Breaking Away

by Patrick O'Sullivan

  When we went to the team’s tryouts in West Chester, Pennsylvania, the coaches were surprised. I was easily the smallest kid on the ice. I was also the only one whose voice hadn’t broken yet. Those were red flags. So was my father’s act. It really wasn’t different, just that they hadn’t seen it before. He never let me out of his sight for a second, and he was in their faces the whole time as well. As the U.S. Hockey Report, an amateur hockey newsletter, said a few weeks later when the con job was exposed, “Good scammers are nothing if not vigilant.”

  The coaches were worried about how I’d hold up at the festival—they thought I was one of most skilled players they had, but I was 140 pounds. Still, I made the cut. They needed players. The Southeast coach, John Riley, told the newsletter, “His hands, shot, and his hockey sense were superior to a lot who made the team—never mind the kids we cut.”

  When the tournament started in Ann Arbor, I wound up scoring the winning goal. We beat Massachusetts 4–1, and nothing tripped an alarm. None of the local minor-hockey officials or parents of local players were at the game, so I wasn’t recognized—and neither was my father, who was yelling at the top of lungs in an arena where I had played dozens of times over the last three winters. The next game, though, all hell was going to break loose, and he knew it would when the schedule was announced: Southeast-Atlantic versus Michigan.

  As soon as the teams skated onto the ice, the parents of the Michigan players started talking among themselves about filing a protest with tournament officials, telling them that Southeast-Atlantic had an ineligible player in the lineup. One of the Michigan Selects was Bobby Kukulka, a kid on my team at Belle Tire. They would have completely busted me. The parents didn’t wind up filing a protest, though, because Michigan won and advanced to the medal round, so the Southeast coaches and festival officials were still in the dark. The truth came out only after we played our last game, a loss to New England. It was a complete embarrassment for USA Hockey.

  The officials realized pretty quickly that the Southeast coaches weren’t in on the scam and that my father had duped them. And my father didn’t deny it. In fact, when the officials cornered him at the arena, he gloated about getting one over on USA Hockey, like he was trash-talking an opponent after a fight he had just won. They could slap his wrist, he said, but so what? He told them to do whatever they wanted, because he was taking me and moving on. He told them that I was going to be playing for a Junior B team in Petrolia, down the road from Sarnia on the other side of the border. “They think he’s an ’83 but you guys know, don’t you?” he said and laughed in their faces.

  USA Hockey pushed back hard. They banned my father indefinitely from coaching any U.S. youth-hockey team (he was still listed by Belle Tire as an assistant coach). When the newsletter wrote up the story of the tournament and the fraud my father had perpetrated, the story referred to him as “the Duke of Deception.” Others would be embarrassed, but my father just laughed it off. None of that mattered to him. He had other plans for me. By his demented way of thinking, USA Hockey couldn’t kick him out if he quit first, and if they understood how good I was going to be, they’d be breaking the rules too.

  13

  A BOY AMONG MEN

  Alvinston, Ontario, October 1998

  Petrolia didn’t work out. It was one thing to use fake ID to get a thirteen-year-old into a tournament of fifteen-year-olds. It was completely another thing to throw me in against players seven and even eight years older, one level below major junior. Rather than looking to put me into a league with players closer to my own age, though, my father targeted the Great Lakes Junior C league in southwestern Ontario—again, players as old as twenty-one but a step down in skill from Petrolia’s Junior B league.

  Almost all pros played against kids reasonably close to their own age growing up. A few would have been like me in Toronto and Michigan—always in with players a year or two older. Going to Junior C was a lunatic idea. Over the years a few fourteen-year-olds have been able to stick in junior hockey, but mostly they were in mold of Denis Potvin: boys with men’s bodies. I was an average-sized thirteen-year-old at best. I’d stood out as undersized with the Southeast team at the U15 Festival but looked like the stickboy when I walked into an arena where Junior C teams held their tryouts.

  The coaches of Junior C teams in Blenheim and Walpole Island told my father to take a hike after just one practice. They didn’t need to see anything more. The third team I skated with was in Alvinston, a little farm town about 150 miles from Ann Arbor. The Flyers were so bad that they actually needed help any way they could get it, and I was more skilled than anyone they had. The Toronto Red Wings were the only championship team I had been part of, but I had never played with a team as outmatched as Alvinston—we won six out of forty games that season.

  For my father, a losing team wasn’t an issue, so long as I was playing up—in this case, way up. And it didn’t matter to him that every game and practice sucked up five hours on the road, more in bad weather and with lineups at Customs. It didn’t matter that games and practices sometimes conflicted with my school days—he’d drive by the school and yank me out of class early. It didn’t matter that after late games or trips to other teams’ rinks we wouldn’t get home until after midnight. My father was going to do whatever it took to get me on the ice. My hockey career—if you can say a thirteen-year-old has a career—took priority over everything.

  Time away from my mother and sisters: it was no issue for my father, and frankly, the time he was out of the house was a relief to them.

  Work: my father went through a bunch of jobs through this stretch—night shifts cleaning carpets, days shifts as a super and janitor—but any job that he took had to have flexible hours, something that would let him come in late or leave early.

  The physical grind on me: my father thought that there was no limit to what I could physically handle, so he kept up with and even intensified the routine that had started with the move to Michigan, which left me so exhausted that I would fall asleep at my desk in school or feel like my legs were full of sand out on the ice. It seemed like I didn’t have a home-cooked meal that season. My mother sent me out to the van with sandwiches to eat on the drive to the games while she stayed home with my sisters.

  By the time I started playing with Alvinston, hockey had become a 24/7 experience for me. You might have heard other pros describe their childhood that way—it would be their way of saying that they would dedicate hours and days to practicing the game on their own time. For me, it was different. Yes, I loved the game the same way that they did and, given a spare hour or two, I would be in our basement or in the driveway, stickhandling and shooting pucks at targets, just like thousands of other kids.

  My father, though, made it something more than the usual 24/7 dedication—he would ambush me with the game. Those times when he’d roll home from work before dawn and wake me up to do push-ups and sit-ups became more frequent and more intense. Same thing went for the workouts in the middle of school days. He kept upping the stakes. Everything became more urgent. He raised his standards. A bad game had meant getting slapped around afterward, but by the time I was playing with Alvinston, just one or two bad shifts would have him slapping me around. After games in Toronto and in Michigan, he used to make get out of the van and run behind it if he didn’t like how I played, but that was always on city streets. That season with Alvinston, he started kicking me out of the van and making me chase it on back roads—I’d be shivering while I ran after him in my sweaty tracksuit on winter nights. No other cars would be on those roads after dark, so my father didn’t have to worry about being seen by other drivers or by police. And he became even bolder about it—he took it from the back roads onto the 402, the four-lane highway to the U.S. border. Rather than crawl along on the soft shoulder, he kicked me out of the car and drove ahead a mile or more down the road, pulled over and parked the van while having a smoke.

  The difference between other pros describing their boyhoods as �
�hockey 24/7” and my experience is the difference between guys on the street saying they love their country and a Navy Seal putting it on the line. They’re using the same words to describe the way they see their lives, but the contexts couldn’t be farther apart. It’s one thing to play the game as a kid, another to play it just to survive another day without a beating. That’s what the game became to me—all about survival.

  It might sound like hyperbole, but that’s the way it felt on the ice and off. In games I landed in situations that you’d never put a thirteen-year-old in. I went into one game afraid for my life: a road game on the Walpole Island Native reserve. The age limit in the league was twenty-one (a year older than major junior), but the Alvinston players and coaches were sure that some guys on the reservation team were twenty-four. They were a bunch of huge guys, and most of them were looking for fights as much as for goals or wins. In the arena parking lot before the game, fans were drinking, starting bonfires and shouting threats at my father and me when I was pulling my equipment bag out of the back of the van. They pounded and yelled that I was going to get killed. It was the one time that I couldn’t hear my father in the arena. The kids I went to school with were going to the Quebec peewee tournament and for pizza with their families after games, while I was skating into the middle of a street fight or barroom brawl between grown men a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than me.

  Looking back on it now, I was lucky to get out of that season without getting seriously hurt. I knew enough about the game to stay away from the places where someone might take a run at me, and I could skate fast enough to get away from a goon who was trying to splash me against the boards. I’m sure that a lot of the tough guys in the league were happy just to let me be or to throw a scare into me—they wouldn’t have taken any satisfaction from flattening a little kid. Still, the game was faster and the bodies were so much bigger than what other thirteen-year-olds were skating against—nobody would have had to go out of his way to put me on a stretcher. Even an accidental collision, even one with a teammate, could have knocked me out.

  That season I went out on the ice knowing that I was in real physical danger—the stakes were that much higher. Job one was just being in one piece at the end of the game. Still, I was Alvinston’s leading scorer. Really, I was just happy that season ended—no more long drives, no more games against grown men, no more long runs on the back roads or along the highways’ soft shoulders. At least until the next season.

  14

  JUNIOR B

  Strathroy, Ontario, December 1999

  Even a season after the birth certificate debacle at the Under-15 Festival, most of the best minor midget and midget programs in Michigan or anywhere in the U.S. would have had no interest in me playing for them if my father was included in the package. And at that point, no matter how well I played, no team would have had me on his terms: he had always managed to get out of paying registration fees and ice charges and all the rest. No one would have wanted to take on a well-known headache like him and pick up the tab at the same time.

  My father didn’t tell me how he got me a tryout with the Strathroy Rockets. He didn’t look for my input on decisions like that. He would have been looking for a step up to Junior B, but probably not to Petrolia if he’d been turned down there the year before. Even if there had been no hard feelings, Strathroy would have been more attractive to my father because Pat Stapleton had run the Rockets. Stapleton had been a defenseman with the Chicago Blackhawks back in the sixties and seventies and played for Team Canada against the Soviets back in ’72. Stapleton had managed and coached the team for almost twenty years and probably could have found a job in the pros but didn’t want to leave his farm behind and work for someone else. He wasn’t behind the bench when I was with the Rockets, but they were still his team. The Rockets weren’t the biggest thing, but they were all his. My father, an ex-minor-leaguer who never played a full season of major junior, thought he knew more about the game than an ex-NHLer like Dwight Foster. Still, he had to concede that Pat Stapleton probably knew as much about hockey as he did. He criticized the way the team used me, but never within Stapleton’s earshot.

  I was happy not to be in Alvinston another season and happy that I was moving up to a higher level of the game, but in every other way it was more of the same. I’d hoped that I’d never have to spend five hours in a car for every game and practice again, but the drive to and from Strathroy was as far if not farther, and the Rockets practiced more and played more games. The grind was brutal: it was routine for us to have a game Friday night and another early Saturday afternoon. With all the hours on the road, I’d be home after midnight Friday and have time for only four or five hours of sleep before heading out again. When we went out on the ice for those Saturday games, my teammates would be warming up while I was trying to wake up.

  Again, physically, I was a mouse in the house with my teammates and the opposition. This time, though, I was in against a better class of players. My father had tried to get me to Junior B after the U15 Festival, a giant step up. If I was a year behind his unrealistic expectations at fourteen, I was years ahead of every fifteen- and sixteen-year-old I had grown up skating with and against in Toronto and Michigan. Again, like in Alvinston, I was on the ice with grown men—there might have been a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old on the ice, but the rest were four or five years older than me. One guy on my line was twenty-one and had a wife and two kids. I was a high school freshman; a few on my team were out of school and holding down jobs. It wasn’t only a matter of age and physical maturity, though. The best in the league were just a cut below major junior and were looking to play college hockey in the U.S. or for university teams in Canada. In against Alvinston, Strathroy would have won by double digits.

  I never really got to know anyone on the Rockets. I had no time to say anything more than hi. I’d arrive with just enough time to lace up my skates and I’d leave right after we came off the ice, just putting on my running shoes and tracksuit and walking out to the van—I was still so young that I didn’t even shower after games. The Rockets traveled to games in a couple of vans, but I never went with them. Separated from the team, I never had any idea what they thought of playing with a kid. I understood that I had to be seen and not heard. I would speak when spoken to and would do as I told. Even if I was playing on the first or second line, I still felt like a guest. I had earned my spot on the team, but they were making a big exception for me. Pat Stapleton didn’t ever speak to me directly: it didn’t seem to matter to him that I was fourteen. He didn’t even really acknowledge the fact. I was just a player, and if he went about his business like there weren’t any risks involved, from day one he just sent me out there to sink or swim.

  I adapted. I scored a goal—a slapshot from the wing—on my first shift in my first game, and the season went that way. I was no novelty or mascot. I’d never recommend throwing a fourteen-year-old in with men, but on the ice Strathroy was a good hockey experience, a lot better than Alvinston for my development. And it was clear from the start of the season that we had a better team: we’d compete for a league title.

  That season the Rockets were a pretty big deal in Strathroy. They’d get a good crowd of ticket-buying customers to the arena, what passed as an alternative to Hockey Night in Canada in towns like that. It was a business—a small business, but still professional in a way that youth hockey isn’t. In Strathroy I landed on the radar of the pro hockey’s big business, and the chance of that happening had to have figured into my father’s motive to get me to Junior B as soon as possible. A fourteen- or fifteen-year-old in Junior B is going to attract the attention of hockey agents, and a stringer for one of the biggest agencies in the sport spotted me in Strathroy. By mid-season, two agents from Newport Sports, one of the biggest agencies in pro hockey, were standing beside my father at Rockets games and ended up striking a handshake deal with him to represent me. Newport’s agents told my father everything he wanted to hear, and my father soaked up al
l of it. For him, an agency’s interest just proved that his plan for me was working. The agents must have put it together that my father was high maintenance even though he would have kept them in the dark about the physical abuse.

  Any benefits from playing in Strathroy were offset by the quality of my life when I left the arena. Early on that season, it was clear that my father was raising the stakes yet again. He had the same act at the arena: “Crazy John” yelling at one end of the rink, as usual, only toned down a bit when the Newport agents were around. He didn’t socialize with other parents—in any case, it’s more buddies and girlfriends who come out to junior games than parents. My father would hang around the dressing room before and after the game, making jokes, not being “an issue” so that Stapleton wouldn’t chase him away. Once we left the arena, though, it was on. The trend that had played out every step of the way over the years increased: the beat-downs were more frequent and more intense, the punches and kicks were harder and aimed to leave bruises and welts. We’d barely be out of the arena and he’d start—out on Highway 402 he’d kick me out of the van and then drive a mile or two ahead, turning off the lights so that I didn’t know where he was or if he hadn’t just driven off and left me behind.