Wayne Gretzky's Ghost

by Roy MacGregor

  In fact, according to Barnsley, the most important contribution Canadian parents can make to their child’s hockey career has nothing to do with the top line of skates, the best equipment or even power-skating classes.

  It’s to mess around on April Fool’s Day and pray for a New Year’s Day baby.

  Dr. Roger Barnsley is the dean of education at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, and he’s been fascinated by the relationship between date of birth and performance since that evening in 1983 when he talked his wife, Paula, into going off to a Broncos junior game while both were at the University of Lethbridge. Growing rather bored with the game, Paula Barnsley began reading the program for something to do, and it struck her as curious that the vast majority of the players from both teams had been born in the early months of the year. The Barnsleys’ own two sons, both born late in the year, were involved in hockey but hardly succeeding, and it struck the mother, a psychologist, and the father, an educator, that there just might be a connection here.

  There was. It has now been five years since the Barnsleys and Dr. Gus Thompson published their first scientific paper on the phenomenon. Their hunch is now irrefutable fact: approximately four times as many junior and professional hockey players are born in the first quarter of each year than in the last quarter.

  Just for the record, Wayne Gretzky’s birthday is fast approaching: January 26. In the years since, the Barnsley-Thompson argument has been further refined. By studying minor hockey they have been able to demonstrate how those children born in the early months of the hockey year (beginning January 1) are the ones who remain as participants, while those born in later months tend to be the ones who drop out.

  It is highly disturbing news for all parents, for Roger Barnsley has grown increasingly fascinated with the thought that his “relative age effect” may be showing up in another childhood endeavour that also uses January 1 as the cut-off date. School. In fact, the longer Barnsley looks at school, the more it takes on all the obvious flaws of the minor hockey system. Schools stream children according to ability—or apparent ability. Both have tier levels tied to advancement.

  Here’s how he sees it working: children are judged less bright when the reason they are progressing more slowly is that they are younger, and so they end up in the slow kids’ class where no one expects much of them, whereas older, more developmentally advanced children are put into the bright kids’ class, where they receive praise and are expected to do well.

  Barnsley has been thinking of solutions. In hockey, he talks about altering the cut-off dates each year and working in new measures like height and weight. In school he pines for the one-room “open” classroom that showed a far greater tolerance for differences among students. But don’t look for changes to come quickly. Hockey, in fact, has gotten worse since Paula Barnsley opened her Broncos program back in 1983. And schools are only now becoming aware of how long a year is to a six-year-old.

  In fact, maybe this column should be kept from everyone—not just hockey loonies—who find themselves racing off to the maternity wards so late in the year. They obviously don’t understand the first thing about family planning in the newly competitive world.

  Shortly after Wayne Gretzky retired a New York Ranger, I was asked to ghostwrite his weekly newspaper column. (photo credit col1.1)

  In Pittsburgh, even a retired Mario Lemieux on the ice is worth a ticket. The 2011 Winter Classic Alumni Game would draw thousands of fans. (photo credit col1.2)

  A championship is never inevitable, but with the great Ray Borque joining Joe Sakic and an all-star cast in Colorado it’s hard to imagine the 2000–01 Avalanche falling short. (photo credit col1.3)

  A young Guy Lafleur takes home the Memorial Cup as a Quebec Rampart in 1971, before becoming a part of hockey history in Montreal. (photo credit col1.4)

  A supremely talented enigma and one of the most revered of Les Glorieux: Alexei Kovalev and Jean Béliveau at the Molson Centre. (photo credit col1.5)

  In a pose his opponents have seen before and will see again, Washington Capitals’ captain Alexander Ovechkin celebrates yet another goal. (photo credit col1.6)

  Philadelphia Flyers captain Bobby Clarke chases down a man who was never easy to catch, Boston Bruins defenseman Bobby Orr. (photo credit col1.7)

  Ryan Kesler surprised many people with his inspired play in the 2011 Stanley Cup playoffs. His disappointment was assuaged somewhat when he was awarded the Selke Trophy as the league’s top defensive forward for 2010–11. (photo credit col1.8)

  Daniel and Henrik Sedin: sharing an uncanny knack for finding one another on the ice, the Swedish twins won back-to-back scoring championships in 2009-10 and 2010-11, and powered a dominant Vancouver offence. (photo credit col1.9)

  Brad Marchand: the Bruins rookie crashes the party—and Vancouver’s hopes that the Canucks will finally bring the Stanley Cup back to Canada. (photo credit col1.10)

  How many gold medals and Stanley Cups does Sidney Crosby need to win before we stop calling him “the Kid”? (photo credit col1.11)

  Eccentric and beloved, before succumbing to cancer in 2003 Roger Neilson pioneered many coaching techniques considered commonplace today, including the use of game video to review plays. (photo credit col1.12)

  Don Cherry, with straight man Ron MacLean, remains the most recognizable, popular, controversial, beloved and despised political voice in the country. (photo credit col1.13)

  Sometimes dreams come true; sometimes they don’t. Despite huge expectations, the only NHL history Alexandre Daigle made was as a cautionary tale. (photo credit col1.14)

  Wally’s Coliseum: the most famous backyard rink in Canada is no more. (photo credit col1.15)

  An established great, Bob Gainey, tries to slow down a new one, Gretzky. Gainey would return to Montreal as general manager in 2003, but his greatest challenges have always come from outside the arena. (photo credit col1.16)

  She’s been called the Wayne Gretzky of women’s hockey, and Hayley Wickenheiser is almost as tough to stop. (photo credit col1.17)

  At the world junior championship, Canadian goalie Mark Visentin faced the third period from hell: a 3–0 lead, a 5–3 loss, a gold for Russia. The collapse would have ruined many teenagers, but he took the loss with courage and humility, and returned to his Niagara IceDogs to win OHL Goaltender of the Year. (photo credit col1.18)

  Wayne Gretzky’s ghost revealed: fifth from the left, back row, with the Huntsville All-Stars, Squirt, 1956–57. (photo credit col1.19)

  SEVEN

  BEHIND THE BENCH

  THE COURAGE OF ROGER NEILSON

  (The Globe and Mail, May 10, 2003)

  OTTAWA, ONTARIO

  There were no white towels waving over Rideau Hall yesterday. But it would have been a lovely touch—considering that they are playing for Lord Stanley’s Cup these days and the man who raised the first white towel in a playoff game was inside being honoured.

  Perhaps the towels were missing because they weren’t quite sure it was really Roger Neilson at the door. He was, after all, wearing a pressed dark suit rather than his usual rumpled jacket and no socks, with only an outrageous starburst of a necktie to identify hockey’s most eccentric and innovative coach.

  Now, however, there will be something to distract the eye from his legendary ties—the Order of Canada pin.

  The sixty-eight-year-old Neilson was presented with the honour yesterday by Governor General Adrienne Clarkson, 110 years after Governor General Lord Stanley’s famous trophy was first presented to the best hockey team of the day—and the day before Neilson’s own Ottawa Senators, the only Canadian team remaining, open the third round of the Stanley Cup playoffs.

  The ceremony was witnessed by a few of Neilson’s closest friends. The lifelong bachelor, who has been battling cancer for the past three years, claims to have no known living relatives—unaware, perhaps, that he is considered family by everyone who has ever played for him, coached with him, attended his hockey schools or simply bumped into
him in a hockey rink or, for that matter, even in one of the absent-minded driver’s multiple fender-benders.

  The official ceremony had to be rescheduled after Neilson was felled by a bout of pneumonia that struck after a late January trip to South Florida for the National Hockey League’s All-Star weekend. Already weakened from treatment for the two cancers he suffers from, melanoma and multiple myeloma, Neilson had run into travel delays that exhausted him and allowed him to spend only the first period behind the bench as he and fellow Ottawa assistant coaches Perry Pearn and Don Jackson coached the Eastern Conference YoungStars to an 8–3 victory over the West.

  “I only watched a few minutes,” Neilson joked at the time. “Too much offence.”

  Neilson was honoured with the Order for his dedication to the game—he began coaching at age seventeen and has held head-coach positions with eight NHL teams, including the Toronto Maple Leafs and Vancouver Canucks—but it is his commitment to defence that has earned him special status in the hockey world. He was the NHL coach who perfected the infamous “neutral-zone trap,” mastering it while building the expansion Florida Panthers into a team that would go to the Stanley Cup final the year after he was fired—the only firing, he says, that caught him completely by surprise.

  “The trap,” Neilson once said, “is the most misunderstood system in sports. It’s just positional play where you try and stop the other team from getting over centre.”

  A former goaltender, Neilson became a master innovator in a game that prefers tradition. He once put a defenceman in net for a penalty shot (now illegal) and is responsible for more rule changes in hockey than anyone alive. He was first to use video equipment—picking up the nickname Captain Video—and “breaking down tape” is now considered an essential coaching technique.

  Neilson is famous in hockey circles for using his dogs to illustrate plays. While coaching in the junior leagues, he would bring his mongrel, Jacques, out onto the ice to demonstrate to young defencemen the futility of chasing behind the net to get to a puck handler. Dog and coach were so close that when Jacques grew feeble, Neilson took to pushing him about in a supermarket buggy.

  Eccentricity has also long been a trademark. Ottawa Senators staff joke about how he can get lost driving from home to rink and shake their heads over the number of parking-lot dents he has caused—always, incidentally, owning up. He says he “hates ties” but began wearing cheap $2 and $3 ones bought from New York street vendors to show up a colleague who was regularly spending $175 on his neckwear, and the cheap tie habit eventually stuck fast.

  As for the white towel, the game’s recognized symbol of home fan support began when Neilson, upset with the officiating in the 1982 Stanley Cup final between his Vancouver Canucks and the New York Islanders, draped a towel over a stick and raised it in surrender. Since then, the white towel has come to represent the direct opposite of surrender in hockey.

  Neilson was struck by cancer three years ago while coaching the Philadelphia Flyers. He fought back with medical treatment, his own deep religious convictions and the friendship of the sporting world. At one point, Tour de France cycling champion Lance Armstrong, himself a cancer survivor, called to tell Neilson that the best approach was to “get back to work.”

  The long-time coach would never have it any other way. In a touching gesture, Senators head coach Jacques Martin stepped aside so that Neilson could coach his thousandth NHL game. Last fall, Neilson was named to the Hockey Hall of Fame. And last week, after a very tough spring, Neilson returned to the road, accompanying his team to Philadelphia, where the Senators defeated the Flyers to move on, for the first time, to the conference finals. “His goal when he started therapy in December was to return to coaching in the playoffs,” said Roy Mlakar, the Senators’ president and a close Neilson friend. “He accomplished that goal.”

  At November’s Hall of Fame induction, Neilson brought down the house with jokes about former Leafs owner Harold Ballard, but also choked up when he realized how deeply appreciated he was by his hockey family.

  “It’s been a great ride,” he said. And, mercifully, it’s still going.

  Roger Neilson died on June 21, 2003. He had just turned sixty-nine. His funeral in Peterborough was a huge affair attended by much of the hockey world. Following his passing, the Ottawa Senators Foundation announced it would build Roger’s House/La maison de Roger, a pediatric palliative care facility at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario. Roger’s House has since become one of Ottawa’s most cherished charities. Wayne Scanlan of the Ottawa Citizen published a best-selling biography, Roger’s World, in 2004.

  COACH OF THE YEAR, FIRINGS OF THE YEAR: TED NOLAN

  (The Globe and Mail, December 8, 2007)

  UNIONDALE, NEW YORK

  Maybe he was just going through menopause.

  At least, that’s how Sandra Nolan tried to laugh it away when her husband began complaining these past few weeks of hot flashes and headaches and suddenly finding himself soaked in clammy sweat. It could not, surely, have to do with stress. Compared to what Ted Nolan had been through in the forty-nine years that led up to this inexplicable condition, his current job as head coach of the New York Islanders was a glide on thick, smooth ice.

  He had fought through poverty, the tenth of twelve children growing up on the Garden River reserve near Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, in a small house with no electricity and no running water. So obsessed was he with hockey that he would build fires around the well to free up the frozen pump, then carry pail after pail of water to his little rink back of the house. When he and younger brother Steve first joined up to play organized hockey in a nearby community, they had to play on different lines so they could share the only stick, helmet and pair of gloves the Nolan kids owned.

  He battled racism, heading off to Kenora, Ontario, for junior hockey and a daily regimen of fighting, both at school and on the hockey rink. Nolan was skilled, but it was toughness that gave him seventy-eight games in the National Hockey League before he turned to the yo-yo life of professional coaching. Up against racism as a child, he found he was up against it still as a man. At his most recent previous job, as coach of the Moncton Wildcats of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League, he had to deal with war whoops, tomahawk chops and pretend arrows in certain rinks. Luckily, he says with a weary smile, he knows no French so never really understood what he was being called.

  He was only fourteen when his father, Stan, died of heart failure. A decade later, his mother, Rose, was killed by a drunk driver. He lost a sister to liver disease, uncles to alcoholism.

  So where was the stress here on Long Island? Here he was in Gatsby country, the world where F. Scott Fitzgerald once pointed out the obvious—“The very rich are different from you and me”—and he was doing well both in the bank and on the ice. The Islanders, dismissed little more than a year ago as a Three Stooges comedy on ice, were now surprisingly respectable.

  They had made the playoffs last year and were off to a fine start this season. And they were doing it with so many Canadian Aboriginals—Nolan an Ojibwa from Garden River, assistant coach John Chabot an Algonquin from Quebec’s Kitigan Zibi, player Chris Simon an Ojibwa from Wawa, Ontario, and even director of player development Bryan Trottier, a Métis from Val Marie, Saskatchewan—that there were regular jokes among them about taking back Manhattan whenever the Islanders went up against the nearby New York Rangers.

  Nolan’s greatest delight this season was in bringing in his long-time friend Chabot to help with the coaching. Chabot too had come from rural poverty—his first skates were so large he had to wear six socks—but had grown up off reserve, as his father, eager to give his eight children a better opportunity, joined the armed forces.

  While Nolan had been hit with racism at every turn, Chabot had been only vaguely aware of a difference when he was young. “I couldn’t play with some of the other kids,” he recalled. “Their parents wouldn’t allow it.” Chabot had been a supremely talented young player who had limited succes
s in the NHL, played in Europe and gained a reputation as a “teacher” as a junior coach in Quebec.

  Things were going so well for Nolan on Long Island, in fact, that cold sweats and hot flashes seemed an impossibility in a man renowned for his ability to remain calm under fire. And then, a few days ago, it was all explained. A toxic mould had invaded a new luxury complex in nearby Westbury. About four hundred apartments were affected, including the one being rented by Ted and Sandra Nolan.

  When the coach arrived for practice, he had just been handed an eviction notice, and he was smiling. “I’ve just become a homeless person,” he said.

  It would not be the first time Ted Nolan has been tossed out in the cold, or, in the case of the NHL, the wilderness. Ten years ago, Nolan seemed at the peak of a soaring coaching career. He had retired as a player and gone to coach the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds of the OHL, where he first met, and changed the life of, Chris Simon. After winning junior hockey’s Memorial Cup, Nolan became an assistant coach with the NHL’s Hartford Whalers, soon moving to head coach with the Buffalo Sabres.

  He took a team of low expectations and turned them into a playoff contender. He was chosen as the NHL coach of the year for 1996 and received the Jack Adams Award. The last time Nolan saw his award, it was in a cardboard box that he threw down the basement steps. He has never looked at it since.

  Whatever happened in Buffalo, it still eats at Nolan. He had great success there, but it was said he warred with fickle goaltender Dominik Hasek. It was said he backstabbed general manager John Muckler, who was fired not long before Nolan was offered a gratuitous one-year contract and, insulted, decided to walk. It was said he was even showing up drunk for practice.