Breaking Away

by Patrick O'Sullivan

  I’ve never understood why my father had me pop Steve. Was it something that Steve said to my father, or a look he gave him? Was it something between my father and Steve’s father? Was it that my father thought he needed to wake me up? Or just to prove to himself and to me that he was in complete control? I’ll never know. But with everything that came out after, I suspect Steve never brought up the fight because he had a pretty good idea that anything I did was whatever my father wanted. If I did impulsive things, a lot of the time it was my father’s impulses that I felt I had to act on.

  You wouldn’t say that a father telling his son to punch out a teammate was trying to clean up his act. After being uninvited by the Marlies, my father didn’t feel like he had to tone down his act with the Red Wings. Because he was one of only a few fathers who could make it out to every practice and game, my father wound up as an assistant coach with the Red Wings. Parents who coach their kids usually go out of their way to avoid the perception of favoritism, but my father either couldn’t help himself or couldn’t be bothered. Nominally he was an assistant coach, but really he held the position so that he could coach me directly, like a personal coach. He gave some attention to my linemates but spent most of his time telling me what to do.

  Word about my father had made it around the Greater Toronto Hockey League when I played for the Marlies, but some people might have been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, thinking that someone with an axe to grind might have been spreading bad rumors about him. My father’s act with the Red Wings left no doubt about it. More people had seen it up close. If it had been based just on my play, the Red Wings would have had me back, moving me up with my teammates to peewee. But the top teams not only had the pick of the players—they had the pick of the parents. The Red Wings wouldn’t have wanted my father back behind the bench again. No team in Toronto would have been interested in having me if that was the condition my father attached.

  My father had moved our family to Toronto to give me a chance to play with and against the best level of competition. Within two years he had earned a reputation as the Hockey Father from Hell. No team would put up with his level of “involvement.” So we were going to have to move again. The first time, we had moved for a better opportunity for me on the ice. This time we were moving so that my father could stay involved. We had to go where they knew nothing about my father’s reputation—even outside Toronto, the word would have made it around.

  So we packed up and headed off to Sterling Heights, Michigan. Not that we had any roots or connections there. And not like there were a lot of jobs in a state where the automakers were laying off workers ten thousand at a time. We moved there for my hockey career. My father was doing it all for me again, even though I was the one who was switching schools and trying to make a new set of friends. My mother wasn’t doing it all for me—she was just doing it because my father said that’s what we were going to do. Even if it didn’t make sense to her, she wasn’t going to question him. Both my sisters were dragged along, again with no say and no consideration from my parents.

  Another season, another team, another league and this time crossing the border—another theme from my father’s career that was becoming one of my own. I was a hockey drifter at age nine.

  10

  KICKED OUT OF PRACTICE

  Michigan, 1996

  My family was able to move pretty freely across the border—my father had a Canadian passport and my mother was a U.S. citizen. I think Customs officers didn’t give them too much attention going back and forth. Being in Sterling Heights made for an easy commute across the border to Windsor. If any of us got sick and needed to see a doctor, we just had to drive through the tunnel to see one, my father claiming that we still lived in Ontario and using his parents’ address. That’s how we lived in so many way—things were pretty sketchy, and my father made things up as he went along. He had a bunch of fake IDs and fake paperwork, whatever he needed to get work and keep a car on the road. He also had my mother’s parents, who were ready to step in if ever the electricity was going to be turned off.

  That first year in Michigan, my father didn’t try to get me a tryout with the top teams. Compuware, Little Caesars and HoneyBaked were established sponsored outfits that played against the top teams in Toronto and traveled across the U.S. for elite tournaments. If I had landed with any of those three teams, it wouldn’t have been a step down from the GTHL at all. Those teams might have been leery about letting a ten-year-old try out for a team of twelve-year-olds. They would also have a network of contacts in the GTHL who would have given them the lowdown on my father. Instead my father lined up a tryout with the Michigan Nationals, a new program and team overmatched against Compuware, Little Caesars and HoneyBaked. Again he’d convince a coach that I was up to playing against players two years older than me—very few kids are. My father couldn’t find any real problem with the Nationals’ coach, Dwight Foster. Dwight had been a first-round NHL draft pick and played ten years in the NHL. He would have lasted longer if an injury hadn’t cut his career short.

  Dwight was skeptical at first about a double underager trying out for his team, and he was skeptical when my father told him that he had bounced around the minor leagues. But after I skated with the team in a couple of practices, I convinced him that I was going to be able to keep with the bigger kids—I wasn’t the best player on the team, but I could help. My father also convinced Dwight to take him on as an assistant coach, telling him how successful the Red Wings had been with him behind the bench the previous season. The Nationals didn’t have any other assistant coaches, so Dwight could use any help that he could get. My father helped for a while but then he didn’t. He became a problem again.

  It was the same story as in Toronto with the Red Wings—my father was supposed to work with the team but focused almost exclusively on me. By age ten, I had stopped following my father blindly. Stuff that I had accepted as my lot in life I had started to question. I had put it together that not all hockey players went through what I had to with my father, no matter what he said. I had seen enough and got to know enough talented kids to realize that being miserable wasn’t a prerequisite to being a good player. I knew that suffering wasn’t the same as working hard. It might be hard to imagine that it took me that long to put things together, but that’s how much I was sheltered. In fact before I realized that, I knew that there was something wrong with all the attention that my father paid to me at practice. Dwight’s son was on the team, and Dwight treated him like he would any other player. My father didn’t follow his lead—and I told him that I didn’t like it. I lipped off to him at practice even though I knew he’d slap me around when we got in the van or got home. It might sound strange, taking physical abuse so casually or accepting it. At age ten I had resigned myself to it. If I was asking for trouble by mouthing off, I figured that it was just getting the inevitable over with now rather than later.

  Dwight tolerated a lot from my father because he needed the help—managing sixteen 10-year-old kids alone is tough even if you did play in the NHL. But one practice my father blasted me and I started chirping back. Dwight stopped practice and told both of us to get off the ice. I’ve been with teams when a coach has thrown a player who was dogging it out of practice. I’ve never heard of an assistant coach getting ordered out of practice. I’m sure there are only a few times in the history of the game at any level that a player and a coach have got tossed out for behaving badly. A father-and-son combination—I have to believe it had never happened before and hasn’t since.

  After practice, Dwight came into the room before the other players were off the ice and within earshot. He laid down the law: he told us that things had to change or I couldn’t be on the team; that it wasn’t fair to the other players on the team when my father and I were a distraction. And he told my father that he was done as the assistant coach, that he’d find someone to help out, but if it meant trying to manage sixteen 10-year-olds on the bench or at practice himself, he
was willing to try. He made it clear that he wasn’t going to take any more shit from my father and probably had taken too much already. That wasn’t up for discussion. If I wasn’t at the next practice, then he was prepared to move on.

  To put it mildly, my father didn’t take this well. A couple of F-bombs later we were gone. I knew I was in for trouble that night, and I really thought I was done with the Nationals.

  It wasn’t really a power struggle, what my father had with Dwight Foster. Dwight was in charge. My father physically intimidated a lot of people at the arena. He gave them good reason to think that he was going to boil over. Dwight wasn’t intimidated. He wasn’t going to take any shit from my father. Some other places, an assistant coach has cut out a head coach—that happens, but it wasn’t going to happen with the Nationals. It was the first time, and just about the only time, I had seen anyone stand up to my father. Dwight knew he had the cards: my father wanted me to play, and he didn’t have any other options halfway through a season—it was the Nationals or nothing. Dwight knew that my father had a hate-on for him but had no way to bail out. So my father drove me to the next practice and didn’t acknowledge Dwight. There was going to be no apology, no tail-between-his-legs act, no plea to get back his spot as an assistant coach. He wasn’t about to go down peacefully, though.

  For that practice and for every game and practice left in that season, my father acted out even more than ever before. He would literally climb onto the boards, in games, in practice. That was his way of making a statement that he wasn’t going to back down, that he wasn’t going to let Dwight show him up. He ran down Dwight at every opportunity. He’d say that Dwight really didn’t know that much about coaching. He said it to me again and again, and he told any parent he crossed paths with the same thing—not that they would buy that from a wild man who seemed completely irrational whenever the team was on the ice.

  It would have been easy for Dwight to drop me from the team. Sometimes he had to have wished, when my father was shouting at the top of his voice, trying to show him up, that he’d done that. I respect the fact that Dwight gave me a chance to play rather than cut me loose. I’m sure that would have only made things worse for me. If I hadn’t been able to play again that season after Dwight told us to get off the ice, my father would have blamed me and taken it out physically on me. If I hadn’t be able to finish the season with the Nationals, my father would have had to cook up some sort of way for me to train that would have made the usual grind seem like a walk in the park by comparison. As it was, my father stepped up his “program” for me away from the arena.

  11

  NIGHT WORK

  When my father worked in Michigan, it was usually a night shift. He had different jobs—maintenance in a retirement home was one—none of them paying that well, most of them not lasting very long, all of them with flexible hours that allowed him to take me to games or put me through his private workouts. In Toronto it had seemed like he had a workout planned for my every waking hour. It had often left me on the verge of exhaustion. In Michigan, though, it intensified. My waking hours weren’t enough to accommodate his program.

  My father would come home at three or four in the morning from his job, a lot of the time half-drunk or worse, and he’d wake me up for a workout while I was still in my pajamas. I was barely able to keep my eyes open, but he’d have me down on the floor doing push-ups until my arms gave out and I did a face-plant on the floor. He’d have me doing sit-ups until my stomach cramped. He would sit there with a beer and a smoke and bark at me. If he didn’t think I was trying hard enough, he’d punch and kick me. A few times in the dead of winter, he would kick me out of the house and lock the door, leaving me standing in the snow in my PJs and bare feet. “This will toughen you up, you little fag,” he’d say, or something to that effect. I knew not to beat my fists on the door or shout for help—if I did anything like that, he’d have come out the door and given me an even worse beat-down. There was no help coming, just more of the same.

  Dozens of times I went to school almost asleep on my feet and with bruises and cuts on my face. Dozens of times I laid my head on my desk and slept, my teachers never asking why I was so tired. Dozens of times he’d come to my school and sign me out of class so that he could push me through workouts that lasted a couple of hours. Dozens of times I’d be sore and trembling from fatigue when I’d go to practices and games for the Nationals or for Belle Tire, the team that I would play for the next season in Michigan. And dozens of times my father would have me run after we left the rink—if he didn’t like how I played, he would kick me out of the van, often while I was still in my full equipment and running shoes, and then make me chase it as he drove down back streets. If I was out of my equipment because I’d changed at the arena, it wasn’t any easier. My father would kick me out of the van, throw my equipment bag at me on the street and then make me lug it over my shoulder while I ran.

  That’s what my life was like: I had to struggle to keep up, but even when I did there’d be no rest.

  In some ways the worst part was the not-knowing.

  When I went to school, I never knew when I might be paged over the PA because my father was waiting to take me for a workout—he’d say that I had a doctor’s appointment or something else that never was questioned by anyone in the principal’s office.

  When I went to bed, I never knew if I’d get a night’s sleep, and I’d roll around in my bed, worried that my father was going to come home and lock me outside. I worried even more when the winter weather was at its worst.

  When I came off the ice after practice or a game, I never knew exactly what was next, but I knew it was going to be bad. While other kids went with their parents to grab a hamburger or ice cream, I’d be looking at an hour or two or more of my father’s conditioning program, running the steps in the arena stands like a hamster on a treadmill or chasing after the van for two or three miles. If he didn’t think that was toughening me up, he’d slap me around. Every year he was ramping it up: a slap in the face when I was eight; a slap with more force and a kick in the ass when I was nine; a punch when I was ten; a big right hook on my jaw and a kick in the gut or ribs until I was gasping when I was eleven, twelve and thirteen. And if that weren’t enough, he’d grind a cigarette out in my face or come up with other ways to punish and humiliate me.

  12

  WITE-OUT

  Ann Arbor, Michigan, August 1998

  USA Hockey’s Under-15 Festival is one of its biggest annual events, bringing in the top fourteen-year-old kids on regional all-star teams from across the country. We were still living in Sterling Heights, but at the U15 Festival I played for the Atlantic-Southeast team, kids from North Carolina, Washington, Georgia and other points south. We had, as you’d expect, the weakest team in the tournament. I didn’t play for the Southeast because of my time in Winston-Salem. Given that I had played the previous season for Belle Tire, I was a Michigan player in the eyes of USA Hockey. But my father had tried to sign me up to try out for the Michigan team that summer and was turned down. I wound up with the Southeast because my father played there.

  It starts with the rules that were on USA Hockey’s books at the time: only players who were fourteen years old on January 1, 1998, were eligible to play in the festival. No older, obviously, but no younger either—the rule was hard and fast. Underage players had to sit the festival out and wait for their turn. I turned thirteen in February of that year, so the wait would have been for two more years, even though I had played with and against the players on the Michigan team.

  My father thought the rule was unfair. He wanted the Michigan coaches to go to USA Hockey and argue for making an exception for me. He had always been able to talk the teams in Toronto and Michigan into allowing me to try out even though I was a year or two younger than everyone else on the ice. For a lot of coaches, the idea of a double-underage player went against their better judgment. They worried about a little kid getting physically banged up against players a he
ad taller and fifty pounds heavier. They also worried about a little kid getting discouraged if things didn’t work out. And they couldn’t see the necessity of it—what was the rush, after all? But my father thought that if you weren’t rushing, you weren’t trying. He had always been able to get his way by being pushy. Or at least it seemed that way until he tried to get me into the U15 Festival with Michigan.

  My father couldn’t accept the idea that players I had skated with and against, players no better than me, were getting a chance to play and I was shut out. It wasn’t like I had to sit out a season, like I would fall behind a year. It was a short tournament, a few games. It should have been no big deal in the grand scheme of things, nothing to go to war over. Still, my father thought that even that was giving an advantage to the other kids, that with just those few games I was falling behind. This was something he wasn’t prepared to accept.

  My father prided himself on being a do-whatever-it-takes kind of guy, someone who would bend the rules if he could and break them if that was what it took. The only thing that was keeping me out of the tournament was my birth certificate, so my father decided to change it.

  Looking back now, it’s laughable that he thought he could get away with it. My ID was white type on a dark background. My father got some Wite-Out, the stuff used to hide mistakes in type, and a Magic Marker. With a couple of tiny brushstrokes, 1985 became 1983. He had made me two years older. That was the first step.

  My father knew there was no hope of going to the Michigan officials with the doctored birth certificate, and most of the teams in neighboring states would have been on to the scam pretty fast as well. The officials in the Southeast, though, didn’t know me. He called them up and made the case that he and I were moving back into the area, using my grandparents’ address in Winston-Salem. He gave them some line about his ex-wife living there and a court ordering the move as part of a custody ruling. He also told them that I had played for Belle Tire’s bantam team the previous season but didn’t mention that I was an underager. And when it came time to fill out the forms and send in the documents, my father faxed a photocopy of my birth certificate. No one who held the original in his hand and looked at it hard would have been fooled, but a blurry photocopy blurred again when faxed might have been able to pass. Whether the blurry copy did the trick or he had already fooled the Southwest officials over the phone, either way my father had got what he wanted. I was registered even though I was ineligible.