This column would prove surprisingly prescient in the final period of the final game of the 2011 world junior hockey championship.
MARK VISENTIN AND THE
THIRD PERIOD FROM HELL
(The Globe and Mail, January 8, 2011)
Let us begin around midnight on Wednesday on the Peace Bridge leading from Buffalo, New York, to Fort Erie, Ontario. Dan Visentin, a high-school math teacher, is driving. His wife, Liz, also a teacher, is in the car, as are his parents, Italo and Rita Visentin.
Italo Visentin knows something about dreams. More than a half century ago, he and Rita came from Italy to nearby Niagara Falls with no idea what would happen to them in this strange new country where they didn’t even speak the language. Yet it all worked out wonderfully. He became a crane operator, their children excelled in school and life, retirement gave them time to spend with grandchildren. They had just witnessed one of them have a dream shattered.
Mark Visentin, who turned eighteen only last August, was in goal for Team Canada at the world junior championship when the unimaginable happened. Canada was ahead 3–0 going into the third period of the gold medal game and seemed on a cruise to avenge the championship lost to the Americans last year in Saskatoon. But then, in what felt like the snap of a finger, the Russians scored twice, then tied the game and stormed on to a stunning 5–3 victory.
Even without the radio on, everyone in the car knew what was being said: the greatest collapse ever … the team had choked … the goalie was the goat. They hoped that Mark, travelling behind in another car with his girlfriend, Harmony, didn’t have his radio on. He didn’t.
“How ya doin’ tonight?” the border guard asked as Dan Visentin handed over the four passports.
“Depressed,” Visentin answered.
The guard, flicking through the passports, paused and looked up, surprised. “Oh, shit,” he said, “you’re a Visentin.”
“I’m the father.”
The guard handed back the passports. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You have a great kid there—you got to be proud of him.”
“We are.”
“He’s going to be a great goalie one day.”
“We know.”
Mark Visentin made it through at another border booth and drove slowly to his parents’ home in little Waterdown. No radio. Hardly any words. What was there to say? He had already said what he thought he had to say. He had sobbed on the ice and was still weeping in the dressing room when Hockey Canada’s André Brin asked if anyone was ready to speak to the media.
“I’ll come out,” he volunteered. Many goaltenders would have refused. Some members of the media reacted with surprise when the black curtain split open and out stepped the Canadian goaltender of record, eyes clear, head held high, and prepared to talk as long as there were questions. “I like to get stuff done and not leave it,” he said Friday in an interview.
He put no blame on the defence that, at times, let him down, no blame on the forwards who had their own breakdowns. He took full responsibility. “I’m not the guy who blames his team,” he said. “You really wish you could have provided a couple of saves when they were needed.”
He had felt the tide turning, as coach Dave Cameron later put it. He watched the “spark” go into the Russians and knew that it had gone out of his own team. “We pushed the panic button a bit,” he said. “We tried to get back, but …”
He knew he could talk forever and the score would never change. “No one to blame but me,” he said. “I try to make myself accountable for what happens.”
It is, in fact, the accountability and responsibility of that crucial position in hockey that first appealed to him. The first time he tried playing goal he “fell in love with it. The goaltender can be a game-changer,” he said, “and that is a great feeling. But if you’re going to do that, you have to accept the ups and downs.”
Growing up, his great hero was Curtis Joseph, then the goaltender for the nearby Toronto Maple Leafs. He and his friends would play on the backyard rink and he would imagine he was “CuJo” kicking out the pucks—at least when Sheeba, the family’s golden retriever puppy, wasn’t running off with them.
At sixteen, he made the leap to Major Junior, drafted by the Niagara IceDogs, a team that plays out of St. Catharines, Ontario. At seventeen, six weeks short of his eighteenth birthday, and much to his own surprise, he became a first-round draft pick (chosen twenty-seventh overall) of the Phoenix Coyotes.
He hopes to have a professional career, but he is also an excellent student and calls his decision to take courses at Brock University his “backup plan.” He was one of nine goaltenders invited to the summer junior camp, one of four at the December camp. His roommate was Olivier Roy, who got an early-morning call that he’d made it, convincing Visentin he had not.
“Who’s your partner going to be?” the disappointed youngster asked.
“You!”
It seemed that partnership would be in the backup role, with the year-older Roy pegged to get the most work, but after Canada lost 6–5 in a shootout to Sweden, the switch was made to Mark Visentin, and Cameron stuck with him right to the final, going with an eighteen-year-old in a tournament meant for nineteen-year-olds.
The young goaltender prepared as usual—have a meal of chicken parmesan, listen to some music (everything from rap to country), get to the rink, work on his sticks—but no one, not the coaches, not the country, was prepared for that third period.
It has been described as the greatest collapse ever in Canada’s time in international hockey, but there are comparables. Alan Eagleson says what happened in Buffalo reminded him of Game 5 in the 1972 Summit Series. Team Canada was up 4–1 into the third period in Moscow, only to have the Soviets score two very quick goals on Tony Esposito and then two more before the period was out to win 5–4. Tony Esposito, it might be worth pointing out, went on to a Hall of Fame career.
“People lose perspective,” said Dan Visentin. “Mark will be fine. He’s got his whole future in front of him.”
Mark Visentin had that future to consider that night as he drove home to Canada. “It was weird,” he said. “There was just so much to take in.” He was grateful for Ben Vanderklok, a coach with the IceDogs, for working so hard on his personal mental toughness.
“It was a tough pill to swallow,” he said. “But I think I’m a better person for it.” He knew now he could handle the worst imaginable adversity. He knew he was strong enough to leave it behind him.
No one was up when he came through the front door, but then came the sound of an old dog’s nails moving along the floor. Sheeba, the old puppy still going at fourteen, came hurrying toward him, wiggling and tail wagging.
“She was just happy to see me,” he said.
Mark Visentin inspired an entire hockey nation when he spoke so openly about his own feelings in the days immediately following that astonishing loss to Russia. He returned to form quickly on return to the Niagara IceDogs and led them into the 2011 Ontario Hockey League playoffs by posting a stunning .977 save percentage and allowing a mere three goals as his team swept the Brampton Battalion in the opening round. He was indeed “a better person” and, still, a first-rate goaltender. At season’s end, he was named the Ontario Hockey League’s Goaltender of the Year.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author is forever indebted to those many editors and sports editors who either assigned me these stories, agreed with me that these were stories or, in a few instances, forced me to do stories they thought needed doing and I could not see why until I was well into it: Peter C. Newman, Don Obe, Mel Morris, John Aitken, John Gault, Hal Quinn, Walter Stewart, Lou Clancy, Keith Spicer, Nelson Skuce, Scott Honeyman, Jim Travers, Lynn McAuley, Graham Parley, Tom Casey, Ken Whyte, Jim Bray, Ed Greenspon, Steve McAllister, David Walmsley, John Stackhouse, Tom Maloney.
Thanks, as well, to Maclean’s, The Canadian, Today, Toronto Star, Ottawa Citizen, National Post and The Globe and Mail for a lifetime of opportunity.
/> A huge note of appreciation to Natasha Haines and Bruce Westwood of Westwood Creative Artists for their continued support. And gratitude, as well, to Craig Pyette of Random House Canada, who pushed and prodded and polished and knows enough about hockey to write his own book.
PHOTO PERMISSIONS
col1.1 “Shortly after Wayne Gretzky retired …” AP/Mark Humphrey
col1.2 “In Pittsburgh …” Justin K. Aller/Getty Images
col1.3 “A championship is never inevitable …” Elsa/Allsport
col1.4 “A young Guy Lafleur …” Quebec Le Soleil
col1.5 “A supremely talented enigma …” Montreal Gazette/Phil Carpenter
col1.6 “In a pose his opponents …” Bruce Bennett/Getty Images
col1.7 “Philadelphia Flyers captain …” John D. Hanlon/Sports Illustrated/Getty Images
col1.8 “Ryan Kesler surprised many …” AP/Marcio Jose Sanchez
col1.9 “Daniel and Henrik Sedin …” Bruce Bennett/Getty Images
col1.10 “Brad Marchand …” Harry How/Getty Images
col1.11 “How many gold medals …” SAEED KHAN/AFP/Getty Images
col1.12 “Eccentric and beloved …” The Canadian Press/Tom Hanson
col1.13 “Don Cherry, with straight man …” Bruce Bennett/Getty Images
col1.14 “Sometimes dreams …” Robert Laberge/Allsport
col1.15 “Wally’s Coliseum …” The Globe and Mail/Kevin Van Paassen
col1.16 “An established great …” The Canadian Press/Ron Poling
col1.17 “She’s been called the Wayne Gretzky …” AP/Julie Jacobson
col1.18 “At the world junior championship …” left image, The Canadian Press; right image, The Globe and Mail/Kevin Van Paassen
col1.19 “Wayne Gretzky’s ghost revealed …” property of the author
Roy MacGregor is the acclaimed and bestselling author of Home Team: Fathers, Sons and Hockey (shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award), A Life in the Bush (winner of the Author’s Rutstrum Award for Best Wilderness Book and the CAA Award for Biography) and Canadians: A Portrait of a Country and Its People, as well as two novels, Canoe Lake and The Last Season, and the popular Screech Owls mystery series for young readers. A regular columnist at The Globe and Mail since 2002, MacGregor has received four National Magazine Awards and eight National Newspaper Award nominations for his journalism. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada, and was described in the citation as one of Canada’s “most gifted storytellers.” He grew up in Huntsville, Ontario, and now lives in Kanata, Ontario.
Wayne Gretzky's Ghost Page 38