. At the same time, he held down a day job as a social worker specializing in crisis intervention. Eighty percent of his caseload focused on victims of domestic violence, hundreds of them over his career.
I’ll be forever grateful for the role he filled back in January 2002 and during the months after. He helped me clear out of the townhouse I shared with Barry and get settled with the Tanel family. He took charge of security with the team and at the arenas that season. Most of all, he was the best sounding board that I had with the IceDogs’ management. He understood at some level, better than others, better than me, that even my father’s conviction and restraining order didn’t put an end to everything—nothing was fixed. He knew better than anyone I saw on a daily basis back then that I had a chance to heal but only over time.
Joe was behind the bench only that one season with the IceDogs. He was always an energetic, constantly positive guy—in a brutal year for the team, we needed someone like that around. I hadn’t talked to him in about five years, and while he was in a different line of work, he hadn’t changed i
n that time.
“I remember on draft day John brought in four funky ties, passed them around and gave Don one,” Washkurak said. “He seemed like a good guy. That first day we all thought that. Maybe Don and Trevor knew more about him, but he made a pretty good impression. He wanted to talk hockey and clearly knew the game. I had a sense that he was really proud of you. I remember your mom was there and she seemed supportive, and your little sisters were quiet but well behaved.”
Washkurak said that a lot went into the IceDogs’ decision to draft me, one of those things being that they considered parents of some other top prospects even more involved than my father. “Some of them were real nutshows,” he said and rattled off names. Washkurak said that one prospect’s father laid out his demands for money, a car and a leased home, all off the books, none of it guaranteeing that demands were going to stop there or that his son would stick with the team for the long haul or even until Christmas.
“We looked into all of the family situations of the top players,” Washkurak said. “You have to when you’re looking at having a relationship to a player for years. And your family issues might not have been the norm, but they weren’t rare either. Don’s brother Richard had gone out to see you a bunch of times and spoke to your father there. Don had gone to games too, went with Pat Morris and Mark Guy. We wanted to see you for sure, but also we wanted to get a sense of him. We were more concerned with him [than we were concerned with you], really. We knew that he didn’t really have grounding, an education or a good job. We knew that part was rocky. What did your father do? A super in a building? Maintenance worker? Clearly, you were the best thing he had going, and your prospects were a helluva lot brighter than his. All that plus we had heard from around the Ann Arbor program that John was really hard on you. I remember that you could hear him in the crowd. It was crazy, but still, the physical stuff we never dreamt about.”
Breaking Away Page 24
