Hockey Towns

by Ron MacLean

  The team was now called the Niagara Falls Canucks. Al coached with a professional attitude. He had four assistants, and they all wore suits. They kept stats, goals, assists, plus/minus, shots, checks and faceoffs. Al fostered Zenon’s competitiveness. Unlike most coaches, Al was no bag skater. He worked on systems and encouraged his players to follow them. Under his guidance, the team won the OMHA minor bantam championship that year.

  Zenon was drafted in the fifth round by the Ottawa 67’s, one of the best teams in the country. They had twelve returning forwards, plus three guys in the draft ahead of him. They’d lost in the OHL finals two years in a row. Brian “Killer” Kilrea’s team was full of top-line guys, guys like Mike Bell, Matt Zultek, Dan Tessier, Justin Davis. Knowing he didn’t have a prayer of making it, Zenon headed for camp anyway.

  Kilrea was looking for guys who were a little unconventional, maybe even a bit of trouble, but who got the job done. A lot of people thought Killer wanted tough guys, but what he wanted was guys who were tough-skinned. He’d yell and scream and swear, and he needed players who could take it. And when two forwards broke their hands at camp, miraculously, Zenon was in. His first year there, the 67’s won the Memorial Cup. His third year, they won the OHL championship, and his final year, 2001–02, he led the league in assists.

  Zenon went from the OHL to the American League, with the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins, and then the Wheeling Nailers of the ECHL, under coach John Brophy, and back to the AHL. But Zenon wasn’t a great skater. He had to work hard to catch up to the speed of the game. He knew the only way he’d be able to stick around was to fight. That was fine—he was young and invincible.

  He still refused to talk much about Big Zee and used his anger to scrap his way through. And then one day he got the tap. The Anaheim Mighty Ducks called him up. That’s when it hit him that, if somebody had asked Big Zee, “Would you give your life for your son to play in the NHL?” he would’ve said, “Yeah, take it.” In Zenon’s head, he felt his dad had literally died so that he could have a great life and play in the NHL. He was going to take that gift and make his dad proud.

  With the girls and Zenon moved out, Arlene decided to sell the farm. As she was packing up, she walked into Zenon’s room and saw the little NHL sign he had made after the funeral. She smiled and pulled it off the wall. There was something written on the back. She turned it over and read, “I will make it to the NHL.”

  After a nine-year NHL career with the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, Columbus Blue Jackets, Tampa Bay Lightning, New York Islanders, Ottawa Senators, Minnesota Wild and Buffalo Sabres, Zenon signed with a professional team in Poland—KH Sanok—in February 2015. The team competes in the country’s top league, Polska Hokej Liga. Zenon’s grandmother Katarzyna was born in Sanok. It’s two and a half hours from Lviv, the home stolen from his family seventy-five years earlier, when the Russians showed up on a cold winter’s night.

  Castlegar

  BRITISH COLUMBIA

  POPULATION:

  7,816

  The Role Player

  Marcel Dionne has strong ties to St. Catharines from his time on the St. Catharines Black Hawks. One night I was out to referee an OHA Junior C game in Glanbrook Township, and Marcel was in the lobby. He was helping coach Chippewa.

  “Look at that guy, always smiling,” he said, referring to me.

  In one simple phrase, the Hall of Fame player lifted me to that place that a compliment takes a person. Marcel had that gift. In Los Angeles, he took rookies Luc Robitaille, Steve Duchesne and Jimmy Carson under his wing. He made Charlie Simmer and Dave Taylor stars.

  Dionne was a spectacular player, a team player, wise and fun, and like Jason Dorland, known for helping others on the same boat including a young rookie named Steve Bozek.

  The “Old Barn” in Castlegar in the 1960s and ’70s was a half oval shared with the curling club. The roof wasn’t really solid—kids would show up to play and get rained out. Sometimes they played anyway, but the rain made the ice lumpy, so the dads and the caretaker would be chopping away at it before the whistle.

  You’d walk into the building and the smell would punch you in the nose—popcorn, hot dogs and hot chocolate, mixed with old wood, chest protectors, pants, gloves, shin guards and skates. It got more pungent as you neared the dressing rooms, which made your heart race with excitement.

  There was no glass along the boards, just wire mesh behind the goals, and there was hardly any seating, so most of the dads stood and yelled from the sidelines.

  Steve Bozek lived next door to his best friend, Brian Verigin. They met when they were five and they grew up together. Castlegar winters are too warm now, but back then the Verigins always had a rink in their backyard. When it snowed, Steve was the Tom Sawyer of the group. He’d watch out his window for Brian to finish shovelling, and then he’d head out. There was a whole group of five or six guys who were fairly good hockey players—Steve, Brian, Bruce Martin, Gordy Pace and Dave Kanigan. In most small towns, friends do what their friends do.

  At seven fifteen every Sunday morning, they’d get up and head down to the Barn. They’d walk into the pitch black, and one of the parents would feel around for the power panel to turn the lights on. The ice would get brighter and brighter, and after about five minutes you could see the puck. It was so cold in the rink that after practice when the boys loosened their skates, their feet would burn so much they’d get tears in their eyes.

  Steve’s dad, Big John, was a pipe fitter at the Castlegar pulp mill. There were always things bursting, and he was the guy responsible for fixing them. He wasn’t a big guy—five foot ten, 170 pounds—and he was a bit of a curmudgeon. He wasn’t a smoker either, but in the locker room and behind the bench, he’d walk around with a rolled-up paper napkin and put it between his lips and puff away. Legendary habs GM Sam Pollock did that too. Big John didn’t believe in the reward system. He was old school that way, strict and regimented. He worked a lot on fundamentals and conditioning and was ahead of his time in believing that skating made the difference. You had to be able to know how to stop and turn both ways. His philosophy was put yourself in good position and skate well, outlast the other team, and you will win. Basic hockey.

  Big John coached Steve and his group of friends on the rep team all the way through from the time they were eight to when they were twelve. The rep team was made up of all the best players from house league. Like a lot of fathers, he figured if he was going to take his kid down to the rink, he might as well do something useful.

  In the 1970s, the defencemen were the bigger, less mobile kind of athletes who hacked and whacked and cross-checked guys, and coaches would put the guy who couldn’t skate in net. Being really agile and able to get in and out of the corners was Steve’s ticket. He was wind on ice, but he didn’t have size, so Big John cut steel, weighed it and welded a set of homemade weights together for him, and he shellacked Steve’s skates to protect his toes.

  By the time they got to Grade 12, both Steve and Brian had tried out for a couple of major junior teams, but neither wanted to take the path through the WHL. They both wanted to continue their education. So they wrote to all kinds of universities to try to get scholarships. Nobody replied—the University of Denver, Colorado College . . . nobody.

  By this time, the town had a new rink, and Mark Pezzin had been recruited to start up a junior team, the Castlegar Rebels. He pulled the five boys up from midget onto his roster and they won the Kootenay International Junior League championship in their inaugural year and the next year as well.

  Pezzin heard that Northern Michigan University in Marquette, Michigan, was starting up a Division I hockey program. He reached out to Rick Comley, the coach, and told him he had a couple of players who were really good, especially one of his defencemen, Brian Verigin. He told Comley these boys wanted to go to college but nobody had yet seen them. Comley, who didn’t have a full-time assistant coach, had to make the most of his time and money. He’d had some luck recruiting five kids from a tea
m in Bramalea, Ontario. In fact, Donny Waddell was his first recruit—he’s now the president of the Carolina Hurricanes. Comley felt that finding pockets of kids would make it easier to get his program off the ground, so he decided to take a chance and sent a young graduate assistant named Rod Hooktwith to see the boys. Rod flew to Spokane and was supposed to make the three-hour drive straight north to Castlegar when Comley got a call. “Coach, I’m trying to get to Castlegar, but I have to go up through this mountain pass and they won’t let me without tire chains. What should I do?” Comley said, “Well, get some chains on the damn tires, then.”

  Rod made it to the arena, and during the second period Comley got another call. “Coach, I like Verigin a lot, I think he’s going to be a good player, but there’s another kid here that I think is a can’t-miss player.” He was talking about Steve.

  Comley made the drive during the playoffs to see for himself. Were Castlegar and this Bozek kid the little gold mine his junior assistant said they were?

  By the end of the first game, he was convinced. Bozek was young and still growing and maturing, but his skating ability was something else. While everyone else on the ice worked to get from point A to point B, for Bozek there was no effort at all. He could change direction without changing speed, and his lateral movement was as fast as his straight-ahead skating. He was so shifty that you’d think you had him when all of a sudden he was gone at full speed in a different direction.

  Comley saw Steve as a new wave of player with the dynamic of a Richard or a Lafleur. The game is just so much easier for players who have the luxury of that kind of talent. Steve and Brian jumped at the chance to play for the only school offering them a scholarship.

  Steve was in great shape. In some ways, he frustrated the other players because he never got tired. They’d be gasping for air and he was ready to skate another hour. He could run, he could skate and he had brains. On the ice, he could see the opportunities shaping up. It seemed he was always in the right place at the right time.

  The second year, Comley went back to Castlegar and recruited the other boys—Gordie Pace, Bruce Martin and Dave Kanigan—and the Castlegar boys became a strong nucleus of the Northern Michigan Wildcats. That year, they finished 34–6–1, taking the Central Collegiate Hockey Association regular-season championship and the CCHA playoff tournament championship. They were on their way to the NCAA Frozen Four.

  They played North Dakota in the championship game. Northern Michigan had beaten UND twice just after Christmas in Marquette, even though five players on North Dakota’s roster would be taken in the NHL draft. But Comley had a big problem— his goalie, Steve Weeks, had pulled a hamstring the weekend before in Minnesota.

  There was a game on Thursday, a game on Friday and then the championship game on Saturday. North Dakota played Thursday and won, so they rested until Saturday. The Wildcats played the top-seeded team, Cornell, on Friday. The game was very physical, but the Wildcats won, and so they met North Dakota on Saturday in what was one of the first major championships to be televised on the brand new ESPN network.

  Weeks was hurt, but he gave it his all. The Wildcats fell behind and battled back, pulling ahead 4–2, but just couldn’t pull it off in the end.

  In 1980–81, Jeff Pyle, another tremendous college player, and Steve both had about ninety points, and Northern Michigan made it to the Frozen Four again, this time losing to Wisconsin in the semifinals.

  But Bozek was drafted and Pyle had an offer to play pro. Sitting in a hotel room in Duluth, Minnesota, after getting beaten a second year in a row in the Frozen Four, Comley asked the boys what they were going to do. They insisted they were coming back. The fourth year was going to be the ticket. But the pros were dangling money in front of them. Steve was offered $65,000 to join the Los Angeles Kings, and in the end he took it.

  At Steve’s first training camp in 1981, Charlie Simmer broke his ankle, so Steve was put up on left wing with Dave Taylor and Marcel Dionne. He had twenty-seven goals in the first thirty-four games. His coach, Parker MacDonald, had him flying, but the team wasn’t winning, and so MacDonald was fired in January. Don Perry came in. He was a coach who insisted on positional play. Perry wanted Steve to just go up and down, up and down, up and down. He told Steve it would cost him a hundred dollars any time he ventured more than six lengths away from the left wing boards. This changed Steve’s game completely, and he scored only six goals the rest of the year.

  Dionne ended the season with 117 points, but that was the year Gretzky scored 92 goals and had 215 points. An average game between the Kings and Edmonton would result in a solid thrashing—Edmonton 8, Kings 3.

  Steve was a rookie. Bernie Nicholls was a rookie. Daryl Evans was a rookie. Doug Smith was a rookie. But when they came up against Edmonton in the first round of the playoffs, they had somehow convinced themselves they were good enough to go up against Gretzky, Glenn Anderson, Paul Coffey, Mark Messier, Jari Kurri, Kevin Lowe, Dave Hunter, Lee Fogolin, Dave Semenko, Charlie Huddy, Randy Gregg, Grant Fuhr, Andy Moog and Ron Low.

  That confidence carried the Kings into a win in Game One of the 1982 Stanley Cup preliminary round, 10–8, in Edmonton. They lost the second game and headed back home to the Forum, which was located on Manchester Boulevard in Inglewood. On April 10, in Game Three, Edmonton had a point to prove and started pounding on the Kings. The Oilers were up 5–0 going into the third period. The Forum was already half empty when the Kings just started picking away. A goal here, another there. And before you knew it, the team had momentum. They got some breaks and started scoring. With four seconds left, Steve was standing right in front of the net and a shot came in. It came back to him and he backhanded it in to tie the game, 5–5. And then Evans scored in overtime. The Kings’ Miracle on Manchester is still talked about by the old purple-and-gold fans. It stands as the biggest comeback in NHL playoff history.

  The fourth game was a squeaker, 3–2 for the Oilers.

  The Los Angeles Kings had so little faith in the team that they never dreamed there would be a fifth game, so there was no flight booked. This meant they had to join the Oilers on their charter flight back to Edmonton. It was about 3 a.m. as they waited together at the airport. Like at a high school dance, the Oilers sat on one side of the lounge with the Kings on the other. The Kings boarded first, heading to the back of the plane, and the Oilers sat at the front. It was a very, very silent plane ride.

  The Kings took that fifth and final game 7–4, eliminating the Oilers from the playoffs. Steve closed out his rookie season with fifty-six points. He was traded to the Calgary Flames two years later, where Bob Johnson was the coach. Bob coined the term “role player” while talking about Steve. If everybody was healthy, Steve sat out, but as soon as somebody got hurt—and there are always going to be injuries—Steve was in at centre, or left wing or right wing, and the team didn’t lose a step.

  And then Johnson realized that, because of Steve’s skating ability, he’d be a great penalty killer. He could hound the puck and take away time. Bob Johnson was a great teacher, an Xs-and-Os guy.

  When Terry Crisp took over the team in 1987, he had an advantage—everyone knew how to play, knew their positions and knew their role. Terry was more of a yeller, a screamer. It was his way of motivating. He grabbed the reins of a team where all the pieces had come together, a team that was playoff hardened, and he took them over the goal line. But Steve wasn’t the kind of hard-nosed player that Terry seemed to like. Gary Roberts was Terry’s kind of guy. One night in Edmonton, when Steve was sitting out, he watched Gary go toe to toe with Mark Messier and he knew right then and there that he would never see the ice again.

  Meanwhile, his teammate Brett Hull had battled his entire life to overcome the shadow of his dad, Bobby. Brett had played in Penticton of the B.C. Junior Hockey League and got a scholarship, scored fifty goals at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, got signed by Calgary and turned pro in ’86 during the finals against Montreal. Everybody recognized his talent, but he wasn’
t considered a team guy, and because the Flames had so many good veterans, the fit wasn’t there.

  So on March 7, 1988, Brett Hull and Steve Bozek went to St. Louis for Rob Ramage and Rick Wamsley. Steve played ten games, but Ron Caron wanted him to take a pay cut. Steve didn’t really understand why. The team had a fairly good run in the playoffs, beating Chicago, and all he heard was, “We want you to be a part of our future.” He was making $185,000 and Ron wanted him to take $170,000. Steve was three days from moving into a new house in St. Louis when all of a sudden he got a call from Flames general manager Cliff Fletcher, who had just traded him six months earlier. Cliff told him he had just traded tough guys Mike Bullard, Tim Corkery and Craig Coxe to St. Louis for Doug Gilmour and Mark Hunter, along with a big defensive prospect named Michael Dark. He said he wasn’t sure what had happened down in St. Louis, but Ron Caron wanted Steve included in the trade. “I have to take you back,” he said.

  Steve said, “What does that mean? What are you going to do?” Fletcher said, “We’re going to try to move you right away.”

  “Well, what if you can’t move me?” Steve asked. Cliff said, “Well, then, you’ll be coming to camp as a Calgary Flame.”

  Steve got off the phone and called the movers. He said, “Don’t unload anything. Keep it on the truck. I don’t know where it’s going.” An hour later, he heard from Pat Quinn, who told him he was now a Vancouver Canuck. Steve belonged to three teams in one hour.

  After three years in Vancouver, he signed as a free agent with the expansion San Jose Sharks. It was a fun year, but the team won only seventeen games. It appeared that Sharks management had decided that if you were over thirty, you weren’t in their future plans. So with the exception of Doug Wilson and Kelly Kisio, the rest of the veterans were gone.