Once the Nordiques passed, we figured our best chance for the selection was the Blackhawks. As Abbott predicted, the Maple Leafs passed on me to take Scott Pearson at number six, and then the Los Angeles Kings took Martin Gélinas at number seven. The Blackhawks then called a timeout, and general manager Bob Pulford spent some time talking to Buffalo general manager Gerry Meehan before going to the podium to announce they were taking me with the eighth pick.
In the next day’s Chicago Tribune, sportswriter Mike Kiley revealed that Pulford believed he had a trade made with the Sabres that would have involved Chicago moving from number eight to number 13.
“I was really mad and disappointed the deal wasn’t made,” Pulford told Kiley.
Kiley’s analysis was that the Blackhawks were willing to give up a veteran player and flop picks for either centre John Tucker or Adam Creighton. Pulford told Kiley that Meehan had changed his mind because he believed he could get the prospect he wanted with the number-13 pick. “And he didn’t get that kid,” Pulford told Kiley.
The best guess would be that the Sabres wanted to take either Brind’Amour, who went ninth to St. Louis, or Teemu Selanne, who was drafted 10th by Winnipeg. The Sabres picked Savage, who ended up playing just three NHL games.
After the draft, it came out that, had the Blackhawks made that trade, they would not have been able to draft me because the Devils were planning to take me with the 12th pick.
Based on his quotes to the media at the draft, you could tell that Pulford wasn’t completely sold on me.
“He can skate like Denis Savard, but the risk is he’s played high school hockey and never played at a higher competition level,” Pulford told Kiley.
Jack Davison was Chicago’s assistant general manager. He pushed for me to be the team’s eighth selection, and through the years I’ve been told that he said he would quit if they didn’t select me. He had watched me play at the World Junior Championship in Moscow six months before and apparently liked what he saw. “The first two games in Moscow, he was right there on a par with Mike Modano,” Davison told Kiley. Davison told the media he thought I had an outside chance to make the Blackhawks next season if I signed. “He looks like a quick learner. A few players have made that jump from high school, players like Bobby Carpenter.”
Abbott had prepared me to deal with the media. What I wanted to say was that I wanted to play in Chicago the following season. What I told the media was “I’ll do whatever the Blackhawks want. I have scholarship offers from Boston College and Boston University, and I’ll go to one of those schools if they want, or I’ll go play in major juniors if they want.”
One of the funniest aspects of the Tribune story is that Kiley said I weighed 179 pounds. Another story about the draft stated I weighed 170. Clearly, Neil’s propaganda campaign had worked to perfection. I think it’s fair to say that no one in the hockey world had any idea how much I weighed. The CIA could not have done a better job of covering up my weight than Neil did.
When the Blackhawks indicated they wanted to sign me right away, I was far more excited than Neil was. But Neil felt strongly about education and really wanted me to consider going to college. He had represented Lawton, and he wondered whether Lawton would have been better served by going to college rather than jumping from high school to the NHL. He believed the money would be there if I waited, and he thought there might even be more money if I waited. Plus, I would have more time to grow and get stronger.
Neil’s first objective was to get me out of high school. Remember, I was a junior when I was drafted. We met with the headmaster at Thayer and worked out a plan for me to finish my high school course work by taking summer classes at Boston College. No one was more ready to leave high school than I was. Tony Amonte had been drafted by the New York Rangers 68th overall, and he planned to play college hockey. But he didn’t try to expedite his high school exodus.
Although Neil wanted me to play college hockey, the Blackhawks didn’t love that plan. Even in 1988, there were NHL teams that believed that college hockey didn’t help quality prospects. But that didn’t mean Pulford was going to open the vault to pay me. We found out very early in my career that Pulford was a stubborn negotiator. He offered me a three-year contract paying $90,000 the first year, $95,000 the second and $100,000 the third. There would also be a $50,000 signing bonus. Neil believed that to be an average offer, which further convinced him I should play college hockey.
I followed his advice. I had a drawer full of college offers, and there probably wasn’t a college team that didn’t want me. But I enrolled at Boston College, mostly because it was close to home and because the Eagles were a quality team.
After I moved into the dorm, before classes started, it really seemed as if I had made the proper decision. I hung my Cheryl Tiegs and Bobby Orr posters on the wall and attended a few parties. It felt as if I would fully enjoy life as a college student.
Then, right before school started, Boston College coach Len Ceglarski asked me to stop by his office. When I showed up, he sat me down and told me he had a problem that he needed me to help him fix. He said he had more quality recruits than he had scholarships. “And we want to take care of everybody,” he said.
He explained to me that the solution he had come up with was to ask the football team to give me a scholarship as a placekicker. The idea was that I would practise with the hockey team, and then on Saturdays I would kick for the football team if I could win the job. At Thayer, I had been the kicker for the football team. In practice, I could boot 45-yard field goals.
Initially, I was flattered by the Ceglarski plan. Then, as I was discussing it with Tracy, I began to feel insulted that I was now technically a walk-on for the hockey team. But there wasn’t time to think about it too much because classes started the next morning. My course work was starting with a math class at eight o’clock in the morning in a large lecture hall. Arriving 10 minutes early, I found a seat in the middle section. I had a bag full of books that I had already purchased for all of my classes.
The room filled quickly, and the professor didn’t waste time as he walked in and started handing out papers to be passed down the aisles.
“This,” the professor said, “is your syllabus.”
I was totally confused. I had no idea what he was talking about. I had never heard of a fucking syllabus. I didn’t know what the word meant.
“Are we getting tested?” I asked the girl next to me.
“No, the syllabus is the course outline,” she said.
When the professor’s syllabus arrived at my seat, it was several pages in length. It had the weight of a short novel. Looking down, I could see a class schedule that read: “Quiz. Quiz. Test. Oral. Paper. Quiz. Mid-Term. Test. Quiz. Quiz. Quiz. Test . . .” The workload seemed to go on fucking forever.
That professor’s syllabus blew me away. Since then, I have actually hated the word “syllabus.” Five minutes into my college education, I stood up, handed the syllabus to the girl next to me and asked her to return it to the professor.
“Have a nice time in this class,” I told her as I hustled down the stairs.
I just left them in the classroom. I ran out of the room, bolted out the door, ran across the quad and found a pay phone. I dropped a quarter into the slot and called Neil.
“Neil, have you talked to the Blackhawks today?” I asked.
“Yes,” Neil said. “There is no change in their offer. They aren’t budging.”
“Neil, let’s take their offer,” I said.
“But Jeremy, we said no to this contract the entire summer,” Neil protested.
“Yes,” I said, “but this entire summer I had never heard of the word ‘syllabus.’ Now I’ve seen a syllabus and I’ve got to get the fuck out of here because this school shit isn’t for me. I’m not a student. I’m a fucking hockey player.”
As I recall, Neil squeezed an extra $5,000 per season out of the Blackhawks, meaning I would be paid $95,000 in the first season, then $100,000 and
later $105,000. The signing bonus was still $50,000.
At the time, my dad was making $90,000 working for Mobil Oil, and I remember thinking I must be doing pretty well if I’m making more than my father.
That night, Neil and I were on a plane from Boston to Chicago. The Blackhawks’ training camp had already started, and Neil prepared me as if he were readying me for a championship fight. He told me to be the aggressor.
“You have to demand respect,” he told me. “If someone fucks with you, you fuck with them.”
That was the language he used. Neil had put fear into me like I had never known before. It felt like I was going off to war.
When I entered the Chicago dressing room for the first time, it was like a scene from a World War II movie where the young recruit is trying to fit into a platoon of combat-hardened veterans. Everyone in that room looked like they had seen plenty of action. I had never had a stitch or broken bone in my life, and many of the Chicago players seemed to have scars all over their bodies, plus several missing teeth. To a kid who was an 11th-grader four months before, the Chicago players seemed like old men. Denis Savard and Steve Thomas were sharing a cigarette in the corner of the room. With his receding hairline, Bob Murray looked old enough to be my grandfather. My grandfather had more hair than Murray had. Daniel Vincelette looked like the NHL’s version of Sasquatch. He was the hairiest fucking man I had ever seen.
It was intimidating for me to dress in the same locker room with these guys. I was shaving every couple of months, and these guys looked like they needed to shave every three hours. The only hair on my body was on the top of my head. There was no need for manscaping at that point in my life. I went into the shower room with my clothes on and was mostly dressed before I came out.
Weightlifting was starting to catch on in those days, and some of the Blackhawks had chiselled bodies. Keith Brown was in impressive shape. Vincelette was fucking ripped. I had tried to add some weight over the summer, but going from 155 to 158 pounds was the best I could do. I still had no guns or definition on my body.
As I stepped onto the ice for my first scrimmage, I wondered what I had gotten myself into. Then, I saw Neil in the stands, waving wildly at me. As I skated closer, I could hear him yelling: “Get the shield off. Get the shield off.”
Then I realized I was the only one on the ice wearing a face mask and the only one who had a mouthguard. I immediately skated to the bench, removed my cage, spit out my mouthguard and asked someone to fetch me another helmet.
When I started that game, I was scared to death I was going to get hit in the face by a puck. I soon discovered that flying pucks were the least of my concerns. Early in the scrimmage, I lifted Rick Vaive’s stick and stole the puck. His response was a slash across my leg. Remembering what Neil told me, I answered with a retaliatory slash across his body. It was like a baseball swing at his arm and torso. Vaive was so startled by my reaction that he didn’t do anything. He was a former 50-goal scorer with the Toronto Maple Leafs, and he certainly didn’t expect an 18-year-old punk to be swinging at him as if he were a piñata. Later, in the dressing room, Vaive got in my face and told me never to fucking slash him again. I apologized profusely, but I didn’t regret it. Neil had been right. After I went crazy on Vaive, no one bothered me again in a scrimmage.
After my first scrimmage, Neil and I had a meeting with owner Bill Wirtz and Pulford. We received the cheque for $50,000. Then I had to go through the battery of tests that the other players had been subjected to on their first day of camp. When I was finished, Neil and I talked about how I should handle myself in training camp. Time got away from us, and there wasn’t a soul around when we exited Chicago Stadium at Gate 3½. That was a mistake, because the area around Chicago Stadium wasn’t a friendly environment in those years. It was considered dangerous to the point that taxis wouldn’t come to that part of town. It felt like a fucking war zone.
As soon as we were standing on Madison Street, Neil looked worried. We were both dressed in suits, and Neil was carrying a briefcase containing my cheque for $50,000. We ducked into a convenience store, and a clerk behind thick bulletproof glass stared at us as if we were aliens that had just walked through his front door. Neil was just trying to figure out if there was a way we could call a taxi, but the clerk just shook his head and laughed.
At that point, we began talking about trying to hoof it back to our hotel. No one was paying much attention to us. But then a younger man approached us. He kept eyeing Neil’s briefcase.
“You are two crazy fucking white boys being out here right now,” he said, laughing. “If I didn’t have somewhere to be, I would be stealing that briefcase.”
As he started to walk away, he added: “But see the guy coming toward you down there? He is going to knife your ass and steal everything you have.”
Neil’s eyes popped almost out of his fucking head. Neil is a very skittish and worrisome man. He has always been very protective of me. He may have soiled his pants at that moment. But he acted in a big way. Seeing a CTA bus coming down West Madison, he ran into the middle of the street and held up his arms in front of it. The bus came to a screeching halt. My memory of Neil stopping that bus is similar to the photo of that man in front of the tank in China’s Tiananmen Square. The doors opened, and the driver started screaming to Neil, “You crazy, man—you could have been killed.”
Meanwhile, Neil was motioning for me to climb onto the bus. When we were on the bus, he told the driver that if she turned it around and took us back to our hotel inside the Loop, he would give her $100. In less than a minute, the bus was headed in the direction Neil wanted it to go. There was one passenger on the bus, an elderly woman, and Neil handed her a hundred-dollar bill for her trouble.
That night, Neil reminded me again that I had a long way to go to prove I was an NHL player. Although I had made a statement to my teammates through my encounter with Vaive, I had a long way to go to earn Keenan’s respect. The baseline for my relationship with Keenan was established in my second NHL preseason game, against the Minnesota North Stars in Kalamazoo, Michigan, when Keenan literally came close to strangling me on the bench.
As a prep school player, I had helped my team with my offensive ability. At that point in my development, hockey, to me, seemed to be about speed and skating. Because I was fast, my high school opponents couldn’t catch me. I had never concerned myself with the physical side of the game. It didn’t seem like trying to run someone over was an effective use of my energy. If I was chasing an opponent with the puck, and he moved it before I reached him, I would spin around without ever finishing that check.
What I learned in Kalamazoo was that my habit constituted sinful behaviour as far as Keenan was concerned.
On one of my early shifts, I was chasing a defenceman in the neutral zone, and when he moved the puck I peeled off and chased it back into my zone. Within seconds of my leaving the ice, Keenan had come down the bench, reached around me and dug his hands into my neck, pulling me back so his face could be directly in front of mine.
“If you pass by one more fucking hit in this fucking game, you will never play another fucking game in this league,” Keenan screamed at me.
He may actually have been even more profane than that.
“Do you understand me?” he asked, as he pushed his face in even closer to mine.
“Yes, sir,” I said. Came close to bawling right there on the bench. Tears definitely welled up in my eyes.
Probably, a U.S. marine could relate to this story, because having Keenan screaming at me in the middle of an exhibition game would probably be like having your sergeant yelling at you while you are trying to crawl through an obstacle course.
That encounter with Keenan was probably one of the defining moments of my career, because it steered me toward embracing a style of play that would allow me to play two decades in the NHL. At that point, I was afraid of Keenan, and afraid that my hockey career was going to be dead before it began. On my next shift, I threw my 1
58 pounds at every opponent I could reach. I tried to crush opponents who were 50 pounds heavier than me because I feared Keenan more than I feared injury. What I quickly discovered is that I was born to play hockey like I was a human battering ram. Each time I hit someone, I became more convinced I could survive, even thrive, playing that style even if I wasn’t the biggest player on the roster. Playing like the Tasmanian Devil on the ice gave me confidence and earned me respect around the NHL. Chicago fans loved that style, and that high-energy output instantly became my trademark.
But I also learned that just playing with energy wasn’t enough to earn you a place on an NHL team’s roster. After making the Blackhawks coming out of training camp in 1988–89, I went pointless in my first three regular-season games. Keenan called me into his office and told me that I wasn’t ready yet to play in the NHL.
At the time, I was devastated. Keenan made an effort to be compassionate, noting that he felt I was close to being ready. But he said he believed I would benefit from playing with players closer to my age. I had been drafted by both Sault Ste. Marie in the Ontario Hockey League and Hull in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League, and it was decided I would play in Quebec because it would be easier for my parents to come and see me.
It was the right call on Keenan’s part, because my confidence grew and my game improved playing in the Quebec League. Alain Vigneault, now behind the bench for the Vancouver Canucks, was my coach in Hull. I liked him because he was like Keenan—tough and direct. I had 34 goals and 36 assists for 70 points in 28 games for Hull. I went off to the World Junior Championship and played well for the USA.
The Hull team had an exceptionally fun group of guys, including Stéphane Matteau, who remains one of my close friends. Cam Russell was on that team, and he and I ended up being buddies. Jason Glickman was the goalie. When I was with the New Jersey Rockets and we beat the Chicago Young Americans for the bantam national championship, they had a top player in Joe Suk, and he was on the Hull team. Future NHL defenceman Karl Dykhuis, who had come up through the junior ranks in Quebec, was on the team. Speedy Martin Gélinas, who went on to have a lengthy NHL career, was my winger. These guys knew how to have fun, and they knew how to play practical jokes on rookies.
J.R.: My Life as the Most Outspoken, Fearless, and Hard-Hitting Man in Hockey Page 4
