Thirty Years of the Game at its Best

by Gare Joyce

  In the wild shootout that was held to settle matters, Canada scored on all three

  of its shots (Eberle, Nazem Kadri, and Brandon Kozun), while the Americans matched goal for goal (Kristo and Jeremy Morin) until the final shooter of the night (Schroeder) failed to score when Canadian goaltender Jake Allen scissored his pads closed to deny the shot.

  It was clear, by this game, that the Americans had become the new rivals to the Canadians—two teams perfectly matched on the ice and two countries forever rubbing up against each other off the ice. It was fitting that the two North American rivals were meeting in a gold-medal game held in—as hockey promoter Bill Hunter put it years ago when Saskatoon was wooing the St. Louis Blues—the very heart of the continent. As Canadian poet Al Purdy had once said, victory in hockey, especially against the United States, serves “as a Canadian specific to salve the anguish of inferiority at being good at something the Americans aren’t.”

  The shootout victory over Team U.S.A. gave Canada a bye into the semifinals. The Americans now had to play Finland in order to survive. And survive the Americans did, defeating Finland to advance against pre-tournament favourite Sweden and then winning that match 5–2 to reach the final. Canada, on the other hand, had a skate in the park by comparison, as they next met unheralded Switzerland, the tournament surprise when they bumped out Russia with a 3–2 overtime victory. Drained and missing their best defenceman to injury, the Swiss had fallen easily to Canada, 6–1.

  It set up a rematch that was jokingly referred to as “Groundhog Day in Saskatoon”—the Canadians and Americans meeting again on the same ice to

  Taylor Hall celebrates

  Greg Nemisz’s goal

  that tied the score 2–2

  in the first period of

  the gold-medal game.

  Jordan Eberle scored

  eight goals in six

  games in the 2010

  tournament, but there

  would be no repeat

  of 2009’s magical goal

  in his second bid for

  gold.

  settle the score once and for all. “A shootout loss is not really a loss,” rationalized Team U.S.A.’s Kristo. “It shows up as a loss, but it’s not really a loss.”

  If the Americans found inspiration in avenging that shootout, then the Canadians had theirs in Travis Hamonic. The young defenceman from little St. Malo, Manitoba, had gone down with a separated shoulder in the final moments of the semifinal. He wouldn’t be suiting up in the game he had worked so hard to get to, and he wouldn’t be playing for the gold medal he had dreamed since childhood of winning. This time he wouldn’t be writing that private message to his late father before the game and then taping over the blade so only he would know what he said. Now, the message was for him, and completely public. “We’re going to try and go out there and win it for him,” said Canadian forward Brayden Schenn.

  The Canadians scored on their first shot, and then their fifth, while the

  Americans matched the Canadian goals and then moved ahead to take a 3–2 lead. When Canada tied the game at 3–3 early in the second period, the American side pulled goaltender Mike Lee in favour of Jack Campbell, who had played so well in the New Year’s classic that Canada had finally taken 5–4 in the shootout. Campbell was an instant standout, continually stopping what seemed, at times, a Canadian stampede to the American net.

  It was not to be the only goaltending change, though, with Canada pulling Jake Allen after the Americans scored twice in the third period and replacing Allen with Martin Jones. The change seemed to fire up the Canadians, with Jordan Eberle once again the Canadian hero as he scored twice on the brilliant Campbell in a span of 2:49 to, once again, force overtime in the gold-medal game. Eberle’s two, combined with Canadian goals from Luke Adam, Greg Nemisz, and Taylor Hall, matched the five goals from five different Team U.S.A. players: Chris Kreider, Jordan Schroeder, John Carlson, Jerry D’Amigo, and Derek Stepan.

  But there would be no shootout this time. And no sixth straight gold medal for Canada. Instead, the dramatic game was ended at 4:21 of the overtime when Team U.S.A. broke up ice on a three-on-one break and rushing defenceman Carlson, with his second goal of the night, beat Jones fairly with a hard blast from the left circle.

  Final score, 6–5. Just like all the great games ever played.

  And Travis Hamonic, shoulder in a sling, had a medal for his father—just not the gold one he had prayed for.

  American John

  Carlson’s overtime

  goal silenced the

  crowd in Saskatoon

  and denied the

  Canadians a sixth

  consecutive gold

  medal.

  Carter Ashton

  hoists an opponent

  along the boards

  in Canada’s 10–1

  romp over Norway.

  The Canadians had

  things their own

  way throughout the

  tournament up to the

  third period of the

  gold-medal game.

  It is shortly after midnight, January 6, 2011. Traffic is still heavy on the Peace Bridge that spans the Niagara River between Fort Erie, Ontario, and Buffalo, New York. Vehicles holding red-jerseyed, face-painted, hoarse Canadians who, earlier in the evening, had packed the HSBC Arena to witness the most astonishing collapse in world junior championship history are slowly making their way home.

  In one car sits Dan Visentin, the driver, who refuses to turn on the radio because he knows only too well what they will be saying and he does not wish to hear the one word that is bouncing about the airwaves: “choke,” the ultimate curse word in hockey. Besides Dan, the car holds Liz, his wife, like Dan a schoolteacher, and his parents, Italo and Rita, who decades ago immigrated to Canada and found their dream life in Niagara Falls. They were now following the great dream of their grandson, Mark, and had just witnessed its shattering.

  The green light signalled them up to the booth. Dan rolled down the window, preparing to hand over the four passports.

  “How ya doing tonight?” the Canadian border guard asked.

  “Depressed,” Dan answered.

  The guard flicked through the top passports. paushed and looked up,surprised.

  “You’re Visentin,” he said.

  Canadian goaltender

  Mark Visentin knew

  all about the loneliest

  position in the game.

  “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.”

  The first time Mark Visentin tried playing goal, he “fell in love with it.” His hero was “CuJo”—Curtis Joseph of the Toronto Maple Leafs—and he tried to emulate Joseph’s style. He played on backyard rinks and driveways and in the street in little Waterdown, Ontario. He even played with the family dog, Sheeba, the golden retriever who had grown up with him, changing from a puppy who

  happily chased balls that missed the net Mark was guarding to a faithful old dog, herself a teenager now, who was simply content to get a pat on the head and her ears scratched. There was no one in her life as important as Mark, her lifelong playmate.

  Goaltenders, as the entire hockey world has long known, are both different people and special people. The great Russian goaltender Vladislav Tretiak called it the most “noble” position in all of sport. Gump Worsley argued it was “not a job that would interest any normal, straight-thinking human.” Hall of Famer Jacques Plante once asked, “How would you like it if you were sitting in your office and you made one little mistake. Suddenly, a big red light went on and 18,000 people jumped up and started screaming at you, calling you a bum and an imbecile and throwing garbage at you.”

  Mark Visentin’s a reflective young man who possesses an understanding of the po
tential rewards and gut-wrenching risks that his position entails. “The goaltender can be a game-changer,” he says, “and that is a great feeling. But if you’re going to do that, you have to accept the ups and downs.”

  Heading into the 2011 world junior championship, it had been all ups. A brilliant minor hockey goaltender, he had made the leap to major junior at 16. At 17, six weeks short of his 18th birthday, he became a first-round draft pick (chosen 27th overall) of the Phoenix Coyotes. He was already a junior star with the Niagara IceDogs and hoped to have a professional career, but as he was also an excellent student he had a backup plan: a degree at nearby Brock University. He had a girlfriend, Harmony, and life could hardly be better for a kid just turned 18.

  Team Canada 2011 came to Buffalo with tremendous promise and a few questions. The team had been selected with an eye to assembling a roster of, as head coach Dave Cameron put it, “200-foot players.” He did not, fortunately, mean height, but rather style. Cameron and management wanted solid, working-class players who were comfortable at both ends of the ice. With a number of flashier juniors left off the team, there were naturally questions raised concerning who would do the scoring, but there were also questions raised as to who would stop the scoring from the other side. From a list of top junior goaltenders the choice came down to two: Olivier Roy, a 19-year-old native of Causapscal, Quebec, playing for the Acadie-Bathurst Titan, and 18-year-old Mark Visentin.

  Roy, the more experienced of the two, had been chosen to start Canada’s first three games, but when Canada lost a 6–5 shootout to another pre-tournament favourite, Sweden, the decision was made to give Visentin a chance the next game—which would be Switzerland and a game that, of course, Canada could be expected to win handily.

  It was not an auspicious debut. The Canada-Switzerland game was barely a minute old when, back of the Canadian net, two Swiss forwards came up with a puck that should already have been cleared safely away by the Canadian defence. Inti Pestoni came around the net and flipped a soft shot that somehow slipped in between Visentin’s right pad and the post.

  Ooooooooooooops.

  It was, however, the only goal the pesky Swiss could manage. Canada went on to a 4–1 victory and the chance to meet nemesis Team U.S.A.—the gold-medal winner in Saskatoon only the year before—in the 2011 semifinal. Visentin, who had stopped the 21 other shots directed his way, was philosophical about the first. “I didn’t want that to happen,” he said. “But it’s over and you can’t change that.”

  He talked about how he had been working on his “mental focus” as much as his angles. He had been learning not to get down on himself, not to doubt—the debilitating bug that all goaltenders must fight off from time to time. “There were 59 minutes left,” he told himself. More than enough time to repair matters.

  He talked about the possibility of him now facing the Americans. A year earlier he had watched the championship being played out in Saskatoon and the final had been “a heartbreaker.” He wanted to be a part of the avenging of Saskatoon.

  He got his wish. Visentin started against the arch-rival Americans and played well, with Canada winning 4–1 to advance once again to the key gold-medal match. What was surprising was the opponent: Russia. The Russians had barely been on the radar heading into the tournament, losing their first two matches to Canada (6–3) and Sweden (2–0), but they had since fashioned the two most remarkable comebacks of 2011. Down 3–1 against the Finns, they had won 4–3 in overtime, then had tied the Swedes in the dying seconds of Sunday’s semifinal game to force overtime and get to a shootout, which they won.

  Instead of the anticipated United States–Canada match, the gold medal had come down to Canada vs. Russia.

  These Russians could not be taken lightly—not after such dramatic comebacks against Finland and Sweden—and the Canadians did not take them lightly. Team Canada captain Ryan Ellis opened the scoring with a blast from the point on an early Canadian power play. Before the first period was over, Canada was up 2–0 on big Carter Ashton’s goal. When Brayden Schenn made it 3–0—a seemingly insurmountable lead—it marked Schenn’s 18th point of the tournament, tying him for the all-time Team Canada single tournament scoring lead with Dale McCourt, who had set the mark in 1977—back before Hockey Canada had established the Program of Excellence.

  To gain some sense of the shock to come, it is worth noting that those who were voting on the tournament’s top players handed in their ballots at the end of the second period. Schenn, to no surprise, was named tournament MVP as well as best forward. Ellis was named the top defenceman. And top goaltender title went to Team U.S.A.’s Jack Campbell.

  And then it happened. In less than five minutes of play, the Russians managed six shots on young Visentin and scored three times—and the period was not even half over. You could almost see the blood drain from the red-painted faces of the Canadian fans who had packed the HSBC Arena to cheer on what had appeared a certain Canadian victory.

  The Russians moved ahead 4–3 when Artemi Panarin managed to elude three Canadian checkers to slip the puck past Visentin and scored again in the dying moments to make it 5–3, all five Russian goals coming in a third period that was

  already being tagged “a monumental collapse.” Many were even saying the word that losing players and coaches most dread: “choke.”

  Who, people wanted to know, was to blame for this humiliation? Cameron for failing to pull his goalie as the Russians had done? Team Canada scouts and officials for failing to add snipers? Or Mark Visentin, the goaltender who couldn’t stop the Russian flood? As Jacques Plante so eloquently put it more than half a century earlier, the goalie gets the blame, no matter what.

  The Russian national anthem was played, and the Canadians, silver medals hanging like albatrosses around their necks, left the ice and hurried through the media availability without even looking up. Mark Visentin had sobbed openly on the ice and cried some more in the dressing room. He heard Hockey Canada’s André Brin asking some of the other players if anyone was ready to speak to the waiting media.

  “I’ll come out,” he volunteered, surprising Brin.

  In his second trip

  to the tournament,

  Brayden Schenn

  racked up 18 points,

  more than any other

  player in the history

  of the Program of

  Excellence.

  The gathered media were even more surprised. Here was this 18-year-old kid who had just been at the centre of a crushing turn of events and he was ready to talk. A few in the media noted how clear his eyes were: shouldn’t he be off somewhere crying?

  And yet he stood there, towering over the microphones and notepads, head held high, and he spoke for as long as there were questions—even though no language could possibly provide equal answers.

  Mark Visentin dressed slowly, still processing what had happened. The teammates said their goodbyes—painful and poignant—and Mark found Harmony waiting outside, as arranged, and the two began the long drive back in the dark. He knew his parents and grandparents would have already crossed over and he made it through without comment, without a border guard recognizing his name. He drove

  Left: Canadian captain

  Ryan Ellis brought

  savvy puck-handling

  skills to the blue line in

  his third WJC.

  Above: Defenceman

  Maxim Berezin lines

  up Carter Ashton in

  the final. With the gold

  medal on the line, the

  older, bigger Russians

  physically wore down

  the Canadians.

  Mark Visentin is

  beaten for a goal

  in the third period

  against the Russians.

  He showed dignity

  beyond his years

  in the wake of a

  wrenching defeat in

  the gold-medal game.

  slowly back to his parents’ home in Waterdown.
No radio for them, either. He didn’t need to hear his own words played back to him.

  “I like to get stuff done and not leave it,” he told me a couple of days later.

  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. 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….

  “No one to blame but me. I try to make myself accountable for what happens.”

  He was, however, being held accountable by others, perhaps too shocked or too angry to allow for perspective. Hockey means so much to Canadians, and success has been so regular, that only success seems acceptable. People who might not expect their own teen to clean up his room or take out the garbage

  were not only expecting, but demanding, that these teenagers take on the best hockey teams in the world and remain, always, the best hockey team in the world.

  Yet even those who knew this made no sense were concerned. What, they wondered, would be the long-term effect of such an experience? They needed to be reminded that in Game 5 of the 1972 Summit Series, the original Team Canada had been up 4–1 in the third period in Moscow only to have the Soviets score four unanswered goals and win. The goaltender in net for that “monumental collapse” was Tony Esposito, who was in the prime of his Hall of Fame career.

  “People lose perspective,” Dan Visentin said of his son a few days after the game. “Mark will be fine. He’s got his whole future in front of him.”

  Mark, however, had driven home that night in silence, thinking more on his past. “It was weird,” he remembered. “There was just so much to take in.” He thought about former coaches, teammates. He was grateful for his relationship with his family, with Ben Vanderklok, a coach with the Niagara IceDogs who had been working so hard with Mark on the importance of personal mental toughness.