Breaking Away

by Patrick O'Sullivan

  Our season came down to game 7 of the league final and we ended up a goal short. The Rockets had a bunch of events away from the arena over the course of the season, but my father avoided them, though he did drive me up for the year-end banquet, where I was given the team’s rookie of the year award. That night the younger players talked to me about coming back in the fall and winning it all. They told me that another fifteen-year-old hotshot, Jeff Carter, would be joining the Rockets, and they’d be the favorites to win a league title.

  I didn’t know that I had played my last game for Strathroy. My father had other plans, but he didn’t let me in on them.

  15

  EXCEPTIONAL

  Sterling Heights, Michigan, May 2000

  During my season in Strathroy, my father started talking to Newport Sports about exceptional-player status, a designation that would have allowed me early entry into the Ontario Hockey League. By the rules on the books, players eligible for the 2000 OHL draft would have been 1984 birthdays. Only a handful of times in recent years had the major junior leagues allowed fifteen-year-olds to play. It’s a lot to ask of an underage player. Even though I’d been playing against twenty-year-olds in Alvinston when I was thirteen, the competition had been Junior C players, a completely different class of talent, at least three cuts below the future NHLers who skate in major junior. Still, my father wanted the agency to pursue it for him. The standard for the exceptional player is ridiculously high: he must be certifiably the best player in his birth year but also better than any player a year older than him in Ontario and the U.S. Midwest. He has to be what they always call a “generational player,” a talent that comes along once in a generation. That’s what my father presumed I was. He took it for granted that I was a prodigy, like the nine-year-old kid who plays Carnegie Hall or the middle-school kid who goes directly to MIT.

  Exceptional-player status was a natural extension of my father’s first principle of manufacturing a NHL star: always play against the best of the oldest players as soon as possible. My father wasn’t unique on that count. It might not be the conventional wisdom, but a lot have bought into that strategy and a lot more will. “Too much too soon” is what you think about other parents’ kids. Still, it’s one thing in a league of top local kids in Toronto or Michigan—the difference between ten- and twelve-year-olds might be pretty small, in skill close to a wash. At the major junior level, it’s another thing entirely to ask a fifteen-year-old to skate against nineteen-year-olds already under contract to NHL clubs, some who’ve already played a few NHL games.

  Being cleared to play in the OHL at fifteen wasn’t going to send me to play away from home. A precedent had been set the year before: a player designated for exceptional status had to play with the team nearest to his home. The league had granted Jason Spezza exceptional-player status for the 1999–2000 season, and because the Spezza family had just bought a house in Brampton, he played for the Brampton Battalion. Optics were a factor. The league didn’t want to be seen as shipping kids away from home at fifteen—some still think it’s pretty cold-hearted to do it with sixteen-year-olds, but then again, every year dozens of kids move away from home to play in better leagues at younger ages, even twelve- and thirteen-year-olds. Wayne Gretzky moved from Brantford to Toronto when he was thirteen. Still, the OHL had its stay-at-home rule for exceptional-status players in order to head off moralizing media criticism about the game being a brutal business.

  My father didn’t ask me if I thought I was ready for it or if I wanted to do it. If he wanted me to do it, I was going to have to do it. It was going to be no different from any other season. What did I know? He knew better, even if he hadn’t been able to get into a game for the Brantford Alexanders back in his day. Newport Sports went along with my father. If they hadn’t, he would have shopped around for another agency. Newport Sports gave the application credibility with the OHL. Newport had a good relationship with the league. Over the years, hundreds of its players had played in the OHL and had gone on to play pro.

  Even today I don’t know what the procedure was. I never sat in on a meeting. I was never interviewed. In retrospect, it seems pretty strange that the people who were making such big decisions about my health and welfare relied on what they heard in meetings and from second-hand reports. There was no video back then, no highlights of me playing for the Strathroy Rockets. Today a kid up for exceptional status would have highlight plays all over YouTube. There was no media coverage, no buzz, about my father’s application. Today a fifteen-year-old’s name would be out there on websites, and hockey fans would have been talking about him for months before.

  I have to imagine that when my case came up in front of the OHL executives in the Toronto offices, Newport Sports took the lead. Even though it felt like my entire career was driven by my father’s ego, he would have been smart enough to know that he wouldn’t be the best spokesman. And if he were spokesman, he’d have had to worry about the league doing a background check on him—he wouldn’t have wanted any questions about his act at arenas in Toronto or about the incident with the forged birth certificate. The league executives could have made a couple of phone calls and poked around into my father’s history and realized that my father was a crank.

  My father’s application for my exceptional-player status was one of two that the league had for review. The other came from the family of Nathan Horton, another fifteen-year-old, who had been playing in the Golden Horseshoe Junior B league down toward Niagara Falls, a league that was probably a step down from the one Strathroy played in.

  I’m not sure how seriously the league took either of the exceptional-player applications, but one thing was clear: the 1984 birthdays didn’t make for a strong OHL draft class.

  It wasn’t the strongest year in the OHL draft. The top-ranked kid was Pat Jarrett, who wound up playing only one minor pro season and a few seasons in Europe after his OHL career. The second-ranked, Tim Brent, would make it into two hundred NHL games down the line; but the kid right behind him in the rankings, a defenseman named Richard Power, didn’t get drafted by an NHL team at eighteen and ended up playing some university hockey.

  Still, the OHL decided against granting either Horton or me exceptional-player status. League officials didn’t give an explanation and didn’t have to, but a couple of things were working against the application Newport Sports made for me.

  One: because I was living in the Detroit area, my rights would have gone to the Plymouth Whalers, a strong program but one unpopular at the time with league executives. The Whalers were owned by Peter Karmanos, a guy who had made hundreds of millions in computer tech and used it pretty liberally for any advantage he could get for his team—including recruiting American prospects who wouldn’t report to teams in Ontario but would bypass the NCAA to play in a nice suburb of Detroit for an owner who would underwrite their college education at a school of their choice down the line. Karmanos landing an exceptional-status player wouldn’t have sat well with small-town teams that were community-owned, kitchen-table operations.

  Two: playing in Strathroy meant that few executives in the league’s Toronto offices had seen me. OHL executives didn’t know much about the league. They would have seen me play if I had been coming out of a Toronto-area program like Jason Spezza had. There would have been media hype. OHL officials had to think that they shouldn’t be granting exceptional status based on word of mouth.

  Looking back now, it doesn’t look like either Horton or I were head and shoulders above the other players in our own draft year, the 1985 class. One of the players who would go into the top five of the OHL draft the next year, Corey Perry, would be named the most valuable player in the NHL one season and win two Olympic gold medals and a Stanley Cup. Another, Mike Richards, would win two Cups.

  Missing out on exceptional status was a disappointment but probably not a complete surprise. My father always knew better than everyone else. It was always Him against the World. For OHL executives, this would be their introduct
ion to my father, and not the last time his name would come up in conversation in their offices. The exceptional-status application was just his way of dropping off his business card—high-maintenance parents have a way of announcing themselves often, and early.

  In the end, though, the OHL’s passing turned out to be a break for me. It wound up opening a door that I thought was going to be shut on me.

  16

  ALL-AMERICAN BOY

  Ann Arbor, Michigan, October 2000

  My father had gone all in on exceptional status. He didn’t have a fallback option for me. It looked like I was going to be back for another year in Strathroy playing for Pat Stapleton—either that or my father would find another Junior B team in another league. It would be a holding-pattern year. There might have been options back in Toronto, but my father’s reputation was too well known. No one there would have wanted to take me on when it meant having to deal with him. I dreaded the idea of another year in Strathroy. I would have nothing to look forward to other than more beatings and more chasing after the van on the 402. I would still be the youngest kid in the room by at least two years. I would be on the team but my father wouldn’t let me be part of it—he wouldn’t let me move in with a billet family in Strathroy, wouldn’t let me ride the bus with the team, wouldn’t let me get to know the players away from the arena. Another season in Strathroy would mean another year commuting, another year completely under his thumb. It looked like I was in for the worst season ever.

  It turned out to be the best so far, maybe the best hockey experience I’d ever have. And it was a fluke, nothing that had ever been in my father’s plans for me.

  In September, USA Hockey had tryouts for its under-17 program and cut its roster down to twenty-four players, all of them born in 1984. This had been the end of a process that had been months, even years, in the works. The under-17 team’s manager and coaches had been keeping tabs on eligible players and talking to parents the previous winter. They had scouted tournaments. The organization had its team set and players had reported in time to enroll for the academic year at the local high school.

  But an opening came up a couple of weeks into the school year, before the under-17s had played a game on their schedule: Zach Parise, one of the key players among the ’84 birthdays, told USA Hockey that he wanted to go back to Shattuck–St. Mary’s, the Minnesota private school where his father, former NHLer J.P. Parisé, managed the hockey program. The timing couldn’t have been any worse for the organization. All the top American players who had been the last cuts in tryouts were already committed to other teams, whether in prep schools like Shattuck or in age-group programs.

  I’m sure that the manager of the program swallowed hard before he called my father. After all, he was still under the seven-year ban, a death sentence for minor hockey that had been handed down when he had forged my birth certificate for USA Hockey’s Under-15 Festival. My father never had a better chance to gloat than when he took that call. As a player, he had been chewed up and spat out by the game, always “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.” Now, as a father, he had a national program reaching out to him, saying that all was forgiven, commuting the death sentence and pardoning me.

  My father didn’t need much convincing. It was the next best thing to exceptional-player status in the OHL. In fact, it was the equivalent of it: one of the goaltenders on the team was a 1985 birthday like me, but everyone else was an ’84. The program had never recruited underage players before. Like with the Under-15 Festival, USA Hockey had a policy that not only discouraged playing up but avoided it without exception. On my count, they were making their first exception with a skater. It wasn’t just a bragging point for my father but something that conformed to the basic tenet of his plan for my development: putting me in with the best available older players, forcing me to catch up. Though the players in Ann Arbor were younger than those I skated with in Strathroy and even Alvinston, they were clearly a cut above in talent. They were ticketed for top NCAA schools. A bunch would be high draft choices and NHL players down the line. The challenge wasn’t quite as forbidding as the OHL, but it was stiff enough. The program had facilities as good as those at a lot of Division I schools and had coaches who could have stepped right into NCAA programs and pro organizations. The program also offered an extensive travel schedule with no cost to players’ families, the tab picked up by USA Hockey, which used funds gathered from players in leagues across country. On all these counts, Ann Arbor would be a huge step up from Strathroy.

  * * *

  Though everyone in the under-17 program was a lot closer in age to me than the players in Alvinston and Strathroy had been, I was still as much of an outsider in Ann Arbor. It wasn’t just that I was the kid who’d been parachuted in. Even if you didn’t know the ugliest of the family secrets, I stood apart from the rest.

  All of them had played with high school, prep school or age-group teams. None of them had experiences in the game like mine, playing like I had in Strathroy with a linemate who was married with kids. None of their families had skipped from one city to the next looking for a team.

  The vast majority of them had stable families, a lot of them really well-to-do, flying in to Michigan for home games and traveling elsewhere first-class. My father and I stood out—we were the closest thing to hardscrabble you’d find in the program. Some of my teammates drove Beamers that would cost six times the book value of my father’s van. Their parents made sure that they had the best of everything and spared no expense, while my father, since my days in Toronto, was cutting deals, getting teams to comp my registration fees and give me equipment. Other players knew only security, while our family got by, barely, and not all on my father’s limited income working nights as unskilled labor. We ate but not well. We lived luxury free in a three-bedroom rental. I never spent one summer in a house with air-conditioning. When money was short for the bills, my mother made a call to her parents to get over the hump.

  Yeah, some of the other parents were “involved”—it would be very hard to get this far in the game and into the Ann Arbor program without a lot of support. Many of the fathers had played the game and had been on the ice with their sons. Many of them had coached their sons at some point, some all the way through. Still, the level of my father’s involvement registered with them. Some of the players’ parents made it to Ann Arbor only once a month. My father was the only one who came out not just to every game but to every practice, and when he was there he didn’t try to blend in with the scenery. He shouted at me just like had at every other stop on the way. My teammates never took shots at me about it, but their expressions, headshakes and eye rolls told me that they sympathized with me—or at least were thankful their fathers weren’t making spectacles of themselves.

  They didn’t know the half of it, of course. At home my father stuck to his usual methods of toughening me up. I was too old to lock out of the house in my pajamas in the dead of winter. I would have been a threat to walk away and get a cab to a teammate’s house. Still, my father would push me every waking hour to be working out. But I didn’t just give in like I had when I was younger. I was starting to fight back—and that meant he had to raise his game. What used to be slaps became punches, with all his weight behind them.

  I was able to break away to socialize more with my teammates than I had when I was younger—the team rule that everyone had to travel with the team cut me a break on that. The more time I spent with my teammates, the more I understood how much I had missed growing up. I wasn’t used to making friends. I could be cut-throat when I spoke to teammates because I had no idea about their feelings. My life’s experiences had been limited by my father’s obsession. I wasn’t a worldly kid. I had never gone to a school dance. I had never gone to a school football or basketball game or any other social event. My father thought that those things were a waste of precious time, time that had to be spent training. They were distractions from the goal. My father aspired to an unbalanced life.

  People who
didn’t know me would read that I was remote, even aloof, and that was an easy takeaway given my father’s attitude and behavior. Patrick Eaves and the other players I became closest to on the team knew different and did what they could to put all that to rest.

  The players were good to me, and they thought they understood my situation. But I never opened up about the worst of it, or even, really, the basics. Everyone was trying to follow the script that our coach, an ex-NHLer named Moe Mantha, laid out. Moe gave us chapter and verse from the USA Hockey playbook, all the stuff about team play, sacrificing for the greater good, not worrying about personal stats. And Moe had it right—when our team was at its best, we won that way, beating teams in our age group and older that had more talent on the ice but didn’t play so well together. But Moe’s message was exactly the opposite from what I heard from my father.

  “Don’t give a damn about your teammates until you get to the NHL,” my father would tell me. That was one of his favorites. Another: “Just get your goals. That’s what you have to do if you’re going to make it.”

  17

  ROAD GAME

  Truro, Nova Scotia, and Chicago, Illinois, January 2001

  When I was offered a spot on the under-17 team, the coaches thought I wouldn’t play a lot. I was in as a spare part, an extra forward who would spend most of the time on the bench, not much more than a practice player. Our schedule was made up almost entirely of junior and college teams—our entire team was “playing up,” and we struggled. Every game, we were fighting above our weight class, so the role of an underage player should have been minimal. The coaches saw me as an investment in the program’s future—a year in waiting would prepare me for a central role with the 1985 birthdays the next season. It didn’t work out that way, though.