Hockey Towns

by Ron MacLean

  As Ian got older, there was pressure to get somebody else as a goalie coach, so Joel bowed out. Ian had been taking lessons at Bandits Goalie School and liked the owner, former pro Stan Matwijiw. When Stan jumped on board, Joel still helped out for the first couple of years. It was great for Ian and his goalie partner because when Stan wasn’t there, Joel reinforced his teachings and helped out.

  Stan taught Ian a philosophy called “Have a Purpose (HAP).” He told Ian, “Every opportunity you have on the ice is an opportunity to improve—reach higher, get better.” Stan told the kids he coached to start keeping a journal and to stash it in their stalls. He wanted them to record two things they wanted to improve each time they stepped on the ice. “If you get better at two things each practice, imagine how much better you will be in a year,” he said. Every once in a while Stan would ask his players, “What’d you write down in your book today?” He wanted to see who was following through. Ian was religious about it. Ian really bought into the philosophy and started writing HAP on the inside wrist of his gloves. When Joel asked him why, he said, “It’s the last thing I see when I go out on the ice.”

  By the time Ian was fifteen and in his sixth season playing AAA, HoneyBaked Hockey, the website The Scouting News reported that “The most effective 1995 goalie playing in the USA Hockey system could very well be Ian Jenkins.” But Ian found that year incredibly stressful. He was torn between college offers and the OHL.

  His folks really wanted him to go the college route. Numerous schools, at least eight of them, flew him in, trying to get him to verbally commit. He was also invited to try out for the US National Development Team, a forty-man camp held in Ann Arbor. He went to the camp with all the top kids and played unbelievably. After his second game, he had yet to be scored on. Two Toronto Maple Leafs scouts came up to introduce themselves. They were chatting when one of them said, “Our GM, Brian Burke, favours goalies six foot three or taller. That’s where the game’s headed, but you’re getting there, Ian.” Ian was five foot eleven, weighed 185 pounds. He hadn’t said much up to that point, but any time you talked about height, it pissed him off. Tim Thomas would win the Conn Smythe Trophy that year and he was five-eleven too. Ian always thought it was total horse crap that they all wanted these huge goalies. What counted was keeping the puck out of the net.

  Suddenly, Ian interrupted the scouts. He was confident but not cocky when he said, “What’s size got to do with it?” And then he thanked them and turned away.

  Ian continued to hash out the pros and cons with both his dad and Stan. Should he go with the US Development Team and then move on to college? Or go with the development team and go on to major junior? Or just go on to junior? In the end, he decided his best way to the NHL was through the OHL. He was so serious about hockey he broke it off with his first and only girlfriend. Love was just too distracting. It messes up your head. He flat out told her, “I need to focus on hockey. I just can’t do this.”

  The week of the 2011 OHL draft, it was all he could think about. During camp, he could barely sleep. There are twenty clubs in the OHL, which means there’s only room for forty goalies, and they are almost always older. Ian had a game so he was on the ice while the draft was happening. His head kept swivelling up to the stands where Joel was monitoring it on his phone. Round One, one goalie, Spencer Martin, 1995, big kid, six-three, 204 pounds—he went to the Mississauga Steelheads. Ian wanted to play for the London Knights. His number one concern was clicking with the coaches, and he thought Dale and Mark Hunter were really good guys and knew what they were doing. He’d also fallen in love with the city. The Knights had the ninth pick. They took a forward, Bo Horvat. Joel was getting texts telling him the Windsor Spitfires were trying to trade up to get Ian. It was really dicey and there were a lot of head games being played between the teams and Ian’s agent, Jason Woolley, a former NHL defenceman who worked at The Players Group Hockey. London’s turn came around again and Ian’s name popped up. Joel met Ian’s eye and put both his thumbs up in the air. Ian couldn’t contain himself. He started circling his net, pumping his fist. Joel watched his boy with an apple in his throat. All their hard work was paying off. All their dreams were coming true.

  At the first whistle, Ian skated over to Joel at the boards. He said, “What’s up, Dad?” Joel grinned. “You went to the London Knights, second round, twenty-ninth overall.” The bench started high-fiving him and pounding his back. Everyone had the same feeling—Ian was headed for the Show someday.

  May 19, 2011, was a beautiful day. Seventy-something degrees and the sun was shining. It was one of those days when you wake up and the lights look brighter. A big wet sandbag had been lifted off Ian’s back, he was going to London the next day, and Joel was taking the kids out for dinner because it was Cassidy’s tenth birthday.

  Ian and Garrett ran track for their high school, so they had practice after school, but Ian was so pumped about leaving for London, his track coach told him to skip practice and get ready for his trip.

  Perfect! It gave Ian time to hang out with his two best buddies near his mom’s place in Milan to say goodbye. Joel was going to swing by and grab Cassidy from school, and so he made plans to pick up Ian too. Ian left Joel a cell phone message. “Hey, Dad, I’ll wait for you at the corner around four o’clock. Just pick me up there. Love you.” Ian always ended his messages with a “love you.” He was thoughtful that way.

  Cassidy and Joel stopped by the ice cream store to pick up some chocolate for Ian, his favourite. And then when they were about five minutes from the corner, a fire truck whizzed by with a couple of police cars and an ambulance in its draft. Joel pulled over. The sirens were so loud it made their ears squeal. Suddenly, Joel’s phone was ringing. It was Gloria. She was breathing hard. “There’s been an awful accident. Will you hurry down the street to Ian?”

  Joel raced to where he was supposed to meet Ian and slammed the car into park so hard it almost rocked off its wheels. He jumped out, yelling at Cassidy not to move. She was crying because she’d never seen her dad so scared. Ian was lying in the road, foaming at the mouth, and his limbs were contorting. Joel had some medical training and so he knew this implied a disconnect between the spinal cord and the brain. In acceleration/deceleration types of injuries, the axons—or fibres that transmit information to the muscles—can tear, cutting the connection and causing the arms to curl up. Joel knelt down and started rubbing Ian’s shoulder, trying to reassure him. He was talking softly. “Hang in there, Big E, you’re going to be okay. Help is here. They’re taking care of you. I love you, buddy.” Joel searched his son’s eyes, but he couldn’t find him.

  The paramedics moved quickly, and Joel jumped up to follow. But as a female paramedic was closing the door to the ambulance, she turned and gave Joel a look that sent his heart rocketing to the bottom of his gut.

  Ian was rushed into the trauma unit, and Joel got on the phone to Debbie, who was a flight attendant. She was in New York, and she started making arrangements to get home. While the family waited for news about Ian, the story of what happened began to unfold. Ian had hopped into the back of his friend’s pickup for a ride to the corner, and when his buddy took off, Ian wasn’t prepared and fell, whacking the back of his head on the trailer hitch.

  One of Ian’s early hockey coaches was the ER physician. He came out and said, “Ian is getting a CT scan right now, but in my opinion I think it looks good.” In that moment, Joel allowed himself to take a full breath for the first time since he heard about the accident. The family celebrated, hugging each other through tears. “Wow!” “Amazing!” “Trust Ian to pull through this.” “Thank God it’s not as bad as we thought.”

  But it turned out Ian’s CT scan was horrible. The medical team reported to the family that his brain was swelling. They would have to perform surgery immediately. The blood vessels inside and on top of the brain were broken and causing clots. Because there is only so much room inside the intracranial sac, the pressure of the clots was squeezing the brai
n, pushing it downward toward the stem, so the surgeon was going to drill a hole in Ian’s head to suck out the extra blood and alleviate the pressure.

  Ian got out of surgery just before midnight. By that time, there were more than twenty people at the hospital waiting for news. Looking at him lying there with tubes and wires running in and out of him was really scary and sad. The surgeon sat with the family and told them he’d never seen anybody survive an injury like Ian had. He told them that all vital functions go through the brain, so when the damage is as great as what Ian had suffered, the drive to breathe stops and the body goes into cardiac arrest. Ian was going to die.

  Just a couple of weeks earlier, in the car on the way to camp, Ian had told Joel it wasn’t lost on him that he couldn’t have made it to the Knights without all the support he got at home. He thanked Joel for all he’d done, and for his new pads and his custom-painted mask with “Big E” painted on the chin. He said he felt bad for all the kids who couldn’t afford to play hockey. That conversation stuck with Joel. And so the family made the decision Ian would have made. They agreed to allow the hospital to harvest Ian’s organs, whatever was still viable.

  Twenty-four-year-old Kevin Folster was at a service in a church close to where the accident happened. It was the same church Ian Jenkins and his family attended. He’d never met Ian, but when he heard about a local teenager fighting to survive, he prayed for him. Kevin had severe health problems and desperately needed a kidney donor. His phone rang. There was a kidney available. And that kidney, Ian’s kidney, would save Kevin’s life.

  One of the first things Joel did after Ian’s funeral was reach out to Ian’s buddy, the sixteen-year-old kid who’d been behind the wheel of the truck. Joel told him, “Accidents happen. You’ve got to be strong.” But nothing made life easier for Joel—he’s got a hole in his heart that will never heal. How could it? He will always be missing a piece of his own HAP.

  The family started the Big E Foundation. It supports amateur sports through equipment donations, grants and events, and it talks about organ donation. Lester started a charity golf event in Ian’s name that is held every August, and he plays a big role in the Big E Foundation through Athletes With a Purpose. It’s how he copes. He talks about Ian and thinks about him all the time. The pain and sadness still reach out and bite, but there are a lot of laughs when talking about Ian too. Like the time he cut the cheese so bad that Garrett, who had a broken leg, rolled back his wheelchair to escape the fumes and fell right out to the floor. Or the time they were in a snowball fight and Ian moved behind a tree to write his name in the snow, and then stepped out and mooned a couple of cars. Sometimes they smile and shake their heads and talk about how, despite Ian’s athleticism and school smarts, he wasn’t very street smart and so he walked around with his head in the clouds.

  Stan Matwijiw took Ian’s death hard. Ian had called him about a goalie session before heading off to sign with London. Stan had an opening on the day—and at the time—of the accident, but Ian asked for a spot a day earlier. Stan said he couldn’t. He was booked up. They went back and forth until finally Stan relented and moved things around. He’s haunted by the thought that, if he had just put his foot down and insisted on the May 19 lesson, Ian would have been with him instead of falling off the truck. It eats him alive.

  But it may be toughest for Garrett. He’s had a lot of struggles and is just now starting to be able to talk about Ian. He thinks about his big brother every day. He’s proud of him.

  All any of them can do is hang on to the words of one of Ian’s favourite songs, “Rise Above This” by Seether. I’m fallin’ down, fallin’ down, but I’ll rise above this, rise above this, rise above this.

  The Big Red Turtleneck

  Eric Lindros was a two-time World Junior champion, an Olympic champion and a winner of the 1991 Canada Cup, as well as a 1995 Hart Trophy winner and a seven-time All-Star. He’s the fifth fastest to reach five hundred points in the NHL (352 games) behind Wayne Gretzky (273), Mario Lemieux (323), Peter Šťastný (394) and Mike Bossy (349). Since NHL players began taking part in the Olympics in 1998, the team has been captained by five players—Sidney Crosby, Scott Niedermayer, Joe Sakic, Mario Lemieux and Eric. Three are in the Hall of Fame, and Crosby is sure to be inducted one day.

  I like that in the 1997 playoffs, in order to get Philadelphia to the Stanley Cup final against the Rangers, he was the key to a win over the Wayne Gretzky–Mark Messier tandem. His goals were big. He scored the winner in Game Four and the first goal of Game Five.

  But more than all that, he championed player rights. Eric was chosen first overall in the 1991 NHL Entry Draft by the Quebec Nordiques but refused to play for them and was eventually traded to the Flyers in June 1992. In his 1994 memoir, My Life in Hockey, Jean Béliveau praises Eric’s abilities and says, “I watched each episode of this [Lindros] soap opera as it unfolded over two years with more than passing interest and more than a little sympathy . . . Unfortunately Eric’s situation became fraught with emotional and political baggage which pitted the Lindros camp and the Toronto media against the Nordiques and the Quebec media . . . But in my view, the situation was cut and dried: Lindros was within his rights.” Maurice Richard described Eric best. He called him “a mean Jean Béliveau.” Injuries finally got Eric, the way they got Bobby Orr.

  Eric Lindros was one of those kids who refused to come in off the ice as long as it was light out. He just loved being out there. He says, “You just kept going. You just kept playing. It was just you, your stick and a couple of pucks. Time just flew.” He didn’t pretend he was Bobby Orr. He wasn’t a kid who fantasized about being in the NHL. It was just what he liked to do.

  Eric’s dad, Carl, and his mom, Bonnie, started him out on bob skates when he was two. They’d bundle him up and take him down to the big rink in London’s Victoria Park. Carl says it wasn’t really skating, it was more like walking on blades.

  London is situated in the snowbelt. The first snowfall usually comes in November, but a white October is not unusual. In 1975, Eric was almost three years old when Carl built their first backyard rink. It was smooth as glass, much better than the rinks at the local arena. Eric says Carl had a white thumb. He’d been building rinks since he was a kid in Chatham, but they had never lasted more than two weeks because the weather there is much milder.

  Carl had two secrets—hot water and rink snow. Early in the winter, there wasn’t enough snow to pack down the base and the banks, and so to get the crust going Carl would drive his Volvo station wagon over to the Argyle rink and fill up garbage pails with Zamboni-dumped snow. By the middle of winter the snow would get built up around the sides well over the kids’ heads and they would make caves and forts.

  Carl’s philosophy was not to use hot water within the first two weeks of building a rink. Instead, use it as a finisher to smooth things out. He doesn’t remember Eric and his brother, Brett, doing the flooding, but they’d help with the shovelling. Sometimes they’d wake up to a foot and a half of snow. Carl would get home at seven or seven thirty at night, wolf down something to eat and head out to flood the rink. The wind would die down and it was unbelievably peaceful. Carl found it a good way to unwind and collect his thoughts.

  Eric’s bedroom was right above the rink. The year he was in Grade 1 was the year Ontario had some of the lowest temperatures on record. It was minus-31 in December in Toronto with wind gusts up to twenty-five kilometres an hour. He would hear the hose in the backyard and he’d look out at his dad, standing in the freezing cold, wearing his big red turtleneck with layers stretched over it. Carl had the hose hooked up to the kitchen sink, and as he moved it back and forth across the ice, the steam rose two storeys high.

  “A lot of times, a bunch of kids would show up and there’d be snowball fights and chasing around and tag. Sometimes they’d play with a puck and sometimes they’d play with a tennis ball, and everybody would take a turn playing in net. So that’s why we did a lot of extra skating in the backyard rink
, but it sure as heck had nothing to do with being a hockey player.”

  Carl’s office building, a five-minute drive from home, overlooked the rink where Eric played hockey. Carl would take Eric over an hour before the school bell rang. They’d bring a shovel and clear the ice together. Early mornings were the only time you could use sticks, so Eric would shoot and skate around. Carl says he liked being outside and skating and being active. However, he wasn’t all that thrilled about hockey. “But at that time hockey meant the Philadelphia Flyers and the tough guys, and Eric loved it. So what are you gonna do?”

  Organized hockey began for Eric at Argyle Arena in the Red Circle League. But Carl says he’s not sure how organized it was. They played cross-rink and used upside-down benches for nets. “There used to be partitions on either blue line, and there was six teams playing at once. Three pucks. I don’t think we even had referees. We had a couple of coaches on the bench just pointing people in the right direction of the ‘nets,’ and then there was an automatic change and the next group went out. We always had a good time.”

  Eric was a good little player, so he was invited to join a rep “travel team,” which was non-competitive. At the end of that first year Eric asked his dad, “Can you sign me up to play with London minor hockey?”

  Carl and Eric spent a lot of time working on skills and stuff. Even though hockey wasn’t Carl’s thing, his philosophy was if you’re going to do it, do it well.

  On their way home in the car after a game, in the spirit of helping Eric get better, Carl was critical and commented on Eric’s play. Later, Bonnie took Carl aside and set him straight. “You shouldn’t be doing that. You should just talk about how fun it was or mention the good stuff that happened. Don’t get into picking on things he could have done differently. He’ll end up hating the game and he’ll resent you for it.” Carl took what she said to heart.