Hockey Dad

by Bob Mckenzie

  If I said a city name in the NHL, he would say the team name. If I pointed at an NHL logo, he would name the city and the team. He would get them all, too, although for some reason the Hartford Whalers were always the "Hartford Blakers."

  He would ask question after question and they were always about hockey. I loved that he loved hockey, but this kid would wear even me down.

  His favorite song was "Big League" by Tom Cochrane.

  Hockey, hockey and more hockey. Mike was hockey mad, just as I figured he would be. Hockey-mad Mike; Hockey-mad Dad.

  Lucky Cindy.

  2: Breaking the Ice: It's Never Too Early

  ONE OF THE MOST FREQUENTLY ASKED questions by neophyte Hockey Dads is at what age should Junior hit the ice for the first time-when is a good time to learn to skate?

  As a proud Canadian, and an incurable wise guy, I like to say, "Well, the child should first be able to walk, but that's not necessarily a hard-and-fast rule."

  Remember, we're not talking here about actually playing hockey in an organized form or even playing hockey at all.

  We're talking about what used to be one of the rites of winter passage for Canadian kids, especially in the good old days when it was no big deal to find an outdoor skating rink or pond close to home.

  To the best of my recollection, I was probably four years old when my dad first took me to the local outdoor rink-no boards, just a rink-at Bendale Public School to see if I would be able to stand up. And really, that's all it needs to be. The first skate isn't about taking skating lessons or playing a game of hockey. It's not about structure; it should be, if at all possible, a social event for the whole family that underscores what it is to be a Canadian-ignoring how cold, windy and snowy it is and thumbing your nose at Old Man Winter. Go out as a family, note the momentous occasion of Junior's first attempt to skate, laugh uproariously at his or her first pratfalls, pick 'em up and go have hot chocolate, or maybe something a touch stronger.

  For the record, Mike was two years, nine months and twenty days old when he first put on skates, but hey, who's counting? Some might think that's too young, but like I said, he could walk, why not try skating? Seriously, what's the point of waiting? If he didn't like it, he would tell me.

  It was Saturday, February 18, 1989, when Cindy, who was four months pregnant with Shawn at the time, Mike and I took a drive down to the frozen marshlands near the mouth of Duffin's Creek, just a stone's throw north of Lake Ontario in Ajax. It was cold-blistering cold, with a wicked wind, the kind that feels like it could cut you in two, howling in off the lake.

  We know this was the exact date of Mike's first time on skates-double-runner bob skates, mind you-because we have the video evidence to prove it. Actually, the video date and time code show us skating on the morning of Sunday February 19, 1989, and while it's marked on the video cassette as Mike's first day on skates, I know better. The truth is it was only after we were coming back from Mike's actual first skate on Saturday afternoon that I stupidly realized we should have captured this grand occasion on the family camcorder. When we went out the next day to skate again, we took the camera, filmed it for posterity's sake and wrote on the tape "Mike's first time on skates." Not quite, but close enough.

  Mike loved it and I must admit I loved that he loved it. The video shows him all bundled up in a green and red snowsuit, wearing a toque under my old Cooper SK10 red helmet that I got for Christmas as a peewee-that, by the way, was a classic bucket…think Steve Shutt, Dave Gardner and Billy Harris in their Toronto Marlie days-with his snowsuit hood pulled up over the helmet and a scarf wrapped around his face.

  I put on his skates-they just strapped onto his little winter boots-and gave him the left-handed hockey stick I had cut down for him. Wait a minute, you're saying, didn't I just say those first steps don't need to be about hockey? True enough, but the boy said he wanted to play hockey.

  Who am I to spoil his fun?

  I immediately asked Mike if he was cold. He said yes. I asked him if he wanted to go home. He said no. I was thrilled, not that we were going home if he said yes anyway. I may have been guilty of playing to the camera a little on that magnanimous but wholly insincere offer to go home. I put on my skates. Cindy manned the video camera and we were out there, considering the temperature and wind chill, for a good long time, the better part of an hour. He would whack a puck with his stick and chase it. He'd fall down occasionally. He'd get up and do it all over again.

  I had kind of expected it might be a failed exercise; that perhaps it was too early to put him on skates, that he would cry when he fell or say he was too cold to skate. But he didn't cry when he went down and he didn't complain about the cold. Therein lies the answer of when you should put your child on skates for the first time-the sooner the better. If he or she doesn't like it, they will let you know. If it's the wrong time, you can try again, in a week or a month or a year. Whatever. But if they do like it, well, you're off to the races.

  And we were.

  3: Family Expansion and Our Little Nerd

  AND LEST YOU GET THE IDEA the McKenzie’s led a one-dimensional life that revolved solely around Mike's love of hockey, I must tell you there were other significant events in our lives at that time which are central to the telling of this story.

  About five months after Mike's first time on skates, July 11, 1989, to be exact, Cindy, Mike and I welcomed Shawn Patrick McKenzie into the family. Another boy. I will spare you the "I told you so" on that one. Been there, done that. I was thrilled to add another player. You will get to know Shawn and his story intimately in due course.

  Life started becoming a lot more chaotic in our household.

  I've always believed that when it comes to taking care of kids, one child equals one but two does not necessarily equal two.

  When you have more than one, it's like the little darlings work to a higher power. They wear you down exponentially. One is one, two might as well be four and, given how much time I spend on my job, Cindy and I never had any intentions of finding out what three equalled, but I'm guessing nine. Bless those who go for it, but one thing you can say about us-we knew our limitations.

  Big changes were happening on the career front for me, too.

  In January of 1990, in addition to my fairly onerous responsibilities at The Hockey News, I started doing color commentary on TSN's weekly Canadian Hockey League (CHL) broadcast on Sunday nights, featuring a game a week from January right through to the Memorial Cup in May. I was already working a lot at THN-sixty-plus hours a week managing a staff and a couple of publications-and now I was taking on work that required many more hours of preparation to say nothing of the travel and time away from home.

  If the CHL game of the week was in the West, and on average it was once every three weeks, I would work twelve-hour days Monday to Friday at THN and then fly out of Toronto around noon on Saturday to go to Medicine Hat or Lethbridge or Seattle or Portland or wherever. I would usually be able to catch a red-eye flight out of Vancouver or Edmonton or Calgary on Sunday night because I absolutely had to be back in my office at THN first thing Monday morning, which was the long, difficult (often eighteen-hour) day when THN was published.

  It was a lot for me and no doubt even more for Cindy to handle, given she had a busy three-year-old, a demanding sixth-month-old, and her husband was off gallivanting across the continent.

  All of this work I was doing at THN and TSN was putting a serious crimp in my efforts to be a Hockey Dad to Mike. Certainly on the Saturdays when I was at home in that first few months of 1990, Mike's hockey activities were limited primarily to playing ball hockey with me in the basement (which we did a lot) or me taking him public skating-he had graduated to real skates as opposed to the bobs-at the Pickering Recreation Complex.

  He loved to go pleasure skating with me but would get bored pretty quickly-round and round we would go-and say he wanted to go home, but I would appeal to his competitive instincts and bet him he couldn't beat me around the rink. Off he would
go, pumping away to beat Dad. I'd play that delay and-distraction card as many times as I could before he finally rebelled and made it clear he was outta there. Fine by me, he was skating well, he enjoyed it. It was all good.

  Just before Mike was set to launch his so-called "organized" hockey career that fall of 1990, at the beginning of his junior kindergarten year, something happened that in a million years I never would have expected.

  Mike got glasses. No big deal, right? Au contraire.

  Mike wasn't the least bit happy to get the news that he needed to wear glasses as part of everyday life-he was diagnosed with astigmatism-and for me it was like being hit in the face with a bag of doorknobs. It never occurred to me a four-year-old might need glasses.

  It's a funny thing about glasses, isn't it? I mean, on one hand, it's not really that big a deal. When you think of your kid being diagnosed with something, well, astigmatism and needing glasses is nothing. I know that. But it does change their appearance and, who's kidding who, not necessarily for the better. The perception, amongst kids and with a lot of adults, too, is that glasses equal nerdiness. Glasses on little kids are perceived as a sign of weakness.

  On every level, it's an absurd and ridiculous notion and the ultimate in superficiality, but it was as plain as the glasses on Mike's face. Without them, he was a cute kid.

  With them, still sort of cute but, uh, what's the word I'm looking for? Poindexter? Yeah, that's it. If that view is held generally in society, and I would suggest it is, multiply it by ten in the athletic world. Like all good parents, we went to great lengths to convince Mike wearing glasses was no big deal. Cindy found a children's book that dealt with this very subject-Tipou and His New Glasses-and read it to Mike. Which is all well and good, but last time I checked, Tipou, a little French mouse, didn't have to play hockey or lacrosse wearing glasses.

  I am no child psychologist but I would say now that Mike getting glasses had an impact on his self-image at that time.

  I am not sure I noticed it as much then, but looking back, I really think he was a little different after he started wearing the glasses, a little more self-conscious, a little more introverted with people outside of our family.

  I only brought up Mike's glasses because it's funny how many times over the years in hockey they became part of the story or, for some time, even his identity. As a quick aside, I am firmly convinced that Mike's glasses were the catalyst that prompted him, the summer after he turned eighteen, to get a (hockey-oriented) tattoo on his left shoulder and bicep. I am not going to lie, Cindy had a tough time with that one. Me, I wasn't sure what to think, but I will tell you this: I'm blaming the damn glasses. A classic case of compensation if ever there were one. All those years of perhaps being perceived as a little nerdy, the first chance Mike had, he was going to show his bad-ass side. And now he has, as the kids like to say, "a sweet tatty" to prove it.

  4: "I hate Larry Marson" and Dissing Mr. Hockey

  WHERE WE LIVED-IN PICKERING, Ont., the first community east of Metropolitan Toronto-was probably as good as, if not better than, any place for Mike to begin his minor hockey journey in the fall of 1990. While the Pickering Minor Hockey Association House League didn't start with actual game competition until a player was six years old-there was a Squirt Division, which combined six- and seven-year-olds-it had programs in place to accommodate kids as young as four and five.

  They called it the PMHA hockey school. There was one session, an hour a week, for four-year-olds and another session for five-year-olds. They ran them back to back on Saturday afternoons at Don Beer Arena. It was obviously modeled on the Hockey Canada Initiation Program, which was introduced in 1986. The Initiation Program was in response to the criticisms that Canadian hockey was too structured too early and that kids who couldn't even skate were being dropped into game situations and never touching a puck, never developing their skills. The Initiation Program was a blueprint for a less structured, more sensible approach to introducing first-time players at young ages to the fundamentals of the game (skating, stick handling, etc.) in a fun, positive atmosphere devoid of pressure associated with winning or losing.

  The PMHA had a couple of brothers, young guys in their twenties, who oversaw the hockey schools and they did an excellent job. These guys knew what they were doing. They asked up front for as many parent volunteers as wanted to be involved. This, of course, was right up my alley and I was out there with Mike each Saturday, at least the ones when I wasn't out of town working.

  Mike loved it. So did I. Mike was fully decked out in his Montreal Canadiens gear-red Habs sweater, red, white and blue gloves, blue pants, Canadiens socks and a white CCM helmet, which is kind of funny for a Toronto-area kid. But since I had no real rooting interest for the Leafs or any team in the NHL, Mike just sort of formed his own likes and dislikes as far as teams. At that time, for whatever reason, Mike was absolutely loopy for Stephane Richer, who was reeling off fifty-goal seasons for the Canadiens, and netminder Patrick Roy.

  As good as the PMHA hockey school was, and it was outstanding, I didn't think it was quite enough. One hour a week?

  Nope, not nearly enough. Now, as "crazy" as I might be about hockey, I am also one of those people who believes if you want to do well at anything-it's not enough to just do it; you should try to excel-you go the extra mile. Welcome to the Larry Marson Power Skating School.

  Like a lot of people, especially the really crazy Hockey Dads, I believed, and still do, that the foundation for everything in hockey is in the skating. So it only made perfect sense to me that while the hockey school was good, an extra hour a week of specialized instruction in just skating was exactly what Mike needed.

  Larry Marson was a good college player who played at Ohio State. Larry is the younger brother of Mike Marson, who became the first black player to be taken in the first round of the NHL draft when he was chosen by the Washington Capitals in 1974.

  Larry was teaching skating to kids of all ages, although they didn't have to wear hockey equipment or use a stick. It was just helmet, gloves and skates. It was held Saturday at 8 a.m. This, I decided, was precisely the kind of basic training Mike needed.

  Awesome, I was pumped.

  There was just one problem-Mike didn't seem to share my enthusiasm. In fact, he hated the entire concept, every minute of it. Once he realized he was going to a skating school where he didn't get to carry a hockey stick or wear hockey equipment, it was a little too much like work for him. Larry and his group of instructors were terrific. But Mike quickly decided it wasn't "fun."

  We would get up early every Saturday morning and drive to the arena and most weeks Mike would start whimpering in the car on the way there. "I don't wanna go to Larry Marson," he would say. Occasionally, the odd tear would even roll down his cheek. I would try to pump him up, tell him, "It's fun, you will enjoy it once you get out there." He would do it, reluctantly, but on the way home in the car, he would pout, grimace and tell me, "I hate Larry Marson."

  This scene would, more or less, play itself out week after week all winter long and you might be wondering what kind of monster makes his four-year-old go to power skating when the kid has made it clear he doesn't want to. That kind of monster would be me, and even now, upon sober second thought, I am not about to relent.

  I am a big believer, for the most part, in once you start something, you finish it. As long as it doesn't apply to me, of course (I lasted six weeks at Wilfrid Laurier University in my first year of post-secondary education). So unless Mike absolutely refused to get into the car with me on those Saturday mornings, he was going to finish that first year of Larry Marson Power Skating. Mike was still loving to go to the PMHA hockey school on Saturday afternoons, so it's not like the power skating was so turning him off that he didn't want to play hockey. I was thinking he would eventually buy in. Hey, it could have been worse. My parents put me in piano lessons…and we didn't even have a piano. So as far as Larry Marson was concerned, Mike was going to finish out the year.


  Tears on the way there? Not nearly good enough. Suck it up, sonny boy. Life is tough. Besides, it's not like he wasn't getting some perks along the way.

  Even before that 1990-91 season, four-year-old Mike had already been to his first Stanley Cup finally game. I had Cindy and Mike-Shawn stayed home with family because he was just ten months old-fly into Boston for Game 2 of the Bruins-Edmonton Oilers 1990 Cup finally. Two funny things happened on that trip that I bring up when I want to embarrass Mike a little.

  The first was that Mike, wearing his No. 4 Bruins sweater I had made up for him with MIKE on the back, found the crowd noise so loud at the old Boston Garden he told Cindy he wanted to leave the arena and go back to the hotel before the first period had ended. Mike just shakes his head at that now.

  The second was Mike's first and very memorable meeting with Gordie Howe. I ran into Gordie in the Boston hotel lobby just as Mike and I were heading to the Garden for the game-day skates. Mike was eager to get to the rink because, a day earlier, Bruin defenseman Greg Hawgood had been nice enough to give Mike a stick at practice, and Mike was all revved up to go back to see his new hero, Greg Hawgood.

  But when I saw Gordie Howe, I stopped to chat. I introduced Gordie to Mike and Mike to Gordie. Gordie being Gordie, he was terrific with Mike, but Mike was starting to get impatient, tugging on my arm.

  "C'mon, Dad, let's go," Mike said.

  "In a minute, Mike," I responded.

  "Dad," he pleaded. "I want to go to the rink; I want to see some hockey players."

  Gordie's eyes were twinkling.

  "You want to go see some hockey players, do you?" Gordie said to Mike.

  "Yup," Mike said to Mr. Hockey.

  "Well, it's too bad there's no hockey players around here, eh, Mike?" Gordie said as he winked at me. "You better get going."

  Good job, Mike, way to diss Mr. Hockey.